The Forgettable Art Machine

FILE 2024 | Installations

International Electronic Language Festival

The Forgettable Art Machine is an artificial intelligence-driven video installation. When facing the panel, the public has their image captured, starting a cycle of analysis, creation and destruction. From this data, a composite emerges, slowly transforming the visitors’ image into a generative visualization. Once the cycle is complete, the composition is deleted, waiting for a new audience to be captured.

Bio

Matthias Oostrik works at the intersection of digital art, installation art, cinema and architecture. His works establish unpredictable relationships between people and their surroundings. Using digital technology, his installations allow visitors to reshape their environment and their relationships with each other. Oostrik collaborates with renowned professionals and, above all, with his audience, who often become an integral part of his work.

Credits

Co-production: Zester
IA Music: Than van Nispen

Pétrole
L’idée principale de ce projet est de présenter aux visiteurs de l’exposition la possibilité de détruire tout objet qui pourrait se trouver sur leur personne, afin de le transformer en une composition sonore unique. L’installation se compose de cinq presses hydrauliques, capables d’écraser pratiquement n’importe quel objet (téléphone portable, paire de lunettes, écouteurs ou autre). En cours de destruction, un microphone spécial enregistre les sons émis lors de la déformation de l’objet et, en quelques minutes seulement, un algorithme informatique les transforme en un album de 20 minutes.

Vidéosculpture XXI
Les VideoSculptures de Van der Auwera prennent une nouvelle position pour explorer les intersections de la vie numérique et physique et comment le filtrage des images dans la production, la diffusion et la digestion modifie à la fois la perception individuelle et l’expérience consensuelle. Utilisant l’écran comme matériau sculptural, ces œuvres sortent les images du cadre de manière low-tech. Ils commencent par un acte de destruction alors que l’artiste prend littéralement un couteau sur un écran pour découper des couches physiques. À l’insu de la plupart, ces couches sont des filtres qui adhèrent à chaque écran LCD. Sans la médiation de ces filtres, les images deviennent impossibles à voir à l’œil nu et le bruit blanc remplit l’espace.

Omelia Contadina
Omelia Contadina est née de l’intérêt de JR pour les difficultés rencontrées par un grand nombre de petits agriculteurs et d’habitants des campagnes italiennes. Alice Rohrwacher explique les origines du projet: “l’automne dernier, lors d’une promenade à la frontière entre l’Ombrie, le Latium et la Toscane, j’ai fait part à mon ami et artiste JR de mes inquiétudes quant à la destruction du paysage agricole, violé par les monocultures intensives avec quelles grandes entreprises façonnent des territoires entiers. Je lui ai raconté, en fille d’apiculteur, la mort massive d’insectes que provoquent de tels changements… À un moment donné, nous nous sommes arrêtés à un carrefour: de tous côtés, des rangées ininterrompues de noisetiers remplissaient le paysage jusqu’à l’horizon. En regardant cela, nous nous sommes dit que cela ressemblait à un cimetière de guerre. Sur le chemin du retour, nous avons décidé – si cela ressemble à un cimetière, nous devons organiser des funérailles. Mais ce doit être un enterrement plein de vie!”

Chronos XXI
Chronos the god of time, permanently destroys and recreates. He who symbolises evanescence and return, was the thematic point of departure for the creation of the kinetic media installation Chronos XXI. The piece is a ‘finger exercise on antiquity’ by our Creative Director Joachim Sauter and was created during his residency at Villa Massimo in Rome. A pendulum continuously swings in front of a monitor. This motion controls the slow synthesis and destruction of depictions of Chronos on the monitor. Chronos appears in various interpretations by painters of the late Renaissance, Baroque and Classicism – as a man who disrobes Veritas, as a performer of volatile music, or docking Cupid’s wings, or as children and crop eating, a scythe and an hour glass carrying, beardy and winged old man.
video

Poetic AI
Ouchhh created an Artificial Intelligence and the t-SNE visualization of the hundreds of books and articles [approx. 20 million lines of text] written by scientists who changed the destiny of the world -and wrote history- were fed to the Recurrent Neural Network during the training. This, later on, was used to generate novel text in the exhibition. 136 projectors shining to be a veritable oneiric experience, the ‘POETIC – AI’ digital installation uses Artificial Intelligence in the visual creation process: the forms, light, and movement are generated by an algorithm that creates a unique and contemplative digital work, an AI dancing in the dark, trying to show us connections we could never see otherwise.

As above
As Above is a short film exploring the tight link between the microscopic world and immensity of the universe. Illustrating our universe’s never ending dance of destruction and creation, in which life can emerge. As Above was made of one single shot filmed on the 8mm2 (0.3 square inch) surface of a chemical reaction. The environment in which we live, is at the constant mercy of the ever changing flow of planets, stars and galaxies… As well as the composition of the microscopic world. “As Above” is an invitation to contemplate the beauty of this perpetual movement of which we are part of… And perhaps invite the viewer to reflect on his position in the universe and the preciosity of life.

Mist Installation
An installation designed by Clap for Minsk, Belarus, that was built by volunteers from the city itself. For the concept of this installation Clap starts from the history of Minsk, a city that during the Second World War was devastated. The bombs destroyed 80% of the buildings and the city was not rebuilt until the 1950s. That is why the population of this city remembers these times as something unpleasant and many of them prefer not to talk about it. The design studio starts from a geometric volume that represents in a conceptual way the volume of a building. They imagine that the bombs fall on him destroying it, generating new openings and brand new volumes. These new openings result ingeniously in an entrance and a viewpoint on the top. The destruction gives way to the function generates grandstands, stairs and seats. From the inside, life makes its way in the form of a tree, exceeding the height of the installation itself.

Breaking News: Flooding of the Louvre
Natural disaster increasingly linked to a climate change has arrived to the museum of Louvre, which responds to the flooding of Paris in 2018. The artwork also respresents the issue of cultural leftover. Recycling is the main value of the process. By destruction of model that was a part of previous project Put Your Head into Gallery, the leftovers are reconstructed and new meanings and possibilities are created. The flooding of the Louvre Museum speaks about news culture and our fluctuating perception of disasters as it is seen through media. The scale of the disaster is often difficult to assess from news coverage. In the work “Breaking News” flood goes slowly into the room of the Louvre, letting the viewer to gradually watch the destruction of interior. it brings the viewer shochinkly close to what has not happened but easily could have, viewer sees the before and after effect in a highly visualized manner, which is as convincing and threatening, as fake.

Videosculpture XXI
Van der Auwera’s VideoSculptures take a new position to explore the intersections of digital and physical life and how the filtering of images in production, dissemination, and digestion alter both individual perception and consensual experience. Using the screen as sculptural material, these works break images out of the frame in a low-tech manner. They start with an act of destruction as the artist literally takes a knife to a screen to carve away physical layers. Unbeknown to most, these layers are filters that are adhered to every LCD screen. Without the mediation of these filters, images become impossible to see with the naked eye and white noise fills the space.

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!‘

Oil
The main idea of this project is to present exhibition visitors with the chance to destroy any object that might happen to be on their person, in order to transform it into a unique sound composition. The installation consists of five hydraulic presses, capable of crushing practically any object (a mobile telephone, pair of glasses, headphones or whatever). In the process of destruction, a special microphone records the sounds made as the object undergoes deformation, and in just a few minutes, a computer algorithm transforms them into a 20 minutes album.

Damnatio Memoriae

From the Latin, damnatio memoriae describes an act of erasure from the historical record reserved for
those who have brought dishonor to the Roman State. Employed as the most stringent punishment for
treason, damnatio memoriae physically razes all traces of an individual from society, typically through
the destruction a statue’s physiognomy or the abrasion of inscribed monuments. Throughout the past
two decades, Sassolino has developed a body of work that examines the relationship between industrial
machines and humanist impulses where viewers are meant to question how an sculpture’s kinetic
function aesthetically and conceptually allegorizes human experiences and cultural conditions.

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

LA SOCIETE DE LA PLACE DES SPECTACLES
FILE SAO PAULO 2015
Inspired from the live works of Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto (1933-) of meticulously ransacking large mirrors, Sorenson revisited the classical traditions of vanitas under the materiality of video, and generate his creative process from the destruction of consumer components.

Periplo (detail)
Based in Bogotá and represented there by Casas Riegner, Leyla Cardenas engages with the remnants and artifacts of destruction, the seen and unseen, the visible and invisible. Working with found object and images from archives, often her process mirrors that of an archeologist since she procures fragments such as walls, ceilings and floors to produce her work.