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CLOUDS ARCHITECTURE OFFICE

AVATAR X Lab
Il progetto è una partnership tra ANA Holdings Inc. e Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA); una parte di AVATAR X, un programma collaborativo per il progresso dell’esplorazione e dello sviluppo dello spazio. ANA e JAXA sono entrambe esperte nel lanciare veicoli nell’atmosfera, la sensazione di sospensione o di “essere nell’aria” è naturale per entrambe le entità. L’AVATAR X Lab Building è progettato come un edificio sospeso che galleggia sopra un cratere simile alla luna. La struttura a più piani galleggia a diciotto metri sopra il fondo del cratere ed è accessibile da un ponte. Quando gli astronauti salgono a bordo di un veicolo spaziale attraversano un ponte; quando saliamo a bordo di un aereo, attraversiamo un ponte a reazione tra il terminal e l’aereo. Questo è il nostro ultimo contatto con un terreno familiare prima di partire per un posto nuovo. L’edificio sospeso incarna questo varco di soglie: dopo aver superato il ponte si viene trasportati in un nuovo luogo, l’AVATAR X Lab Building, dove l’innovazione tecnologica cambierà il modo in cui vediamo il mondo.

Clouds Architecture Office

AVATAR X Lab
The project is a partnership between ANA Holdings Inc. and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA); a part of AVATAR X, a collaborative program for the advancement of space exploration and development. ANA and JAXA are both experts at launching vehicles into the atmosphere, the feeling of suspension or ‘being in the air’ is natural for both entities. The AVATAR X Lab Building is designed as a suspended building floating above a moon-like crater. The multi-story structure floats eighteen meters above the crater bottom, and is accessible by a bridge. When astronauts board a spacecraft they cross a bridge; when we board a plane we walk across a jet bridge between the terminal and airplane. This is our last contact with familiar ground before taking off for someplace new. The suspended building embodies this crossing of thresholds: after passing over the bridge you are transported to a new place, the AVATAR X Lab Building, where technological innovation will change how we see the world.

DORETTE STURM

FILE SAO PAULO 2017
THE BREATHING CLOUD
“The Breathing Cloud” is a monumental floating organism. The work transforms a space by its motion, light, and rhythmic breathing. With this light art the phrase “let a room come to life” gets a new meaning. The clouds skin looks fragile and soft, and the movements are rhythmic, yet random, so the whole room feels like a living being. The technology is designed so that the strong LED modules and the mechanism support the pervasive breathing. It gets physically bigger and smaller and embraces with its bright light space.

EVERYWARE: HYUNWOO BANG & YUNSIL HEO

Cloud Pink
FILE FESTIVAL

The installation invites participants to “touch the pink clouds” drifting on a giant fabric screen suspended in the air.
Lying down on a hill with your pupils filled with the endless blue sky, perspective of your eyesight suddenly gets distorted and clouds drift at the tip of your nose. You stretch your arms up to the sky to touch the clouds but can’t reach. Another world right above your head, clouds.

PARMEGIANI

ベルナール・パルメジャーニ
La Creation du Monde
This is a sprawling, ambitious painting in sound modeled on the birth of the universe. Moving from roiling, gaseous clouds of hiss and static through sharp peels of detailed, unrestrained texture, this is acousmatic music at its very finest, literally creating a universe of sound out of thin air.

Nicolas Bernier

frequencies (light quanta)

The project is part of an ongoing process entitled «frequencies», exploring basic sound and light dichotomic systems. Here, frequencies (light quanta) stems from a fascination towards science, light, and granular synthesis allowing to create clouds/grains of sounds. The conceptual focus lies in the quantum — the smallest measurable value of energy —, on the smallness of matter. The whole project is based on the possible conceptual relationships between basic quantum physics principles applied to the audio-visual creative process: particles, probabilities, wave/particle duality and discontinuity. Metaphorically structured around these notions, the audio-visual composition stems from 100 sound and light micro-sequences that develop themselves, generating an ever expending but yet disruptive form in time and space. With the use of randomness, the vectorial graphics are always creating new ways to look at the visual, physically superimposing pattern images.

Lukas Truniger, Itamar Bergfreund & Bruce Yoder

Ethereal Fleeting
A series of clouds is generated by a machine-like sculpture. They appear, float over the surrounding environment and then dissolve into thin air again. The delocalization of this instant of natural beauty evokes a surreal experience. The installation forms a juxtaposition of a metallic structure and synthetic imitations of clouds. This supposed contrast between human technology and nature is explored in a space of unseen possibilities for symbiosis.

TEAMLAB

Massless Clouds Between Sculpture and Life
Жизнь – это порядок энергии. В пространстве произведений искусства создается порядок энергии, как и в жизни. Образуется огромная белая масса, которая плывет вверх. Это можно рассматривать как визуализацию порядка или энергии. Скульптура, гигантская белая масса, парит между полом и потолком в пределах пространства, неопределенная форма меняется, как бы выходя за рамки концепции массы. Граница между этой парящей скульптурой, пространством и телом зрителя неоднозначна, и люди могут погружать свое тело в эту скульптуру. Даже когда люди проталкивают скульптуру и ломают ее, она естественным образом восстанавливается, как живое существо. Но, как и в случае с живыми существами, когда скульптура разрушается сверх того, что она может восстановить, она не может восстановить себя и разрушается. Даже если люди попытаются сдвинуть или толкнуть эту парящую скульптуру в воздухе, они не смогут этого сделать. Если они поднимут ветер, облако разорвется. Мы понимаем, что простое действие человека не может сдвинуть эту скульптуру.

Shinseungback Kimyonghun

Cloud Face
Humans see figures in clouds: animals, faces and even god. This kind of perception also appears in machine vision. Face-detection algorithms sometimes find faces where there are not any.’Cloud Face’ is a collection of cloud images that are recognized as human faces by a face-detection algorithm. It is a result of machine vision’s error but they often look like faces to human eyes too. Humans, yet, know these are not actual faces. Humans rather imagine faces from the clouds. Here, the error of machines and the imagination of humans meet.

BREAKFAST

Empire State
Empire State is a kinetic A.I. artwork visualizing the current time-of-day and weather at the Empire State Building in New York. The imagery was created from running a sketch through an Artificial Intelligence model to generate two variations on the image, each printed on each side of the discs. The piece visualizes the current time-of-day and weather by animating clouds, rain, light/shadow, by rotating sections of discs to the reverse side. When one walks up to the piece, they will see their image reflected back at them, further embedding them to the connection between where they are and the current state in NYC.

Ronald van der Meijs

Odoshi Cloud Sequence
A symbiosis between nature and culture is created against the backdrop of the Japanese garden in the pond of the Amstelpark. This artwork explores new possibilities to generate sound and composition that are controlled by slow, unpredictable and unexpected elements of nature which are highly respected in Japanese culture. The diversity of natural sounds gives the work an almost meditative character, while the dependance on natural factors evoke a tension between longing and acceptance. This sound installation engages, as a natural sequencer, in a dialogue with the water, sun wind and clouds. It refers to Japanese garden culture by using the principle of the Japanese bamboo water tumbler.

Philip Beesley

Meander
Meander is a large-scale immersive testbed environment constructed within a historic warehouse building at the centre of a residential highrise development in Cambridge, Ontario. The meshwork scaffolds which comprise the testbed are organized as a series of species within an artificial ecosystem, gently flexing and responding to the movement of viewers. Similar to natural environments such as rivers and clouds, large groups of parts pass physical impulses and data signals back and forth, enabling the entire environment to work as an interconnected whole. The innovations in Meander suggest ways of making adaptive, sensitive buildings of the future.

Liam Young

Where the City Can’t See
Directed by speculative architect Liam Young and written by fiction author Tim Maughan, ‘Where the City Can’t See’ is the world’s first narrative fiction film shot entirely with laser scanners, designed in collaboration with Alexey Marfin. The computer vision systems of driverless cars google maps, urban management systems and CCTV surveillance are now fundamentally reshaping urban experience and the cultures of our city. Set in the Chinese owned and controlled Detroit Economic Zone (DEZ) and shot using the same scanning technologies used in autonomous vehicles, we see this near future city through the eyes of the robots that manage it. Exploring the subcultures that emerge from these new technologies the film follows a group of young car factory workers across a single night, as they drift through the smart city point clouds in a driverless taxi, searching for a place they know exists but that the map doesn’t show.

ANOUK WIPPRECHT AND ADUEN DARRIBA

Smoke Dress
Fellow designer, Valerie Lamontagne, writes: “SMOKE DRESS is a collaboration between fashiontech designer Anouk Wipprecht [NL] and technologist Aduen Darriba [NL]. The dress is a wireless and wearable tangible couture “smoke screen” imbued with the ability to suddenly visually obliterate itself through the excretion of a cloud of smoke. Ambient clouds of smoke are created when the dress detects a visitor approaching, thus camouflaging itself within it’s own materiality. The SMOKE DRESS, with its loose net of metallic threads and electrical wire, works at the scale of the magical illusionists trick, permitting a hypothetical magician’s assistant to perform her own disappearing act.

Marnix de Nijs

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.

SANKAI JUKU

山海塾

butoh

TOBARI

“Over the 90 minute performance, I feel no less than transported. There are eight male performers, including Ushio Amagatsu himself. The dancers often move slowly, with incredible muscular control, fluidity and elegance. And suddenly the spell will be broken and they’ll run across the stage, their painted bodies leaving clouds of white powder hanging in the air like a shadow or ghost. Slow sustained movements are countered with tiny, minute gestures of the fingers. Hands are often gnarled, the joints contorted with incredible tension. It is mysterious, hypnotic and strange. The countenance of the performers is most arresting – behind the white paint, their faces reveal the fragility, humility, vulnerability and truth of their humanity.”Day Helesic

Can Buyukberber

Noumenon
Noumenon is a site-specific large-scale architectural and year-long installation in ZeroSpace, New York City; a compilation of Buyukberber’s last 4 year of audiovisual work and explorations; from emergent systems to out-of-body experiences; from transcendental objects to the symbols of the collective unconscious.

WILLIAM FORSYTHE

ויליאם פורסיית
ウィリアム·フォーサイス
威廉‧科西
윌리엄 포사이드
УИЛЬЯМ ФОРСАЙТ
the fact of matter

The choreographer William Forsythe constructed this installation to encourage participants to swing and stretch their way across a defined space. In practice it is an incredibly difficult activity, particularly for adults as you realise how heavy and “clumsy” your body actually is.

SEBASTIAN WOLF

Brume
In the collaborative work Brume fog emerges from and self-organizes on the surface on a sculptural element, congealing with light into an elusive stratum. The installation utilizes a series of ultrasonic transducers that generate thick clouds of dense, yet extremely lightweight water vapor. Fog is produced in an inner chamber contained within an enclosure that is outfitted with a porous surface. A small radial blower inside the apparatus gently pumps air into the inner chamber lifting the fog through the membrane, whereby it “settles” on the surface. Viewed from a distance, the fog appears as a visualized mass of air circumscribing the perimeter of the enclosure.

Donald Davis

Internal view of the O’Neill cylinder
“One of my earliest Space Colony paintings was based on the giant ‘Model 3’ cylindrical habitats envisioned by Gerard O’Neill. I imagined the clouds forming at an ‘altitude‘ around the rotation axis. At this time the scene is bathed in the ruddy light of all the sunrises and sunsets on Earth at that moment as the colony briefly enters the Earths shadow, out at the L5 Lagrangian point where stable locations are easily maintained. Oil on canvas panel disposition unknown. “

FONG QI WEI

Flypast Sunset
“In this series of animated artworks, which are essentially slowed down versions of the series Time in Motion, I invite you to experience the passage of moments across a landscape. Perhaps understanding that even though all moments are transient, all moments are equally worthy of our respect because they are parts of a larger whole. Each Time Loop is made manually. I captured every moment across a sunset or sunrise using a digital camera, and manually stitched these moments into Time Paintings. Finally, different sequential time paintings were put together to create a sense of motion  almost imperceptible in some of the works, in the manner of clouds drifting across a sky.” Fong Qi Wei

Ann Veronica Janssens

States of Mind
Brussels-based artist Ann Veronica Janssens’ practice is concerned primarily with light, colour, and perception. Janssens makes very few art objects. Instead, her work attempts to escape the ‘tyranny of objects’ and what she describes as their ‘overbearing materiality’. Since the late 1990s, Janssens has filled spaces with washes of coloured light or ‘haze sculptures’: dense, illuminated clouds of vapour that render surroundings unfamiliar and sensory perception altered.

Tanabe Chikuunsai

Vuslat
Tanabe was born to one of Japan’s most prestigious bamboo pedigrees and is the fourth generation of his family to take the artist name Chikuunsai, meaning “master of the bamboo clouds.” Tanabe works hard to keep his family’s legacy alive by mastering the styles and techniques that the Tanabe family is known for, while also establishing his own original artistic voice.

Agnes Meyer-Brandis

Cloud Core Scanner

Her current installation IN THE TROPOSPHERE LAB provides insights into the material produced under conditions distant from earth. The exhibition tells of the formation of clouds and shows conditions and combinations of art and science during zero gravity. With the exhibition by Agnes Meyer-Brandis, the project space of the Ernst Schering Foundation once again presents a contemporary art project that stimulates interdisciplinary debate and builds bridges to scientific research. The lab as a gravimetric document of the “Cloud Core Scanner” experiment shows a world alternating between controlled and bound-less states – artistic research in search of the reality level of constructions of the matter that surrounds us.

Leo Villareal

Star Ceiling
Expressing the vibrant dynamism of nature—from billowing cosmic clouds and swarming masses to radial bursts, spiraling vortices, and turbulent waves—Star Ceiling​ explores the tension between the rational and the transcendent, between the human and the non-human worlds. Villareal’s artwork gives life to inanimate matter through the invisible medium of code and induces a deep connectedness and rare experiential awareness.

Joy Division

The Eternal
[Verse 1]
Procession moves on, the shouting is over
Praise to the glory of loved ones now gone
Talking aloud as they sit round their tables
Scattering flowers washed down by the rain
Stood by the gate at the foot of the garden
Watching them pass like clouds in the sky
Try to cry out in the heat of the moment
Possessed by a fury that burns from inside
[Verse 2]
Cry like a child, though these years make me older
With children my time is so wastefully spent
A burden to keep, though their inner communion
Accept like a curse an unlucky deal
Played by the gate at the foot of the garden
My view stretches out from the fence to the wall
No words could explain, no actions determine
Just watching the trees and the leaves as they fall

Michael Pinsky

Transparent Room
Transparent Room suspends viewers in a virtual space where they see through walls to hidden rooms and city streets, and through ceilings to the sky. The room’s confining walls are replaced by projections of the outside world, its time accelerated as clouds speed by and as cars and pedestrians alike race down the street. In this caricatured passing of time, views of the cityscape and of the building’s interiors are magnified, first showing details, then textures and, finally, just single colours.

Luke Aikins

Skydiver
On 30 July 2016, veteran American skydiver Luke Aikins made history by being the first person to jump 7600 m without a parachute. As he took his gigantic leap of faith, a crowd of anxious spectators craned their necks in the Californian desert in anticipation of his emergence from the clouds.

RONAN & ERWAN BOUROULLEC

ロナン&エルワン·ブルレック
Ронан и Эрван Буруллек
Буруллек братья
Clouds

Respectivement diplômés de l’École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs de Paris et de l’école nationale supérieure d’arts de Cergy-Pontoise, Ronan (né en 1971) et Erwan Bouroullec (né en 1976) s’associent en 1999 pour mener un travail au sein d’un dialogue permanent et d’une exigence commune vers plus de justesse et de délicatesse.

KOHEI NAWA

كوهي ناوا
名和晃平
КОХЕЙ НАВА
foam

Japanese artist Kohei Nawa has immersed visitors at the aichi triennale in undulating sea of bubbling matter, surrounding the walls and floor in porous, cloud-like material. ‘Foam’ inhabits an almost pitch-black room, creating an ethereal quality that seems aesthetically otherworldly walking through the space, the topography of the puffs creates a massive terrain of floating material, stiff enough to stand in place, yet copious in its fragility and delicacy.

Chris Klapper & Patrick Gallagher

Symphony in D Minor

‘Symphony in D Minor’ is an interactive sound and video installation on an epic scale. A thunderstorm contained within a series of large hand cast resin sculptures, each individual form is a unique instrument hanging from the ceiling. Suspended just within reach and activated by touch, the viewer sets the symphony in motion by pushing the forms through the air to trigger the various sound elements of the storm. Sensors relay individual recordings of thunder, lightning, wind and rain with alternating intensities to a full-scale sound system. Acting as both conductor and musician, the viewer creates an evolving composition out of atmospheric sounds, forging an environment that envelops the audience. Housed within each piece are 2 video projectors employing mapping software to evenly fill the surface of the forms. Like giant illuminated pendulums each sculpture radiates video projections that in their dormant state display abstractions of water droplets and slow moving clouds. As the sensors detect movement different ranges initiate more visual elements of the storm. Once activated, the form then shifts to a swirling torrent of clouds.