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.

舞妓武田
武田麻衣子
מאיקו טאקדה
마이코 다케다
مايكو تاكيدا
Atmospheric Reentry

Maiko Takeda’s creations seem like a surreal creatures from fantastic dream world. The headpieces of her latest creation, ‘Atmospheric Reentry’, are excitingly different, delicate and futuristic. The Tokyo born graduate of Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art, seeks to ‘create surreal, subtle dramas around the person wearing a piece and the people near them’. She imagines to give the people wearing her pieces the opportunity to ‘experience or share surreal moments in their daily lives, at a party or in the privacy of their own home’. ‘I want my pieces to give people those magical experiences’

МИЕОНГБЕОМ КИМ
김명범
Myeong Beom Kim is from Seoul, Korea. He produces otherworldly installations and sculpture works that juxtapose man-made elements with nature to create surreal dream spaces. Utilising suspension as a common motif, his works are constantly poised in a state of ambiguous wonderment. Within his installations, living things are held inside the fragile confines of light bulbs and helium balloons replace tree foliage, literally uplifting the tree and its roots.

舞妓武田
武田麻衣子
מאיקו טאקדה
마이코 다케다
مايكو تاكيدا
ATMOSPHERIC REENTRY
Maiko Takeda’s creations seem like a surreal creatures from fantastic dream world. The headpieces of her latest creation, ‘Atmospheric Reentry’, are excitingly different, delicate and futuristic. The Tokyo born graduate of Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art, seeks to ‘create surreal, subtle dramas around the person wearing a piece and the people near them’.

Space Odyssey 2002

FILE 2024 | Aesthetic Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
Valentin Rye – A Space Odyssey 2002 – Denmark

This video offers a surrealist take on futuristic sci-fi concepts from the 60s and 70s. Imagine a future colonization of Mars where interior design is given an avant-garde twist. It was created by brainstorming visual ideas, generating countless images, refining the best ones and assembling them into clips. After careful selection, these clips have been organized into a cohesive timeline, accompanied by atmospheric music to enhance the overall experience.

Bio

Valentin Rye is a self-taught machine whisperer based in Copenhagen, deeply passionate about art, composition and the possibilities of technology. He has been involved in AI and neural network image manipulation since starting DeepDream in 2015. While his IT work lacks creativity, he indulges in digital arts during his free time, exploring graphics, web design, video, animation and experimentation with images.

Floating

FILE 2024 | Aesthetic Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
Leilanni Todd – Floating – United States

Floating explores the concept of surrendering and freeing oneself by allowing oneself to float, symbolizing overcoming adversity and mastering self-confidence. Inspired by her grandmother’s journey to overcome her fear of water through swimming, the work uses water and sea creatures as symbols of resilience and transformation. The personal narrative behind the work adds depth to its exploration of overcoming fears and discovering inner strength.

Bio

Leilanni Todd is an award-winning creative director with extensive experience in advertising, fashion and new media. Originally from Toronto and now based in New York, she harmoniously integrates art, technology and culture into her work. Through her FLOAM WORLD platform, Leilanni creates surreal narratives, reimagines traditional norms in fashion and advertising, and addresses complex human issues with humor and creativity.

Useless Hands

FILE 2024 | Aesthetic Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
Infratonal – Useless Hands – France

When our hands become useless, what will we choose to do with them? We can use AI to visualize the unthinkable, the strangely familiar yet indescribable forms and structures. Generative AI could be used as an amplifier of our ability to explore abstraction and surrealism rather than a simple mirror of our usual perceptions.

Bio

Infratonal is an artistic project led by Louk Amidou, a Paris-based multidisciplinary artist who works at the intersection of digital arts, electronic music and interaction design. He uses algorithms to create hybrid visual and sound pieces which aim to be performed by the human gesture as intangible instruments. He questions the artwork’s nature at the age of AI and the relationship between the artist and the algorithm.

2526
Polymorphic Robotic Garments
2526 refers to the number of hours invested in the creation of the two polymorphic robotic garments, from ideation to the finish, from the first line of drawing to the last stitch. The two polymorphic outfits of the 2 5 2 6 project are very real: woven, hand-screened, and consolidated materials have been specially designed to create these clothes. They are not virtual at all. However, they simulate the effects of virtual clothing: a surreal undulation generates a play of volume and transparency; their polymorphic movement, as well as their reflectivity, are results of an entirely new flexible material that combines glass, precious metals and silicone.

Thixotropes
They’re called Thixotropes. Compositions comprised of eight illuminated mechanized structures create choreographies of lighting effects that alternate form warm to cold light. Designed by London based design firm Troika, these suspended systems merge technology with art and explore the realm in which rational observations intersect with the metaphysical and surreal. Each of the structures is shaped as a composition of intersecting angular and geometric forms, made of thin tensed banding lined with rows of LED’s. The constructions continuously revolve around their own axis thereby materializing the path of the light and dissolving the spinning structures into compositions of aerial cones, spheres and ribbons of warm and cold light while giving life and shape to an immaterial construct.

Growth
Wang & Söderström is a Copenhagen based transdisciplinary duo composed of Swedish designer Anny Wang and architect Tim Söderström. The bridging of the physical and digital realms is a major theme in their practice and they are constantly trying to challenge the boundaries between them. Fluctuating between art and design, Wang & Söderström wants to throw out pre-existing conventions regarding the digital and put emphasis on the emotional and tactile side of materials, objects and textures to give the digital a more human-relatable quality and create more meaningful connections. “By 3D scanning elements from nature, like tree trunks, leaves and plants and mixing it with surrealistic materials and behaviors, we wanted to let them continue to grow in a digital environment.”

다니엘 아샴
ДАНИЭЛЯ АРШАМА
Connecting Time
‘Connecting Time’ is a survey show with works spanning Arsham’s entire career. Included are four at first glance ‘conventional’ architectural interventions that subtly manipulate the physical environment to create surrealistic settings. Fitness gear and objects rooted in pop culture are presented in eroded form as though excavated from some archaeological site, while swaddled animalistic figures recall the work of Christo or Man Ray, but with a playful, childlike twist.

Wrapped up
With her installations, sculptures and photographs, Dutch artist Guda Koster transforms the human body and attaches a new identity to her characters or to herself, using clothing as the main visual art form, patterns and colours to create surreal stories.

Shenzhen Bay Culture Park
“I want to create a surreal atmosphere, so that the people who visit, relax or exercise here have the possibility of engaging in a dialogue with the past and the future. Time and space are dissolved and placed against each other, manifesting a sense of weightlessness, and unrestrained imagination,” Ma Yansong

Antistructures
Amusing head-scratchers: a fitting description for the surreal, towering collection of architecture by photographer Alex Lysakowski in the series, Antistructures. Standing out against perfectly banal backdrops, Lysakowski creates structures of magnanimous and exaggerated proportions with a mix of photography and digital manipulation.

Born in Poland but now based in London, Sylwana Zybura who goes under the name Madam Peripetie is a highly imaginative photographer who creates surreal, visually vibrant, unconventional characters using a variety of props and make-up and hair design.

一月史云梅耶
ヤン·シュヴァンクマイエル
Ян Шванкмайер
Dimensions of dialogue
Surrealist genius Jan Svankmajer’s stop frame masterpiece ‘Moznosti dialogu’ (Dimensions of Dialogue) drew on his experience with puppetry, experimental theatre and his role in the Czechoslovakian Surrealist Group, to create an examination in three parts of how humans communicate and what can often go wrong.

Woos
FILE SAO PAULO 2015
ANIMA+
Our friends at PetPunk in Vilnius, Lithuania have created this surrealistic ride through a digital arboreal world in their short film “Woos”. Designed by Gediminas Å iaulys, animated by Andrius Kirvela, the project was commissioned by Computer Arts Magazine and is featured in (and on the cover of) their recent issue #172. Sound by Huma-Huma.

уильям хандли
Based out of Austin, Texas, William Hundley has received acclaim for his experimental photography which combines figurative elements with often surreal settings and landscapes to create something confronting and bizarre.

Nothing of This is Ours
“With his strong signature, and his recognizable visual and digital language, Alex creates infinite, surrealistic worlds with colorful creatures, alchemistic symbols, buddhas and other worldly cultural discoveryheritages. In the multiplayer game installation ‘Nothing of This is Ours’, visitors can immerse themselves in the mystic landscapes, graphic patterns and polygon characters. A journey without a destination, exploring with pure instinct. Alex offers the visitors a closer look at the artistic, innovative possibilities of the art game. The game as a contemporary medium, where the newest technique and art come together and enrich the one who takes the time to play the game. Alex invites the visitor to play in M0Bi, individually or collectively, experienced and inexperienced!”

フィリップ·ラメット
Филиппа Рамета
Born in 1961, Philippe Ramette is a French conceptual artist who plays with the viewer’s mind. Ramette creates gravity-defying photographs that appear to be digitally manipulated, using cleverly designed weight-bearing structures (or lead weights for the underwater shots), but in fact they are real world settings that were carefully arrangement, in order to achieve these impressive scenes. In Ramette’s surreal photography, surrealism literally invades reality.

فريدريك هيمان
弗雷德里克·海曼
פרדריק היימן
フレデリックヘイマン
ФРЕДЕРИК ХЕЙМАН
His work, humorous and surreal, helps to erase boundaries between photography, graphic design and space shaping. With many distortions (real or digital), not to mention strange and imposing installations, Heyman creates a world both unstructured and fascinating. Part of a new generation of photographers, his aim seems to give birth to a new kind of collaboration between all the arts, definitely modern and complex.

Laura Kampman
Daniel Sannwald creates fashion optimism. His work? A bit of minimalism, a bit of sci-fi surrealist. It’s a swatch of really interesting ideas. What really turns my crank about Daniel Sannwald, is that his ideas don’t just stop at the end of a shoot. He’s as mysterious as the photos he takes (which are quite the mystery).

Aguado
Argentinian Larissa Haily Aguado is collaging in the digital age. Still assembling manually from found materials, the trained artist and designer creates enchanting compositions through the the mixing of various motifs, fused with surrealism and an unmistakable humorous quality that makes you stop and think. These dreamlike collages mix inanimate objects, nature, fashion and animals, with other seemingly random elements. However, they may not be so random.

ВИВИАН САССЕН
ויויאן סאסן
ヴィヴィアンサッセン
维维安·萨森
Sassen’s fashion photography is marked by both innovative strength and a surrealistic beauty. In contrast to her renowned independent work, Sassen’s fashion photography is commissioned work that is created in close collaboration with a team of stylists, art directors, models and make-up artists. This means Sassen can treat fashion photography as the ultimate playground […]

Джулия Рэндалл
Blown
Julia Randall is in love with drawing, and uses her seductive technique to craft images that subtly challenge assumptions about corporeality, desire, and the natural world. Intersecting sensibilities activate her work; images are simultaneously erotic and humorous, beautiful and repulsive. Although she clearly operates in the realm of fantasy, Randall uses observation-based drawing and hyperrealistic technique to create images that are surreal and suggestive.

فريدريك هيمان
弗雷德里克·海曼
פרדריק היימן
フレデリックヘイマン
ФРЕДЕРИК ХЕЙМАН
His work, humorous and surreal, helps to erase boundaries between photography, graphic design and space shaping. With many distortions (real or digital), not to mention strange and imposing installations, Heyman creates a world both unstructured and fascinating. Part of a new generation of photographers, his aim seems to give birth to a new kind of collaboration between all the arts, definitely modern and complex.

Reface [Portrait Sequencer]

Reface [Portrait Sequencer] by Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman (2007) is a surreal video mash-up that composes endless combinations of its visitors’ faces. Based on the Victorian “Exquisite Corpse” parlor game, the Reface installation records and dynamically remixes brief video slices of its viewers’ mouths, eyes and brows. Reface uses face-tracking techniques to allow automatic alignment and segmentation of its participants’ faces. As a result, visitors to the project can move around freely in front of the display without worrying about lining up their face for the system’s camera. The video clips recorded by the project are “edited” by the participants’ own eye blinks. Blinking also triggers the display to advance to the next set of face combinations. Through interactions with an image wholly constructed from its own history of being viewed, Reface makes possible a new form of inventive play with one’s own appearance and identity. The resulting kinetic portraiture blends the personalities and genetic traits of its visitors to create a “generative group portrait” of the people in the project’s locale.

FLUID ECSTASY
by Peter Palm
is an artistic underwater video work by Peter Palm, which he realized on the island of Mauritius with the conceptual artist Milo Moiré. Filled with a naive sexuality, this short film lasting just under six minutes reveals surreal, grace-filled perspectives on the female nude. Beneath the surface, within the concealing element of water, nothing remains concealed.
The title “Fluid Ecstasy” describes a trance-like, natural bliss in the flow of merging.
“Fluid Ecstasy” presents a metaphysically ambivalent ambience that documents our prenatal state of becoming in the form of a visual metaphor. In an analogous notion of being, “being” is understood as that in which everything partakes, though in various ways. The origin of all life lies in water. Peter Palm shows the nude Milo Moiré in a peaceful world, comparable to our “being” in the womb prior to our birth.
Both Milo Moiré and Peter Palm have done without technical aids, with one exception … flippers, which make reference to the metamorphosis from fish to Homo sapiens.
The video was created during numerous dives.

리시 엘
Lissy Laricchia aka Lissy Elle is a Canadian photographer who creates magical, paused in motion surreal photos. She plays with the subject, likes to change the rules of gravity and use smart props, location and digital manipulation. Her dreamy photographs are certainly pleasing on the eye, taking you off somewhere for a moment but the world within these images has also an air of mystery

Polygonal Horse II
Gregor Gaida’s sculptures have something almost unreal, in them surrealism is powerful, there is transfiguration, symbol and narration; creates incredibly exciting sculptures in which even the elements: wood, resin and concrete mix without losing their contrasting nature. Its themes can be seen as three-dimensional snapshots, with fictional protagonists fighting and being advanced, extracted and distant from their original framework of action. In his sculptures, Gaida literally shapes this approach and stories without finishing them; many of his subjects are also physically cut in half, incomplete and, therefore, to be completed.

In Voluptas Mors

“In Voluptas Mors” (“Voluptuous Death”), is probably one of the most complex portraits I have ever seen alongside Halsman’s “Dali Atomicus” which took 28 attempts! “In Voluptas Mors” is again a carefully considered and planned out portrait of the surrealistic Spanish artist Salvador Dalí, made in collaboration with photographer Philippe Halsman (1951). The image depicts Dalí posing beside a giant ‘skull’, a tableau vivant (or “living picture”) comprising of seven nude female models in beautiful mind blogging poses. As you can imagine it took a considerable amount of time to create this wonderful photograph. It took all in all Halsman and Dali three hours to arrange the models according to Dalí’s precise sketch.

리시 엘
Lissy Laricchia aka Lissy Elle is a Canadian photographer who creates magical, paused in motion surreal photos. She plays with the subject, likes to change the rules of gravity and use smart props, location and digital manipulation. Her dreamy photographs are certainly pleasing on the eye, taking you off somewhere for a moment but the world within these images has also an air of mystery

Requiem

In REQUIEM choreographer Nanine Linning imagines the tension between life and death, the profane and the sacred, the carnal and the spiritual. Themes, which are inextricably linked together and are at the same time absolute opposites. Inspired by Fauré’s “Requiem”, Dante’s “La Divina Commedia” and the absurd and surreal images of the artist duo “Les Deux Garçons”, Linning is searching for her own paradise on earth.REQUIEM is a multidisciplinary production with 25 dancers, live orchestra, two soloist singers, a choir, a sound artist and video. It is a triptych where the public will first walk on stage through dance installations; the dancers create a frozen, silent world.In the second part Fauré’s “Requiem” is being performed while singers and dancers follow Linnings choreography in a world of immense video images on stage. In the last part a Sound Artist will break apart Fauré’s “Requiem”. The frozen world of part one will melt and the energy of life will be released in a dynamic choreography for the choir and dancers.

イリ·キリアン – スティーヴ·ライヒ
יירי קיליאן – סטיב רייך
Иржи Килиана – Стив Райх
Falling Angels
Falling Angels was created in 1989 as one Kylián’s Black and White Ballets. The Black and White ballets consisted of six pieces, with Falling Angel being dance 6. It is choreographed to Steve Reich’s Drumming (Part One) created in 1971, which was based on ceremonial ritual music from Ghana (West Africa). Throughout Fallen Angels there is the use of mesmeric choral movement and repeated phrases. Falling Angels is for 8 women and depicts female dancers in their aim to achieve perfection but succumb in various stages to the human female psyche and female events such as ambition, seduction, pregnancy, birth, death, motherhood and self-awareness. Kylián was influenced by surrealism and minimalism during the creation of this work and the ‘black and white ballets’. In this ballet we see the combination of classical lines and sharp percussive movements that give unpredictability to the piece as a whole

“Hannes Van Severen makes the connection between reality and imagination in his work. The artist starts with an existing, everyday object, usually a piece of furniture, which he then transforms and changes. In this way, he deprives the object of its original functionality and allows its aesthetic value to prevail. As a result, the original usefulness of the everyday object no longer predominates, but his work nevertheless continues to be a visual reference to the original. With this paradoxical construction, Hannes Van Severen creates a fictitious world of images with alternative, intrinsic meanings and potential. The observer has to let go of the explanatory and allow his or her imagination to take flight. In combination with the personal experience of the observer, a richer dimension of the reality experienced will emerge with the new reading and interpretation of things that are apparently obvious. With this transformation, Van Severen wants to break down our recognition, to question the obviousness of our reality, and to show us the absurdity that surrounds us. Like the cubists and the surrealists, the artist divides into pieces and rearranges  an existing reality, which means that he can be described as a saboteur of the obvious.” Stef Van Bellingen

리시 엘
Lissy Laricchia aka Lissy Elle is a Canadian photographer who creates magical, paused in motion surreal photos. She plays with the subject, likes to change the rules of gravity and use smart props, location and digital manipulation. Her dreamy photographs are certainly pleasing on the eye, taking you off somewhere for a moment but the world within these images has also an air of mystery

조니 레인저
ジョニーレンジャー
ג’וני ריינג’ר
约翰尼游侠
جوني الحارس
Six Mil Antennas
SIX MIL ANTENNAS is a 360 degree immersive film that employs a range of visual and audio codes to bring a surrealist perspective to the forefront. Framing shifting communication processes in a fictional setting, the whimsical, open-ended work re-imagines different states of the world in a futuristic timeframe. Through a series of events, the piece alternates its tone between deconstructed gravity, aesthetic sensuality and satirical humor. Inserting filmed actors in faux designed landscapes, the film creates non-linear narratives of a personal, social and political nature and expresses a complex intertwining multiverse, in which the characters and abstract landscapes evolve.