Limbo
Arnt Jensen
File Festival
FILE GAMES

Limbo is a 2D sidescroller, incorporating the physics system Box2D to govern environmental objects and the player character. The player guides an unnamed boy through dangerous environments and traps as he searches for his sister. The developer built the game’s puzzles expecting the player to fail before finding the correct solution. Playdead called the style of play “trial and death“, and used gruesome imagery for the boy’s deaths to steer the player from unworkable solutions.

Inside
Inside expands on the concepts and scope of its predecessor in wildly creative ways, and it’s so immaculately designed and constructed from top to bottom that it almost feels suitable for display in an art museum. This is one hell of a followup
FILE GAMES 2017

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
A sense of depression is reflected in his reluctance to use close-ups or camera movement, yet Andersson has quite an eye for beautiful set-ups even within the restrictions he’s given himself. His sense of humor is deadpan and misanthropic yet humanist. Andersson’s dour wit isn’t far from Louie. A Pigeon Sat On a Branch Reflecting On Existence expects the worst from the human race but holds out a slim hope for the best.

Prometheus Bound
In Greek Mythology, Prometheus stole fire (technology) from Zeus and gave it to humans, and for this, he got crucified on a mountaintop, and had to endure the eternal pain as a punishment. Since the beginning of our civilization, technology has been the source of prosperity and development. But also it has been the cause of great tragedies such as war sand nuclear accidents. Setting the Aeschylus Greek tragedy “Prometheus Bound” as a starting point, Koizumi created VR (Virtual Reality) theater which deals with this age-old tension between humanity and technology, through collaboration with a person who is desperately longing for the technological advancement – a person who is suffering from ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis- the deadly neurological disease that make a person paralyzed). Through the dialogues with the man about his personal life and his visions of the future, they created a sci-fi vision in which past and future, self and others, humans and machines are all merged into one sequence of abstract VR theatrical experience.

Cold Sleep
Right now, approximately 400 human bodies are frozen at -196 degrees Celsius in America and Russia. They are dead – legally speaking. The hope is to one day defrost and resuscitate them. The procedure is controversial. Nonetheless, cryopreservation, i.e. preserving people at extreme temperatures below zero, is an area marked by growth. The condition is sometimes referred to as ‘cold sleep’, which is also the title of Stine Deja’s first solo show in Denmark at Tranen. The exhibition is an installation of kinetic sculpture and animation. Cryopreserved bodies in thermal, yellow suits are suspended in big, circular aluminium structures revolving around their own axis on small islands in a desert landscape. In the sand lie craters where artificially inseminated cells divide. A barren desert landscape is usually seen as lifeless and abstract. In Deja’s version it becomes a place for being before or after human life, or, as the artist has it, “a population in another dimension.”

Less faithful to the original text than Robert Wise’s 1971 film, the current version, whose executive producers include Tony and Ridley Scott, retains the essential elements of the plot: a government satellite on an intergalactic germ-related fact-finding mission crashes into a small town out West, emitting a deadly pathogen that kills everyone nearby save for an unhealthy older man and a baby whose survival is an epidemiological mystery. The military is called in to contain the disaster, and a team of high-status scientific researchers is assembled to determine the capacities of whatever is causing this plague and thus forestall the end of civilization.

cinema full

Slow room
To bring a life form to a singular lack of motion is to kill it. Museums are repositories of the past. Ideas that lived outside are rendered dead in the careful buildings. Just as dead as the grizzly in the diorama at the Met is the Lichtenstein at the MoMA. The ideas reach a peak and trade their vitality, their life, for an expanded lifespan. The SLOW ROOM was envisioned as an answer to this dilemma… to be in motion to live and die in the museum… to be a part of the system while denying and rejecting the stasis… to embrace the chaos to make the entropy an ally is to understand a fundamental nature of the Universe. SLOW ROOM will live and it will die.

Machine Tree
Machine with Tree is a kinetic sculpture combining dead trees with metal machinery. It is designed to use the object’s center of gravity to achieve a movement where the tree appears to float in midair. In Machine with Tree, a dead tree is placed at the end of a long, sharp rod on the machine. The tree slowly moves back and forth with the machine’s movements, as though floating in midair. Through its creation of artificial, bizarre movements controlled by machinery, it illustrates a melancholy contemplation of the strange and contradictory things woven together by our reality.

Imagination Dead Imagine
An androgynous head is projected as if contained within a minimalist cube. Sounds of the head slowly breathing fill the space. The head is serene, waiting. Suddenly a substance pours over it from all sides, drenching it in what appears to be a bodily fluid. The spectator wants to turn away but can not, the gaze is compelled through the invocation of the scopic drive. Horror at the repulsive nature of the substance (the abject) is replaced by fascination with the beauty of what might be considered a contemporary sublime.

基督教波尔坦斯基
בולטנסקי
クリスチャン·ボルタンスキー
Кристиан Болтански

Homage

R.I.P 1944-2021

Preoccupied with collective memory, mortality, and the passage of time, Christian Boltanski creates paintings, sculptures, films, and mixed-media installations that approach these themes in a range of styles, symbolic to direct. Boltanski often makes metaphorical use of found objects, as in No Man’s Land (2010), an enormous pile of discarded jackets set to the soundtrack of thousands of human heartbeats, suggesting the anonymity, randomness, and inevitability of death. In Monuments (1985), electrical bulbs cast a seemingly bittersweet light on pictures of child holocaust victims. Describing his interest in personal histories, Boltanski has said, “What drives me as an artist is that I think everyone is unique, yet everyone disappears so quickly. […] We hate to see the dead, yet we love them, we appreciate them.”

The mask of youth
The eyes of the latest portrait of Queen Elizabeth I follow you around the room. No, they really do. Mat Collishaw’s hyperrealistic mask of the Tudor queen comes to life, whirring and grimacing, to shock visitors in the shadowy former royal chambers of the Queen’s House. As the days darken, the effect will get spookier. The Virgin Queen’s dark eyes dart around nervously. Her mouth opens as if to speak but she cannot find the words. She is dazed by a future she can’t comprehend, a robot ghost staring in horror and doubt at her own painted image – Collishaw’s undead death mask has her eyes fixed on the Armada Portrait, painted in 1588 and a treasure of the Queen’s House after being meticulously restored.

SCHRÖDINGER’S BABY
Schrödinger’s Baby(2019/20), TZUSOO alludes to the popular thought experiment devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. Schrödinger proposed a scenario in which a cat is locked in a box with an unstable radioactive atom that could potentially begin to emit radiation and release a toxic gas. However, there is no way to say with certainty when or indeed whether this will happen without opening the box. The result is a paradox, with Schrödinger asserting that the cat enters a state of superposition that makes it impossible to say whether it is alive or dead.The South Korean artist translates this famous paradox into the reality of her own life, creating a digital baby in virtual space. Based on her inner grappling with potential motherhood, TZUSOO bought the digital model of a developing embryo, refining it according to her own ideas. She is free to determine the sex, skin colour and other characteristics or to dispense with all specifications so as to avoid stereotyping. In Schrödinger’s Baby, TZUSOO thus discuss core aspects of her work including reflection on gender and origin for which she also draws on her personal experience as a South Korean artist in Europe.

أندريه تاركوفسكي
塔可夫斯基
アンドレイ·タルコフスキー
Андрей Тарковский
Solaris
In Solaris (1972), Andrei Tarkovsky presents a vision of contemporary society as one that has become cut off from nature, and provides a narrative that illustrates the possibility of remaining human in the inhuman world that is the result. The film contrasts a life-affirming natural landscape to an urban, constructed landscape where the natural world is submerged and invisible. The Solaris space station is both a projection of this second, inhuman, landscape and an allegory for Tarkovsky’s view of urban life. The narrative of the film concerns the journey by the central character, Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis), from emotional deadness to a rediscovery of his humanity as he charts a course between these two worlds, and the role that art, whether painting, music or film, plays in this.
cinema full

This Mess Won’t Make Itself – Dead Seem Old
Dead Seem Old é um projeto de indie pop sedeado em Londres e da autoria do músico e compositor Thom Wicks[…] O resultado é uma peça de indie pop contemporâneo absolutamente memorável, que dos coros aos arranjos das cordas, irradia uma luz incomum e que merece uma audição dedicada.

あずままこと
אזאמה מקוטו
아즈마 마코토
Адзума Макото
Water and Bonsai

In his continued forays into experimental botany that blur the lines between art and science, artist Makoto Azuma (previously) has reimagined the bonsai tree, one of the oldest Japanese artforms. This latest work titled Water and Bonsai, began with a dead branch from a juniper tree which was carefully attached to java moss meant to simulate the form of leaves. The entire piece was then submerged into a modified hydroponic environment similar to some of his earlier aquatic plantscapes replete with LEDs, a filtration system, and C02 emissions that encourage photosynthesis.
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Akhnaten
Portrait Trilogy:Einstein; Akhnaten; Gandhi
According to the composer, this work is the culmination of his two other biographical operas, Einstein on the Beach (about Albert Einstein) and Satyagraha (about Mahatma Gandhi). These three people – Akhenaten, Einstein and Gandhi – were all driven by an inner vision which altered the age in which they lived, in particular Akhenaten in religion, Einstein in science, and Gandhi in politics.
The text, taken from original sources, is sung in the original languages, linked together with the commentary of a narrator in a modern language, such as English or German. Egyptian texts of the period are taken from a poem of Akhenaten himself, from the Book of the Dead, and from extracts of decrees and letters from the Amarna period, the seventeen-year period of Akhenaten’s rule. Other portions are in Akkadian and Biblical Hebrew. Akhnaten’s Hymn to the Sun is sung in the language of the audience.
OPERA

w for w
Hansje van Halem has run her studio in Amsterdam since 2003. In between deadlines for book designs, she fills time gaps with type drawings and empty book space with patterns. With a “practice makes perfect” mind-set, she taught herself not to be afraid of failure. Her time gaps soon took the upper hand and became her core business. While working on commissions from patterns for endpapers, architectural typography, and all scales in between, she creates a lot of overproduction.

ICARUS
The National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain
conducted by Mark Wigglesworth
“What makes this myth so touching is Icarus’s impatience of the heart, his wish to reach the unreachable, the intensity of the ecstatic brevity of his flight and inevitability of his fall. If Icarus were to fly safely – there would be no myth. His tragic death is beautiful. It also poses the question – from Deadalus‘ point of view – how can one distinguish success from failure? Deadalus‘ greatest invention, the wings which allowed a man to fly, was his greatest failure as they caused the death of his son. Deadalus was brilliant, his wings were perfect, but he was also a blind father who did not truly understand his child.” LERA AUERBACH

Кристофа Сенсена
dead man float
CAVEman 3-D Virtual Patient Is a Holodeck For the Human Body

The virtual-reality rig at the University of Calgary visualizes aspirin’s journey through the body in 3-D. First stop: the stomach and intestines [red], where the drug is absorbed. Next up is the bloodstream [light green] and finally the kidneys [dark green], which flush by-products into the urine
In this image, three stereoscopic projectors mounted on the floor and one on the ceiling display a computer-animated body. Looking through the goggles, researchers can watch its bloodstream turn from white to red as aspirin travels through it. Sensen hopes to develop computer simulations that will model the progression of diseases like Alzheimer’s and diabetes and help scientists quite literally look for cures. Updated to reflect what’s happening inside a real patient, the technology could also help doctors diagnose and treat cancer. “You could stand inside your patient,” Sensen says, “and see how big the tumor is, how to treat it, and what the outcome will be.”

Bacteria Dress
Using one of the most unusual materials you could imagine, artist Anna Dumitriu transforms superbugs into unique items of clothing. The artist sterilizes strains of deadly bugs that kill tens of thousands of people across the US each year. She then uses the strains to embroider into dresses and quilts. Her work has a fascinating concept behind it, exploring the complex relationship between humans and bacteria.

朱塞佩 利卡里
The sky in a room
“Nature has always been a big passion and the relation of nature and man-made environments is something I often try to confront in my work. The Sky in a Room was first inspired by the forests’ fires that in 2007 destroyed a big part of the south of Europe. They were largely man-made fires, intending to generate new land available for building speculation. A sick tree was cut down by the municipality of Rotterdam, cut in smaller pieces, archived and re-built inside the exhibition space, against the architectural surfaces of the gallery. The trunk of the tree was removed in order to give the public a different physical relation to the tree itself and to the white sterilized space of the gallery. The dead tree presents its branches covered with a layer of moss and molds creating a suspended landscape.”

Dead Language Poetry
What we lose when a language dies is a broad topic which is interesting from both a cultural historical, linguistic and philosophical point of view. With a background in art, music and philosophy, Espen Sommer Eide has used numerous approaches to observe the phenomenon. He is interested in the complexity in the process behind destruction, evolution and creation of language[…] ‘Dead Language Poetry’ is Espen Sommer Eide’s first solo exhibition.

That a Dead Man Sings
Creating sculptures out of materials such as sheets of glass, foam, metal, cement, and various found objects, Dave Hardy composes his sculptures’ seemingly precarious poise as an intentionally engineered defiance of gravity. Distinguished by a constant shuttle between literal and allegorical readings, Hardy’s artworks are both resolutely materialist and infused with a human scale and, more precisely, a human fragility that forces the viewer to confront them as bodies in space.

Gravity is dead
Using 3D modeling, Vincent Mauger creates a world that is firmly grounded in the tangible matter. Wood, concrete blocks, bricks, metal or polystyrene, these materials are worked beyond what we could assume from their materiality. more…

dead man

تاكاشي موراكامي
村上隆
טקאשי מורקאמי
무라카미 다카시
Такаши Мураками
In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow

Life’s An Ocean – Dead Finks Don’t Talk

Dead Guardian

Tree Virus
“Tree Virus” sculpture wasn’t much to look at: a dead, black tree rooted in a craggy white ball suspended over a dirt pit, all of it covered by a plastic igloo. Built on a college campus in the Netherlands in 2008, the whole thing might have been leftover scenery from a Tim Burton film if it weren’t for the outrageous smell.
Inside the igloo, a heady mix of peppermint and black pepper saturated the air. It flooded the nose and stung the eyes. Most visitors cried; many ran away. Others seemed to enjoy it, laughing through the tears.

Dead Reckoning

أنطونيو غونزاليس باوكر
安东尼奥冈萨雷斯保卡尔
АНТОНИО ГОНСАЛЕС ПАУКАР
Dead Flies

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.

Dead Fire

dead astronaut

RELATIONSHIP : The Quick and The Dead

Клер Морган
كلير مورجان
克莱尔·摩根
クレア·モーガン
클레어 모건
Over My Dead Body
A primera vista, estos objetos parecen estar en movimiento. Objetos que dan la sensación de caerse como en el caso de la manta fresa. La escultura de Belfast, Claire Morgan utiliza objetos naturales como plumas, frutas y flores que deja suspendidos de hilos de nylon obteniendo sensaciones de ingravidez o de parada del tiempo.

DVD dead drop

drawing with robot arm
“With gene mapping, gender reassignment, prosthetic limbs and neural implants, what a body is and how a body operates becomes problematic. We generate Fractal Flesh and Phantom Flesh, extended operational systems and virtual task environments. Meat and metal mesh into unexpected and alternate anatomical architectures that perform remotely beyond the boundaries of the skin and beyond the local space it inhabits. The monstrous is no longer the alien other. We inhabit an age of Circulating Flesh. Organs are extracted from one body and inserted into other bodies. Limbs that are amputated from a dead body can be reattached and reanimated on a living body. A face from a donor stitched to the skull of the recipient becomes a Third Face. A skin cell from an impotent male can be recoded into a sperm cell. And more interestingly a skin cell from a female body might be recoded into a sperm cell. Turbine hearts circulate blood without pulsing. In the near future you might rest you head on your loved one’s chest. They are warm to the touch, they are breathing, they are certainly alive. But they will have no heartbeat. A cadaver can be preserved forever through plastination whilst simultaneously a comatose body can be sustained indefinitely on a life-support system. Dead bodies need not decompose, near-dead bodies need not die. Most people will no longer die biological deaths. They will die when their life-support systems are switched off. The dead, the near-dead, the not-yet-born and the partially living exist simultaneously. And cryongenically preserved bodies await reanimation at some imagined future. We live in an age of the Cadaver, the Comatose and the Chimera. Liminal spaces proliferate. Engineering organs, stem-cell growing them or by bio-printing will result in an abundence of organs. An excess of organs. Of organs awaiting bodies. Of Organs Without Bodies.” STELARC

Флорентин Хофман
the dead fly

Dead Garden