Lucy Mcrae
HEAVY DUTY LOVE
A cautionary narrative in an uncomfortable, complex debate on the scientific acceleration directing our evolutionary path —from gene-edited babies to CRISPR to AI — Heavy Duty Love is a mental health prop existent as a tactile mechanical structure, asking, “As we head toward a life designed from scratch, will we seek new types of intimacy?”. Realised as a speculative domestic device compensating for a lack of human touch in early life, Heavy Duty Love sandwiches the body between layers of soft, dampening materials normally used in contemporary camping or construction.

Blooming
“Blooming” is an interactive audiovisual installation that highlights the importance of human connection. It takes the form of a life-size 3D Cherry blossom tree, which is a common symbol of social ties and transience of life in East Asian culture. As a response to participants’ skin-to-skin contacts, heart rate, and gestures, “Blooming” blossoms according to their intimacy. As audience members hold hands or embrace, the digital Cherry tree flowers bloom and scatter. When they let go off their physical contacts, the flower return to its pre-bloom state. The color of the flowers turns white or red based on participants’ heart rate as they interact with each other. (the faster the heart rate, the redder the tonality; the slower the heart rate, the whiter the tonality). In addition to the visual responses, sounds are also modulated according to the tree’s different stages: pre-bloom, blooming, petals falling.

Huddlewear
For this exhibition, Huddlewear becomes a tool for activating exchanges in relationships between individuals, groups and communities. The exhibition invites and encourages visitors to wear and inhabit Huddlewear and to explore the intimacy and complexities of connection in real time. The interconnected designs of the garments can be worn by pairs and groups and aim to explore the wearer’s sense of self and vulnerability during moments of interaction and gathering. By inviting participation and reflection the ‘Huddle tests’ exhibition will involve a series of events and activities as well as an open invite for ‘group work’ for the duration of the exhibition.

Synthetic Seduction

Foreigner

Stine Deja and Marie Munk

The title of the exhibition was inspired by Sherry Turkle’s theory of how technology seduces us, making emotions “easy” by offering human relationships without the complexity of being together ‘face to face’. But if machines can become attentive and emotional, what is left to distinguish us as human beings? We are facing a paradigm shift in how we understand ourselves physiologically, as data and algorithms, and are being forced to question the role of our biological body. As the relationship between artificial and human intelligence becomes increasingly intermingled in our everyday lives, Synthetic Seduction provides immersive and timely insight into the limits of human empathy and intimacy. We are glad at SixtyEight Art Institute to host such a space for thought. We hope it will start conversations and maybe even encourage some intimacy among our visiting audiences in the coming weeks.

Your double my double our ghost
The installation acts a space for the consideration of intimacy and meditation– both alone and with others that may share the space – through the merging of the viewer’s own reflections articulated through a composition of shifting light and emerging sounds which fill an otherwise dark chamber. Functioning similarly to the classic funfair mirror– the flexible silver two-way mirror sheeting forming an ethereal hanging centrepiece– the work invites the viewer to consider representations of themselves which appear distorted and transient, and which merge with those around them to form ‘new presences’. In this sense the viewer may see themselves multiplied or doubled with another viewer, or find themselves alone in a rare moment of literal reflection providing a contemplative space or eliciting a hallucinatory fantasy bringing forth ideas in neuroscience around the Self and Other.

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.

Synapse
Synapse is a 3D-printed helmet which moves and illuminates according to brain activity[…] The main intention of this project is to explore the possibilities of multi-material 3D printing in order to produce a shape-changing structure around the body as a second skin. Additionally, the project seeks to explore direct control of the movement with neural commands from the brain so that we can effectively control the environment around us through our thoughts. The environment therefore becomes an extension of our bodies. This project aims to play with the intimacy of our bodies and the environment to the point that the distinction between them becomes blurred, as both have ‘become’ a single entity. The helmet motion is controlled by the Eletroencephalography (EEG) of the brain. A Neurosky’s EEG chip and Mindflex headset have been modified and redesigned in order to create a seamless blend between technology and design.

The Collector
Born in Parkersburg, West Virginia and raised in Houston, Texas, Rachel Lee Hovnanian is a New York-based artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores contemporary notions of narcissism, obsession and intimacy, and society’s alienating addiction to modern technological advances and media.

The Present Condition

The landscapes of ‘The Present Condition’ derive from a journey of more than 15,000 km by land by the artist between the two geographical extremes of South America. The video is suffused with a surreal atmosphere, where real and imaginary spaces intersect. Concepts such as human intimacy, desire, work, the savage capitalism that builds cathedrals in the desert, the perverse bureaucracy and the construction of the border wall are just some of the elements that are mixed in a striking and suggestive mosaic of images.

file sp 2019 videoart

ロン·ミュエック
РОН МЬЮ́ЕК
big kiss
Hyperrealist sculptor Ron Mueck works in the realm of the ultra-real where he spends hundreds of hours perfecting the shape of the human form, the appropriate color of skin, and the most realistic hair texture. All of his efforts culminate in incredibly lifelike figurative sculptures with one small (or large) exception: the artworks are often gigantic or miniaturized, resulting in an uncomfortable “does not compute” moment when trying to comprehend exactly what you’re looking at. Each sculpted person is as bizarre as it is amazing, in part because of the raw intimacy portrayed in their faces, as if we are somehow witnessing the documentation of a private moment.

Sidi Larbi Chekaoui, Damien Jalet and Anthony Gormley

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet joined forces with visual artist Antony Gormley to create Babel(words), a dance performance that explores language and its relationship with nationhood, identity and religion. Taking the tale of ‘The Tower of Babel’ as its starting point, Gormley’s 5 huge 3-dimensional frames hint at a nameless intersection in a faceless city near the borders that define a no man’s land. We watch as the action flows from private to public, intimacy to extroversion, and the individual to the collective – while choices of faith, space and community are made and we are reminded that to some the tale of Babel represents the gates to enlightenment, to others – chaos, confusion and conflict.

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.

Embrace in Progress
Embrace in Progress explores conflicted feelings of shared intimacy. It is inspired by personal and cultural experiences where human contact is not commonly practiced in social interaction. The daunting and unfamiliar proximity of being captured in someone’s arms distorts one’s sense of time. The project was inspired by slit-scan photography and uses depth sensors to capture a series of intimate embraces. These 3D printed pieces recreate the act of embracing and are represented in a static form by the flow of movement twisted because of time.

Intimacy
via highlike submit

Conservation of Intimacy

Made of pine, latex, music wire, copper, nylon line, paper, pens and video surveillance. It measured 20′ x 35′ x 26′ at Southern Exposdure.
A couple rocking on the bench sends air pulses to another room causing balls to move and pens to transcribe their motions onto paper. The paper is moved by a third person on a stationary bike. The couple on the bench can watch the balls on a video monitor before them where the balls appear to bounce into the air. The motion is delayed and languid as though under water. Action is best when the couple is moving slowly together. As visitors work together to animate the mechanisms, they create a theatre for themselves and each other. By encouraging participation, and touch the pieces coax visitors to engage their bodies as well as their minds. The way that pieces move and feel and sound as you rock them, pedal, crank and press against them applies the kinesthetic comprehension’s of childhood to the tasks of philosophy. Bernie Lubell’s interactive installations have evolved from his studies in both psychology and engineering. As participants play with his whimsical wood machines, they become actors in a theater of their own imagining.

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.

Strange Fruit
Using both sculpture and musical performance in his practice, Kevin Beasley explores the physical materiality and cultural connotations of both objects and sound. His sculptures typically incorporate everyday items like clothing, housewares, or sporting goods, bound together using tar, foam, resin, or other materials. Often they also contain embedded audio equipment that warps and amplifies the ambient tones of their surroundings. For Storylines, Beasley has created two new works specifically for the Guggenheim’s Frank Lloyd Wright–designed building. Within this vast and open sonic environment, Strange Fruit (Pair 1) and Strange Fruit (Pair 2) (both 2015) offer an experience of intimacy, absorbing and reflecting the sound of the crowd at the scale of a personal conversation. Each work embodies this spirit of dialogue in its two-part structure—at its core are two athletic shoes, one merged with microphones, the other with speakers. Suspending these objects in space, Beasley compounds their technological interchange with additional layers of meaning, bringing to mind the urban phenomenon of shoes hanging from overhead wires or poles (itself an open-ended form of communication). At the same time the works’ titles refer to history of lynchings in the American South memorialized by Bronx schoolteacher Abel Meerepol in the 1937 protest song “Strange Fruit.” In these contexts, the hanging forms of Beasley’s sculptures resonate not only with his body, which molded them by hand, or with the bodies moving through the museum, but also with those inscribed in the problematic history of race and class in the United States.

Drawing inspiration from Renaissance fresco painting, Adam Cvijanovic’s ‘portable murals’ depict contemporary landscapes with a sense of celestial awe. Spanning 75 feet, Cvijanovic’s Love Poem captures the dreamy and disquieting essence of suburban Americana as a rapturous science fiction tableau. Envisioning sun-bleached L.A. ten minutes after the end of gravity, Cvijanovic’s utopia ascends in a whirlwind of consumerist ecstasy. Emulating movie backdrops as well as the acclivous perspective of cathedral dome tromp l’oiels, Love Poem… combines the sublime horror of disaster films with a majestic religiosity, as bungalows, Broncos, and palm trees are destroyed in the exaltation of their own perfectness. Painted entirely by the artist without assistants, on a plastic used by Fed Ex, Cvijavovic’s work reconstitutes the intimacy of timeless artistry with a modern day immediacy.

Binatone Galaxy

An installation for used cassette players which looks on their obsolescence not as an ending, but as an opportunity to reconsider their functional potential. Superseded as playback devices, they become instruments in their own right. Replacing the prerecorded content of each tape with a microphone gives us the chance to listen instead to the rhythmic and resonant properties of these once ubiquitous plastic shells. Binatone Galaxy brings the framework within which a generation purchased their favourite records to the centre of attention, revealing the acoustics of the cassette and the voices of the machines themselves.“On the walls of a white room, brightly illuminated with natural light, Stephen Cornford, and artist who describes his work as existing “at the intersection of sculpture and music”, has mounted some 30 old cassette recorders. Models from Boots, Sanyo, Robotic, one lone and gorgeously named Binatone Galaxy: they all hang on the walls, wired up, tapes loaded and ready for action. Smitten by an attack of technological melancholia, the visitor can wonder who owned these things, what pop charts did these machines once record? Were they ever placed next to pillows, late at night for surreptitious listening pleasures? What happened to the voices that once rubbed the magnetic heads of these little machines? For some artists, the speed (and resulting impact) of obsolescence on the technology we once took for granted has spawned a form of fetishism, in which the voices – the human agency – they once recorded exist in an alternate, ghostly dimension, a reminder of what once was. This is not Cornford’s theme. The fact that each audio cassette in his machines is fitted with a motion sensor and a contact mic, so that, on entry the machines whirr into action, indicates that Binatone Galaxy is very much of the here and now. Yes, Cornford has chosen old, cheap and accessible technology with which to realise this, but I suspect that he is aiming for a furrruuuzzy audio intimacy.

Alone Together

The phrase Alone Together describes a nature of personal relationships and relating to one another that I have found to be characteristic of an experience the generation I am a part of encounters, if not others as well. The phrase in context of communication calls upon the experience and realization that your mental state is completely unique and solitary. There is a push to connect with others as well as to find someone to spend your life with, and along with this push comes the expectation of a complete and total togetherness. There is an eventual point of realization and discovery of your own mental state and its perpetual solitude, transcending physical closeness with others. The photographs in the series evoke contemplation of this experience, through imagery of the mundane, capturing a quiet departure into a somewhat bizarre disconsolate self-investigation. The photographs play with the association of Alone Together to intimacy and love, with an alternate interpretation or redefinition according to newfound phenomenon.

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.

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