Pretty Vacant

Modern Guru
Modern Guru is a translucent ovoid with four huge digital eyes, floating above a ceremonial ring of LEDs. From his mouth flows a ream of absurdist messages, and in a statement about the true nature of lived experience, a new message is delivered when visitors take a photo of Modern Guru – a missive produced only for those who seek to photograph life rather than live the moment. This immersive new media art installation uses the intersection of art and technology to explore modern paths to happiness through unique interactions with characters along a mystical journey of discovery. Visitors are asked to commit to the path – a tight and winding trail with subtle points of connection along the way – a glowing landscape of oversized, whimsical mountains that chant incantations and blink innocently from digital eyes.
Having communed with the Guru, visitors then weave their way back through this warped and strange world full of illusions and delusions, perceptions and deceptions, all the while bathing in luminescent light; embracing big, gentle forms; and following their own path up the pink tongue staircase to meet the one who oversees the whole fantastic dominion, the Sun God.

The Legend of Ogie

FILE 2024 | Aesthetic Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
SurrealismToday.com – The Legend of Ogie – United States

What worlds exist beyond Einstein’s speed limit? Inspired by Eric Weinstein’s theory of Geometric Unity, the work explores the idea that space-time is like a melody playing over an eight-dimensional universe. Abstract and metamorphic forms transition from organic forms to parastatic patterns, creating a dance of visuals and sounds that merge into an immersive experience of fractal unfolding.

Bio

SurrealismToday.com is an artist collective and educational platform dedicated to the proliferation of surreal and visionary ontologies in contemporary art. The group began as an esoteric cargo cult dedicated to discovering the beautiful, the fantastic, and the transcendent in the pseudo-philosophical landscape of the art world. His methods include searching for gems in the digital world and infusing mystical enchantments into generative diffusion models.

Kelly Luck
Strangeland 1 (excerpt)

FILE 2024 | Aesthetic Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
Kelly Luck – Strangeland 1 (excerpt) – United States

From a surrealist point of view, the main attraction of generative AI, for the artist, is its lack of memory. At any given moment, she only has the current frame and instructions on how to proceed, similar to free association in dreams. This work is part of a series of long-term environments designed to immerse the viewer in a constantly evolving and never-ending landscape, inviting relaxation and engagement.

Bio

As part of the first generation to grow up around computers, Kelly Luck quickly became fascinated with the creative possibilities of this new technology. Her journey has ranged from pixel art and graphic ‘hacks’ to the 90s demoscene, 2D and later 3D graphics, and now the modern tools of digital art. With the emergence of generative AI, it endlessly explores how technology continues to blur the line between imagination and reality.

Squid

FILE 2024 | Interator – Sound Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
Verbo Pluriel (aka volt46) & XWave – Calamar – United States and France

The Calamar music video is comprised of AI-generated clips that are sequenced and synchronized to create a hypnotic, ever-changing landscape.

Bio

Verbo Pluriel is an electronic music producer who has been active in the NFT scene since 2020 under the name volt46. X-Wave is also an NFT producer that trains its own AI models to generate collections. Although they never met in person, their participation in the web 3.0 art collective Based Ghouls led to their collaboration.

Credits

Music: Calamar (Kraken Mix) by Verbo Pluriel
Music Video: volt46
AI Video Generation: XWave

Wasteland

FILE 2024 | Interator – Sound Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
Iskarioto Dystopian AI Films – Wasteland – Spain

Wasteland takes you on a journey across a vast desolate landscapelandscape that transforms and evolves with the musical wavesmusical waves, featuring a post-apocalyptic theme.

Bio

Iskarioto Dystopian AI Films is an emerging Spanish artist, empowered with cutting-edge AI tools, a fusion of human creativity with machine potential. He is known as a visual alchemist, pixel manipulator, and graphic, dark, dystopian storyteller. Since its premiere in 2022, it has been shown in art galleries around the world, having won the Artistic Award at the AI ​​Film Festival Montpellier 2023.

Credits

AI-generated music made with Suno.ai

Relaxation

FILE 2024 | Interator – Sound Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
Iskarioto Dystopian AI Films – Relaxation – Spain

Relaxation is an animated painting that transports you to a surreal natural landscape, hypnotically inviting mental relaxation.

Bio

Iskarioto Dystopian AI Films is an emerging Spanish artist, empowered with cutting-edge AI tools, a fusion of human creativity with machine potential. He is known as a visual alchemist, pixel manipulator, and graphic, dark, dystopian storyteller. Since its premiere in 2022, it has been shown in art galleries around the world, having won the Artistic Award at the AI ​​Film Festival Montpellier 2023.

Credits

Music: Relaxation by NPM

Athena

FILE 2024 | Interator – Sound Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
Iskarioto Dystopian AI Films – Athena – Spain

Athena is a captivating animation that immerses you in a psychedelic and nostalgic journey, evoking the retro aesthetic of 80s anime with its vibrant visual style. A world full of bright colors, geometric shapes and surreal landscapes that explores the corners of the human mind, providing a unique visual experience.

Bio

Iskarioto Dystopian AI Films is an emerging Spanish artist, empowered with cutting-edge AI tools, a fusion of human creativity with machine potential. He is known as a visual alchemist, pixel manipulator, and graphic, dark, dystopian storyteller. Since its premiere in 2022, it has been shown in art galleries around the world, having won the Artistic Award at the AI ​​Film Festival Montpellier 2023.

Credits

Music: Athena by Karl Casey

Phosphor
Focused rays of ultraviolet light paint temporary landscapes on a layer of phosphorous dust on the museum floor. Operating on concepts of erosion and mutation, the installation changes its behaviour and visual appearance during the exhibition period. Each trace of light leaves a mark on a virtual mountain range, like water slowly washing out deep canyons. With a little help from alchemy and quantum physics, matter acquired a memory: translating time into space

A Symphony of Noise
Created by Michaela Pnacekova, Jamie Balliu
Herbert’s everyday sound sources are the inspiration for A Symphony of Noise VR. This interactive virtual reality experience is a journey through four sonic landscapes. The first centers on breathing, which immediately makes you focus on listening to the world differently. This is followed by an arctic environment full of scraping and crunching sounds, and finally a shop interior. Using the controllers or by blowing or singing, you can add sounds to the audio palette, which is visualized as waves and colors in three-dimensional space. In the fourth and final landscape, all the sounds are combined in an ultimate symphony.

balenciaga collaboration
A 25 minute video loop with previously unreleased tracks by DJ Hell, made in collaboration with Balenciaga.

Here is a dramatic tension in his work between the real and the imagined in his use of often-appropriated digital objects to create virtual landscapes, which frequently contain elements – animals, machines, fragments of videogames – that are recognisable from our day to day life. This creates a symbiotic relationship between the digital and the real. In a very real way digital space has now become an intangible reality. The worlds built by Robak have a distinctly cinematic sensibility that hyperbolises the shine and dramatic effects of 3D rendered animation. The aesthetic of his work is supremely important, drawing the viewer into a truly alluring, indulgent and strangely gratifying environment. There is a further challenge to the void between high-art and the worlds of 3D animation and gaming, in the intersection between depiction and simulation. This can be partially attributed to the vernacular of advertising Robak is so proficient at utilising.

MAN-NAHĀTA
Computational growth across material and urban scales offers a framework for design through self-organization, enabling the generation of vast, diverse forms exhibiting characteristics like those that emerge through the biological growth processes found in Nature. In this project, we construct an oriented volume spanned by surface normals of the shape at every point. The value of the oriented volume drives the iterative deformation of the shape. Depending on the parameterization of this process, we can obtain distinctly different growing forms. Importantly, the emergence of these forms is driven only by the time evolution of a geometric operator acting on the shapes iteratively, thereby connecting geometry and growth through an algorithm. To form the Man-Nahata landscape, the buildings of the urban landscape are transformed through repeated morphological closing operations, where the field of influence follows a gradient from the center to the outskirts of a circular region.

Principles of Motion
For Principles of Motion, UVA uses a rotating LED disc to create an abstract rotating and shifting kinematic landscape that plays with the viewer’s perception of movement and reflects the phenomenon of persistence of vision (sparkler’s trail effect / pov display). By varying the luminosity of the LED, the kinetic landscape moves and gives the viewer a sense of space and time. While observing the abstract rotating patterns and rhythms, the optic nerve of the recipient replicates the effect of an afterimage on the eye.

Ritual
An undisclosed location. Dry land under a scorching sun. Something abominable has happened here in recent memory. Now a ritual is taking place. The remains of what was once human are flickering in darkness. Nature is reclaiming what is hers. She is savage and unforgiving. She is laughing at us. Her sinister laughter echoes in the emptiness. Ritual re-imagines the notion of site-specificity within the mediated landscape. The digital and physical work for this exhibition sit in a forgotten mining town somewhere in the California desert. The viewer is invited to interact with Triantafyllidis’ new live simulation, sculptures and custom electronics blurring the line between the real life and online experience

Matilda Home
The idea to bring design also in common life attracted us. This is a new concept of habitat of house. It’s a mobile home it can be everywhere around the world; everybody can be a client. It’s a modular unit so many of them can be added together like a cloud. It can even be a city .This is not an object, it is a concept, it can be a city, a landscape or simply an home. Easy to build, it can be done in different materials more or less expensive. Matilda is a completely different space since nowadays we don’t need so much storage space, you just need to have a screen. The only thing is important is to have a nice place to eat, to seat and to sleep but also this can be done with something you close when you don’t need

Fallen Water
Fallen Water explores questions about why humans are drawn to waterfalls and flowing water as a source for renewal. Waterfalls imbue subconscious associations with pristine and healthy drinking water, but what happens when the fountain can no longer renew itself? Is the water no longer pure? Cooley’s choice of subject matter strikes a deep chord with current social consciousness and anxieties about contemporary water usage and the drought crisis faced by the American West. Cooley references Blake’s famous quote from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as context for the diametric opposites of the current water conundrum: our deep sense of entitlement to and dire dependence on this precious commodity, coupled with a pervasive obliviousness concerning the sources which supply it. As a way to connect with his personal water use, Cooley hiked into the mountains to see firsthand the snowpack (or lack thereof), streams, and aquifers which feed the water sources supplying his Los Angeles home. This multi-channel installation is an amalgamation of videos made over numerous trips to remote locations in the San Gabriel Mountains, the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and locales as far away as the San Juan Mountains in Southwestern Colorado. These disconnected video vignettes coalesce, constructing a large water landscape canvasing the gallery walls and floors – reflecting the disparate and widespread origin of Los Angeles’s drinking water. The colorspace within the videos is inverted, turning the water pink, orange and yellow—channeling an altered vision of water—in which something is definitely amiss: a stark reminder of the current water crisis in the state of California.
.

FRAMERATE
Created from thousands of daily 3D time-lapse scans of British landscapes, the work observes change on a scale impossible to see with the lens of traditional cameras. This is not just an artwork. The data collected and presented by FRAMERATE is ground-breaking scientific research, containing empirical, measurable facts. We glimpse a future perpetually documented by the eyes of a billion autonomous vehicles and personal devices, creating high fidelity spatial records of the earth.

Great Chain of Being
FILE FESTIVAL
The great chain of being, an ancient philosophical concept, attempted to explain the structures and relationships of the world as a form of hierarchy or set of strata. This philosophical idea is here expressed in the form of the entities that constitute the contemporary world. The philosophers of the past believed that the structure of the world had at its top a god, and that beneath there were angels, animals, plants, and elements. But this conception of the world, as a result of the changes in civilization and culture, resulted in the elements that constitute the world undergoing a transition and sustaining an unforeseen hierarchy. The works of art depict the contemporary structure in the form of robots, machines, people, animals, and virtual or digital entities. Within virtual systems, these entities undergo a process of creation, arrangement, use, disposal and recycling, through which they emerge and disappear. The work depicts the stories emerging from these processes, against the background of a systemically designed landscape akin to a factory.
video

Untitled 05
“I look at forms in nature for inspiration – from microscopic organisms like bacteria and viruses, to moss covered stones, branches of trees, the human body, seedpods, landscapes, star charts, etc., then try to bring all of these disparate elements together in the work”

Networked Ecosystem
In Networked Ecosystem, natural phenomena have been replaced by digital and artificial systems as forces that drive development: Electricity/battery = sustenance, WIFI signals = nutrition, Lidar data = fire/heat. Data Organisms populate this digital ecosystem as native life forms in the form of bots, AI’s, and avatars. Visitors to this networked landscape develop new kinds of digital senses to experience data as environmental changes, and interact with the simulated world and each other in an ever-changing online environment.

Cold Sleep
Right now, approximately 400 human bodies are frozen at -196 degrees Celsius in America and Russia. They are dead – legally speaking. The hope is to one day defrost and resuscitate them. The procedure is controversial. Nonetheless, cryopreservation, i.e. preserving people at extreme temperatures below zero, is an area marked by growth. The condition is sometimes referred to as ‘cold sleep’, which is also the title of Stine Deja’s first solo show in Denmark at Tranen. The exhibition is an installation of kinetic sculpture and animation. Cryopreserved bodies in thermal, yellow suits are suspended in big, circular aluminium structures revolving around their own axis on small islands in a desert landscape. In the sand lie craters where artificially inseminated cells divide. A barren desert landscape is usually seen as lifeless and abstract. In Deja’s version it becomes a place for being before or after human life, or, as the artist has it, “a population in another dimension.”

Interpolate
Interpolate incorporates live coding and generative processes to create an audio/visual performance where visuals control audio, and audio controls visuals. Stark, minimal, generative 3D geometry and particle systems take the audience through the music, conveying the physicality of the sound while mapping out the emotional landscape of the melodies. To interpolate means to determine an intermediate value or term in a series by calculating it from surrounding known values; on stage Push 1 stop and Woulg send data wirelessly to each other in order to be able to patch new interactions between audio and visuals in real time, and interpolate the missing data between sound and image.

Liquid Landscape
LIQUID LANDSCAPE is the permanent public artwork commissioned by the contemporary open air museum Arte Sella in Italy. Roosegaarde was asked to create something with a challenging framework: no use of electricity, no use of artificial light, low maintenance, robust for decades, yet interactive to people.

Liminal Lands
Liminal Lands is an environmental multiplayer experience shared by four people at the same time. Each person transforms into the basic elements controlling life across the landscape: Algae, salt, water and mud. As they embark on a communal ritual experience, people morph and change throughout their journey, exploring each new world from a changed perspective of the landscape. Visitors move across different scales and global weather conditions, shedding their human perspective as they are pulled into six different realms inspired by the macro-landscape.

AVA

Ava’ is Troika’s first sculptural manifestation of their exploration of algorithms. ‘Ava’ is the physical result of emergence and self organisation brought about by ‘growing’ a sculpture through the use of a computer algorithm that imitates the emergence of life by which complexity arises from the simplest of things. As such the sculpture probes at the nature of becoming, existence and our strive to understand and replicate the complexities of life.In a landscape where our personal data is a raw material, and where we, humans, have become subordinate spectators of algorithms and a computerised infrastructure, we ask the question how much or little are we capable of influencing our surrounding reality, how much is predetermined, how much is down to chance.

Great Animal Orchestra
The Fondation Cartier invited United Visual Artists to collaborate on The Great Animal Orchestra, exhibition that celebrates the work of musician, bio-acoustician and scientist Bernie Krause. Krause has been recording animals for 45 years and has amassed a collection of more than 5,000 hours of sounds  recording of over 15,000 individual species in their natural habitats from all over the world. UVA’s creative approach linked together the various exhibition content elements throughout the basement space — soundscapes, spectrograms and art works — into a cohesive, immersive experience that three-dimensionalises Krause’s recordings and suggests scenes from the natural world. The spectrograms form an abstract landscape, an interpretation of the various global locations and times of day that Krause made the original recordings in a way that envelops the audience and encourages them to linger in the space.

WiFi Impressionist
Wifi Impressionist is a field installation that draws electromagnetic landscapes inspired by the cityscapes of William Turner. The work consists of a directional antenna on a pan-tilt mechanism that listens for WiFi signals and builds a three dimensional model of the signals around it. From this model a viewport is selected that defines the perspective and the frame. Signals that are picked up within the frame are visualised as waves emitted from a specific origin and drawn using a mobile plotter. The antenna and the plotter are both mounted on a tripod and can be placed in the field much like a painter would set up his easel. Once positioned and oriented a drawing becomes denser over time depending on the density of networks around it. Wherever there is a WiFi signal, the drawing will eventually fill the frame.

퐁 치 웨이

‘Time is a Dimension’

The beauty of photography, in its essence, is conveyed by capturing a moment in time and freezing it out of its context. Singapore-based photographer Fong Qi Wei, however, uses photography to show the passage of time. In his time lapse series called ‘Time is a Dimension’, Fong doesn’t use a typical long exposure trick. He captures the passing time by layering different photos of the same spot with clear edge lines of each frame. Each collage is digitally cut and created from pictures Fong takes within 2 to to 4 hours. Fong usually works at sunrise or sunset, as the light and color palettes are most varied at those times.
“The basic structure of a landscape is present in every piece. But each panel or concentric layer shows a different slice of time, which is related to the adjacent panel/layer. The transition from daytime to night is gradual and noticeable in every piece, but would not be something you expect to see in a still image. Similarly, our experience of a scene is more than a snapshot,” explains Fong.

Cloud Arbor
A 20-foot diameter sphere of fog forms inside a forest of stainless steel poles. High-pressure fog nozzles embedded in the 30-foot tall poles convert water into a cloud that appears and vanishes every few minutes. A collaboration with landscape architect Andi Cochran and the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum. Completed in 2012.

DEPART
The Entropy Gardens
.
The Entropy Gardens is an artistic VR experience that explores one of humanity’s most archetypical artforms – garden making. It challenges its myths, aesthetics and modes of perception. Like a garden, The Entropy Gardens attempts to become a spatiotemporal poem — a poetic organism. In the form of a sprawling journey it constructs a hermetic, virtual garden as a poetic ecosystem — a psychic landscape that is foremost a complex audiovisual experience. It admits the visitor into a place that is equally challenging and contemplative (and of course profoundly weird).

Brazil Now
BRAZIL NOW is a composition that addresses increasing militarization and surveillance within urban areas. Its geographical and acoustic reference is São Paulo, the largest megacity in Latin America. The piece is based on field recordings that capture the symptoms of a Latin American variant of turbo-capitalism with its distinctive acoustic features. Eruptive public demonstrations on the streets are often accompanied by loud, carnivalesque elements. These are controlled by a militarized infrastructure, openly demonstrating a readiness to deploy violence. The sonic documents are analyzed by machine learning algorithms searching for acoustic memes, textures, and rhythms that could be symptomatic for predominant social forces. The algorithmic results are then used as a base for a score and its interpretation through a musical ensemble. The piece drafts a phantasmatic auditory landscape built on the algorithmic evaluation of urban conflict zones.

Path of silence
Inspired by the remarkable topography of the landscape of the Kistefos Sculpture Park, the stepped slope and terraces beside the Industry Museum, where the power and energy of water is directly visible and gives the site a special quality, a free form is adapted to the shape of this landscape, thus creating a dialogue between the place and the object. The sculpture is defined by an extensive mirror labyrinth that encloses three spaces of silence: A contemplative space, where an enclosure of high mirror steles promotes an upward glance to the sky, a natural space, where a tree inside the sculpture links the inside with the outside and an active space where walls of water appear and disappear, thus offering ever-changing perspectives of the surroundings.

State Gallery

Like a dancing cube shimmering in titanium, the new State Gallery of Lower Austria is placed between the picturesque inner cities of Krems and Stein, and links these with the surrounding natural and river landscape. The spherical curvature and the strongly outward-projecting external walls presented a challenge: titanium shingles and glass panes were individually produced, having been calculated in 3D. Inside, light-flooded areas alternate with daylight-free levels that can be used as required. The project is a strong illustration of the capabilities of the Vorarlberg architectural practice of Marte.Marte.

H.O.R.T.U.S. XL Astaxanthin.g menschlicher Garten
H.O.R.T.U.S. XL Astaxanthin.g ist eine hochauflösende 3D-gedruckte Bioskulptur in großem Maßstab, die sowohl für menschliches als auch für nicht menschliches Leben empfänglich ist. Das Projekt wurde von Claudia Pasquero und Marco Poletto (ecoLogicStudio) konzipiert und in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Synthetic Landscape Lab der Universität Innsbruck entwickelt.

Dià
Dià (from greek διά, through) is a sculpture installed on a piece of no man’s land on the top of mount Pal Piccolo on the border between Italy and Austria, where World War I was fought. The double-trumpet shaped sculpture symbolically connects, both visually and acoustically, the first lines’ trenches. Two arched doors, that refer to the entrance of the shelters and trenches, turn into cavities to listen or observe the surrounding landscape. The work, conceived as a symbolic link between the two fronts, combines the dimensions of silence and sound: dià is indeed a device that invites audience to interact with the two cavities as a megaphone or a peephole, to start an intimate dialogue through the sculpture.

Équinoxe
A concert-show. A visual and audio journey. Moving digital images. A moment, ephemeral and unique. An immersive road movie with live music, created as an allusion to the performance Hakanaï. The encounter of two worlds : that of the band Limousine with its instrumental music, both pop and jazz, contemplative and graceful with that of Adrien M & Claire B and its abstract landscapes of images, vertiginous and poetic.

The coffee cup spring
The monotone repetition of the movement created by the conveyor belt recalls the pace and the landscape of animation or video games. As an extension of the conveyor, several geometric and orthogonal motifs evoking a Tetris composition are slotted together and suggest the shapes of a table, a chair or stairs. The objects are exposed on thin metal structures with fringed ends, and seem to peel off from their construction, as if they were undressing and exchanging skins, depriving themselves of sculptural depth and allowing only the surface to emerge. The technique developed by the artist to produce the sculptures inverts the usual steps of printing: first the pattern is created, then the background to which the fiberglass support is apposed. The pieces are therefore ripped off their mold, revealing their final texture, and the motif on every sculpture seems to remain the same, yet is altered by the shape of the object itself. A series of wall works using this procedure extends from the installation into the gallery space.

Mirage Gstaad
“Mirage Gstaad by Doug Aitken uses the frequency of light to reflect the sublime Alpine landscape as part of a continually changing encounter in which land and sky, subject and object, inside and outside are in constant flux. Standing in contrast to the surrounding chalet’s the ranch-style structure suggests a latter-day architectural version of Manifest Destiny, the westward migration that began in Europe and finally settled in California. With every available surface clad in mirror it both absorbs and reflects the landscape around in such ways that the exterior will seemingly disappear just as the interior draws the viewer into a never-ending kaleidoscope of light and reflection.

Acceleration Structures
Dan Holdsworth’s ‘Acceleration Structures’ explores and examines the topography of three great Alpine glaciers, capturing their fragility and intricacy like no artist has done before. Using geomapping technology, Holdsworth’s films guide the viewer through the skeletal landscape of each glacier, giving a unique perspective and a new understanding of their geography.

Quantum memories
Quantum Memories is Refik Anadol Studio’s epic scale investigation of the intersection between Google AI Quantum Supremacy experiments, machine learning, and aesthetics of probability. Technological and digital advancements of the past century could as well be defined by the humanity’s eagerness to make machines go to places that humans could not go, including the spaces inside our minds and the non-spaces of our un- or sub-conscious acts. Quantum Memories utilizes the most cutting-edge, Google AI’s publicly available quantum computation research data and algorithms to explore the possibility of a parallel world by processing approximately 200 million nature and landscape images through artificial intelligence. These algorithms allow us to speculate alternative modalities inside the most sophisticated computer available, and create new quantum noise-generated datasets as building blocks of these modalities. The 3D visual piece is accompanied by an audio experience that is also based on quantum noise–generated data, offering an immersive experience that further challenges the notion of mutual exclusivity. The project is both inspired by and a speculation of the Many-Worlds Interpretation in quantum physics – a theory that holds that there are many parallel worlds that exist at the same space and time as our own.

Landscape Paintings
Jardins d’Été by Quayola pays homage to the tradition of french impressionism and the late works of Claude Monet.The second iteration of this series of artworks investigates the ways in which nature is observed, studied and synthesized, becoming a point of departure towards abstration. Quayola recreated similar conditions to the classical impressionist landscape paintings, however he engaged with an extensive technological apparatus to capture the sensitive nuances of reality beyond our senses. Here natural landscapes are observed and analysed through the eye of the machine, and re-purposed through new modes of visual synthesis.

Surface detail
A myriad of details in an evolving fractal landscape.

Tower C
‘tower C’ by zaha hadid architects within the Shenzhen bay super headquarters base responds to its location at the intersection of the city’s planned north-south green axis and shenzhen’s east-west urban corridor. Connecting directly with its adjacent park and plazas, which transform into a terraced landscape extending upwards within its two towers, the design invites the public into the heart of the building where cultural and leisure attractions are housed in sweeping bridges that tie the towers together and give panoramic views of the city.

Point Cloud Old Growth
Forest on Location
In the video work Forest on Location, we see the avatar of the Iranian opera singer Shahram Yazdani walking through a forest. One moment, the forest wraps around him protectively, the next moment the trees crumble away into loose pieces of bark, or melt into a static green mass. At the same time, the forest as a whole floats around in darkness, uprooted. It is a forest without a location, except on our screen. The young man’s avatar appears to be wandering around there aimlessly. It is a wonderland that he exits from towards the end of the video, when his body slips straight through the green wall. This finally breaks the spell of the illusory forest, and everything is revealed to be no more than staged decor. But the forest does exist as a real forest, somewhere. This virtual green world is a digital back-up of Bia?owie?a Forest: the last remaining stretch of primeval low land forest that once covered much of Central Europe. Inspired by what the historian Simon Schama wrote about Bia?owie?a in Landscape and Memory (1995), Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács journeyed to Poland to capture the forest suffused by old-Germanic nostalgia and mythical atmosphere.

Remains Series
Video is one of several ways Quayola explores his relationship with the world—and he has a mesmerizing way of undercutting reality while celebrating it. During Miami Art Week, Quayola premiered “Promenade,” a 4K drone-shot film of impeccable beauty. Commissioned by Audemars Piguet, the work winds through and above the forests of the Vallée de Joux, Switzerland near the brand’s historic watchmaking facility. In waves of interconnected footage, it translates documentation of the landscapes into digital art drawn from various technologies. It succeeds in a deep dissection of form.

Feel My Metaverse
Feel My Metaverse is Keiken’s first venture in creating a cinematic film, using game engines to build a fictional future, wanting to create stories that viewers can collectively believe in. “I normally make CGI animation from Cinema 4D, often taking days and weeks just to produce short sequences or footage. Whereas working with game engines, we could generate landscapes or worlds that we can continually build onto collectively to produce larger scale works”. The film, set in a future when climate crisis has rendered Earth inhabitable, explores the daily lives of three characters and their experiences in the multiple realities – Pome Sector (a corporate wellness world), 068 (a roleplaying VR world), and Base Reality, or what we currently know as earth. The characters navigate the challenging landscape in the world’s unforgiving points system. Keiken’s goals of unlearning norms of the current world is included in one of these realities.

Meandering River

Over time, landscapes are gradually shaped by natural forces. Indiscernible to the naked eye, we only perceive one moment at a time. The fluctuations and the rhythmic movement of rivers are a glimpse into the past, as traces provide evidence of the constant transformations that surround us.

Modern Desert Magic
Petecia Le Fawnhawk is a modern surrealist whose body of work is a meditation in form as monuments juxtaposed against minimal and ethereal desert landscapes. In placing elemental shapes in a vast dreamscape, Petecia strips away the unnecessary in an attempt to reveal truth in the mysterious and magisterial.

The look elsewhere
The work, which in this video version is coupled with uncanny virtual landscapes, blurs the boundaries between the real and the simulated, while expanding the artwork into the virtual via the VR-headset wearing dancers. The artwork captures the entangled play between the participants, but also provides the viewer with a new perspective—opening a window onto the virtual dimension of the performance. The borders keep on fading, from the point where technology begins and physicality ends.

Cusp
A familiar childhood location on the Essex marshes is reframed by inserting images randomly generated by a neural network (GAN*) into this tidal landscape. Initially trained on a photographic dataset, the machine proceeds to learn the embedded qualities of different marsh birds, in the process revealing forms that fluctuate between species, with unanticipated variations emerging without reference to human systems of classification. Birds have been actively selected from among the images conceived by the neural network, and then combined into a single animation that migrates from bird to bird, accompanied by a soundscape of artificially generated bird song. The final work records these generated forms as they are projected, using a portable perspex screen, across the mudflats in Landermere Creek.