highlike

Heinrich Bulthoff

Cable Robot Simulator
Max-Planck-Institut für biologische Kybernetik

Eight steel cables, each with 1.4 tons of tensions, hold aloft a caged platform with a seat for one person. Using a wireless VR headset, that person can simulate experiences like flight while being zoomed in dozens of different ways. Eight retracting cables connected to a winch pull on the cage. It’s like a giant, flying VR jungle gym.

COD.ACT

Coro pêndulo
Pendulum Choir é uma peça coral original para 9 vozes A Cappella e 18 macacos hidráulicos. O coro é constituindo por um corpo vivo e sonoro. Esse corpo se expressa por meio de vários estados físicos. Sua plasticidade varia de acordo com sua sonoridade. Varia entre sons abstratos, sons repetitivos e sons líricos ou narrativos. Os corpos dos cantores e suas vozes brincam com e contra a gravidade. Eles se tocam e se evitam, criando polifonias vocais sutis. Ou, apoiados por sons eletrônicos, rompem sua coesão e explodem em um voo lírico ou se dobram em um ritual obsessivo e sombrio. O órgão viaja da vida à morte em uma alegoria robótica onde a complexidade tecnológica e o lirismo dos corpos em movimento se combinam em uma obra com acentos prometéicos.
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Pendulum Choir is an original choral piece for 9 A Cappella voices and 18 hydraulic jacks. The choir is constituted by a living and sonorous body. This body expresses itself through various physical states. Its plasticity varies according to its sound. It varies between abstract sounds, repetitive sounds and lyrical or narrative sounds. The singers’ bodies and their voices play with and against gravity. They touch and avoid each other, creating subtle vocal polyphonies. Or, supported by electronic sounds, they break their cohesion and explode in a lyrical flight or bend in an obsessive and dark ritual. The organ travels from life to death in a robotic allegory where technological complexity and the lyricism of moving bodies combine in a work with Promethean accents.

TOSHIO IWAI

Piano
Iwai’s Piano — As Image Media (1995), a later sound work, is related to these early interactive experiments. Here the user, seated at the piano, triggers a flow of images that depress the piano’s keys; a consequence of this action releases yet another flight of images. The resulting interactive installation synthesizes two different aesthetics: sounds (simple melodies), images and a mechanical object (the piano) with digital media. A projected score and computer-generated imagery transform the piano into image media, hence the work’s name. Sound is the triumphant component in these works, for it activates and shapes the visual work. But the visual aspect of Iwai’s installations is lovely. His interactive systems appeal to the creative impulses of adults and children alike with their celebration of animation, computer potential, and the joy of sound.07

James Bridle

The Right to Flight

A Londres, l’installation aérienne «The Right to Flight» de l’artiste britannique James Bridle explore la notion de surveillance depuis les airs et revient sur les utopies dévoyées des premiers aérostats.
Dans le ciel limpide de Londres flotte depuis le mois de juin un étrange ballon noir. Localisé dans le quartier populaire de Peckham, dans le sud de la ville, il est arrimé au niveau supérieur d’un parking désaffecté, vaisseau brutaliste dont les deux derniers étages hébergent depuis huit ans Bold Tendencies, un projet artistique estival, ainsi qu’un bar de plein air très couru avec une vue stupéfiante sur la skyline londonienne.Connu pour ses projets sur les drones ou son blog de recherche The New Aesthetic, James Bridle, né en 1980, a aussi posé sur le toit du parking une station de recherche expérimentale explorant l’histoire des aérostats, via des ateliers, des conférences et projections. Constituée de trois modules circulaires, fabriqués à partir de silos de grains lestés par des sacs de sable, l’architecture évoque tout à la fois les hangars des compagnies aériennes et la maison en kit Dymaxion de Buckminster Füller

 

Liam Young & John Cale

Loop 60 Hz: Transmissions from the Drone Orchestra
A flock of autonomous DJI copters are programmed as aerial dancers and are mounted with specially engineered wireless speakers to broadcast the instruments of the band. Other copters are dressed in elaborate costumes to disguise their form and reflect light across the audience below. Against a score of original compositions and selected tracks from Cale’s seminal career this collaboration with Young imagines the possibilities of the drones as emerging cultural objects. If these technologies are no longer unseen objects overhead, or propelled along classified flight paths but brought into close and intimate relations with us then how might we see them differently. When their transmission fades, when the drones lose their signal and without their protocols for terror and surveillance, do they drop from the sky, do they fall in love or do the drones drift endlessly, forever on loop.

Nicole L’Huillier and Sands Fish

Telemetron
Nicole L’Huillier and Sands Fish decided to explore how design and creativity might evolve as we begin to do more than merely survive in space. The Telemetron is a unique musical instrument that takes advantage of the poetics of zero gravity, and opens a new field of musical creativity. The project attempts to expand expression beyond the limits of Earth-based instruments and performers. Leveraging sensors, data transmission and capture (for performance after flight), as well as their experience as composers and performers, Sands and Nicole explore a new body language for music.

Marshmallow Laser Feast

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.

TOMÁS SARACENO

توماس ساراسينو
托马斯·萨拉切诺
トマスサラセーノ
SOLAR BELL
Inspired by Alexander Graham Bell’s lesser-known experiments with flight behavior of tetrahedrons, Berlin-based artist Tomas Saraceno developed Solar Bell – a lightweight, wind and solar powered, sculpture that plays with the concept of flying buildings.

Wow

Beyond Cassini
“BEYOND CASSINI” uses this narrative to celebrate the accomplishments of one of the most successful and beloved Satellites in space exploration history. As Cassini begins its final flight into Saturn’s upper atmosphere with a mission of disintegration, visuals flash back through time giving viewers highlights of this dying satellite’s life.

Sanja Marusic

Moonflight
The fashion short was inspired by the symbolic abstract forms and geometric shapes of the avant- gardist Triadic ballet. Sanja Marusic simplied bodily shapes by substituting them with cylinders and circles, she made her own costumes and then abstracted the human form even further by incorporating stylised dance movements by filming herself dancing. The result is a surrealist symbiosis of the human body moving through time and space.

Tomas Saraceno

توماس ساراسينو
托马斯·萨拉切诺
トマスサラセーノ
Aerocene

In the desert of New Mexico, artist Tomás Saraceno realized the very first human flight in a zero carbon solar-powered hot air balloon, propelled by Studio Tomás Saraceno and curated by Rob La Frenais. For three hours without touching the ground, the balloon rose into the air without the usual burner, its black fabric heated by the sun and the infrared rays reflected by the white dunes.
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Cod.Act

振り子の合唱団
Pendulum Choir

Pendulum Choir is an original choral piece for 9 A Cappella voices and 18 hydraulic jacks. The choir stands on tilting platforms, constituting a living, sonorous body. That body expresses itself through various physical states. Its plasticity varies at the mercy of its sonority. It varies between abstract sounds, repetitive sounds, and lyrical or narrative sounds. The bodies of the singers and their voices play with and against gravity. They brush and avoid each other creating subtle vocal polyphonies. Or, supported by electronic sounds, they break their cohesion and burst into lyrical flight or fold up into an obsessional and dark ritual. The organ travels from life to death in a robotic allegory where the technological complexity and the lyricism of the moving bodies combine into a work with Promethean accents.

Robert Battle

Роберт битва
No Longer Silent

Robert Battle’s dramatic ensemble work No Longer Silent, set to Erwin Schulhoff’s percussive score “Ogelala,” features dancers evoking a complex and mysterious ritual. Originally created in 2007 for The Juilliard School, Battle’s alma mater, the work was part of a concert of choreography that brought to life long-forgotten scores by composers whose work the Nazis had banned. Powerful phrases stir the imagination with images of flight and fatigue, chaos and unity, and collectivity and individualism as dancers, clad in all black, travel in military rows.

lera auerbach

ICARUS
The National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain
conducted by Mark Wigglesworth
“What makes this myth so touching is Icarus’s impatience of the heart, his wish to reach the unreachable, the intensity of the ecstatic brevity of his flight and inevitability of his fall. If Icarus were to fly safely – there would be no myth. His tragic death is beautiful. It also poses the question – from Deadalus‘ point of view – how can one distinguish success from failure? Deadalus‘ greatest invention, the wings which allowed a man to fly, was his greatest failure as they caused the death of his son. Deadalus was brilliant, his wings were perfect, but he was also a blind father who did not truly understand his child.” LERA AUERBACH

SRULI RECHT

Masked – In Flight
“Masked in Flight” is a project by Iceland’s Sruli Recht that studies what kind of masks air travelers might wear — travelers that wanted to look like serial killers and creepy stormtroopers, that is. Would you feel comfortable on a plane with the person next to you wearing something like this?

SARAH BUCHANAN

سارة بوكانان
Empire of the Clouds is a dramatic futuristic representation of aviation achievements, throughout the past, present and future. Inspired by the true design innovation and achievement from machines of flight throughout the entirety of the concept. Focusing on model making to gain a unique perspective and develop an understanding of the overwhelming human drive, almost obsession, to achieve what we cannot do naturally, to fly. Passionate about research Buchanan has a meticulous attitude towards uncovering all elements in a concept. In this collection it enabled a distinctive perspective to a large subject, creating a concept based around model making and accessibility of a globally collective dream.

LUCAS SAMARAS

Лукас Самарас
卢卡斯·萨马拉斯
لوكاس ساماراس
ルーカスサマラス
루카스 사마라스
Chair

Since the 1960s, Lucas Samaras has devoted his art to the evocation of an intensely private, obsessional, sometimes hallucinatory realm. Among the many motifs that occur in his work, the chair is especially prominent. The “Chair Transformation” series has included provocative sculptures executed in a variety of materials including wood, wire mesh, and mirrored glass. Throughout the series, Samaras transforms the ordinary object into a fantastical one, evoking a dreamlike metamorphosis. Here the artist suggests an animated flight of stacked chairs. A deceptively simple form, the sculpture appears from different viewpoints to be upright, leaning back, or springing forward.

FABIEN GIRAUD AND RAPHAEL SIBONI

THE OUTLAND
The Outland is a large black box, perched atop hydraulic legs, that bounces and dives unpredictably, shudders and shakes, tips and wobbles, to the point you might be afraid it will fall over. It is in fact a flight simulator ride, with no door and no external markings. As soon as you learn that, the box becomes more and more intriguing, inciting imaginary flight paths as you try to reconcile the visible movement of the box with what sort of vision the imaginary audience inside would be experiencing.

CHOE U-RAM

チェ·ウラム
Cakra Lamp

CHOE U-RAM’s work engages a fanciful dialog of aesthetics and machinery and explores themes of biological transformation, flight, and movement. In his recent work, large-scale metal and plastic automata materialize with such a delicacy and weightlessness that it seems to take on the shape and silhouette of an organic life form. Motors, heat and light sensitive materials add to the intricacy of Choe’s kinetic sculptures.

JOEL TAUBER

In the 11th century, an English monk named Eilmer believed that the secret of flight was metaphysical. Prayer not science would enable him to fly. Eilmer thought that wings were useful only as mystical tools. Their physical properties were irrelevant. When Eilmer’s wings and prayers helped him believe he could fly, Eilmer leapt from the top of Malmesbury Abbey. Eilmer flew for more than a furlong… but then he crashed. He was crippled for the rest of his life.

KISS & CRY

NanoDanses
FILE FESTIVAL

All the people we meet during our life time – what happens to them? An old woman’s memories of her past loves come to life in this magical miniature world. The gentle, melancholy story unfolds in real time before the audience through dance and live film. A set of highly expressive dancing fingers take centre stage. Choreographer Michèle Anne De Mey and film director Jaco Van Dormael have given their imaginations free flight. The projected miniature world that forms this ”nano performance” captures every nuance of human emotion. The audience also have the opportunity to follow, step by step, the making of the live film. The carefully crafted, diminutive stage settings are brilliantly expressive.

ART+COM

Mobility
The installation spans a corridor of 7-metres width. On the left wall one hundred prosthetic hands arranged in a matrix revolve around their own vertical axis, the movements being controlled by motors. The mirrors they hold reflect the beam of a strong light across the space and onto the opposite wall. What initially seems like an asynchronous, chaotic pattern of movement soon reveals itself as a complex, computational choreography: at first the hundred light spots move around a central point, akin to the celestial dynamics of the planets or the flight pattern of a swarm of insects and creating the impression of a three-dimensional space. Then suddenly this organic oscillation converges to form a Chinese character denoting movement and action.

USMAN HAQUE & NATALIE JEREMIJENKO

ウスマン·ハック
Flightpath

“Flightpath Toronto’s swarms of flying people experiment with an urban-scale participatory proposition: one that demonstrates the pleasures of emissionless urban mobility and creates a shared memory of a possible future. Flightpath Toronto is a collaboration between Usman Haque, architect/artist and Natalie Jeremijenko, engineer/artist, uniting his expertise in participatory urban spectacle with her expertise in bird flight and urban natural systems.”A panoramic 4-loop animation showed imaginative 3D-generated city featured some art projects by Usman Haque and Natalie Jeremijenko from a “flyer” ‘s point of view. Images of the art projects gradually appeared in each loop.

DILLER + SCOFIDIO

The Blur Building (an architecture of atmosphere)
The Blur Building is a media pavilion for Swiss EXPO 2002 at the base of Lake Neuchatel in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland.From piles in the water, a tensegrity system of rectilinear struts and diagonal rods cantilevers out over the lake. Ramps and walkways weave through the tensegrity system, some of them providing a counterweight for the structure. The form is based on the work of Buckminster Fuller.The pavilion is made of filtered lake water shot as a fine mist through 13,000 fog nozzles creating an artificial cloud that measures 300 feet wide by 200 feet deep by 65 feet high. A built-in weather station controls fog output in response to shifting climatic conditions such as temperature, humidity, wind direction, and wind speed.The public can approach Blur via a ramped bridge. The 400 foot long ramp deposits visitors at the center of the fog mass onto a large open-air platform where movement is unregulated. Visual and acoustical references are erased along the journey toward the fog leaving only an optical “white-out” and the “white-noise” of pulsing water nozzles. Prior to entering the cloud, each visitor responds to a questionnaire/character profile and receives a “braincoat” (smart raincoat). The coat is used as protection from the wet environment and storage of the personality data for communication with the cloud’s computer network. Using tracking and location technologies, each visitor’s position can be identified and their character profiles compared to any other visitor.In the Glass Box, a space surrounded by glass on six sides, visitors experience a “sense of physical suspension only heightened by an occasional opening in the fog.” As visitors pass one another, their coats compare profiles and change color indicating the degree of attraction or repulsion, much like an involuntary blush – red for affinity, green for antipathy. The system allows interaction among 400 visitors at any time.Visitors can climb another level to the Angel Bar at the summit. The final ascent resembles the sensation of flight as one pierces through the cloud layer to the open sky. Here, visitors relax, take in the view, and choose from a large selection of commercial waters, municipal waters from world capitals, and glacial waters. At night, the fog will function as a dynamic and thick video screen.

HANNES VAN SEVEREN

“Hannes Van Severen makes the connection between reality and imagination in his work. The artist starts with an existing, everyday object, usually a piece of furniture, which he then transforms and changes. In this way, he deprives the object of its original functionality and allows its aesthetic value to prevail. As a result, the original usefulness of the everyday object no longer predominates, but his work nevertheless continues to be a visual reference to the original. With this paradoxical construction, Hannes Van Severen creates a fictitious world of images with alternative, intrinsic meanings and potential. The observer has to let go of the explanatory and allow his or her imagination to take flight. In combination with the personal experience of the observer, a richer dimension of the reality experienced will emerge with the new reading and interpretation of things that are apparently obvious. With this transformation, Van Severen wants to break down our recognition, to question the obviousness of our reality, and to show us the absurdity that surrounds us. Like the cubists and the surrealists, the artist divides into pieces and rearranges  an existing reality, which means that he can be described as a saboteur of the obvious.” Stef Van Bellingen