Lost in Computation
A multilingual conversation between two Chatbot AIs (Artificial Intelligence) trained in Swedish and Italian, translated through Google Translate, exploring how the multiple layers of computation in today’s digital landscape distorts our communication.
FALIN MYND
Falin Mynd is an audiovisual installation dedicated to the city of Milan that draws inspiration from the concept of the latent image in the photographic field: an invisible imprint left by the light on the film that is revealed only after its development. Similarly, the data generated by the inhabitants and visitors of the city of Milan produce abstract digital landscapes, leaving a trace from their analysis and interpretation in real-time. In this way, the work makes visible the indissoluble bond between individual and community, highlighting how the two entities influence one another changing the perception of the reality surrounding us made of places, people, colors, and sensations. The data thus constitute an invisible image of the city, a map of what is not manifest and which is revealed in Falin Mynd.
Glow
Glow is an illuminating 30-minute choreographic essay by Artistic Director Gideon Obarzanek and interactive software creator Frieder Weiss. Beneath the glow of a sophisticated video tracking system, a lone organic being mutates in and out of human form into unfamiliar, sensual and grotesque creature states. Utilising the latest in interactive video technologies a digital landscape is generated in real time in response to the dancer’s movement. The body’s gestures are extended by and in turn manipulate the video world that surrounds it, rendering no two performances exactly the same.
Modern Guru
Modern Guru is a translucent ovoid with four huge digital eyes, floating above a ceremonial ring of LEDs. From his mouth flows a ream of absurdist messages, and in a statement about the true nature of lived experience, a new message is delivered when visitors take a photo of Modern Guru – a missive produced only for those who seek to photograph life rather than live the moment. This immersive new media art installation uses the intersection of art and technology to explore modern paths to happiness through unique interactions with characters along a mystical journey of discovery. Visitors are asked to commit to the path – a tight and winding trail with subtle points of connection along the way – a glowing landscape of oversized, whimsical mountains that chant incantations and blink innocently from digital eyes.
Having communed with the Guru, visitors then weave their way back through this warped and strange world full of illusions and delusions, perceptions and deceptions, all the while bathing in luminescent light; embracing big, gentle forms; and following their own path up the pink tongue staircase to meet the one who oversees the whole fantastic dominion, the Sun God.
The Legend of Ogie
FILE 2024 | Aesthetic Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
SurrealismToday.com – The Legend of Ogie – United States
What worlds exist beyond Einstein’s speed limit? Inspired by Eric Weinstein’s theory of Geometric Unity, the work explores the idea that space-time is like a melody playing over an eight-dimensional universe. Abstract and metamorphic forms transition from organic forms to parastatic patterns, creating a dance of visuals and sounds that merge into an immersive experience of fractal unfolding.
Bio
SurrealismToday.com is an artist collective and educational platform dedicated to the proliferation of surreal and visionary ontologies in contemporary art. The group began as an esoteric cargo cult dedicated to discovering the beautiful, the fantastic, and the transcendent in the pseudo-philosophical landscape of the art world. His methods include searching for gems in the digital world and infusing mystical enchantments into generative diffusion models.
Kelly Luck
Strangeland 1 (excerpt)
FILE 2024 | Aesthetic Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
Kelly Luck – Strangeland 1 (excerpt) – United States
From a surrealist point of view, the main attraction of generative AI, for the artist, is its lack of memory. At any given moment, she only has the current frame and instructions on how to proceed, similar to free association in dreams. This work is part of a series of long-term environments designed to immerse the viewer in a constantly evolving and never-ending landscape, inviting relaxation and engagement.
Bio
As part of the first generation to grow up around computers, Kelly Luck quickly became fascinated with the creative possibilities of this new technology. Her journey has ranged from pixel art and graphic ‘hacks’ to the 90s demoscene, 2D and later 3D graphics, and now the modern tools of digital art. With the emergence of generative AI, it endlessly explores how technology continues to blur the line between imagination and reality.
balenciaga collaboration
A 25 minute video loop with previously unreleased tracks by DJ Hell, made in collaboration with Balenciaga.
Here is a dramatic tension in his work between the real and the imagined in his use of often-appropriated digital objects to create virtual landscapes, which frequently contain elements – animals, machines, fragments of videogames – that are recognisable from our day to day life. This creates a symbiotic relationship between the digital and the real. In a very real way digital space has now become an intangible reality. The worlds built by Robak have a distinctly cinematic sensibility that hyperbolises the shine and dramatic effects of 3D rendered animation. The aesthetic of his work is supremely important, drawing the viewer into a truly alluring, indulgent and strangely gratifying environment. There is a further challenge to the void between high-art and the worlds of 3D animation and gaming, in the intersection between depiction and simulation. This can be partially attributed to the vernacular of advertising Robak is so proficient at utilising.
Ritual
An undisclosed location. Dry land under a scorching sun. Something abominable has happened here in recent memory. Now a ritual is taking place. The remains of what was once human are flickering in darkness. Nature is reclaiming what is hers. She is savage and unforgiving. She is laughing at us. Her sinister laughter echoes in the emptiness. Ritual re-imagines the notion of site-specificity within the mediated landscape. The digital and physical work for this exhibition sit in a forgotten mining town somewhere in the California desert. The viewer is invited to interact with Triantafyllidis’ new live simulation, sculptures and custom electronics blurring the line between the real life and online experience
Great Chain of Being
FILE FESTIVAL
The great chain of being, an ancient philosophical concept, attempted to explain the structures and relationships of the world as a form of hierarchy or set of strata. This philosophical idea is here expressed in the form of the entities that constitute the contemporary world. The philosophers of the past believed that the structure of the world had at its top a god, and that beneath there were angels, animals, plants, and elements. But this conception of the world, as a result of the changes in civilization and culture, resulted in the elements that constitute the world undergoing a transition and sustaining an unforeseen hierarchy. The works of art depict the contemporary structure in the form of robots, machines, people, animals, and virtual or digital entities. Within virtual systems, these entities undergo a process of creation, arrangement, use, disposal and recycling, through which they emerge and disappear. The work depicts the stories emerging from these processes, against the background of a systemically designed landscape akin to a factory.
video
Networked Ecosystem
In Networked Ecosystem, natural phenomena have been replaced by digital and artificial systems as forces that drive development: Electricity/battery = sustenance, WIFI signals = nutrition, Lidar data = fire/heat. Data Organisms populate this digital ecosystem as native life forms in the form of bots, AI’s, and avatars. Visitors to this networked landscape develop new kinds of digital senses to experience data as environmental changes, and interact with the simulated world and each other in an ever-changing online environment.
퐁 치 웨이
‘Time is a Dimension’
The beauty of photography, in its essence, is conveyed by capturing a moment in time and freezing it out of its context. Singapore-based photographer Fong Qi Wei, however, uses photography to show the passage of time. In his time lapse series called ‘Time is a Dimension’, Fong doesn’t use a typical long exposure trick. He captures the passing time by layering different photos of the same spot with clear edge lines of each frame. Each collage is digitally cut and created from pictures Fong takes within 2 to to 4 hours. Fong usually works at sunrise or sunset, as the light and color palettes are most varied at those times.
“The basic structure of a landscape is present in every piece. But each panel or concentric layer shows a different slice of time, which is related to the adjacent panel/layer. The transition from daytime to night is gradual and noticeable in every piece, but would not be something you expect to see in a still image. Similarly, our experience of a scene is more than a snapshot,” explains Fong.
Équinoxe
A concert-show. A visual and audio journey. Moving digital images. A moment, ephemeral and unique. An immersive road movie with live music, created as an allusion to the performance Hakanaï. The encounter of two worlds : that of the band Limousine with its instrumental music, both pop and jazz, contemplative and graceful with that of Adrien M & Claire B and its abstract landscapes of images, vertiginous and poetic.
Quantum memories
Quantum Memories is Refik Anadol Studio’s epic scale investigation of the intersection between Google AI Quantum Supremacy experiments, machine learning, and aesthetics of probability. Technological and digital advancements of the past century could as well be defined by the humanity’s eagerness to make machines go to places that humans could not go, including the spaces inside our minds and the non-spaces of our un- or sub-conscious acts. Quantum Memories utilizes the most cutting-edge, Google AI’s publicly available quantum computation research data and algorithms to explore the possibility of a parallel world by processing approximately 200 million nature and landscape images through artificial intelligence. These algorithms allow us to speculate alternative modalities inside the most sophisticated computer available, and create new quantum noise-generated datasets as building blocks of these modalities. The 3D visual piece is accompanied by an audio experience that is also based on quantum noise–generated data, offering an immersive experience that further challenges the notion of mutual exclusivity. The project is both inspired by and a speculation of the Many-Worlds Interpretation in quantum physics – a theory that holds that there are many parallel worlds that exist at the same space and time as our own.
Point Cloud Old Growth
Forest on Location
In the video work Forest on Location, we see the avatar of the Iranian opera singer Shahram Yazdani walking through a forest. One moment, the forest wraps around him protectively, the next moment the trees crumble away into loose pieces of bark, or melt into a static green mass. At the same time, the forest as a whole floats around in darkness, uprooted. It is a forest without a location, except on our screen. The young man’s avatar appears to be wandering around there aimlessly. It is a wonderland that he exits from towards the end of the video, when his body slips straight through the green wall. This finally breaks the spell of the illusory forest, and everything is revealed to be no more than staged decor. But the forest does exist as a real forest, somewhere. This virtual green world is a digital back-up of Bia?owie?a Forest: the last remaining stretch of primeval low land forest that once covered much of Central Europe. Inspired by what the historian Simon Schama wrote about Bia?owie?a in Landscape and Memory (1995), Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács journeyed to Poland to capture the forest suffused by old-Germanic nostalgia and mythical atmosphere.
Remains Series
Video is one of several ways Quayola explores his relationship with the world—and he has a mesmerizing way of undercutting reality while celebrating it. During Miami Art Week, Quayola premiered “Promenade,” a 4K drone-shot film of impeccable beauty. Commissioned by Audemars Piguet, the work winds through and above the forests of the Vallée de Joux, Switzerland near the brand’s historic watchmaking facility. In waves of interconnected footage, it translates documentation of the landscapes into digital art drawn from various technologies. It succeeds in a deep dissection of form.
Topographie digitale
“Topographie Digitale” is an interactive installation created by DataPaulette. This landscape uses electrically functionalized and pleated textiles as sensitive surfaces reacting to touch. This interaction brings to life a “digital clone”, video-projected. This mirrored scene reveals an organic side contrasting with the mineral aspect of the physical scene.
Hertzian Landscapes
Hertzian Landscapes (2019) is a live visualization of the radio spectrum. Unlike visible light, waves in the radio spectrum cannot be perceived by us directly yet this space is teeming with human activity. Hertzian Landscapes employs a digital receiver to scan large swaths of radio spectrum in near real-time and visualizes thousands of signals into a panoramic electromagnetic landscape. Users can zoom in to specific frequencies by positioning themselves in front of the panorama as if controlling a radio tuner with their body, giving them a sense of walking through the spectrum.
TransVision
Through three perceptual machines, TransVision questions the habitual ways in which we interpret and understand the visual world intervened by digital media, and how technology mediates the way we perceive reality. We have observed an increase in allergies and intolerances in modern society. Hypersensitivities are emerging not only medically but also mentally. Digital media reinforce people’s tendency to overreact through the viral spread of information and amplification of opinions, making us hypersensitive to our sociopolitical environment. By creating an artificial allergy to the color red, this machine manifests the nonsensical hypersensitivity created by digital media. In nocebo mode, red expands, which is similar to social media’s amplification effect; in placebo mode, red shrinks, like our filtered communication landscape where we can unfollow people with different opinions.
Transient
Transient – Impermanent paintings is an audiovisual concert for two motorized pianos and two conductors in collaboration with generative algorithms. Hyper-realistic digital brushstrokes articulate endlessly on a large-scale projection as if on a real canvas. Each brushstroke is sonified with a piano note, creating polyphonic synesthetic landscapes. The project continues Quayola’s research on traditional artistic techniques in the context of human-machine relationship, this time gradually withdrawing from formal subjects and giving way to the computational substance: the algorithm.
Flypast Sunset
“In this series of animated artworks, which are essentially slowed down versions of the series Time in Motion, I invite you to experience the passage of moments across a landscape. Perhaps understanding that even though all moments are transient, all moments are equally worthy of our respect because they are parts of a larger whole. Each Time Loop is made manually. I captured every moment across a sunset or sunrise using a digital camera, and manually stitched these moments into Time Paintings. Finally, different sequential time paintings were put together to create a sense of motion almost imperceptible in some of the works, in the manner of clouds drifting across a sky.” Fong Qi Wei
timeLandscape woolrhythms
“timeLandscape – wool rhythms” 2010. Part of timeLandscape series, 2009 – 2010. Video, audio, projector, speakers, custom patch (PD-Gem), sensor, wool engine. Variable dimensions and duration, loop. “timeLandscape – woolrhythms” is an interactive audiovisual installation in which a landscape is depicted from its multiple time possibilities and [re]composed through users’ real time interaction. The installation was developed in Biella, Italy, an area economically attached to textile industry, and deals with the cyclical perception of time and human, linear, interference on it. It gathers nature and artefact, by connecting a physical wool engine to digital imagery of daily cycles. By turning the wheel crank, users generate movement starting the engine. Through a sensor attached to the machine, software calculates the rotation speed, altering parameters for mixing audio and video fragments in real time. Every turn of the machine leads to different time thread combinations in response to the rhythm and speed of each interactor.
МЯО СЯОЧУНЬ
缪晓春
مياو شياو تشون
The large-scale nine-panel installation, Microcosm, is based on Hieronymus Bosch’s 15th century masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights. Microcosm is an imaginative reinvention of the sumptuous landscape of sin, salvation, and tawdry visions of those who never made it to paradise. The structure and narrative pattern of Bosch’s triptych, such as the architecture of heaven, earth and hell, as well as the basic forms of Bosch’s pictures, have been preserved in Miao Xiaochun’s work. But new digital means and computer technologies have allowed Miao Xiaochun to explore a contemporary visual vocabulary. He abolishes the traditional fixed single-point perspective aesthetic, instead favoring the Chinese tradition of multiple points of view in a single landscape.
digitalized
“Tron, a cult film from 1982, takes place in two parallel universes: the real and the virtual. Through a laser that converts real people into pixels, the world of Tron appears like a strange foreign world without sun, where androids live surrounded by 3D landscapes. The film has a strong retro character given by the era of production, which coexists with a high-tech nature. Both aspects are the basis of my collection. It consists in androgyn, straight silhouettes out of wool, leather, cotton and lack. Through different techniques I have created cube patterns on the surface of some of the materials. Giving the designs a technical yet minimalist character.”
Nothing of This is Ours
“With his strong signature, and his recognizable visual and digital language, Alex creates infinite, surrealistic worlds with colorful creatures, alchemistic symbols, buddhas and other worldly cultural discoveryheritages. In the multiplayer game installation ‘Nothing of This is Ours’, visitors can immerse themselves in the mystic landscapes, graphic patterns and polygon characters. A journey without a destination, exploring with pure instinct. Alex offers the visitors a closer look at the artistic, innovative possibilities of the art game. The game as a contemporary medium, where the newest technique and art come together and enrich the one who takes the time to play the game. Alex invites the visitor to play in M0Bi, individually or collectively, experienced and inexperienced!”
Encompassing painting and sculpture, Zeigler’s practice takes its starting point from the digital. His works often begin as computer-constructed images, which are then painstakingly transformed by hand onto canvas or into three-dimensional forms. The geometric aesthetic contrasts with the organic subject matter of landscapes, skies and animals; the use of computer programming speaks to a contemporary condition of understanding and interacting with the world through technology.
cinematique
An invitation to journey, daydream and idle away, while rediscovering the childhood fantasies hidden in each one of us. An invitation to shake up the rational principles that guide us today in our modern existence. Afloat a raft voyaging across virtual materials and through landscapes. Lines, points, letters and digital objects projected on plain surfaces weave through poetic surfaces, marrying body and gesture.
Avactor (A.I.)
FILE FESTIVAL
Thus, we could define computers not only as object-machines for the use of natural subjectivity, but also as machines of artificial subjectivity, in such way that the subject- machines would operate the object-machines, the same happening for automata, robots and digital avatars. However, we observe the need of another element, whose absence prevents artificial subjectivity’s manifestation. In the present moment, rather than an artificial ego or an artificial conscience, in a structuralizing sense, it must have, in a tactical sense, a persona or a personality, in sum, an actor. Without that persona, artificial subjectivity becomes a mere landscape, lacking subjective referential; without that actor, there is not empathy between artificial subjectivity and natural subjectivity. We call that artificial personality: the Avactor.
City of Drones
City of Drones is an interactive digital environment developed by musician John Cale, speculative architect Liam Young and digital artists FIELD. Charting the story of a lost drone drifting through an abstract cityscape, players are invited to pilot a virtual craft and remotely explore this imaginary world. Samples from Cale’s original soundscape compositions echo across the landscape as we see the city through the eyes of the drone, buzzing between the buildings, drifting endlessly, in an ambient audio visual choreography. The City of Drones digital environment accompanies Loop, 60hz, an immersive live music and drone performance. John Cale, known for experimenting with different industrial sounds in his practice, once tuned his instruments to the hum of refrigerator motors. Cale in collaboration with Liam Young now explore the soundscape of a new generation, the distant rumble of drone propellers, to be set against the visual spectacle of Young’s choreographed flying machines. Typically associated with militarised applications, each drone is repurposed here as both disembodied instrument and dynamic audio infrastructure.
Contemporary Art Centre in Cordoba
BUILDING FAÇADE WITH AN INTEGRATED LIGHT AND MEDIA INSTALLATION
To transform the façade into a light and media display without fundamentally changing its solid appearance as envisioned by Nieto Sobejano turned out to be the biggest challenge in the project. The façade is accordingly designed to deliver a tactile and solid appearance in the daytime while it turns at night into a unique and dynamic communication wall that reacts very specifically to the architecture. The 100-meter façade consists of 1,319 hexagonal, recessed and pre-fabricated “bowls” on different scales. Each of the bowls serves as a reflector for an integrated artificial light source. The intensity of each lamp can be controlled individually, forming a huge irregular low-resolution grey scale display. The thorough immersion of the “pixel-bowls” – like negative impressions – in the volume of the façade turns the architectural scheme itself into a digital information carrier. During the day, the façade shows a three-dimensional landscape with no sign of being a media facade. Additionally, this tectonically modulated surface topography is characterized by a playful composition of light and shadow that constantly changes with the movement of the sun.
РЕЙНАЛЬД ДРУХИН
LANDSCAPE MONOLITH
MONOLITH is the title of French multimedia artist Reynald Drouhin’s latest art project which consists of a series of digitally manipulated images of stunning natural landscapes. In the middle of picturesque sunsets and serene Arctic landscapes, Drouhin pastes a mysterious prismatic shape and then flips it, thus creating a mind-boggling visual effect of an otherworldly transparent object hovering in desolate locations. The entire project is an ingenious appropriation of the famous monolith from Stanley Kubrick’s film ”2001: A Space Odyssey” where mysterious dark rectangular objects (dubbed as monoliths) were scattered across the solar system by an unknown alien civilisation which seemed to guide humans along a risky interplanetary journey. Reynald Drouhin’s MONOLITH series captures exactly the double nature of Kubrick’s monoliths: the inverted shapes in the photographs seem to be a window to another dimension, a physical anomaly which distorts the nature around it, and is both menacing and inviting.
Suaveciclo
File Festival
Vjsuave is Ygor Marotta and Cecilia Soloaga, a new media art duo, based in São Paulo, Brazil. As specialists in animation, moving projection and digital graffiti, they have realesed 4 short films, “Run”, “Homeless”, “La Cena” and “Trip” Their main performances are: “suaveciclo” – a tricycle adapted to project in the streets, live painting and animation with ipad, live audiovisual performance, video mapping and site-specific a/v installations. They want to comunicate love through light. Their performances are poignant, warm, and personal, crafted from hand-drawn and hand-painted media, transformed into digital animation, then projection-mapped in a way that seems to bring São Paulo’s streets alive. Characters dance and run across the urban landscape, with a convincing blend of simulated movement and real moving projection.