HYSTERESIS

FILE 2024 | Aesthetic Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
Robert Seidel – HYSTERESIS – Germany

HYSTERESIS intimately weaves a transformative fabric between Robert Seidel’s projections of abstract drawings and queer performer Tsuki’s vigorous choreography. Using machine learning to mediate these delayed re-presentations, the film intentionally corrupts AI strategies to reveal a frenetic, delicate and extravagant visual language that portrays hysteria and hysteresis in this historical moment.

Bio

Robert Seidel is interested in exploring abstract beauty through cinematic techniques and insights from science and technology. His projections, installations and award-winning experimental films have been presented at numerous international festivals, art venues and museums, highlighting his innovative approach to visual art.

Credits

Film: Robert Seidel
Music: Oval
Performer: Tsuki
Graphics: Bureau Now
5.1 Mixing: David Kamp
Support: Miriam Eichner, Carolin Israel, Falk Müller, Paul Seidel
Financing: German Federal Film Board

Falling Black
Unfalling Black is an augmented reality experience that reveals digitally manipulated weather formation in an enclosed environment. Treating the mobile device as a digital window, the work uncovers the displacing choreography of rain, storms and snow, occurring all around the audience and yet witnessed only through the computerized lens.

Noumenon

A truly universal artist, the American Alwin Nikolais (1910-1993) devoted his life to a radical form of staged art he called “dance theater.” Inspired (perhaps unconsciously) by the experiments of Bauhaus members such as Oskar Schlemmer and László Moholy-Nagy in the 1920s, Nikolais devised a style of abstract dance that encompassed costumes, stage sets, choreography, lighting, and music, all under his control. Also in 1963, Nikolais met analog synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog, who was at the time just starting his business in New York. He was fascinated by the sounds of Moog’s machines, and with the money provided by a a Guggenheim Fellowship, Nikolais bought the first ever commercially produced Moog synthesizer. It was the primary sound-source for all of Nikolais’ scores from 1963 to 1975. The instrument is now housed at the Stearns Collection of Musical Instruments at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Cunningham Clip -Summerspace
CUNNINGHAM is a 3D cinematic experience about the legendary American choreographer, Merce Cunningham, orchestrated through his iconic works and performed by the last generation of his dancers. This poetic film traces Merce’s artistic evolution over three decades of risk and discovery (1944–1972), from his early years as a struggling dancer in postwar New York to his emergence as one of the most visionary and influential choreographers worldwide. 3D technology weaves together Merce’s philosophies and stories, creating a visceral journey through the choreographer’s world.

arabesque
FILE FESTIVAL
“My recent investigations of this theme have involved the usage of computers combined with mechanical elements to create mandala like installations. These installations are my medium and I use them to create ephemeral animations. This ephemeral choreography of movement is the focal point of my work”.

White Water and Dust
White Water and Dust, a rare double bill by the internationally renowned choreographer Lin Hwai-min, brings great intensity of contrast between the two works. While White Water, set to piano music by Erik Satie, flows like a movable celebration of life, Dust, to a powerful rendering of Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8, evokes a memory of Goya’s Black Paintings.

PLEXUS
Aurélien Bory is a Toulouse-based choreographer working at the intersection of dance, circus and visual art. In Plexus, he encloses the Japanese dancer Kaori Ito in a forest of tensioned vertical cables. It’s as if she’s in a transparent cuboid cage. We can see her, but her image is blurred by the shimmer of Arno Veyrat’s lighting as it moves across the cables. Ito strains against these confines, writhing, flailing and hurling herself against the cables. Every sound is hugely amplified, so with her every movement we are assailed by a high-tensile jangling and groaning. At intervals she subjects her environment to furious challenge, racing backwards and forwards within the limited inner space so that the cage rocks on its axis. At other times she positions herself between the cables so that they bear her weight, and hangs there like an exhausted insect, faintly articulating her limbs.

マイケル·クラーク·カンパニー
Come, been and gone

Ballet meets punk, and neither comes out the same. In its highly anticipated first visit to Chicago, the electrifying Michael Clark Company provocatively pays homage to the decadence and unbridled fun of 1970s club culture. British dance iconoclast Michael Clark sets his choreography in come, been and gone to the music of fellow rebel David Bowie, and collaborates with video artist and dance film pioneer Charles Atlas. Clark’s dancers don Bowie-style leather jackets and echo his unique body language, building up to a detonation of jumps and kicks. “Come, been and gone” pulls off a remarkable feat—matching the cool, alien beauty of the singular singer, who makes a cameo appearance here thanks to 1977 film footage of his track “Heroes.”

ROSA
A short film based on the work of choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker to Bartók music
Rosa (1992 ; ca. 16 min., b&w ; letterboxed format) / La Monnaie/De Munt & Rosas ; based on a choreography by Anpeter-greenaway-and-anne-teresa-de-keersmaekerne Teresa de Keersmaeker in collaboration with Jean-Luc Ducourt ; with Fumiyo Ikeda, Nordine Benchorf ; directed by Peter Greenaway ; a production of Entropie

Pasionaria

Pasionaria represents the consequences of our current way of life, as conceived by choreographer Marcos Morau. A future where human beings would have lost their vitality through individualism and transhumanism. The gloomy universe of the spectacle thus seems sanitized of all affect, all passion, and consequently, humanity. All that remains is the labor force that is tirelessly busy vacuuming or handling packages of products. Ringing phones, doors or other objects constantly capture the attention of the protagonists who have become puppets. Manipulated by outside forces, instead of being driven by their deep desires, the humans of this dystopia merge into simple working robots.

The Movement of Air

A frontal show for three dancers evolving in an immersive environment made up of images projected, generated and animated live. A show where two impossible ones come together: the body that flies, thanks to suspension devices and the body that fits into the image. An acrobatic and digital choreographic writing which outlines a body language opening onto other relationships to time, space and the world. Beyond the search for technical prowess, it is that of a dreamlike movement and writing through images.

Reclining Stickman
Reclining StickMan is a 9m long robot, actuated by pneumatic rubber muscles. Visitors at the AGSA can intuitively animate the robot from a control panel. At indicated periods, people online elsewhere can choreograph its movements and sounds. A background algorithm animates the robot intermittently if no-one intervenes, locally or remotely.

Living Archive

The Living Archive is an experiment between Studio Wayne McGregor and Google Arts and Culture – a tool for choreography powered by machine learning which generates original movement inspired by Wayne’s 25-year archive.

Two Hundred and Seventy
Through the combination of an everyday material with precise technology the mixed media installation fills the whole columned hall from the 19th century with its fluid movement and peculiar sound. Concavely arranged and floating above the spectators heads the form of the artwork seems to pass the skylight like the sun’s rays. Subdivided into nine columns, the nearly 70 square metres large piece of art follows a site-specific choreography determined by a program. Its moving surface is made from 270 white garbage bags, being inflated and deflated. In this way shapes and the boundaries of the installation itself start to dissolve. “Two Hundred and Seventy“ is the first installation with an undisguised view behind the scenes and onto the origin of the wavelike and organic movement: 1080 fans, lots of cables and 45 circuit boards

Polish Pieces
Alvin Ailey
Introdans
music: Henryk Mikołaj Górecki
Photographer: Hans Gerritsen

In this exuberant ensemble work, Dutch choreographer van Manen displays his mastery for building dazzling creations from simple motifs and geometric patterns. Driven by the rhythms of Henryk Górecki’s score, the dancers come together and disperse in endlessly shifting formations that culminate in two sensual pas de deux.

Trio A
Dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, and writer Yvonne Rainer is one of the most influential artistic figures of the last 50 years. Her work has been foundational across multiple disciplines and movements: dance, cinema, feminism, minimalism, conceptual art, and postmodernism.

Self-Reflected

Dr. Greg Dunn (artist and neuroscientist) and Dr. Brian Edwards (artist and applied physicist) created Self Reflected to elucidate the nature of human consciousness, bridging the connection between the mysterious three pound macroscopic brain and the microscopic behavior of neurons. Self Reflected offers an unprecedented insight of the brain into itself, revealing through a technique called reflective microetching the enormous scope of beautiful and delicately balanced neural choreographies designed to reflect what is occurring in our own minds as we observe this work of art. Self Reflected was created to remind us that the most marvelous machine in the known universe is at the core of our being and is the root of our shared humanity.

요르단 울프슨
ジョーダンウォルフソン
Colored sculpture
“Colored Sculpture” is a work in animatronic that becomes a mechanical theatre, with its spectacular performance brings us reflections on a dark past that we want to reject.“With a highly polished appearance, the work is suspended with heavy chains from a large mechanized gantry, programmed to choreograph his movements. The sheer physicality of the installation, which fills the entire space of the gallery and includes the work being hoisted and thrown hard on the floor, viscerally obscures the distinction between figuration and abstraction, in addition to promoting the formal and narrative possibilities of sculpture. “

Black and White
Dedicated to the design and distribution of live shows combining the arts in all its forms, Compagnie Hybride offers a fusion of aesthetics. It is positioned at the crossroads of creativity where the bodies and new technology meet. Land on which confronts, body language and visual arts, in order to promote a work interdisciplinary research, choreography and artistic innovation. Through its creations, productions, performances, films, exhibitions, installations, educational workshops and event services, Compagnie Hybride, carried primarily by a desire to exchange, sharing, research and development, has a mandate to create and disseminate its designs in the artistic and cultural networks nationally and internationally.

ZERO
Tanzkompanie Heidelberg

Nanine Linning is responsible for die best niederländischen Choreographers. After the successful performance “Synthetic Twin”, the fiery “Requiem” and the apokalyptic “Voice Over” she is once again going big. ‘ZERO’ is an excitement Crossover, In which Dance, Game, Film, Music and costumes – by Iris van Herpen – ensure that you are short of eyes and ears. Was it born there when the world changed drastically? What are people different in the last hours before everything else? To the spherical music of, among others, Julia Wolf, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arvo Pärt and Philip Glass phantasieren von Linning und Haarspangen von faszinierenden Ideen.

4&5
Tao Ye likes to designate his dances by number rather than name. After 4 comes 5, his latest to appear in the US: the 27-year-old choreographer behind Beijing’s six-member Tao Dance Theater is just getting started. And yet he is already a worldwide festival favourite and distinctive to boot, in spite of – or perhaps because of – his deliberately limited means. From 2012, 4 restricted itself to four dancers moving in unison and in a tight cohort within the square of the stage. The dancers’ faces were blacked out, their gaze down, their spines never succumbing to the easy beauty of uprightness, and their voluminous costumes, full of folds and creases, were identical.

ecce homo

The expressive capacity of the human body is infinite. A naked body, beyond any sexual connotation, is pure art. Conceptual photographs about the idea of the body is what Evelyn Bencicova brings us in her series Ecce Homo (Latin term that means “here is the man” and which is cited in terms of violence or war), in which we see a lot of bodies pile up and form strange sculptural forms. At no time do we see any faces, which helps to depersonify each of the participating actors. The result is somewhat disturbing: we do not know why those bodies are there, or what they are trying to do. It is a mix between choreography, aesthetics and a theatrical performance. Of great artistic sensitivity, there is something in these figures that evokes the feeling of a human collective. Feelings to the surface.

劳丽西蒙斯
ローリー·シモンズ
로리 시몬스
ЛОРИ СИММОНС
PUPPE
SIMMONS HAT DIE MENSCHLICHE LEISTUNG LANG UNTERSUCHT, WENN SIE SICH AUF SPEZIFISCHE UMGEBUNGEN DURCH EINE TIEFE DOKUMENTATION UND PROFUNDE CHOREOGRAPHIE VON PUPPEN UND OBJEKTEN IN UND AUF EINER STUFE BEZIEHT. Die Grenzen zwischen Fiktion und Wirklichkeit sind oft verschwommen, und der Tisch des Künstlers erinnert an eine aufrichtige Menschlichkeit, Emotion und Charakter.

Circles II
Doris Chase has achieved international stature as a pioneer in the field of video art since she moved from Seattle to New York City in 1972. An artist of remarkable and continuous creativity, Chase now divides her time between her video headquarters in New York and a Seattle studio where she works on new projects in painting and sculpture.Beginning as an innovative painter and sculptor in Seattle in the 1950s, Chase created sculpture that was meant to be touched and manipulated by the viewer. Chase then developed large-scale kinetic sculptures in collaboration with choreographers, and her art was set in motion by dancers. In New York, her majors contribution to the evolution of artists’ video has been her work in videodance. On videotape, dancers and sculpture evolve into luminous abstract forms which represent some of the most sophisticated employments of video technology by an artist of the 1970s. In the 1980s, Chase began working in the nascent genre of video theater. In these productions, she uses the imtimacy of the video screen to achieve a new synthesis of visual and dramatic art. Her video theatre compositions present multicultural and social commentary, utilizing scripts by writers such as Lee Breuer, Thulani Davis, and Jessica Hagedorn in the “Concepts” series. Collaborating with actresses Geralding Page, Ann Jackson, Roberta Wallach, Joan Plowright, and Luise Riner in the “By Herself” series, she focuses on the viewpoints and experiences of older women. Today, coming full circle, Doris Chase in Seattle is exploring a renewed interest in painting and sculpture as well as in the modernist aesthetic she never really ceased pursuing, even during her most adventuresome multimedia years.

Morphs
MORPHs, short for Mobile Reconfigurable Polyhedra, are motive architectural structures which can crawl and self-assemble in order to encourage social interaction through play. These playful robotic creatures encourage the public to choreograph them into dance routines, assemble them into complex sculptural geometries or else play music at them, which they will play back over time. Groups of people can interact at any one time and eventually develop a dialogue amongst participants, through the use of contemporary digital technology.

ויליאם פורסיית
ウィリアム·フォーサイス
威廉‧科西
윌리엄 포사이드
УИЛЬЯМ ФОРСАЙТ
Swinging Pendulum

Suspended from automated grids, more than 400 pendulums are activated to initiate a sweeping 15 part counterpoint of tempi, spacial juxtaposition and gradients of centrifugal force which offers the spectator a constantly morphing labyrinth of significant complexity. The spectators
are free to attempt a navigation this statistically unpredictable environment, but are requested to avoid coming in contact with any of the swinging pendulums. This task, which automatically initiates and alerts the spectators innate predictive faculties, produces a lively choreography of manifold and intricate avoidance strategies.

Requiem

In REQUIEM choreographer Nanine Linning imagines the tension between life and death, the profane and the sacred, the carnal and the spiritual. Themes, which are inextricably linked together and are at the same time absolute opposites. Inspired by Fauré’s “Requiem”, Dante’s “La Divina Commedia” and the absurd and surreal images of the artist duo “Les Deux Garçons”, Linning is searching for her own paradise on earth.REQUIEM is a multidisciplinary production with 25 dancers, live orchestra, two soloist singers, a choir, a sound artist and video. It is a triptych where the public will first walk on stage through dance installations; the dancers create a frozen, silent world.In the second part Fauré’s “Requiem” is being performed while singers and dancers follow Linnings choreography in a world of immense video images on stage. In the last part a Sound Artist will break apart Fauré’s “Requiem”. The frozen world of part one will melt and the energy of life will be released in a dynamic choreography for the choir and dancers.