That a Dead Man Sings
Creating sculptures out of materials such as sheets of glass, foam, metal, cement, and various found objects, Dave Hardy composes his sculptures’ seemingly precarious poise as an intentionally engineered defiance of gravity. Distinguished by a constant shuttle between literal and allegorical readings, Hardy’s artworks are both resolutely materialist and infused with a human scale and, more precisely, a human fragility that forces the viewer to confront them as bodies in space.

micro | macro
micro | macro transforms Hall E in the MuseumsQuartier into an oversized world of moving images and sounds. In his immersive installation, multimedia artist Ryoji Ikeda creates a field of imagination between quantum physics, empirical experimentation and human perception. In collaboration with nuclear scientists at CERN, Ikeda has translated complex physical theories into a sensory experience. The Planck scale is used by scientists to denote extremely small lengths or time intervals. Concepts like space and time lose their meaning beyond this scale, and contemporary physics has to rely on speculative theories. And on art. Visitors to micro | macro enter a world of data, particles, light and sound that makes the extremes of the universe perceptible to the eye and ear. In the micro world we penetrate the smallest dimensions of the unrepresentable, while in the macro world we take off into cosmic expanses that allow us to experience the infinite space beyond the observable universe. In this maelstrom of data, an acoustic and visual firework bridges the gap between theoretical understanding and sensual perception.

But does it run Linux? – A clocked marble calculator
We switch them on, they do stuff for us. Is it magic? What do our computers do? This brand new mechanical 0.1Hz calculator featuring 1-bit architecture and 16bit of RAM is constructed to answer that question by bringing elemental computer logic to a human scale. It does not run Linux, but marbles. See them rolling.

Liminal Lands
Liminal Lands is an environmental multiplayer experience shared by four people at the same time. Each person transforms into the basic elements controlling life across the landscape: Algae, salt, water and mud. As they embark on a communal ritual experience, people morph and change throughout their journey, exploring each new world from a changed perspective of the landscape. Visitors move across different scales and global weather conditions, shedding their human perspective as they are pulled into six different realms inspired by the macro-landscape.

Vertical Migration
Unsettling our perceptions of scale and otherness, Vertical Migration is an intimate encounter with a life form that bears no resemblance to human beings, though we share a planet, an ecosystem, and a future. Because of sea-level rise, humans will also be migrating vertically in the coming centuries, to higher elevations and raised buildings. The siphonophore’s story is our story. Though we can never experience its journey through the pitch-black ocean depths, we can shift our perspective to recognize that we’re connected, that our actions affect each other, and that we share a common fate.

PANGOLIN DRESS

The Pangolin Scales Project demonstrates a 1.024 channel BCI (Brain-Computer Interface) that is able to extract information from the human brain with an unprecedented resolution. The extracted information is used to control the Pangolin Scale Dress interactively into 64 outputs.The dress is also inspired by the pangolin, cute, harmless animals sometimes known as scaly anteaters. They have large, protective keratin scales covering their skin (they are the only known mammals with this feature) and live in hollow trees or burrows.As such, Pangolins and considered an endangered species and some have theorized that the recent coronavirus may have emerged from the consumption of pangolin meat.Wipprecht’s main challenge in the project’s development was to not overload the dress with additional weight. She teamed up 3D printing experts Shapeways and Igor Knezevic in order to create an ‘exo-skeleton’ like dress-frame (3mm) that was light enough to be worn but sturdy enough to hold all the mechanics in place

The Raft
The Raft depicts at life-sized scale a group of ordinary people casually standing together. Suddenly, they are struck by strong blasts of water that rush in, overtake them, and then, just as unexpectedly, recede. In the aftermath of the deluge, the victims huddle together, seek protection, and help those who have fallen. The viewer experiences this event in an immersive setting, standing in a darkened room and surrounded by the roaring sounds of the water. Meticulously captured in slow-motion, The Raft arouses a visceral experience of human calamity and shared humanity, provoking a consideration of the range of responses to crisis.

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.

Quantum memories
Quantum Memories is Refik Anadol Studio’s epic scale investigation of the intersection between Google AI Quantum Supremacy experiments, machine learning, and aesthetics of probability. Technological and digital advancements of the past century could as well be defined by the humanity’s eagerness to make machines go to places that humans could not go, including the spaces inside our minds and the non-spaces of our un- or sub-conscious acts. Quantum Memories utilizes the most cutting-edge, Google AI’s publicly available quantum computation research data and algorithms to explore the possibility of a parallel world by processing approximately 200 million nature and landscape images through artificial intelligence. These algorithms allow us to speculate alternative modalities inside the most sophisticated computer available, and create new quantum noise-generated datasets as building blocks of these modalities. The 3D visual piece is accompanied by an audio experience that is also based on quantum noise–generated data, offering an immersive experience that further challenges the notion of mutual exclusivity. The project is both inspired by and a speculation of the Many-Worlds Interpretation in quantum physics – a theory that holds that there are many parallel worlds that exist at the same space and time as our own.

Expanded Holiday
Expanded Holiday demonstrated the enormous potential of AR technology, which provides virtual perspectives on real-world environments, and conveys KAWS’s mischievous humour through the juxtaposition of physical and virtual worlds. These virtual sculptures were accessible via the Acute Art app and could be experienced in conjunction with the NGV’s exclusive exhibition KAWS: Companionship in the Age of Loneliness, a comprehensive survey of 25 years of KAWS’s oeuvre and his largest solo survey to date. Full of humour, hope and humanity, the exhibition featured more than 100 works including iconic paintings reappropriating pop-culture figures to more recent largescale, layered works, and an impressive collection of KAWS’s celebrated sculptural figures.

Oculus
Oculus is a large-scale, collaborative light sculpture that depicts a colossal abstracted drosophila eye, replete with compound faceted surfaces. It both recalls the circular opening at the apex of a cupola and alludes to a surveillance device or drone hovering in mid-air. Oculus is inspired in part by a series of scanning electron micrographs produced in a transgenic lab while researching human and non-human sensoria. The work evokes affective encounters with scale such as viewing miniature particles through the lens of a microscope or wandering through monumental physical environments. As each viewer’s reflection plays across the sculpture’s undulating surface, the apprehension of the self affects both individual and collective behavior in unexpected ways. This affective dynamic plays on the precariousness of our coexistence with other lifeforms in the world, one that is always contingent upon viewers’ bodies and the variability of the environment around them. The act of gazing at Oculus also puts into play the reciprocal condition of both seeing and being seen.

S.A.M. The Symbiotic Autonomous Machine
As machines gain more autonomy and importance in human life, they are still given no agency in our society. Could a legalization of their status create a shift towards a more collaborative relationship with humans? S.A.M. 1, 2 & 3 are a Symbiotic Autonomous Machines challenging those ideas. It employs water kefir grains or kombucha to produce a beverage, acting as small scale automated food production systems.

Transient
Transient – Impermanent paintings is an audiovisual concert for two motorized pianos and two conductors in collaboration with generative algorithms. Hyper-realistic digital brushstrokes articulate endlessly on a large-scale projection as if on a real canvas. Each brushstroke is sonified with a piano note, creating polyphonic synesthetic landscapes. The project continues Quayola’s research on traditional artistic techniques in the context of human-machine relationship, this time gradually withdrawing from formal subjects and giving way to the computational substance: the algorithm.

池田亮司
이케다 료지
РЕДЗИ ИКЕДА
superposition
superposition is a project about the way we understand the reality of nature on an atomic scale and is inspired by the mathematical notions of quantum mechanics. Performers will appear in his piece for the first time, performing as operator/conductor/observer/examiners. All the components on stage will be in a state of superposition; sound, visuals, physical phenomena, mathematical concepts, human behaviour and randomness – these will be constantly orchestrated and de-orchestrated simultaneously in a single performance piece.

Homemade RC Toy
Her new installation centers on five human-scale, remote-control sculptures that she cobbled together from metal brackets, batteries, wires, dental study props, and disassembled mannequins. Surrounding them are stepped plinths whose bright colors echo the robot sculptures’ wiring. The plinths display fetishistic agglomerations of spare parts: wheels, cables, gutted medical practice torsos, home repair parts. In their default state, the sculptures are frozen, comatose, even if all that wiring and machinery certainly suggests movement. The installation is the setting for a series of live interactions between the artist and her uncanny others.

skalar

SKALAR is a large-scale art installation that explores the complex impact of light and sound on human perception. Light artist Christopher Bauder and musician Kangding Ray give an audio-visual narration of radiant light vector drawings and multi-dimensional sound inside the pitch-dark industrial space of Kraftwerk Berlin. By combining a vast array of kinetic mirrors, perfectly synchronized moving lights and a sophisticated multi-channel sound system, SKALAR reflects on the fundamental nature and essence of basic human emotions.

H.O.R.T.U.S. XL Astaxanthin.g in-human garden
H.O.R.T.U.S. XL Astaxanthin.g is a large scale, high-resolution 3D printed bio-sculpture receptive to both human and non-human life. The project is conceived by Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto (ecoLogicStudio) and developed in collaboration with the Synthetic Landscape Lab at the University of Innsbruck.

Balance From Within
File Festival
Jacob Tonski is a pragmatic optimist whose work explores dynamic balance through kinetic metaphors.
A self-adjusting platform makes everyone the same height, probing ideas of equality and the origins of power. A larger-than-life top spins about the room, wobbling through themes of pleasure, danger, youth and decay. A sofa teeters, standing on one leg, musing on the stability of the social structures we build.
These and other human-scale objects, both amusing and threatening, find an uncanny identity between toys and tools. The forces of time and gravity serve in these works as foils for those things we are powerless to direct in our lives, and with which we must instead dance and negotiate.

The Weather War
Bigert & Bergström is an artist duo living and working in Stockholm, Sweden. They met while at the art academy in Stockholm in 1986 and have collaborated ever since. Through their career B&B have produced and created art ranging from large-scale installations to public works, sculptures and film projects. Often with a conceptual edge, the core of their work is placed right in the junction between humanity, nature and technology. With energetic curiosity their art investigate scientific and social topics discussed in contemporary society.

The Comedown Human Powered Rollercoaster
The Comedown is reminiscent of the late ’90s Human Powered Rollercoaster that made an appearance at the 1995 Toronto Cycle Messenger World Championships (edited, org text had wrong date), though at a smaller scale. Where the earlier HPR was large enough for two-up racing (video, images) The Comedown is single-file affair.

Forced Landscape
Rachael Champion’s site-specific sculptures and installations are engaged in a discourse surrounding the dependant yet unclear relationship between industry, technology and nature. Her works consist of large scale constructions and dramatic architectural interventions that question the shifting interactions humanity has with the natural world and considers their boundaries, separations and progressive implications. Through manipulating information from diverse influences that include brutalist architecture, agriculture, raw materials, municipal infrastructure, public space and ecology, Champion questions the layered and dynamic complexities of our shifting physical environment.

Primary Producers
Rachael Champion’s site-specific sculptures and installations are engaged in a discourse surrounding the dependant yet unclear relationship between industry, technology and nature. Her works consist of large scale constructions and dramatic architectural interventions that question the shifting interactions humanity has with the natural world and considers their boundaries, separations and progressive implications.

Самуэль Сальседо
塞缪尔·萨尔塞多
사무엘 살 세도
サミュエル・サルセド
In Samuel Salcedo art irony mixes with the great sympathy to the humans. His realistically made sculptures show ridiculous, funny and some times touching heroes often show nuked. Despite of the small scale, Samuel’s works truly and deeply show all the complex of the human loneliness and confusion.

Behold
Behold 2009 is an immersive large-scale installation by the South Indian artist Sheela Gowda. This work consists of four kilometres of hand knotted rope and approximately twenty car bumpers. The bumpers are suspended against the gallery wall, individually or in sets, from ropes made of braided human hair, which are knotted around the metal. The ropes extend irregularly between the hanging bumpers in small and large loops, as well as being gathered on the floor in piles and heaps, some of which can also be suspended from the ceiling. In this way the installation can take over a single gallery space or occupy a single stretch of wall.

Vaakasuora-Horizontal
The artwork shows a 11-metre tall spruce, with its branches swaying in the wind, filmed at full scale in six parts. The soundscape consists of the sound of the wind, the creaking of the trunk and birdsong. The method of display is, however, unexpected: it is shown in a horizontal position.Vaakasuora-Horizontal is a portrait of a spruce. It is an interpretation of the essence of the spruce, and the difficulty of observing and recording the life of a spruce. How can one capture the very being of a spruce? Each viewer will see the reality differently and each one of them will see the spruce trough glasses tinted by their personal memories and experiences. The artist has wanted to use this artwork to represent the German biologist Jakob von Uexküell’s idea of the parallel and concurrent existence of time and spatial worlds. The work of art, on the other hand, also moves the focus from the human being as the centre of the universe to the greatness of nature; people play a minor part in the greater picture.

Balance Study Apparatus
Jacob Tonski is a pragmatic optimist whose work explores dynamic balance through kinetic metaphors.
A self-adjusting platform makes everyone the same height, probing ideas of equality and the origins of power. A larger-than-life top spins about the room, wobbling through themes of pleasure, danger, youth and decay. A sofa teeters, standing on one leg, musing on the stability of the social structures we build. These and other human-scale objects, both amusing and threatening, find an uncanny identity between toys and tools. The forces of time and gravity serve in these works as foils for those things we are powerless to direct in our lives, and with which we must instead dance and negotiate.