HYSTERESIS

FILE 2024 | Aesthetic Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
Robert Seidel – HYSTERESIS – Germany

HYSTERESIS intimately weaves a transformative fabric between Robert Seidel’s projections of abstract drawings and queer performer Tsuki’s vigorous choreography. Using machine learning to mediate these delayed re-presentations, the film intentionally corrupts AI strategies to reveal a frenetic, delicate and extravagant visual language that portrays hysteria and hysteresis in this historical moment.

Bio

Robert Seidel is interested in exploring abstract beauty through cinematic techniques and insights from science and technology. His projections, installations and award-winning experimental films have been presented at numerous international festivals, art venues and museums, highlighting his innovative approach to visual art.

Credits

Film: Robert Seidel
Music: Oval
Performer: Tsuki
Graphics: Bureau Now
5.1 Mixing: David Kamp
Support: Miriam Eichner, Carolin Israel, Falk Müller, Paul Seidel
Financing: German Federal Film Board

Drawn Together, Held Apart

Caitlin is an artist that is interested in intentional social connection in public spaces. She creates experiences that allow participants to quietly communicate and listen to one another. In the live component of her installation, Caitlin hosts an conversation entitled ‘talking and listening about talking and listening’. ‘Drawn Together, Held Apart’ (2017), a custom made table with inbuilt surface transducer speaker, motion sensor activated LED lighting, proximity speakers and audio. Visitors rest their ears on the glass and listen.

Squint
file festival
I was inspired by how the sunlight bounces around in our artificial forest.
“Squint” is a kinetic light installation consisting of 49 mirrors that reflect lights in a bright space. The mirrors track and reflect lights on audiences’ face with composed patterns of movements. It extends the generated perception by focusing on how lights pass across our visual senses physically, and combines with our perception of images through flickering. “Squint”, which extracts various daily experiences to an abstraction brings the audience to expand their interpretation of lights and perceived imagination into a non-linear experience.
“Squint” simulates light source and intentionally shines lights on audience’s faces. Bright light is projected in the gallery, a clean bright space.
Everyday people are dynamically moving around in the city. Sunlight reflects and flickers even when it is indirect and hidden behind the artifacts. While we are traveling, we are experiencing motion. We are also experiencing the shift of light intensity, visual patterns and textures. The varieties of light forms inspire the artist to explore the potential of light textures, select and sort out the combined complexity in urban space. The artist turns them into a minimal form of light experience, while maximizing its diversity of perception.

The Decelerator Helmet
The technique of the Decelerator extends the awareness of time and transforms the concept of present in a constructed, artificial state. On a different Level the helmet dramatically visualizes how slowing down under all circumstances causes a loss of actuality and as idea is inconsistent with it´s Environment. Technical enhancement as a tool to give us control about our perception, asks the question how far this influence can go, before we are all lost in how we want to see reality. The Decelerator unintentionally explores how aspects of this shift to a personalized perception could change our view of the world.

Homo Economicus
Homo Economicus explores how men working in the City of London financial district both modify and commodify their own bodies. The work intentionally conflates the corporate and the corporeal, questioning male self-worth and its apparent apotheosis in the hyper-competitive financial services industry. Grounded in audio interviews with real city men, Homo Economicus proposes an alternative economy of the male body: not as an unquestioned instrument of power, but a site of vulnerability and power-play.

Limited Spaces N2
On approaching the piece, the viewer must mount a bicycle and start pedaling at a suitable and steady speed — only then will the projection of a film onto the screen start. In order to watch the film to the end one has to continue cycling without stopping. This work is built around a performance, produced by two actors: a man riding a bicycle and a woman, who, concealed behind the screen, moves depending on the man’s velocity, unintentionally creating changing reliefs which resemble sculptures. The abusive nature of the relationship embodied in the performance clearly draws on the ancient Greek myth about sculptor Pygmalion and his “artwork” Galatea on the one hand, and on the other references more contemporary feminist discourse, something to which the artist is far from being indifferent. The faster the man pedals, the faster and more forcedly the woman moves. Few trained artists could withstand such a speed.

Skorpions
LUTTERGILL
Skorpions are a set of kinetic electronic garments that move and change on the body in slow, organic motions.They breathe and pulse, controlled by their own internal programming. They are not “interactive” artifacts insofar as their programming does not respond to simplistic sensor data. They have intentionality; they are programmed to live, to exist, to subsist. They are living behavioral kinetic sculptures that exploit characteristics such as control, anticipation and unpredictability. They have their own personalities, their own fears and desires.

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.

I Fought The Law
In her “I Fought The Law” series, Olivia Locher has come up with a series of images that creatively poke fun at some of the more absurd laws in effect in the United States. Each photo is a tongue-in-cheek rebellion that intentionally violates some absurd U.S. State law, most of which are outdated or bizarrely specific.

安托万·卡塔拉
Antibody
French born, New York-based artist Antoine Catala first began experimenting with digital artifacts in 2003, through a technique that intentionally causes compression errors in digital video, which often plague satellite television, streaming internet videos and other digital environments.