The Museum of Faces

Designed to record and tell the stories of the local community and beyond, this futuristic invention by Synarcade Audio-Visuals is an astonishing communal forum of the city at a unique moment of growth and change.
Visitors are invited to approach the work and press a glowing button to make the faces come alive and speak. Then, they can step into a special Video Capture Booth and contribute their own face, voice, and story to become part of the ever-changing Museum.
The Museum of Faces is based on Synarcade Audio-Visuals’ award-winning invention, The Lumiphonic Creature Choir, an eerie mechanical choir that can sing together in unison, beatbox, or recite poetry at the touch of a button. The Lumiphonic Creature Choir has performed to sell-out audiences in Melbourne, Croatia, New York, and at TEDxSydney 2018.

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.

Russian Roulette

FILE 2024 | Interator – Sound Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
Dennis Schöneberg – Russian Roulette – Germany

An incessant bass drum drives the journey through an eccentric world populated by fruity alien creatures in a cheerful and colorful environment.

Bio

Dennis Schöneberg, German AI artist, data science student and developer of open source AI models, integrates his passion for electronic music into his creative endeavors. Merging art with technology, he explores the synergy between creativity and artificial intelligence.

Credits

Music: Believe by Russian Roulette

Breathing
File Festival
Breathing is a work of art based on a hybrid creature made of a living organism and an artificial system. The creature responds to its environment through movement, light and the noise of its mechanical parts. Breathing is the best way to interact with the creature.
This work is the result of an investigation of plants as sensitive agents for the creation of art. The intention was to explore new forms of artistic experience through the dialogue of natural and artificial processes. Breathing is a pre-requisite for life, and is the path that links the observer to the creature.Breathing is a small step towards new art forms in which subtle processes of organic and non-organic life may reveal invisible patterns that interconnect us.Breathing is a work of art driven by biological impulse. Its beauty is neither found isolated on the plant nor in the robotic system itself. It emerges at the very moment in which the observer approaches the creature and their energies are exchanged through the whole system. It is in that moment of joy and fascination, in which we find ourselves in a very strange dialogue, that a life metaphor is created.Breathing is the celebration of that moment.

PARADISE – A contemporary interpretation of The Garden of Earthly Delights

Lo Studio Smack, meglio conosciuto per il video musicale Witch Doctor di De Staat, ha rilasciato una nuova animazione: un’interpretazione contemporanea di uno dei dipinti più famosi del primo maestro olandese Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights. Nel loro ultimo lavoro, il gruppo ha ripulito il paesaggio originale del pannello centrale del dipinto di Bosch e lo ha ricostruito in un’allucinante animazione 4K. Le creature che popolano questo parco giochi al coperto incarnano gli eccessi e i desideri della civiltà occidentale del XXI secolo. Consumismo, egoismo, evasione, richiamo dell’erotismo, vanità e decadenza. Tutti i personaggi sono metafore per la nostra società in cui i solitari sciamano nel loro mondo dei sogni digitale. Sono riflessi simbolici dell’ego e dell’immaginazione delle persone come si vedono, a differenza della versione di Bosch, in cui tutti gli individui sembrano più o meno uguali. Da un Hello Kitty arrapato a un serpente del pene che caccia alla coca Da uno spybot incarnato a polli fritti senza testa. Questi personaggi, una volta figure di sogno dipinte con precisione, sono ora modelli 3D creati digitalmente. A tutti loro è stato dato il proprio ciclo di animazione per vagare nel paesaggio. Inserendoli tutti insieme in questo affresco sintetico, il quadro non è mai lo stesso. Ciò che l’animazione e il trittico di Bosch hanno in comune è che difficilmente riuscirai a sopportare tutto, puoi guardarlo per ore. “Paradise” è stato commissionato dal Museo MOTI nei Paesi Bassi per la mostra New Delights, che fa parte del 500 ° anniversario di Hieronymus Bosch. Una gigantesca installazione video di quest’opera è esposta nel Museo fino al 31 dicembre 2016.

让汤格利
ז’אן טינגלי
ジャン·ティンゲリー
장 팅겔리
Жан Тингели
Le Cyclop
jean tinguely and niki de saint phalle
Aux premiers abords, cette masse perdue dans la forêt de Fontainebleau m’a laissé assez sceptique. Je ne la trouvais pas forcément esthétique et elle n’a pas retenu mon attention. Et pourtant… Plus la vidéo avançait, plus cette installation permanente m’intriguait. Il faut préciser que c’est une oeuvre bruyante (grincements, roulements répétés de boules, mécanismes…) et qui interpelle le spectateur/visiteur par tous ses sens, il observe, touche, entend, sent, il est présent et peut participer. Le spectateur est donc acteur et c’est une caractéristique essentielle dans l’oeuvre.
C’est l’oeuvre de Jean Tinguely mais qui existe telle qu’elle est grâce à la contribution de plusieurs artistes comme Klein, Arman, César, Soto, Weber… Le Cyclop se parcourt à l’extérieur mais aussi par l’intérieur où plusieurs salles sont dédiées aux oeuvres des divers artistes souvent sculpteurs. Le visiteur est au coeur de la structure, constate et se questionne. La créature, qui est recouverte de milliers d’éclats de miroirs, contraste totalement avec l’environnement qui l’entoure. On a une construction plutôt moderne placé dans un paysage réel et vivant, ce qui fait ressortir l’oeuvre et lui donne toute son originalité. Cela m’intéresserait de me balader dans le bois-des-Pauvres et d’y trouver une création aussi riche et complète. J’ai l’espoir et l’envie de la voir et de pouvoir la parcourir par moi-même, un jour, peut être…

Silverfish Stream
file festival
The sound generated by the friction of the metallic robots against the floor, like that created by the contact between man and machine, is registered, altered and played in real time by the spheres, each with its own tonality, and amplified in the room. What is generated is a stream of multisensory information (visual, auditive, tactile), natural environment for mechanic creatures.

Scale
‘scale’ is an interspecies art project: an audience-interactive installation that involves nocturnal electric fish from the Amazon River Basin. Twelve different species of these fish comprise a choir whose sonified electrical fields provide the source tones for an immersive audiovisual environment. The fish are housed in individual tanks configured in a custom-built sculptural arc of aluminum frames placed around a central podium. The electrical field from each fish is translated into sound, and is thus heard — unprocessed or with digital effects added, with immediate control over volume via a touchscreen panel — through a 12-channel surround sound system, and with LED arrays under each tank for visual feedback. All software is custom-designed. Audience members interact as deejays with the system. Amongst the goals of the project is our desire to foster wider public awareness of these remarkable creatures, their importance to the field of neurological research, and the fragility of their native ecosystem.The project leaders comprise visual/conceptual artist Marlena Novak, composer/sound designer Jay Alan Yim, and neural engineer Malcolm MacIver. MacIver’s research focuses on sensory processing and locomotion in electric fish and translating this research into bio-inspired technologies for sensing and underwater propulsion through advanced fish robots. Novak and Yim, collaborating as ‘localStyle’, make intermedia works that explore perceptual themes, addressing both physical and psychological thresholds in the context of behavior, society/politics, and aesthetics.

1194D^3
Initially started as a tweak of 115C8 in 2013, one of Kwok’s Algorithmic Creatures based on finite subdivision, 1194D is an experiment on multiple geometric creatures co-existing within a tetrahedron-based grid environment. In 2017, The project was improved and revised into an immersive triple-screen audiovisual installation as 1194D^3 for .zip Future Rhapsody art exhibition curated by Wu Juehui & Yan Yan at Today Art Museum in Beijing, China. The entire visual is programmed and generated using Processing. All stages are later composed and exported using Premiere.

Prehysterical Machine

The Prehysterical Machine has a spherical body and eight arms made of aluminum tubing. It has a sensing system, a motor system and a control system that functions as an autonomous nervous system (entirely reactive). The machine is suspended from the ceiling and its arms are actuated by pneumatic valves and cylinders. Pyroelectric sensors allow the robot to detect the presence of viewers in the nearby environment. It reacts to the viewers according to the amount of stimuli it receives. The perceived emergent behaviors of this machine engender a multiplicity of interpretations based on single dynamic pattern of events.The aim of this project is to induce empathy of the viewer towards a “character” which is nothing more than an articulated metal structure. The strength of the simulacra is emphasized by perverting the perception of the creature, which is neither animal nor human, carried through the inevitable instinct of anthropomorphism and projection of our internal sensations, a reflex triggered by any phenomenon that challenges our senses.
FILE FESTIVAL

Paradise

serpent mouthpiece

Paradise is the term used to describe a place or state of timeless harmony and beauty. Whether connected to religion or not, the term Paradise echoes Utopian realms of humanity living at one with nature, sharing their tope with every exotic and fantastical creature imaginable.

David, Artificial Intelligence

Prometheus & Alien Covenant

“Since the first sequence, when he interacts briefly with the man who gave him life and soon realizes the stupidity of his mania for greatness, the android demonstrates wanting even more than what he received at birth. Could he, a creature, become a creator?” Virgílio Souza

cinema

ppp-creatures-generator
Asao Tokolo studied at the AA School of Architecture in London following graduation from Tokyo Zokei University in 1992. His decorative patterns based on the concept of ‘connection’ stem from September 11, 2001, and he continues to work in fields straddling art, architecture, and design. He designs and creates simple geometric crests and patterns that can be drawn with a ruler and compass, and three dimensional forms using the same principles.

Ada
File Festival
Similar to Tinguely’s “Méta-Matics”, “ADA” is an artwork with a soul. It acts itself. At Tinguely’s it is sufficient to be an unawarely struggling mechanical being. He took it wryly: the machine produces nothing but its industrial self-destruction. Whereas “ADA”, by Karina Smigla-Bobinski, is a post-industrial “creature“, visitor-animated, creatively acting artist-sculpture, self-forming artwork, resembling a molecular hybrid, such as a one from nanobiotechnology. It develops the same rotating silicon-carbon-hybrids, midget tools, miniature machines able to generate simple structures. “ADA” is much larger, esthetically much more complex, an interactive art-making machine.

Boxing Ballet
Yang’s Boxing Ballet turns one half of the gallery into a reworking of Oskar Schlemmer’s 1922 costumed dance work Triadisches Ballett, with replicas of five of the Bauhaus teacher’s bulbous and exaggerated figures, from a female figure made of hoops to a circle that looks like a flattened stickman. Here, Schlemmer’s figures are reimagined as golden bell-covered shapes on wheels or wire frames hanging by a wire from the ceiling. As they all come with handlebars, it seems we are meant to provide the choreography, stiffly pushing, say, a giant roosterlike creature around like an awkward shopping trolley.

Дэвид Линч
ديفيد لينش
大卫·林奇
デビッドリンチ
데이비드 린치
Дэвид Линч
Eraserhead
The Man in the Planet (Jack Fisk) pulls levers in his home in space, while the head of Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) floats in the sky. A giant spermatozoon-like creature emerges from Spencer’s mouth, floating into the void. The Man in the Planet appears to control the creature with his levers, eventually making it fall into a pool of water.
cinema

Fearful Symmetry
Taking its title from a line in William Blake’s poem “The Tyger”, the installation is inspired in part by the visceral description of an encounter with a creature in the night. So startling that the author questions the purpose and tools that could make such a life form. Intending to bring visitors to a primal state of hyper-awareness, the encounter of the work aimed to create such a visceral encounter.

DSM-VI
DSM-VI est une suite logique à notre approche artistique de création de mondes artificiels et de systèmes entièrement robotiques. Cette fois, nous voulons créer un univers qui met en scène des créatures exprimant des symptômes de comportements psychologiques «anormaux» et confrontés à de graves problèmes de «santé mentale», tels que névrose, psychose, troubles de la personnalité, paranoïa, schizophrénie, dépression, délire, etc. formes de comportement et troubles mentaux. Le titre du projet est inspiré du célèbre manuel de référence publié par l’American Psychiatric Association, le DSM-IV. Le DSM-IV (Manuel diagnostique et statistique des troubles mentaux) est considéré comme la bible de la psychiatrie moderne. Tantôt glorifié tantôt fortement critiqué, il s’agit d’un ouvrage de représentation qui décrit et classe les troubles du comportement humain et les maladies mentales. La version IV du DSM a été publiée en 1994 puis révisée en 2000. La version V est actuellement en préparation et devrait à terme être publiée en 2012. Avec ce projet, nous proposons la version VI. A l’instar de certains de nos précédents travaux conçus autour de l’idée de «la misère des machines» (voir La cour des miracles), le projet DSM-VI veut poursuivre notre travail de création sur la métaphore du vivant en interrogeant désormais la notion d’une «psychose des machines».

CARTE BLANCHE – CORPS DE WALK
Corps de Walk combines shapes and emotions in a unique, almost extraterrestrial “walk” by androgynous creatures. It makes a number of references to Killer Pig, Sharon Eyal’s first choreography for Carte Blanche, created in 2009. In Killer Pig, a piece for female dancers, Sharon Eyal plays with multiple incarnations of sensuality with a minimalist style and intense physical expression. She pursues that approach in Corps de Walk, but this time will all the company dancers involved. As with the previous piece, the costumes suggest androgynous nudity. She has collaborated with the Israeli musician DJ Ori Lichtik for many years, and once again here his music underpins her potent choreographic language, whose rhythm constantly evokes a beating heart.

Dying Centaur 2.0
polyester et robotique
They do look alike, for Alain Séchas’centaur is made of white polyester, from the moulds made for the bronze versions of Bourdelle’s scuplture. It’s not called Dying Centaur but Rêve Brisé (Broken Dream). Broken dream of a creature not only half human, half animal but half human, half god too.So every fifteen minutes, after light has come on the white centaur, it starts slowly collapsing.It comes more and more to pieces as it falls.And at the end of the process, its head bangs against the ground.But after a while, it starts rising from the dead.And then light fades out, and fifteen minutes later, the centaur dies and comes back to (still) life.

Augmented Shadow
File Festival

Augmented Shadow is a design experiment producing an artificial shadow effect through the use of tangible objects, blocks, on a displayable tabletop interface. Its goal is to offer a new type of user-experience. The project plays on the fact that shadows present distorted silhouettes depending on the light. Augmented Shadows take the distortion effect into the realm of fantasy. Shadows display below the objects according to the physics of the real world. However, the shadows themselves transform the objects into houses, occupied by shadow creatures. By moving the blocks around the table the user sets off series of reactions within this new fantasy ecosystem. In this installation, the shadows exist both in a real and a virtual environment simultaneously. It thus brings augmented reality to the tabletop by way of a tangible interface. The shadow is an interface metaphor connecting the virtual world and users. Second, the unexpected user experience results from manipulating the users’ visual perceptions, expectations, and imagination to inspire re-perception and new understanding. Therefore, users can play with the shadows lying on the boundary between the real, virtual, and fantasy. Augmented Shadow utilizes this unique interface metaphor for interactive storytelling. Maximizing the magical amusement of AR, it is embedding an ecosystem where imaginary objects and organic beings co-exist while each of them influences on each other’s life-cycle, even though it is not in use by users. Light and shadow play critical roles in this world’s functions causing chain reactions between virtual people, trees, birds, and houses. A set of tangible blocks allows users to participate in the ecosystem. Users can influence on the system by playing with the blocks or observe the changes of the shadows as if kids were playing with an ant farm.

chuncho
The Forest Creatures

In one live recording of “Chuncho”, she sings a range of over four and a half octaves, from B2 to G♯7. She was able to sing notes in the low baritone register as well as notes above the range of an ordinary soprano. Both low and high extremes can be heard in the song “Chuncho (The Forest Creatures)” (1953). She was also apparently able to sing in a remarkable “double voice“. “Chuncho” is a song of nature through the multiple voices that live in the rainforest