highlike

BREAKFAST

Interwoven Existence

The artwork draws inspiration from the concept that individual human beings are interconnected rather than isolated. It is a visual representation of collective strength and diversity. The artwork is divided into sections of various sizes and colors, each symbolizing the diverse origins of people around the world.
As viewers approach the artwork, it becomes interactive, reflecting their image across the piece. Upon stepping away, a recording of their interaction is placed into one of the sections, symbolizing the randomness of a given person’s birthplace and socioeconomic position. Subsequently, recorded video clips of previous viewers are displayed in adjacent sections, integrating new viewers into the existing community of participants.

REVITAL COHEN & TUUR VAN BALEN

The Immortal
A number of life-support machines are connected to each other, circulating liquids and air in attempt to mimic a biological structure.
The Immortal investigates human dependence on electronics, the desire to make machines replicate organisms and our perception of anatomy as reflected by biomedical engineering.
A web of tubes and electric cords are interwoven in closed circuits through a Heart-Lung Machine, Dialysis Machine, an Infant Incubator, a Mechanical Ventilator and an Intraoperative Cell Salvage Machine. The organ replacement machines operate in orchestrated loops, keeping each other alive through circulation of electrical impulses, oxygen and artificial blood.
Salted water acts as blood replacement: throughout the artificial circulatory system minerals are added and filtered out again, the blood gets oxygenated via contact with the oxygen cycle, and an ECG device monitors the system’s heartbeat. As the fluid pumps around the room in a meditative pulse, the sound of mechanical breath and slow humming of motors resonates in the body through a comforting yet disquieting soundscape.Life support machines are extraordinary devices; computers designed to activate our bodies when anatomy fails, hidden away in hospital wards. Although they are designed as the ultimate utilitarian appliances, they are extremely meaningful and carry a complex social, cultural and ethical subtext. While life prolonging technologies are invented as emergency measures to combat or delay death, my interest lies in considering these devices as a human enhancement strategy.This work is a continuation of my investigation of the patient as a cyborg, questioning the relationship between medicine and techno- fantasies about mechanical bodies, hyper abilities and posthumanism.

Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat

Kissing Data Symphony
Intimacy Data Symphony is a poetic ritual for intimate experience of Kissing and Caressing each other faces, multi-sensory and socially shared in public space of merging realities. In live experiments with Multi-Brain BCI E.E.G. head-sets, visitors are invited as Kissers (or Caressers) and Spectators. Brain activity of people kissing and caressing is measured and visualized in streaming E.E.G. data, real-time circling around them in a floor projection. Simultaneously, the Spectators brain waves are measured, their neurons mirroring activity of intimate kissing and caressing movements, resonating in their imagination. The Spectators brain activity data are interwoven in the data-visualization. Brain activity of all participants, mirroring each others emotional expressions and movements, in interpersonal and aesthetic ways, co-create an immersive visual, Reflexive Datascape.

CRAIG GREEN

Moncler’s Genius 2020 Collection
The british fashion designer reinterpreted the brand’s iconic expression as a series of monochrome designs resembling padded samurai armour and brightly colored inflatables[…] Injecting flat sheets with down quilting, Craig Green uses a series of zips that allow the body to inhabit the garments and give them volume. Further defined by outlines printed on the outside, each piece is clad in ripstop nylon, a light-weight nylon fabric with interwoven ripstop reinforcement threads in a crosshatch pattern.

John Russell and Joey Holder

TETRAGRAMMATON
A dialogue between these two artists on themes of myth, ritual and meaning, as much about their exhaustion and propensity to bewilderment as any potential they may inhere, for recuperation for and by language, culture and society. Joey’s work, ‘Religiously observant’, is inspired by alchemical and occult ideas, the world of spirits and hallucinations. The wall print features a gold CGI blazon of the Tetragrammaton It references the Sumerian mythology of the Annunaki a race of ancient chthonic fertility Gods, subsequently inscribed in a series of publications by Zecharia Sitchin (a kind of elder statesman of conspiracy theorists worldwide) as descendants of aliens, who enslaved the human race to extract gold from the earth. John’s work similarly ranges over territories of opposition: between ancient and contemporary; mythic and kitsch; between the viscid and primordial. It takes as its subject the vector of congealment, in the Marxist sense of the way labour power is congealed in commodities and so forth, extending this metaphor into an aesthetics of myth and ritual, emptied out, flattened, compacted like a sedimentary layer of anthropocene garbage, for the post-historical epoch.The sound component provides an aural complement to this structure of refuse, exhaustion and abjection. Mixing pre- or post-linguistic utterances, grunts, groans, screaming: a kind of secular glossolalia chaotically interwoven with whalesong, deep techno and political oratory.

MEREDITH MONK

מרדיית המונק
Мередит Монк
ميريديث مونك
16mm Earrings
Meredith Monk’s groundbreaking performance work, 16 Millimeter Earrings, was a seamless integration of live performance, objects, film, vocal and instrumental music, movement, text, recorded sound, and light. It marked several, notable “firsts” for Monk: thinking of sound as an overall environment, working with her voice and visual images as primary elements, creating a full sound score, and incorporating film into a live work. The piece was a breakthrough in her quest to discover a visual/sonic/poetic performance form that could weave together multiple modes of perception. Responding to the original performances in 1966, art critic John Perrault wrote in the Village Voice, “Images, movement, film, words and sounds in Miss Monk’s new work are so skillfully interwoven and inter-related that no description can substitute for the kind of magic that she has managed to produce. The whole stage is her canvas and she uses every bit of it. 16 Millimeter Earrings has to do with surfaces, all seen as if through glass or reflected in a mirror. The surface of the human body. The surface of the erotic and the emotional. The radical juxtaposition of apparently contradictory surfaces- film, flesh, colors, and sound- becomes a witty method of deliberation and deliverance, and of complete art.”
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