Modern Guru
Modern Guru is a translucent ovoid with four huge digital eyes, floating above a ceremonial ring of LEDs. From his mouth flows a ream of absurdist messages, and in a statement about the true nature of lived experience, a new message is delivered when visitors take a photo of Modern Guru – a missive produced only for those who seek to photograph life rather than live the moment. This immersive new media art installation uses the intersection of art and technology to explore modern paths to happiness through unique interactions with characters along a mystical journey of discovery. Visitors are asked to commit to the path – a tight and winding trail with subtle points of connection along the way – a glowing landscape of oversized, whimsical mountains that chant incantations and blink innocently from digital eyes.
Having communed with the Guru, visitors then weave their way back through this warped and strange world full of illusions and delusions, perceptions and deceptions, all the while bathing in luminescent light; embracing big, gentle forms; and following their own path up the pink tongue staircase to meet the one who oversees the whole fantastic dominion, the Sun God.

The Witness

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival

Image activated by augmented reality, where 3D animated subjects and scenarios are integrated into a physical photograph. Inspired by the work of Carl Jung, the image is part of a larger series that explores themes such as identity, introspection and transformation. Through AR, game elements were introduced into the piece, offering virtual content unlockable through interactions.

Bio

Camila Magrane is a Venezuelan-American visual artist known for her augmented reality images, integrating 3D animated scenes and subjects into physical photographs. With experience in video game development and a passion for analog photography, she explores the dialogue between the virtual and physical worlds. Magrane’s images are inspired by surrealist compositions and reference the graphic hyperrealism of contemporary video game design.

Everything Before, Everything After

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival
Seph Li – Everything Before, Everything After – China and UK

A digital installation features a winding river in the style of Chinese painting, symbolizing time and transition. Touch screens allow visitors to paint over it, altering its course unpredictably. The river embodies history and the future, with each trace contributing to its eternal flow through space and time. Recorded interactions ensure its perpetual existence.

Bio

Born in Beijing in 1988, Seph Li has a mixed background in technology and design, and his keen interest in interactive artworks led him to the field of media arts. Seph studied computer science and entertainment design at Tsinghua University and continued his master’s study in design/media arts at UCLA. Seph currently resides in London, United Kingdom; he creates interactive artworks as well as technical experiments with other production studios.

FRAGILE
Fragile is an audio-visual installation that aims to investigate the relationship between stressful human experience and the transformations that occur in our brain. Recent scientific research has shown that neurons belonging to different areas of our brain are affected by stress. In particular stress causes changes in neuron circuitry, impacting their plasticity, the ability to change through growth and reorganization.
Our process exploits the scientific data provided by the Society for Neuroscience and elaborates this information trying to show the effect of external interactions on our nervous system and ultimately on our relationship with the outside world. In order to achieve this we developed an artwork composed of different digital representations following one another, branching into 5 screen projections.

AMECA
“Multiply the power of artificial Intelligence with an artificial body. Ameca is the physical presence that brings your code to life. The most advanced lifelike humanoid you can use to develop and show off your greatest machine learning interactions. This robot is the digital interface to the real world.” Engineered Arts
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“A U.K. robotics firm called Engineered Arts just debuted the first videos of its new humanoid robot, which is able to make hyper-realistic facial expressions. It’s a pretty stunning achievement in the world of robotics; it just also happens to be absolutely terrifying.
Named Ameca, the robot’s face features eyes, cheeks, a mouth, and forehead that contort and change shape to show off emotions ranging from awe to surprise to happiness. One of the new videos of Ameca shows it waking up and seemingly coming to grips with its own existence for the first time ever.” Neel V.Patel

Aerial Assemblies
Self-Assembly is a process by which disordered parts build an ordered structure through local interaction. We have demonstrated that this phenomenon is scale-independent and can be utilized for self-constructing and manufacturing systems at nearly every scale. We have also identified the key ingredients for self-assembly as a simple set of responsive building blocks, energy and interactions that can be designed within nearly every material and machining process available. Self-assembly promises to enable breakthroughs across every applications of biology, material science, software, robotics, manufacturing, transportation, infrastructure, construction, the arts, and even space exploration.

Interactions du corps abstrait
Avec “Interactions of the Abstract Body”, McElheny a poussé ces idées plus loin, créant un ensemble de travaux vaste et varié qui examine comment la mode et le modernisme se sont entrecroisés et influencés, en particulier à travers le langage commun du corps. Fondamentalement, McElheny a animé cette dynamique avec la présence constante d’un interprète. En combinant une performance continue en chair et en os avec une sculpture statique dans le même espace de galerie, une première pour White Cube, McElheny rompt radicalement la distinction entre performance et exposition.

ANTIBODIES
ANTIBODIES est une installation interactive qui suit les visages des participants et les incite à faire des expressions faciales. La pièce reflète à quel point nous sommes absents et détachés lors des appels vidéo – la forme aujourd’hui imposée de rassemblements sociaux. À la fin de chaque expérience, toutes les interactions deviennent partie d’une galerie d’êtres humains désincarnés.

Interpolate
Interpolate incorporates live coding and generative processes to create an audio/visual performance where visuals control audio, and audio controls visuals. Stark, minimal, generative 3D geometry and particle systems take the audience through the music, conveying the physicality of the sound while mapping out the emotional landscape of the melodies. To interpolate means to determine an intermediate value or term in a series by calculating it from surrounding known values; on stage Push 1 stop and Woulg send data wirelessly to each other in order to be able to patch new interactions between audio and visuals in real time, and interpolate the missing data between sound and image.

Climat General College des Bernardins
Se référant à l’« Hypothèse Gaïa » de James Lovelock, Malrieux transforme la figure de Gaïa en une machine climatique autonome qui affiche un espace dynamique et organique, construit selon des flux de données empruntés aux principaux modèles climatiques prédictifs. A travers différents scénarios programmatiques, l’artiste met en évidence l’influence de l’homme sur son environnement, un environnement en perpétuelle mutation dont la fin ne peut être programmée. Car si l’entrée dans l’anthropocène marque la fin d’une Terre en extension, elle marque surtout le début d’autre chose : une situation différente dans le temps et dans l’espace. Un espace où le décor est en mouvance et dans lequel l’histoire humaine s’adapte et évolue.
L’usage simultané du dessin et des algorithmes permet de visualiser des interactions et des causes à effets habituellement invisibles, de les décoder et d’en interroger les enjeux.

田中功起
Everything is Everything

The eight-channel video installation, Everything is Everything, was created for the first time to be shown at the 2006 Taipei Biennial, curated by Dan Cameron. For this work, the artist and two assistants spent a total of eight days recording their interactions and interventions with readily available items, including hangers, glasses, towels, air mattresses and toilet paper, all found in the city of Taipei. The physical properties of these objects have been tested (a metal hanger is stretched to the breaking point) or their uses have been expanded (a level placed on two table legs becomes an improvised obstacle). Tanaka and his assistants experimented with these objects several times indoors and in public, and their explorations were compiled into eight separate video loops lasting from 1:19 to 1:50 minutes. Tanaka’s narrowly cut frame of each scene often features performers from the neck down or removes them completely from the scene, thus focusing the viewer’s attention on the simple, repetitive objects and acts being performed.

Realistic and Interactive Robot Gaze
System for lifelike gaze in human-robot interactions using a humanoid Audio-Animatronics® bust. Previous work examining mutual gaze between robots and humans has focused on technical implementation. We present a general architecture that seeks not only to create gaze interactions from a technological standpoint, but also through the lens of character animation where the fidelity and believability of motion is paramount; that is, we seek to create an interaction which demonstrates the illusion of life. A complete system is described that perceives persons in the environment, identifies persons-of-interest based on salient actions, selects an appropriate gaze behavior, and executes high, fidelity motions to respond to the stimuli. We use mechanisms that mimic motor and attention behaviors analogous to those observed in biological systems including attention habituation, saccades, and differences in motion bandwidth for actuators.

Interactions of the Abstract Body
With ‘Interactions of the Abstract Body’ McElheny pushed these ideas further, creating a large and varied body of work that looks at how fashion and modernism have intersected and influenced each other, especially through the common language of the body. Crucially, McElheny animated this dynamic with the constant presence of a performer. By combining a continuous flesh-and-blood performance with static sculpture in the same gallery space, a first for White Cube, McElheny radically fractures the distinction between performance and exhibition.

Vitreous
The nine virtual sculptures underlying vitreous resulted from experimental setups by Robert Seidel for generating three-dimensional clusters of fibrous refractions, as well as the gravitational lensing of different volumetric and chromatic densities. Singular elements gravitate towards each other, accumulating in a gigantic sculptural system, where each entity exists with its own visual axis and vanishing point. The impalpable luminous formations create prismatic interactions between the ridges and plateaux of the main colours floating in front of the infinite violet background.

ELECTRIC SKIN

The Electric Skin explores the possibility of creating a wearable that extends the functionality of the skin to sense electromagnetic fields (mostly within the radio spectrum) and translate that information into touch sensation. The wearable consists of two main functional parts: 1) A matrix of omnidirectional antennas that act as sensors and probes and 2) corresponding electrodes that stimulate the skin of the wearer. Through this artificial “skin” or “exoskeleton”, the wearable changes our experience, perception, and understanding of space and movement, and in doing so, our interactions. The project speculates on the possible co-evolution of man and technology and draws attention to the role of environmental influence on our own bodily development and behavior.

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.

After Deep Blue

ADB is a modular robot designed for tactile interactions with people. It is composed of a chain of prism-shaped robotic modules. Through the modules’ coordinated behavior, the robot writhes, wriggles and twists in response to the presence of skin and force. The robot is animated only when actively engaged by a person, otherwise it is at rest. Stroking, rubbing or grasping ADB results in it pushing back, retreating or occasionally grasping onto a body part, depending on the combination of stimulus. Participants may experience the object at their leisure. They can play with the device, exploring how it feels, and how it responds to their touch.

Liquid MIDI
An experimental modular textile interface for sonic interactions, exploring aesthetics and morphology on contemporary interaction design. Trigger  pads and fader board are screen printed modules focused on AV performances, allowing the performer to build its set up regarding its needs.

BEHAVIOURAL COMPLEXITY

Design Research Laboratory (AADRL) and the experimental design studio Minimaforms examining a behavior-based agenda that engages experimental forms of material and social interaction. Cybernetic and systemic thinking through seminal forms of prototyping and experimentation will situate the work through continued experiments that have manifested since the early 1950s as maverick machines, architectures and computational practices exploring the generative potential of self-regulating phenomena as proto-architectural environments. Through explicit models of interactions, observable patterns and proto-animalistic agency; the research will discuss the capacity of these systems to evolve, adapt and self-structure through computation.

Since the emergence of time as a concept, the circle has been a graphic representation that registers and measures the passing of seconds, minutes, hours, and even decades. . . . The torus may be seen as a three-dimensional form utilized to represent time as it travels through a cyclic loop. The geometric shape of the torus speaks of duration, of looped time, and of transformations along and in time. In this project, Boolean operations between varying tori in multiple dimensions indicate the interaction between durations—possibly time in addition to time, or interactions diluted by time—that reveal a new architectural realm featuring free curves which direct visitors’ movements inside flowing spaces. People will lose the perception of direction or time and find themselves worshipping in open and serene volumes.

Life Support
Les abeilles sont entraînées en utilisant le réflexe de Pavlov pour cibler une odeur spécifique et leur plage de détection comprend les phéromones, les toxines et le diagnostic des maladies. Non seulement ils peuvent parcourir de grandes distances à la recherche de ce que vous voulez qu’ils reniflent, mais cela ne prend que quelques minutes pour les entraîner, contrairement aux chiens dont la formation peut durer jusqu’à un an. Leur comportement peut être conditionné par des récompenses telles que l’eau sucrée. Ils sont placés dans des récipients en forme de paille et conçus pour sentir une combinaison, disons de sucre, avec de minuscules résidus de TNT. C’est tout! Le sens aigu de l’odorat des abeilles associera alors l’odeur des explosifs à la nourriture. Dans son projet BEE’S, Susana utiliserait les insectes comme biocapteurs, exploitant leur odorat extroadinaire pour détecter des maladies telles que le cancer du poumon, le cancer de la peau et la tuberculose. En outre, ils pouvaient repérer le problème très tôt bien mieux que les machines. Ils pourraient même détecter si une femme est enceinte, ce que je trouve beaucoup plus attrayant et élégant que la méthode habituelle qui consiste à faire pipi sur un morceau de plastique.La créatrice a visité la London Beekeepers Association et a utilisé du chewing-gum dans ses tests avec les abeilles. Elle a ensuite localisé un maître verrier et fait souffler des objets en verre. Les gens respiraient dans les outils de diagnostic en verre où les abeilles sont gardées pendant la courte période de temps nécessaire pour leur permettre de détecter les cycles généraux de santé et de fertilité. Pour éviter que la bouche n’entre en contact avec l’insecte, il existe deux sphères différentes, l’odeur de l’abeille étant suffisamment forte pour renifler ce que vous respirez à travers le verre. Bess se précipiterait dans les tubes qui mènent plus près de la respiration quand ils détectaient une maladie qu’ils associent à la nourriture. Dans son scénario, les gens recevraient des abeilles entraînées par la poste (rien de rare ici apparemment), procéderaient au test respiratoire que de libérer les abeilles.BEE’S explore comment nous pourrions cohabiter avec les systèmes biologiques naturels et utiliser leur potentiel pour augmenter nos capacités de perception. . Nous avons toujours coexisté avec ces systèmes, mais leur potentiel était inconnu. Ce projet est basé sur des recherches en cours qui ont fourni les connaissances nécessaires pour permettre de nouvelles interactions. L’objectif de ce projet est de développer des relations de collaboration entre la recherche scientifique et technologique, les apiculteurs et le design, entre autres, traduisant le résultat en systèmes et objets que les gens peuvent comprendre et utiliser, engendrant des ajustements significatifs.

Architectural Timepiece
Since the emergence of time as a concept, the circle has been a graphic representation that registers and measures the passing of seconds, minutes, hours, and even decades. . . . The torus may be seen as a three-dimensional form utilized to represent time as it travels through a cyclic loop. The geometric shape of the torus speaks of duration, of looped time, and of transformations along and in time. In this project, Boolean operations between varying tori in multiple dimensions indicate the interaction between durations—possibly time in addition to time, or interactions diluted by time—that reveal a new architectural realm featuring free curves which direct visitors’ movements inside flowing spaces. People will lose the perception of direction or time and find themselves worshipping in open and serene volumes.

Absent Engagement
Alexandra Zierle (DE) and Paul Carter’s (UK) collaborative work is Interdisciplinary, multi-sensory and often site/context responsive, spanning performance, happenings and interventions, sound, video and installation. Through their collaborative practice, Zierle & Carter critically examine different modes of communication and what it means to be human, addressing notions of belonging, dynamics within relationships, and the transformation of limitations. Their work sites an embodied investigation into human interactions and encounters, acting as an invitation to venture into the spaces in-between the external and internal, permanent and transient, spoken and unheard. The work fundamentally explores society’s conventions, traditions, and rituals, often flipping them on their head, reversing orders, and disrupting the norm.

Antistructure
L’artiste visuel canadien s’approprie le réel en lui donnant des aspects grandiose et grotesque. Dans sa récente série «Antistructure», Alex Lysakowski basé à Mississauga, au Canada, nous propose de découvrir des bâtiments industriels, des automobiles, mais aussi des monuments devenus invraisemblables grâce à la magie de la retouche photo. «Je crée des images avec des interactions structurelles surréalistes et étranges au sein de paysages banals. J’évite ainsi un espace de transition entre la réalité et la fiction, tout en conservant le réalisme dans l’atmosphère de l’image», indique-t-il.

Cloud
Liz Nurenberg: “Cloud” My Sculptural objects act as experience stations where viewers can form relationships both to the work and to other viewers. Interactivity allows me to explore intimacy, personal space,and how the body physically connects with something while confusing the line between viewers and viewed. The handmade nature of my work evokes intimacy, suggesting the presence of human effort or authorship. Sound acts as an inner voice, which can create a subtle sense of awkwardness. These touches come together to build a scene where interactions happen and narrative forms.

Romance & The Landscape
Romance & The Landscape by Justin Hodges disrupts the banality of the day to day by re-contextualizing images and objects and highlighting the intricacy of our relationship to our planet. According to the artist, the natural world is a container of sorts for many things, both human and otherwise. With that, he encourages us to think about the routines and convenience of our interactions.

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.

Insides Evening Cape
Hannah Soukup brings a multidimensional approach to apparel design by combining traditional and unconventional techniques using innovative materials and technologies to transform ideas into provocative, and intriguing wearable experiences. She is a futuristic thinker and passionate ideator with her process deeply rooted in material research and experimentation, evolving ideas through draping and sculpting on the body to bring to life intimate interactions with the garments and realities.

Reface [Portrait Sequencer]

Reface [Portrait Sequencer] by Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman (2007) is a surreal video mash-up that composes endless combinations of its visitors’ faces. Based on the Victorian “Exquisite Corpse” parlor game, the Reface installation records and dynamically remixes brief video slices of its viewers’ mouths, eyes and brows. Reface uses face-tracking techniques to allow automatic alignment and segmentation of its participants’ faces. As a result, visitors to the project can move around freely in front of the display without worrying about lining up their face for the system’s camera. The video clips recorded by the project are “edited” by the participants’ own eye blinks. Blinking also triggers the display to advance to the next set of face combinations. Through interactions with an image wholly constructed from its own history of being viewed, Reface makes possible a new form of inventive play with one’s own appearance and identity. The resulting kinetic portraiture blends the personalities and genetic traits of its visitors to create a “generative group portrait” of the people in the project’s locale.

Automultiscopic 3D displays
Automultiscopic 3D displays allow a large number of viewers to experience 3D content simultaneously without the hassle of special glasses or head gear. This display uses a dense array of 216 video projectors to generate images with high angular density over a wide field of view. As users move around the display, their eyes smoothly transition from one view to the next. The display is ideal for displaying life-size human subjects, as it allows for natural personal interactions with 3D cues such as eye-gaze and spatial hand gestures.

the Waterfall Swing

Towering steel swing set holding arrays of mechanical solenoids that create a water plane falling in the path of its riders. Formed from a tangent of ideas raised from the study of interactions of water as space, the swing is the first in a series that play with interaction in rides and installations. Riders pass through openings in a waterfall created by precisely monitoring their path via axel-housed encoders, creating the thrill of narrowly escaping obstacles.

Intimacy Dress

INTIMACY is a high-tech fashion project exploring the relation between intimacy and technology. Its high-tech garments entitled ‘Intimacy White’ and ‘Intimacy Black’ are made out of opaque smart e-foils that become increasingly transparent based on close and personal encounters with people. Social interactions determine the garmentsʼ level of transparency, creating a sensual play of disclosure.

振り子の合唱団
CYCLOID-E

This piece, which comprises a series of tubular pieces arranged horizontally and activated by a motor, generates a particular sound through its movement, which is unexpectedly harmonic. The artists have taken their interest in the mechanisms that generate wave motions as a starting point to create this sculpture: five metal tubes joined together feature sound sources and sensors that allow them to emit different sounds based on their rotations.
The sculpture runs through a series of rhythmic movements, like a dance, creating, in the words of the artists themselves, “a unique kinetic and polyphonic work, in the likeness of the “Cosmic Ballet” to which the physicist Johannes Kepler refers to in his “Music of the Spheres” in 1619.” This work is part of the reflection on the possible interactions between sound and movement developed by the artists since 1999, using electronic devices and inspired by the aesthetics of industrial machinery.

Cluster

CLUSTER, la dernière génération d’œuvre audiovisuelle 3D en temps réel de Kurt Hentschläger, se focalise sur le comportement collectif (psychologie, interactions) et plus particulièrement sur le phénomène de foule. La configuration est simple, voire absurde : des personnages humains en 3D apparaissent, comme un banc de poissons. Dans la chorégraphie en apesanteur de CLUSTER, les êtres humains semblent être des particules anonymes, une masse amorphe sous impulsion, un nuage de matière trouble faite de morceaux de corps et de lumière. Visuellement, l’œuvre alterne entre des formes abstraites et réalistes.Par sa nature générative jamais complètement prévisible, CLUSTER, décrit un méta-organisme à caractère irrévocablement anti-individualiste. Alors que les personnages ont une forme humaine, leur comportement ne l’est pas, ce qui empêche la naturelle identification du public à ses alter-egos présumés. Le dispositif informatique permet de définir la nature et le champ de l’action tandis que l’artiste canalise et orchestre les forces en présence.L’œuvre tire son ambiguïté à la fois de ses éléments répétitifs et rythmiques, ainsi que de ses structures « naturelles » improvisées. La majorité des sons de CLUSTER, est produit par les événements qui animent l’œuvre : mouvements et comportements des masses, changements de lumière. Une grille rythmique lie chaque parties entre elles, ce qui donne une impression de pulsion. Les basses fréquences sous les spectateurs et les hautes fréquences les surplombant, encadrent les sons générés par les événements.

transmutation
In the weird and wonderful world of humanoidquantum mechanics, dimensional transmutation describes a phenomena which changes the state of a parameter by adding dimensions to its dimensionless condition. This experimental film applies this principle to visualize the complex interactions between atmosphere and climate. It utilizes a six-dimensional framework, comprised of regular space-time augmented with climate data collected between 1993 and 2011. Changes in global tropospheric temperature, mean sea level, and atmospherical co2 concentration are mapped onto the color palette, shape, and stereoscopic depth of a video clip, depicting a low-lying shoreline in Indonesia, threatened by rising sea levels. The film begins ‘flat’, but over time, with increasing co2 concentration in the atmosphere, its stereoscopic depth expands, and the landscape opens up to the observer, while temperature and sea-level changes modify color and shape.

EMERGENT
According to wikipedia, “emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.” Thus “EMERGENT” was created using a particle system that was given basic rules of behavior, this is very similar to swarm algorithms using in architecture to create 3D forms. The application/particle system was created/simulated using Processing and OpenGL. The particle trails (locations over time) were imported to Maya using a MEL script and then animated to show their growth over time. I developed a (pretty complex) Processing application that helped me simulate the particle system (300 particles, with per particle interaction) in real-time.