highlike

Wayne McGregor

Atomos

Atomos grows out of the smallest unit of matter. Bodies, movement, film, sound and light are atomised into miniature shards of intense sensation.Ten incredible dancers perform the unique style of Wayne McGregor – sculptural, rigorous, jarring and hauntingly beautiful. McGregor is accompanied by a team of sensational artists including longtime collaborators lighting designer Lucy Carter and filmmaker Ravi Deepres, and neo-classical ambient composers A Winged Victory For The Sullen.

Neri Oxman

MAN-NAHĀTA
Computational growth across material and urban scales offers a framework for design through self-organization, enabling the generation of vast, diverse forms exhibiting characteristics like those that emerge through the biological growth processes found in Nature. In this project, we construct an oriented volume spanned by surface normals of the shape at every point. The value of the oriented volume drives the iterative deformation of the shape. Depending on the parameterization of this process, we can obtain distinctly different growing forms. Importantly, the emergence of these forms is driven only by the time evolution of a geometric operator acting on the shapes iteratively, thereby connecting geometry and growth through an algorithm. To form the Man-Nahata landscape, the buildings of the urban landscape are transformed through repeated morphological closing operations, where the field of influence follows a gradient from the center to the outskirts of a circular region.

THOM KUBLI

FILE SAO PAULO 2017
BLACK HOLE HORIZON
The nucleus of the installation is the invention of an apparatus resembling a ship horn. With the sounding of each tone, a huge soap bubble emerges from the horn. It grows while the tone sounds, peels off the horn, lingers through the exhibition space and finally bursts at an erratic position within the room.

JeeYoung Lee

La Vie En Rose II
“There is a saying that life is a thorny path. The title of the work, La Vie En Rose, reveals the situation paradoxically. Life doesn’t always go as planned. Going forward in life can be a struggle comparable to walking through impenetrable brambles in a dark forest. Here, both big and small difficulties we face on our journey are evoked by the thorns growing out of the walls. These elements also recall the my childhood memories in the countryside, picking up berries and getting pricked by their thorns while the character in the work represents our own selves, as we must overcome these obstacles.
In this second version of La Vie en Rose, I wanted to express a change in the mind of the main character.” JeeYoung Lee

Jeremy Rotsztain

BECHA-KPACHA
BECHA-KPACHA is an algorithmic music video for the electronic musician COH. The song’s tittle (pronounced Vesna Krasna) was taken from an old Russian poem and roughly translates “Spring the beautiful”, though it can also mean “Spring the red.” The animation reference’s traditional Russian folk patterns, commonly known as Hohloma. In these patterns, colorful plant leaves expand and twist around one another while fruit grows along side. These patterns were a starting point for this sound-responsive animation.

Studio Roosegaarde

Grow
Daan Roosegaarde’s latest artwork GROW is an homage to the beauty of agriculture. In the world film premiere GROW appears as a luminous dreamscape of red and blue waves of light over an enormous field. GROW is inspired by scientific light recipes which improve plants’ growth and resilience. Most of the time we hardly notice the huge areas of the Earth which are literally feeding us. GROW highlights the importance of innovation in the agriculture system: How can cutting-edge light design help plants to grow more sustainably? How can we make the farmer the hero?

Stine Deja

Cold Sleep
Right now, approximately 400 human bodies are frozen at -196 degrees Celsius in America and Russia. They are dead – legally speaking. The hope is to one day defrost and resuscitate them. The procedure is controversial. Nonetheless, cryopreservation, i.e. preserving people at extreme temperatures below zero, is an area marked by growth. The condition is sometimes referred to as ‘cold sleep’, which is also the title of Stine Deja’s first solo show in Denmark at Tranen. The exhibition is an installation of kinetic sculpture and animation. Cryopreserved bodies in thermal, yellow suits are suspended in big, circular aluminium structures revolving around their own axis on small islands in a desert landscape. In the sand lie craters where artificially inseminated cells divide. A barren desert landscape is usually seen as lifeless and abstract. In Deja’s version it becomes a place for being before or after human life, or, as the artist has it, “a population in another dimension.”

STUDIO ROOSEGAARDE

Grandir
GROW, la dernière œuvre de Daan Roosegaarde, est un hommage à la beauté de l’agriculture. Dans la première mondiale du film, GROW apparaît comme un paysage onirique lumineux de vagues de lumière rouges et bleues sur un immense champ. GROW s’inspire de recettes lumineuses scientifiques qui améliorent la croissance et la résilience des plantes. La plupart du temps, nous remarquons à peine les immenses zones de la Terre qui nous nourrissent littéralement. GROW souligne l’importance de l’innovation dans le système agricole : comment une conception d’éclairage de pointe peut-elle aider les plantes à pousser de manière plus durable ? Comment faire du fermier le héros ?

Marco Barotti

The Egg
Ten thousand years ago, there were 1 million people living on the planet, fifty years ago there were 3 billion of us and, by the end of this century, we are estimated to reach a population of 10 billion people! We have modified almost every part of our planet and, as we continue to grow, our need for vital resources increases exponentially. We human beings are the main force behind every global problem we face. The work is a kinetic sound sculpture resembling an egg. The cycle of life, reflected in the shape of the sculpture with neither beginning nor end, symbolizes fertility and reproduction – and thus questions the impact of overpopulation. Driven by real-time data generated by the Worldometer, the sculpture constantly changes its shape.

Doug Aitken

Sonic Mountain
As a unique site-specific commission for the Donum Estate, Los Angeles-based artist Doug Aitken has created the ethereal work Sonic Mountain (Sonoma), three concentric circles of suspended stainless-steel pipes whose differing lengths form a wave at their base, mirroring the free Euler-Bernoulli shape that describes the chime’s frequency. Installed in the eucalyptus grove, measuring forty-five feet in diameter and twice human height, and comprising 365 chimes — one for each day of the year — Sonic Mountain (Sonoma) works with one of Donum’s most persistent elements, the Carneros breeze that cools the grapes and creates a temperate zone for growing Pinot Noir. Each day, the warm wind begins its soft whisper, rustling through the vines and trees, building in strength through the day until mid-afternoon, and then gradually diminishing in force. Known to have been used since at least the ancient Roman period in Europe and the second century in India and China, wind chimes create chance, inharmonic music. At Donum, Aitken has teamed up with his friend the composer Terry Riley to compose chords in the chimes to be played by the wind , depending on how it blows, so the lyrical work sounds throughout the estate, demonstrating the artist’s practice of making installations that synthesize many media and are never constrained by tradition.
video

numen / for use

tape sao paulo
file sao paulo 2016
Constant wrapping of pillars with a transparent adhesive tape results in a complex, amorphous surface through the process reminiscent of growing of organic forms. One line evolves into surface that forms an organic shape of extraordinary strength. The entrance of the audience inside the volume transforms the sculpture into architecture. It was practically “found” through the act of chaotic wrapping, where a one-dimensional line (“tape”) slowly turned into two-dimensional plane, which then finally curved into volume.

Troika

AVA

Ava’ is Troika’s first sculptural manifestation of their exploration of algorithms. ‘Ava’ is the physical result of emergence and self organisation brought about by ‘growing’ a sculpture through the use of a computer algorithm that imitates the emergence of life by which complexity arises from the simplest of things. As such the sculpture probes at the nature of becoming, existence and our strive to understand and replicate the complexities of life.In a landscape where our personal data is a raw material, and where we, humans, have become subordinate spectators of algorithms and a computerised infrastructure, we ask the question how much or little are we capable of influencing our surrounding reality, how much is predetermined, how much is down to chance.

Terreform ONE

PLUG-IN ECOLOGY: Urban Farm Pod with Agronomy
The Plug-In Ecology; Urban Farm Pod is a “living” cabin for individuals and urban nuclear families to grow and provide for their daily vegetable needs. It is an interface with the city, potentially touching upon urban farming, air quality levels, DIY agronomy techniques in test tubes, algal energy production, and bioluminescent light sources, to name a few possibilities. It can be outfitted with a number of optional systems to adapt to different locations, lighting conditions, and habitation requirements. While agricultural food sources are usually invisible in cities such as New York, the pod archetype turns the food system itself into a visible artifact, a bio-informatic message system, and a functional space.

PETER MOVRIN

“Movrin’s main inspiration has always been his childhood, where tradition, God and meat were the subject of everyday life. As an only son of a butcher in a small Slovenian town, surrounded by woods and bears, his growing up marked him with a roughness that he transcends in his designs with a special kind of romanticism. In this hard provincial life meat became his medium of expression, as a child he would carve steaks in a way that would appeal to his bewildered eye. There were, however, also fresh issues of Vogue magazines in the house, brought from trips to Trieste, that stirred up his imagination.” Black Sheep

mode:Niko Riam

Driessens & Verstappen

Breed
Breed (1995-2007) is a computer program that uses artificial evolution to grow very detailed sculptures. The purpose of each growth is to generate by cell division from a single cell a detailed form that can be materialised. On the basis of selection and mutation a code is gradually developed that best fulfils this “fitness” criterion and thus yields a workable form. The designs were initially made in plywood. Currently the objects can be made in nylon and in stainless steel by using 3D printing techniques. This automates the whole process from design to execution: the industrial production of unique artefacts.
Computers are powerful machines to harness artificial evolution to create visual images. To achieve this we need to design genetic algorithms and evolutionary programs. Evolutionary programs allow artefacts to be “bred”, rather than designing them by hand. Through a process of mutation and selection, each new generation is increasingly well adapted to the desired “fitness” criteria. Breed is an example of such software that uses Artificial Evolution to generate detailed sculptures. The algorithm that we designed is based on two different processes: cell-division and genetic evolution.

KATHARINA UNGER

Fazenda 432: criação de insetos
O Farm 432 permite que as pessoas se voltem contra o sistema disfuncional da produção de carne atual, cultivando sua própria fonte de proteína em casa. Após 432 horas, 1 grama de ovos de mosca se transforma em 2,4 kg de proteína de larva, larvas que se auto-coletam e caem limpas e prontas para comer em um balde de colheita.

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Farm 432: Insect Breeding

Farm 432 allows people to turn against today’s dysfunctional meat production system by growing their own source of protein at home. After 432 hours, 1 gram of fly eggs turns into 2.4 kg of larva protein, self-collecting larvae that drop clean and ready to eat in a harvest bucket.

 

Denis Villeneuve

Arrival

“Arrival’s narrative plays out in four languages: English, Mandarin, Russian and Heptapod. Though they are not spoken in the film, we learn that Louise is also fluent in Farsi, Sanskrit and Portuguese (and possibly others). The language learning process and the growing translingual bond between Louise and the heptapods forms the film’s narrative arc and the majority of its plot. Thus language, and specifically the mechanics of ←215 | 216→multilingualism, is Arrival’s central theme. Within this context, the ability to communicate across language barriers is an asset, and the flexibility to navigate new linguistic challenges is invaluable. The heptapods are pure science fiction, but serve a powerful metaphorical function. As Emily Alder (2016) writes in The Conversation, “ultimately, Arrival is less about communicating with the aliens than with each other – internationally but also individually […] The film’s message is that difference is not about body shape or colour but language, culture and ways of thinking. It’s not about erasing that difference but communicating through it”. Gemma King

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语言学习过程以及路易丝与七足动物之间越来越多的跨语言联系形成了电影的叙事弧线和大部分情节。 因此,语言,尤其是←215的机制| 216→使用多种语言是到达中心的主题

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Процесс изучения языка и растущая межъязыковая связь между Луизой и гептаподами составляют повествовательную дугу фильма и большую часть его сюжета. Таким образом, язык и, в частности, механика ← 215 | 216 → многоязычие – центральная тема Арривала.

Jonathan O’Hear, Martin Rautenstrauch & Timothy O’Hear

DAI – the Dancing Artificial Intelligence
DAI is an Artificial Intelligence artist. What this means is that it* thinks; it doesn’t follow a script or act randomly. In its first physical form, DAI is a performer and is inviting you to view its movement creation process. During the process DAI has been exploring its body and its environment, searching for ways to overcome some of the limitations that the physical world has imposed upon its virtual aspirations. This project is a reaction to the rapidly growing importance of artificial intelligence (AI) in our lives. Simple versions of AI are already everywhere, and today we are at a turning point where the first machines capable of learning through experience, like us, are making their appearance. This raises all kinds of ethical and moral issues and we want to be involved in this debate in our own way.

Thomas Feuerstein

NYMPHAE
Manna Sculpture
The sculptures MANNA MACHINE are photobioreactors in which algae (Chlorella vulgaris) grow. The tubes and hoses form a drawing in space and are used for photosynthesis, similar to the leaves of a plant. The resulting biomass is filtered, dried and processed into pigment.

ANDY LOMAS

Morphogenetic Creations
Created by a mathematician, digital artist and Emmy award winning supervisor of computer generated effects – Andy Lomas, Morphogenetic Creations is a collection of works that explore the nature of complex forms that can be produced by digital simulation of growth systems. These pieces start with a simple initial form which is incrementally developed over time by adding iterative layers of complexity to the structure.The aim is to create structures emergently: exploring generic similarities between many different forms in nature rather than recreating any particular organism. In the process he is exploring universal archetypal forms that can come from growth processes rather than top-down externally engineered design.Programmed using C++ with CUDA, the series use a system of growth by deposition: small particles of matter are repeatedly deposited onto a growing structure to build incrementally over time. Rules are used to determine how new particles are created, and how they move before being deposited. Small changes to these rules can have dramatic effects on the final structure, in effect changing the environment in which the form is grown. To create these works, Andy uses the GPU as a compute device rather than as a display device. All the data is held in memory on the GPU and various kernel functions are called to do things like apply forces to the cells, make cells split, and to render the cells using ray-tracing. The simulations and rendering for each of the different animated structures within this piece take about 12 hours to run, Andy explains. By the end of the simulations there are over 50,000,000 cells in each structure.The Cellular Forms use a more biological model, representing a simplified system of cellular growth. Structures are created out of interconnected cells, with rules for the forces between cells, as well as rules for how cells accumulate internal nutrients. When the nutrient level in a cell exceeds a given threshold the cell splits into two, with both the parent and daughter cells reconnecting to their immediate neighbours. Many different complex organic structures are seen to arise from subtle variations on these rules, creating forms with strong reminiscences of plants, corals, internal organs and micro-organisms.

STEVE WILHITE

STEVE WILHITE
R.I.P
dancing baby
GIF (JIF)
graphics interchange format

The inventor of the Gif file has revealed that the world has been mispronouncing his creation.
Steve Wilhite, who invented the Gif file in 1987, told the New York Times that the word is pronounced “jif” not “giff”.
“The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations. They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story,” he said.
The internet has reacted strongly to Wilhite’s claim, pointing to a range of evidence from the White House announcing their allegiance via a note on their Tumblr: “Animated GIFs (Hard ‘G’)”, to simple common consensus.
Others have suggested that the hard ‘G’ relates to the acronym that the word springs from, which stands for Graphical Interface Format.
The Gif has enjoyed a surge of success in the last five years thanks to Buzzfeed-style listings of puppies and kittens and ‘live-giffing’, a form of on-the-spot reporting that had its first major outing during the 2012 presidential debates.
Wilhite may be the parent of the Gif, but most agree that the creation has outgrown its creator.
When even the White House is on the other side of the debate, it seems it might be best if Wilhite concedes defeat with grace.

Walid Raad

The Atlas Group

In the late 1990s Raad created a fictional foundation called The Atlas Group in order to accommodate and contextualise his growing output of works documenting the Lebanese Civil Wars, generally dated 1975–1990. Within Atlas Group Raad produces artworks, addressing the infrastructural, societal, and psychic devastation wrought by the wars, which he then re-dates and attributes to an array of invented figures who in turn are said to have donated these works directly or by proxy to The Atlas Group archive. Regardless of original medium of the documents, Raad processes and outputs all of his work digitally consciously adding another layer of documentary intervention to his overarching fictional conceit.

Azuma Makoto

Encapsulated environmental system: Paludarium YASUTOSHI
This machine is fully equipped with a mist machine as if wrapping plants in a fog from both sides and drip feed-water system which can be activated depending on the situation in order to maintain the condition of a plant and control inside temperature and humidity. Also the cylindrical shape can fully capture the natural light by 365°angles from glasses, and it can correspond to plant growth by having the series’ largest scale of height. Fans on the ceiling play a role of wind, and a plant can listen music from the waterproofed speakers. The machine takes in essential elements – rain, wind, light and sound – by artificial means and completes a small world where its ecological cycle is condensed. It enables us to admire the beauty of the plants by not being affected by external environment.

Evelyn Bencicova & Enes Güç

Work in progress
The motionless figure of an androgynous giantess occupies almost the entire gallery space in her entangled posture. On its body and around it, small scaffolding grows upwards. But the construction site is deserted. Only the figure, which resembles an avatar, remains in a calm state. A state of “being in between”. Between day and night. Between dream and reality or even between life and death? It almost seems as if the figure is still being brought back to life. One is inclined to think of Mary Shelley, whose novel character Victor Frankenstein created an artificial human being 200 years ago – in a time of great upheaval and discovery. Today we find ourselves once again at a turning point in society and technology, which makes us question ourselves as well as platforms on which we construct our selfs… Is that what Evelyn Bencicova and Enes Güç are alluding to here?

Eve Bailey

Rising Awareness
Could one succeed in rising the level of awareness by sharpening one’s perception rather than repeating the vapid catchphrase, “raising awareness,” which has been coopted by an ever-growing money-raising industry that fails to improve our circumstances in a substantive way? Wearing a cocktail dress, I assembled a large kinetic structure made of wooden beams and ladders in front of the audience. I then walked and balanced on the twenty-foot wide structure at eight feet off the floor. Rising Awareness addresses my ongoing preoccupations about the physicality of experience, inhabiting the body, proprioception as the possible strongest sense of self, how spatial awareness correlates with overall awareness and self-awareness, how physicality enhances creativity, finding balance between gravity and groundlessness, a concept of happiness as the fullest expression of one’s particular cognitive potential, pushing boundaries, and the current irreverent politics of liability.

Broersen & Lukács

Point Cloud Old Growth
Forest on Location
In the video work Forest on Location, we see the avatar of the Iranian opera singer Shahram Yazdani walking through a forest. One moment, the forest wraps around him protectively, the next moment the trees crumble away into loose pieces of bark, or melt into a static green mass. At the same time, the forest as a whole floats around in darkness, uprooted. It is a forest without a location, except on our screen. The young man’s avatar appears to be wandering around there aimlessly. It is a wonderland that he exits from towards the end of the video, when his body slips straight through the green wall. This finally breaks the spell of the illusory forest, and everything is revealed to be no more than staged decor. But the forest does exist as a real forest, somewhere. This virtual green world is a digital back-up of Bia?owie?a Forest: the last remaining stretch of primeval low land forest that once covered much of Central Europe. Inspired by what the historian Simon Schama wrote about Bia?owie?a in Landscape and Memory (1995), Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács journeyed to Poland to capture the forest suffused by old-Germanic nostalgia and mythical atmosphere.

Szymon Kaliski

Fabfungus
FabFungus is a physical installation inspired by questions of digital life and cellular growth. FabFungus is also a computational tool for creating digital structures grown out with a simulated process. It is also a manifestation of couple of these forms, brought to physical reality through imperfect 3D printing.

Daan Brinkmann & Nenad Popov

Cellwise
Cellwise is a generative projection specifically designed for the city hall of The Hague. During the festival the city hall becomes the new habitat of a kind of ‘visual lifeform. From the façade’s neatly arranged grid of white tiles, structures of a more entropic nature emerge. Shapes start growing, bursting, dripping, crawling and creeping. Cellwise is exploring the city hall’s sterile architecture, while at the same time challenging it to look for its visual counterpoints.

Wolfgang Buttress

The Hive  Kew Gardens

“The proposal involves the idea of ​​’temporary’ in an interesting way. It uses the temporary aspect of the installation to carefully engage with the purpose and short and long-term needs of the land,” said the judges. Originally designed for the Expo 2015 from Milan, The Hive was transferred to Kew Gardens, in central London, for two years, where it was part of an event space. Designed to give visitors a glimpse into the life of working bees, the pavilion was built with 169,300 individual aluminum components equipped with hundreds of LED lights. As the meadow surrounding the structure grows, several species of plants begin to flourish, bringing with them the sounds of real bees that enhance the multi-sensory experience of the pavilion.The aesthetic and symbolic installation represents its namesake, with the aim of showing visitors the importance of protecting the honeybee.

AMY KARLE

regenerative reliquary
Leveraging the intelligence of human stem cells, she created “Regenerative Reliquary”, a bioprinted scaffold in the shape of a human hand design 3D printed in a biodegradable pegda hydrogel that disintegrates over time. The sculpture is installed in a bioreactor, with the intention that human Mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs from an adult donor) seeded onto that design will eventually grow into tissue and mineralize into bone along that scaffold.

Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau

The Interactive Plant Growing
Interactive Plant Growing is an installation that deals with the principle of the growth of virtual plant organisms and their change and modification in real time in 3D virtual space. These modifications of pre-defined “artificially living plant organisms” are mainly based on the principle of development and evolution in time. The artificial growing of program-based plants expresses the desire to discover the principle of life as defined by the transformations and morphogenesis of certain organisms. Interactive Plant Growing connects the real-time growing of virtual plants in the 3D space of the computer to real living plants, which can be touched or approached by human viewers.

Doug Rosman

Self-contained II
A neural network, trained to see the world as variations of the artist’s body, enacts a process of algorithmic interpretation that contends with a body as a subject of multiplicity. After training on over 30,000 images of the artist, this neural network synthesizes surreal humanoid figures unconstrained by physics, biology and time; figures that are simultaneously one and many. The choice of costumes and the movements performed by the artist to generate the training images were specifically formulated to optimize the legibility of the artist within this computational system. self-contained explores the algorithmic shaping of our bodies, attempting to answer the question: how does one represent themselves in a data set? Building on the first iteration of the series, the synthetic figures in self-contained II proliferate to the point of literally exploding. Through the arc of self-contained II, this body that grows, multiples, and dissolves never ceases to be more than a single body.

Charles Lindsay

CARBON
CARBON merges the aesthetics of space exploration and scientific imaging with the interpretation of abstract symbols. I’m interested in extremophiles, the origins of life on earth, and what forms sentience might assume elsewhere in the universe. Would we recognize it hovering in front of us? What began with a camera-less method I discovered while experimenting with photograms, and drawing, has grown into immersive environments including large stills, video, multi-point sound and inter-active sculptures.

NOIZ

SHIBUYA HYPER CAST. 2
Shibuya Hyper CAST. 2 is a showcase of most cutting-edge urban innovations combined into one building. Shibuya CAST., an existing development designed by noiz, has been an urban lab of mixed function and culture located in the middle of one of the hottest areas in Tokyo. This hypothetical project has started for the 5-year memorial celebration of the CAST., to project future possibility of the building, the area, our society, and potentially a form of future city. It demonstrates how cities of the future could be structured and operated. The project is based on urban studies in the area of mobility, social welfare, administration, funding, security, sustainability and more. Shibuya Hyper CAST. 2 translates the best features of vibrant downtown districts into vertical language of ever-growing cities of the future.

MONOCOLOR

Latent Space
In Latent Space fine lines weave virtual spaces around the viewers. The architecture that manifests is highly fragile — the space grows, shrinks, collapses. The acoustic dimension is also deeply spatial — slowly morphing soundscapes float around the dome, enveloping the observers in sound and image. The omnipresence of the virtual realm is transposed into the physical space of the dome to unmask the often proclaimed boundlessness of digital space. The work tests and investigates the spatial effects of the dome, which serves as a metaphor for the virtual net that always surrounds us.

Joaquin Fargas

Glaciator
Glaciator is an installation composed by one to four solar robots that help to compress and crystallize the snow, this process turns snow into ice that is fixed to the glacier mass. The mission of these robots is to help to accelerate the ice formation process on glaciers, allowing them to grow with the addition of snow, regaining the mass they lost as a result of the melting of ice. Its final mission is to raise awareness about the climate change, the melting of the ices and its consequences on the planet.

X-Architects

Architectural Constellation
To intensify the experience of visitors with the particular surrounding, X-Architects imagined “a constellation of architecture strategically placed on the vast terrain”. In fact, using the existing topography, the project puts in place dune shaped units, offering views of sabkhas. Moreover, other elements placed on the highest point of the site, grow vertically like the desert flower Cistanche Tubulosa and propose views towards the stars.

Guy Ben-Ary

CellF
“CellF is the world’s first neural synthesiser. Its “brain” is made of biological neural networks that grow in a Petri dish and controls in real time it’s “body” that is made of an array of analogue modular synthesizers that work in synergy with it and play with human musicians. It is a completely autonomous instrument that consists of a neural network that is bio-engineered from my own cells that control a custom-built synthesizer. There is no programming or computers involved, only biological matter and analogue circuits; a ‘wet-analogue’ instrument.”Guy Ben-Ary

FEDERICO DIAZ

geometric death frequency 141

The title of the piece is a pun that, with irony, alludes to the exceeding of tradition, irreconcilable dichotomy between life and death in a sculpture made, provocatively, by lifeless forms“, adds Diaz. “The line between life and none-life is more fleeing than we usually think: think about a virus that attacks a complex organism and reproduces in the same way as a micro-organism, even though it’s only an agglomerated of lifeless molecules: a natural crystal that, even though is a stone, can be born and undergo a fascinated process of growth that mimes perfectly the ways of an organic life“.

Wang & Söderström

Growth
Wang & Söderström is a Copenhagen based transdisciplinary duo composed of Swedish designer Anny Wang and architect Tim Söderström. The bridging of the physical and digital realms is a major theme in their practice and they are constantly trying to challenge the boundaries between them. Fluctuating between art and design, Wang & Söderström wants to throw out pre-existing conventions regarding the digital and put emphasis on the emotional and tactile side of materials, objects and textures to give the digital a more human-relatable quality and create more meaningful connections. “By 3D scanning elements from nature, like tree trunks, leaves and plants and mixing it with surrealistic materials and behaviors, we wanted to let them continue to grow in a digital environment.”

Lara Campos

beGrounded
beGrounded is a project that explores the relationship between humans and other living organisms, as an emotional and artistic act through textiles. It proposes an exploration of a new habitable space in the form of a woven garment with growing sprouts, as a sensorial and interactive experience.

LATURBO AVEDON

Chatrooms II
LaTurbo Avedon is a social media avatar and artist. Her work has been enabled by an ever-growing network of friends and collaborators, allowing her to participate in both online and offline exhibitions internationally. Residing entirely on digital platforms, her work ranges from character creation in video games to constructing entirely new virtual environments to inhabit.

Eduard Galkin

Eduard Galkin presents unusual architectural projects with organic modulations that can develop to infinity as a vine can mold itself to any environment; it is not necessary to have a function or an end just to be able to grow.

jon mccormack

Fifty Sisters, Series of fifty evolved digital plant images
Fifty Sisters is comprised of fifty 1m x 1m images of computer synthesised plant-forms, algorithmically “grown” from computer code using artificial evolution and generative grammars. Each plant-like form is derived from the primitive graphic elements of oil company logos.

The Farmhouse

Our Farmhouse runs on an organic life-cycle of by products inside the building, where one processes output is another processes input: Buildings create already a large amount of heat, which can be reused for plants like potatoes, nuts or beans to grow. A water-treatment system filters rain- and greywater, enriches it with nutrients and cycles it back to the greenhouses. The food waste can be locally collected in the buildings basement, turned into compost and reused to grow more food.Our Farmhouse is an attempt to reconnect people in the city with the process of growing our food.

ADAM FERRISS

“Adam Ferriss is one of those technologically-minded creatives who is able to put his ever-growing knowledge of code and processing to use building aesthetically wondrous digital art for the rest of us to enjoy. His images make me feel like I’ve just taken some psychedelics and stepped into one of those crazy houses you get in funfairs, where there are giant optical illusions on every wall and the floor keeps moving under your feet, except these are made using algorithms and coding frameworks […]”

Heather Dewey-Hagborg & Phillip Andrew Lewis

Spirit Molecule
Spirit Molecule II, engages local community members as DNA donors to be memorialized in a site-specific commission for the Broad Museum at Michigan State University, created in collaboration with University scientist Dr. Bjoern Hamberger. The work consists of a large mound of moss growing in the gallery, with four embedded cylinders containing genetic memorial plants. In this iteration we embed both human DNA and a gene for the scent of patchouli into lab-strain moss Physcomitrella patens.

Rosie Danford Phillips

Opulent Virulence
“My collection is inspired by my fascination with nature; an interpretation of the complexity and unrestrained beauty of nature, which I express through complex layering, colour and a maximalist aesthetic that takes joy in abundance and opulence. I create my own ecosystems of layered and built fabrics in knit, print and unconventional embroidery. My clothes are in a state of rewilding – I infect the silhouettes with rich colourful textiles, giving them life. I grow my embroideries over graphic and sculptural silhouettes to emphasise and contrast the organic and the built landscape.” Rosie Danford Phillips

OLAFUR ELIASSON

オラファー·エリアソン
اولافور الياسون
奥拉维尔·埃利亚松
אולאפור אליאסון
Олафур Элиассон
Infinite Staircase (Umschreibung)

Permanently installed in the atrium of an office building in Munich, two spiral staircases interlock with each other, creating a continuous loop in the form of a double helix. To plan the work, a double helix was projected onto the surface of a sphere. The heights of the steps vary slightly to compensate for the curvature of the staircases, growing shallower at the poles. Precise engineering was necessary to enable the structure to balance on one point.
The continuous loop of Umschreibung contrasts starkly with the office courtyard in Munich where it is installed. Umschreibung – which can be translated as ‘circumscription’ or ‘periphrasis’ – proposes a movement without destination, a space defined by motion rather than walls.

GUY BEN-ARY, PHILIP GAMBLEN AND STEVE POTTER

Silent Barrage

Silent Barrage has a “biological brain” that telematically connects with its “body” in a way that is familiar to humans: the brain processes sense data that it receives, and then brain and body formulate expressions through movement and mark making. But this familiarity is hidden within a sophisticated conceptual and scientific framework that is gradually decoded by the viewer. The brain consists of a neural network of embryonic rat neurons, growing in a Petri dish in a lab in Atlanta, Georgia, which exhibits the uncontrolled activity of nerve tissue that is typical of cultured nerve cells. This neural network is connected to neural interfacing electrodes that write to and read from the neurons. The thirty-six robotic pole-shaped objects of the body, meanwhile, live in whatever exhibition space is their temporary home. They have sensors that detect the presence of viewers who come in. It is from this environment that data is transmitted over the Internet, to be read by the electrodes and thus to stimulate, train or calm parts of the brain, depending on which area of the neuronal net has been addressed.