launch interactive book

FILE – Electronic Language International Festival and SESI publishing house launch the “highlike book”. This is a yearbook on global contemporary ART and CULTURE. Its first edition has 584 pages with 577 artists from 35 countries. The “highlike book” encompasses several aspects of contemporary culture, providing the user a new form of appreciation of an art book. This is a book connected to the cloud. All information, images, videos and texts, is connected to their on-line counterparts in several languages, in a hybrid book which maintains its physical aspects and the virtual simultaneity of multimedia information. Its main purpose is to provide users with a new way of access culture in a global diversified view on the contemporary creativity in its transversal and heuristic aspect, by means of technologies currently available.

Construction N
Often occupying both physical and temporal space, my sculpture has always incorporated both conventional and experimental media, including woodcarving, metalworking, installation, kinetics, microelectronics and video. While it tends to be visually diverse, the friction between object and memory has been at the conceptual core of my sculptural practice since 1994. The images, objects and narratives of a particular place or experience undergo distortions each time they are represented, and it is these forms of abstraction I explore in my sculpture.
Earlier bodies of work have utilized the physical residue of my traveling – the souvenirs, postcards, snapshots and videotapes – as central elements of the sculpture, forcing them to reveal their own inadequacy, disengagement or transformation, to subvert the nostalgic ideal, or to disrupt the usual implications of value and validation in a cultural artifact. In later works I utilize the physicality of scale, motion, and orientation to extend and challenge the conventional representation of landscape. These pieces define specific places as indefinite spatial constructs that complicate the certainty of “being there,” and are part of a larger attempt to relate a fragmented travel narrative through architecture, landscapes and souvenirs.
I have been using IKEA products as raw material for several years, and continue to be interested in extracting conceptual value from it. I am currently exploring the relationship between the Modern avant-garde and contemporary consumer design culture. In my recent work, I attempt to articulate various points of connection and rupture between IKEA and the Bauhaus by constructing scale models of demolished or unrealized buildings by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius using “hacked” IKEA products such as tables, bookshelves and flooring.

Speculative Evolution, Prototype 1

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival
Speculative experiment on a future ecosystem under strict control. The narrative takes place in a simulation, 30 years in the future, where artificial intelligence and synthetic biology collaborate to optimize an environment for cultivated species. An AI-powered simulator helps visitors generate new species to balance the ecosystem. Inspiration comes from the book Under the White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert and artists’ stories about life on a damaged planet.

Bio

Marc Lee is a Swiss artist focused on real-time rendered audiovisual installations, AR, VR and mobile applications, critically exploring creative, cultural, social, ecological, political and speculative themes. His work has been exhibited in important museums and new media art spaces. Shervin Saremi is an Iranian musician and audio engineer specializing in sonic computing, procedural sound design and production. Currently researching immersive audio at UdK Berlin.

Spring/Summer 21
The spring 2021 collection reflects that mentality, and highlights the more commercial offerings of the brand, which are normally buried underneath his over-the-top runway styling. Carryover styles — such as quilted jackets, padded vests, parkas, shirts and hoodies with cutout hole and lace trim details — are available in pine green, beige, raisin purple, and midnight blue, and take center stage in the look book. Even Green’s signature frame-like constructions around the body have been toned down. Instead of using experimental and colorful materials, Green has hung deconstructed parts of a shirt or a jacket on metal frames. The effect is of two people interacting in one sculpture.

balenciaga collaboration
A 25 minute video loop with previously unreleased tracks by DJ Hell, made in collaboration with Balenciaga.

Here is a dramatic tension in his work between the real and the imagined in his use of often-appropriated digital objects to create virtual landscapes, which frequently contain elements – animals, machines, fragments of videogames – that are recognisable from our day to day life. This creates a symbiotic relationship between the digital and the real. In a very real way digital space has now become an intangible reality. The worlds built by Robak have a distinctly cinematic sensibility that hyperbolises the shine and dramatic effects of 3D rendered animation. The aesthetic of his work is supremely important, drawing the viewer into a truly alluring, indulgent and strangely gratifying environment. There is a further challenge to the void between high-art and the worlds of 3D animation and gaming, in the intersection between depiction and simulation. This can be partially attributed to the vernacular of advertising Robak is so proficient at utilising.

Replica
We begin with a tour of a virtual 3D model of the London house-cum-museum built by 19th-century architect Sir John Soane. The journey traverses the five floors of the museum’s meticulously restored rooms, each filled with original and duplicate fragments of antiquity. Sir John Soane (1753-1837) was one of the foremost British architects of the Regency era, a Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy, and a dedicated collector of paintings, sculpture, architectural fragments and models, books, drawings and furniture. Soane was awarded the Royal Academy’s prestigious Gold Medal for Architecture, as a result receiving a bursary (funded by King George III) to undertake a Grand Tour of Europe. His travels to the ruins of Ancient Rome, Paestum and Pompeii would inspire his lifelong interest in Classical art and architecture. As an enthusiastic collector, later in life he began to repurpose his home at Lincoln’s Inn Fields as a Museum for students of architecture. With a collection containing thousands of objects ranging from Ancient Egyptian antiquities and Roman sculpture to models of contemporary buildings, Soane’s house had become a Museum by the time of his death.

Frühling / Sommer 21
Die Frühjahrskollektion 2021 spiegelt diese Mentalität wider und unterstreicht die kommerzielleren Angebote der Marke, die normalerweise unter seinem übertriebenen Runway-Design verborgen sind. Carryover-Styles wie Steppjacken, gepolsterte Westen, Parkas, Hemden und Hoodies mit Ausschnittloch- und Spitzenbesatzdetails sind in den Farben Kieferngrün, Beige, Rosinenpurpur und Mitternachtsblau erhältlich und stehen im Lookbook im Mittelpunkt. Sogar die rahmenartigen Konstruktionen von Green rund um den Körper wurden abgeschwächt. Anstatt experimentelle und farbenfrohe Materialien zu verwenden, hat Green dekonstruierte Teile eines Hemdes oder einer Jacke an Metallrahmen gehängt. Der Effekt besteht darin, dass zwei Personen in einer Skulptur interagieren.

What hath God wrought?
The title of the installation is a line from the Book of Numbers in early modern English. It was the first message transmitted by telegraph in 1844, the first communication technology on the basis of electricity and binary coding. The artwork is fed by the 100 most used words in Thomas More’s book ‘Utopia’, feeding the correspondence between a series of telegraphs. The telegraphs translate the words into sound and light. Written rolls of paper drift to the floor. Slowly but surely, mistakes slip into the closed system and the meaning of the words alters. The Morse orchestra deals with the rationalism of the Renaissance and its belief in progress and posits by contrast an aesthetic of a self-regulating system in which the fault rules and defect becomes beauty.

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

Poetic AI
Ouchhh created an Artificial Intelligence and the t-SNE visualization of the hundreds of books and articles [approx. 20 million lines of text] written by scientists who changed the destiny of the world -and wrote history- were fed to the Recurrent Neural Network during the training. This, later on, was used to generate novel text in the exhibition. 136 projectors shining to be a veritable oneiric experience, the ‘POETIC – AI’ digital installation uses Artificial Intelligence in the visual creation process: the forms, light, and movement are generated by an algorithm that creates a unique and contemplative digital work, an AI dancing in the dark, trying to show us connections we could never see otherwise.

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.

A Dog’s Heart
Dutch National Opera
Libretto by Cesare Mazzonis
based on a novella by Mikhail Bulgakov

Metabolism _ Invisible Cities
Pierre-Jean Giloux’s first monograph, the publication extends the eponymous video tetralogy inspired by the Japanese utopian architectural movement: Metabolism (1960-70).
The films of the Invisible Cities cycle are portraits of Japanese cities, superimposing filmed and photographed images of everyday, social and urban reality, with virtual images.
The book explores the links in Pierre Jean Giloux’s work that connect four Japanese cities with a rich architectural past (Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Kyoto). This jorney through Japan’s Megapolis traces the history of Japan and ends with the reconstruction of pavilions for the Osaka 70 Universal Exhibition and a virtual proposal for a smart city on the waters of Lake Biwa.
The metabolist utopia to which reference is constantly made in the work of Pierre Jean Giloux played a decisive role in the constitution of post-war Japanese cultural identity and had a notable influence on many contemporary architects.

video

Until the Lions
In this partial adaptation of poet Karthika Naïr’s book Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, an original reworking of the epic Mahabharata, Khan uses kathak and contemporary dance to tell the tale of Amba, a princess abducted on her wedding day and stripped of her honour, who invokes the gods to seek revenge. In an epic theatrical piece, Khan explores the notion and the physical expression of gender, bringing together some of the stellar artistic team behind his solo DESH: writer Karthika Naïr, visual artist Tim Yip, lighting designer Michael Hulls and dramaturg Ruth Little.

Reading Plan
“Reading Plan is an interactive artwork with 23 automation book flipping machines. When audiences enter the exhibition room, these machines will start to turn pages automatically and read the context at the same time. The updated figure to show that average student numbers per primary school in years 2016 in Taiwan is 23 students. I included a metaphor classroom in this artwork. In Taiwan, when people go to school, they don’t have much decision power to decide what they want to read and study. It is like being controlled by a huge invisible gear. The education direction led by authorities always prioritizes industry value and competitiveness. They want create a money-making machine instead of self exploration and humanism thinking.” Lien-cheng Wan

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

Travel Notebooks: Perugia
FILE SAO PAULO 2015
FILE VIDEO ART
“Perugia” is part of a series of works titled “Travel Notebooks”.
Perugia is a magical three-dimensional chessboard where rods of light alternate with cones of shadow and show the soft pink of the stone or the dark humidity of time.

parallel supercomputer
Connection Machine CM-1(1986) and CM-2 (1987)

The Connection Machine was the first commercial computer designed expressly to work on “artificial intelligence” problems simulating intelligence and life. A massively parallel supercomputer with 65,536 processors, it was the brainchild of Danny Hillis, conceived while he was a doctoral student studying with Marvin Minsky at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. In 1983 Danny founded Thinking Machines Corporation to build the machine, and hired me to lead the packaging design group. Working with industrial design consultants Allen Hawthorne and Gordon Bruce, and mechanical engineer consultant Ted Bilodeau, our goal was to make the machine look like no other machine ever built. I have described that journey in this article, published in 1994 in the DesignIssues journal and republished in 2010 in the book The Designed World.

video

Death Death Death
File Festival
“Death Death Death” is book written by an algorithm. It utilizes a word association study conducted by the University of South Florida between 1976 and 1998. It contains over 10,000 words and their associations to each other. “Death Death Death” traces a path from each word to the word death. The book starts off with the words most closely associated to death. The beginning reads like this: Life – Death Funeral – Death Coffin – Death. Later, it takes several associative leaps to get to death: Enthusiasm – Spirit – Soul – Death Folly – Funny – Sad – Death Bahamas – Paradise – Heaven – Death Waggle – Wiggle – Worm – Maggot – Death. Reading soon becomes humorous, as every line reads like a joke-death is always the punchline. “Death Death Death” is 405 pages, contains an index so you can find any word, and a detailed description of the algorithm. Death Death Death was nominated for the 2010 File Prix Lux in the Digital Languages category.
video

منير فاطمي
Evolution or Death
Fatmi inverts spectacular representations of identity by rendering them mundane and within reach of a subject that may scramble any conclusive narrative. Fatmi’s work counters strategies of interpellation that identifies a subject with an ideology prior to that subject’s ability to place their identity in or beyond a particular ideology. Fatmi parodies the various interpellations of colonialism and capitalism that seek to define others according to symbolic narratives. In Evolution or Death, 2004, (fig. 4) two Anglo-European looking subjects imitate suicide bombers with books and papers taped around their abdomens. One holds open a trenchcoat and another holds up a book that looks like a detonator attached to wires. Fatmi reverses the situation. These are not the suicide-bombers from Arab and Muslim countries. Instead, they appear to be of European descent in a European street or modern room in casual clothing.

Brad Troemel and Lauren Christiansen
JOGGING uses the microblogging platform Tumblr as a stage for immaterial works of art both real and digitally manipulated. The site functions as an evolving sketchbook in which ideas are conceived and executed with a speed and immediacy unconstrained by physical or institutional limitations, with as many as twenty pieces of work posted per day. This is in deliberate contrast to personal websites and curated portfolios in which an artist limits his or her production in an attempt to carve out an identifiable brand. Instead, JOGGING sees itself as both artist and art object, composed of multiple pieces or individual works but functioning as a single schizophrenic body, an abstract machine.

Murmur Study
Murmur Study (ou l’étude des murmures) est une œuvre d’art originale qui propose une réflexion autour de l’art et du web. Elle a été réalisée par Christopher Baker, Márton András Juhász et Budapest Kitchen, et se veut être un observatoire des technologies de micro-blogging comme Twitter et les status Facebook. L’installation est composée de 30 imprimantes thermales qui impriment en continu des messages Twitter récoltés aux quatre coins de la planète. Les messages tombent des imprimantes comme des chutes d’eau avant de venir s’empiler par terre.

Brad Troemel and Lauren Christiansen
soup base
JOGGING uses the microblogging platform Tumblr as a stage for immaterial works of art both real and digitally manipulated. The site functions as an evolving sketchbook in which ideas are conceived and executed with a speed and immediacy unconstrained by physical or institutional limitations, with as many as twenty pieces of work posted per day. This is in deliberate contrast to personal websites and curated portfolios in which an artist limits his or her production in an attempt to carve out an identifiable brand. Instead, JOGGING sees itself as both artist and art object, composed of multiple pieces or individual works but functioning as a single schizophrenic body, an abstract machine.

Flash Gordon
The Greatest Adventure of All

Flash Gordon is the hero of an adventure and science fiction newspaper strip (planetary novel) originally designed by Alex Raymond. First published on January 7, 1934
In 1979, Filmation produced a cartoon series based on comic books (“The New Adventures of Flash Gordon”), and its first season is remembered as one of the studio’s best works. Although this series was first released, the Gordon Flash TV movie, the Greatest Adventure of Them All, was produced earlier.

دينيس أوبنهايم
丹尼斯·奥本海姆
デニス·オッペンハイム
데니스 오펜하임
Деннис Оппенгейм

Reading Position for Second Degree Burn

“Reading position for second degree burn”, an experiment in which he sunbathed for five hours with a book on his torso. The Time, The Sun, the Light and the Book titled Tactics: Vol II, Cavalry Artillery, by German Colonel Balck: Would it be the Enlightenment of Iron and Fire? Is it the culture that marks our bodies as we mark horses? Or just a book that Dennis took to the beach and asleep forgot about his body?