Re-Wired / Re-Mixed: Event for Dismembered Body
“Re-Wired / Re-Mixed: Event for Dismembered Body” was a five-day, six-hour a day internet enabled performance, that explores the physiological and aesthetic experience of a fragmented, distributed, de-synchronized, distracted and involuntary body – wired and under surveillance. The artist wears a HUD (head up display) that enables him to see with the “eyes” of someone in London, whilst hearing with the “ears” of someone in New York. The body is also augmented by an 8 degrees-of-freedom exoskeleton so that anyone anywhere can generate involuntary movement of his right arm, using an online interface. The artist becomes optically and acoustically de-synchronized and performs partly involuntarily.

Ad Infinitum
Ad infinitum is a parasitical entity which lives off human energy. It lives untethered and off the grid. This parasite reverses the dominant role that mankind has with respect to technologies: the parasite shifts humans from “users” to “used”. Ad infinitum co-exists in our world by parasitically attaching electrodes onto the human visitors and harvesting their kinetic energy by electrically persuading them to move their muscles. The only way a visitor can be freed is by seducing another visitor to sit on the opposite chair and take their place. Being trapped in the parasite’s cuffs means getting our muscles electrically stimulated in order to perform a cranking motion as to feed it our kinetic energy. This reminds us that, in the cusp of artificially thinking machines, we are no longer just “users”; the shock we feel in our muscles, the involuntary gesture, acknowledges our intricate relationship to uncanny technological realm around us.

真鍋 大 度

One of the new technology projects from the programmer and artist Daito Manabe based in Tokyo, Japan, centres on experimental music performances and connects a person’s face to electric sensors. This innovative system lets you ‘play’ your face like a musical instrument with the help of facial movements that trigger sounds. Electrical stimulation makes a face twitch involuntary, each twitch matches the beat of the music.

Accessories for Wearing Emotions
Head Accessory of Tears
I have heard somewhere that it is not yet fully understood why people shed tears.
We shed tears when feeling sad, moved, sometimes happy.
I do even when feeling angry.
We cannot control our emotions.
They sometimes cannot be stopped from overflowing to the outside even before we internally register them although they should exist within and surely derive from the inside of us.
It is as if they do not even pass through our brain – As if it is an involuntary action,
like in sports, where the body moves before we tell it to.
However, what would happen when we trace the process in reverse?
I tried to make it work from the outside in.
(Like, we sometimes pretend to be okay with an unwilling smile.)
I want to see what would happen on the inside of us if we “wear” emotions on the outside.
Hazuki Katagai

Taking in her paintings is like opening your eyes after a nap in the sand. The colourful masses on her canvas appear to be in motion, plunging the spectator into a semi-conscious state. Beyond the merely pictorial, Ana Montiel’s works read like spiritual, dreamlike invitations, that hit you with a feeling of satisfaction and involuntary entrancement. Any tangible form looks acid-washed; a silhouette or a ray of sun gives way to a sfumato of light and pigments. The artist is interested in the conceptual issues of perception and phenomenology, based on the premise that reality is nothing but a collective and controlled hallucination.

The Blur Building (an architecture of atmosphere)
The Blur Building is a media pavilion for Swiss EXPO 2002 at the base of Lake Neuchatel in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland.From piles in the water, a tensegrity system of rectilinear struts and diagonal rods cantilevers out over the lake. Ramps and walkways weave through the tensegrity system, some of them providing a counterweight for the structure. The form is based on the work of Buckminster Fuller.The pavilion is made of filtered lake water shot as a fine mist through 13,000 fog nozzles creating an artificial cloud that measures 300 feet wide by 200 feet deep by 65 feet high. A built-in weather station controls fog output in response to shifting climatic conditions such as temperature, humidity, wind direction, and wind speed.The public can approach Blur via a ramped bridge. The 400 foot long ramp deposits visitors at the center of the fog mass onto a large open-air platform where movement is unregulated. Visual and acoustical references are erased along the journey toward the fog leaving only an optical “white-out” and the “white-noise” of pulsing water nozzles. Prior to entering the cloud, each visitor responds to a questionnaire/character profile and receives a “braincoat” (smart raincoat). The coat is used as protection from the wet environment and storage of the personality data for communication with the cloud’s computer network. Using tracking and location technologies, each visitor’s position can be identified and their character profiles compared to any other visitor.In the Glass Box, a space surrounded by glass on six sides, visitors experience a “sense of physical suspension only heightened by an occasional opening in the fog.” As visitors pass one another, their coats compare profiles and change color indicating the degree of attraction or repulsion, much like an involuntary blush – red for affinity, green for antipathy. The system allows interaction among 400 visitors at any time.Visitors can climb another level to the Angel Bar at the summit. The final ascent resembles the sensation of flight as one pierces through the cloud layer to the open sky. Here, visitors relax, take in the view, and choose from a large selection of commercial waters, municipal waters from world capitals, and glacial waters. At night, the fog will function as a dynamic and thick video screen.