highlike

MASAKI FUJIHATA

beyond pages

The data projector loads images of a leather bound tome onto a tablet which a light pen activates, animating the objects named in it – stone, apple, door, light, writing. The soundscore immaculately emulates the motion of each against paper, save for the syllabic glyphs of Japanese script, for which a voice pronounces the selected syllable. Stone and apple roll and drag across the page, light illuminates a paper-shaded desklamp; door opens a video door in front of where you read, a naked infant romping, lifesize and laughing, in.

ALWIN NIKOLAIS

Noumenon

A truly universal artist, the American Alwin Nikolais (1910-1993) devoted his life to a radical form of staged art he called “dance theater.” Inspired (perhaps unconsciously) by the experiments of Bauhaus members such as Oskar Schlemmer and László Moholy-Nagy in the 1920s, Nikolais devised a style of abstract dance that encompassed costumes, stage sets, choreography, lighting, and music, all under his control. Also in 1963, Nikolais met analog synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog, who was at the time just starting his business in New York. He was fascinated by the sounds of Moog’s machines, and with the money provided by a a Guggenheim Fellowship, Nikolais bought the first ever commercially produced Moog synthesizer. It was the primary sound-source for all of Nikolais’ scores from 1963 to 1975. The instrument is now housed at the Stearns Collection of Musical Instruments at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Haegue Yang

Sol LeWitt Upside Down
Haegue Yang’s expansive installation, titled Sol LeWitt Upside Down – Structure with Three Towers, Expanded 23 Times, Split in Three, consists of over 500 independent components made of Venetian blinds that together recreate one of LeWitt’s signature works from 1986 – connecting LeWitt’s work to her own attempts to be liberated from the urge to compose, and the way modular thinking leads towards proliferation. Magnifying its size 23 times and hanging it upside down, this is the first work in her Sol LeWitt Upside Down series.

BILL VIOLA

The Raft
The Raft depicts at life-sized scale a group of ordinary people casually standing together. Suddenly, they are struck by strong blasts of water that rush in, overtake them, and then, just as unexpectedly, recede. In the aftermath of the deluge, the victims huddle together, seek protection, and help those who have fallen. The viewer experiences this event in an immersive setting, standing in a darkened room and surrounded by the roaring sounds of the water. Meticulously captured in slow-motion, The Raft arouses a visceral experience of human calamity and shared humanity, provoking a consideration of the range of responses to crisis.

MOMOYO TORIMITSU

鳥光桃代
Miyata Jiro
“Miyata Jiro” by Momoyo Torimitsu is a life size replica of the typical Japanese businessman. Sporting a suit, glasses, and a receding hair line complete with a comb-over, Miyata has mechanically crawled the metropolises of New York, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and Sydney. With the aid of the artist in full nurse costume, the duo engages street and business life (Miyata has crawled the likes of Wall Street and La Defense — epicenters of business cultures as well as typical touristic destinations). The performance and audience reactions were videotaped and photographed and six monitors at the Dikeou Collection play the respective videos, each identified by a small flag for the country in which the crawl took place.

Eliška Sky

WOMANEROES

“Eliška Sky’s tribe of ‘womaneroes’ stand bold and bright, their bodies and heads adorned in vibrant shapes, colours, and textures. Beneath the wigs and paint are women of all ages, shapes and ethnicities, photographed with a large-format camera to capture every detail, rough or smooth, with the intention for the images to eventually be printed and exhibited life-size. “It started as visual play, but transformed into a series that challenges depictions of women’s bodies,” explains the London-based Czech photographer. “In light of my own experience of working in the fashion industry, I felt the need to portray the body in new ways and forms, with an element of playfulness and humour in opposition to western media advertising”.” Marigold Warner

KRIS VERDONCK

I / II / III / IIII

In I/II/III/IIII, choreographer and visual artist Kris Verdonck transforms the stage into a life-size dollhouse. Four female ICK-dancers – not unlike marionettes – are floating in mid-air, suspended from a huge machine. A solo, a duet, a trio and a quartet follow one another in this choreography of identical movements. A game of surrendering to the machine and at the same time, searching for control. The images evoked by I/II/III/IIII are confusing and ambiguous: the dancers almost look like graceful, fragile swans … but they also remind us of animal carcasses being dragged along, floating angels, falling human bodies and everything in between.

LEANDRO ERLICH

Леандро Эрлих
莱安德罗·埃利希
Dalston House
The Dalston House resembles a movie set, featuring the façade of a late nineteenth-century Victorian terraced house. A mirrored surface is positioned on the on the ground lying life size façade, in a 45-degree angle. Visitiors apppear to be hanging of the building or sitting on window sills, by sitting, standing or lying on the horizontal surface. The audience plays an important and active role in the installations for Erlich. By altering the viewer’s relationship with familiar spaces, he playfully disrupts our own notion of reality,through the mirrored projection of the image, creating new possibilities and situations.

 

JEFFREY SHAW

Disappearance

In this work the movement of a large video monitor mounted on an industrial fork-lift truck creates a virtual representation of a larger than life size ballerina. As the forklift moves the monitor up and down the ballerina is presented from head to toe, and as the forklift truck rotates the ballerina also appears to turn. In this way the monitor functions as a window that gradually reveals the virtual presence of the ballerina who is dancing in the same axis as the rotating forklift truck. Also visible inside the motor compartment of the forklift truck is a small rotating ballerina figurine in front of which a video camera moves up and down. This mechanism is electronically synchronised with the movement of the forklift itself and provides the closed circuit source for the video image of the ballerina that is seen on the monitor screen. Disappearance evokes and celebrates the memory of the ballerina on a music box (a first generation robot) and generates her virtual reconstruction to the extent that the machinery of reproduction itself now incarnates her pirouettes.
video

DUMBTYPE

LOVERS
Computer-controlled, five-channel video/sound installation with five video projectors, eight-channel sound system, and slide projectors […] As an image, a pair of lovers often suggests a castle of exclusion. With the sexual liberation of the last few decades, the word now has more to do with physical coupling than with the sublimity of “true love.” AIDS has added a new dimension of wariness to this pairing. The life-size dancers in Lovers are drained of life. Projected onto the black walls of a square room, the naked figures have a spectral quality. Their movements are simple and repetitive. Back and forth, they walk and run with animal grace. Their actions become familiar over time, so that it is a surprise when two of the translucent bodies come together in a virtual embrace. These ostensible lovers–more overlapping than touching–are not physically entwined.

Marc Quinn

A Surge of Power
Within 24 hours Marc Quinn’s statue A Surge of Power (Jen Reid) 2020 has been erected in secret on a Bristol plinth and as quickly removed by the council. Life-sized, cast in black resin, it showed the campaigner Jen Reid standing, one fist raised, in a pose in which a photographer had captured her a few weeks earlier when she had stood on the empty plinth after Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters tore down a bronze monument to the 17th-century slaver Edward Colston.

Iris van Herpen

АЙРИС ВАН ЭРПЕН
イリス ヴァン ヘルペン
Syntopia
For Syntopia, Van Herpen collaborates with the artists Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta of Studio Drift, whose biomimic art works translate natural processes by breathing life into delicate immersive sculptures through movement[…] The vivacious glass bird flows in symbiosis with the models while they move over the runway, their delicate interaction emphasizes the fragility of new worlds living and soaring together.

Loris Cecchini

The ineffable Gardener
“Loris nurtures a strong attraction to the composition made by fusing life and art. In his creations, he often includes segments from different scientific fields, for example chemistry and cutting edge technology. Following this philosophical line, one of the main ingredients and vital conceptions in his work is the notion of the organic element. This notion serves to a double purpose, with intention to explore a certain object and his relevance in the material world, but also to emphasize the minimalist approach in art making.”Hugo Hess

QUAYOLA

Captives
Captives is an ongoing series of digital and physical sculptures by Quayola and a contemporary homage to Michelangelo’s unfinished series “Prigioni” (1513-1534) and his technique of “non-finito”. The project explores tensions and equilibrium between form and matter, man-made objects of perfection and complex, chaotic forms of nature. In this series mathematical functions and processes describe computer-generated geological formations, endlessly evolving and morphing into classical figures resulting into life-size ‘unfinished’ sculptures.

bart hess

바트 헤스
巴特·赫斯
בארט הס
БАРТА ХЕССА
SIlVERNanine Linning
Nothing has changed as radically in the last few decades as the technology we surround ourselves with on a daily basis. Modern means of communication let the world shrink to a pocket size Global Village. Medical technology promises life beyond its natural limits. Robotics, cybernetics and developments in the field of artificial intelligence put the equally fascinating as disquieting idea of artificial life within our grasp. Nanine Linning’s new production SILVER addresses the intimate – and increasingly intrusive – relationship between the human and the technological, showing the beauty of its aesthetics, but also questioning its promise of ever increasing progress and self-improvement.

john de andrea

جون دي اندريا
존 드 안드레아
ジョン·デアンドレア
ДЖОН ДЕ АНДРЕА
John De Andrea, (born November 24, 1941, Denver, Colorado, U.S.), American Super-realist sculptor known for his detailed life-size female nudes depicted in naturalistic poses. He is associated with the Photo-realist and Verist art movements.

Daniel Firman

ДЭНИЕЛ ФИРМАН
丹尼尔·菲尔曼
دانيال فيرمان

French-born artist Daniel Firman was born in 1966. He currently works and resides in Paris. His life-sized body cast plaster sculptures are particularly fascinating. In most cases, they are arranged in odd formations–balancing off of each other, crawling backwards or sideways–and on various suspensions–either up in the air or flopping over metal bars.

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.”

 

Matthias Zwicker, Wojciech Matusik, Fredo Durand, and Hanspeter Pfister

Automultiscopic 3D displays
Automultiscopic 3D displays allow a large number of viewers to experience 3D content simultaneously without the hassle of special glasses or head gear. This display uses a dense array of 216 video projectors to generate images with high angular density over a wide field of view. As users move around the display, their eyes smoothly transition from one view to the next. The display is ideal for displaying life-size human subjects, as it allows for natural personal interactions with 3D cues such as eye-gaze and spatial hand gestures.