highlike

Tobias Stretch

Craco

Tobias Stretch channels the beauty and melancholia of Hauschka’s single “Craco” in his uncanny video filmed in Philadelphia’s answer to Brooklyn’s High Line, Reading Viaduct Park. With music videos for Radiohead, Crystal Fighters and Christopher Bono to his name, the Philly-based animator is known for his distinct aesthetic and method, pairing landscape photography with life-size stop-motion puppets. “I thought right from the beginning when I saw Tobias’s work that it has a mixture of analog and handmade elements and a surreal atmosphere. In my music you have similar elements,” says Hauschka himself, aka the German pianist and composer Volker Bertelmann, who headline’s London’s Union Chapel tonight as part of his European tour. Although best known as a 21st-Century protagonist of the prepared piano practice championed by John Cage, Bertelmann “left all the preparations at home” in order to work with a pure sound on this track. Named after the Italian ghost town,“Craco” is taken from his entropy-laced album Abandoned City and played to Stretch’s own fascination with urban decay. “The music was there beforehand, but I had a bowl of music and a bowl of names and I tried to pair them up. I think the music sounded not only like an abandoned place but also like a nostalgic place and that’s why I thought it was a great match.”

 

DENNIS NEUSCHAEFER-RUBE

The Wizard of Oz experiment

The Videoinstallation “The Wizard of Oz experiment” by Dennis Neuschaefer-Rube shows the movie „The Wizard of Oz“ 5829 times side by side. The movies are arranged in rows from left to right and time shifted by exactly one second each. The video starts at the top left, with the first second of the film and finishes bottom right with the last second of the film. The projection is in a that repeats every 98 minutes.
A computer voice speaks the whole subtitles of the film „The Wizard of Oz.“ in a 68-minute loop.

George Balanchine

The Nutcracker
Waltz of the Flowers
New York City Ballet

“You don’t think of choreographers as mathematicians — yet group dances involve arithmetic and geometry. Nobody mastered those aspects of the art more brilliantly than George Balanchine.
See what he does with the “Waltz of the Flowers” in “The Nutcracker,” as in this short detail:As it begins, 14 women, arrayed in four rows, face front. The two demi-soloists start: They dance from our right to left, with two turning jumps at the end of the phrase. Then a row of four women behind them take up the same phrase — but now the first two women repeat the phrase in the opposite direction, from left to right.It’s like seeing screens sliding in opposite directions. Then the next row takes it up; then the next; suspense and excitement build. It’s an accumulating canon — not spread out across the stage but at close quarters”. Alastair Macaulay

ECAL

Automač
Fantastic Smartphones
Built around a simple mechanism, Tinder reduces the act of dating to a single swipe. This slide of the finger to the right or the left is enough to show our interest or disinterest in a profile that comes up. Although high-stakes, even when performed repeatedly, this movement can become purely mechanical and lose its meaning. As its name indicates, Automač is a device that enables us to automatically match with a maximum number of potential partners on Tinder. The automaton consists of a smartphone holder, a camera that observes the screen and a rotating mechanism to swipe on the smartphone screen. Via a screen interface, the user has the possibility to choose selection criteria. By automating this process and delegating it to a machine, Automač positions itself as an optimal machine to have a maximum amount of matches in a minimum amount of time.

DILLER SCOFIDIO + RENFRO

SLOW HOUSE

To either side of the “picture window” are two antenna-like stacks: the chimney is to the right, the video apparatus to the left. At the summit of the left stack sits a live video camera directed at the water view and feeding the monitor in front of the picture window. The electronic view is operable; the camera can pan or zoom by remote control. When recorded, the view may be deferred— day played back at night, fair weather played back in foul. The composite view formed by the screen in front of the picture window is always out of register, collapsing the opposition between the authentic and mediated.

marnix de nijs

PIVOT POINT – ICHIHARA
‘Pivot Point – Ichihara’ is an interactive site-specific installation. Standing on a controller pod you navigate over and through a 3D terrain where gravity seems to have disappeared, you gradually become tele-present in a parallel projected space by exploring a mediated version of the venue, it’s direct surroundings and the Ichihara region. A cinematic journey to a fascinating point cloud realm, precise in details but simultaneously abstract and dreamlike.The kidney shaped interface is covered with capacitive sensors and mounted on a pole, touching this interface right, left, up or down aims the virtual camera accordingly. When you release the navigation pole the virtual camera automatically starts spiralling back to the initial starting point your journey and temporary centre of the universe, the Asohbara Art House.

Marshmallow Laser Feast

NEST

Inspired by Homer’s Odyssey
Loosely based on Homer’s The Odyssey, Marshmallow Laser Feast’s light installation lit the primary performance space within the chapel’s hazy internal dome. Grid-like projections crossed with mobile structures (designed by the architectural practice Studio Weave) as agile bodies crept over, in and through the many lit towers and surfaces. This first act was seen by the audience from the left and right balconies above. The second act, down flights of rope-lined staircases in the concrete basement, was more disorienting, lit only with triangular neon tubing and an eerie glow that seeped from an open door. The style of dance, in keeping with the more rapid and percussive score, by Canadian composer Christopher Mayo and electronic music composer / performer Anna Meredith, confronted the audience and was staged without boundaries dividing the dancers (some of whom were in street clothes) and viewers.

Roy Andersson

Songs from the second floor
A man is standing in a subway car, his face dirty with soot. In his right hand he carries a plastic bag with documents, or rather, the charred leftovers of them. In a corridor a man is clinging desperately to the legs of the boss who just fired him. He is screaming: “I’ve been here for thirty years!” In a coffee shop someone is waiting for his father, who just burned his furniture company for insurance money.
cinema full

ALICE ANDERSON

أليس أندرسون
爱丽丝·安德森
アリス·アンダーソン
앨리스 앤더슨
Алиса Андерсон
COCOON
Alice Anderson’s giant installations created out thousands of feet of red colored doll hair are a thing of wonder. Selected for its relationship to her own bright red hair, Anderson selected the material to refer to her childhood where she invented rituals based around her hair to calm her anxieties when left home alone. Draped over buildings, walls, and every imaginable surface, Anderson’s work is just as much about reinterpreting an everyday material as it is about coming to terms with the ghosts of her youth.

FELIX KLEIN

克莱因瓶
Klein’s bottle

The Klein bottle is a non-orientable surface; informally, it is a surface in which notions of left and right cannot be consistently defined.Simplifying things: A Möbius strip is a simpler example of a non-orientable object. That means it has no inside or outside. Add another aspect – having no boundaries – to it, it gets more complex and you end up with a Klein bottle.

Vasilis Asimakopoulos

“I am interested in the moment that stretches from “now” to the future. The interweaving web of images and possibilities connecting our world and the parallel. The trails of the heavy scent left from this point to tomorrow and right next to it. Dystopia. New life. Post-apocalypse. Growth. The descent. Love. Arsenic. Candies. And everything vibrating in between.”

Jiun-Shian Lin

the Reversed Eye

‘The Reversed Eye’ is a cheek-controlled wearable device made by Jiun-Shian Lin in 2013. It provides participants upside-down left-right reversal sight and rear vision in their everyday life, attempting to turn the ordinary life experience into an aesthetic one.

Alois Kronschlaeger

Grid Structure

Influenced by constructivism and post-minimalism, Alois Kronschlaeger plays with colors and angles to produce a kinesic effect in the works that are part of the series “Polychromatic structures. These WORKS by Kronschlaeger require the active participation of the viewer, as that on one side is something that is transformed by just moving a few steps to the right or left.