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”.

BOB

Cheng’s work explores mutation, the history of human consciousness and our capacity as a species to relate to change. Drawing on principles of video game design, improvisation and cognitive science, Cheng develops live simulations – virtual ecosystems of infinite duration, populated with agents who are programmed with behavioural drives but left to self-evolve without authorial intent, following the unforgiving causality found in nature.

Photo: Andrea Rossetti

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The work magnifies the process of virtual and real fusion, which is the process of uploading human consciousness to digital space. When the visual perception has been lost, can people still recognize the body through the touch and sound of wind, sound and vibration everywhere? Experiencers use non-visual senses, experience media art, and cooperate with the Taiwanese Non-Visual Aesthetic Education Association to create a digital space where the computer can fully understand the location of the experiencer in the space, allowing the experiencer to listen, move, touch objects, feel the vibration and come to know the space.

Undercurrents

“Mostly the fact that I AM a human body. We can live our lives buried in complex abstraction, or in virtual reality, but you can’t separate your consciousness from the fragility of your physical form. Many of my own fears and anxieties revolve around that realization. I would probably say my pieces involving the human body are a kind of self prescribed therapy to deal with my neurosis”.Albert Omoss

Intagible #Form
In this artwork “intangible #form [2019]”, focusing on how do we see the intangible as tangible using 420 kinetic laser modules. I’ve tried to generate virtual consciousness, presence and behavior of life in this time. And then I’ve been exploring what are we getting the surfacing consciousness and presence from the thing is in front of us or are we giving these to them? I think that when paying attention to consciousness, it could be a trigger to sense that we are human ourself.

Staalhemel

The intimate topography of the brain is laid out across a grid of 80 steel ceiling tiles as a spatialized form of tapping. The visitor can experience the dynamics of his cognitive self by fitting a wireless EEG interface on his head, that allows him to walk under the acoustic representation of his own brain waves.The accumulating resonances of impacted steel sheets generates penetrating overtones. The spatial distribution of impact and the overlapping of reverberations create a very physical soundspace to house an intangible stream of consciousness.‘Staalhemel’ (‘steel sky’, 2009) articulates the contradictory relationship we entertain with our own nervous system. Neurological feedback makes that the cognitive focus is repeatedly interrupted by the representation of this focus. Concentrated thinking attempts to portray itself in a space that is reshaped by thinking itself nearly every split second.

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.

Biofeedback Artwork

Amy Karle connects her body and consciousness to technology to create art, repurposing a Sandin Image Processor as an electrophysiological visualization device. While meditating, Amy Karle inputs her biofeedback into the historically significant Sandin IP analog computer to generate the output of image and sound in real-time. The artwork is both the long-duration performance as well as the experimental video art that is created in the process.

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.

Death and the Powers

Science fiction and poignant family drama combine in one of the most stunning, cutting-edge operas of the 21st century, with a libretto by former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, coming to the stage of the Winspear Opera House in a production directed by Diane Paulus, designed by Alex McDowell (Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report) and conducted by Nicole Paiement (TDO’s The Lighthouse).This visually spectacular robot pageant by MIT Media Lab’s Tod Machover tells the story of a terminally ill billionaire, sung by Robert Orth, who downloads his consciousness into “the System” and proceeds to use all his powers to persuade his loved ones to join him there. Without bodies, without the possibility of touch, sex, suffering, and death — are we still genuinely human?Explore these existential questions and much more in a piece Variety described as “playful, lyrical and…mesmerizing.” Also starring Joélle Harvey as Miranda, Patricia Risley as Evvy, and Hal Cazalet in his Dallas Opera debut as Nicholas.