The Sea

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival

The Sea is an extraction of a complex natural phenomenon, resulting in an artificial emulation that develops a life form of its own. Just like the sea with its endless waves, this artificial system follows the impact of an immersive state, leading to a unique vision of an artificial generator. Despite appearing chaotic, it is capable of generating associations ranging from the movement of waves to science fiction scenarios.

Bio

Paul Gründorfer develops process-related systems and explores variable or unstable conditions in the occurrence of sound when exposed to amplification, feedback, and multiple signal streams. His works focus on processes that evolve in a social space. Leo Peschta is an artist and researcher. During his studies, he worked in various fields of media arts, including sound, installations and software, developing over the years a special interest in robotics and machinery.

Credits

Austrian Embassy

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.

Cloud Pink
FILE FESTIVAL

The installation invites participants to “touch the pink clouds” drifting on a giant fabric screen suspended in the air.
Lying down on a hill with your pupils filled with the endless blue sky, perspective of your eyesight suddenly gets distorted and clouds drift at the tip of your nose. You stretch your arms up to the sky to touch the clouds but can’t reach. Another world right above your head, clouds.

infinite posture dataset

She moves by endlessly morphing to the rhythm of the device – strapped in the frame of the screen – following or giving instructions; part human, part machine. The design of the device is inspired by a gadget to cheat the step-counter on your smartphone. Technology tricked by technology. Her movements, caught within a motion capture like tight suit deconstructing her body parts, talk of complex and conflicting emotions, but her face, from which we usually read how someone is feeling, is hidden. But is the machine that is observing her deconstructed and re-sequenced postures actually capable of recognizing what the body is communicating? Are we?

蔡国强
Цай Го-Цян
Endless

In dieser Installation namens Endless schafft der in New York lebende Künstler Cai Guo Qiang eine ruhige Atmosphäre, in der klassische Holzschiffe auf grünen, nebligen Wasserwellen schweben. Die Schiffe scheinen mitten im Meer verloren zu treiben, während eine Wellenmaschine ruhige Wellen erzeugt und eine Nebelmaschine den Raum mit einem verschwommenen Dunst füllt. Während die Schiffe langsam und endlos im Wasser schaukeln, befinden sich die Betrachter in einer ruhigen, reflektierenden Atmosphäre. Der Künstler bezieht zwei Arten von Schiffen als Aussage über die Interaktion zweier Welten ein. Zwei Houri-Boote, die normalerweise in der Golfregion zu sehen sind, sind jeweils etwa 244 Zoll lang, während ein chinesisches Fischerboot, das seit Jahrhunderten in Qanzhou eingesetzt wird, 800 Zoll lang ist. Die beruhigende Umgebung, die von Cai Guo Qiang geschaffen wurde, löst meditative Gedanken über alte Kulturen und Traditionen aus, die an einem Ort zusammenkommen, während die physische Repräsentation zweier Welten, Ost und Naher Osten, in einem endlosen Meer friedlicher Bewegung nebeneinander schwebt.

Winterreise
Captured moments are central in Kicsiny’s installations. His characters are simultaneously frozen still and in motion. In some works this paradox becomes literal, as in the installation Winterreise that depicts two priests skiing in different directions using the same skis, which makes forward motion impossible. The figures seem lost, isolated and their journey endless. In their hands they hold Jacob’s staffs, navigational instruments used in the 17th century. The work alludes to the continuous search for one’s place in life.

Light High
The installation LIGHT HIGH is aimed at guiding the perception through targeted acoustic and visual phenomena into border areas in which ambivalent experiences set in and the habitual experience of space is abolished.[…] A mirrored ceiling together with a thin reflecting surface of water on the ground and a grid arrangement of lights are creating the spatial illusion of an infinite vertical space of light and darkness. By traversing a small bridge, the visitor can cautiously discover the immersing endlessness beneath his/her feats and above his/her head.

The Olive Tree
SamMao
Don’t ask me where I’m coming from
My hometown is far far away
Why do I wander so far?
Wandering in the distant land?
For the little birds that soar through the sky
For the creeks that rush between the mountains
For the endless grasslands
Wandering afar, wandering

Urban imprint
“If there is to be a “new urbanism… it will no longer be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent … but for the creation of enabling fields….that refuse to be crystallized into definitive form; it will no longer be about meticulous definitions, the imposition of limits, but about expanding notions, denying boundaries, not about separating and identifying entities, but about discovering hybrids; it will no longer be obsessed with the city but with the manipulation of infrastructure for endless intensifications and diversifications, shortcuts and redistributions – the reinvention of psychological space.”, Dutch architect + Harvard Professor, Koolhaas 959, writer of Delirious New York. URBAN IMPRINT is how we design a piece of this new urbanism, an augmented materiality , as we define it. An environment that is a ‘blank canvas’ to be reshaped by the future self.

Bigfoot
While variety in composition and form is evident, Kelleher further experiments with material and color. Digital rendering techniques offer endless iterative opportunities. Multiple shifts in material, especially when applied to a singular form, allow for a variety of interpretations. Kelleher explains: ‘The visual expression I try to achieve is one that is open to interpretation. In one piece someone may see something playful, or whimsical, in another it may feel menacing.’

Cyberia

Performance & live computer generated simulation

A postmodern fairytale, Cyberia takes place somewhere in a cold distant East, stretching between and endless imaginary realm and a vast physical space. It is a westwards journey towards a promised future with no arrival and no return. There is no here or there, only a twilight zone between a departure point and a simulated destination. Between digital video projections and a physical setting, using the mechanics of a video-game engine with a motion capture suit, Cyberia is the simulation of an endless pre-climax state where a performer and a CG avatar dance as one to the rhythms of an imaginary West. In a world oversaturated by digital data –mysticism and paranormal are as popular as ever. Emerging technologies are increasingly incorporated in a form of postmodern spiritualism, as Arthur C. Clarke points out: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Spectrum
How intensely can you experience colour? Colour as a phenomenon which you don’t just see, but which totally absorbs… Spectrum is a spatial installation that makes colour tactile and tangible.
Fall backwards into a black hole and reawaken in an infinite spectrum. An immersive experience which will give you a whole new perspective on the coloured cycles of our everyday light. Following Blaas and Curve, Spectrum completes a triptych centred on white space, each piece created with spatial designer Cocky Eek in collabaration with Schweigman&. In Blaas you crawl through an inflatable balloon; in Curve you enter an endlessly spiralling tunnel. Spectrum starts by asking: how can we make the colour physically tangible?

Loop 60 Hz: Transmissions from the Drone Orchestra
A flock of autonomous DJI copters are programmed as aerial dancers and are mounted with specially engineered wireless speakers to broadcast the instruments of the band. Other copters are dressed in elaborate costumes to disguise their form and reflect light across the audience below. Against a score of original compositions and selected tracks from Cale’s seminal career this collaboration with Young imagines the possibilities of the drones as emerging cultural objects. If these technologies are no longer unseen objects overhead, or propelled along classified flight paths but brought into close and intimate relations with us then how might we see them differently. When their transmission fades, when the drones lose their signal and without their protocols for terror and surveillance, do they drop from the sky, do they fall in love or do the drones drift endlessly, forever on loop.

Satellite Daylight
Satellite Daylight is an interactive light installation formed by a trapeze of 24 high-voltage neon tubes tapering upwards, created by fabric | ch – a studio for architecture, interaction and research dedicated to investigating contemporary space based in Lausanne. The installation is connected to data collected in real time from online weather stations and meteorological satellite maps, which therefore translate actual global light conditions picked up by satellites orbiting the earth at the latitude of Basel into an endless loop of perceivable electrical intensity.

Perpetual (Tropical) Sunshine
Perpetual (Tropical) Sunshine is an architectural, climatic and temporal installation. Thanks to a “screen” composed of several hundred infrared light bulbs, Perpetual (Tropical) Sunshine retransmits the journey and intensity of the sun as perceived on the 23rd parallel south, according to information transmitted live by weather stations all around the Tropic of Capricorn. Perpetual (Tropical) Sunshine thereby creates a displaced architectural space, which confronts the visitor with an abstract form of day and endless summer. It represents the increasingly artificial nature of our environment and suggests a form of “static mobility” or “displaced tropicality”.

Subdivided Cube 4
At best, a computational approach enables architecture to be embedded with an extraordinary degree of information. Structure and surface can exhibit a hyper-resolution, with seemingly endless distinct formations. The processes can generate highly specific local conditions, while ensuring an overall coherency and continuity. As such, the resulting architecture does not lend itself to a visual reductionism. Rather, the procedures can devise truly surprising topographies and topologies, offering a thousand unique perspectives. Computational architecture can defy classification, it can evoke curiosity and elicit individual interpretations. The projects presented here forecast an exuberant architecture in which the exceptional supersedes the standard.

Grid
Grid 4×4 is an autonomous apparatus that creates an endless series of geometric forms. The vertices of the form are located on discs, each of them rotatable by a motor. A computer software plays tenderly with the rotation of the discs and generates an endless amount of geometric and chaotic patterns.

Lost Dimension
Lost Dimension Non-dimensional Cities is an immersive cinematic experience in which participants journey through an endlessly unfolding virtual cityscape that expands over all axes. This dimensionless cityscape is constructed from a large collection of point clouds and sounds. While the user is standing on the controller pod and navigates through this virtual world, a sense of physical instability takes over and the platform becomes an anchor to hold on to. The building blocks of the world are generated from depth map information and panoramic photographs obtained from Google Street View’s API. Depending on the user’s position in the virtual world these blocks are dynamically repositioned on a three-dimensional grid. By subtle manipulation of motion and sound, perspective distortion and shifts in balance Lost Dimension unquestionably re-calibrates the viewer’s perception of dimensionality.

Morphosis
Morphosis uses artificial neural networks to create morphing images of scale. The system explores how natural structures from the most tiny to the most huge, share aesthetic properties, as recognized by the trained network, and recreated in continuous flowing sequence via these connections. It’s a study of the seemingly infinite nature of space and natural physical structure, which can loop back on itself to give endless visual exploration and variation.

Dans 13 Tongues
Choreographer CHENG Tsung-lung has always been fascinated by his mother’s stories about “Thirteen Tongues”: the street artist and legendary storyteller from their neighbourhood in Taipei was known for being able to slip into various roles. With his full-length work, CHENG succeeds in becoming a modern “Thirteen Tongues” himself: He transforms Taoist rites, festive parades and the bustling street life of Taipei into a fantasy world, blurring the past and the present, the real and the surreal. Against a mysterious soundscape of Taiwanese sounds, Japanese Nakashi melodies and the electronic music of LIM Giong, the dancers stomp and tremble in ecstasy like enchanted shamans in an endless festival.

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.

Polish Pieces
Alvin Ailey
Introdans
music: Henryk Mikołaj Górecki
Photographer: Hans Gerritsen

In this exuberant ensemble work, Dutch choreographer van Manen displays his mastery for building dazzling creations from simple motifs and geometric patterns. Driven by the rhythms of Henryk Górecki’s score, the dancers come together and disperse in endlessly shifting formations that culminate in two sensual pas de deux.

Scroll
Scroll is a seamlessly looping video installation depicting an endless vertical column of cryptic technological contraptions, architecture, fur, and fabric. The unsettling ambiguity of the forms and the discordance between artificial and natural materials confronts the ever-blurring border between technology and the organic.

THINK AND SENSE

Under the theme of Zen, this artwork represents a part of the philosophy of Zen with three-dimensional data created with photogrammetry technology composed of the most minimalistic landscape of “dots” and the soundscape of “undulations,” with the cooperation of Toryo Ito, vice priest of Ryosokuin, Kennin-ji Tacchu temple, Kyoto. The generated image reflecting the environmental information of the exhibition space creates “interaction between the environment and the image,” just like the trees and leaves swinging in the silence in the garden of a Zen temple.

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Credit Concept / Technical Direction: Shuhei Matsuyama Point Cloud System Design:Takamitsu Masumi Sound Design: Intercity-Express (Tetsuji Ohno) Photogrammetry Shooting: Naoya Takebe Photogrammetry Engineering: Katsuya Sakuma

True/False
True/False is a kinetic sculpture composed of arrays of circular black metal segments set in mechanical columns. Interlocking and rotating around fluorescent light tubes, the cylinders cover or expose the light to display an endless number of patterns. The transformation of the sculpture is based on the shifting elements and their correlation to each other. As the segments do not move independently, for any of the cylinders on a column to change, the segments affected must work in unison to achieve the command. Reminiscent of devices originally used for calculations, such as Turing machines, the sound originates from the mechanical movement of the moving parts thus making the algorithm audible. The rhythm of »true/false« is captivating as variations in the visual choreography result in distinctive changes in its soundscape. Through the generation of algorithmic patterns and the repetition of endless tasks, »true/false« transforms itself into something more than the sum of its elements to reveal the beauty hidden within a basic algorithm.

على فوجيموتو
후지모토에
על פוג’ימוטו
НА ФУДЗИМОТО
infinity ring pavilion
An investigation into the ergonomics of seating in both private and public environments, the Infinity Ring takes the preconception of predefined spaces and their rituals and wraps it around a ring, creating a continuous strip of inhabitable spaces. The entire ring is then rotated, thereby generating infinite configurations of space-between-space, creating endless ways to sit, climb, lie down, crawl on…resulting in spatial configurations that are much richer than the sum of its parts.

FLORA 2

The animation in FLORA is generated by overlapping sine waves that travel through a string of lines. This wave principle often appears in nature when energy is transmitted through a medium like water, air or simply a rope. It can also be observed in the locomotion of animals and human-beings, in which kinetic energy is transmitted successively through joints.
The FLORA algorithm of is based on the discovery that a simple system of rotating lines can create endless variations of abstract shapes – ranging from curved harmonious lines to edgy and chaotic patterns. The resulting aesthetics combine computational accuracy with an organic playfulness, and tend to trigger diverse associations in the mind of the viewer.

FILE FESTIVAL
gif

“Moveable Type”

In the entrance hall of the New York Times Building there is an installation made by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin “Moveable Type” with hundreds of small monitors where fragments of the newspaper’s electronic files, words, phrases, quotations, places, crosswords, etc… permanently appear in an endless series of combinations.
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Captives
Captives is an ongoing series of digital and physical sculptures by Quayola and a contemporary homage to Michelangelo’s unfinished series “Prigioni” (1513-1534) and his technique of “non-finito”. The project explores tensions and equilibrium between form and matter, man-made objects of perfection and complex, chaotic forms of nature. In this series mathematical functions and processes describe computer-generated geological formations, endlessly evolving and morphing into classical figures resulting into life-size ‘unfinished’ sculptures.

About Endlessness
La nueva película de Roy Andersson, una especie de secuela espiritual de A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, está compuesta por una serie de viñetas narradas por una mujer joven desde un futuro indefinido: una pareja flota por una Colonia en ruinas; un padre se detiene a atar los cordones de los zapatos de su hija bajo la lluvia; un cura con crisis de fe busca ayuda de un psiquiatra que lo único que quiere es llegar a tomar el colectivo de vuelta a casa. La película, por la que Andersson ganó el León de Plata a Mejor Director en el último Festival de Venecia, es otra muestra de su talento para captar la esencia de la vida, transitando entre la comedia y el drama, entre la alegría y la tristeza. Y todo esto en apenas 76 encantadores minutos.

Wyne Veen is a Dutch artist working in the photographic medium. Veen’s work consists of sculptural arrangements, utilizing everyday objects and their isolated materials. The work possesses an aesthetic and absurd appeal. Inspired by all things overly developed, Veen is fascinated by our highly manufactured lives, while also endlessly drawn to all steps of the production process. Veen graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 2008 and maintains a studio in the Red Light district of Amsterdam

Kiesler’s longest-running project was Endless House, a single-family dwelling whose biomorphic form and lack of corners strongly contrasted with the hard geometric edges that defined most modern architecture of the time. He sought to design a structure responsive to the occupants’ functional and spiritual requirements. He developed his ideas for the house over several decades, creating numerous sketches and models. Although plans were made to build a to-scale model in MoMA’s Sculpture Garden in 1958, they did not materialize, and the project remains unrealized. Nonetheless, Kiesler’s Endless House concept was highly influential and stands as a strong expression of his bold statement: “Form does not follow function. Function follows vision. Vision follows reality.”

video

阿兰达\拉希
アランダ\ラッシュ
Railing Lounge Chair
Railing is an exploration of structural modular loops that are upholstered like handle-grips to become furniture. Each piece of furniture is a single loop made up of many circles. Here, the circle does not display the qualities it is most known for, but it is what a circle can be. It is not whole or complete but is instead growing into itself. It is a circle that refuses its own dimension and finitude, that struggles to be endless.

Gallim Dance
Founded by choreographer Andrea Miller, Gallim Dance burst onto the New York dance scene in 2007 and immediately caught the attention of the New York dance community. The company includes an ensemble of dancers hailed for their quick wit and technical virtuosity. The mission of Gallim Dance is to play inside the imagination, to find juxtapositions of the mind and body that resonate in the soul, to investigate our limitations and pleasures, and to realize the endless human capacity for inspiration.

POF 51
Fabrice Hyber sets out to examine the way we communicate and mimic the endless affinities between ideas. What interests Hyber is engaging people with everyday life to invent new modes of behavior. In his mental spa with Faust, he deploys one of his POF’s (Prototypes d ‘Objets en Fonctionnement, created between 1991-2012) to interpret and resolve the complexity of reality by constantly searching for possible, or impossible, hypotheses, a kind of activism to explore endless possibility and infinite variations for art-making.

Cloud Pink
FILE FESTIVAL
Lying down on a hill with your pupils filled with the endless blue sky, perspective of your eyesight suddenly gets distorted and clouds drift at the tip of your nose. You stretch your arms up to the sky to touch the clouds but can’t reach. Another world right above your head, clouds. Today, I visualize my colorful cloud of words right in front of your eyes. Touch the pink clouds drifting on a giant fabric screen, reminisce your childhood clouds of dreams. I spent countless sleepless nights just to realize my unproductive and only romantic cloud of words. But, isn’t it nice if we could feel the clouds at our fingertips?

“I move, reverse, manipulate the rules so that they cannot integrate in any frame. My measure is dynamic, it always ties and unties, endlessly exceeding itself. I overflow, going past the initial measure. The resulting drift becomes my new measure and imposes on me another frame, a palette with rigid outlines. I am confronted to strict and solid delimitations. One more time bored of being subjected to the measure.”

dream-land No 987
“With ‘Dream-Land’ we have tried to create our own place beyond time and space; a place that blurs the boundaries between digital and physical reality, in which parallel versions of the Museum’s historic objects are free to exist today. The known is replaced with endless narratives that collectively create an unexpected history and unremembered future.”

林天苗
Endless door
LIAN TIANMIAO lives and works out of Beijing creating predominantly installation pieces. She has made a career transforming silk, threads and textiles into elaborate works of art and also for her experimentation with photography and video. Her art has a textural and tactile nature that plays on the senses.

Landscape n°2
Nostalgia (Euro loop)
The “Endless Project” could be a cartography of independent art spaces in Europe; a documentary. It could also be a representation of my mental landscape… or a succession of images relating stories; stories of encounters, possible and impossible. In fact a human story that is played inside the viewer. Each image interacting with each other to form a connected space, a same story.

СЕРИС ВИН ЭВАНС
ケリス·ウィン·エヴァンス
Form in Space…By Light

‘Cerith’s installation sits beautifully within the space, unfolding as you walk through,’ explains Clarrie Wallis, Tate’s Senior Curator of Contemporary British Art. The neon experience builds, from a single ‘peep hole’ ring in the South Duveens, through which you can glimpse swirls of radial light and an imposing octagon in the central gallery. The fractured neon fragments look like frantically drawn sparkler-lines on fireworks night.But there’s method and logic within these celestial scribbles. Hidden in the design are references to a host of highbrow sources, from Japanese ‘Noh’ theatre, to Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915-23. Don’t worry if you missed them. The beauty of rendering precise (verging on obscure) references in such a celebratory neon explosion allows for multiple – if not endless – interpretations.Each way you look at the sprawling 2km of neon tubing, a different shape or symbol emerges. No small thanks to the elegant way in which the structures have been painstakingly suspended. ‘There were over 1000 fixing points, and obviously we couldn’t drill 1000 holes in the Grade II listed building,’ Wallis explains. ‘We had to work with structural engineers very intensely, so as to be completely happy and convinced that we would be able to remove it without damaging the fabric of the building.’Though it seems too soon to be discussing the installation’s removal, Wallis has a point. It’s a visibly fragile, delicate sculpture – whose impermanence makes it more intriguing. As it is a site-specific sculpture, it can’t be recreated elsewhere. What’s more, because the neon tubes are filled with a constantly moving stream of pulsing, vibrating gasses, visitors will never see the same sculpture twice.

פיונה טאן
フィオナ·タン
Фиона Тан
فيونا تان
Rise and Fall
Fiona Tan explores storytelling, memory, and the part they play in the formation of identity throughout this exhibition of five video installations, various associated sketches and one single-channel video. Rise and Fall (2009), elongated projections onto two large, side-by-side screens, is a wordless meditation, set to music, of a woman no longer young but still conscious of her looks; she was clearly a beauty in her youth. As the video proceeds we gather that the young woman pictured on the second screen is the memory of her younger self. They often move through domestic activities (sleeping, bathing, dressing) in parallel; this is inter-cut with scenes of violently rushing water (shot at Niagra Falls, it turns out). It’s a hackneyed metaphor – the water’s endless surging as an image of time’s relentless uni-directionality – but in Tan’s hands that doesn’t seem to matter; she creates extraordinarily emotional work out of simple stories and well-worn themes.

Reface [Portrait Sequencer]

Reface [Portrait Sequencer] by Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman (2007) is a surreal video mash-up that composes endless combinations of its visitors’ faces. Based on the Victorian “Exquisite Corpse” parlor game, the Reface installation records and dynamically remixes brief video slices of its viewers’ mouths, eyes and brows. Reface uses face-tracking techniques to allow automatic alignment and segmentation of its participants’ faces. As a result, visitors to the project can move around freely in front of the display without worrying about lining up their face for the system’s camera. The video clips recorded by the project are “edited” by the participants’ own eye blinks. Blinking also triggers the display to advance to the next set of face combinations. Through interactions with an image wholly constructed from its own history of being viewed, Reface makes possible a new form of inventive play with one’s own appearance and identity. The resulting kinetic portraiture blends the personalities and genetic traits of its visitors to create a “generative group portrait” of the people in the project’s locale.

Endless

Canoe
The work here in Dawson is like an old vehicle in which I’ve put a new engine. Entitled Canoe, it consists of an approximately 20 foot long trough of water, that resembles some kind of boat. This provides a means for a gunwales tracking mechanism to slowly, endlessly paddle its way back and forth. It was first constructed in 2001 in a studio beside Halifax harbour. It draws visual inspiration from the bridges and water vessels of this port. Conceptually, it grew from an interest in technological obsolescence: how things (like canoes) make shifts from utility to leisure.
It has experienced several major rebuilds since 2001. Most of them have been practical, but for Dawson I’ve opted for an experimental configuration that changes significantly the nature of the work. Previously, Canoe has only ever been shown indoors. Normally in runs on rechargeable batteries, with a continuous, smooth motion. In Dawson, it is shown outdoors, alongside the Yukon river, showing up in an absurd way the paleness of its artificial river. Here, the primary source of power is sunlight.
Making use of the long northern day, solar panels receive light, storing energy in an array of super-capacitor cells. At this time, Canoe remains still. A custom circuit monitors the amount of charge, and when a predetermined trigger point is reached, it is dumped into Canoe’s electric motor in a burst, allowing it to make a few strokes. Then Canoe rests, while the charging cycle begins again. Motion is intermittent, entirely dependent on the amount and intensity of sunlight. It ranges from near standstill in overcast conditions to perhaps 1 or 2 strokes every minute in full light. The technical term for this type of circuit is a relaxation oscillator. I like this term because, if you remove it from its technical context, it points back to ideas about leisure and utility.

endless stair

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.

and in the endless sounds there came a pause

in transit
Two swift beams of light travel through a room creating infinite shadows on a series of floating white frames. This is In Transit X, a darkened, room-based installation that alludes to an endless void.The dizzying effects of In Transit X place the viewer into a monochromatic man-made space. The fifty-foot-wide animated light installation by artist Hc Gilje was originally made for the Wood Street Galleries in Pittsburgh in 2012, and recently went on display last month at Kulturkirken Jakob in Oslo. Using block-like frames and light as the mediums, Gilje creates dynamic visual dimensions that lend themselves to a mesmerizing noirish experience.

مارك كوين
마크 퀸
מארק קווין
МАРКА КУИННА
Endless column