The Museum of Faces

Designed to record and tell the stories of the local community and beyond, this futuristic invention by Synarcade Audio-Visuals is an astonishing communal forum of the city at a unique moment of growth and change.
Visitors are invited to approach the work and press a glowing button to make the faces come alive and speak. Then, they can step into a special Video Capture Booth and contribute their own face, voice, and story to become part of the ever-changing Museum.
The Museum of Faces is based on Synarcade Audio-Visuals’ award-winning invention, The Lumiphonic Creature Choir, an eerie mechanical choir that can sing together in unison, beatbox, or recite poetry at the touch of a button. The Lumiphonic Creature Choir has performed to sell-out audiences in Melbourne, Croatia, New York, and at TEDxSydney 2018.

3D Makeup

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival

Ines Alpha, a digital artist specializing in 3D makeup, constantly seeks artistic collaborations that transcend her own face. Working only on her personal characteristics became restrictive and monotonous for Ines. Starting from faces as blank canvases, she incorporates digital elements that ‘amplify‘ unique personalities, styles and essences.

Bio

Ines Alpha is a digital artist internationally recognized for her unique 3D makeup style, developed while working in the beauty industry as an art director. Her innovative approach combines makeup with technology, creating ethereal and futuristic narratives, and redefining the future of aesthetics in the world of beauty.

Photo
Diane Sagnier

IJIROS
file festival
Ijiro is a robot which expresses emotions reacting to a user’s actions. Boldly, it consists of an OLED display, a speaker and an accelerometer in a cylinder shell. Ijiro isn’t able to move itself because it doesn’t have any actuators. However, it expresses emotions with faces in the display and voice from the speaker when a user touches it, lying, standing, swinging, hanging and so on. For example, if a user swings it softly, it reacts smiling. But if a user swings it roughly, it reacts angrily. So those reactions let users feel it like a baby. It is actually baby’s emotions characterized by cognitive science. Also, Ijiro’s shape is designed as a cylinder. It is considered to get various user’s actions because only a cylinder can be stood, lied down, rolled and so on in primitive shapes. Recently it has been easier to use electronic parts for arts. One advantage of making art pieces with compact electronics like a cell phone. So the art style is able to change from being viewed in a large room to being anywhere. Ijiro was developed to entertain people to keep it like a physical pet. We hope you all enjoy touching it.

Gaitkeeper
“Just be yourself, and nobody else”. Our motions, as distinctive as our faces, will soon be captured and interned. Gaitkeeper is a biometric control suite designed to counter the challenge of ‘Locomotive Camouflage’. LoCam, which combines the physical control of dance with the unpredictability of performance art, is rapidly being adopted by civic insurgents. Gaitkeeper units, based on the off-the-shelf Kiva chassis, are now being deployed as standard counter measures.

Hills beyond a river
Music: “CHINA-瓷” by Mickey Zhang
file festival
“Hibanana Studio is a creative art&tech studio, swinging at the intersection of audio-visual performance & installation, moving images and interactive installations. We are inventing new forms of the moving image for display surfaces of the future. A series of interdisciplinary research and practices range from video, sound, light, interaction and spatial experience leads us to artworks, commissions, and exhibition.”

The exterior view of the figure and “point of view shot” are synchronised onto two projection surfaces. If a protagonist leans his head it shifts the observer’s view correspondingly. Observer, figure and object all interact. Netzhammer is not only a master of the erotic of touch, his images awaken unease: they show decay and perishability as well as regularity in the flow of life, which the subject cannot escape, much as expansion and transcendence are desired.

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A visão externa da figura e o “ponto de vista” são sincronizados em duas superfícies de projeção. Se um protagonista inclina a cabeça, ele muda a visão do observador de forma correspondente. Observador, figura e objeto interagem. Netzhammer não é apenas um mestre do erótico do tato, suas imagens despertam desconforto: mostram decadência e perecibilidade, assim como regularidade no fluxo da vida, da qual o sujeito não pode escapar, por mais que se deseje expansão e transcendência.

Squint
file festival
I was inspired by how the sunlight bounces around in our artificial forest.
“Squint” is a kinetic light installation consisting of 49 mirrors that reflect lights in a bright space. The mirrors track and reflect lights on audiences’ face with composed patterns of movements. It extends the generated perception by focusing on how lights pass across our visual senses physically, and combines with our perception of images through flickering. “Squint”, which extracts various daily experiences to an abstraction brings the audience to expand their interpretation of lights and perceived imagination into a non-linear experience.
“Squint” simulates light source and intentionally shines lights on audience’s faces. Bright light is projected in the gallery, a clean bright space.
Everyday people are dynamically moving around in the city. Sunlight reflects and flickers even when it is indirect and hidden behind the artifacts. While we are traveling, we are experiencing motion. We are also experiencing the shift of light intensity, visual patterns and textures. The varieties of light forms inspire the artist to explore the potential of light textures, select and sort out the combined complexity in urban space. The artist turns them into a minimal form of light experience, while maximizing its diversity of perception.

‘SnP’, 2018, recycled plastic, injection moulded

“Widrig’s art breaks down the boundaries between disciplines; borrowing tools traditionally associated with one industry and using them in other fields, in often unanticipated and exciting ways. Widrig uses computer simulation processes and advanced technologies adopted from the special effects business to create sculptural 3D-printed craftwork—digital designs materialize into intricate sculptures in glass or recycled plastic and furniture pieces with impeccable undulated thin surfaces,” Devid Gualandris

In Search of Petra Genetrix

Petra Genetrix, the protagonist of the series Porosity Valley, is a migrant, mineral, and data cluster. In this lecture performance, the artist traces the origin of Petra Genetrix who constantly crosses borders, gender boundaries, and the concept of existence and nonexistence and creates her own hyperbolic mythology. While utilizing audio and video excerpts from her existing works, Ayoung Kim uses her own voice to create a verbal narrative exploring those agents who cross boundaries. By doing so, she continues to trace multifaceted crystal faces of Petra Genetrix, who is fundamentally porous and ambiguous.

Lightning Ride
“With Lightning Ride, it is now poles of technology, organics and mysticism that collide with  electricity as a connecting point. The video is produced from excerpts of “Taser Certifications”, a sort of ceremony authorizing in the United States the use of Tasers in the condition of being tased by someone else. Filtered with the Photoshop’s “oil painting effect”, slowed down and accompanied by a disturbing soundtrack, the succeeding images show us bodies and faces whose deformations and positions evoke a feeling of pain as well as a Christian ecstacy. Everything unfolds as if the miracle of electricity, symbol of the rationalization of the world, revived paradoxically an aspiration to transcendence, antipodes joining each other and disappearing in profit of a new map of possibilities.” (Sarah Ihler-Meyer)

Presence and Erasure
Presence and Erasure is a portrait machine that explores the reality of automated facial recognition and how people relate to their self-image, instinctively and emotionally. Within a given spatial domain, the artwork constantly scans for faces in the vicinity and photographs them. When the artwork’s algorithm detects a certain quality within a photograph, this image is temporarily printed at large scale by exposing a photochromic surface to light impulses. Each automated portrait remains for little more than a minute, before gradually dissolving into blankness. RANDOM INTERNATIONAL began to combine transient mark-making with automated portraiture early on in their practice, in 2008. Presence and Erasure marks the latest development in this body of work and assumes a minimal, industrial aesthetic that references their earliest studies on this theme. The physical impact of facial recognition and machine vision is emphasised by the exposure of the printing process itself, contrasted against the aesthetic of the high resolution portraits generated. RANDOM INTERNATIONAL intend this as a counter to the perception of surveillance footage as always being low quality, aiming to create a deeper reflection on the nature of surveillance today as well as the resounding cognitive and emotional dissonances.

LIGHT

“Helen Pashgian is a pioneer and pre-eminent member of the California Light and Space Movement. Her signature forms include columns, discs and spheres in delicate and rich coloration, often with an isolated element suspended, embedded or encased within. Pashgian’s innovative application of industrial epoxies, plastics and resins effect semi-translucent surfaces that simultaneously filter and contain illumination. Activated by light, these sculptures resonate in form and spatiality, both inner and outer.” Dimitris Lempesis

The Gold Divide
“I visualized The Gold Divide as a transparent wall; a large surface representing emotion and energy. The piece was inspired by my experiences studying abroad in Amsterdam, time spent at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and the community at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. It was a cumulation of observations and experiences—like riding my bike through the city of Boston and seeing vast construction netting wrapped around buildings. These large surfaces of material triggered my fascination for creating work at an enormous scale. I reflected on process, on how something is made, and was further intrigued by the challenge and symbolism of independently sewing four hundred yards of fabric on a single industrial sewing machine.” Leah Medin

理查德·杜邦
리처드 듀퐁
Mr. Dupont makes these sculptures based on a full-body scan of his own body. He says viewers relate to them like they’re three dimensional illusions: The viewer walks around the figures and gets all these different perspectives as the surfaces change. That’s one way the distortions are interesting, because no two perspectives are the same.

Mark Napier has been creating artwork exclusively for the Web since 1995. He combines his training as a painter with his expertise as a software developer to create “art interfaces,” software that addresses issues of authority, ownership, and territory in the virtual world.
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smoke
“A symbol of the human desire to monumentalize ideas in physical form, the Empire State Building is a subject of Mark Napier’s artwork in the past four years. This icon of American hegemony is key to exploring shifting structures of power, specifically the transition from steel to software as the medium of power in our time.”Mark Napier

Cloud Face
Humans see figures in clouds: animals, faces and even god. This kind of perception also appears in machine vision. Face-detection algorithms sometimes find faces where there are not any.’Cloud Face’ is a collection of cloud images that are recognized as human faces by a face-detection algorithm. It is a result of machine vision’s error but they often look like faces to human eyes too. Humans, yet, know these are not actual faces. Humans rather imagine faces from the clouds. Here, the error of machines and the imagination of humans meet.

Vendo esferas
Cada uma das esferas de visão de Olafur Eliasson suporta uma face espelhada circular plana, emoldurada por um anel de luzes LED, que é orientado para dentro para refletir as faces espelhadas das esferas circundantes. Juntos, eles produzem um ambiente surpreendente de espaços refletidos em várias camadas, nos quais as mesmas pessoas e cenários aparecem repetidamente, visíveis de vários ângulos inesperados. Conjuntos de reflexos aninhados em forma de túnel se abrem nos espelhos, repetindo-se inúmeras vezes e desaparecendo na distância.

Geometric mirrors
Geometric Mirrors is a series of mirror angles, each comprised of two mirror surfaces intersecting at a 90° angle. While a perpendicular viewpoint simply reflects the viewer and the opposite space, an interesting visual phenomenon occurs when the viewer faces the corner angle directly. The right angle causes a duplicate reflection, as both mirrors reflect not only the space but also each other. Their widths become extended into the adjoining side, thus appearing to the viewer as a mirrored cross rather than a mirrored angle.

Art and Light
Exploration sensorielle. Tout part de la ligne, comme une envie d’infini. Composition géométrique de lignes lumineuses projetées sur les miroirs et le mur. En partant de la ligne la plus épurée jusqu’à une recherche d’accumulation en travaillant la profondeur et la perte de repère. Le travail sonore créé à partir des vibrations lumineuses nous enveloppe et joue sur nos propres resonances. Interaction avec les surfaces réfléchissantes qui transcendent

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.

Crown Fountain
Designed by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa, the Crown Fountain in Millennium Park is a major addition to the city’s world-renowned public art collection. The fountain consists of two 50-foot glass block towers at each end of a shallow reflecting pool. The towers project video images from a broad social spectrum of Chicago citizens, a reference to the traditional use of gargoyles in fountains, where faces of mythological beings were sculpted with open mouths to allow water, a symbol of life, to flow out.

Princess of Parallelograms
What will happen when our imagination itself is externalized in machines? Artificial intelligence constructs its own world-truth that is beyond our sensory perception. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) use algorithms to synthesize and generate images in a completely new way. These images have almost uncanny aesthetic characteristics, seeming to emerge from an ocean of data, a kind of pixel soup. Rather as if we were observing the emergence of artificial “thought.” The machine learns to understand the “essence” of a thing, be it an animal, the face of a celebrity or a body of text. It is then able to generate new images of this thing, including faces of celebrities who do not exist, mutant animals, or new texts. Eventually, AI will be capable of instantaneously and dynamically emulating all representations. The era of the optical machine and the capture of reality will then be at an end, supplanted by the era of machines that generate their own reality.

Throne
This work attempts to express that premonition as an immense “floating vacant throne”. If instances of power and authority have ruled since ancient times, and the pyramids provide one example—we must ask what the future will hold. Created with reference to the forms of festival floats and portable shrines that appear in the rituals and festivities of the East, the sculpture fuses today’s 3D modeling techniques with gold leaf applications that date back to ancient Egypt. In the frontal center is an empty room, space enough for a 2 to 3-year-old child to sit, suggesting that the new intelligence is still in a young state. Shining, spherical mirrors placed at the center in front and back. Made of platinum foil, they represent “the eyes overlooking the world”, where the frontal one faces the future and the back reflects into the past.

Faces Latent Walk
“Interpolating some of the projected images from the dataset itself into the model.” Truncation Xero

Face IT
The interactive installation FACE IT displays and exposes local people in a communicative setting where they are able to interact with faces of themselves or of other participants and at the same time become creative players and the stars of the artwork. This interactive situation not only creates a strong interplay between facial expressions and body movements, it also enhances these expressions and in the very best moments it creates a unique nonverbal language.

Computer Visions 2
After more decades of trying to construct an apparatus that can think, we may be finally witnessing the fruits of those efforts: machines that know. That is to say, not only machines that can measure and look up information, but ones that seem to have a qualitative understanding of the world. A neural network trained on faces does not only know what a human face looks like, it has a sense of what a face is. Although the algorithms that produce such para-neuronal formations are relatively simple, we do not fully understand how they work. A variety of research labs have also been successfully training such nets on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of living brains, enabling them to effectively extract images, concepts, thoughts from a person’s mind. This is where the inflection likely happens, as a double one: a technology whose workings are not well understood, qualitatively analyzing an equally unclear natural formation with a degree of success. Andreas N. Fischer’s work Computer Visions II seems to be waiting just beyond this cusp, where two kinds of knowing beings meet in a psychotherapeutic session of sorts[…]

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.

Appeel
»Appeel« is a game without rules. It starts with a wall that is covered all over with a signal red adhesive foil. The foil consists of thousands of circular stickers pre-cut in a narrow grid that wait to be pulled off and put in a new order by the visitors. The stickers, and its white negative on the wall, form, similarly to binary coded pixels, ornaments, news and pictures – on the original wall and far beyond: they move to adjoining rooms, onto faces and even leave the city.

Lumibolic
Lumibolic is an interactive and occupiable environment shaped from hyperbolic paraboloid geometries. Its luminous surfaces are composed of strands of glowing EL wire that modulate their form and intensity in response to sound and motion inputs. Designed to generate dynamic visual vibrations inspired by the work of Op-Artists Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely, the piece visualizes relationships between site and visitor on a large scale.

Topographie digitale
“Topographie Digitale” is an interactive installation created by DataPaulette. This landscape uses electrically functionalized and pleated textiles as sensitive surfaces reacting to touch. This interaction brings to life a “digital clone”, video-projected. This mirrored scene reveals an organic side contrasting with the mineral aspect of the physical scene.

Les petits chercheurs de sons
Les Dirty Tangible Interfaces constituent une famille de contrôleurs basés sur l’interaction avec des matériaux tangibles. Elles permettent de contrôler par exemple une tablette de la même manière que l’écran tactile le permet… et elles s’en écartent en fournissant une interaction infiniment nuancée et expressive.

Kissing Data Symphony
Intimacy Data Symphony is a poetic ritual for intimate experience of Kissing and Caressing each other faces, multi-sensory and socially shared in public space of merging realities. In live experiments with Multi-Brain BCI E.E.G. head-sets, visitors are invited as Kissers (or Caressers) and Spectators. Brain activity of people kissing and caressing is measured and visualized in streaming E.E.G. data, real-time circling around them in a floor projection. Simultaneously, the Spectators brain waves are measured, their neurons mirroring activity of intimate kissing and caressing movements, resonating in their imagination. The Spectators brain activity data are interwoven in the data-visualization. Brain activity of all participants, mirroring each others emotional expressions and movements, in interpersonal and aesthetic ways, co-create an immersive visual, Reflexive Datascape.

山海塾

butoh

TOBARI

“Over the 90 minute performance, I feel no less than transported. There are eight male performers, including Ushio Amagatsu himself. The dancers often move slowly, with incredible muscular control, fluidity and elegance. And suddenly the spell will be broken and they’ll run across the stage, their painted bodies leaving clouds of white powder hanging in the air like a shadow or ghost. Slow sustained movements are countered with tiny, minute gestures of the fingers. Hands are often gnarled, the joints contorted with incredible tension. It is mysterious, hypnotic and strange. The countenance of the performers is most arresting – behind the white paint, their faces reveal the fragility, humility, vulnerability and truth of their humanity.”Day Helesic

Triph
“When left alone with no audience, the object glows dimly as if it were asleep. Yet when visitors approach, the installation slowly comes back to life. Colour gradients pour into each shape, whilst mirrored surfaces start reflecting light – all to the orchestra of an encompassing soundscape. This project invites visitors to become part of something. An immersive light experience in which the audience directs the intensity, audio and colour palettes simply by approaching, moving around in and between the large geometric shapes of the installation. Truly, a merging of art, interaction design, sound, tech and vision. As visual architects, our aim with ‘TRIPH” is to demonstrate that a number of different techniques can be combined into a mix of unexpected shapes and materials, that in turn help to create a new truly unique way of experiencing a story. Both in daylight condition and at night. With our self-initiated work, we aim to find undiscovered methods of narrative, questioning the ways people discover and open themselves up to new conceptual work.” Circus Family

NEST

Inspired by Homer’s Odyssey
Loosely based on Homer’s The Odyssey, Marshmallow Laser Feast’s light installation lit the primary performance space within the chapel’s hazy internal dome. Grid-like projections crossed with mobile structures (designed by the architectural practice Studio Weave) as agile bodies crept over, in and through the many lit towers and surfaces. This first act was seen by the audience from the left and right balconies above. The second act, down flights of rope-lined staircases in the concrete basement, was more disorienting, lit only with triangular neon tubing and an eerie glow that seeped from an open door. The style of dance, in keeping with the more rapid and percussive score, by Canadian composer Christopher Mayo and electronic music composer / performer Anna Meredith, confronted the audience and was staged without boundaries dividing the dancers (some of whom were in street clothes) and viewers.

露西·麦克雷和巴特·赫斯
Люси Мак Рае и Барт Хесс

“Lucyandbart” is a collaboration between artists Lucy McRae and Bart Hess. In it they imagine human bodies and faces physically altered with a shocking but artistic realism. Globules of foam, asymmetric spines… fascinating and repugnant simultaneously, the pictures become even more disturbing because they don’t hint at the emotional state of the subject. Each transformed human looks blankly back at you, neither horrified or surprised or excited about their change of form, but merely present and allowing it to be shown to you.

Smell of faces
This unique, ever-changing pattern is visualized in a facial composite. This is how it works: when a person approaches the analyzer, sniffing tubes “sniff” him, then gas analyzers process the information, which then passes to a computer program that translate air composition data into data concerning the shape and position of facial features (the components of a facial composite). As a result, a person sees a face of their smell that is conditional, in no way related to their actual physical appearance.

Swamp Radio
Swamp Radio gets beyond our anthropocenic reality, and maintains connections between the humans and other species. By artistic interventions and transmitting interfaces, the Swamp Radio is turned into a social media megaphone for invisible and inaudible actors of nature. The artists are installing microbial fuel cells, environmental monitoring sensors and transmitting devices to transform the swamps into dynamic power plants and the 21st century multi-voiced broadcast media.

shrink
File Festival
Two large, transparent plastic sheets and a device that gradually sucks the air out from between them leave the body (in this case the artist himself) vacuum-packed and vertically suspended. The transparent tube inserted between the two surfaces allows the person inside the installation to regulate the air flow. As a result of the increasing pressure between the plastic sheets, the surface of the packed body gradually freezes into multiple micro-folds. For the duration of the performance, the person inside moves slowly and changes positions, which vary from an almost embryonic position to one resembling a crucified body.

Björk: All Is Full of Love

The video reaches its harmonious climax as the robots join in embrace, still being detailed by the robotic machines beside them.
Each robot was designed by Cunningham, faces reminiscent of Björk’s own delicate visage. The sterility of the room and lighting and the rendered movements of the machines contrasts with the fluid motions of the robots as they connect in a purely human method.

daemon
The reactive audio-visual installation Daemon (in collaboration with Hansi Raber) analyzes the never-sleeping and permanent alertness of an artificial intelligence. Consisting of three semi-translucent, spatial shifted surfaces, the installation represents a solid wall when entering the space. When no visitor is in the room, the installation is in balance and visualizes infinite planned tasks and processes: rational beauty. When visitors enter the room, the installation reacts and the perfect procedure gets more and more distorted. When the visitor walks into, through and behind the surfaces, his silhouette gets merged with the projected visuals and absorbed by the surfaces.

INTERIOR N0. 58

Primarily working within abandoned office spaces, her process involves stripping the rooms down to their individual components, laying bare the layers found beneath the surfaces. She then re-assembles the room using materials found on-site, such as fluorescent tubes, paper towels, laminate, and tape, by adapting techniques of sculpture, painting and drawing.

森永邦彦
쿠니히코 모리나가
くにひこ もりなが
КУНИХИКО МОРИНАГА
Anrealage

Kunihiko Morinaga, the creative director of cult Japanese label Anrealage, has a thing for sensations and optical illusions. His debut Paris show last season was about light and shadow. Today, his sophomore outing focused on light and dark. Or, better, on the impressions you get from flashing or projecting light in pitch black. The Anrealage sculptural silhouettes were cut in a special black fabric that revealed a printed texture only under ultraviolet lights, or had needle-punched white circles—like a spotlight projection—splattered across the front. To emphasize the depth of such darkness, everything was black, including models’ faces, a heavy stroke that made things a little too dramatic.

FALA
File Festival
It is an autonomous and interactive talking machine, designed to establish automatic communication and synchronization between humans and machines, and between machines and machines. At installation, a microphone interfaces with a “chorus” of forty cell phones. All devices are in a listening state to capture voices and other sounds The autonomous talking machine analyzes the information and establishes equivalence with its memory. If so, the machine generates an audiovisual result with a semantic meaning similar to the sound captured, that is, it speaks and displays on the screens a word identical or similar to the word heard. Speakers and visualization of words on the screens of cell phones allow a “dialogue”, and for humans, to listen and see the machine conversation.

AI Facial Profiling, Levels of Paranoia

The Ultimate Acceptance
THE ARTIST REIN VOLLENGA IS KNOWN FOR HIS HIGHLY VISCERAL SCULPTURES THAT SHOW A FASCINATION FOR THE HUMAN BODY MERGED WITH A SYNTHETIC AESTHETIC. THESE OPPOSITES ARE REFLECTED IN HIS TECHNIQUE OF COMBINING FOUND GENERIC OBJECTS WITH TRADITIONALLY HAND-SCULPTED MATERIAL, THE CRAFTSMANSHIP BEING IN STARK CONTRADICTION TO THE SLEEK HIGH GLOSS SURFACES OF THE FINISHED WORK. VOLLENGA’S SCULPTURES HAVE BEEN EXHIBITED IN BOTH MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES.

In-line
Nohlab’s audiovisual installation in-line was inspired by the natural phenomenon of horizon, and used a total of 21 LED panels, reflective surfaces on two ends, hazer and a quadraphonic sound system to turn the limited area into a limitless space and present an everchanging time-space experience […]The installation takes its form not only from the content, but also from the space it is exhibited. Its audio and video elements are especially designed for a holistic perception of sound and visuals, letting the audience live a synesthetic experience. This way, the audience steps into a different reality than the one they are already in.

This installation, for a restaurant in San Francisco, responds to three large skylights high overhead in a long, narrow space. The design is an interpretation of “extruding” the skylights down through a partial false ceiling and into the more intimate space below. For this project, we pushed our glass “fabric“ techniques (used in the Capella Hotel and the IHG Lobby installations) one step further, heating the woven glass fabric in a kiln for further shaping. This lets us deform the tubes in the fabric as well as flex the overall matrix to create large continuous glass surfaces that billow like sheets in a breeze.

Electric Chair

The distinctive work of Sam Buxton is dominated by his innovative use of advanced materials and technologies. From his immensely popular MIKRO series (miniature fold-up sculptures, laser cut into thin strips of stainless steel through an acid etching process) to his explorations concerning interactive intelligent surfaces on the familiar objects around us, his work has continually managed to blur the lines between art, science and design.Through his work, which has regularly involved relatively common objects ranging from business cards to a dining table, Buxton has demonstrated an ability to see potential in what others take for granted. His on-going efforts in developing objects that can communicate, display information and react to the actions of the user, demonstrate his commitment to investigating the delicate relationship between the human body and its environment. Buxton’s fusion of art and science has resulted in a highly innovative and unique range of personal designs, many of which, have utilized the latest, most advanced materials and technologies available.

Neri Oxman: Material Ecology

Vespers

“Vespers is a collection of 15 3-D-printed masks that explore the idea of designing with live biological materials. The collection consists of three distinct series, each reinterpreting the concept of the death mask—traditionally a wax or plaster impression of a corpse’s face. Taken as a whole, the three series form a narrative arc from death to rebirth. In the first series, Oxman and The Mediated Matter Group looked at the death mask as a cultural artifact. Fabricated using an algorithm that deconstructed polyhedral meshes into subdivided surfaces, the masks were 3-D printed with photopolymers, as well as with bismuth, silver, and gold, and rendered in color combinations that recur in religious practices around the world.” Rachel Morón