The Sea

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival

The Sea is an extraction of a complex natural phenomenon, resulting in an artificial emulation that develops a life form of its own. Just like the sea with its endless waves, this artificial system follows the impact of an immersive state, leading to a unique vision of an artificial generator. Despite appearing chaotic, it is capable of generating associations ranging from the movement of waves to science fiction scenarios.

Bio

Paul Gründorfer develops process-related systems and explores variable or unstable conditions in the occurrence of sound when exposed to amplification, feedback, and multiple signal streams. His works focus on processes that evolve in a social space. Leo Peschta is an artist and researcher. During his studies, he worked in various fields of media arts, including sound, installations and software, developing over the years a special interest in robotics and machinery.

Credits

Austrian Embassy

Machine Tree
Machine with Tree is a kinetic sculpture combining dead trees with metal machinery. It is designed to use the object’s center of gravity to achieve a movement where the tree appears to float in midair. In Machine with Tree, a dead tree is placed at the end of a long, sharp rod on the machine. The tree slowly moves back and forth with the machine’s movements, as though floating in midair. Through its creation of artificial, bizarre movements controlled by machinery, it illustrates a melancholy contemplation of the strange and contradictory things woven together by our reality.

Divide, Multiply
The King Deluxe label teamed up with animator Keita Onishi to create an innovative music video for ‘Divide, Multiply’[…] The final result is a seriously aesthetically pleasing work of videographic art, living up exactly to King Deluxe’s ‘audio-visual laboratory’ manifesto. With its geometric simplicity, and cog-like machinery driven by symmetrical beats, the video instills the utmost satisfaction deep within every viewer.

I-Machinarius
In I-Machinarius, Mexican artist Marcela Armas presents a map of her native country, which takes the form of machinery whose belts are continuously lubricated by oil. In front of the map, presented here in an inverted form, the black liquid flows towards the “north”, acting as a symbol of Mexico’s economic dependence on the United States.

Impacts
If you’ve never seen a Tesla coil in person, it’s a remarkable experience. Purple plasma flashes in unpredictable, wide-reaching bolts. The sound cracks with more fearsomeness than a whip. The air fills with the sterile acridity of ozone. The effect is equal parts frightening and beautiful; this machinery can use enough voltage to carbonize your flesh right down to the bone, yet some self-destructive impulse tells you to look closer. Alexandre Burton plays with this very impulse in his installation, Impacts. The exhibition features several Tesla coils that hang from the ceiling. They fire, not against a cage or predictable grounding surface, but a delicate pane of glass, so the viewer can appreciate the plasma filaments like a framed piece of art or a caged lion.

Homemade RC Toy
Her new installation centers on five human-scale, remote-control sculptures that she cobbled together from metal brackets, batteries, wires, dental study props, and disassembled mannequins. Surrounding them are stepped plinths whose bright colors echo the robot sculptures’ wiring. The plinths display fetishistic agglomerations of spare parts: wheels, cables, gutted medical practice torsos, home repair parts. In their default state, the sculptures are frozen, comatose, even if all that wiring and machinery certainly suggests movement. The installation is the setting for a series of live interactions between the artist and her uncanny others.

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

Seo Young Deok’s work aims to reflect the disease-like contamination we experience caused by materials in our society, he hopes to reveal the amount of suffering it places on the modern-day human. To express this, he utilized metal chains to create the modern man. Chains were made by our civilization and created through mass production, yet it is also just one accessory, one part in a massive piece of machinery. He considered each part of the chain a human cell and used the chains to create a human figure. Thus, this being’s form has been created in contamination by materials in our current world.

チェ·ウラム
Cakra Lamp
CHOE U-RAM’s work engages a fanciful dialog of aesthetics and machinery and explores themes of biological transformation, flight, and movement. In his recent work, large-scale metal and plastic automata materialize with such a delicacy and weightlessness that it seems to take on the shape and silhouette of an organic life form. Motors, heat and light sensitive materials add to the intricacy of Choe’s kinetic sculptures.

Mécaniques Discursives
This installation project has developed out of the encounter of the engraver Fred Penelle with the video artist Yannick Jacquet (Legoman). It is a mixture of engraving and video projection representing a sort of absurd and poetic machinery unfolding across walls like some exquisite corpse using the principle of a chain reaction as its starting point. Frédéric Penelle has been going to great lengths for a number of years to release engraving from its traditional context and “beautiful paper”. He uses his installations to breathe new life into engraving by moving it off a path that is too well trodden. As regards Yannick Jacquet’s work, this is marked by a desire to step outside of traditional projection formats and put video into space. The main tool is audiovisual performances, installations and stage design. Their shared desire to leave the beaten path of their respective disciplines brought them together in this project.

振り子の合唱団
CYCLOID-E

This piece, which comprises a series of tubular pieces arranged horizontally and activated by a motor, generates a particular sound through its movement, which is unexpectedly harmonic. The artists have taken their interest in the mechanisms that generate wave motions as a starting point to create this sculpture: five metal tubes joined together feature sound sources and sensors that allow them to emit different sounds based on their rotations.
The sculpture runs through a series of rhythmic movements, like a dance, creating, in the words of the artists themselves, “a unique kinetic and polyphonic work, in the likeness of the “Cosmic Ballet” to which the physicist Johannes Kepler refers to in his “Music of the Spheres” in 1619.” This work is part of the reflection on the possible interactions between sound and movement developed by the artists since 1999, using electronic devices and inspired by the aesthetics of industrial machinery.

The Golden Calf

This work is constituted by a white pedestal on which there stands an LCD colour monitor connected to computing machinery by a cable running through the pedestal. The viewer of this work picks up and holds this monitor in his hands. The screen shows a representation of the pedestal with a computer-generated image of a golden calf on top. By moving the monitor around the actual pedestal the viewer can examine this golden calf from above and below and all sides. Thus the monitor functions like a window that reveals a virtual body apparently located physically in the real space.