highlike

Sougwen Chung

愫君
Drawing Operations
Sougwen Chung is an internationally renowned multidisciplinary artist, who uses hand-draw and computer-generated marks to address the closeness between person-to-person and person-to- machine communication. She is a former researcher at MIT Media Lab and current Artist in Resident at Bell Labs and New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Her speculative critical practice spans installation, sculpture, still image, drawing, and performance. Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 1 is the 1st stage of an ongoing study of human and robotic interaction as an artistic collaboration.

ARAKAWA + GINS

Yoro Park – Site of Reversible Destiny
“The couple first fully explored Reversible Destiny in what is regarded as their seminal gallery piece, “The Mechanism of Meaning,” an ever-evolving manifesto-cum-artwork begun in 1963, comprising 80 panels that they refined and added to over decades, many of them high-concept diagrams and puzzles with instructions and text (“A Mnemonic Device for Forgetting,” “Think One, Say Two”), made primarily of acrylic and mixed media on canvas. In an accompanying précis to the work, which was exhibited at the Guggenheim in 1997, they prescribed “no more irretrievable disappearances” and declared death “old-fashioned.” Critical opinion differs on how seriously the pair, whose work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and Paris’s Centre Pompidou, took the grandiose quest to end death. But if it was intended as metaphor, neither of them ever let on. Indeed, though Arakawa himself died at 73, in 2010, and Gins four years later, at the age of 72, defying death became the defining work of their lives.”

Liam Young

Planet City

Planet City, by Los Angeles-based film director and architect Liam Young, explores the productive potential of extreme densification, where 10 billion people surrender the rest of the planet to a global wilderness. Although wildly provocative, Planet City eschews the techno-utopian fantasy of designing a new world order. This is not a neo-colonial masterplan to be imposed from a singular seat of power. It is a work of critical architecture – a speculative fiction grounded in statistical analysis, research and traditional knowledge.
It is a collaborative work of multiple voices and cultures supported by an international team of acclaimed environmental scientists, theorists and advisors. In Planet City we see that climate change is no longer a technological problem, but rather an ideological one, rooted in culture and politics.

Carlos Motta

Patriots, citizens, lovers was developed in conversation with Ukrainian journalist Maxim Ivanukha as a commission of the PinchukArtCentre’s Future Generation Art Prize 2014 and is composed of ten urgent interviews with Ukrainian LGBTI and queer activists who discuss the critical and dire situation of lesbian, gay, trans and intersex lives in Ukraine in times of war[…] Social invisibility, physical and psychological abuse, political violence, and a deeply patriarchal culture frame the context for the difficult work of LGBTI activists who denounce discrimination and demand the transformation of the system.

Mark Dorf

Contours
Contours proposes a distancing through de-familiarization of what has become concrete by way of image and language. Active contradiction and abstraction are central to the works through a mixture of variables often seen in opposition or as dis-harmonious. Through the presentation of puzzling symbols, both familiar and skewed, a legible illegibility is produced: information being transmitted, but the immediate read obscured and hidden from sight. Through this, current sight-lines are made visible allowing for critical reflection, while simultaneously revealing the flexibility of language and image in order to engender the possibility of alternative understandings of the world: a crucial consideration in context of our contemporary global social and political shifts.
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Roy Andersson

World of Glory
World of Glory is a 1991 Swedish short film written and directed by Roy Andersson. Its original Swedish title is Härlig är jorden, which means “Lovely is the Earth”, and is the Swedish title of the hymn “Fairest Lord Jesus”. The narrative portrays a man in white make-up who guides the viewer through his life in a bleakly stylised world. The film was Andersson’s critical comeback to cinema, after many years in advertising

THOMAS ROBSON

Томас Робсон
توماس روبسون
トーマス・ロブソン

Art Remixer” Thomas Robson says he “develops collision art to confront received aesthetics & critically re-appraise imagery in a visually saturated world.” Whatever he says, the stuff is freaking cool. He has worked in graphic design and in interactive design for the web & TV for the BBC. But it seems like he’s more interested now in coloring outside the lines:
It is remarkable how diverse his work is in various series like Landscape with Data, Made in China and Luxe Art with styles and materials including collage, photography, computer graphics and even ceramics.

Golan Levin, Chris Sugrue and Kyle McDonald

The Augmented Hand Series
The “Augmented Hand Series” (by Golan Levin, Chris Sugrue, and Kyle McDonald) is a real-time interactive software system that presents playful, dreamlike, and uncanny transformations of its visitors’ hands. It consists of a box into which the visitor inserts their hand, and a screen which displays their ‘reimagined’ hand—for example, with an extra finger, or with fingers that move autonomously. Critically, the project’s transformations operate within the logical space of the hand itself, which is to say: the artwork performs “hand-aware” visualizations that alter the deep structure of how the hand appears.