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.

Samplingplong
File Festival

Randomly selected, acoustically usable finds (electronic junk, relays, plastic toys,compressed air valves, pneumatically operated components) are combined with cables and tubes. Via a device controlled by computer, they are turned into interactive instruments. An improvised ensemble evolves, from which – per mouse-over and mouse-click -short miniature compositions of dense rhythmic clicks, hisses, whirs, hums and crackles can be elicited. A tapestry of sound bursts forth from the floral-like web of cables and tubes. The installation can be used by the projected mouse-cursor: rolling over the improvised instruments causes small sound events. Activating the installation by rolling over its parts enables the user to play spontaneous improvisations. Clicking these objects starts short programs of loop-like compositions. Small “techno-compositions en miniature”, rhythmic patterns of analog (or real) sounds; a physical low-tech simulation of electronic, digital music, perhaps an ironic comment on interactivity.

Everything
FILE GAMES 2017
Everything is an interactive experience where everything you see is a thing you can be, from animals to planets to galaxies and beyond. Travel between outer and inner space, and explore a vast, interconnected universe of things without enforced goals, scores, or tasks to complete. Everything is a procedural, AI-driven simulation of the systems of nature, seen from the points of view of everything in the Universe.

FEED ME
FEED ME is a ludic experiment that explores the relation between the artwork and its public. With a self-ironical approach, the project is calling the subjects of monstrous and perpetually insatiable Tra to her feeding ritual: the entire exhibition is a live organism that feeds on the energy produced by the movements of the public. It is an interactive multimedia capsule that carries a dynamic platform where everything moves, pulses and reacts to motion on a common rhythm. The exhibition space is structured in narrowing concentric circles, creating several worlds that include each other and cocoon around a magical protection space, thus the public is activated on several levels.

Face Substitution

Faces is an interactive installation result of the work on face substitution in collaboration with Arturo Castro

“The installation is based on the idea of wishing for a new identity: when the subject first steps up, they see their face unmodified. After closing their eyes to make a wish and opening them again, they discover they are wearing a new face. The result is a mixture of a playful, surprising and some times scary experience.This installation takes advantage of the unique experience of slowly recognizing yourself as someone else playing also with the concept of the uncanny valley by showing a face that perfecly matches the visitors facial expresion but still has some lighting and texturing imperfections. This elicits everything from laughter, to surprise, or repulsion.Knowing that it takes approximately one second for someone to respond to a completely unexpected event, we store a photograph at 1.5 seconds after the swap — capturing that moment of realization.”Arturo Castro