Spiritus Sonata

Spiritus Sonata is an artistic representation of animism. ‘Spiritus’ is variously translated from Latin, Hebrew and Greek to mean breath or ‘spirit sense’. With this theoretical combination of breath, spirit, animating the inanimate and investing our characters with digital souls, we aim to engender positive emotion in our audience.
By embedding echoes of childhood play in this installation and linking them to animism we hope to inspire reflection in participants. The same air used to inflate the structures is used to create sounds from their nose extensions, an instrument that operates like an old church pipe organ, another subtle link to worship as well as being a joyful, playful feature.

САША ФРОЛОВА
AQUAAEROBIKA
Aquaaerobika is a project synthesizing art-performance and electronic music. Electro-pop, 8bit, disco-house music and futuristic inflatable costumes from latex are mixed in a vivid spectacular pop-art show. Dancers in avant-garde Bauhaus-style costumes with huge inflatable decorations and objects look rather like a live sculptures and turn the whole show in one moving sculpture. Aquaaerobika’s author is Moscow based artist – Sasha Frolova.

An untethered isoperimetric soft robot
The simplest version of this squishy robot is an inflated tube that runs through three small machines that pinch it into a triangle shape. One machine holds the two ends of the tube together; the other two drive along the tube, changing the overall shape of the robot by moving its corners. The researchers call it an “isoperimetric robot” because, although the shape changes dramatically, the total length of the edges – and  the amount of air inside – remains the same.

Torus
Directed by British fashion photographer Nick Knight of SHOWStudio, Torus is a film on human connection and loneliness featuring choreography by Wayne McGregor and styling by Norwegian designer Fredik Tjærandsen. Performed by Company Wayne McGregor, Torus shows dancers wearing inflatable balloons designed by Tjærandsen, orbiting in darkness as isolated entities, occasionally lit as they transition through a temporal universe, a mirror to the life that many are only passing through, barely connecting.

Infection Drivers
Infection Drivers (2019) explores the body under attack. In this work, a CGI figure struggles to move and breathe in a translucent suit, which takes her body through transmutations of stereotypically masculine and feminine physiques as it inflates and deflates. In a time of increased public surveillance through facial-recognition software and biometric data  mining, Cooper’s high-definition world invites us to investigate and perhaps find freedom in the technologies often used to constrain us.

Park Lage
In the installation, an 11m x 15m x 25m orange inflatable that completely covered the historic courtyard, the viewer accesses the interior of the work and observes how the previously known space, or not, was reconfigured by a monochromatic plastic cover, through which only the shapes of a reality that has just become a work are drawn. This work makes visible a space that was previously just the place where things live. A work that the wind, the sun, the rain and the passing of people keeps alive, breathing.

Another Generosity
Another Generosity explores a new structure that consists of a membrane holding two basic elements: air and water. The simple structures are combined to create a visible and dynamic cellular structure. The inflated elements mediate between the natural and built environment. They respond to external and sometimes unseen stimuli, creating a new kind of experience, a momentary hesitation that heightens our awareness of our surroundings.

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

Moth in B-Flat
“Moth in B-Flat is the most minimal expression of this moment, which in music could be identified as a pause, an offbeat, or a “bridge”-a passage that breaks with the previously established pattern and leads to a new movement.” Rudolf Frieling

Skia

file festival
As natural as the daily sunshine, one’s shadow, formerly a constant companion, now often escapes from attention. A silhouette of our physical form, one’s shadow is no more than a flat, disembodied reduction of the contours of one’s self.The installation skia examines the interplay of our shadows and our conscious awareness of our physical displacement of space. In this closed-circuit installation, visitor´s images are manipulated and projected as artificial shadows.What does it mean if one’s shadow suddenly frees itself and develops an alien autonomy? And what has such an estrangement in common with the multiple identities of the post modern ego?

平らなものを1つ再現
1970年代には早くも、ウィリアムフォーサイスは、アカデミックバレエの予想外の進歩でダンスに革命をもたらしました。他の人が古典的なジャンルから離れていたとき、彼は以前は欠陥があると考えられていた形で語彙を豊かにしました。ムーブメントはねじれ、曲がり、解体され、再組み立てされて別の部屋に置かれます。 2000年にフランクフルトバレエで初演された「OneFlatThing、replicated」は、この研究の範囲の終わりにあります。南極点への遠征に関する本に触発されて、フォーサイスはますます密集した振り付けを開発しました。それは、20の完璧に配置されたテーブルの真っ只中にある体の明らかな混乱で最高潮に達します。

Apollo
Victor Pasmore’s ‘Apollo’ Pavilion sits at the heart of the Sunny Blunts estate in Peterlee[…] Four large orange forms intersect the pavilion at right angles to the main orientation and appear to slice through the pavilion. The blocks are drawn from the geometry of the pavilion and a nod to the remote object planes of Victor Pasmore’s work. The inflatable textiles blocks create a juxtaposition between the angular grey concrete of the pavilion and the soft, rounded, colourful forms of the installation. The intervention is deliberately bold with a strong visual aesthetic to temporarily transform the pavilion. The piece is also, on the surface, playful, tactile and accessible – encouraging the audience to look at the pavilion with fresh eyes.

NEMO OBSERVATORIUM
Wenn auf könnte kein Observatorium, auf wird von einem Stück Derire sprechen, einem Raum, der nicht die Möglichkeit hätte, ein oder zwei Personen zu sein. Kein Besucher, der Besucher, befindet sich in der Mitte eines transparenten Zylinders und drückt auf einen Knopf zu einer. Triggerknopf, der dann bei sehr hoher Geschwindigkeit einen Wirbelwind der kleinen Bulks von Polystyrol flattern lässt, der zu schnell ist, um vom verdrängten menschlichen Auge verfolgt zu werden. Die Person, die sich für den Tornado (Hut). Der Tornado arbeitet mit 5 Brutto Fan. Eine Situation unter dem Betrachter und 4 andere um den Zylinder.

Survive the Savage Sea

When I was seven years old, my mother read a book aloud to me titled Survive the Savage Sea (1973). It was the true story of the Robertsons, a family of farmers in England who sold all their possessions to buy a sailboat with the intent of sailing around the world for several years. In June 1972, the Robertsons lost their sailboat in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean when a pod of Orca smashed the hull, leaving the four adults and two children adrift for 38 days. After their inflatable life raft grew too leaky to be safe, they abandoned it for their nine-foot fiberglass dinghy, Ednamair, a vessel so small that with everyone aboard only six inches of the boat remained above the waterline. The family navigated to areas where they could collect rainwater and survived by finding ways to catch sea turtles, dorado, and flying fish until they were spotted and rescued by the crew of a Japanese fishing boat.

video

Homo Economicus
Homo Economicus explores how men working in the City of London financial district both modify and commodify their own bodies. The work intentionally conflates the corporate and the corporeal, questioning male self-worth and its apparent apotheosis in the hyper-competitive financial services industry. Grounded in audio interviews with real city men, Homo Economicus proposes an alternative economy of the male body: not as an unquestioned instrument of power, but a site of vulnerability and power-play.

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

Phantom Geometry
“We are developing a system of moving streaming information through space, in the form of light, to generate material form. This system is a full-scale, generative fabrication process that is innately non-linear, is interruptible and corruptible at any time, and does not rely on periodic flattening to 2D. Light is the medium for data in our system. There resident data can be drawn through physical space, at full scale, to generate a photographic artifact, or to instantiate material form through the selective polymerization of proximal photo-responsive resin. This thesis, then, begins to investigate a design paradigm centered on the material reification of light. That paradigm questions the supremacy of the digital model, and the static flattening and stacking logics inherent to typical fabrication workflows. It is part of a conversation about representation, about the role of the designer, and about the way we make.”

Midtown Flutter
Midtown becomes a flattened, uniform construct for this play of texture, rhythm and interruptions.My installation is inspired by the concept of architectural relief (a technique where the sculpted elements remain attached but raised above the background plane). Audiences experience a gradual shift in the appearance and depth of the installation from a flat image to a three-dimensional view with protruding geometric shapes.

Cusp
A familiar childhood location on the Essex marshes is reframed by inserting images randomly generated by a neural network (GAN*) into this tidal landscape. Initially trained on a photographic dataset, the machine proceeds to learn the embedded qualities of different marsh birds, in the process revealing forms that fluctuate between species, with unanticipated variations emerging without reference to human systems of classification. Birds have been actively selected from among the images conceived by the neural network, and then combined into a single animation that migrates from bird to bird, accompanied by a soundscape of artificially generated bird song. The final work records these generated forms as they are projected, using a portable perspex screen, across the mudflats in Landermere Creek.

Defence Cascade
In the installation inflated silicone forms are suspended amidst an austere metal structure, and are prodded by automated rods. Set to contrastingly beautiful music by composer Alex Mills, which is punctuated by the industrial sounds of the mechanised device, the art work looks like a science experiment, or some kind of torture device, and you may find yourself anthropomorphising the poor, inflated bags which are at the mercy of their mechanical environment.

Рафаэль Лозано-Хеммер
拉斐尔·洛萨诺 – 亨默
ラファエル·ロサノ=ヘメル
라파엘 로자노
רפאל לוזאנו, המר
Flatsun

A circular display that simulates the turbulence at the surface of the Sun using mathematical equations. The piece reacts to the presence of the public by varying the speed and type of animation displayed. If no one is in front of the piece the turbulence slows down and eventually turns off. As the built-in camera detects people more solar flares are generated and the fake Sun shows more perturbation and activity. At 140 cm diameter, Flatsun is exactly a billion times smaller than the real Sun. The piece consists of custom-made panels with 60,000 red and yellow LED lights, a computer with 8 processing cores, a camera with a pinhole lens and a mechanically engineered aluminium, steel and glass structure that pivots for maintenance. A single knob lets the collector set the brightness of the piece and turn it on and off.

Two Hundred and Seventy
Through the combination of an everyday material with precise technology the mixed media installation fills the whole columned hall from the 19th century with its fluid movement and peculiar sound. Concavely arranged and floating above the spectators heads the form of the artwork seems to pass the skylight like the sun’s rays. Subdivided into nine columns, the nearly 70 square metres large piece of art follows a site-specific choreography determined by a program. Its moving surface is made from 270 white garbage bags, being inflated and deflated. In this way shapes and the boundaries of the installation itself start to dissolve. “Two Hundred and Seventy“ is the first installation with an undisguised view behind the scenes and onto the origin of the wavelike and organic movement: 1080 fans, lots of cables and 45 circuit boards

the psychotron installation
Now one of Doug’s stunning installations is available in edition format. The Psychotron Framed – a video piece based on the 12-petal lotus flower symbolising eastern spirituality’s heart chakra – has been harnessed into a purpose-built viewer that can hang on a wall or stand freely on a flat surface. The piece is currently only available by collection from The Outsiders London gallery. Order now and Doug will assemble the materials in two weeks.“For centuries, circular figures containing symmetrical patterns have been used as a tool for meditation,” says Doug of his original Psychotron on display at Bedlam. “The mandala, the yantra and visualisations of the various chakras, all conform to radial design principles that have been refined throughout the ages. Now those principles have been ruthlessly plundered for the creation of The Psychotron.

FILE FESTIVAL
Performance: Capture Part 2

In “Performance Capture: Part 2”, open source motion capture sequences are mapped onto stock low-polygonal unsmoothed 3D characters. Bodies inflate, deflate and oscillate between states, while movements shift and repeat in offset patterns as information transfers from one body to the next. In the animation, what should be used to record, simulate and create perfect virtual realities instead collapses into the uncanny, the abstract and the unreal.

FILE SAO PAULO 2017
THE PHYSICAL MIND
“The Physical Mind” is Vonk’s attempt to let participants experience the relation between their physical and mental states by applying physical pressure to the body. The installation consists of two inflatable objects in-between which a participant lays down to subsequently get lifted up and be gently squeezed between the curves of the two objects. While the lifting creates an unstable feeling, this stressful sensation is soon thereafter contrasted with the secure feeling of being gently squeezed between two soft objects. Besides this experience for participants, the installation also evokes feelings of empathy amongst bystanders who witness participants undergo the experience.

electric-light
Electric Light presents a scenography of forms borrowed from the world-behind-the-scenes of lens based image production. Backdrops, stands, flats, flags and bounces populate the gallery space, illuminated by a changing array of coloured lights. A moving light animates the space with changing forms, shapes and colours, adding another layer of dynamic activity. This new work brings light to the foreground and renders the gallery as an unfolding set.

Soft Skin
‘Soft Skin’ is a research project developed by Lubna Alayeli, Nina Jotanovic, Ceren Temel, and Farah Alayeli from the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia. The work investigates the possibilities of using air inflation in architecture as an active response to changing environmental parameters. The ‘skin’ is composed of a specially developed composite made of thin layers of flexible silicone and elastic fabric. The material system consists of dozens of inflatable cells combined in larger groups. As parameters change — light and wind in this instance — the cells can inflate or deflate in real time. By acting in real time, it is able to reduce wind vibrations and wind drag, and control light infiltration.

The Flat Arc
​Intent: Experimenting artistic freedom on data, a road to explore possibilities of telling abstract yet emotional stories not with literature but visuals corresponding to datasets. Method: Generative visual parameters based on World Urbanization Prospects data are governed by real time image/video synthesis, with the help of graphic manipulative software platforms and creative coding.

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Moncler’s Genius 2020 Collection
The british fashion designer reinterpreted the brand’s iconic expression as a series of monochrome designs resembling padded samurai armour and brightly colored inflatables[…] Injecting flat sheets with down quilting, Craig Green uses a series of zips that allow the body to inhabit the garments and give them volume. Further defined by outlines printed on the outside, each piece is clad in ripstop nylon, a light-weight nylon fabric with interwoven ripstop reinforcement threads in a crosshatch pattern.

Fragments

Almost two hundred identical, small mirrors are arranged in a grid to form a flat, homogenous surface. Hung against the wall, the mirrors are closely spaced and apparently static; but they possess the ability to move in harmony with one another. Approaching the artwork, the individual mirrors turn together to face the onlooker, following as he or she moves. The plane of the surface distorts into varying, three-dimensional forms — perhaps a wave, or a curve, or a circle. The reflection becomes fragmented and the apparently inanimate object becomes akin to something organic and alive

INFLATABLE DRESS
Diana Eng, in collaboration with Emily Albinski, created this gorgeous dress way back in 2003, which ended up making its way on the cover of ID Magazine. The designers used this project to explore how they could use electronics to change the shape and color of a gown. The dress inflates to allow you to change it’s shape. Pump up the back or the sides to change its silhouette.
The designers made no attempt to hide the electronics, rather, they exposed the spaghetti-ball of wires and components as the main aesthetic.

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.

transdock
Ken Nakagaki, Yingda (Roger) Liu, Chloe Nelson-Arzuaga, and Hiroshi Ishii
TRANS-DOCK is a docking system for pin-based shape displays that expand their interaction capabilities for both the output and input. By simply interchanging the transducer modules, composed of passive mechanical structures, to be docked on a shape display, users can selectively switch between different configurations including display sizes, resolutions, and even motion modalities such as rotation, bending, and inflation.
In our paper accepted to TEI 2020, we introduce a design space consisting of several mechanical elements and enabled interaction capabilities. Our proof-of-concept prototype explores the development of the docking system based on our previously developed 10 x 5 shape display, inFORCE. A number of transducer examples are shown to demonstrate the range of interactivity and application space achieved with the approach of TRANS-DOCK.

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.

Esseline is a Biomimicry designer. She draws her designs with nature as a source of inspiration. Her recent designs are inspired by the beautiful shapes and patterns that you see when you look at cells at a microscopic level. The arrangement of lines in her flat design has a major influence on the final bulging of the printed 3D objects.
Photographer: Andy Hendrata

Losing Control
Guda Koster (Amsterdam) werkt al een leven lang met textiel, en daar is sinds enige jaren de fotografie als medium bijgekomen. Het is werk dat zich begeeft in het gebied tussen mode, beeldhouwkunst, fotografie en performance. Kort gezegd maakt ze foto’s waarin zij zelf figureert als drager van textiele vormen die niet of nauwelijks wat met ‘kleding’ te maken hebben. De ruimtelijke situaties in het atelier worden, eenmaal gefotografeerd, vrijwel platte beelden.

“The Flat Side of the Knife”combine des espaces physiques avec des espaces illusoires qui n’apparaissent que dans des miroirs, reflétant ce que l’artiste appelle des «couches de conscience», semblables aux espaces psychologiques et psychédéliques de l’esprit. Son utilisation de miroirs en conjonction avec des éléments sculpturaux fabriqués à partir d’un panneau isolant argenté, connu sous le nom de Rmax ou Thermax, permet à l’isolant d’espace de s’étendre dans de multiples directions; créer une profondeur imaginaire sous le sol de la galerie, par exemple, ou suggérer des pièces adjacentes qui n’existent pas réellement.

Boxing Ballet
Yang’s Boxing Ballet turns one half of the gallery into a reworking of Oskar Schlemmer’s 1922 costumed dance work Triadisches Ballett, with replicas of five of the Bauhaus teacher’s bulbous and exaggerated figures, from a female figure made of hoops to a circle that looks like a flattened stickman. Here, Schlemmer’s figures are reimagined as golden bell-covered shapes on wheels or wire frames hanging by a wire from the ceiling. As they all come with handlebars, it seems we are meant to provide the choreography, stiffly pushing, say, a giant roosterlike creature around like an awkward shopping trolley.

Akhnaten
Portrait Trilogy:Einstein; Akhnaten; Gandhi
According to the composer, this work is the culmination of his two other biographical operas, Einstein on the Beach (about Albert Einstein) and Satyagraha (about Mahatma Gandhi). These three people – Akhenaten, Einstein and Gandhi – were all driven by an inner vision which altered the age in which they lived, in particular Akhenaten in religion, Einstein in science, and Gandhi in politics.
The text, taken from original sources, is sung in the original languages, linked together with the commentary of a narrator in a modern language, such as English or German. Egyptian texts of the period are taken from a poem of Akhenaten himself, from the Book of the Dead, and from extracts of decrees and letters from the Amarna period, the seventeen-year period of Akhenaten’s rule. Other portions are in Akkadian and Biblical Hebrew. Akhnaten’s Hymn to the Sun is sung in the language of the audience.
OPERA

Conversation Bubble
At any given moment of time five people are needed to inflate the structure. While the bodies of participants are squeezed and immobilized between two layers of clear vinyl, their heads can move and talk inside the inflated bubble. The duration of the piece depends on the five people’s agreement to end it, as no one can leave on his/her own accord.

“Places”: images often making use of flat field coloring and ranging from almost photorealistic landscapes to surreal scattered fragments of urban sectors.

the flat perimetrali

TETRAGRAMMATON
A dialogue between these two artists on themes of myth, ritual and meaning, as much about their exhaustion and propensity to bewilderment as any potential they may inhere, for recuperation for and by language, culture and society. Joey’s work, ‘Religiously observant’, is inspired by alchemical and occult ideas, the world of spirits and hallucinations. The wall print features a gold CGI blazon of the Tetragrammaton It references the Sumerian mythology of the Annunaki a race of ancient chthonic fertility Gods, subsequently inscribed in a series of publications by Zecharia Sitchin (a kind of elder statesman of conspiracy theorists worldwide) as descendants of aliens, who enslaved the human race to extract gold from the earth. John’s work similarly ranges over territories of opposition: between ancient and contemporary; mythic and kitsch; between the viscid and primordial. It takes as its subject the vector of congealment, in the Marxist sense of the way labour power is congealed in commodities and so forth, extending this metaphor into an aesthetics of myth and ritual, emptied out, flattened, compacted like a sedimentary layer of anthropocene garbage, for the post-historical epoch.The sound component provides an aural complement to this structure of refuse, exhaustion and abjection. Mixing pre- or post-linguistic utterances, grunts, groans, screaming: a kind of secular glossolalia chaotically interwoven with whalesong, deep techno and political oratory.

한스 해머
ハンス・ハマート
Hans Hemmert is fascinated by air and latex balloons in a bright canary yellow. But these aren’t just your average latex inflatables, some fill entire rooms while others surround Hemmert himself. Posing as a giant elongated egg, he performs dances or interacts with the objects outside his elastic bubble.

Living pod
file festival
Light, shape variations and mimicry meet in Living Pod. In front of the false twin pieces, the user can slowly set garment A in motion using a light source. Garment B then imitates piece A in an exaggerated and unbalanced fashion, changing structure through miniature electric motors activated by light sensors that are sown through the garment. Using flat-pattern cutting techniques, Ying Gao was able to give the process fluidity and flexibility. In addition to the mechanical movements of the garments, Living Pods underlines two fundamental aspects of today’s fashion system: confrontation and imitation. The garment plays a mediating role between man and his environment. By using light, Living Pod is similar to project Walking City, which uses air to make the pieces look like they are breathing.

Paper Ensemble
Never coming up flat is the work of Bea Szenfeld, a Polish-born, Stockholm-based artist whose medium is paper. Szenfeld worked as a ceramicist and sculptor before pursuing a fashion degree at Beckmans College of Design in Stockholm. After graduating, she landed a job in the industry. Quickly realizing that working with commercial clothes was not her thing, she “jumped back to work with clothes in art.”

Double Imposition
Daniel Lefcourt’s monochromatic works criticize and dismantle the processes of painting itself: its inspirations, its materials, and the spaces in which it occurs. Using source material such as photographs of the trash in his studio, Lefcourt creates indecipherable surfaces in low relief that hover between abstract and representational, as well as flat versus textured; The New Yorker has called the artist’s conceptual practice “a surrender to mystery.”

The Great Haul
Artist Anna Hepler breaks it all down into the perfect representation of form and leaves the viewer to ponder… which is exactly what every artist should do. Her 2D work evolves from her 3D sculpture that she constructs using various cast off pieces of plastic that are assembled and inflated. She then uses those structures as the spring board for her drawings, paintings and prints.

Row Colors: Invertuals 2
These oversized, misshapen, foamy straightjacket bundles were made by Eindhoven-based duo Raw Color for design collective Dutch Invertuals. In a sweet range of minty pastels they look like they should provide a comfy bed, but wrapped around a head they’re more likely to suffocate. Created a couple of years ago as press material for Dutch Invertual’s participation in home furnishings exhibition Salone Internazionale del Mobile, the series creatively illustrates the malleability of material by taking flat foam and creating strange, abstract human sculptures.

Anne Ferrer is a sculptor based in Paris, France who makes inflatable, kinetic objects that are either worn on the body or appear free-standing. Since completing her MFA at Yale University in 1988, Ferrer has worked as a painter who places colors in space, playing with versatile and hybrid forms that are inspired by the human, animal, and floral worlds. Air serves as a solution that resolves space and transport issues making each piece seem as if they literally breathe.