Bots

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival

Bots presents a computer-controlled society through a series of algorithmically controlled humanoid avatars that appear on physical carpets using augmented reality (AR). Real-time performances synthesize human behavioral patterns into a formalized digital social study. Omnipresent, combined with our devices and incorporated into virtual environments, the work reminds us of our own digitalized world, in which we are surrounded by invisible bots.

Bio

Giulia Bowinkel (born 1983) and Friedemann Banz (born 1980) live in Berlin and have worked together under the name Banz & Bowinkel since 2009. In 2007 they graduated from the Art Academy with Albert Oehlen and started making art with computers . His work encompasses computer-generated imagery, animation, augmented reality, virtual realities and installations.

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.

Useless Hands

FILE 2024 | Aesthetic Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
Infratonal – Useless Hands – France

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.

БОХЬЮН ЮН
윤보현
To Reverse Yourself

FILE FESTIVAL

My work poses the question: how does reality becomes exquisitely animated by certain social control systems such as politics, mass media, technology, science, and etc. It is my artistic goal to reveal how human beings are fragile and delicate in these social environments. By living in Korea, Japan and the U.S, I have first-hand experience in diverse social systems and have come to view my life experiences as raw material for my research. With my research in mind, my art utilizes the body as the tool for an intensive investigation of the public and private; examining the relationship between how people understand their body and how this understanding represents themselves in the greater context.
Currently, I am curious about human perception developing parallel with the ever-evolving progression of technological world. Thus, I question technology’s relationship to reality and illusion; asking what is reality? My work takes advantage of illusion to explore and answer this question, and often my artistic materials consist of the body and mirrors. I use mirrors for integrating reality and illusion.

Magenta Moon Garden
Designed to spark conversation around sustainability, tech and media skills in a playful and intuitive way, this interactive, walkthrough video installation comprises three distinct visual environments (Sunrise Garden, Moon Garden, Magenta Moon) enriched with intuitive, interactive real-time elements. The stunning environment and experience is flanked by online contents and events that tackle topics from hate speech to climate change, flanked by a wide spectrum of online contents, talks and on-site workshops.

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.

SOL
SOL is a minimalistic environment, leading visitors into the reaches of their perception. The installation builds on loss of control, shifts in awareness and a feeling of dislocation and timelessness. SOL is the third work in an ongoing series of phenomenological environments, after the live performance FEED, 2005 and the installation ZEE, 2008. The all encompassing darkness of SOL is lifted, in intervals and for parts of seconds only, by animated bursts of intensely bright light. Falling back into darkness, visitors experience abundant retinal after-images, that gradually drift away until eventually the next eruption of light is triggered. In the surround sound-scape of SOL, electronic drones mix with swarming field recordings, amidst a sea of infra-bass.

Ange
Ange is the result of discussions between two artists and a “hikikomori”. This term imported from Japan, which has no equivalent in France, is used to describe young people, sometimes even teenagers, choosing not to leave their room or their apartment for months or even years. Ael is one of them, recluse in a shed in his parents garden for 13 years, somewhere in the south of France. The artistic duo fleuryfontaine has maintained a relationship with him using internet. They used the video game as a medium to try to reconstruct the world of this hikikomori and to engage a dialogue during game sessions where Ael evolves in the environments created by the artist. His room, his objects, the parental home, his neighborhood, this film reveals the fragmented portrait of a man hiding from the world.

Underwater Pavilions
Underwater Pavilions is artist Doug Aitken’s large-scale installation produced by Parley for the Oceans and presented in partnership with The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). The work consists of three temporary underwater sculptures, floating beneath the ocean’s surface that swimmers, snorkelers, and scuba divers swim through and experience. Geometric in design, the sculptures create underwater spaces synthesizing art and science as they are constructed with carefully researched materials and will be moored to the ocean floor. Part of each structure is mirrored to reflect the underwater seascape and create a kaleidoscopic observatory for the viewer, while other surfaces are rough and rock-like. The environments created by the sculptures will constantly change with the currents and the time of day, focusing the attention of the viewer on the rhythm of the ocean and its life cycles.

Emotive city
Emotive City is a framework to explore a mobile and self-organizing model for the contemporary city. Models of the past are limited and should not operate, as blueprints for our urban future, a new generation of design enquiry by necessity must address the challenges of today. The fixed and finite tendencies that once served architecture and urbanism have been rendered obsolete. Today the intersections of information, life, machines and matter display complexities that suggest the possibility of a much deeper synthesis. Within this context, architecture is being forced to radically refactor its response to new social and cultural challenges with an environment of accelerated urbanization. We propose a framework that participates and engages with the information-rich environments that are shaping our lives through a model of living that we call an adaptive ecology.

Expanded Holiday
Expanded Holiday demonstrated the enormous potential of AR technology, which provides virtual perspectives on real-world environments, and conveys KAWS’s mischievous humour through the juxtaposition of physical and virtual worlds. These virtual sculptures were accessible via the Acute Art app and could be experienced in conjunction with the NGV’s exclusive exhibition KAWS: Companionship in the Age of Loneliness, a comprehensive survey of 25 years of KAWS’s oeuvre and his largest solo survey to date. Full of humour, hope and humanity, the exhibition featured more than 100 works including iconic paintings reappropriating pop-culture figures to more recent largescale, layered works, and an impressive collection of KAWS’s celebrated sculptural figures.

Oculus
Oculus is a large-scale, collaborative light sculpture that depicts a colossal abstracted drosophila eye, replete with compound faceted surfaces. It both recalls the circular opening at the apex of a cupola and alludes to a surveillance device or drone hovering in mid-air. Oculus is inspired in part by a series of scanning electron micrographs produced in a transgenic lab while researching human and non-human sensoria. The work evokes affective encounters with scale such as viewing miniature particles through the lens of a microscope or wandering through monumental physical environments. As each viewer’s reflection plays across the sculpture’s undulating surface, the apprehension of the self affects both individual and collective behavior in unexpected ways. This affective dynamic plays on the precariousness of our coexistence with other lifeforms in the world, one that is always contingent upon viewers’ bodies and the variability of the environment around them. The act of gazing at Oculus also puts into play the reciprocal condition of both seeing and being seen.

Immersed Garden
Immersed Garden is in its true sense a sunken world. Floating bodiless in an underwater garden, natural sounds guide you through an immersive surrounding, somewhere between calming and irritating, natural and artificial. It is a playful exploration of the individual conception of safety and confusion and a personal approach to aesthetic references to habits of introspection and retreat in digital environments. It was created by fusing different digital processes like photogrammetry of selected natural places around Karlsruhe and field recordings in a local natural reserve. Underwater videos hybridize with 3D scans of trees and plants while invisible frogs are croaking and humming birds are buzzing by synthetic flowers. The artistic aim was to explore the personal perception of calming and irritating, playing with the concept of immaterialness and attentiveness. The artwork creates aesthetic references to philosophical and scientific theories of introspection and identity.

Meander
Meander is a large-scale immersive testbed environment constructed within a historic warehouse building at the centre of a residential highrise development in Cambridge, Ontario. The meshwork scaffolds which comprise the testbed are organized as a series of species within an artificial ecosystem, gently flexing and responding to the movement of viewers. Similar to natural environments such as rivers and clouds, large groups of parts pass physical impulses and data signals back and forth, enabling the entire environment to work as an interconnected whole. The innovations in Meander suggest ways of making adaptive, sensitive buildings of the future.

Power Plants
Hito Steyerl’s series of projects at the Serpentine Galleries is positioned around ideas of ‘power’. Beginning from the premise that ‘power is the necessary condition for any digital technology’, the artist considers the multiple meanings of the word, including electrical currents, the ecological powers of plants or natural elements, and the complex networks of authority that shape our environments. She addresses the notion of power through three interrelated research strands and projects: Actual Realityos, a collectively-produced digital tool; Power Walks, a series of guided walks and a tour that draws upon conversations with campaigners, community groups and organizations in the local area surrounding the Serpentine, and finally this exhibition, Power Plants, which features new video installations created using artificial intelligence trained to predict the future.

CARBON
CARBON merges the aesthetics of space exploration and scientific imaging with the interpretation of abstract symbols. I’m interested in extremophiles, the origins of life on earth, and what forms sentience might assume elsewhere in the universe. Would we recognize it hovering in front of us? What began with a camera-less method I discovered while experimenting with photograms, and drawing, has grown into immersive environments including large stills, video, multi-point sound and inter-active sculptures.

Lenna
Focusing on the orientation and dispersion of sound images, this spatial musical work was made using multiple audio channels, and only the human voice as a sound source. It represents at once an attempt to encourage the creation of multichannel acoustic contents, and the theoretical and practical development of audiovisual environments.

zones of flow (ii)
“zones of flow” is a work-in-progress project which investigates the fluid connections between people, sea and land. The piece zones of flow (ii) is an audiovisual artwork created to for the MAN display, which is located in a public area in NTU-Singapore; an open corridor where there is a regular flow of people moving across the space. The piece has come out of a sailing experience across the Atlantic in a 15m sailing boat. The ongoing project explores the instantaneous but sometimes asynchronous connectivity between things and people as they move in and across digito-tangible environments.

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.

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.

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.

Chatrooms II
LaTurbo Avedon is a social media avatar and artist. Her work has been enabled by an ever-growing network of friends and collaborators, allowing her to participate in both online and offline exhibitions internationally. Residing entirely on digital platforms, her work ranges from character creation in video games to constructing entirely new virtual environments to inhabit.

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

A wall is just a wall (and nothing more at all)

In ‘A wall is just a wall (and nothing more at all),’ Canadian, Paris-artist, Kapwani Kiwanga explores disciplinary architecture and design by isolating the structural traits and intended psychological effects of different built environments, such as prisons, hospitals, and mental health facilities.

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.

holistic strata
Tokyo-based choreographer and video artist Hiroaki Umeda creates mesmerizing visual environments for his visceral solo works, appearing as a fine-spun swirl of movement in a digital storm of light and sound—an elusive figure, by turns frantic and still, awash in pulsating electronic waves. In a program of acclaimed companion pieces, Haptic and Holistic Strata, Umeda’s distinctive dance vocabulary draws on a range of butoh, ballet and hip-hop. He conceives his interdisciplinary events as a sensorial whole, creating the beats and sonic textures as well as the entrancing video and lighting effects. Designed to elicit primal emotion, Umeda’s work is minimalist and radical, subtle and violent, abstract yet precise, and thrillingly physical.

Contours
London-based creative laboratory Bare Conductive was invited to team up with designers Fabio Antinori and Alicja Pytlewska in order to develop a large-scale metaphor for the idea of breathing life into a collection of responsive textile skins. ‘Contours’ is at the core of the interactive tapestry installation; a series capacitive sensors are applied to the suspended fabric substrates using conductive paint. These sensors react to the presence of a person within the vicinity and track their movements, outputting a constantly modulated ambient soundscape reminiscent of medical research environments. The abstract geometric ornamentation connects the tapestries’ individual sensors to form giant panels, serving as an acoustic feedback loop that alludes to the relationship between science and the body.

the sound of empty space
The sound of empty space explores relationships between microphones, speakers, and surrounding acoustic environments through controlled, self-generating microphone feedback. Amplifying and aestheticizing the acoustic inactivity between technological “inputs” and “outputs” – stand-ins for their corporeal correlates, the ear and mouth – the notion of a causal sound producing object is challenged, and questions are posed as to the status of the ʻamplifiedʼ. By building flawed technological systems and nullifying their intended potential for communication, the ear is turned towards the empty space between components; to the unique configurations of each amplifying assemblage.

Matic Veler is ispired by researching his aesthetic development since upbringing up until now. One of the biggest inspiration, architecture of 17th and 18th century architecture, especially details and ornaments together with impression of magical environments combined with brutalism architecture he was surrounded in when he was child, help him to translate and reflect when creating garments and installations to impress viewers and customers. ​He uses Baroque architecture details and ornaments as his inspiration. Always starting with collecting different photos of details and studying different architects. 
Matic manipulates the ornaments into collages on which he draw sketches and then making toiles on mannequins.

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.

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.

Spatial Environments with neon
Ambiente spaziale con neon
Fontana’s “Spatial Environments” are considered the most innovative outcome of the theories about space that Lucio Fontana first expressed in his Manifiesto Blanco of 1946. Here and in later manifestos, he described a new form of visual representation linked to space and time, which would move past the classic materials of sculpture and painting and employ modern technology to create “artificial forms, rainbows of wonder, words written in light” […] Ambiente spaziale con neon had a single red bent neon hanging from the ceiling in a room covered with pink fabric.

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.

Amorphoustudio’s ‘symbiotic towers’ in Jumeirah Gardens, Dubai consists of a residential, a hotel, and an office tower, connected on the ground level by a double-deck pedestrian shopping plaza. The connecting plaza creates two environments that can be used throughout the different seasons. The first environment, the lower deck, is a lavish green semi-shaded oasis level that is packed with trees and water to provide gathering zones for people during the hot summer season. It is located on the natural landscape level to be accessible to pedestrians from all sides.

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.

安托万·卡塔拉
Antibody
French born, New York-based artist Antoine Catala first began experimenting with digital artifacts in 2003, through a technique that intentionally causes compression errors in digital video, which often plague satellite television, streaming internet videos and other digital environments.

Samorost 3
Prague-based Amanita Design, creators of the award-winning Mechinarium, recently released what may be their best game yet: Samorost 3. This deeply immersive puzzle game spans the ecosystems of 9 unusual planets as you encounter strange inhabitants and unlock increasingly complex secrets to advance to the next level. Amanita Design’s approach to creating completely non-verbal/non-textual games relies heavily on intuition, sound design, and symbolism to create environments that are practically interactive artworks.

Theo Watson, Emily Gobeille and Nick Hardeman
Connected Worlds
Connected Worlds is an immersive, interactive ecosystem that was designed for the New York Hall of Science. It’s an installation of six smaller ecosystems, actually—all of which are connected, much like real ecosystems are. The difference here is that the environments only exist on massive screens connected by a 3,000-ft² interactive floor.

Wave house
If you would build a house made of moving waves? What it would be? Art director Justin Vin has collaborated with team of talented artists to find this out. This project is an approach to see and feel technologies in new way – as organic, friendly environments. It is nurturing, divine and filled with spirituality. Intuitive and friendly. Inspired by today’s emerging technologies – claytronics, programmable matter, quantum locking – we eventually came to the vision of Wave House. A home of beauty, freedom and softness. We see big spaces, like temple or church and a surrealism, surrounding it.

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.

Synaptic Bliss
Begun in 2003, the series of works collectively known as “SYNAPTIC BLISS” explore ideas of a digital consciousness that allows for the simultaneous perception of multiple perspectives and scales, as well as the blurring of the distinctions between the body and its environment, the exterior and the interior, and the organic and the artificial. The works in this ongoing series include a variety of media, ranging from architectural installations, to video projections and environments, as well as digital prints and hand-woven rugs.

The Creator

Decades ago, Turing famously asked, ‘Can machines think?’ and ever since, the notion of computers exceeding human intelligence has transfixed researchers and popular culture alike. For their fantastical Turing interpretation, the directors conjoin Lynchian nightmare with the prophetic themes of J.G. Ballard. Audiences will enter the haunting dream world of the legendary scientist, who gave birth to the computer age. Turing’s binary children embark upon a mystical odyssey to explore their creator’s dream diaries in a quest to discover their origins and destiny in the universe.
Probing the infinite possibilities of technology, AL and AL investigate the shaping forces of fantasy and reality. Having established themselves as pioneering artist filmmakers, they combine performance with computer-generated 3D environments to create dream worlds.

Морис Бенаюн
莫里斯·贝纳永
Cosmopolis
Overwriting the city

Cosmopolis endeavours to examine urban realities through people’s eyes. It is an artistic, and scientific interpretation of urbanization, making a visit a physical and intellectual experience.
The visitor enters a big, moving panorama of a constantly changing city. Twelve observation binoculars, much like those found at scenic lookout points, allow one to be surrounded 360° by twelve urban environments. Seven Occidental cities and five Asian cities: Paris , Berlin , Barcelona , Chicago , Johannesburg , Cairo , Sao Paulo , Beijing , Shanghai , Chongqing , Chengdu , Hong Kong , can thus be discovered, each from different viewpoints. Bearing no resemblance to the touristy landscapes one may expect to see, these scenes lay out major urban issues simply through a choice of viewpoint: transportation, environment, architecture, energy, health…