highlike

Olafur Eliasson

DET LYTTENDE SPEJL
Visitors to DNV-Gødstrup, a new hospital near Herning, Denmark, are greeted at the main entrance by an airy, round pavilion. Two curved pipes, crossing one another perpendicularly, hold a large disc aloft at a slight angle. The reflective underside of the disc mirrors the semicircular pipes, creating the illusion of two complete circles passing through the ceiling and rising into an imaginary space above. As visitors enter the pavilion, they can gaze up at their own reflections in the mirror and see themselves incorporated, upside down, into the artwork, embraced within the globe drawn by the pipes. The tilt of the ceiling allows the reflections to be seen from the outside. As the viewer moves towards and around the pavilion, the rings appear to shift in shape, changing from ellipses to circles and back again.

Sam Twidale & Marija Avramovic

Sunshowers
(AI) infinite simulations
FILE FESTIVAL SP 2019
.
‘Sunshowers’ is the third in our series of real-time animation artworks. It is inspired by the opening chapter of Akira Kurosawa’s film Dreams which follows a young boy as he explores a forest and stumbles across a fox wedding (Kitsune no Yomeiri). Our piece explores ideas of animism and techno-animism by assigning life in the form of artificial intelligence to all of the objects, both natural and man-made, within the virtual world. The piece unfolds in real time with the characters themselves deciding which paths they will follow.

MASAKI FUJIHATA

beyond pages

The data projector loads images of a leather bound tome onto a tablet which a light pen activates, animating the objects named in it – stone, apple, door, light, writing. The soundscore immaculately emulates the motion of each against paper, save for the syllabic glyphs of Japanese script, for which a voice pronounces the selected syllable. Stone and apple roll and drag across the page, light illuminates a paper-shaded desklamp; door opens a video door in front of where you read, a naked infant romping, lifesize and laughing, in.

matthew bird

parallaxis
In a new moving-image work by Melbourne-based artist and architect Matthew Bird, two bodies move across the land, working with large cylindrical instruments. We witness them map and survey a terrain analogous to universal physical and psychological locations, each revolution marking a paradoxical attempt to pin an earthly position through perpetual movement. Playing on the human need to understand our relationship to the people and places around us, Parallaxis considers the potential for architectural processes and measurements to act as a foundation for structures of understanding.

JF Malouin

Les trois Grâces

file festival
“Les Trois Grâces” is a presence and corporeality simulation in virtual reality. Exposing the underlying power struggle implied within touch, this piece explores the trespassing  of bodily frontiers and territoriality. As a sculpture, its object is not matter, but our relationship to the other.
It offers a troubling experience of intimate proportions.

Ayoung Kim

In Search of Petra Genetrix

Petra Genetrix, the protagonist of the series Porosity Valley, is a migrant, mineral, and data cluster. In this lecture performance, the artist traces the origin of Petra Genetrix who constantly crosses borders, gender boundaries, and the concept of existence and nonexistence and creates her own hyperbolic mythology. While utilizing audio and video excerpts from her existing works, Ayoung Kim uses her own voice to create a verbal narrative exploring those agents who cross boundaries. By doing so, she continues to trace multifaceted crystal faces of Petra Genetrix, who is fundamentally porous and ambiguous.

ALISA ANDRASEK

Cloud Osaka
Envisioned as a high-resolution urban interchange, Cloud Osaka embodies Biothing’s approach to complex design synthesis across multiple orders of scale. Due to its central position in the city, a high convergence of users and one of Asia’s densest transportation nodes found in the adjacent JR Osaka Station, the key driver for the project was to understand 2.5 million people traversing the site every day. This is nearly 10 times the number of daily passengers at the busiest airports in the world. Such an extreme volume of pedestrian traffic, compounded by other forms of traffic in the area, warranted choosing computational physics simulation ordinarily used to simulate systems like river flows; indeed, a key driver for the project became the concept of a “river of people”.

Xu Zhen

徐震
Eternity

Xu Zhen is one of the most interesting and promising artists working in China today. An irreverent artist with a voracious appetite for global information and a unique ability to produce work across multiple platforms and media.Xu Zhen is a conceptual artist whose work often takes the form of provocative sculptures, installations and interventions that confront sociopolitical taboos in contemporary China and freely manipulate western expectations of Chinese art and commerce.

daan roosegaarde

waterlicht

Dubbed “the northern light of the Netherlands” by Studio Roosegaarde, the Waterlicht installation is designed to create the impression of a “virtual flood”.The waving lines of light spread across 1.6 hectares bear a resemblance to the northern lights – the natural phenomenon created when charged particles enter the Earth’s atmosphere – when viewed from underneath.

OLAFUR ELIASSON

Algenfenster
Algenfenster ist eine Anordnung von Glaskugeln, die in einer Wand montiert sind. Direkt hinter der Wand und den Kugeln befindet sich ein Fenster; So erscheinen in jeder Sphäre lebendige, invertierte Miniaturansichten der Szene außerhalb der Galerie und bewohnen sie. Die Zusammensetzung der Arbeit ähnelt stark der Struktur eines Typs einzelliger Algen, die als Kieselalgen bekannt sind und große Mengen Kohlenstoff aus der Atmosphäre entfernen.

.

Janela de algas
A janela de algas é um arranjo de esferas de vidro que são montadas em uma parede. Há uma janela logo atrás da parede e das bolas; Assim, em cada esfera, miniaturas vivas e invertidas da cena aparecem fora da galeria e a habitam. A composição da obra se assemelha muito à estrutura de um tipo de alga unicelular conhecida como diatomácea, que remove grandes quantidades de carbono da atmosfera.

 

XU ZHEN

徐震是当今中国最有趣,最有前途的艺术家之一。 徐震是一位概念画家,是一位概念画家,他的作品经常采取挑衅性的雕塑,置和干预的形式,面对当代中国和中国的社会政治禁忌,这是一位顽强的艺术家,对全球信息有强烈的需求,并且具有跨多种平台和媒体制作作品的独特能力。

.

Xu Zhen is one of the most interesting and promising artists in China today. Xu Zhen is a conceptual painter and a conceptual painter. His works often take the form of provocative sculptures, installations and interventions. Faced with contemporary China and China’s social and political taboos, this is a tenacious artist. There is a strong demand for global information and the unique ability to produce works across multiple platforms and media.

.

Xu Zhen è uno degli artisti più interessanti e promettenti in Cina oggi. Xu Zhen è un pittore concettuale e un pittore concettuale. Le sue opere assumono spesso la forma di sculture, installazioni e interventi provocatori. Di fronte alla Cina contemporanea e ai tabù sociali e politici della Cina, questo è un artista tenace. C’è una forte richiesta di informazioni globali e la capacità unica di produrre opere su più piattaforme e media.

 

Denis Villeneuve

Arrival

“Arrival’s narrative plays out in four languages: English, Mandarin, Russian and Heptapod. Though they are not spoken in the film, we learn that Louise is also fluent in Farsi, Sanskrit and Portuguese (and possibly others). The language learning process and the growing translingual bond between Louise and the heptapods forms the film’s narrative arc and the majority of its plot. Thus language, and specifically the mechanics of ←215 | 216→multilingualism, is Arrival’s central theme. Within this context, the ability to communicate across language barriers is an asset, and the flexibility to navigate new linguistic challenges is invaluable. The heptapods are pure science fiction, but serve a powerful metaphorical function. As Emily Alder (2016) writes in The Conversation, “ultimately, Arrival is less about communicating with the aliens than with each other – internationally but also individually […] The film’s message is that difference is not about body shape or colour but language, culture and ways of thinking. It’s not about erasing that difference but communicating through it”. Gemma King

.

语言学习过程以及路易丝与七足动物之间越来越多的跨语言联系形成了电影的叙事弧线和大部分情节。 因此,语言,尤其是←215的机制| 216→使用多种语言是到达中心的主题

.

Процесс изучения языка и растущая межъязыковая связь между Луизой и гептаподами составляют повествовательную дугу фильма и большую часть его сюжета. Таким образом, язык и, в частности, механика ← 215 | 216 → многоязычие – центральная тема Арривала.

Jeppe Hein

Geometric mirrors
Geometric Mirrors is a series of mirror angles, each comprised of two mirror surfaces intersecting at a 90° angle. While a perpendicular viewpoint simply reflects the viewer and the opposite space, an interesting visual phenomenon occurs when the viewer faces the corner angle directly. The right angle causes a duplicate reflection, as both mirrors reflect not only the space but also each other. Their widths become extended into the adjoining side, thus appearing to the viewer as a mirrored cross rather than a mirrored angle.

AURÉLIEN BORY

PLEXUS
Aurélien Bory is a Toulouse-based choreographer working at the intersection of dance, circus and visual art. In Plexus, he encloses the Japanese dancer Kaori Ito in a forest of tensioned vertical cables. It’s as if she’s in a transparent cuboid cage. We can see her, but her image is blurred by the shimmer of Arno Veyrat’s lighting as it moves across the cables. Ito strains against these confines, writhing, flailing and hurling herself against the cables. Every sound is hugely amplified, so with her every movement we are assailed by a high-tensile jangling and groaning. At intervals she subjects her environment to furious challenge, racing backwards and forwards within the limited inner space so that the cage rocks on its axis. At other times she positions herself between the cables so that they bear her weight, and hangs there like an exhausted insect, faintly articulating her limbs.

Liam Young & John Cale

Loop 60 Hz: Transmissions from the Drone Orchestra
A flock of autonomous DJI copters are programmed as aerial dancers and are mounted with specially engineered wireless speakers to broadcast the instruments of the band. Other copters are dressed in elaborate costumes to disguise their form and reflect light across the audience below. Against a score of original compositions and selected tracks from Cale’s seminal career this collaboration with Young imagines the possibilities of the drones as emerging cultural objects. If these technologies are no longer unseen objects overhead, or propelled along classified flight paths but brought into close and intimate relations with us then how might we see them differently. When their transmission fades, when the drones lose their signal and without their protocols for terror and surveillance, do they drop from the sky, do they fall in love or do the drones drift endlessly, forever on loop.

Jake Elwes

Cusp
A familiar childhood location on the Essex marshes is reframed by inserting images randomly generated by a neural network (GAN*) into this tidal landscape. Initially trained on a photographic dataset, the machine proceeds to learn the embedded qualities of different marsh birds, in the process revealing forms that fluctuate between species, with unanticipated variations emerging without reference to human systems of classification. Birds have been actively selected from among the images conceived by the neural network, and then combined into a single animation that migrates from bird to bird, accompanied by a soundscape of artificially generated bird song. The final work records these generated forms as they are projected, using a portable perspex screen, across the mudflats in Landermere Creek.

geoffrey mann

Cross-fire cutlery detail
The focus of the Past, Present & Future Craft practice commission was to examine the intangible characteristic of the spoken word and investigate the unseen affect of sound upon its inhabited environment.The project centralizes around the context of a domestic argument. In this case the event samples an audio excerpt from the 1999 Sam Mendes Film ‘American Beauty’. The slow building dialogue between the three central characters family dinner climaxes with a sound clash of emotions. The cross-fire of the argument traverses the dinning table but where previously the inanimate everyday objects such as plates, cutlery, teapot etc were unable to express their character, the intensity of the conversation deforms their once static existence into objects of unseen familiarity.The presented sound artifacts each encapsulate a momentary emotion of the argument.

Shilpa Gupta

For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit
‘For, in your tongue, I cannot fit,’ gives voice to 100 poets who have been jailed through time for their writing or their beliefs. The haunting work highlights the fragility and vulnerability of our right to freedom of expression today—and the bravery of those who struggle to resist. Visitors will encounter 100 microphones suspended over 100 metal rods, each piercing a verse of poetry. Over the course of an hour, each microphone in turn recites a fragment of the poets’ words, spoken first by a single voice then echoed by a chorus which shifts across the space.

Liam Young

Where the City Can’t See
Directed by speculative architect Liam Young and written by fiction author Tim Maughan, ‘Where the City Can’t See’ is the world’s first narrative fiction film shot entirely with laser scanners, designed in collaboration with Alexey Marfin. The computer vision systems of driverless cars google maps, urban management systems and CCTV surveillance are now fundamentally reshaping urban experience and the cultures of our city. Set in the Chinese owned and controlled Detroit Economic Zone (DEZ) and shot using the same scanning technologies used in autonomous vehicles, we see this near future city through the eyes of the robots that manage it. Exploring the subcultures that emerge from these new technologies the film follows a group of young car factory workers across a single night, as they drift through the smart city point clouds in a driverless taxi, searching for a place they know exists but that the map doesn’t show.

Karen Lancel & Hermen Maat

Paranoid Panopticum

Entering The Paranoid Panopticum you will run across your own fixation on control. While you will be able to control the visual by mirror and video- projection, a shift in the perception of reality takes place. Controlling changes into fear of being controlled, maximizing control becomes its own threat. In the Paranoid Panopticum you are haunted by your own mirrored projections. You can play with your own projection in a paradox based on the myth of Echo, Narcissus and his mirrored image. At the moment where Narcissus commits suicide, the mirrored image of the visitor is ‘suicided’. At this point the story starts over again.

Christopher Meerdo

Metadata
These videos are networked across multiple screens that have ben sculpturally shaped into a tall arch, asserting its physical presence like boding force. Embedded within one of the video sections is a poem the artist wrote about the ties the police have to slave catchers who then became police officers after abolition. The video also separately speaks to the artist’s own personal loss, affecting the video with an additional elegiac quality of the search for a missing friend.

SANKAI JUKU

山海塾

butoh

TOBARI

“Over the 90 minute performance, I feel no less than transported. There are eight male performers, including Ushio Amagatsu himself. The dancers often move slowly, with incredible muscular control, fluidity and elegance. And suddenly the spell will be broken and they’ll run across the stage, their painted bodies leaving clouds of white powder hanging in the air like a shadow or ghost. Slow sustained movements are countered with tiny, minute gestures of the fingers. Hands are often gnarled, the joints contorted with incredible tension. It is mysterious, hypnotic and strange. The countenance of the performers is most arresting – behind the white paint, their faces reveal the fragility, humility, vulnerability and truth of their humanity.”Day Helesic

alexander lehmann

Hybris – Garbage Truck
Inspired by chaos theory and non-linear dynamics, Hybris invested a few years sitting in the studio to create his debut, and the results of such an amount of time invested in it stand out at first glance because not only has his head blown of how much ordinary human being crosses his music in addition to blowing the minds of Noisia themselves (who surely do not have to be very easy people to surprise), it has also made UKF (the largest d & b / idm community the world) highlight his first single as a piece worthy of freezing in time and that somehow revitalizes and reinvents the d & b that in Hybris Garbage Truck has not only found a new form of expression with what you hear but also with what you see with his precise and perfectly timed video made by Alexander Lehmann.

Liu Wa

2020 Got Me Like
As COVID-19 speeds around the world and continues to shut down more cities, people begin to consume Internet culture in order to escape the apocalyptic anxiety in 2020, allowing Internet memes to go viral across the globe. Built upon social media, this work merges everyday sentiments with classical movie scenes to deconstruct the common imagination of “apocalypse” in entertainment industry. The video also incorporates the artist’s footage during protests, turning memes into public commentary and political satire. In this eventful year, meme does more than hijacking and decontextualizing meanings, it has become a form of silent revolt against the absurd.

Marshmallow Laser Feast

NEST

Inspired by Homer’s Odyssey
Loosely based on Homer’s The Odyssey, Marshmallow Laser Feast’s light installation lit the primary performance space within the chapel’s hazy internal dome. Grid-like projections crossed with mobile structures (designed by the architectural practice Studio Weave) as agile bodies crept over, in and through the many lit towers and surfaces. This first act was seen by the audience from the left and right balconies above. The second act, down flights of rope-lined staircases in the concrete basement, was more disorienting, lit only with triangular neon tubing and an eerie glow that seeped from an open door. The style of dance, in keeping with the more rapid and percussive score, by Canadian composer Christopher Mayo and electronic music composer / performer Anna Meredith, confronted the audience and was staged without boundaries dividing the dancers (some of whom were in street clothes) and viewers.

Christoph De Boeck

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.

Katharina Grosse

It Wasn’t Us

A painting by Katharina Grosse can appear anywhere. Her large-scale works are multi-dimensional pictorial worlds in which splendid color sweeps across walls, ceilings, objects, and even entire buildings and landscapes. For the exhibition “It Wasn’t Us” the artist has transformed the Historic Hall of Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin as well as the outdoor space behind the building, into an expansive painting which radically destabilises the existing order of the museum architecture.

Jeppe Hein

杰普·海因
ЙЕППЕ ХАЙН
ЈЕПЕ ХЕИН
Distance

An immense circuit, conceived as a graphic composition, is extended across a forest of fine metal pillars. Arabesques, spirals and nodal interconnections support a track for a hundred or so white balls, razing the ground or very high up in the air. An infrared sensor detecting the arrival of each visitor triggers the propulsion of a ball, which then journeys through the vast visual and sonic landscape. The installation draws on different sources evoking a primitive industrial imaginary, such as the machines of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Tinguely’s assemblages, and the fairground universe of roller coasters and pinballs.

Jesper Just

CORPORÉALITÉS
Corporealités is a large-scale work exploring the autonomy of ballet through the immersive elements of sculpture and video. At the heart of a piece is Just’s film, displayed across a series of LED-panels strewn about the space, where close up shots of dancers from the American Ballet Theatre show their bodies affixed to electrotherapy patches. As the muscles displayed on the panels contract, notes of Fauré’s Op. 50 seem to play in tandem, providing an ominously invisible link between the film and physical space.

Skylar Tibbits and Arthur Olson

The Self-Assembly Line
Can we create objects that assemble themselves — that zip together like a strand of DNA or that have the ability for transformation embedded into them? These are the questions that Skylar Tibbits investigates in his Self-Assembly Lab at MIT, a cross-disciplinary research space where designers, scientists and engineers come together to find ways for disordered parts to become ordered structures.

Pedro Veneroso

file festival 2019
‘Tempo: cor’(Time:color) consists of an immersive installation that seeks to modify our experience of time by converting hours into color. A set of chromatic clocks, each set to a different GMT time zone, projects, in a semicircle, the current time in their mathematical and chromatic representations. The conversion between these two forms of time representation is based on an algorithm composed of sinusoidal functions that modulates the RGB colors as a function of the current time, gradually modifying the intensities of blue, green and red throughout the day: at midday yellow predominates, while at four in the afternoon the hour is red; midnight is blue, six o’clock in the morning is green. Side by side, the colors projected by the clocks merge, creating an immersive experience of a continuous and circular time, between the different time zones, that crosses the entire chromatic spectrum. This installation is part of a series of works in which I investigate the relationships between human notations and codes and our experience of space-time, seeking to change the ways we understand it; in this case, visitors immerse themselves in a spatial experience of time that provokes the questioning of notations and perceptions that we usually consider axiomatic. Changing the way we represent time will change our way of experiencing it?

ÖYVIND FAHLSTRÖM

The Little General Pinball Machine
“One of the most memorable pieces in the 1997 Documenta X was Öyvind Fahlström’s The Little General (Pinball Machine), 1967. Resembling a raised indoor swimming pool with some two dozen movable parts spread out across its shimmering Plexiglas surface, the thirty-year-old “variable” sculpture radiated a visual audacity that made much of the current work around it pale by comparison. Ersatz scoring cues brushed up against cutouts of historical and pop-culture figures, who in turn seemed to jostle dismembered cartoon limbs and partial anatomies. The cumulative effect was dizzying, as if news, commercials, and cartoons were being broadcast in one overpowering barrage.”Dan Cameron

kimchi and chips

キムチアンドチップス
Light Barrier

Kimchi and Chips create phantoms of light in the air, crossing millions of calibrated beams with their work Light Barrier, 2014. The light installation creates floating graphic objects which animate through space as they do through time.

MARK HANSEN & BEN RUBIN

“Moveable Type”

In the entrance hall of the New York Times Building there is an installation made by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin “Moveable Type” with hundreds of small monitors where fragments of the newspaper’s electronic files, words, phrases, quotations, places, crosswords, etc… permanently appear in an endless series of combinations.
.

Amy Congdon

Totobobo
New Human
As a designer Amy is interested in exploring the crossovers between design and science, through a highly experimental and research driven practice. Using speculative design work she investigates the implications of engaging with new technologies, such as biotechnology.

George Balanchine

The Nutcracker
Waltz of the Flowers
New York City Ballet

“You don’t think of choreographers as mathematicians — yet group dances involve arithmetic and geometry. Nobody mastered those aspects of the art more brilliantly than George Balanchine.
See what he does with the “Waltz of the Flowers” in “The Nutcracker,” as in this short detail:As it begins, 14 women, arrayed in four rows, face front. The two demi-soloists start: They dance from our right to left, with two turning jumps at the end of the phrase. Then a row of four women behind them take up the same phrase — but now the first two women repeat the phrase in the opposite direction, from left to right.It’s like seeing screens sliding in opposite directions. Then the next row takes it up; then the next; suspense and excitement build. It’s an accumulating canon — not spread out across the stage but at close quarters”. Alastair Macaulay

AXEL LIEBER

阿克塞尔利伯
Axel Lieber uses everyday items as objects of reference and alienates their materiality by coring them semantically and then filling thus evolving empty spaces with new content. In this way, new synthetic-aesthetic crossovers and oppositions arise that enliven the sculptures and guide the viewer into an intimate sphere at the same time.

Aranda\Lasch

阿兰达\拉希
アランダ\ラッシュ
Primitives

Primitives is an installation that combines the romantic tradition of ruined landscapes with modular fractals. First realized across the entry of the Venice Biennale in 2010, it is comprised of loosely dispersed furniture elements that appear like rock piles, each one unique but formed from the same universal building block. Like microcosms in the distance, the clusters are imagined as islands falling apart and building back up, organizing and eroding at once.

olafur eliasson

オラファー·エリアソン
اولافور الياسون
奥拉维尔·埃利亚松
אולאפור אליאסון
ОЛАФУР ЭЛИАССОН
cirkelbroen bridge
The bridge is made of five circular platforms, and it contributes to a larger circle that will form a pedestrian route around Copenhagen Harbour, where people – cycling, running, walking – can see the city from a very different perspective. As many as 5,000 people will cross this bridge each day. I hope that these people will use Cirkelbroen as a meeting place, and that the zigzag design of the bridge will make them reduce their speed and take a break. To hesitate on our way is to engage in bodily thought. I see such introspection as an essential part of a vibrant city

Ballet Preljocaj

AND THEN, ONE THOUSAND YEARS OF PEACE
And Then, One Thousand Years of Peace is a huge, ambitious monolith of a work. First created by Angelin Preljocaj for the Bolshoi Ballet in 2010, it takes inspiration from the vision of apocalypse conjured by St John in the biblical Book of Revelation.There are no horses galloping across the stage or horned beasts. But Preljocaj sets himself a barely less daunting task: choreographing the essential meaning of apocalypse, as a cataclysm so profound it lays bare the very essence and history of human nature.Preljocaj launches his work with a shattering opening sequence. Ten women drive through hard, slicing, geometric formations; lights flash, electro-percussive music reverberates; and the air becomes as thick and swarming as a tropical thunderstorm as the movement accelerates towards its convulsive climax.Out of this intensity emerges a Garden of Eden tranquillity, where men lope and flutter in delicately animalistic moves, and two women in white tunics play like lazy cherubs.

Tobias Putrih

Re-projection: Hoosac

Influenced by the utopian projects — and notable failures — of innovative artists and designers such as Buckminster Fuller, Frederick Kiesler, and Charles Eames, Tobias Putrih likens his works to experiments, or design prototypes. His use of cheap materials, including egg crates, cardboard, and plywood signify both a sense of potential and impending collapse. Many of the artist’s works reference the architecture and spectacle of the cinema: a space suspended between fantasy and reality, image and environment. With Re-projection: Hoosac Putrih distills the cinema to its most basic element: fishing line stretched across the gallery mimics the conical trajectory of a beam of light. A spotlight hits the strands of monofilament which in turn become a screen, reflecting an image in illuminated dots. Inspired by the Hoosac Tunnel just east of North Adams — a storied, engineering marvel that draws ghost-hunters to the area — Putrih’s tunnel is, likewise, both real and a representation, an optical trick that invites both wonder and investigation.

THOMAS LANFRANCHI

Structure volante

Thomas Lanfranchi uses lightweight materials to create environmentally responsive sculptures. Many of his projects have been wind blown, taking the form of kites or wind socks. He has installed these pieces at sites across France and on buoys at sea. On a recent visit to Australia he made a journey around the outback, creating and documenting a new airborne sculpture each day to suit the site. Working with a type of plastic commonly used for shopping bags, Lanfranchi is able to make very large structures that are capable of being supported by the lightest breeze. When they are destroyed after the exhibition an object the size of a blue whale collapses into a carrier bag.