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 Cage of Time

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival
Interactive installation that presents a kinetic instrument object and virtual reality glasses, functioning as a device that animates the illusion of the passage of time in virtual space. In the fabric of existence, time weaves a cage around our ephemeral moments, limiting our perceptions of the past, present and future. By embracing this paradox, we may discover that the cage of time becomes the crucible where the alchemy of experience transforms our understanding of existence.

Bio

Anna Vasof is a multi-award-winning artist who focuses on filmmaking, short videos, and time-based sculptures. VRinMotion is an artistic research project based at St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences in Austria that investigates how features of stop-motion animation and motion capture can be combined with virtual reality to enrich current artistic discourse.

Credits

VRinMotion Team: Franziska Bruckner, Christoph Schmid, Clemens Gürtler, Matthias Husinsky, Christian Munk, Julian Salhofer, Stefan Nebel, Vrääth Öhner.
Concept by: Anna Vasof.

ДАНИЭЛЬ ВИДРИК
Tower Study
Daniel Widrig’s studio now works in a broad range of fields including sculpture, fashion, furniture design and architecture. Embracing digital systems since its early days, the studio holds a unique position in the field and is widely considered to be in the vanguard of digital art and design.The Tower Studies examine this same material behaviour on an architectural scale, further blurring the distinction found on a small scale between structure and ornament.

BELIEF SYSTEMS
Facial micro expressions last less than a second and are almost impossible to control. They are hard wired to the emotional activity in the brain which can be easily captured using specially developed technological devices. Free will is now in question as the science exposes decision-making as an emotional process rather than a rational one. This ability to read emotions technologically result in a society obsessed with their emotional reactions. Emotions, convictions and beliefs which usually remain hidden, now become a public matter. “Belief systems” is a video scenario about a society that responds to the challenges of modern neuroscience by embracing these technological possibilities to read, evaluate and alter peoples behaviours and emotions.

Organic
Daniel Widrig’s studio works in a broad range of fields including sculpture, fashion, furniture design and architecture. Embracing digital systems since its early days, the studio holds a unique position in the field and is widely considered to be in the vanguard of digital art and design.

Pink Panther
This strange sculpture is a combination of innocent naiveté and raunchy voyeuristic delight…if you’re into bestiality, that is. In this cartoon come to life, a topless Jayne Mansfield (70s actress and Playboy Playmate) is literally and figuratively feeling her feline friend. Half naked, passionately embracing the kitty, so-to-speak, Mansfield fulfills one of Koons-y’s favorite artistic strategies: capitalizing on recognizable celebrities in order to sell art.

he Merce Cunningham performances, the final events of Dance Umbrella’s 25th Anniversary season and co-incidentally in MCDC’s 50th year, took place in the vast, 152 meter long Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern within the embracing environment of Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project.

Embrace in Progress
Embrace in Progress explores conflicted feelings of shared intimacy. It is inspired by personal and cultural experiences where human contact is not commonly practiced in social interaction. The daunting and unfamiliar proximity of being captured in someone’s arms distorts one’s sense of time. The project was inspired by slit-scan photography and uses depth sensors to capture a series of intimate embraces. These 3D printed pieces recreate the act of embracing and are represented in a static form by the flow of movement twisted because of time.

弗洛里安·海福樂
フロリアンハーフェレ
Флориан Хафель
The central theme of artist Florian Hafele, born 1979, is the observation of the body, which reflects many questions about our social environment and its related phenomena. Hafele’s work translates into sculptures of deformed creatures, human as well as object, which develop a multi-interpretable essence through various contortions. Embracing this aspect a variety of his works deal with performance in our social environment like the “Champion” which is a synonym for the over-strained human, in an achievement oriented society, or the exhausted tools which treat themselves to a break.

Джон Мак-Кракен
约翰·麦克拉肯
ジョン·マクラッケン
Star, Infinite, Dimension, and Electron

“The geometric forms McCracken employed were typically built from straight lines: cubes, rectangular slabs and rods, stepped or quadrilateral pyramids, post-and-lintel structures and, most memorably, tall planks that lean against the wall. Usually, the form is painted in sprayed lacquer, which does not reveal the artist’s hand. An industrial look is belied by sensuous color.His palette included bubble-gum pink, lemon yellow, deep sapphire and ebony, usually applied as a monochrome. Sometimes an application of multiple colors marbleizes or runs down the sculpture’s surface, like a molten lava flow. He also made objects of softly stained wood or, in recent years, highly polished bronze and reflective stainless steel.Embracing formal impurity at a time when purity was highly prized, the works embody perceptual and philosophical conundrums. The colored planks stand on the floor like sculptures; rely on the wall for support like paintings; and, bridging both floor and wall, define architectural space. Their shape is resolutely linear, but the point at which the line assumes the dimensional properties of a shape is indefinable.” Christopher Knight