Akihito Ito + Issey Takahashi
FILE FESTIVAL 2018
story changes in the body as it acclimates to a new rhythm. Participating in the installation can bring about unexpected emotional responses that also affect heart rate variability and, thereby, get recorded, too. The reason why the gift-box is used as an indicator of the heartbeat is because it is a metaphor of a “Gift.
Maurice Benayoun and Tobias Klein
Brain Factory Prototype 2
Brain Factory is an installation that allows the audience to give a shape to human abstractions through Brain-Computer Interaction (BCI), and then to convert the resulting form into a physical object. The work examines the human specificity through abstract constructs such as LOVE, FREEDOM, and DESIRE. The project articulates the relationship between thought and matter, concept and object, humans and machine. Brain Factory uses Electroencephalography (EEG) data captured by BCI. As a brain activity is unique, we developed a novel calibration process of the individual data readings and associated emotional responses within a framework of binary outcomes. This is key for a real-time feedback – a biofeedback – between the virtual generative processes and the brain’s associated response.
100% Other Fibres
Through collisions of image, noise, objects, language and bodies, Heather Phillipson’s videos and sculptural installations behave as places, musical scores, poems and nervous systems – attending to how physical and affective ‘selves’ are constructed, manipulated and, above all, escape. Often rendered as walk-in conglomerations of readily accessible materials (digital images, paint, cardboard, words, audio loops and reproducible consumer detritus), her works stake out an ambiguous territory in which cultural references and emotional responses are mutually contingent and reactive. Collapsing distinctions between the forthright and the inarticulable, the banal and the ecstatic, and between metaphor and extreme literalisation, Phillipson’s work performs constant tonal shifts, disruptions and bleeds. In so doing, it oscillates between physical intimacies and conceptual distances – desire, sensuality, touching and being touched, shame, anxiety, (over-)exposure, resistant surfaces.
Delusions of self-immolation
The installation Delusions of self-immolation will lead a great number of visitors to ask themselves where the boundaries of their own body lie and why one would wish to discover them. Erik Hobijn has built a machine in which one may almost look death in the face, and that, equipped with fire and water spraying devices, sets light to the victim and extinguishes the flames, standing in the middle of a platform. During the course of the festival Erik Hobijn will give demonstrations.The borders of the body are hard to define in terms of averages, because they are closely related to the psyche that demonstrates the physical limits. Despite its extremely physical nature, the way in which it is experienced is determined by personal fears, dreams and desires. Erik Hobijn’s machine unleashes such strong emotional responses because it forces the person to be the guardian and researcher of their own body limits. It is a life of initialization toward self development, with its own warmth and beauty..
The willful marionette
the willful marionette (2014) was created by artists Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcault during a residency with the University of North Carolina Charlotte, working with the College of Computing and Informatics as well as the College of Art and Architecture. The marionette is 3d printed from the scanned image of a human figure and responds engagingly in real time to spontaneous human gestures by reading a viewer’s movements and expressions. Its strings are manipulated by motors and software and there are two depth sensors that read and analyze the behaviors and gestures of participants. The puppet’s subsequent actions are designed to elicit further responses, creating an exchange focusing on the frailty and insecurities of the human participant and raising issues of contemporary relevance. The intention of the project was not to create so much a perfectly functioning robot but rather to imbue an obviously mechanically actuated marionette with the ability to solicit a physical and emotional dialog with a viewer.