The Cage of Time

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival
Interactive installation that presents a kinetic instrument object and virtual reality glasses, functioning as a device that animates the illusion of the passage of time in virtual space. In the fabric of existence, time weaves a cage around our ephemeral moments, limiting our perceptions of the past, present and future. By embracing this paradox, we may discover that the cage of time becomes the crucible where the alchemy of experience transforms our understanding of existence.

Bio

Anna Vasof is a multi-award-winning artist who focuses on filmmaking, short videos, and time-based sculptures. VRinMotion is an artistic research project based at St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences in Austria that investigates how features of stop-motion animation and motion capture can be combined with virtual reality to enrich current artistic discourse.

Credits

VRinMotion Team: Franziska Bruckner, Christoph Schmid, Clemens Gürtler, Matthias Husinsky, Christian Munk, Julian Salhofer, Stefan Nebel, Vrääth Öhner.
Concept by: Anna Vasof.

Squint
file festival
I was inspired by how the sunlight bounces around in our artificial forest.
“Squint” is a kinetic light installation consisting of 49 mirrors that reflect lights in a bright space. The mirrors track and reflect lights on audiences’ face with composed patterns of movements. It extends the generated perception by focusing on how lights pass across our visual senses physically, and combines with our perception of images through flickering. “Squint”, which extracts various daily experiences to an abstraction brings the audience to expand their interpretation of lights and perceived imagination into a non-linear experience.
“Squint” simulates light source and intentionally shines lights on audience’s faces. Bright light is projected in the gallery, a clean bright space.
Everyday people are dynamically moving around in the city. Sunlight reflects and flickers even when it is indirect and hidden behind the artifacts. While we are traveling, we are experiencing motion. We are also experiencing the shift of light intensity, visual patterns and textures. The varieties of light forms inspire the artist to explore the potential of light textures, select and sort out the combined complexity in urban space. The artist turns them into a minimal form of light experience, while maximizing its diversity of perception.

ニコラ·シェフェール
Chronos 5
In 1948 he created the concept of “space dynamism”. In his words, space dynamism is “the constructive and dynamic integration of space in plastic work.” Based on this idea, he will seek to create the total work of art, concretized in the cybernetic village, a city full of utopian spaces. His work combines cybernetic, kinetic art and interactive art, of which he is one of its first representatives, making the first works of art in real time or live in the history of art.

Ciel Électrique
Une gigantesque installation ELECTRIC SKY composée de 640 lumières LED Winch XS et Sphere 17 a été créée par KINETIC LIGHTS pour une performance scénique épique en 2047 Apologue dirigée par ZHANG Yimou et produite par L!VE Kingway au National Center for the Performing Arts de Pékin. ZHANG Yimou brise la forme des pièces de théâtre traditionnelles, combinant les arts folkloriques chinois avec la technologie internationale, et créant ainsi une « performance conceptuelle » unique. Les arts populaires chinois ont été présentés avec différentes technologies de pointe, déclenchant une nouvelle vitalité. Notamment, 20 équipes et individus de sept pays se sont réunis dans cette performance.

Rising Awareness
Could one succeed in rising the level of awareness by sharpening one’s perception rather than repeating the vapid catchphrase, “raising awareness,” which has been coopted by an ever-growing money-raising industry that fails to improve our circumstances in a substantive way? Wearing a cocktail dress, I assembled a large kinetic structure made of wooden beams and ladders in front of the audience. I then walked and balanced on the twenty-foot wide structure at eight feet off the floor. Rising Awareness addresses my ongoing preoccupations about the physicality of experience, inhabiting the body, proprioception as the possible strongest sense of self, how spatial awareness correlates with overall awareness and self-awareness, how physicality enhances creativity, finding balance between gravity and groundlessness, a concept of happiness as the fullest expression of one’s particular cognitive potential, pushing boundaries, and the current irreverent politics of liability.

Our Time
Our Time is a site-specific evolution of UVA’s 2013 commission for the Barbican, Momentum. The installation, which features music specially composed by Mira Calix, features kinetic structures swinging in and out of phase between projected light.

DARK ECOLOGY

IsoScope

IsoScope is a kinetic audiovisual outdoor installation, a sensorial experience in which the audience wanders through rotating lights and an ever-changing sonic cloud. This new work by Dutch artist Joris Strijbos consists of multiple robotic wind objects interacting with each other and with their surroundings. Strijbos aimed at creating a human-constructed phenomenon, an abstract entity which, like most natural phenomena, can only be experienced in certain weather conditions. IsoScope can be seen as a proposition for a new kind of machinic and artificial lifeform. IsoScope was commissioned by Sonic Acts for the second Dark Ecology Journey (2015) and realised in collaboration with Jeroen Molenaar, Daan Johan and Erfan Abdi.

Somatic Field Project
In 2014, he started Somatic Field Project, aiming at nurturing young dancers as well as his own movement method ‘Kinetic Force Method’.

Intagible #Form
In this artwork “intangible #form [2019]”, focusing on how do we see the intangible as tangible using 420 kinetic laser modules. I’ve tried to generate virtual consciousness, presence and behavior of life in this time. And then I’ve been exploring what are we getting the surfacing consciousness and presence from the thing is in front of us or are we giving these to them? I think that when paying attention to consciousness, it could be a trigger to sense that we are human ourself.

АЙРИС ВАН ЭРПЕН
イリス ヴァン ヘルペン
Autumn/Winter 2019
This season van Herpen collaborated with American kinetic sculptor Anthony Howe, whose pieces are powered by the wind. His spherical Omniverse sculpture had pride of place in the Élysée Montmartre venue. The designer said she was compelled by the way its arching vertebrae, spinning on a curving axis, simultaneously expand and contract. Her finale dress was made in the image of Omniverse, with rotating wings constructed of aluminum, stainless steel, and feathers.

Борис ПЕТРОВСКИЙ
The Global Pursuit of Happiness or: The Army of Luck
What would you do with 520 cat figurines? If you’re artist Boris Petrovsky, you might turn them into a massive kinetic sculpture that serves as a sort of pixel-grid display for user-submitted expressions of hope. In his installation The Global Pursuit of Happiness, or: The Army of Luck, Petrovsky arranges 40 rows and 13 columns of the popular Japanese lucky talisman, Maneki Neko (literally Beckoning Cat; aka Lucky Cat, Money Cat), into a golden army of kitsch.

ユナイテッド·ビジュアルアーティスト
美国视觉艺术家
our time

Our Time (2016) is the latest large-scale installation by United Visual Artists investigating our subjective experience of the passing of time. How long is a moment? At what rate does time actually pass? The work joins a series of kinetic sculptures that began with Momentum (2013); an installation designed as a ‘spatial instrument’ that was to reveal the relationship between expectation and perception when intersected with a physical space.
Our Time defines a physical environment where pendulums swing at a pace apparently unhindered by the laws of nature and where no single time measurement applies. The installation combines movement, light and sound as a multi-sensory, multi-dimensional canvas the visitor can enter. Pendulums swing, each to their own rhythm, as time flows through the grid. With light tracing the path and sound its echo, the passing of time becomes almost palpable.

FLORA 2

The animation in FLORA is generated by overlapping sine waves that travel through a string of lines. This wave principle often appears in nature when energy is transmitted through a medium like water, air or simply a rope. It can also be observed in the locomotion of animals and human-beings, in which kinetic energy is transmitted successively through joints.
The FLORA algorithm of is based on the discovery that a simple system of rotating lines can create endless variations of abstract shapes – ranging from curved harmonious lines to edgy and chaotic patterns. The resulting aesthetics combine computational accuracy with an organic playfulness, and tend to trigger diverse associations in the mind of the viewer.

FILE FESTIVAL
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The Source
The Source, an eight storey high kinetic sculpture, is the new symbol for the London Stock Exchange. Every morning, millions of viewers around the world will watch the installation come to life, signifying the opening of the London Markets.
“The Source is formed from a grid of cables arranged in a square, 162 cables in all, reaching eight stories to the glass roof. Nine spheres are mounted on each cable and are free to move independently up and down its length. In essence the spheres act like animated pixels, able to model any shape in three dimensions a fluid, dynamic, three dimensional television.Visitors to the atrium are greeted by this motion: its particles rising and falling, generating an infinite range of figurative and abstract shapes that rise, dissolve and reform at different heights in the atrium. The shape of the sun rising on a new day of trade, the names and positions of currently traded stocks, the DNA helix at the center of life formed by the work, and floating in the 32m void of the atrium.”

АЙРИС ВАН ЭРПЕН
イリス ヴァン ヘルペン
Autumn/Winter 2019
This season van Herpen collaborated with American kinetic sculptor Anthony Howe, whose pieces are powered by the wind. His spherical Omniverse sculpture had pride of place in the Élysée Montmartre venue. The designer said she was compelled by the way its arching vertebrae, spinning on a curving axis, simultaneously expand and contract. Her finale dress was made in the image of Omniverse, with rotating wings constructed of aluminum, stainless steel, and feathers.

Cliff Hanger

Jeff Shore and Jon Fisher started their collaborative practice in 2002. Trained as a visual artist, Jeff Shore develops the visible sculptures and mechanisms, while Jon Fisher builds the electronics, writes the software, and creates the original soundtracks; for this he uses both digital and analog audio sources. The result of their collaboration is a series of kinetic devices and installations that generate live animated video and musical compositions. Similar to cinema storytelling, the movement in the pieces relate to the accompanying soundtrack or animation, and similar to a theater of automata, the pieces create precise and captivating sequential events. Bridging high and low-tech devices and instruments, the collaborative team creates mechanically activated moments of wonder, explores the relationship between automatism and chance, and comments on the impact of technology interfaces in our lives.

f5x5x5
f5x5x5 is a kinetic light sculpture conceived of and realized by the belgian design studio lab[au]. the project was most recently installed in the basilique de saint denis in paris for nuit blanche 2009. the design consists of fixed and kinetic aluminum frames that can move randomly or be programmed for use as a low resolution display. the piece is designed as a framework, taking inspiration from software development
frameworks. in the case of the project, the framework is a five by five module which is repeated five times
to create the final form. one side of the work is white, while the other is black. the 125 pixel screen works on binary language and can transform captured data from the physical environment into kinetic actions.

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.