MIT Media Lab, Stanford University
This work explores a dynamic future where the accessories we wear are no longer static, but are instead mobile, living objects on the body. Engineered with the functionality of 18 robotics, this “living” jewelry roams on unmodified clothing, changing location and reconfiguring appearance according to social context and enabling multitude presentations of self. With the addition of sensor devices, they transition into active devices which can react to environmental conditions. They can also be paired with existing mobile devices to become personalized on-body assistants to help complete tasks. Attached to garments, they generate shape-changing clothing and kinetic pattern designs–creating a new, dynamic fashion.
It is our vision that in the future, these robots will be miniaturized to the extent that they can be seamlessly integrated into existing practices of body ornamentation. With the addition of kinetic capabilities, traditionally static jewelry and accessories will start displaying life-like qualities, learning, shifting, and reconfiguring to the needs and preferences of the wearer, also assisting in fluid presentation of self. We envision a new class of future wearables that possess hybrid qualities of the living and the crafted, creating a new on-body ecology for human-wearable symbiosis.

CAPACITIVE BODY
file festival

The installation “capacitive body” is a modular light system that reacts to the sound of its environment. Each custom-built module consists of an electro-luminescent light wire linked to a piezoelectric sensor and a microcontroller. Through its modular setup it can easily be adapted to various urban spaces. The sensors are used to measure vibrations of architectural solids in a range of low frequencies. These oscillations are triggered by surrounding ambient noise, for example traffic noise. The data sensor controls the light wires, which are tensed to a spatial net structure. According to the values of the measurement, light flashes are generated. With increasing vibrations the time between flashes becomes shorter and shorter. The stability of this nervous system gets to an end where it collapses and restarts again. A dynamic light space is thereby created, which creates a visual feedback of the aural activity around the installation.

GK-0G – Floating Habitat

The GK-0G is the minimum size prototype of a scalable floating installation.
It is composed of five tetrahedral frameworks, its basic structural elements, arranged like sections of an orange. It is enveloped with a cover which acts as an interface between internal and external environments.Flotation is gained by tetra balloons inside the tetrahedral frameworks. As the only choice at this moment, helium is encapsulated inside the tetra balloons made of an impermeable film.This model is meant to verify that it can float and move in the air. It is considered that different degrees of flotation can be gained by combining tetra balloons in different ways.

Breathing
File Festival
Breathing is a work of art based on a hybrid creature made of a living organism and an artificial system. The creature responds to its environment through movement, light and the noise of its mechanical parts. Breathing is the best way to interact with the creature.
This work is the result of an investigation of plants as sensitive agents for the creation of art. The intention was to explore new forms of artistic experience through the dialogue of natural and artificial processes. Breathing is a pre-requisite for life, and is the path that links the observer to the creature.Breathing is a small step towards new art forms in which subtle processes of organic and non-organic life may reveal invisible patterns that interconnect us.Breathing is a work of art driven by biological impulse. Its beauty is neither found isolated on the plant nor in the robotic system itself. It emerges at the very moment in which the observer approaches the creature and their energies are exchanged through the whole system. It is in that moment of joy and fascination, in which we find ourselves in a very strange dialogue, that a life metaphor is created.Breathing is the celebration of that moment.

Active Inlays

Oyler Wu Collaborative approaches architecture with a critical and rigorous intent that challenges the typical vision of the built environment. The office relies on the constant exchange between large architectural proposals and small architectural installations..

Colourfield
Colourfield is an evolutionary ecosystem of colour. Colour agents try to exist in a simple universe by producing colours that are suited to their environment. This environment is determined by the other agents and the colours they produce. Entering into complex feedback cycles, Colourfield presents an evolving palette of shifting colours. Different configurations emerge based on the strategies the ecosystem discovers for co-existance and co-dependency. Harmonious configurations often remain stable for a short while, before eventually being replaced by new relations, better able to survive in the ever shifting environment.

中谷芙二子

fog sculptures
ok-offenens kulturhaus linz

In 1970 Nakaya created her first fog sculpture when commissioned by the group Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T) to make a work for the Pepsi Pavillion of the Osaka World Exposition. In creating a work of white mist enclosing the building, Nakaya became the first artist to have used fog as a sculptural medium. E.A.T is an organisation devoted to facilitating working relationships between artists and engineers. Nakaya worked with American engineer Thomas Mee to create the fog for her Osaka commission, the technique for which she has continued to use, with minor moderations, for her subsequent fog sculptures since.Whilst Nakaya has also worked in film and video, it is her use of fog for which she is best known. Nakaya has used pure-water fog to create installations, performances, stage-sets and environmental park designs, often collaborating with other artists or with performers, choreographers and composers. Nakaya’s interest in fog has developed from its relation to our visual sense. In a thick fog we become disorientated, frustrated at our inability to see. In this way, Nakaya’s sculptures activate our other senses, to compensate for our loss of sight.

ALL THE SCREENS IN MY HOUSE

Her nearby environment and the observations she makes in it form the starting point for Remty Elenga (Los Angeles, 1987) in creating new work. In doing this she likes to explore how we give meaning to various layers of reality, looking for contradictions in time and place, the visible and invisible, between what is real and what isn`t.

diagonal section
With a recognisably minimal aesthetic, Galan employs abstract geometry to delineate the political and social implications of his chosen environments, deconstructing the codes of objects established through everyday use.

HYPER FRACTAL

When I was a child I had some vivid dreams. They felt like I was falling and flying into an infinite multi-dimensional environment. They were satisfying and terrifying at the same time but I couldn’t find any explanation for them. 6 years ago I read about Benoit Mandelbrot’s theory, the fractals, and it changed my perspective. I realized that my dreams were fractals. So I tried to remake my dreams as a visual VR experience. According to Benoit Mandelbrot’s theory, Fractals are the mathematical\visual explanation of the nature’s structural geometry. Geometry for irregularity.

Morphogenetic Creations
Created by a mathematician, digital artist and Emmy award winning supervisor of computer generated effects – Andy Lomas, Morphogenetic Creations is a collection of works that explore the nature of complex forms that can be produced by digital simulation of growth systems. These pieces start with a simple initial form which is incrementally developed over time by adding iterative layers of complexity to the structure.The aim is to create structures emergently: exploring generic similarities between many different forms in nature rather than recreating any particular organism. In the process he is exploring universal archetypal forms that can come from growth processes rather than top-down externally engineered design.Programmed using C++ with CUDA, the series use a system of growth by deposition: small particles of matter are repeatedly deposited onto a growing structure to build incrementally over time. Rules are used to determine how new particles are created, and how they move before being deposited. Small changes to these rules can have dramatic effects on the final structure, in effect changing the environment in which the form is grown. To create these works, Andy uses the GPU as a compute device rather than as a display device. All the data is held in memory on the GPU and various kernel functions are called to do things like apply forces to the cells, make cells split, and to render the cells using ray-tracing. The simulations and rendering for each of the different animated structures within this piece take about 12 hours to run, Andy explains. By the end of the simulations there are over 50,000,000 cells in each structure.The Cellular Forms use a more biological model, representing a simplified system of cellular growth. Structures are created out of interconnected cells, with rules for the forces between cells, as well as rules for how cells accumulate internal nutrients. When the nutrient level in a cell exceeds a given threshold the cell splits into two, with both the parent and daughter cells reconnecting to their immediate neighbours. Many different complex organic structures are seen to arise from subtle variations on these rules, creating forms with strong reminiscences of plants, corals, internal organs and micro-organisms.

Hotfix
In the midst of the pandemic, people experience every day that technology such as smartphones and the Internet make social distance bearable. With his AR sculpture, Manuel Rossner shows how technology can become a hotfix, a quick solution to an unexpected challenge. “Hotfix” with its bubbles and lines is a playful introduction to problem solving through gamification.

Cross-fire cutlery detail
The focus of the Past, Present & Future Craft practice commission was to examine the intangible characteristic of the spoken word and investigate the unseen affect of sound upon its inhabited environment.The project centralizes around the context of a domestic argument. In this case the event samples an audio excerpt from the 1999 Sam Mendes Film ‘American Beauty’. The slow building dialogue between the three central characters family dinner climaxes with a sound clash of emotions. The cross-fire of the argument traverses the dinning table but where previously the inanimate everyday objects such as plates, cutlery, teapot etc were unable to express their character, the intensity of the conversation deforms their once static existence into objects of unseen familiarity.The presented sound artifacts each encapsulate a momentary emotion of the argument.

N-01

The artist creates an unprecedented visuospatial system that transforms the historical museum and its viewers alike.Visitors are kindly invited to touch and move the black metal and glass elements of the artwork.The built environment is inhabited through an array of inputs and outputs. Our bodies set in motion invisible chains of cause and effect. Enter a room: lights turn on. Turn a handle:a door opens. This relay is modulated through system controllers, devices programmed to respond to moving bodies and aural commands. Buried within walls, floors and ceilings, building networks are a black box.

Silverfish Stream
file festival
The sound generated by the friction of the metallic robots against the floor, like that created by the contact between man and machine, is registered, altered and played in real time by the spheres, each with its own tonality, and amplified in the room. What is generated is a stream of multisensory information (visual, auditive, tactile), natural environment for mechanic creatures.

Scale
‘scale’ is an interspecies art project: an audience-interactive installation that involves nocturnal electric fish from the Amazon River Basin. Twelve different species of these fish comprise a choir whose sonified electrical fields provide the source tones for an immersive audiovisual environment. The fish are housed in individual tanks configured in a custom-built sculptural arc of aluminum frames placed around a central podium. The electrical field from each fish is translated into sound, and is thus heard — unprocessed or with digital effects added, with immediate control over volume via a touchscreen panel — through a 12-channel surround sound system, and with LED arrays under each tank for visual feedback. All software is custom-designed. Audience members interact as deejays with the system. Amongst the goals of the project is our desire to foster wider public awareness of these remarkable creatures, their importance to the field of neurological research, and the fragility of their native ecosystem.The project leaders comprise visual/conceptual artist Marlena Novak, composer/sound designer Jay Alan Yim, and neural engineer Malcolm MacIver. MacIver’s research focuses on sensory processing and locomotion in electric fish and translating this research into bio-inspired technologies for sensing and underwater propulsion through advanced fish robots. Novak and Yim, collaborating as ‘localStyle’, make intermedia works that explore perceptual themes, addressing both physical and psychological thresholds in the context of behavior, society/politics, and aesthetics.

Vanitas Machine

The installation VANITAS MACHINE addresses the desire for eternal life and the potential of life-prolonging measures. Based on a candle which – by means of technical intervention – burns down very slowly, vanitas machine creates a contemporary analogy to the endeavour of prolonging the human lifespan with the help of science and technology.Being one of the classical vanitas symbols, a burning candle recalls the futility of the moment, the transience of human life and the certainty of the end of all existence. But is this end really still inevitable?In the course of the last two centuries, average human life expectancy has increased significantly in the industrialised countries. Moreover, in the context of scientific research the biological causes of ageing are being explored. Numerous theories of aging have already been developed pointing both towards physiological as well as environmental factors.One of the first theories of ageing was the so-called »metabolism theory«, which claims that the lifespan of organisms is reciprocally related to energy turnover and therefore connected to calorie intake, oxygen consumption and heart rate: The higher the metabolic rate, the shorter the lifespan of the organism.

n-Polytope: Behaviors in Light and Sound after Iannis Xenakis
N_Polytope: Behaviors in Light and Sound After Iannis Xenakis is a spectacular light and sound performance-installation combining cutting edge lighting, lasers, sound, sensing and machine learning software inspired by composer Iannis Xenakis’s radical 1960s- 1970s works named Polytopes (from the Greek ‘poly’, many and ‘topos’, space). As large scale, immersive architectural environments that made the indeterminate and chaotic patterns and behaviour of natural phenomena experiential through the temporal dynamics of light and the spatial dynamics of sound, the Polytopes still to this day are relatively unknown but were far ahead of their time. N_Polytope is based on the attempt to both re-imagine Xenakis’ work with probabilistic/stochastic systems with new techniques as well as to explore how these techniques can exemplify our own historical moment of extreme instability.

ELECTRIC SKIN

The Electric Skin explores the possibility of creating a wearable that extends the functionality of the skin to sense electromagnetic fields (mostly within the radio spectrum) and translate that information into touch sensation. The wearable consists of two main functional parts: 1) A matrix of omnidirectional antennas that act as sensors and probes and 2) corresponding electrodes that stimulate the skin of the wearer. Through this artificial “skin” or “exoskeleton”, the wearable changes our experience, perception, and understanding of space and movement, and in doing so, our interactions. The project speculates on the possible co-evolution of man and technology and draws attention to the role of environmental influence on our own bodily development and behavior.

Turbulence
TURBULENCE is an ongoing series of immersive experiences created for large-scale, high-resolution media environments that embosom the viewer in digital flow of particles.It’s a set of visual experiments on particles simulated in different virtual environments.

Shifting Intimacies
An interactive/media artwork for one person at a time. Each participant enters a large, dark space containing two circles of projected film imagery presented within an immersive sound environment. One image floats upon a disc of white sand and the other on a circle of white dust. Participants’ movements direct and affect the filmic image and spatialised audio experience. Throughout the work a layer of dust (an artificial life form) slowly eats away and infuses itself deep into the imagery and sound. Each person has 10 minutes alone with the work. Their movement through the space continually affects speed, quality, balance and flow within the work. At the end of the experience they are invited to climb a lit platform and cast dust back onto the images below.

Марин Савва
مارين سوا

Algaerium
Algaerium is an in-vitro aesthetic photosynthesis system of microalgae for spatial installation of algal biotechnology in the urban environment. As a collective family, each member of Algaerium represents an urban bio-repository, floating biota, in which to preserve the microorganisms for their future biotechnological use such as bio-energy. Through displacement into the urban environment, Algaerium re-contextualises the sterile environment of the algae culture laboratory. I have incorporated and manipulated the endogenous yet ‘re-programmable’ biological processes of photosynthesis and bioluminescence.

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

object no. 9

Marleen Sleeuwits is inspired by impersonal environments—places that could be anywhere and nowhere—such as vacant zones in airports, unoccupied corridors of hotels, and empty rooms in office buildings. The Netherlands-based artist is attracted to these non-spaces for the lack of impression they leave on people; her work focuses on finding ways of visualizing the identity of these voids and connecting to them in novel ways. Through structural contradiction, illusion, and the manipulation of scale, she aims to transform viewers’ awareness of their surroundings.

루드 반 엠펠
Рууд ван Эмпель

La méthode de travail de Van Empel est complexe. Il photographie 4 ou 5 modèles professionnels dans son atelier, et réalise de nombreuses séries de photos détaillées de feuilles, fleurs, plantes et animaux. Après avoir rassemblé des centaines d’images dans une base de données, il sélectionne les images avec lesquelles il peut obtenir les meilleurs résultats. Les modèles sont mélangés dans le programme Photoshop, les vêtements sont photographiés séparément sur un mannequin de tailleur. De cette manière, il crée de nouvelles images principalement d’enfants, en noir ou blanc,dans un paradisque environment.

다니엘 아샴
ДАНИЭЛЯ АРШАМА
Connecting Time
‘Connecting Time’ is a survey show with works spanning Arsham’s entire career. Included are four at first glance ‘conventional’ architectural interventions that subtly manipulate the physical environment to create surrealistic settings. Fitness gear and objects rooted in pop culture are presented in eroded form as though excavated from some archaeological site, while swaddled animalistic figures recall the work of Christo or Man Ray, but with a playful, childlike twist.

After Party

(AI) infinite simulations

‘After Party’ is an animation about two young girls, Ada and Milica. They find themselves in a strange space where an adult party is happening. With every new simulation their personalities evolve in unpredictable ways: between Childhood and Adolescence, Refined and Savage. Our digital work consists of creating artificial environments in the form of real-time animation using our own custom software, where artificial intelligence characters interact with each other as well as with the virtual world that surrounds them. These pieces are usually inspired by stories or myths found in different cultures.

FILE SAO PAULO 2019

ARART
File Festival

“Arart” is an application that breathes life into objects. It links reality with the expressions delivered through mobile devices adding new stories and values to the real environment.
How will the impressions of the environment that surround us and the various objects that envelop our bodies change through “Arart”?
We propose “Arart” as a new platform of expression that can maintain a strong link with reality.

Limbo
Arnt Jensen
File Festival
FILE GAMES

Limbo is a 2D sidescroller, incorporating the physics system Box2D to govern environmental objects and the player character. The player guides an unnamed boy through dangerous environments and traps as he searches for his sister. The developer built the game’s puzzles expecting the player to fail before finding the correct solution. Playdead called the style of play “trial and death“, and used gruesome imagery for the boy’s deaths to steer the player from unworkable solutions.

every time the stars align
FILE LED SAO PAULO 2018
“Every Time the Stars Align” fuses different natural elements of crystals, plasma and flowers in a lava lamp environment. Red crystals freeze with rigid edges and thaws into a relaxing mood. Plasma liquid rises and falls reflecting a lava-like quality. Flowers fluctuate between a spectrum of color symbolizing intense human affections. Contradicting and uniting flat and deep spaces, the three elements compose and decompose.

Prehysterical Machine

The Prehysterical Machine has a spherical body and eight arms made of aluminum tubing. It has a sensing system, a motor system and a control system that functions as an autonomous nervous system (entirely reactive). The machine is suspended from the ceiling and its arms are actuated by pneumatic valves and cylinders. Pyroelectric sensors allow the robot to detect the presence of viewers in the nearby environment. It reacts to the viewers according to the amount of stimuli it receives. The perceived emergent behaviors of this machine engender a multiplicity of interpretations based on single dynamic pattern of events.The aim of this project is to induce empathy of the viewer towards a “character” which is nothing more than an articulated metal structure. The strength of the simulacra is emphasized by perverting the perception of the creature, which is neither animal nor human, carried through the inevitable instinct of anthropomorphism and projection of our internal sensations, a reflex triggered by any phenomenon that challenges our senses.
FILE FESTIVAL

NOQTURNL V1
Noqturnl is an audiovisual meditation exploring collective dreamstate. The audience is invited to spend the night in the 4DSOUND system. A group of listeners are immersed in a spatial experience while they flit around the threshold between waking state and dream. Slow, pulse driven musical constructs, vast landscapes of sound and visual patterns develop over hours as the listeners drifts in and out of sleep, blurring the boundaries between dream environment and physical space: in doing so, allowing conscious access to the vivid, intuitive imagery and sensation within the borders of dream experience.

ユナイテッド·ビジュアルアーティスト
美国视觉艺术家
our time

Our Time (2016) is the latest large-scale installation by United Visual Artists investigating our subjective experience of the passing of time. How long is a moment? At what rate does time actually pass? The work joins a series of kinetic sculptures that began with Momentum (2013); an installation designed as a ‘spatial instrument’ that was to reveal the relationship between expectation and perception when intersected with a physical space.
Our Time defines a physical environment where pendulums swing at a pace apparently unhindered by the laws of nature and where no single time measurement applies. The installation combines movement, light and sound as a multi-sensory, multi-dimensional canvas the visitor can enter. Pendulums swing, each to their own rhythm, as time flows through the grid. With light tracing the path and sound its echo, the passing of time becomes almost palpable.

musings on a glass box
‘Musings on a glass box’ occupies the entire ground floor of the jean nouvel-designed building, generating an immersive and captivating environment split between two adjacent gallery spaces. In the first volume, a fabricated leak in the ceiling generates single droplets of water, which then fall from 12 specified points in the structure’s roof. Each drip is then caught below in a red robotic bucket that moves in synchronization with the falling water. At the same time, an enormous LED screen hung within the neighboring gallery invites visitors to view nouvel’s ceiling from the perspective of the bucket, projecting a wavy and distorted image.

Zee
File Festival 

Immersive Audiovisual Environment Artificial Fog, Stroboscopes, Pulse Lights and Surround Sound, 2008

ZEE proposes a state of tabula rasa and unfolds without a narrative or reproducible imagery.The audience wanders freely in a space filled with extremely dense fog that fully obscures all of its boundaries. Stroboscopic- and pulse lights illuminate the fog, in a softened and evenly dispersed manner, creating kaleidoscopic three-dimensional structures in constant animation. An ambient and minimal sound-scape connects to the imagery, without directly synchronizing to it.The core visual impression of ZEE is of a psychedelic architecture of pure light, an abstract luminescent landscape enveloping the visitor. Time appears to stand still.

Seeing spheres
Each of olafur eliasson’s seeing spheres supports a flat, circular mirrored face, framed by a ring of LED lights, which is oriented inward to reflect the mirrored faces of the surrounding spheres. Together they produce a surprising environment of multilayered, reflected spaces in which the same people and settings appear again and again, visible from various unexpected angles. Tunnel-like sets of nested reflections open up in the mirrors, repeating countless times and disappearing into the distance.

Silent Barrage

Silent Barrage has a “biological brain” that telematically connects with its “body” in a way that is familiar to humans: the brain processes sense data that it receives, and then brain and body formulate expressions through movement and mark making. But this familiarity is hidden within a sophisticated conceptual and scientific framework that is gradually decoded by the viewer. The brain consists of a neural network of embryonic rat neurons, growing in a Petri dish in a lab in Atlanta, Georgia, which exhibits the uncontrolled activity of nerve tissue that is typical of cultured nerve cells. This neural network is connected to neural interfacing electrodes that write to and read from the neurons. The thirty-six robotic pole-shaped objects of the body, meanwhile, live in whatever exhibition space is their temporary home. They have sensors that detect the presence of viewers who come in. It is from this environment that data is transmitted over the Internet, to be read by the electrodes and thus to stimulate, train or calm parts of the brain, depending on which area of the neuronal net has been addressed.

アン·ハミルトン
앤 해밀턴
the event of a thread
Ann Hamilton is a visual artist internationally recognized for the sensory surrounds of her large-scale multi-media installations. Using time as process and material, her methods of making serve as an invocation of place, of collective voice, of communities past and of labor present. Noted for a dense accumulation of materials, her ephemeral environments create immersive experiences that poetically respond to the architectural presence and social history of their sites.

the Point of Perception
Produced in collaboration with neuroscientists at UCL, Beau Lotto and Mark Lythgoe, this work is art and science; we intend it as an experiment in the gallery. It manifests as an immersive environment consisting of a ‘screen’ which is a large gridded space of uncertainty and projected film.The project came about after I undertook a period of research of the human visual system and neuroesthetics and set up a collaboration with Professor Mark Lythgoe and Dr Beau Lotto at UCL.

BEHAVIOURAL COMPLEXITY

Design Research Laboratory (AADRL) and the experimental design studio Minimaforms examining a behavior-based agenda that engages experimental forms of material and social interaction. Cybernetic and systemic thinking through seminal forms of prototyping and experimentation will situate the work through continued experiments that have manifested since the early 1950s as maverick machines, architectures and computational practices exploring the generative potential of self-regulating phenomena as proto-architectural environments. Through explicit models of interactions, observable patterns and proto-animalistic agency; the research will discuss the capacity of these systems to evolve, adapt and self-structure through computation.

anthropOcean

AnthropOcean, interactive project created by the artist-researcher Olga Kisseleva, brings the public to question its implication in an environment which we keep adjusting to our aspirations, with a particular focus on the ocean. At the heart of this project is an online database dedicated to climate change and to the broader ties between ocean, climate and society. This database is the source of all visual displays seen by the public and it also has an interactive dimension: the public itself is able to feed the database thanks to a specific barcode. In other words, the art piece takes the shape of a visual display installation composed of digital objects that it visually maps and connects to one another.

The photographic images Niv Rozenberg creates allows us to see the urban environment through a new perspective. With New York City and Tel Aviv as his subjects, he “breaks the visual and spatial congestion of the city by constructing an archetypal form, isolated from function and separated from the city’s total urban structure.”

Tesseract
Tesseract is a collaboration between Charles Atlas, Rashaun Mitchell, and Silas Riener. It is an evening-length presentation in 2 parts separated by an intermission: a 3D dance film featuring 7 dancers and a live proscenium performance with 6 dancers. The film offers speculative worlds and alternate possibilities in bold visual environments. The performance includes live-video capture with multiple cameras, mixed by Atlas and projected into the stage space. Images obscure and reveal moving bodies behind a translucent scrim, magnified and refracted by Atlas. Through collective action we forge a link between human ritual conjuring and new technological magic. Between the past and the future.

Джозефин Мексепер
Josephine Meckseper is adept at critiquing her environment. She questioned the prosperity of the art world by placing an “Out of Business” sign in the window of a gallery in Chelsea (a similarly cheeky “Help Wanted” sign attracted up to 20 applicants a day who had failed to get in on the joke). In 2012 she erected two 25-foot oil rigs in the heart of Times Square to remind unsuspecting tourists about the perils of capitalism and industrialization. Her work critically examines mass media, our consumption-obsessed society, and even our political systems.

Putting The Pieces Back Together Again

The kinetic installation “Putting the Pieces Back Together Again” is a complex system with self-organizing and emergent behaviour, at the same time it is an artistic inquiry and meditation on contemporary scientific methodology. The installation investigates non-hierarchical communication and collective behaviour by implementing such a system physically through many electro-mechanical actors.
The Installation consists of 1250 stepper motors arranged in a two dimensional grid of two by two meters. Each motor is equipped with a pointer made from white acrylic glass. The radii of the pointers are chosen to intersect with the pointers of its neighbours. All motors are excited with the same alternating current that let them move initially in a random direction. Each actor is at the same time sensing its environment. In the event of a collision the pointers reverse their turning direction. This is achieved through a custom motor control circuit. Through the interplay of many entities a complex behaviour emerges on the surface of the installation. By manipulating the signals during runtime the system will form spontaneous pattern on its surface. It seems like they are negotiating it’s position with nearby actors. By this the system is showing behaviour of self-organization. The installation drifts through various activation levels during its run time by this it constantly evolves new formations and constellations (crystallization).

f5x5x5
f5x5x5 is a kinetic light sculpture conceived of and realized by the belgian design studio lab[au]. the project was most recently installed in the basilique de saint denis in paris for nuit blanche 2009. the design consists of fixed and kinetic aluminum frames that can move randomly or be programmed for use as a low resolution display. the piece is designed as a framework, taking inspiration from software development
frameworks. in the case of the project, the framework is a five by five module which is repeated five times
to create the final form. one side of the work is white, while the other is black. the 125 pixel screen works on binary language and can transform captured data from the physical environment into kinetic actions.

CCTV chandelier
“CCTV Chandelier : Virtual Doppelganger Simulator” is an interactive installation that can reflect viewer’s Virtual Doppelganger. You can look objectively into yourself in a third person’s point of view.
This machine have around 12 CCTVs surrounding and hanging near viewer’s face and engineering viewer’s experience to show their Virtual Doppelganger in the connected monitors. This wearable visual system then allows the participant to see his/her own body or the surrounding environment from a third person’s perspective even when he/she is moving. Therefore, you yourself, viewer and visitor is displayed as an object in the gallery.

flicker

Flicker is an immersive electronic environment of generative image and sound. A collaborative work with Oliver Bown. Based on biological models of firefly behaviour, Flicker generates an ever shifting rhythmic, meditative environment to the viewer. Flicker uses 4 channels of synchronised high definition video and 8 channels of sound to immerse the viewer in a phenomenologically rich environment of artificial life. The work is a large-scale agent-based simulation, with each agent providing a rhythmic pulse at regular intervals. Agents try to synchronise their pulse with other agents in their immediate neighbourhood. The collective pulsations of groups of local agents are spatially sonified with int exhibition space. Over time, large groups synchronise at different rates, leading to complex visual and aural structures, syncopating and constant shifting in to a long term complexity.

The Table
The Table is an autonomous robot with an automatic mechanized system able to react to unexpected movement or obstacles and to carry out one or more tasks by executing a program in a given environment. As is the case with most “prototypical” robotic works, or single editions, the basic physical components can be pre-manufactured then modified or custom built to meet specific needs. In the case of The Table, the control system and its algorithms were entirely conceived by Max Dean and Raffallo D’Andrea. All the components, including the wheels and motors, were also custom manufactured, giving the installation a unique character. The singular characteristic of this work lies in the robotic nature of the table and it’s capacity to operate in an environment specifically designed for it. For example, the shade of red painted on the floor is directly linked to the effective functioning of the camera and the control software. Also, the space lights used in the room produce a light that prevents the creation of shadows, which the software could mistakenly interpret as a physical presence.

As We May Feel
file festival

“As We May Feel” A parody of the 1945 text “As We May Think”, by Vannevar Bush What enduring benefits did science and technology bring to human beings? First of all, science and technology have extended the humans’ control on their material environment, helping them to perfect their food, their clothes, their dwelling, and gave them more security, allowing to live above the level of mere subsistence. Later on, they have permitted a wider knowledge of the biological processes that occur within our bodies, allowing the control of a more healthy and lasting life, always promising an enhancement of mental health. Finally, they contribute to the effectiveness of our communication. We have therefore a reason to live beyond survival — abundant health and efficient communication. And how do we deal with our existential feelings and conflicts? We don’t have time for our feelings, we can no longer ruminate them. We bury them in secret wishes without bigger consequences. Should we care more for our feelings? Negligence has been our way of cleaning our lives of sentimental values. When we cannot sweep them, we zip them and eventually access them to solve conflicts and/or to organize our thoughts. This project offers the access, through a click, to a central that points to a series of paths toward “As we may feel”. The content of this simulation of a phone center has as its aim to create an encyclopedia of existential feelings and conflicts that represent human life in contemporary society. Welcome to our call center!