Journey of Life

FILE 2024 | Aesthetic Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
Dallaserra Maxime – Journey of Life – France

Journey Of Life was triggered by the death of the artist’s grandmother. There is a message of resignation and optimism in the face of adversity in this work. However, he decided to portray the life of a young man in a futuristic city. The video is rich in details. The strength of artificial intelligence lies in its ability to allow this profusion of images, which would otherwise require the artist an incomparable amount of time to produce.

Bio

Maxime Dallaserra is an electronic music composer who always wanted to produce a comprehensive audiovisual work. In addition to his music creation activities, he managed to create live shows with video projections, accompanied by a team. At the same time, he began broadcasting his creations. With the arrival of artificial intelligence, he found ways to enhance and realize his artistic vision, leading to the creation of Journey of Life .

Flexible Column

“Frei Otto “hesitates to pursue a project unless he is certain that its realization will be temporary enough to not be in man’s way.”
This position indicates a polite anarchism through death. A delicate rebellion against the monumental architectural quest.” Helen Levin

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„Frei Otto „zögert, ein Projekt zu verfolgen, es sei denn, er ist sich sicher, dass seine Realisierung nur vorübergehend genug ist, um dem Menschen nicht im Weg zu stehen.“ Diese Position weist auf einen höflichen Anarchismus durch den Tod hin. Eine zarte Rebellion gegen die monumentale architektonische Suche.” Helen Levin

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«Фрей Отто« не решается продолжать проект, если не уверен, что его реализация будет достаточно временной, чтобы не мешать человеку ». Эта позиция указывает на вежливый анархизм через смерть. Тонкое восстание против монументального архитектурного поиска ». Елена Левин

بيتر غريناواي
彼得·格林纳威
פיטר גרינווי
ピーター·グリーナウェイ
피터 그리너웨이
Питер Гринуэй
The Pillow Book
Beautiful to behold and impossible to forget, THE PILLOW BOOK is auteur Peter Greenaway’s erotically-charged drama about love, death, revenge and the indelible nature of our earliest memories. Each year on her birthday, Nagiko (Vivian Wu) would became her father’s canvas, as he painted the creation myth in elaborate, elegant calligraphy on her body. Years later, she continues the practice with a succession of lovers, including a bisexual translator (Ewan McGregor) who becomes a pawn in an escalating game of vengeance against her beloved father’s exploitative publisher. Told in a series of chapters and featuring innovative cinematography and picture-in-picture techniques, Roger Ebert called THE PILLOW BOOK “a seductive and elegant story [that] stands outside the ordinary.”

cinema full

Coro pêndulo
Pendulum Choir é uma peça coral original para 9 vozes A Cappella e 18 macacos hidráulicos. O coro é constituindo por um corpo vivo e sonoro. Esse corpo se expressa por meio de vários estados físicos. Sua plasticidade varia de acordo com sua sonoridade. Varia entre sons abstratos, sons repetitivos e sons líricos ou narrativos. Os corpos dos cantores e suas vozes brincam com e contra a gravidade. Eles se tocam e se evitam, criando polifonias vocais sutis. Ou, apoiados por sons eletrônicos, rompem sua coesão e explodem em um voo lírico ou se dobram em um ritual obsessivo e sombrio. O órgão viaja da vida à morte em uma alegoria robótica onde a complexidade tecnológica e o lirismo dos corpos em movimento se combinam em uma obra com acentos prometéicos.
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Pendulum Choir is an original choral piece for 9 A Cappella voices and 18 hydraulic jacks. The choir is constituted by a living and sonorous body. This body expresses itself through various physical states. Its plasticity varies according to its sound. It varies between abstract sounds, repetitive sounds and lyrical or narrative sounds. The singers’ bodies and their voices play with and against gravity. They touch and avoid each other, creating subtle vocal polyphonies. Or, supported by electronic sounds, they break their cohesion and explode in a lyrical flight or bend in an obsessive and dark ritual. The organ travels from life to death in a robotic allegory where technological complexity and the lyricism of moving bodies combine in a work with Promethean accents.

TIMELAPSE OF THE FUTURE: A Journey to the End of Time
We start in 2019 and travel exponentially through time, witnessing the future of Earth, the death of the sun, the end of all stars, proton decay, zombie galaxies, possible future civilizations, exploding black holes, the effects of dark energy, alternate universes, the final fate of the cosmos.

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.” Marie Doezema

quantum gate
Edgar Froese – Thorsten Quaeschning – Ulrich Schnauss – Hoshiko Yamane
Quantum Gate is roughly the 150th release and roughly 30th main studio album by Tangerine Dream. It is the first full-length album since the death of founder Edgar Froese in 2015, and is largely based on ideas and musical sketches left by Froese.The album was preceded by and is companion to the 2015 mini-album Quantum Key.
This album earned the group the most press they have had since the release of 1988’s Optical Race due to the revived interest in the group following Froese’s death

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Quantum Gate (2017) ist ungefähr die 150. Veröffentlichung und das ungefähr 30. Hauptstudioalbum von Tangerine Dream. Es ist das erste Full-Length-Album seit dem Tod des Gründers Edgar Froese im Jahr 2015 und basiert weitgehend auf Ideen und musikalischen Skizzen, die Froese hinterlassen hat. Dem Album ging das Mini-Album Quantum Key aus dem Jahr 2015 voraus und ist dessen Begleiter.
Dieses Album brachte der Gruppe die meiste Presse ein, die sie seit der Veröffentlichung von Optical Race von 1988 aufgrund des wiederbelebten Interesses an der Gruppe nach Froeses Tod hatte

Replica
We begin with a tour of a virtual 3D model of the London house-cum-museum built by 19th-century architect Sir John Soane. The journey traverses the five floors of the museum’s meticulously restored rooms, each filled with original and duplicate fragments of antiquity. Sir John Soane (1753-1837) was one of the foremost British architects of the Regency era, a Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy, and a dedicated collector of paintings, sculpture, architectural fragments and models, books, drawings and furniture. Soane was awarded the Royal Academy’s prestigious Gold Medal for Architecture, as a result receiving a bursary (funded by King George III) to undertake a Grand Tour of Europe. His travels to the ruins of Ancient Rome, Paestum and Pompeii would inspire his lifelong interest in Classical art and architecture. As an enthusiastic collector, later in life he began to repurpose his home at Lincoln’s Inn Fields as a Museum for students of architecture. With a collection containing thousands of objects ranging from Ancient Egyptian antiquities and Roman sculpture to models of contemporary buildings, Soane’s house had become a Museum by the time of his death.

32 rue vandenbranden
The script of physical actions is inspired by the Japanese film A ballad de Naraiama (1983), by Shohei Imamura, the one with tearing images, like that of the son carrying his mother on his back, embraced by the wind, climbing the mountain to put her on the summit until death, as the local tradition says that every septuagenarian must have an equal destiny. In the same village in the late 19th century, parents used to sell babies to survive. These material and spiritual miseries do not bring literals to the stage. Rather, they are essentials that make the show a fabulous visual poem written in and with the body and the scenic space. The song is also celebrated at the height, with moments such as Stravinski’s The Bird of Fire suite, and the song Fline on you crazy diamond, by the band Pink Floyd.

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.”

宫岛达男
mega death

在日本当代先锋艺术家宫岛达男眼中，数字是抽象的，又是有具象意义的，它们象征着巨大的可能性，时间和空间的永恒，生命、死亡和重生的无限循环。他围绕着 ——“持续变化”、“关联一切”、“永无止尽”为主题进行艺术创作，这些源自古老的东方佛教哲学的概念，结合他运用的LED、计算机集成电路和视频投影技 术后，散发出充满现代感的全新魅力。
宫岛达男的很多作品中都采用了精密的LED设计，使从9到1（或从1到9）的数字——人类最为通用和极简的语言，循环跳转。当他们同时熄灭，整个房间会浸 入一片黑暗，但是在他的作品中却从未出现数字0，因为艺术家认为0意味着否定，否定了人类存在的无限循环，艺术家以让0缺失的方式引发更多对于虚无的思 考。

艺术家自述

从1988 年起，我就开始尝试用LED 和数字化的计算排列方式来进行艺术创作。其中，我想要表达的主旨有三个：“持续变化”,“关联一切”，“永无止尽”。作品的数字排列是从9 到1（或从1 到9），变化的速度因不同数字而异。0 则不被表现出来，用灯光的熄灭来代替。数字运行时所发出的光代表了“生”，而表示0 的黑暗部分则意味着“死”。我把这个计算和排列系统视为生命的象征，这是多年来我一直想表达的观念。这种思想最早源于佛教。中国为佛教的传播做了很大贡 献，因此这次来到中国举办个展，我感到很荣幸。

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.

Work in progress
The motionless figure of an androgynous giantess occupies almost the entire gallery space in her entangled posture. On its body and around it, small scaffolding grows upwards. But the construction site is deserted. Only the figure, which resembles an avatar, remains in a calm state. A state of “being in between”. Between day and night. Between dream and reality or even between life and death? It almost seems as if the figure is still being brought back to life. One is inclined to think of Mary Shelley, whose novel character Victor Frankenstein created an artificial human being 200 years ago – in a time of great upheaval and discovery. Today we find ourselves once again at a turning point in society and technology, which makes us question ourselves as well as platforms on which we construct our selfs… Is that what Evelyn Bencicova and Enes Güç are alluding to here?

The Immortal
A number of life-support machines are connected to each other, circulating liquids and air in attempt to mimic a biological structure.
The Immortal investigates human dependence on electronics, the desire to make machines replicate organisms and our perception of anatomy as reflected by biomedical engineering.
A web of tubes and electric cords are interwoven in closed circuits through a Heart-Lung Machine, Dialysis Machine, an Infant Incubator, a Mechanical Ventilator and an Intraoperative Cell Salvage Machine. The organ replacement machines operate in orchestrated loops, keeping each other alive through circulation of electrical impulses, oxygen and artificial blood.
Salted water acts as blood replacement: throughout the artificial circulatory system minerals are added and filtered out again, the blood gets oxygenated via contact with the oxygen cycle, and an ECG device monitors the system’s heartbeat. As the fluid pumps around the room in a meditative pulse, the sound of mechanical breath and slow humming of motors resonates in the body through a comforting yet disquieting soundscape.Life support machines are extraordinary devices; computers designed to activate our bodies when anatomy fails, hidden away in hospital wards. Although they are designed as the ultimate utilitarian appliances, they are extremely meaningful and carry a complex social, cultural and ethical subtext. While life prolonging technologies are invented as emergency measures to combat or delay death, my interest lies in considering these devices as a human enhancement strategy.This work is a continuation of my investigation of the patient as a cyborg, questioning the relationship between medicine and techno- fantasies about mechanical bodies, hyper abilities and posthumanism.

Flesh love all
I want to express love through my work. Because everything in the world is based on love[…] Based on such an idea, I started a project to vacuum pack a couple and everything around with a landscape. Not only a couple who loves each other but also everything around them is vacuum-packed, and eventually the whole landscape is vacuum-packed, creating an image where everything in the world is one existence. The shooting location is the most important place for them. The things you love will be one, and the world will be one. I think that is an ideal form of love. In order to participate in this project, you need to be ready for death and love next to you, and I need to be prepared for it too.

Gogol
“The opera’s three acts are divided into seven scenes which blend fact with liberal amounts of invention. Among other things, Gogol wrestles with his (and Russia’s) demons by night, obsesses over his will and funeral arrangements, gets abused by doctors (‘but I don’t drink alcohol,’ he cries; ‘all the more reason for a leeching,’ they reply), bats away bothersome suitors with disconcertingly large papier-mâché breasts, falls in love with a nymph, and undergoes a literary show trial which culminates in his death.”
By Zwölftöner

Omelia Contadina
‘Omelia Contadina’ was born out of JR’s interest in the difficulties encountered by a large number of small farmers and inhabitants of rural italy. Alice Rohrwacher explains the origins of the project: ‘last autumn, during a walk on the border between Umbria, Lazio and Tuscany, I told my friend and artist JR of my concerns about the destruction of the agricultural landscape, violated by the intensive monocultures with which major corporations are shaping entire territories. I told him, as the daughter of a beekeeper, of the mass death of insects that such changes bring about… At one point, we stopped at a crossroads: on all sides, uninterrupted rows of hazelnut trees filled the landscape as far as the horizon. As we looked upon this, we commented to each other that it looked like a war cemetery. On the way back we decided — if it looks like a cemetery, we have to hold a funeral. But it must be a funeral full of life!‘

Mannequin Death
Jarring and violent yet strangely hypnotizing, the video references the Kantian sublime landscape and the “sex appeal of the inorganic,” which, the Italian philosopher Mario Perniola argues, marks the transition from an organic, bodily sexuality to an inorganic and artificial one.

video

比尔•维奥拉
빌 비올라
ביל ויולה
ビル·ヴィオラ
БИЛЛ ВИОЛА
martyrs (earth, air, fire, water)
“As the work opens, four individuals are shown in stasis, a pause from their suffering. Gradually there is movement in each scene as an element of nature begins to disturb their stillness. Flames rain down, winds begin to lash, water cascades, and earth flies up. As the elements rage, each martyr’s resolve remains unchanged. In their most violent assault, the elements represent the darkest hour of the martyr’s passage through death into the light.”

Licht, mehr Licht!
“Licht, mehr Licht!”, or “Light, more light!” in English, were the great German author and scientific thinker Goethe’s dying words. The installation, created and developed by French visual artist Guillaume Marmin, echoes near-death experiences, whose survivors describe a “tunnel of light” opening up beyond the darkness. Marmin’s works give form to the intangible, unveiling the beauty of the unseen and the mathematical foundations of reality.

Abyss of Light

Abyss of Light is divided into three screens and into three acts, the traditional structure of classic narrative film. In the first act, all the images synchronize to form a single panorama of Bryce Canyon in Utah. In the second, the screens break away from one another into three parallel sequences wherein each projection shows the same one hundred images at different speeds. In the third, all three images synchronize once again to form a single wrapping panorama of Death Valley, California. The work is an ode to the American western, one of my favorite film genres. Despite my admiration, however, my desire is not to imitate westerns. Instead, I set up an abstraction in opposition to the idea of narrative, something that can be seen in all of my work. In Abyss of Light, continuous disruptions of the American landscape document my refusal to see the land as backdrop for man’s heroic conquering of the wild; instead I see it as a foreground, a subject to be contemplated for itself and for which wildness is a state of grace.

geometric death frequency 141

“The title of the piece is a pun that, with irony, alludes to the exceeding of tradition, irreconcilable dichotomy between life and death in a sculpture made, provocatively, by lifeless forms“, adds Diaz. “The line between life and none-life is more fleeing than we usually think: think about a virus that attacks a complex organism and reproduces in the same way as a micro-organism, even though it’s only an agglomerated of lifeless molecules: a natural crystal that, even though is a stone, can be born and undergo a fascinated process of growth that mimes perfectly the ways of an organic life“.

Return to Sender
Disarm music box
For the work group Disarm, he was able to use 6,700 weapons confiscated in the Mexican drug war and transform these into musical instruments[…] They play well-known, classical music pieces from the respective manufacturer’s country of origin. A musical box made with Glock pistol parts plays Mozart, Beretta barrels Vivaldi, while Reyes’s weapon of choice for Swiss songwriter Mani Matter is the Carabine. Reyes is concerned with «upcycling» – transforming an instrument of death into a musical instrument that stands for dialog and exchange. He undertakes this transformation process with the conviction that the physical act is always accompanied by an idealistic one and appeals to the spiritual dimension of this quasi-alchemical operation towards the good.

Захаров, Вадим Арисович
danaë installation
Drawing from the perpetually revisited myth of Zeus and Danae, an installation by Vadim Zakharov in the Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2013 used consumable objects and the sequence of architectural spaces to make manifest underlying ideas about ‘rudeness, lust, narcissism, demagoguery, falsehood, banality, and greed, cynicism, robbery, speculation, wastefulness, gluttony, seduction, envy, and stupidity.’ the impregation of danae occurs when zeus appears to her as a golden shower after she is locked in a tower to prevent the professed death of her father. gender dynamics and the poetic cycle of gestation are reconstructed spatially with a total use of the pavilion– a first in the history of the building.

a little death

Despite the broader reference to the traditional pictorial genre of “still life”, disseminated from the Dutch and Spanish painters of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, ‘Still life’ from 2001 and ‘A little death’ from 2002 refer especially to the painting of transient elements of the French Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) to discuss the distortion and inexorability of time, the finitude of life or, above all, the interdependence between life and death. The title makes a direct reference to the expression with which the French philosopher Georges Bataille defined the orgasm: ‘une petite mort‘.

كورنيليا باركر
科妮莉亚·帕克
קורנליה פרקר
コーネリア·パーカー
코넬리아 파커
Корнелии Паркер
two rooms
For some years Cornelia Parker’s work has been concerned with formalising things beyond our control, containing the volatile and making it into something that is quiet and contemplative like the ‘eye of the storm’. She is fascinated with processes in the world that mimic cartoon ‘deaths’ – steamrollering, shooting full of holes, falling from cliffs and explosions. Through a combination of visual and verbal allusions her work triggers cultural metaphors and personal associations, which allow the viewer to witness the transformation of the most ordinary objects into something compelling and extraordinary.

ماریکو موری
森万里子
Мори, Марико
Tom Na H-Iu
Tom Na H-iu is a three-dimensional glass work almost 3 meters in height. It is networked to the Super Kamiokande neutrino observatory operated by the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, University of Tokyo, enabling it to interact and respond when the observatory captures a neutrino. On detecting a neutrino, such as those emitted by stars in our galaxy as they die in supernova explosions[…] Tom Na H-iu represents a modern standing stone that conveys the death of a star, meanwhile hinting at the birth that follows – as if to suggest to the viewer that our existence is in resonance with the universe. When we view this work that emits peaceful light amidst darkness, we can project ourselves into the darkness and gain a sense that we are standing quietly in the flow of eternal time.

Neri Oxman: Material Ecology

Vespers

“Vespers is a collection of 15 3-D-printed masks that explore the idea of designing with live biological materials. The collection consists of three distinct series, each reinterpreting the concept of the death mask—traditionally a wax or plaster impression of a corpse’s face. Taken as a whole, the three series form a narrative arc from death to rebirth. In the first series, Oxman and The Mediated Matter Group looked at the death mask as a cultural artifact. Fabricated using an algorithm that deconstructed polyhedral meshes into subdivided surfaces, the masks were 3-D printed with photopolymers, as well as with bismuth, silver, and gold, and rendered in color combinations that recur in religious practices around the world.” Rachel Morón

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.

file sao paulo 2018
“Outrospectre” is an experimental proposal for a medical device aimed at reconciling people with death through simulating out-of-body experiences. In healthcare the majority of efforts and research focus on keeping people alive. The fear and experience of death is a mostly neglected topic. Recent (para) psychological research, however, suggests that the sensation of drifting outside of one’s own body using virtual reality technology could help reduce death anxiety. “Outrospectre” explores the possible application of these findings in hospital surroundings where it could help terminal patients accept their own mortality with more comfort.
This project investigates unanswered questions about mortality and ‘end of life’.

Death and the Powers

Science fiction and poignant family drama combine in one of the most stunning, cutting-edge operas of the 21st century, with a libretto by former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, coming to the stage of the Winspear Opera House in a production directed by Diane Paulus, designed by Alex McDowell (Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report) and conducted by Nicole Paiement (TDO’s The Lighthouse).This visually spectacular robot pageant by MIT Media Lab’s Tod Machover tells the story of a terminally ill billionaire, sung by Robert Orth, who downloads his consciousness into “the System” and proceeds to use all his powers to persuade his loved ones to join him there. Without bodies, without the possibility of touch, sex, suffering, and death — are we still genuinely human?Explore these existential questions and much more in a piece Variety described as “playful, lyrical and…mesmerizing.” Also starring Joélle Harvey as Miranda, Patricia Risley as Evvy, and Hal Cazalet in his Dallas Opera debut as Nicholas.

振り子の合唱団
Pendulum Choir

Pendulum Choir is an original choral piece for 9 A Cappella voices and 18 hydraulic jacks. The choir stands on tilting platforms, constituting a living, sonorous body. That body expresses itself through various physical states. Its plasticity varies at the mercy of its sonority. It varies between abstract sounds, repetitive sounds, and lyrical or narrative sounds. The bodies of the singers and their voices play with and against gravity. They brush and avoid each other creating subtle vocal polyphonies. Or, supported by electronic sounds, they break their cohesion and burst into lyrical flight or fold up into an obsessional and dark ritual. The organ travels from life to death in a robotic allegory where the technological complexity and the lyricism of the moving bodies combine into a work with Promethean accents.

Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages
Regarded as one of the most influential films of the silent era (though it received mixed reviews at the time), the three-and-a-half-hour epic intercuts four parallel storylines, each separated by several centuries: (1) a contemporary melodrama of crime and redemption, (2) a Judean story: Christ‘s mission and death, (3) a French story: the events surrounding the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572, and (4) a Babylonian story: the fall of the Babylonian Empire to Persia in 539 BC. Each story had its own distinctive color tint in the original print, but not in the currently available versions.
cinema full

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

Sacre
Sacre is Waltz’s forceful version of The Rite of Spring. The stage is smoke-filled, and a cone of rocks and ash lies centre stage like the remains of a fire. Couples invade the stage, and clump into ragged groups that rupture and re-form: fracturing along gender lines, or splintering into disparate parts. Though she ends up overloading the piece with too many sub-scenes – too many rites, really – Waltz is terrific at simultaneously marshalling and unleashing the wild energies of her dancers, skewering the stage with images of birth, sex and death, of savage conformity and naked revolt.

The Admiral’s Garden
Christine Ödlund’s work explores the borders of our knowledge of the world around us, connecting such themes as the chemical communication of plants, synaesthesia and theosophy. She works in a variety of media, including drawing, sculpture, video, watercolour and sound works.
Stress Call of the Stinging Nettle: When a plant reacts to a butterfly larvae feeding on its leaves, it releases chemical substances, or compounds. The characteristics of these compounds have been analyzed in collaboration with the Ecological Chemistry Research Group at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and then transposed into amplitude and intensity of sinus tones, recorded at EMS (Electroacoustic Music in Sweden), Stockholm. Thus these beautiful graphic score and soundtrack by Swedish artist Christine Ödlund are direct transpositions of “the plant’s life, struggle and death”.

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

Death Death Death
File Festival
“Death Death Death” is book written by an algorithm. It utilizes a word association study conducted by the University of South Florida between 1976 and 1998. It contains over 10,000 words and their associations to each other. “Death Death Death” traces a path from each word to the word death. The book starts off with the words most closely associated to death. The beginning reads like this: Life – Death Funeral – Death Coffin – Death. Later, it takes several associative leaps to get to death: Enthusiasm – Spirit – Soul – Death Folly – Funny – Sad – Death Bahamas – Paradise – Heaven – Death Waggle – Wiggle – Worm – Maggot – Death. Reading soon becomes humorous, as every line reads like a joke-death is always the punchline. “Death Death Death” is 405 pages, contains an index so you can find any word, and a detailed description of the algorithm. Death Death Death was nominated for the 2010 File Prix Lux in the Digital Languages category.
video

Generator
A story about a tourist drowning in the Mediterranean, the transition of the body from life to death, and a metaphor-laden sock puppet.

Hosotan

Hijikata conceived of Ankoku Butoh from its origins as an outlaw form of dance-art, and as constituting the negation of all existing forms of Japanese dance. Inspired by the criminality of the French novelist Jean Genet, Hijikata wrote manifestoes of his emergent dance form with such as titles as ‘To Prison’. His dance would be one of corporeal extremity and transmutation, driven by an obsession with death, and imbued with an implicit repudiation of contemporary society and media power. Many of his early works were inspired by figures of European literature such as the Marquis de Sade and the Comte de Lautréamont, as well as by the French Surrealist movement, which had exerted an immense influence on Japanese art and literature, and had led to the creation of an autonomous and influential Japanese variant of Surrealism, whose most prominent figure was the poet Shuzo Takiguchi, who perceived Ankoku Butoh as a distinctively ‘Surrealist’ dance-art form.

Death mask
Similar to the group’s previous collection of masks – which although released prior to Lazarus are later in concept – the pieces were formed using a Stratasys Objet500 Connex3 multi-material 3D printer, which constructs 3D forms by depositing polymer droplets in layers.

ماریکو موری
森万里子
Мори, Марико
Infinite Energy
Redefining the architecture of the espace Louis Vuitton are eight monumental pieces by internationally-renowned japanese artist mariko mori. The exhibition ‘Infinite Review’ amasses sculptures and experiential installations in a series of works that metaphorically reflect the never ending circulation of life and death as well as fragments from the artist’s personal experiences. Towering above visitors and traversing the space between the floor and ceiling are a triptych of luminous spirals. The soaring ‘infinite energy’ series is a visualization of an invisible force, felt and seen through their unseen participation with gallery entrants.

The Garden of Earthly Delights
Based on his own novel “Metaphysics”, Lech Wajewski’s film is an erotic treatise on art, love and death. When British art historian Claudine learns that her cancer is terminal, she abandons caution and takes her lover, Chris, on an extraordinary journey to Venice, where their passion finds fulfillment in the fantastic paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Videotaping their trip, Claudine intends to leave Chris a haunting record of their emotional and spiritual discoveries.

The Carrier
Mella Jaarsma’s wearable sculpture The Carrier addresses the fleeting nature of all living things, especially the temporality of humans and their urgent need to escape their current situation or move from place to place. She notes how the human condition of gathering experiences without knowing why, collecting possessions, and fearing death while longing for immortality impacts every living human being. We live in a world in which people are on the move as travelers, vacationers, explorers, and even migrants fleeing the oppressors of their beloved homelands.

منير فاطمي
Evolution or Death
Fatmi inverts spectacular representations of identity by rendering them mundane and within reach of a subject that may scramble any conclusive narrative. Fatmi’s work counters strategies of interpellation that identifies a subject with an ideology prior to that subject’s ability to place their identity in or beyond a particular ideology. Fatmi parodies the various interpellations of colonialism and capitalism that seek to define others according to symbolic narratives. In Evolution or Death, 2004, (fig. 4) two Anglo-European looking subjects imitate suicide bombers with books and papers taped around their abdomens. One holds open a trenchcoat and another holds up a book that looks like a detonator attached to wires. Fatmi reverses the situation. These are not the suicide-bombers from Arab and Muslim countries. Instead, they appear to be of European descent in a European street or modern room in casual clothing.

Gray Nightmares
Grey Nightmares” is the name of a personal collection in which different subjects have been studied, the ones I have been involved in for the last couple of years. The subjects include, loneliness, death, nihility, downfall, pain, wait … though the main characters of this collection are the people who are looking for a way out of their limbo so that it can be a relief for them.

伊岛薫
Landscape with a Corpse
The early 1990s saw Kaoru enter the phase for which he is most well-known. Combining beauty and glamour with bloodshed and revulsion, he began to photograph attractive models and actresses, all elegantly adorned, in sequential shots where their own deaths are portrayed […] Preferring to leave the circumstances of these grisly scenes to the viewers’ imaginations, Kaoru begins with wide-angle shots and narrows to close-ups. In doing so, he makes the woman herself the focus, rather than her death. In fact, he lets the actress or model determine the scene by eliciting her opinion on the perfect death.

Fruit Series
“I am fascinated by the physical-ness of things: how a flame moves, how trees bend, how water feels on the skin. I am especially fascinated by the invisible forces at work in living things. In particular, those forces associated with growth and renewal, but also its other side, death and decay.”

Broken Flower
Liquid Nitrogen
Throughout his career, Shireman has maintained a connection with flowers in decay; in other still lifes, he has cataloged the wilting of tulips and mums. This series, unlike those previous, is brutal and instantaneous. Where his other flowers underwent a slow, gradual death, these broken flowers are quickly frozen and violently ruptured. The process captured here is not a natural one but one that necessitates the use of a manmade element.

WITH NEW EYES
This new series of paintings present amorphous, yet graphically stark figures rendered in a richly saturated prismatic array of colors. Centered on themes of life, death, and rebirth, Morgan’s works question how we relate to our past and challenge us to live in the present.more…