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

balenciaga collaboration
A 25 minute video loop with previously unreleased tracks by DJ Hell, made in collaboration with Balenciaga.

Here is a dramatic tension in his work between the real and the imagined in his use of often-appropriated digital objects to create virtual landscapes, which frequently contain elements – animals, machines, fragments of videogames – that are recognisable from our day to day life. This creates a symbiotic relationship between the digital and the real. In a very real way digital space has now become an intangible reality. The worlds built by Robak have a distinctly cinematic sensibility that hyperbolises the shine and dramatic effects of 3D rendered animation. The aesthetic of his work is supremely important, drawing the viewer into a truly alluring, indulgent and strangely gratifying environment. There is a further challenge to the void between high-art and the worlds of 3D animation and gaming, in the intersection between depiction and simulation. This can be partially attributed to the vernacular of advertising Robak is so proficient at utilising.

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.

Life after bob
Ian Cheng’s Life After BOB is an episodic anime series built in the Unity game engine and presented live in real-time. Bridging the artist’s interest in simulation’s capacity to generate emergent surprising phenomena, with cinematic storytelling’s capacity to evoke deep psychological truths, Life After BOB imagines a future world in which our minds are co-inhabited by AI entities. Life After BOB asks: How will life lived with AI transform the archetypal scripts that guide our sense of a meaningful existence?

In the robot skies
In the Robot Skies is the world’s first narrative shot entirely through autonomous drones. In collaboration with the Embedded and Artificially intelligent Vision Lab in Belgium the film has evolved in the context of their experiments with specially developed camera drones each programmed with their own cinematic rules and behaviours. The film explores the drone as a cultural object, not just as a new instrument of visual story telling but also as the catalyst for a new collection of urban sub cultures. In the way the New York subway car of the 80’s gave birth to a youth culture of wild style graffiti and hip hop the age of ubiquitous drones as smart city infrastructure will create a new network of surveillance activists and drone hackers. From the eyes of the drones we see two teenagers each held by police order within the digital confines of their own council estate tower block in London. A network of drones survey the council estates, as a roving flock off cctv cameras and our two characters are kept apart by this autonomous aerial infrastructure.

PIVOT POINT – ICHIHARA
‘Pivot Point – Ichihara’ is an interactive site-specific installation. Standing on a controller pod you navigate over and through a 3D terrain where gravity seems to have disappeared, you gradually become tele-present in a parallel projected space by exploring a mediated version of the venue, it’s direct surroundings and the Ichihara region. A cinematic journey to a fascinating point cloud realm, precise in details but simultaneously abstract and dreamlike.The kidney shaped interface is covered with capacitive sensors and mounted on a pole, touching this interface right, left, up or down aims the virtual camera accordingly. When you release the navigation pole the virtual camera automatically starts spiralling back to the initial starting point your journey and temporary centre of the universe, the Asohbara Art House.

톰슨 & 크레이그 헤드
Belief
Belief is made from information found entirely on the worldwide web. In fifteen minutes, this two-screen installation presents a series of fragmented broadcasts about belief, all sourced from the video sharing community YouTube. A compass floor projection interacts with the montage showing where each clip originated in relation to the geographical location of the artwork. With a little help from Google Earth viewers are placed at the centre point of this cinematic data visualisation.

Arr. for a Scene

“The sonic force of cinema’s most famous murder scene is investigated.Two foley artists recreate Hitchcock’s shower sequence, deconstructing the associations of aural signifiers, and the synesthetic power of sound. Jonna Kina contextualize this uncanny phenomenon — the “trans-sensory” quality of sound – within both Kina’s oeuvre, as well as other historical and contemporary works inside and outside the realm of art. In Arr. for a Scene (2017), Kina explores the structures and forms of cinematic sound – transforming an iconic image — the horrific shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) – into the sonic frequencies of quirky, seemingly innocent, domestic objects.” Melissa Ragona

Feel My Metaverse
Feel My Metaverse is Keiken’s first venture in creating a cinematic film, using game engines to build a fictional future, wanting to create stories that viewers can collectively believe in. “I normally make CGI animation from Cinema 4D, often taking days and weeks just to produce short sequences or footage. Whereas working with game engines, we could generate landscapes or worlds that we can continually build onto collectively to produce larger scale works”. The film, set in a future when climate crisis has rendered Earth inhabitable, explores the daily lives of three characters and their experiences in the multiple realities – Pome Sector (a corporate wellness world), 068 (a roleplaying VR world), and Base Reality, or what we currently know as earth. The characters navigate the challenging landscape in the world’s unforgiving points system. Keiken’s goals of unlearning norms of the current world is included in one of these realities.

Stasis in Flux
“Stasis in Flux is an experimentation of animation’s potential to mimic the real. I began by building a functional zoetrope within 3D space to test if persistence of vision is replicated accurately. From this experiment I realized 3D animations potential to go beyond the physical limits of the real, allowing me to coordinate movements between both the camera and the zoetrope to replicate much more advanced cinematic techniques. The result is a carefully choreographed animation that represents the ebb and flow of the creative process.” Joe Hambleton

Lost Dimension
Lost Dimension Non-dimensional Cities is an immersive cinematic experience in which participants journey through an endlessly unfolding virtual cityscape that expands over all axes. This dimensionless cityscape is constructed from a large collection of point clouds and sounds. While the user is standing on the controller pod and navigates through this virtual world, a sense of physical instability takes over and the platform becomes an anchor to hold on to. The building blocks of the world are generated from depth map information and panoramic photographs obtained from Google Street View’s API. Depending on the user’s position in the virtual world these blocks are dynamically repositioned on a three-dimensional grid. By subtle manipulation of motion and sound, perspective distortion and shifts in balance Lost Dimension unquestionably re-calibrates the viewer’s perception of dimensionality.

Machine Hallucination
Refik Anadol’s most recent synesthetic reality experiments deeply engage with these centuries-old questions and attempt at revealing new connections between visual narrative, archival instinct and collective consciousness. The project focuses on latent cinematic experiences derived from representations of urban memories as they are re-imagined by machine intelligence. For Artechouse’s New York location, Anadol presents a data universe of New York City in 1025 latent dimensions that he creates by deploying machine learning algorithms on over 100 million photographic memories of New York City found publicly in social networks. Machine Hallucination thus generates a novel form of synesthetic storytelling through its multilayered manipulation of a vast visual archive beyond the conventional limits of the camera and the existing cinematographic techniques. The resulting artwork is a 30-minute experimental cinema, presented in 16K resolution, that visualizes the story of New York through the city’s collective memories that constitute its deeply-hidden consciousness.

Dutch-Croatian photographer Sanja Marušić uses an experimental approach to colour, composition, materials, and manipulations in her work to create dreamlike scenes that are at once cinematic and alienating.She travels the world in her production of these otherworldly images, finding settings and forms that play with our relation to the subconscious, simplifying the bodies of her subjects with geometric shapes, and abstracting the human form even further by incorporating stylised dance movements.Putting places above people, many of Sanja’s photographs are set in wide open futuristic spaces in an attempt to create surreal and alienating visual emotions. She often uses cool and bright colours as well as singular objects and accessories in order to create unique and enigmatic narratives.

Julia Fullerton-Batten is a worldwide acclaimed and exhibited fine-art photographer. Her body of work now encompasses twelve major projects spanning a decade of engagement in the field[…]Julia’s use of unusual locations, highly creative settings, street-cast models, accented with cinematic lighting are hallmarks of her very distinctive style of photography. She insinuates visual tensions in her images, and imbues them with a hint of mystery, which combine to tease the viewer to re-examine the picture, each time seeing more content and finding a deeper meaning. These distinctive qualities have established enthusiasts for her work worldwide and at all ends of the cultural spectrum, from casual viewers to connoisseurs of fine-art photography.

A Single Composite

A Single Composite is a series of kinetic installations and projection apparatuses that stretch, twist, and loop film strips containing declassified and other found reconnaissance footage. Using reconstituted digital printer chassis, this cinematic enterprise is projected on walls, ceilings, and floors, to form a series of individual moments of surveillance and implied violence.

ダグエイケン
道格·艾特肯
altered earth
Aitken’s focus is the Camargue region of southern France, where he’s spent months capturing the reedy lagoons, splendid fauna and empty panoramas of a geography that’s been settled since Roman times yet scarcely developed since. The snippets of life are werer shown as ’Altered Earth: Arles, city of moving images’, an exhibition at the Parc des Ateliers in historic Arles. In the park’s hangar-like Grande Halle, Aitken’s enormous cinematic screens create what he calls ’an almost holographic view of the physical landscape’. They dangle from the vaulted ceiling like fantastical backdrops in a Hollywood sound studio, drawing the viewer into the landscape. He calls the effect ’liquid architecture’, though it’s unclear whether he’s referring to the venue, which seems to melt away in the background, or the labyrinthine arrangement of screens, which guide visitors like the current of a winding stream.

Virtual Depictions
Parametric data sculptures
The main idea of ‘Virtual Depictions:San Francisco’ is to bring 21st century approach to public art to define new poetics of space through media arts and architecture and to create a unique parametric data sculptures that has an intelligence, memory and culture. Through architectural transformations of media wall located in 350 Mission’ lobby, home of Salesforce, main motivation with this seminal media architecture approach is to frame this experience with a meticulously abstract and cinematic site-specific data-driven narration. As a result, this media wall turns into a spectacular public event making direct and phantasmagorical connections to its surroundings through simultaneous juxtapositions. The project also intends to contribute to contemporary discourse of public art by proposing a hybrid blend of media arts and architecture in 21st century.

Garden of Emoji Delights
FILE SAO PAULO 2015 

The Garden of Earthly Delights Triptych is one of the most famous works by the Dutch painter Hyeronimus Bosch. It dates back to the end of the fifteenth century and is kept in the Prado Museum in Madrid. The Triptych of the Garden of Emoji Delights is the version created by the contemporary artist Carla Gannis, in which space is invaded by small icons that today – thanks to the WhatsApp effect – are becoming an increasingly significant component of our language. It is not the first time that artists have played with emojis, perhaps inserting them in the real world or using them as neo-hieroglyphic fragments for cinematic riddles.

Endangered Species
Best-known for her videos and animated films combining drawn art, music and occasionally scratched or reworked cinematic images, Camille Henrot’s work blurs the traditionally hierarchical categories of art history. Her recent work, adapted into the diverse media of sculpture, drawing, photography and, as always, film, considers the fascination with the “other” and “elsewhere” in terms of both geography and sexuality. This fascination is reflected in popular modern myths that have inspired her, such as King Kong and Frankenstein. The artist’s impure, hybrid objects cast doubt upon the linear and partitioned transcription of Western history and highlight its borrowings and grey areas. In the series of sculptures Endangered Species, for example, the artist has created objects inspired by African art by using pieces from car engines; placed on tall pedestals, these slender silhouettes with zoomorphic allure make reference to the migration of symbols and forms as well as to the economic circulation of objects. This survival of the past, full of misunderstandings, shifts and projections (as shown in the slideshow Egyptomania, the film Cynopolis, drawings of the Sphinx, and even in the photographs of prehistoric flints) troubles cultural codes and conventions. In this way, Camille Henrot’s work questions mental resistances and the past’s resonance, whether it be drawn from myth or from reality.

ケリーリチャードソン
켈리 리처드슨
קלי ריצ’רדסון/
凯利·理查森
mariner 9
Mariner 9 presents a panoramic view of a Martian landscape set hundreds of years into the future, littered with the rusting remains from various missions to the planet. Despite its suggested abandoned state, several of the spacecraft continue to partially function, to do their intended jobs, to ultimately find signs of life, possibly transmitting the data back to no one.
Mariner 9 was created using scenery-generation software employed by the film and gaming industries in combination with technical data from NASA’s missions to Mars to produce a faithful artist’s rendering of Martian terrain, populated by the debris from centuries of exploration through real and imagined spacecraft in the centre of a duststorm. “Cinematic tropes of sci-fi films abound, but any search for a clear narrative is frustrated. Presented with minimal action, we wonder instead about the search for life beyond our own planet and the simultaneous destruction of life on earth.” (Laurel MacMillan, Programmer for TIFF Future Projections)