Bots

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival

Bots presents a computer-controlled society through a series of algorithmically controlled humanoid avatars that appear on physical carpets using augmented reality (AR). Real-time performances synthesize human behavioral patterns into a formalized digital social study. Omnipresent, combined with our devices and incorporated into virtual environments, the work reminds us of our own digitalized world, in which we are surrounded by invisible bots.

Bio

Giulia Bowinkel (born 1983) and Friedemann Banz (born 1980) live in Berlin and have worked together under the name Banz & Bowinkel since 2009. In 2007 they graduated from the Art Academy with Albert Oehlen and started making art with computers . His work encompasses computer-generated imagery, animation, augmented reality, virtual realities and installations.

Portraits in Black and Silver
Portraits in Black and Silver is an interactive kinetic artwork that uses BREAKFAST’s custom-engineered Flip-Disc medium. This computer-controlled installation invites you to become a part of its history. As you engage with the piece, it will record a brief clip of your interaction and play it back at a later time, cycling through all of the portraits captured. Flip-Discs are small dime-size circles that can rotate 60 times per second using electromagnets, creating abstract images of black and silver portraits. The artwork challenges your perception of what art can be and pushes the boundaries of traditional mediums.

The Half
New media artist group, Intermedia Chef is trying to explore dynamic artwork generated by computer-controlled sound in the aspect of data visualization. The sound installation artwork transits sound wave into physical movement. Overmore, they are aiming that the sound wave energy turns out a kinetic type of visual art.

LOVERS
Computer-controlled, five-channel video/sound installation with five video projectors, eight-channel sound system, and slide projectors […] As an image, a pair of lovers often suggests a castle of exclusion. With the sexual liberation of the last few decades, the word now has more to do with physical coupling than with the sublimity of “true love.” AIDS has added a new dimension of wariness to this pairing. The life-size dancers in Lovers are drained of life. Projected onto the black walls of a square room, the naked figures have a spectral quality. Their movements are simple and repetitive. Back and forth, they walk and run with animal grace. Their actions become familiar over time, so that it is a surprise when two of the translucent bodies come together in a virtual embrace. These ostensible lovers–more overlapping than touching–are not physically entwined.

ダグエイケン
道格·艾特肯
sonic fountain
A large round hole—if it were a hot tub, it would be comfortably orgy-sized—has been gouged roughly out of the slick concrete floor of 303 Gallery and filled with milky gray water. Attached to the black duct-work and girders of the ceiling directly above it is a square of pipe surrounded by a speaker array. In the center of the square and at each of its corners is a computer-controlled spigot, dripping, spitting or jetting out, in a rhythmically complex 15-minute cycle, milky water pumped up from the pit in a closed circuit. This is Doug Aitken’s Sonic Fountain.

tour en l’air
With “tour en l’air”, the Berlin artist Ursula Neugebauer returns to an unforgettable childhood experience: Donned with the first long skirt in the fast turn around your own axis, to experience a previously unknown body feeling – and to get to know a new form of stability in the rotation.
Tour en l’air is an impressive installation at the intersection of fashion, art and architecture. Decorative busts slip into several floor-length red taffeta dresses and come to life thanks to computer-controlled electric motors. Although the individual components are of purely mechanical and material origin, the overall composition appears as a poetic expression of the human: namely a magical dance.