N-DRA

FILE 2024 | Interator – Sound Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival

Dennis Schöneberg – N-DRA – Germany

Created during the pandemic, N-DRA is a video that explores the nostalgia of pre-pandemic times. Through a dreamlike and psychedelic journey through the artist’s memories, it reflects feelings of loneliness, isolation and the desire for connection.

Bio

Dennis Schöneberg, German AI artist, data science student and developer of open source AI models, integrates his passion for electronic music into his creative endeavors. Merging art with technology, he explores the synergy between creativity and artificial intelligence.

Credits

Music: N-DRA by Ricardo Villalobos

Tribe City
Hundreds of beings and dreamlike and dystopian elements inhabit the digital and autonomous works that are part of this project. “It’s a portrait of the masses,” summarise the artists, whose fascination with group dynamics, technological phenomena and the ego are expressed in Tribe with an eclectic selection of individuals who bring to life deeply recognisable social attitudes. Collective behaviour and manipulation are recurring themes in SMACK’s work, which often uses popular visual references and light-hearted aesthetics to present us with an uncomfortable reflection of who we are.

TOKYO METACLOUD
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Vincent Leroy onthult ‘Tokyo Metacloud’, een gigantische zwevende wolk die door de straten van de japanse metropool trekt. De installatie, bestaande uit dunne gebogen bladen, speelt met de balans tussen materiaal, lucht en transparantie om een ​​indruk van extreme lichtheid te creëren. Nogmaals, het poëtische en contemplatieve universum van Leroy maakt kijkers los van de echte wereld en nodigt hen uit om te genieten van een meeslepende, dromerige ervaring.
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Vincent Leroy unveils ‘Tokyo Metacloud’, a gigantic floating cloud that sweeps through the streets of the Japanese metropolis. The installation, consisting of thin curved blades, plays with the balance between material, air and transparency to create an impression of extreme lightness. Again, Leroy’s poetic and contemplative universe detaches viewers from the real world and invites them to enjoy an immersive, dreamlike experience.

PIVOT POINT – ICHIHARA
‘Pivot Point – Ichihara’ is an interactive site-specific installation. Standing on a controller pod you navigate over and through a 3D terrain where gravity seems to have disappeared, you gradually become tele-present in a parallel projected space by exploring a mediated version of the venue, it’s direct surroundings and the Ichihara region. A cinematic journey to a fascinating point cloud realm, precise in details but simultaneously abstract and dreamlike.The kidney shaped interface is covered with capacitive sensors and mounted on a pole, touching this interface right, left, up or down aims the virtual camera accordingly. When you release the navigation pole the virtual camera automatically starts spiralling back to the initial starting point your journey and temporary centre of the universe, the Asohbara Art House.

岑侃倫
The Undercurrent
file festival
In the installation, the distorted image projected on the tabletop is reflected in the cylindrical mirror. While one sequence is distorted and reminiscent of a dreamlike state or the hazy inner workings of the mind, the other is clear and in proportion, which enables us to decipher the anamorphic image, thus to confront the “undercurrent” in our mind.

Den of Wolves
Den of Wolves is a video installation drawing on a range of references to weave a new multi-layered mythology. The work follows three bizarre wolves through a series of increasingly surreal retail stores as they search for the regalia of a monarch. Composed of one continuous camera shot, the work is an immersive, dreamlike journey drawing connections between popular culture, institutional authority and technological over-dependence.

Ljós
Ljós (Icelandic for ‘light’) has been conceived in continuity with the research carried out by fuse* in the field of digital and performative arts, which explores the deep connection between light, space, sound and movement. In Ljós, the performer is the means that allows the viewer to access a surreal and dreamlike space, a dimension with no gravity nor time, made by sounds and images reacting and interacting in real time. A shape-changing universe, which evolves from amniotic fluid in the beginning – protecting and supporting the performer – to the setting for violent explosions and transformations later – leading her to a direct contact with ground and Earth.

The Movement of Air

A frontal show for three dancers evolving in an immersive environment made up of images projected, generated and animated live. A show where two impossible ones come together: the body that flies, thanks to suspension devices and the body that fits into the image. An acrobatic and digital choreographic writing which outlines a body language opening onto other relationships to time, space and the world. Beyond the search for technical prowess, it is that of a dreamlike movement and writing through images.

slow drop
Slow Drop captures a distorted and dreamlike image of the city. Everything seems to become clear and natural. Slow Drop is free, fluid separate from the real world and all the limitations. It is a singular and pure form, as if it had come from another universe. It gives way to sleep, to contemplation.

Dutch-Croatian photographer Sanja Marušić uses an experimental approach to colour, composition, materials, and manipulations in her work to create dreamlike scenes that are at once cinematic and alienating.She travels the world in her production of these otherworldly images, finding settings and forms that play with our relation to the subconscious, simplifying the bodies of her subjects with geometric shapes, and abstracting the human form even further by incorporating stylised dance movements.Putting places above people, many of Sanja’s photographs are set in wide open futuristic spaces in an attempt to create surreal and alienating visual emotions. She often uses cool and bright colours as well as singular objects and accessories in order to create unique and enigmatic narratives.

The Augmented Hand Series
The “Augmented Hand Series” (by Golan Levin, Chris Sugrue, and Kyle McDonald) is a real-time interactive software system that presents playful, dreamlike, and uncanny transformations of its visitors’ hands. It consists of a box into which the visitor inserts their hand, and a screen which displays their ‘reimagined’ hand—for example, with an extra finger, or with fingers that move autonomously. Critically, the project’s transformations operate within the logical space of the hand itself, which is to say: the artwork performs “hand-aware” visualizations that alter the deep structure of how the hand appears.

Криста ван дер Ниет

The work of Krista van der Niet emerges from a dreamlike state of mind, whereby her imagination brings the things around her to life. She seems to glide along the lightness of things and grasps the beauty of the pure object. During the making process objects gain a metaphysical layer of meaning. She is the guiding factor for the viewpoint of her audience, in order to convey her perception. At this moment the sculptor becomes a photographer and you stand still together with her.

Taking in her paintings is like opening your eyes after a nap in the sand. The colourful masses on her canvas appear to be in motion, plunging the spectator into a semi-conscious state. Beyond the merely pictorial, Ana Montiel’s works read like spiritual, dreamlike invitations, that hit you with a feeling of satisfaction and involuntary entrancement. Any tangible form looks acid-washed; a silhouette or a ray of sun gives way to a sfumato of light and pigments. The artist is interested in the conceptual issues of perception and phenomenology, based on the premise that reality is nothing but a collective and controlled hallucination.

Fictitious fashion house
“The realistic everyday environment of her studio is reflected in her work and transforms into a sublime dreamlike world. She incorporates elements of nature and space and uses earth tones and natural fabrics.”

Лукас Самарас
卢卡斯·萨马拉斯
لوكاس ساماراس
ルーカスサマラス
루카스 사마라스
Chair
Since the 1960s, Lucas Samaras has devoted his art to the evocation of an intensely private, obsessional, sometimes hallucinatory realm. Among the many motifs that occur in his work, the chair is especially prominent. The “Chair Transformation” series has included provocative sculptures executed in a variety of materials including wood, wire mesh, and mirrored glass. Throughout the series, Samaras transforms the ordinary object into a fantastical one, evoking a dreamlike metamorphosis. Here the artist suggests an animated flight of stacked chairs. A deceptively simple form, the sculpture appears from different viewpoints to be upright, leaning back, or springing forward.

КРИСТА ВАН ДЕР НИЕТ
The work of Krista van der Niet (1978) emerges from a dreamlike state of mind, whereby her imagination brings the things around her to life. She seems to glide along the lightness of things and grasps the beauty of the pure object. During the making process objects gain a metaphysical layer of meaning. She is the guiding factor for the viewpoint of her audience, in order to convey her perception.

Aguado
Argentinian Larissa Haily Aguado is collaging in the digital age. Still assembling manually from found materials, the trained artist and designer creates enchanting compositions through the the mixing of various motifs, fused with surrealism and an unmistakable humorous quality that makes you stop and think. These dreamlike collages mix inanimate objects, nature, fashion and animals, with other seemingly random elements. However, they may not be so random.

Continuum
A reflecting panel that dominates an entire space, situated right in the middle of it. Two projectors that, at the opposite sides of the panel, offer a constant flow of images that meet each other and merge together, giving life to a real “virtual window” capable of connecting the souls of two different spaces. Everything among smoky suspensions, proceeding through cones of light: a dreamlike atmosphere to demonstrate that dualities can coexist.

Residual Balance

The type of objects she chooses have ranged from large antlers, brightly coloured cables, old Christmas trees, light bulbs, American basketballs, orange balloons, scientific test tubes and even butterflies. Hardy puts these everyday objects together and transforms them into unusual, almost dreamlike, environments which can be unnerving with their themes of abandonment and desolation.

CENTIPEDE SUN

Symbol of isolation, doubled by the sublime landscape and the complex spiritual background, the Altiplano region in Chile is the main character in the film. It represents a self-sufficient being, and the film is this being’s portrait. The illustrious landscape keeps traces of a dark past – hidden dangers and gloomy places add a layer of anxiety: the environment is injured. The human element appears briefly in the video: we see traces of human presence being erased by a devouring nature. By means of creating mental landscapes halfway between photographic research and experimental animation, this work depicts a dreamlike world, a vision hidden in a secret dimension of our reality.

تاكاهيرو ماتسو
松尾高弘
타카히로 마츠오
Такахиро Мацуо
Phantasm
file festival

To explore a fantasy world experienced sometime and somewhere in our memory. Phantasm is an interactive installation in which participants light up in a small dreamlike world in space. As you take hold of a glowing sphere that releases a pale light, the area lights up in pale blue light, and white butterflies appear from nowhere as a soft piano melody flows. Butterflies fly slowly and gloriously, gathering toward the sphere, and chase you as you move the sphere. The sphere is the key to the real world and fantasy. Participants can experience the nostalgia of playing with butterflies by moving around or holding the sphere in the air. Beautiful white butterflies draw wing strokes in the air as if they are symbols of a fantasy world; they delicately lead you into their world. If you cover the sphere with your hands to shut out the light, the butterflies gradually disappear, leaving silence and lingering light, bringing you back to reality. You will find yourself perplexed as if it were a fleeting dream. Technical statement of “Phantasm” LEDs are used as the light source for the sphere which is the interface, so that the sphere glows in uniformity and allows the interaction of participants hiding the light or releasing the light with their hands. Light, color tone, and the position of the sphere are monitored with a sensor camera placed on the ceiling, and by connecting with real time CG, the butterfly movements (appearance, disappearance, gathering, and chasing) become possible.