Floating

FILE 2024 | Aesthetic Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
Leilanni Todd – Floating – United States

Floating explores the concept of surrendering and freeing oneself by allowing oneself to float, symbolizing overcoming adversity and mastering self-confidence. Inspired by her grandmother’s journey to overcome her fear of water through swimming, the work uses water and sea creatures as symbols of resilience and transformation. The personal narrative behind the work adds depth to its exploration of overcoming fears and discovering inner strength.

Bio

Leilanni Todd is an award-winning creative director with extensive experience in advertising, fashion and new media. Originally from Toronto and now based in New York, she harmoniously integrates art, technology and culture into her work. Through her FLOAM WORLD platform, Leilanni creates surreal narratives, reimagines traditional norms in fashion and advertising, and addresses complex human issues with humor and creativity.

Delusional Crime and Punishment

Who created life? I think this is the question everyone has been asking themselves since childhood? At least I have many doubts, the subjective feeling of the existence of consciousness allows us to face the world from that source. Why do humans eat like this for energy? Why not get energy in other ways? Why do you need energy to exercise? Why is this so joyful and so painful? What is the need for pain, pleasure, fear, excitement, etc.?Upon careful analysis, it appears that the source of many desires comes from the design of our physical structure. If God designed human beings, why was he designed that way and why was he designed as a biological mechanism for sin and hell? Why do human beings have desires because of such a physical structure and even they don’t understand self-control, they have sins, and they have to go to another hell of punishment system to atone for their sins? Who created this series of systems?

Unreal

Lawrence’s accompanying soundtrack is a delicate lattice; complex, opaque and entirely synthetic. Diva’s yearning vocals, sung in English and Mandarin, cast classical melodies over billowing, intricately arranged songs. Her voice is created with a Vocaloid voice synthesiser, giving it an uncanny feeling. Her confessional lyrics draw empathy from the listener, as she reveals her fears of becoming an irrelevant influencer, obsolete in a machine-driven age.

The lead single ‘ unreal’ is launched with a harrowing video adapted from the film.

We Were Monkeys

Mihai Wilson and Marcella Moser

Tears For Fears “Break The Man”

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Through a 3D animation in white black and very sophisticated, they transport us into a cold and labyrinth world, built like immense escherian space.

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“Break the Man,” which features light piano and blasting guitar as the musicians reflect on women fighting patriarchy.

Fear of Choice
Rafaël Rozendaal is a Dutch-Brazilian artist. He has been making websites-as-art-objects since 2001. He has shown in The Whitney Museum, Stedelijk Museum, Centre Pompidou, and Times Square.

Fear of Choice
Rafaël Rozendaal 是荷兰裔巴西艺术家。自 2001 年以来，他一直将网站制作为艺术品。他曾在惠特尼博物馆、市立博物馆、蓬皮杜中心和时代广场展出。

Ah! Pain!
Always the fear of losing
Feel the fear of not being you
But now, I know and it hurts
And I will wander until you know too
I’ve always been a bad hero
Always being saved by you
But now that it’s gone
I know my best is gone too
Ah! Pain! Ah! Pain!
Don’t leave me, I beg you, stay
Surrounds me, comforts me, fixes me
Ah! Pain! Ah! Pain!
You were all that was left in me
It’s what makes me alive without you here
I always feel like it will be
Always time erasing you
And now it’s so late
And the longing comes, invades, burns
I always think about you
I always think to myself “What about you?”
And I don’t want to forget you
And the wound doesn’t close, doesn’t close
Ah! Pain! Ah! Pain!
Don’t leave me, I beg you, stay
Surrounds me, comforts me, fixes me
Ah! Pain! Ah! Pain!
You were all that was left in me
It’s what makes me alive without you here, here
Ah! Pain! Ah! Pain!
Ah! Pain! Ah! Pain!
Don’t leave me, I beg you, stay
Surrounds me, comforts me, fixes me
Ah! Pain! Ah! Pain!
You were all that was left in me
It’s what makes me alive without you here

Solitary Survival Raft
Solitary Survival Raft is a machine that comforts a single body as they drift into the unknown. This artwork explores how we can reconcile the human urge to explore new frontiers, while tending to fear. The raft is an exploration of where we are at, rather than a demonstration of survival – do you drop off the edge when you reach the horizon or merge closer to truth when you give fear the cold shoulder?

Repeat
In the midst of the promises and fears surrounding robots and Artificial Intelligence, especially in the manual labour sector, Repeat attempts to imagine the illusory dance moves of the so-called augmented body tainted with the gender stereotypes of human ballet duets. Repeat shifts the performing body of the assembly line into the performing body onstage, unceasingly carrying out its tasks. The body meshed with the industrial exoskeleton tolerates and sustains strenuous tasks but ironically, it enables those actions to be repeated even more. Repeat uses passive industrial exoskeletons that are currently deployed in the workplace. This ain’t no fiction, this is the future promised to the human worker.

Hash2ash
Installation touches on the themes of selfie-culture, and the fear of permanently losing the digital records of our lives due to technical failures, impermanence of data storage, or simply because of the obsolescence of the old digital file formats. Even with such compulsive overproduction of the images of ourselves we might end up with nothing but the blank memories of our past. Even the data on ourselves will eventually fade away… The installation consist of the display that prompts you to take a selfie on your phone, which it renders in digital particles on its large 1×1 meter screen. Then a moment later, your face scatters and falls apart and the real black gravel starts to fall at the bottom of the screen in perfect synchrony with the digital simulation. Gradually a dark mound builds up at the foot of the construction.

Paranoid Panopticum

Entering The Paranoid Panopticum you will run across your own fixation on control. While you will be able to control the visual by mirror and video- projection, a shift in the perception of reality takes place. Controlling changes into fear of being controlled, maximizing control becomes its own threat. In the Paranoid Panopticum you are haunted by your own mirrored projections. You can play with your own projection in a paradox based on the myth of Echo, Narcissus and his mirrored image. At the moment where Narcissus commits suicide, the mirrored image of the visitor is ‘suicided’. At this point the story starts over again.

Undercurrents

“Mostly the fact that I AM a human body. We can live our lives buried in complex abstraction, or in virtual reality, but you can’t separate your consciousness from the fragility of your physical form. Many of my own fears and anxieties revolve around that realization. I would probably say my pieces involving the human body are a kind of self prescribed therapy to deal with my neurosis”.Albert Omoss

THE BED EXPERIMENT ONE

Witness as the covers are pulled back to reveal the rites and rituals of the untamable Homo Sapiens in its favorite nesting place — a giant bed! Like a bizarre nature documentary THE BED EXPERIMENT tracks four males and four females, who while confronting their deepest fears and desires, balance the witty and weird against the painfully true to life.

“As the piece proceeds, the focus shifts from mating rituals to the antics of lovemaking, from the battle of the sexes to baby worship, and from dreams of conquest to nightmares of disembowelment. The bed turns from the cradle of civilization into a hospital cot, from a sultry desert to a tundra of monsters. As the scenes evolve — the performance is a 60-minute continuum — the tone mysteriously oscillates between extremes of farcicality or pathos. How the performers effect these wondrous transformations is one of the Adaptors’ most singular professional secrets”. Alan M. Kriegsman

Impacts
If you’ve never seen a Tesla coil in person, it’s a remarkable experience. Purple plasma flashes in unpredictable, wide-reaching bolts. The sound cracks with more fearsomeness than a whip. The air fills with the sterile acridity of ozone. The effect is equal parts frightening and beautiful; this machinery can use enough voltage to carbonize your flesh right down to the bone, yet some self-destructive impulse tells you to look closer. Alexandre Burton plays with this very impulse in his installation, Impacts. The exhibition features several Tesla coils that hang from the ceiling. They fire, not against a cage or predictable grounding surface, but a delicate pane of glass, so the viewer can appreciate the plasma filaments like a framed piece of art or a caged lion.

Skorpions
LUTTERGILL
Skorpions are a set of kinetic electronic garments that move and change on the body in slow, organic motions.They breathe and pulse, controlled by their own internal programming. They are not “interactive” artifacts insofar as their programming does not respond to simplistic sensor data. They have intentionality; they are programmed to live, to exist, to subsist. They are living behavioral kinetic sculptures that exploit characteristics such as control, anticipation and unpredictability. They have their own personalities, their own fears and desires.

file sao paulo 2018
“Outrospectre” is an experimental proposal for a medical device aimed at reconciling people with death through simulating out-of-body experiences. In healthcare the majority of efforts and research focus on keeping people alive. The fear and experience of death is a mostly neglected topic. Recent (para) psychological research, however, suggests that the sensation of drifting outside of one’s own body using virtual reality technology could help reduce death anxiety. “Outrospectre” explores the possible application of these findings in hospital surroundings where it could help terminal patients accept their own mortality with more comfort.
This project investigates unanswered questions about mortality and ‘end of life’.

Neotenous dark dwellers
Lygophilia
Lygophilia weaves together mythologies and sciences, history and future, fears and desires, continents, cultures, humans and non-humans. Lygophilia folds and unfolds the stories carried by those fascinating creatures that are the Mexican Axolotl and the Slovene Proteus.
From immortality to regenerative medicine — both animals are, as adults, in a state of “eternal youth” (neoteny) showing extraordinary longevity and regenerative abilities that put them at the centre of ancient myths as well as current cutting-edge scientific researches.

W
His paintings expand the best of contemporary non-objective work in their shear boldness and fearless scope, the entirety of the painting’s dynamics are always greater than the architecture that supports them…

Impossible Cityscapes
Samsara
Often creating based on what he calls a “fear of blank spaces,” Sack tells Colossal that his starting point for each drawing is different. Finding inspiration in history, cartography, and his own travels, the artist starts with a general concept and builds his intricate worlds intuitively as he goes.

The Carrier
Mella Jaarsma’s wearable sculpture The Carrier addresses the fleeting nature of all living things, especially the temporality of humans and their urgent need to escape their current situation or move from place to place. She notes how the human condition of gathering experiences without knowing why, collecting possessions, and fearing death while longing for immortality impacts every living human being. We live in a world in which people are on the move as travelers, vacationers, explorers, and even migrants fleeing the oppressors of their beloved homelands.

לזכות ונדרס
ヴェンダースに勝つ
벤더스 승리
ВЫИГРАТЬ ВЕНДЕРС
Wings of Desire
cinema
Wings of Desire is one of cinema’s loveliest city symphonies. Bruno Ganz is Damiel, an angel perched atop buildings high over Berlin who can hear the thoughts—fears, hopes, dreams—of all the people living below. But when he falls in love with a beautiful trapeze artist, he is willing to give up his immortality and come back to earth to be with her. Made not long before the fall of the Berlin wall, this stunning tapestry of sounds and images, shot in black and white and color by the legendary Henri Alekan, is movie poetry. And it forever made the name Wim Wenders synonymous with film art.

Train Performance
Recently, I have found that traveling has made my anxiety peak. I suddenly feel trapped on a train, or in a car, and start being unable to breath. In order to both face this fear as well as do a performative piece about it, I taped myself up on a train. This is putting in to a literal sense the emotions I feel when traveling.

Fearful Symmetry
Taking its title from a line in William Blake’s poem “The Tyger”, the installation is inspired in part by the visceral description of an encounter with a creature in the night. So startling that the author questions the purpose and tools that could make such a life form. Intending to bring visitors to a primal state of hyper-awareness, the encounter of the work aimed to create such a visceral encounter.

Aesthetic of Fears
“My collection is about the aesthetic and the attraction of fears […] In many cultures people wear masks to scare evil away, so the masks are decorated with frightening images from the wearer’s own fears.”

Glass Houses: Self-Portraits In A Moving Mirror
“In this project, I confront questions of self-image and the ways in which our interior worlds conflict with our exterior form. How does the image that we present to the world differ from what we see when we look in the mirror? If our desires, fears, secrets and vulnerabilities were manifested physically, what might they look like?”

On Shame
FILE BELO HORIZONTE 2018-DISRUPTIVA
foto: Luiza Ananias
On Shame is part of the series Psychosomatics which was initiated in 2010. In these works Franco makes it possible to tangibly experience such emotions as joy, fear, confusion, happiness or shame by means of digital technologies. Cameras and motion and tactile sensors serve as tools to facilitate the dialogue between humans and machines. more…

Delusions of self-immolation

The installation Delusions of self-immolation will lead a great number of visitors to ask themselves where the boundaries of their own body lie and why one would wish to discover them. Erik Hobijn has built a machine in which one may almost look death in the face, and that, equipped with fire and water spraying devices, sets light to the victim and extinguishes the flames, standing in the middle of a platform. During the course of the festival Erik Hobijn will give demonstrations.The borders of the body are hard to define in terms of averages, because they are closely related to the psyche that demonstrates the physical limits. Despite its extremely physical nature, the way in which it is experienced is determined by personal fears, dreams and desires. Erik Hobijn’s machine unleashes such strong emotional responses because it forces the person to be the guardian and researcher of their own body limits. It is a life of initialization toward self development, with its own warmth and beauty..

Nature, Fear, Entity
Nature, Fear, Entity sont trop importantes pour être traitées. Bien que je sois d’accord avec les sources de la douleur, elle existe inévitablement dans chaque expérience personnelle, mais je ne donnerai aucun indice détaillé, mais pour comprendre l’expérience dans un respect macro et la transformer en création. For me, transformation is a key method, sometimes when you see some scenes or chapters, seems like impossible to happen in the reality, but after a while when you think backward, probably you would feel that’s exactly how they should/originally are, an apperance after transformation. So transform becomes a very important channel to connect the interconnectness of things, to unseal some questions you would like to discuss; this is why I like to apply it often.

فيليب توليدانو
菲利普托莱达诺
פיליפ טולדנו
フィリップ·トレダノ
Филипп Толедано
Hope & Fear

Fear Expanded

Fears
File Festival – Machinima

Pierrot Lunaire
In his desire to expand his art to other forms of dance, Rudolf Nureyev performed this choreography by Glen Tetley many times and in many countries, and included it in the repertoire of his “Nureyev and Friends”.
He identified with this tragic character as with Fokine’s Petrouchka, another of his favourite roles. Glen Tetley resisted during five years before giving him this choreography, fearing that the intense personality of the dancer would overwhelm the innocence of Pierrot, but Rudolf revealed a deep vulnerability in this role. While he was rehearsing Pierrot lunaire with Tetley, he was being filmed in Valentino, and had started to choreograph his version of Romeo and Juliet. It is just an example of the extraordinary density and variety of his schedules. Martine Kahane