Useless Hands

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

When our hands become useless, what will we choose to do with them? We can use AI to visualize the unthinkable, the strangely familiar yet indescribable forms and structures. Generative AI could be used as an amplifier of our ability to explore abstraction and surrealism rather than a simple mirror of our usual perceptions.

Bio

Infratonal is an artistic project led by Louk Amidou, a Paris-based multidisciplinary artist who works at the intersection of digital arts, electronic music and interaction design. He uses algorithms to create hybrid visual and sound pieces which aim to be performed by the human gesture as intangible instruments. He questions the artwork’s nature at the age of AI and the relationship between the artist and the algorithm.

StickMan
StickMan is a minimal but full-body exoskeleton that algorithmically actuates the artist with 6 degrees-of-freedom. It is a gesture generating system capable of 64 possible combinations. Sensors on StickMan generate sounds that augment the pneumatic noise and register the limb movements. A ring of 6 speakers directs and circulates the sounds.

Inextinguishable fire
The title of the piece references Harun Farocki’s 1969 film of the same name, which approaches the impossible task of effectively depicting the horror of napalm on film. Cassils’s gesture of self-immolation speaks to both the desire for–and the impossibility of–knowing such horror, even while decisively aiming to approach it. Though the stunt is a simulation of violence, it still presents real danger. This possibly volatile situation–and the attempt to control it–is captured to create an image where danger, empathy for those experiencing violence, and the privilege of removal from such circumstance operate simultaneously in one transparent performance.

Blooming
“Blooming” is an interactive audiovisual installation that highlights the importance of human connection. It takes the form of a life-size 3D Cherry blossom tree, which is a common symbol of social ties and transience of life in East Asian culture. As a response to participants’ skin-to-skin contacts, heart rate, and gestures, “Blooming” blossoms according to their intimacy. As audience members hold hands or embrace, the digital Cherry tree flowers bloom and scatter. When they let go off their physical contacts, the flower return to its pre-bloom state. The color of the flowers turns white or red based on participants’ heart rate as they interact with each other. (the faster the heart rate, the redder the tonality; the slower the heart rate, the whiter the tonality). In addition to the visual responses, sounds are also modulated according to the tree’s different stages: pre-bloom, blooming, petals falling.

gesture/data
Ken Okiishi（生于 1978 年，美国）在不同的媒体系统中工作。他的作品在物质和记忆、感知和行动、图像网络和语言系统、技术和情感之间不安地徘徊。无论是通过视频、文本、绘画、物品甚至货币，他都反复煽动“现实世界”失去连贯性和代表性方案崩溃的时刻。

The willful marionette
the willful marionette (2014) was created by artists Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcault during a residency with the University of North Carolina Charlotte, working with the College of Computing and Informatics as well as the College of Art and Architecture. The marionette is 3d printed from the scanned image of a human figure and responds engagingly in real time to spontaneous human gestures by reading a viewer’s movements and expressions. Its strings are manipulated by motors and software and there are two depth sensors that read and analyze the behaviors and gestures of participants. The puppet’s subsequent actions are designed to elicit further responses, creating an exchange focusing on the frailty and insecurities of the human participant and raising issues of contemporary relevance. The intention of the project was not to create so much a perfectly functioning robot but rather to imbue an obviously mechanically actuated marionette with the ability to solicit a physical and emotional dialog with a viewer.

光
光正在使用高精度激光在屏幕上绘制连续的抽象形状，并与声音完美同步。强烈的光线与完全的黑暗形成对比，缓慢的动作和微小细节的演化与强而有力的手势一样重要。结果既是古朴的又是未来主义的。新兴的模式为许多可能的解释留出了空间。象形文字，一种未知语言的符号，建筑图纸，数据点之间的连接或类似Tron的早期视频游戏放大了1000倍。

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Light

Light is using high-precision lasers to draw continuous abstract shapes on the screen, perfectly synchronized with the sound. Intense light contrasts with total darkness, and slow movements and the evolution of small details are as important as strong gestures. The result is both quaint and futuristic. Emerging models leave room for many possible explanations. Hieroglyphs, symbols in an unknown language, architectural drawings, connections between data points, or early video games like Tron are magnified 1,000 times.

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Lumière

La lumière utilise des lasers de haute précision pour dessiner des formes abstraites continues sur l’écran, parfaitement synchronisées avec le son. La lumière forte contraste avec l’obscurité totale, le ralenti et l’évolution des petits détails sont aussi importants que les gestes forts. Le résultat est à la fois pittoresque et futuriste. Les modèles émergents laissent place à de nombreuses explications possibles. Les hiéroglyphes, les symboles dans une langue inconnue, les dessins d’architecture, les connexions entre les points de données ou les premiers jeux vidéo comme Tron sont agrandis 1 000 fois.

随机国际
future self

‘future self’ is a study in human movement. the installation captures movement in light to create a three dimensional ‘living sculpture’ based on the composite gestures surrounding it, mirroring the actions of those who pass around it. entirely hand-made, 30,000 LED lights line the brass rods which are arranged to create a structure reminiscent of a rectangular prism, 3D cameras record people’s motions which are expressed through a ghostly, illuminated image, constantly changing.

Please Smile
File Festival
“Please smile” is an exhibit involving five robotic skeleton arms that change their gestures depending on a viewer’s facial expressions. It consists of a microcontroller, a camera, a computer, five external power supplies, and five plastic skeleton arms, each of them with four motors. It incorporates elements from mechanical engineering, computer vision perception, to serve artistic expression with a robot.

توماس هيرشهورن
托马斯·赫塞豪恩
תומס הירשהורן
トーマス·ヒルシュホルン
abschlag

Thomas Hirschhorn’s “Abschlag” installation, which occupies the first room on the main floor, offers a lesson in how not to engage with the Russian milieu: the Swiss artist constructed part of a typical Petersburg apartment block out of cardboard inside the full-height space, ripped off its façade, and deposited the refuse at its base, revealing shabby interiors lined with original avant-garde masterpieces (on loan from the nearby Russian Museum) by the likes of Malevich and El Lissitky. The references allude to a politically radical Russian past; the construction debris acts as a metaphor for history. Though Hirschhorn suggests a recovery of the revolutionary communist spirit of the 1920s, he falls prey to a historically revisionist fetish: citing the Russian avant-garde as a generative point for vanguard culture in the West, and offering it as a source for renewed progressivism in Russia. Hirschhorn seems woefully unaware of the Putin government’s branding campaign, one that aims to sell the Russian avant-guard as a nationalist movement in line with the regime’s own values (perhaps he didn’t watch the Sochi opening ceremony). Hirschhorn ultimately proves Zhilayev right — with its political pretenses, “Abschlag” aspires to make a grand gesture against conservatism, but fails because its critique has already been co-opted..
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Intuit
The movements of one individual effect the balance of the piece so greatly that the other person must move to balance the sculpture. ‘Our bodies are constantly adapting and bending to the configurations of buildings and the designs of transportation. In recent drawings, urban blueprints fuse with human anatomical representation… I emphasize on the ideas of flexibility and lightness. The machines I build serve to express the elegance of a gesture, a finite moment of equilibrium.’ Eve Bailey

ST/LL
ST/LL opens on a stage with a long set table, perpendicularly to the orchestra, under the eyes of the audience; on the sides of the table there are some chairs. On the background, coinciding with the inner extremity of the table, there is a projection screen developing vertically, like a painting that evokes the Japanese pictorial tradition. The perimeter of the stage is covered with a veil of water, in which everything reverberates. The whole visual structure of the work develops all around this diaphanous dimension. A man enters the scene and carries out actions on the table: he moves the cutlery, changes the position of the chairs, makes tiny gestures, which let the audience foretell that an action played on the visible will develop. To the sound of a metronome, two women and then a third one enter the scene and sit at the table making gestures that imitate a meal without food.

AEA.movi
Imitation is a part of being human. Eelco Brand uses both paint and digital techniques to create images that reflect his conception of nature. In this sense his works are not so much the depiction of an actual place or event, but the way he imagined it and modelled it in the calculated space of digital art. Viewing his work can be both an alienating and deeply human experience. His subjects are modelled to the utmost detail to create a kind of hyperreal cosmos, a simulacrum of nature. Still, we experience these models of forests, cars and mountains as pure conveyers of meaning. These static images speak the language of scale, light, repetition, infinite detail and the deeper meaning of a simple gesture.

WIDE/SIDE
WIDE/SIDE is an interactive installation in which shapes, images, and sounds are joined and interdependent. A visually engaging block, captivating in its monochromatic conception and minimalist lines, serves as a projection screen and teems with conglomerations of lines and shapes. As a result the installation is always changing and acquiring countless different forms.
The individual forms of the projections in reality are based on the surrounding environment, responding to the movements and gestures of the viewers. Visitors and passersby therefore themselves become part of the work and define its appearance.

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

Ghost Pole Propagator II
Ghost Pole Propagator captures and replays the ‘skeletons‘ of passersby in its environment, creating a layered and dynamic tapestry that reflects the history and activity of a locale. Presenting a universal communication of presence, attitude and gesture, the stick-figures this artwork generates are compact and expressive means of representing the human form. The format of the work is variable; in some presentations, the project serves as a kind of ‘interpretive monitoring station’ for nearby pedestrian traffic.

Ad Infinitum
Ad infinitum is a parasitical entity which lives off human energy. It lives untethered and off the grid. This parasite reverses the dominant role that mankind has with respect to technologies: the parasite shifts humans from “users” to “used”. Ad infinitum co-exists in our world by parasitically attaching electrodes onto the human visitors and harvesting their kinetic energy by electrically persuading them to move their muscles. The only way a visitor can be freed is by seducing another visitor to sit on the opposite chair and take their place. Being trapped in the parasite’s cuffs means getting our muscles electrically stimulated in order to perform a cranking motion as to feed it our kinetic energy. This reminds us that, in the cusp of artificially thinking machines, we are no longer just “users”; the shock we feel in our muscles, the involuntary gesture, acknowledges our intricate relationship to uncanny technological realm around us.

Specimen Box

The OCR began work on Specimen Box in 2014 at the request of Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit. Microsoft’s Cybercrime Center monitors communications coming from hundreds of millions of PCs around the world that have become infected by botnet malware. Employing data sonification together with advanced visualization techniques, Specimen Box provides a configurable multi-sensory presentation of botnet signal activity in real time. It also features a multitouch gesture-based interface for navigating, exploring, selecting, and examining the billions of signals that have previously been collected. Users can access the collected signals based on their activity levels, the geographic locations of their sources, or their daily activity patterns over time, using clustering to group sources with similar behavior.

Penwald: 2: 8 circles: 8 gestures
Se trata de creación a través del cuerpo, el movimiento y la acción. Podríamos decir que lo que muestra es más una acción que una exposición. Así, presentará una performance de creación plástica en directo, que deja sobre el papel un dibujo espectacular. Las dos obras de su actuación se enmarcan dentro del proyecto artístico en el que está trabajando, Penwald drawings. Su técnica: grafito en mano y utilizar las posibilidades de movimiento de su cuerpo, ya sea tumbado, con las rodillas o involucrando todo el cuerpo en su obra.

the double

The gestures in the performance are inspired by gargoyle, a legendary stone-carved grotesque with a spout that normally is designed to convey water from a roof. Mouth serves as the opening for food intake and in the articulation of sound and speech. However, when performers wear the mouthpieces, or when women’s mouth is forced to open, the mouth loses its function. In fact, it silences and disables the women because they are unable to talk when their mouths are widely pulled open. This performance explores another side of the unseen and unspoken—the vulnerability, struggle, shame, and suffering that we are uneasy to share and expose.
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Field of Infinity

Inspired by both Italian Renaissance paintings and contemporary news broadcasts of protests at the border of Gaza with Israel – the work processes human gestures and figures in a landscape into a dark and colorful mix, opening up a series of reflections on the political image, the image of the political, the politics of the image, and the image of the image.

file sao paulo 2019 videoart

Electro-cución
“I am fascinated with the physicality of low-tech manual devices and mechanical systems. I am aroused by their shapes, sounds, and gestures, which are beautiful descriptions of their own functions. Industrial materials—stainless steel, aluminum, titanium, plastics, and rubbers—seduce me. Artifacts of disappearing industry, I find strange and beautiful shapes in their debris that allude to sexual operations, violent actions, mysterious purposes. Their potential triggers my thought process.”

Flowers for Africa
Flowers For Africa the artist mined archives related to African de-colonization to compile a list of flowers associated with individuals, nations and/or resistance movements; an image library that became the basis for meticulous sculptural recreations of individual flowers, or entire bouquets. As Kapwani described of the series, in a statement that reads as apt in relation to her overall approach: “What I’m trying to do is to acquaint myself with these various historic times, and questions, and more generally an interest I have in power dynamics. With this project I have chosen to look from the African continent at these global questions of power dynamics. This project is a way for me to acquaint myself with different archives, consulting documents and simply pondering on those moments. In this process, this was the most natural gesture which emerged”

INposition
In the photo project INposition (2013), which was shot by a Hasselblad 501CM camera, she’s using playful manipulation of physical fragments to express existentialism or the limits of body and mind. Anna Horcinova staged her models – mostly dancers in physically difficult dance poses expressing an emotional state of mind together with a gesture. And with the help of the body she tries to cross the imperceptible boundaries between her subject and the world around it.

NETWORK
Sara Schnadt explores technology in her work both as subject and media. Her installations and performances use found objects, interactivity, projection, spatial illusions, and movement derived from common gestures. Much of her work involves representations or data that translate large quantities of socially resonant information into poetic forms, including data visualization. Schnadt often performs within accompanying sculptural environments, or sites works within functioning everyday spaces, attempting to articulate the personal within virtual and technological innovation.

Structures by Catherine Wales were inspirational when it comes to the aspect of percieving space around the body. They are fragile, but three dimensional. Despite not being very spectacular in terms of texture of colour they are eye-catching because of the shapes they create. They embrace the space around the body and therefore somehowe extend the personal space of the person who wears it. Michal Strach added movement to it and put life into the jewelery, but also an interesting interaction between the object and the wearer, as it makes the piece different with every gesture.

Джоан Джонас
جوان جوناس
조안 조나스
ジョーン・ジョナス
Joan Jonas, believing that sculpture and painting were exhausted mediums, became known for her pioneering work in performance and video art. Jonas, who studied sculpture and art history, was deeply influenced by the work of Trisha Brown, with whom she studied dance, as well as John Cage and Claes Oldenburg, particular in their exploration of non-linear narrative structure and form. Jonas’s own work has frequently engaged and questioned portrayals of female identity in theatric and self-reflexive ways, using ritual-like gestures, masks, mirrors, and costumes.

Parades & Changes
Parades & Changes, replays is a full scale re-creation of the masterpiece Parades & Changes, a major 1965 work of American postmodern dance legend Anna Halprin. The provocative Parades & Changes, Halprin’s first “collective creation” dynamited the codes dominating dance by exposing the process of performance: improvising around several “scores,” dancers dress and undress, inventing gestures and vanishing naked in rolls of skin colored paper. This “ceremony of trust,” as it was named by Halprin, seeks to utilize dance as a medium for being together: her prolific composition addresses the process, the place, the action, and the performer as both unique and corresponding entities.

ВИЛЛИ ВЕРДЖНЕРА
意大利雕塑家
ciuria de foies
These lifelike sculptures are typically carved from solid linden wood then painted with acrylic paint. Their subtle but strange gestures coupled with unexpected objects give the sculptures a quietly surreal atmosphere. Verginer’s peculiar style of painting his work adds to each piece’s enigmatic quality. Rather than realistically paint each individual detail, Verginer applies large swaths of color to his sculptures. The pieces nearly seem to be dipped in pools of pigment. These large fields of color work in contrasting against the realism of each sculpture.

cinematique
An invitation to journey, daydream and idle away, while rediscovering the childhood fantasies hidden in each one of us. An invitation to shake up the rational principles that guide us today in our modern existence. Afloat a raft voyaging across virtual materials and through landscapes. Lines, points, letters and digital objects projected on plain surfaces weave through poetic surfaces, marrying body and gesture.

falling star
“The role of translation, the passage between gesture, body and voice, the shift from Chinese into English and back again, the relationship between performance and prints this is the sense contained within my work. Always movement across surfaces, entering and exiting backwards and forwards therefore I cannot settle on any one point. I am in flux, restless: a pure relationship between motion and the void.”

24 drones
24 Drones is a video demonstration of the incredible drones made by Rhizomatiks and their ability to move around 3d space in ways never before seen. With intricate sensor systems both on the drones and in the room the drones are constantly checking their surroundings and mapping them in order to move without colliding with each other or a speaker who stands in the middle of the swarm of drones directing them with gestures and movements. The movement of the drones is not only controlled and safer than ever, the drones awareness of their surroundings makes them appear conscious and gives them a sense of personality.

Automultiscopic 3D displays
Automultiscopic 3D displays allow a large number of viewers to experience 3D content simultaneously without the hassle of special glasses or head gear. This display uses a dense array of 216 video projectors to generate images with high angular density over a wide field of view. As users move around the display, their eyes smoothly transition from one view to the next. The display is ideal for displaying life-size human subjects, as it allows for natural personal interactions with 3D cues such as eye-gaze and spatial hand gestures.

Digits
File Festival
“Digits” is a single player wall projection installation game using a multi-touch tablet (iPad) as a controller. The game consists of moving a puppet using a set of dials.
The player can manipulate the dials on the tablet by performing a rotational gesture with the finger, which will rotate the joints of the puppet on the wall projection. Multiple dials can be rotated at the same time.
If the player lifts his fingers from the touch screen, the joints and limbs of the puppet will gradually fade and loosen his articulations. Because the puppet is subject to gravity, the player has to time the joint rotations in order to coordinate the movements of the puppet.

Monkey Business
file festival

A cuddly toy monkey, hanging on a wall like a Jumping Jack. With a friendly hello the puppet starts to react to the visitor’s movements and immediately apes every gesture with its arms and legs, its head and body. You can let the ape act smoothly or invite him to a wild dace.
But in a subtle way the monkey asks for another move you have never ever performed before. Playing the game you will lose control unconsciously and after the seductive encounter you might start wondering: What is all this monkey business about? Who pulls the strings?

Cloud.data
Created by Aaajiao (Xu Wenkai), a media artist based in Shanghai, cloud.data is an iPhone/iPad app installation inspired by an ancient legend. Using different touch gestures you get to control the passing cloud formations. Single tap allows you to redirect them, double to change their size and three finger drag to adjust opacity. The app is an interactive incarnation of the processing installation Aaajiao created in 2009 (see images).

吴珏辉
Hand Gesture

ШЕН ВЕЙ
שן וויי
沉伟
folding
Folding will irk those who view modern dance as a grounded form of ballet. But for those who consider the simplest gesture worthy of exploration as a dance, and who relish in costume design and the slow progression of what feels like figures in friezes breaking free from the confines of their molds, much like Michelangelo’s “slaves,” Folding is an enthralling, gorgeous sci-fi spectacle. The entire event carries a regal air, as if commissioned by Star Wars Queen Amidala.

Protest

“Protest” is from the project, “Misbehaving: Media Machines Act Out”(2002-2007), a series of mechanical girls’ legs, each with their own prescribed and programmed behavior. In each tableau, an electronically controlled, mechanical being protests with a voice of erratic physical gestures and projected video imagery. As a combination of robotics and performance, they represent girls who disobey or resist expectations. Unlike machines designed for perfect job performance, these machines will declare their fallibility, impatience, approval, and disapproval through small gestural acts. In these tableaus of protest and transformation, the machine is spirited, emotional, thoughtful, and irregular. “Protest” consists of aluminum, mechanized pairs of 6 year-old girl’s legs fitted with shoes and standing on a table top. An electronic circuit and proximity sensors make her responsive to the presence of viewers for whom she stomps loudly and erratically

Silent Percussion
File Festival
The “Silent Percussion Project” (SPP) consists in building a set of computer musical instruments that use human gestures to control sounds, composing and performing with them in an attempt to re-incorporate the body in music performance practice. The “SPP” is a response to the question: what kinds of musical instruments does live computer music performance need? To answer this question it researches the aesthetic qualities and language of non-live electronic music, action-perception systems and new media theory to experiment new ways of bridging between gesture and sound. In that sense, the “SPP” looks to address the problem of sound control by introducing new sensing techniques that take advantage of our sensorimotor capabilities. The Silent Drum and MANO instruments analyze shapes made by hands and transform them into multiple streams of continuous data. These streams, or variables, are directly applied to sound control, avoiding the key paradigm. Continuous data is analyzed to extract discrete features of the signals. The variables resulting from analysis are interdependent, that is, changes in one result in changes in the others, creating complex systems that the performer learns by experimentation.

ヘザーハンセン
헤더 한센
هيذر هانسن
emptied gestures

It´s fire, you can touch it

On the other hand, an example of a work representing a difference in which the viewer is faced with participation in the event, is an installation by Yoko Ishii and Hiroshi Homura It’s fire, you can’t touch it (2007). In this work which appoints the active environment, onto the hands reached out by the participants, miniature light signs are projected—a Japanese tanka poem is running through, glyphs change form, fuse together, move. Here we deal with a poetic spectacle in which the perspective of cognitive interactivity, set off in contact with poetry, is complemented by tactile sensations and poems themselves are as if extracted from the environment by interactive gestures of receivers-readers.

جنيفر روبل
제니퍼 루벨
ジェニファールベル
Portrait of the Artist

Jennifer Rubell, the American artist and niece of Studio 54 co-founder Steve Rubell, brings a maternal touch to this year’s Frieze Art Fair with her autobiographical piece Portrait of the Artist. The pristine white nude, cast from steel-reinforced fibreglass, reclines like an odalisque at the Stephen Friedman Gallery stand. The sculpture is a replica of Rubell’s own eight-months-pregnant body, except it is eight metres high: the large belly, which is carved out to leave an egg-shaped void, can accommodate a fully grown adult. Spectators are able to clamber into the artwork and curl up inside as if they are the artist’s unborn child.Rubell’s intention was to create a monumental gesture of unconditional motherly love. There is a feminist statement here, too: Rubell has appropriated a style and scale historically reserved for male leaders to show, she says, “an emotion that is intensely personal and un-heroic”. The artist adds that watching members of the Frieze audience enter in the sculpture’s womb is “tremendously satisfying” – in her eyes the enlarged form was “incomplete until the first viewer entered”. Amid the hustle of Frieze’s mini-city there is something undeniably appealing about the opportunity to put your feet up in the foetal position in the name of art. Not to mention the comfort factor.

Glow
Glow is an illuminating 30-minute choreographic essay by Artistic Director Gideon Obarzanek and interactive software creator Frieder Weiss. Beneath the glow of a sophisticated video tracking system, a lone organic being mutates in and out of human form into unfamiliar, sensual and grotesque creature states. Utilising the latest in interactive video technologies a digital landscape is generated in real time in response to the dancer’s movement. The body’s gestures are extended by and in turn manipulate the video world that surrounds it, rendering no two performances exactly the same.

Габриэлла Мелдайкайт
Multi Touch Gestures

カロリナ・ソアベッカ
Каролина Собечка
sniff
File festival

Karolina Sobecka is a Polish artist that works with animation, design, interactivity, computer games and other media. Her work often engages public space and explores ways in which we interact with the world we create. Sniff is an interactive projection in a storefront window. When motion is detected along the sidewalk in front of the display, a virtual dog appears and responds the person’s behavior and gestures. The passerby’s movements are tracked by a computer vision system, and the dog behaves differently depending on how he is engaged. Like a real canine, big swift actions are interpreted as threatening, while slow and friendly actions directed to him are interpreted as friendly. He tracks and remembers the attitude of the viewer and forms a relationship with them over time based on the history of interaction. Depending on the nature of the relationship, he may bark, growl, roll over or even play fetch.

Aquaplayne
file festival

Aquaplayne lays out a new field of expression by extending the framework for immediate experience. The horizontal plane bypasses recognition and “sets up” an interactive surface, making a play of art by providing the viewer with instant access to the creative flow. In the movement from observation to participation we interface with an intelligent canvas through the automatic rendering of action into effect. The “body in motion” plays across a field of sensation, making the ripples of possibility appear as an ever-changing artwork. Unlike the action painter, whose technique is to offload creative energy in the painterly gesture, the activator retrieves what has already been deposited as data and brings it to the surface, aquaplaning on a stream of information. The virtual is restored to the actuality of expression, brought back to life in the flux between cause and effect, between code and composition. The calibrated experience of Aquaplayne is the art of permutation, the programmed initiative played and replayed as the artwork in formation.

wearable gesture controlled arm-band

FLOATING ORCHESTRA

‘floating orchestra’ by london-based poietic studio (richard harvey and keivor stainer) is an unconventional electronic
instrument controlled by iPhone. the orchestra is composed of levitating balls whose physical height determines their volume.
although the studio intends that future renditions of the project are controlled via gestures, in the current model an iPhone
application permits users to adjust the sounds and height and angle of the raising balls.