EGO

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival

The mirror stage in psychology explains how the Ego forms through objectification, where one’s visual appearance comes into conflict with emotional experience, a concept called ‘alienation‘ by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The interactive installation EGO reenacts and reverses this process by distorting the mirror image based on the user’s movements, highlighting the tension between the real and the symbolic, the Ego and the It, subject and object.

Bio

Klaus Obermaier is an interdisciplinary artist, director and composer who creates innovative works in the performing arts, music and installations using new media. Stefano D’Alessio researches social issues induced by the internet and explores how the web and its derivatives influence human behavior and the body. Martina Menegon creates intricate assemblages of physical and virtual elements, exploring the contemporary self and its hybrid corporeality.

Berenike Corcuera’s collection was inspired by kirilian photographs of her aura, first captured in Chinatown’s reowned Magic Jewelry. when she lived in New York in 2014. She began studying the electromagnetic field of the human body to understand how to translate the invisible. She began the practice of mandala and colour studies, to understand how metaphysical bodies could be interpreted into physical bodies and contemporary menswear clothing.

Robinson
FILE FESTIVAL SAO PAULO 2016
The piece “Robinson” is part of Ting-Tong Chang’s new body of work investigating the history of automatons in Europe as a means of exploring utopian visions. The word “automaton” is often used to describe self-moving machines, especially those that have been made to resemble human or animal actions. From Jacques de Vaucanson’s Digesting Duck (1739) to Andreas Jakob Graf Dietrichstein’s Mechanical Theatre (1752), automatons have entertained kings and princesses, taught moral lesson to citizens and raised deep philosophical questions

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?

Hertzian Landscapes
Hertzian Landscapes (2019) is a live visualization of the radio spectrum. Unlike visible light, waves in the radio spectrum cannot be perceived by us directly yet this space is teeming with human activity. Hertzian Landscapes employs a digital receiver to scan large swaths of radio spectrum in near real-time and visualizes thousands of signals into a panoramic electromagnetic landscape. Users can zoom in to specific frequencies by positioning themselves in front of the panorama as if controlling a radio tuner with their body, giving them a sense of walking through the spectrum.

airmorphologies

Electric Chair

The distinctive work of Sam Buxton is dominated by his innovative use of advanced materials and technologies. From his immensely popular MIKRO series (miniature fold-up sculptures, laser cut into thin strips of stainless steel through an acid etching process) to his explorations concerning interactive intelligent surfaces on the familiar objects around us, his work has continually managed to blur the lines between art, science and design.Through his work, which has regularly involved relatively common objects ranging from business cards to a dining table, Buxton has demonstrated an ability to see potential in what others take for granted. His on-going efforts in developing objects that can communicate, display information and react to the actions of the user, demonstrate his commitment to investigating the delicate relationship between the human body and its environment. Buxton’s fusion of art and science has resulted in a highly innovative and unique range of personal designs, many of which, have utilized the latest, most advanced materials and technologies available.

Guerre

A struggle that seems to be of particular relevance today. A metaphorical title, poetry of the line and of colour, that highlights the challenge that each of the parties represents. A kind of symbolic correspondence that flirts with our world, with our history, our human condition. War opens up perspectives of matter, a struggle both real and poetic that blends lines and directions, inscribing the trace, the hue, in the flesh of the dancing body but also in a seductive paradox between line and colour.

Self Luminous 2 – Unbalance
Self-luminous 2 is an experimental handmade instrument shown as performance. It is a series-project which I have been working on since 2013 and finally developed into shape in 2014. I am looking for intimate and personal instrument that reflects on the relation of digital sound and light message. In computer language, light on is 1 and light off is 0. If more than 2 lamps, it could be code or readable possibility by the meanings. When I press the button or turn the knob, the message will be sent to Pure Data, and the sound will be triggered in live by Pure Data.
The Data of sound such as frequency and volume, are analysed and sent out to the second Arduino to control the light. The light, in thus case, is an intuitive element for human beings. From this point, it is really close to sound which disturbs our biological body directly. The lights are visualised and they can be transferred the into messages. The message might be readable by coincidence with the link to the code. The light is bright enough to let audience to have persistence of vision in mind. During the performance, the sound will be reproduced by code and part of it is impromptu.
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Me, My Selfie and I
Katja is inspired by the influence of everydays’ digital technologies on society and with that the arising questions about the identity of our human body. She fuses everydays’ technology, the dancers’ body and the presence of the audience into unconventional performances. Who moves who?

Pow2045
The mathematical construct covers the human body, yet sets a contrast to organic shapes in its accuracy and mechanical precision. This kind of visual contrast can be understood as a visual representation of human computer difference and reveals core features of both – man and machine. A characteristic foundation to design the dialogue of “POW 2045″

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.

In ‘We Need Sanctuary’ (2016) and ‘Symptom Machine’ (2017), Cooper offers the body up as a contested space for communication and representation. Using computer-generated imagery, situations and characters are brought together to think through politics of exploitative labour, and the somatic experience of image production and distribution. Both works present, scenes of a Computer-generated bodies; both female and non-human who loom at the very edges of the screen. Their hands touch; they move backwards on a conveyor belt; and blood drips from the girl’s mouth while the non-human sweeps the floor behind her.

Gallim Dance
Founded by choreographer Andrea Miller, Gallim Dance burst onto the New York dance scene in 2007 and immediately caught the attention of the New York dance community. The company includes an ensemble of dancers hailed for their quick wit and technical virtuosity. The mission of Gallim Dance is to play inside the imagination, to find juxtapositions of the mind and body that resonate in the soul, to investigate our limitations and pleasures, and to realize the endless human capacity for inspiration.

Inner Fashion
Inner Fashion questions the codes, rules and production technic of fashion. The human body is seen as a fluid, inflatable and mobile structure in which the tension of fabric remplace muscles. Each piece of cloth are made of 2 layers: an inner layer, XXS, highly strechable and an outer layer, XL and none strechable. Both layer are dressed on a zeppelin shaped balloon representing the human body. As the balloon fills up with air, the fabric of the inner layer stretches out and both fabric are touching each other.

wearable solar

There is nothing natural in nature; technology makes our humanness giving form to our surroundings. The human habitat reveals a techno-morphed structure that can no longer be hidden behind the vestiges of a natural world: technology has to be naturalized. Pauline van Dongen researches the body in a technologically textured space. After graduating from ArtEZ, Academy of the Arts in Arnhem, the Netherlands, she started her own womenswear label in 2010. Pauline operates a meticulous research of the behaviour of experimental and high-tech materials, combining new technologies with traditional techniques to constantly renovate craftsmanship. Working closely with companies from the field of science and innovation, Pauline aims to merge fashion and technology giving life to scientific creations.

Shapeshifter Heartbreaker

Shapeshifter, Heartbreaker, is an installation on two levels composed of sculptural work and 3D computer animations that are both abstract and figurative. On the first level Pakui Hardware has designed an office desk using the typical components of a trading floor. However, this is not a work station for individuals; it is for computer aided trading, non-human activities which are approximated in the three channel videos atop desks noticeably lacking keyboards and mice. These activities often occur at an exceedingly fast pace, in the blink of an eye, an expression that lends its name to a video installed on the second floor. There, the blinks of a humanoid form have been accelerated to illustrate how fast the body would have to consciously react if it were operating at the speed of decision making that resulted in the stock market’s ‘flash crash’ of 2010.

crocheted membrane

‘Crocheted Membrane’ experiments with creating a momentary fiction through fashion artifacts. Starting with the physical needs of one individual human body in an outdoor temperature of 10 degrees Celsius, seven hand-crocheted body forms were produced. The clothing’s texture got thinner or opened up completely on areas of the body that needed less warmth and were thicker where warmth was lacking. In this way, a fundamental change in the aesthetic and function of clothes was displayed. Fixed forms, such as trousers, were recreated into new, unique body forms. Instead of one uniform surface, the textures became alive and inimitable. “Her concept of clothing does not derive in the same way as most fashion design, from shape or historically patterned form with embedded social hierarchy and material richness, but is instead determined by the needs and sensations of the human body – performing in the same way that bacteria populations individually respond.” (Villeré 2014) The resulting fictional artifacts illustrate how we could use knowledge about our unique bacteria population to create a novel layer.

Shapeshifter, Heartbreaker

Shapeshifter, Heartbreaker, is an installation on two levels composed of sculptural work and 3D computer animations that are both abstract and figurative. On the first level Pakui Hardware has designed an office desk using the typical components of a trading floor. However, this is not a work station for individuals; it is for computer aided trading, non-human activities which are approximated in the three channel videos atop desks noticeably lacking keyboards and mice. These activities often occur at an exceedingly fast pace, in the blink of an eye, an expression that lends its name to a video installed on the second floor. There, the blinks of a humanoid form have been accelerated to illustrate how fast the body would have to consciously react if it were operating at the speed of decision making that resulted in the stock market’s ‘flash crash’ of 2010.
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