blind

It’s an image that evokes a moment in history seared into our collective consciousness. This is “Blind” by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. The sculpture of an aircraft spearing a towering monolith recalls the 9/11 attack on New York’s Twin Towers. The simple black pillar carries a heavy meaning. It’s the final artwork in a new Milan exhibit called “Breath Ghosts Blind”.

Loom
Loom showcases abstract animations developed with data from real-time Google Trends. Popular queries appear momentarily as overlaid text before dissolving into a smoky abstraction. These terms are approached with an accidental lyricism —each word appears and disappears in a trail of saturation. Colors within the animation are determined by the prevalence of a specific topic; the more viral the search is online, the warmer the tones become. Stripped from headlines, graphic imagery, and statistics, each phrase inspires a contemplative experience, a chance for the viewer to ruminate on what is streaming through the collective consciousness at any given time. Loom weaves a social fabric, mixing the transcendental with the banal, to present the spirit of our time in generative motion.

Liminal Beings
Liminal Beings explores the concept of automaton and the different anthropomorphic forms and functions embedded within its ontology. Automata, since ancient times, have been standing on the verge of two states, developing machinic and human characteristics simultaneously – in reality, and in the collective consciousness. They are trained to execute and learn respective actions and procedures, thus creating an uncanny, awkward state, trapped in limbo between diverse conditions of existence.

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.

曹斐
ツァオ·フェイ
Чао Фей
Haze and Fog

Cao Fei’s ‘Haze and Fog’ is a new type of zombie movie set in modern China made by one of the most important Chinese artists working today. Working with film, photography, installation and performance Cao Fei probes her personal and cultural relationship to metropolitan China.Rather than positioning activity as good vs evil, Cao Fei’s major new video commission explores how the collective consciousness of people living in the time of what the artist calls “magical metropolises” emerges from seemingly tedious, mundane, day-to-day life. This magic reality is created through a struggle at the tipping point between the visible and the invisible.

Synaptic Bliss
Begun in 2003, the series of works collectively known as “SYNAPTIC BLISS” explore ideas of a digital consciousness that allows for the simultaneous perception of multiple perspectives and scales, as well as the blurring of the distinctions between the body and its environment, the exterior and the interior, and the organic and the artificial. The works in this ongoing series include a variety of media, ranging from architectural installations, to video projections and environments, as well as digital prints and hand-woven rugs.