Dromos

Dromos is a metaphoric AV Performance that takes its concept from the philosophical work of P. Virilo who is mostly known for founding the idea of Dromology (science of speed). Dromos invites audience to a criticism experience of the ’peed’ role that impacts all aspects of our daily lives. During 40mns, it focuses people attention on this essential factor that shapes our world. With its message, Dromos invites you to wonder about your relationship with progress. It’s an unconventional work with an original sensorial approach, placing the audience inside an immersive environment.

The Movement of Air

A frontal show for three dancers evolving in an immersive environment made up of images projected, generated and animated live. A show where two impossible ones come together: the body that flies, thanks to suspension devices and the body that fits into the image. An acrobatic and digital choreographic writing which outlines a body language opening onto other relationships to time, space and the world. Beyond the search for technical prowess, it is that of a dreamlike movement and writing through images.

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.

the Point of Perception
Produced in collaboration with neuroscientists at UCL, Beau Lotto and Mark Lythgoe, this work is art and science; we intend it as an experiment in the gallery. It manifests as an immersive environment consisting of a ‘screen’ which is a large gridded space of uncertainty and projected film.The project came about after I undertook a period of research of the human visual system and neuroesthetics and set up a collaboration with Professor Mark Lythgoe and Dr Beau Lotto at UCL.

Temporary Immersive Environment Experiments

Temporary Immersive Environment Experiments’ is a research on audio/visual installations by using the state called immersion which is the state of consciousness where an immersant’s awareness of physical self is transformed by being surrounded in an engrossing environment; often artificial, creating a perception of presence in a non-physical world.
In this particular edition, the poetics of light bending is explored. Inspired by Issac Newton’s experiments with light, this installation bends laser light in unpredictable angles to create a architectural light + sound scape. ‘Liminality’ is chosen as a concept in this project,a radical effort to deconstruct the framework of this illusory space and transgress the normal boundaries of the viewing experience to set out to transform the conventional flat cinema projection screen into a three dimensional kinetic and architectonic space of visualisation.

via highlike submit

Struct- Generative Realtime Audio-Visual Environment
The target of “Struct” was to create installation which could make immersive environment inside the space of public event dedicated to the opening of the office of an architectural company UNK Projects. It was planned to make this installation fully autonomic during the several hours as well as there was an idea to hold the public interested and immersed into the space of environment during the all period of time.

The main conception of the installation is to create the second alternative scale inside the internal space of the office. It was realized screen projection for this with the size of 18×4 meters and taken almost whole the length of the interior. The Animated surface was projected as the extension of the super-graphic situated on the facade of office`s building. The external graphic was created by Vladimir Garanin. The first one layer is the super-graphic onto the facade and another one layer is the real-time generative graphic inside the interior. The visual image and algorithmic sound of the whole structure are connected each other and are forming the whole organism.

Machine Hallucinations — Sphere

The artwork presents a series of AI Data Sculptures that incorporates vivid pigments, shapes, and patterns, aiming to create a collective, meditative, and multisensory experience. This immersive experience simulates the rhythms of various environments and invites the visitors to imagine alternative realities constructed by invisible data movements around them.
Machine Hallucination: The Sphere features dynamic visualizations of data that are based on vast archives containing visual imageries of space and nature while celebrating the unique architecture of The Sphere. For this project, Anadol and his team used these themed datasets as the building blocks for the three distinct chapters of the artwork and trained a unique AI model with subsets of the collected image archives. After the training, when idle and unsupervised, the “machine mind” generates new aesthetic visuals and color combinations through unique lines drawn by algorithmic connections.

Embodied Simulation

‘Embodied Simulation’ is a multiscreen video and sound installation that aims to provoke and nurture strong connections to the global ecosystems of which we are a part. The work combines artificial intelligence with dance and research from neuroscience to create an immersive, embodied experience, extending the viewer’s bodily perception beyond the skin, and into the environment.
The cognitive phenomenon of embodied simulation (an evolved and refined version of ‘mirror neurons’ theory) refers to the way we feel and embody the movement of others, as if they are happening in our own bodies. The brain of an observer unconsciously mirrors the movements of others, all the way through to the planning and simulating execution of the movements in their own body. This can even be seen in situations such as embodying and ‘feeling’ the movement of fabric blowing in the wind. As Vittorio Gallese writes, “By means of a shared neural state realized in two different bodies that nevertheless obey to the same functional rules, the ‘objectual other’ becomes ‘another self’.”

QUBIT AI | quantum & synthetic ai
Electronic Language International Festival

July 3rd to August 25th
Tuesday to Sunday, 10am – 8pm
FIESP Cultural Center

Design: André Lenz
Image: Iskarioto Dystopian AI Films – Athena

QUBIT AI

In its 25 years of existence, the International Electronic Language Festival (FILE) is an internationally renowned Brazilian project that since 2000 has explored the intersection between art and technology. With more than two decades of history, the festival stands out for fostering exhibition spaces and debate about artistic innovations driven by disruptive and innovative technologies, inviting the public to get involved with experimental forms of art that challenge the boundaries of conventionality. Currently, two of these technologies stand out in the contemporary scenario: the accelerated development of quantum computing and artificial intelligence corroborated by synthetic data.

Quantum computing, an emerging revolution in the technological field, offers a new range of creative possibilities for contemporary artists. This new era allows the exploration of unprecedented frontiers through a new computational format that consists mainly of quantum superposition and entanglement, a new field of exploration for synthetic computer science, as well as for the arts in general; on the other hand, artificial intelligence, fueled by synthetic data, offers artists a new way of making and understanding art, opening up space for new forms, concepts and artistic expressions.

Entitled QUBIT AI, the exhibition delves into this unexplored territory presenting a selection of works of art resulting from the connection between artistic creation and technology, proposing a theoretical reflection on what the interrelationship between quantum computers and synthetic artificial intelligence will be.

Visitors will be invited to experience immersive installations, experimental videos, digital sculptures and other forms of interactive art, which intertwine reality and imagination. The exhibition encourages reflections on the influence of technology on art and contemporary society, while at the same time providing an environment to compare already established technological arts (analog and digital) with the possible futures of art in the synthetic era, enhanced by quantum computing. The QUBIT AI exhibition at FILE SP 2024 transcends the mere presentation of works of art; it is a journey to the limits of human creativity, driven by the convergence of art, science and technology.

Ricardo Barreto and Paula Perissinotto
co-organizers and curators of FILE
International Electronic Language Festival

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.

FILE 2024

QUBIT AI | quantum & synthetic ai
Electronic Language International Festival
July 3rd to August 25th
Tuesday to Sunday, 10am – 8pm
FIESP Cultural Center

Design: André Lenz
Image: Iskarioto Dystopian AI Films – Athena

QUBIT AI

In its 25 years of existence, the International Electronic Language Festival (FILE) is an internationally renowned Brazilian project that since 2000 has explored the intersection between art and technology. With more than two decades of history, the festival stands out for fostering exhibition spaces and debate about artistic innovations driven by disruptive and innovative technologies, inviting the public to get involved with experimental forms of art that challenge the boundaries of conventionality. Currently, two of these technologies stand out in the contemporary scenario: the accelerated development of quantum computing and artificial intelligence corroborated by synthetic data.

Quantum computing, an emerging revolution in the technological field, offers a new range of creative possibilities for contemporary artists. This new era allows the exploration of unprecedented frontiers through a new computational format that consists mainly of quantum superposition and entanglement, a new field of exploration for synthetic computer science, as well as for the arts in general; on the other hand, artificial intelligence, fueled by synthetic data, offers artists a new way of making and understanding art, opening up space for new forms, concepts and artistic expressions.

Entitled QUBIT AI, the exhibition delves into this unexplored territory presenting a selection of works of art resulting from the connection between artistic creation and technology, proposing a theoretical reflection on what the interrelationship between quantum computers and synthetic artificial intelligence will be.

Visitors will be invited to experience immersive installations, experimental videos, digital sculptures and other forms of interactive art, which intertwine reality and imagination. The exhibition encourages reflections on the influence of technology on art and contemporary society, while at the same time providing an environment to compare already established technological arts (analog and digital) with the possible futures of art in the synthetic era, enhanced by quantum computing. The QUBIT AI exhibition at FILE SP 2024 transcends the mere presentation of works of art; it is a journey to the limits of human creativity, driven by the convergence of art, science and technology.

Ricardo Barreto and Paula Perissinotto
co-organizers and curators of FILE
International Electronic Language Festival

FILE 2024

QUBIT AI | quantum & synthetic ai
Electronic Language International Festival
July 3rd to August 25th
Tuesday to Sunday, 10am – 8pm
FIESP Cultural Center

Design: André Lenz
Image: Iskarioto Dystopian AI Films – Athena

QUBIT AI

In its 25 years of existence, the International Electronic Language Festival (FILE) is an internationally renowned Brazilian project that since 2000 has explored the intersection between art and technology. With more than two decades of history, the festival stands out for fostering exhibition spaces and debate about artistic innovations driven by disruptive and innovative technologies, inviting the public to get involved with experimental forms of art that challenge the boundaries of conventionality. Currently, two of these technologies stand out in the contemporary scenario: the accelerated development of quantum computing and artificial intelligence corroborated by synthetic data.

Quantum computing, an emerging revolution in the technological field, offers a new range of creative possibilities for contemporary artists. This new era allows the exploration of unprecedented frontiers through a new computational format that consists mainly of quantum superposition and entanglement, a new field of exploration for synthetic computer science, as well as for the arts in general; on the other hand, artificial intelligence, fueled by synthetic data, offers artists a new way of making and understanding art, opening up space for new forms, concepts and artistic expressions.

Entitled QUBIT AI, the exhibition delves into this unexplored territory presenting a selection of works of art resulting from the connection between artistic creation and technology, proposing a theoretical reflection on what the interrelationship between quantum computers and synthetic artificial intelligence will be.

Visitors will be invited to experience immersive installations, experimental videos, digital sculptures and other forms of interactive art, which intertwine reality and imagination. The exhibition encourages reflections on the influence of technology on art and contemporary society, while at the same time providing an environment to compare already established technological arts (analog and digital) with the possible futures of art in the synthetic era, enhanced by quantum computing. The QUBIT AI exhibition at FILE SP 2024 transcends the mere presentation of works of art; it is a journey to the limits of human creativity, driven by the convergence of art, science and technology.

Ricardo Barreto and Paula Perissinotto
co-organizers and curators of FILE
International Electronic Language Festival

FILE 2024

QUBIT AI | quantum & synthetic ai
Electronic Language International Festival
July 3rd to August 25th
Tuesday to Sunday, 10am – 8pm
FIESP Cultural Center

Design: André Lenz
Image: Iskarioto Dystopian AI Films – Athena

QUBIT AI

In its 25 years of existence, the International Electronic Language Festival (FILE) is an internationally renowned Brazilian project that since 2000 has explored the intersection between art and technology. With more than two decades of history, the festival stands out for fostering exhibition spaces and debate about artistic innovations driven by disruptive and innovative technologies, inviting the public to get involved with experimental forms of art that challenge the boundaries of conventionality. Currently, two of these technologies stand out in the contemporary scenario: the accelerated development of quantum computing and artificial intelligence corroborated by synthetic data.

Quantum computing, an emerging revolution in the technological field, offers a new range of creative possibilities for contemporary artists. This new era allows the exploration of unprecedented frontiers through a new computational format that consists mainly of quantum superposition and entanglement, a new field of exploration for synthetic computer science, as well as for the arts in general; on the other hand, artificial intelligence, fueled by synthetic data, offers artists a new way of making and understanding art, opening up space for new forms, concepts and artistic expressions.

Entitled QUBIT AI, the exhibition delves into this unexplored territory presenting a selection of works of art resulting from the connection between artistic creation and technology, proposing a theoretical reflection on what the interrelationship between quantum computers and synthetic artificial intelligence will be.

Visitors will be invited to experience immersive installations, experimental videos, digital sculptures and other forms of interactive art, which intertwine reality and imagination. The exhibition encourages reflections on the influence of technology on art and contemporary society, while at the same time providing an environment to compare already established technological arts (analog and digital) with the possible futures of art in the synthetic era, enhanced by quantum computing. The QUBIT AI exhibition at FILE SP 2024 transcends the mere presentation of works of art; it is a journey to the limits of human creativity, driven by the convergence of art, science and technology.

Ricardo Barreto and Paula Perissinotto
co-organizers and curators of FILE
International Electronic Language Festival

‘Semi-Diurnal Spaces’ is a site specific immersive installation in form of a full dome which makes use of local tidal and atmospheric data of South Wales. Locals were invited to experience their close-by waterbody through a meditative environment, connecting to it in a poetic, technological and tele present way. Tidal patterns and atmospheric data such as wind and humidity influence a digital NVIDIA FleX particle system in real-time. The site-specific data influences the gravitational forces, fluid viscosity and flow rate within the dome as a body, resulting in a living digital sculpture and AV experience connecting to aspects of the channel itself.

Ascent
Ascent is a large-scale site-specific light installation that embodies a variety of archetypical and physical associations – from microscopic observations, electromagnetic wave dynamics, and atmospheric phenomena of a whirlwind to a spiritual epiphany. Most importantly, Ascent offers a unique immersive experience, that invites the viewer to become its central point, and transforms the perception of the viewer on a sensual level. The light and the fog create a monumental dynamic space that is participatory, the space that opens up a new dimension and directs the attention toward the bodily sensations in the explicit environment. The viewer is free to approach the work according to its own sensual response, but direct interaction can offer the potential to evoke a new perceptual imagination.

Skin-awareness
The immersive space morphs and alters with light and becomes solid, its pressure composing and decomposing the self-awareness of skin. The dancer’s body is extended and manipulated as a conscious entity, exceeding the physiological object. The constant feedback between the body’s trajectory and interaction with the environment changes the nature of the object itself.

Versus
Elaborated by the French/Japanese duo Nonotak, ‘VERSUS’ is an immersive A/V experience that questions the relationship between 360° image and sound. The viewer finds himself submerged, at the centre of a perfectly geometric environment that constantly redefines space by breaking distances between projection, audience and screen. The work gives the illusion of a new type of architecture, a world created from distortions that shatter boundaries, and that brings the idea of infinity.

Journey
JOURNEY is a 4 min. immersive audiovisual experience, telling the story of photons, primary elements of light, from the moment they approach the eye until the brain reconstructs them into perceivable forms. Our journey begins with the formation of photons in blank space, the colored photons approach the eye and we find ourselves in the capillary structure of Iris, the first layer of the eye. Next stop for the light particles is the Lens, which has a more crystalline form. We find ourselves in a refractive and fractalized environment. With an accelerating pace, we move towards a structure of many capillaries, aka optic nerves, gradually becoming thinner and eventually transmitting light particles towards neurons.

Immersed Garden
Immersed Garden is in its true sense a sunken world. Floating bodiless in an underwater garden, natural sounds guide you through an immersive surrounding, somewhere between calming and irritating, natural and artificial. It is a playful exploration of the individual conception of safety and confusion and a personal approach to aesthetic references to habits of introspection and retreat in digital environments. It was created by fusing different digital processes like photogrammetry of selected natural places around Karlsruhe and field recordings in a local natural reserve. Underwater videos hybridize with 3D scans of trees and plants while invisible frogs are croaking and humming birds are buzzing by synthetic flowers. The artistic aim was to explore the personal perception of calming and irritating, playing with the concept of immaterialness and attentiveness. The artwork creates aesthetic references to philosophical and scientific theories of introspection and identity.

Meander
Meander is a large-scale immersive testbed environment constructed within a historic warehouse building at the centre of a residential highrise development in Cambridge, Ontario. The meshwork scaffolds which comprise the testbed are organized as a series of species within an artificial ecosystem, gently flexing and responding to the movement of viewers. Similar to natural environments such as rivers and clouds, large groups of parts pass physical impulses and data signals back and forth, enabling the entire environment to work as an interconnected whole. The innovations in Meander suggest ways of making adaptive, sensitive buildings of the future.

Scale
‘scale’ is an interspecies art project: an audience-interactive installation that involves nocturnal electric fish from the Amazon River Basin. Twelve different species of these fish comprise a choir whose sonified electrical fields provide the source tones for an immersive audiovisual environment. The fish are housed in individual tanks configured in a custom-built sculptural arc of aluminum frames placed around a central podium. The electrical field from each fish is translated into sound, and is thus heard — unprocessed or with digital effects added, with immediate control over volume via a touchscreen panel — through a 12-channel surround sound system, and with LED arrays under each tank for visual feedback. All software is custom-designed. Audience members interact as deejays with the system. Amongst the goals of the project is our desire to foster wider public awareness of these remarkable creatures, their importance to the field of neurological research, and the fragility of their native ecosystem.The project leaders comprise visual/conceptual artist Marlena Novak, composer/sound designer Jay Alan Yim, and neural engineer Malcolm MacIver. MacIver’s research focuses on sensory processing and locomotion in electric fish and translating this research into bio-inspired technologies for sensing and underwater propulsion through advanced fish robots. Novak and Yim, collaborating as ‘localStyle’, make intermedia works that explore perceptual themes, addressing both physical and psychological thresholds in the context of behavior, society/politics, and aesthetics.

n-Polytope: Behaviors in Light and Sound after Iannis Xenakis
N_Polytope: Behaviors in Light and Sound After Iannis Xenakis is a spectacular light and sound performance-installation combining cutting edge lighting, lasers, sound, sensing and machine learning software inspired by composer Iannis Xenakis’s radical 1960s- 1970s works named Polytopes (from the Greek ‘poly’, many and ‘topos’, space). As large scale, immersive architectural environments that made the indeterminate and chaotic patterns and behaviour of natural phenomena experiential through the temporal dynamics of light and the spatial dynamics of sound, the Polytopes still to this day are relatively unknown but were far ahead of their time. N_Polytope is based on the attempt to both re-imagine Xenakis’ work with probabilistic/stochastic systems with new techniques as well as to explore how these techniques can exemplify our own historical moment of extreme instability.

Turbulence
TURBULENCE is an ongoing series of immersive experiences created for large-scale, high-resolution media environments that embosom the viewer in digital flow of particles.It’s a set of visual experiments on particles simulated in different virtual environments.

Shifting Intimacies
An interactive/media artwork for one person at a time. Each participant enters a large, dark space containing two circles of projected film imagery presented within an immersive sound environment. One image floats upon a disc of white sand and the other on a circle of white dust. Participants’ movements direct and affect the filmic image and spatialised audio experience. Throughout the work a layer of dust (an artificial life form) slowly eats away and infuses itself deep into the imagery and sound. Each person has 10 minutes alone with the work. Their movement through the space continually affects speed, quality, balance and flow within the work. At the end of the experience they are invited to climb a lit platform and cast dust back onto the images below.

ФИЛИПП ПАРРЕНО
فيليب بارينو
菲利普·帕雷诺
H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS
H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS includes a vast collection of sculptural lighting that suspends from the cavernous ceiling. glowing white shapes informed by the design of movie marquees hang above visitors in bundles and as single geometries, casting dynamic patterns on the ground. as a participant walks through the site, they meet video installations, projections, pianos, chairs, speakers and sounds, all which have been carefully orchestrated to produce an immersive, sensory, and constantly-unfolding creative environment.

Infranet
Infranet is a generative artwork realized through a population of artificial lifeforms with evolutionary neural networks, thriving upon open geospatial data of the infrastructure of the city as their sustenance and canvas. Born curious, these agents form spatial networks through which associations spread in complex contagions. In this city as organism, the data grounds an unbounded, decentralized, open-ended, and unsupervised system. Non-human beings flourish in this environment by learning, discovering, communicating, self-governing, and evolving. The invitation is to witness, through immersive visualization and sonficiation of this complex adaptive system, how a new morphologic landscape emerges as a possible but speculative city.

1194D^3
Initially started as a tweak of 115C8 in 2013, one of Kwok’s Algorithmic Creatures based on finite subdivision, 1194D is an experiment on multiple geometric creatures co-existing within a tetrahedron-based grid environment. In 2017, The project was improved and revised into an immersive triple-screen audiovisual installation as 1194D^3 for .zip Future Rhapsody art exhibition curated by Wu Juehui & Yan Yan at Today Art Museum in Beijing, China. The entire visual is programmed and generated using Processing. All stages are later composed and exported using Premiere.

chromo sapiens
Icelandic artist Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir / Shoplifter has transformed a warehouse in Giudecca into a multi-sensory, cavernous environment with a cacophonous amount of her signature material, synthetic hair. Color, sound and irresistible textures guide visitors through three distinct chambers provoking an immersive experience of visual and auditory stimuli.

musings on a glass box
‘Musings on a glass box’ occupies the entire ground floor of the jean nouvel-designed building, generating an immersive and captivating environment split between two adjacent gallery spaces. In the first volume, a fabricated leak in the ceiling generates single droplets of water, which then fall from 12 specified points in the structure’s roof. Each drip is then caught below in a red robotic bucket that moves in synchronization with the falling water. At the same time, an enormous LED screen hung within the neighboring gallery invites visitors to view nouvel’s ceiling from the perspective of the bucket, projecting a wavy and distorted image.

Zee
File Festival 

Immersive Audiovisual Environment Artificial Fog, Stroboscopes, Pulse Lights and Surround Sound, 2008

ZEE proposes a state of tabula rasa and unfolds without a narrative or reproducible imagery.The audience wanders freely in a space filled with extremely dense fog that fully obscures all of its boundaries. Stroboscopic- and pulse lights illuminate the fog, in a softened and evenly dispersed manner, creating kaleidoscopic three-dimensional structures in constant animation. An ambient and minimal sound-scape connects to the imagery, without directly synchronizing to it.The core visual impression of ZEE is of a psychedelic architecture of pure light, an abstract luminescent landscape enveloping the visitor. Time appears to stand still.

アン·ハミルトン
앤 해밀턴
the event of a thread
Ann Hamilton is a visual artist internationally recognized for the sensory surrounds of her large-scale multi-media installations. Using time as process and material, her methods of making serve as an invocation of place, of collective voice, of communities past and of labor present. Noted for a dense accumulation of materials, her ephemeral environments create immersive experiences that poetically respond to the architectural presence and social history of their sites.

The Chronarium
The Chronarium is a public sleep laboratory presented as an immersive audiovisual environment that totally transforms its location into a restorative, calm and contemplative experience, responding to the Smart Nation’s need to tackle the challenges of the healthcare system.

Samorost 3
Prague-based Amanita Design, creators of the award-winning Mechinarium, recently released what may be their best game yet: Samorost 3. This deeply immersive puzzle game spans the ecosystems of 9 unusual planets as you encounter strange inhabitants and unlock increasingly complex secrets to advance to the next level. Amanita Design’s approach to creating completely non-verbal/non-textual games relies heavily on intuition, sound design, and symbolism to create environments that are practically interactive artworks.

flicker

Flicker is an immersive electronic environment of generative image and sound. A collaborative work with Oliver Bown. Based on biological models of firefly behaviour, Flicker generates an ever shifting rhythmic, meditative environment to the viewer. Flicker uses 4 channels of synchronised high definition video and 8 channels of sound to immerse the viewer in a phenomenologically rich environment of artificial life. The work is a large-scale agent-based simulation, with each agent providing a rhythmic pulse at regular intervals. Agents try to synchronise their pulse with other agents in their immediate neighbourhood. The collective pulsations of groups of local agents are spatially sonified with int exhibition space. Over time, large groups synchronise at different rates, leading to complex visual and aural structures, syncopating and constant shifting in to a long term complexity.

It Only Happens All of the Time

Constructed by Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon within San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) new exhibition series Control: Technology in Culture, It Only Happens All of the Time is an installation that shapes sound, movement, and perception. Architectural in ambition, the installation tasks visitors with exploring a room lined with a droning 11.1.4 surround sound system and custom sound-dampening acoustic panels in order to foreground what the artist describes as the “the exchange between moving within the sound, moving within the sculpture, moving with someone else” and yielding an “intimacy” in the process. Borrowing the materials and geometries of the acoustic panels used in anechoic chambers and acoustic testing labs, Gordon’s immersive sonic environment deploys clinical sound design to engender exploration and interaction.Positioned in the centre of Gordon’s space is “Love Seat”, a pair of adjoined enclosures where visitors can sit and listen. While sharing a common sightline—but physically separated—listeners can enjoy a moment together, each within (relative) acoustic isolation. In the essay accompanying the exhibition, Control: Technology in Culture curator Ceci Moss succinctly describes Gordon’s approach as “sound modulating mood” to “both commune and command” those entering the space.As would be expected, Gordon went to great lengths to sculpt the acoustics within It Only Happens All of the Time and the exhibition saw her working closely with specialists at Meyer Sound Laboratories. She touches on her process briefly in the video below and the Creator’s Project post on the project is worth delving into, as it provides some worthwhile ‘making of’ details as well as comments from collaborators Jon Leidecker (aka Wobbly) and Zackery Belanger.

Theo Watson, Emily Gobeille and Nick Hardeman
Connected Worlds
Connected Worlds is an immersive, interactive ecosystem that was designed for the New York Hall of Science. It’s an installation of six smaller ecosystems, actually—all of which are connected, much like real ecosystems are. The difference here is that the environments only exist on massive screens connected by a 3,000-ft² interactive floor.

City of Drones

City of Drones is an interactive digital environment developed by musician John Cale, speculative architect Liam Young and digital artists FIELD. Charting the story of a lost drone drifting through an abstract cityscape, players are invited to pilot a virtual craft and remotely explore this imaginary world. Samples from Cale’s original soundscape compositions echo across the landscape as we see the city through the eyes of the drone, buzzing between the buildings, drifting endlessly, in an ambient audio visual choreography. The City of Drones digital environment accompanies Loop, 60hz, an immersive live music and drone performance. John Cale, known for experimenting with different industrial sounds in his practice, once tuned his instruments to the hum of refrigerator motors. Cale in collaboration with Liam Young now explore the soundscape of a new generation, the distant rumble of drone propellers, to be set against the visual spectacle of Young’s choreographed flying machines. Typically associated with militarised applications, each drone is repurposed here as both disembodied instrument and dynamic audio infrastructure.

MID AND PLAYMODES
radial and blaus
‘radial’ and ‘blaus’ are two interactive lighting installations, both a result of the collaboration between catalonia-based digital research collectives MID (media interactive design) and playmodes. ‘blaus’ introduces the abstract realm of three dimensional geometry through the mediums of audio and illumination – this could manifest as a cube or a blossoming flower, a grid or a jellyfish, a mutant framework of reflecting lights which submerge the audience into a multi-faceted universe, driven by hidden forces of the architecture. ‘blaus’ is an immersive space where audio-visual elements relate
intimately to impact on the visitor. the process led the designers to build most of the software and hardware elements themselves, by means of algorithm design, digital fabrication techniques and craft handwork. on the hardware side, the use of open source technologies, such as arduino, allowed us to create a flexible electronic system easily addressable by opensound – control data. ‘duration open source software by
james george was used in order to independently control, compose, and play a full score for the laser diodes, servomotors, lights and music.on the sound design side, all music and sound effects are made through the use of audio programming environments such as predate and reactor.
custom digital instruments are made in order to exactly match the resonant frequency of the space and its harmonics.
‘blaus’ is an immersive space where audio-visual elements relate intimately to impact on the visitor.