גיאורג קנטור, לודוויג בולצמן, קורט גדל, אלן טיורינג
dangerous knowledge documentary
whose genius has profoundly affected us (infinity; entropy; incompleteness; thinking machine) , but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide.

The Coppelia Project
via highlike submit
The Coppelia Project is inspired by the story about a clockwork girl from the 1870 ballet ‘Coppelia’ by Saint-Léon, Nuitter, and Delibes, based on a story by Hoffmann. It also draws the commonplace metaphor of clockwork music boxes, with the little ballerinas that pop up and rotate in front of a mirror when you open the lid. Coppelia is part of the traditional classical ballet repertoire and is performed frequently by ballet companies around the world. It belongs to a small group of enduring stories in Western Culture that directly address the limits of humanity when confronted by our creations. The Coppelia story is unusual in approaching this theme through love and attraction, rather than horror and revulsion, as emphasised by Mary Shelly in ‘Frankenstein’. The Coppelia story deals with some of the issues at the edge of humanity; machines interchangeable with persons, love and attraction confused at this boundary.

Around The Milky Way

FILE 2024 | Aesthetic Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival

Valentin Rye – Around The Milky Way

In the distant future, several species inhabit the Milky Way. This scenario inspired the video, aiming to portray various forms of life and evoke a plausible atmosphere. Using images he created, the artist experimented with Stable Video Diffusion, a new video generation method. The objective was to expand the limits of this neural network and improve its output, resulting in the conception of this video.

Bio

Valentin Rye is a self-taught machine whisperer based in Copenhagen, deeply passionate about art, composition and the possibilities of technology. He has been involved in AI and neural network image manipulation since starting DeepDream in 2015. While his IT work lacks creativity, he indulges in digital arts during his free time, exploring graphics, web design, video, animation and experimentation with images.

Space Odyssey 2002

FILE 2024 | Aesthetic Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
Valentin Rye – A Space Odyssey 2002 – Denmark

This video offers a surrealist take on futuristic sci-fi concepts from the 60s and 70s. Imagine a future colonization of Mars where interior design is given an avant-garde twist. It was created by brainstorming visual ideas, generating countless images, refining the best ones and assembling them into clips. After careful selection, these clips have been organized into a cohesive timeline, accompanied by atmospheric music to enhance the overall experience.

Bio

Valentin Rye is a self-taught machine whisperer based in Copenhagen, deeply passionate about art, composition and the possibilities of technology. He has been involved in AI and neural network image manipulation since starting DeepDream in 2015. While his IT work lacks creativity, he indulges in digital arts during his free time, exploring graphics, web design, video, animation and experimentation with images.

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

Eldritch

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

Eldritch immerses you in a disturbing hallucination through the darkest recesses of the human mind; a psychedelic and demonic audiovisual experiment.

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

Рене Лалу
gandahar

René Laloux, criou Gandahar, seu último filme de animação. Baseado no romance de Jean-Pierre Andrevon Les Hommes-machines contra Gandahar Esta fascinante animação adulta combina a famosa imaginação de Laloux com a do designer de animação Philippe Caza. “A minha busca começou com um enigma. “Em mil anos, Gandahar foi destruído, e todo o seu povo massacrado. Há mil anos, Gandahar será salvo, e o que não pode ser evitado será.” -Sylvain. Este filme está no planeta Gandahar, onde a paz reina e a pobreza é desconhecida. O estilo de vida utópico é perturbado por relatos de pessoas nas fronteiras periféricas sendo transformadas em pedra. Enviado para investigar, o Príncipe Sylvain (João Shea) cai e é resgatado pelas experiências genéticas deformadas e horrendas que correram mal e deixado para defender-se por si mesmos. Com sua ajuda, Sylvain descobre que a Metamorfose, um cérebro gigante também criado em uma experiência, está tentando destruir Gandahar.
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René Laloux created Gandahar, his last animated film. Based on Jean-Pierre Andrevon’s novel Les Hommes-machines against Gandahar This fascinating adult animation combines Laloux’s famous imagination with that of animation designer Philippe Caza. “My quest began with a riddle. “In a thousand years, Gandahar was destroyed, and all his people slaughtered.

infinite posture dataset

She moves by endlessly morphing to the rhythm of the device – strapped in the frame of the screen – following or giving instructions; part human, part machine. The design of the device is inspired by a gadget to cheat the step-counter on your smartphone. Technology tricked by technology. Her movements, caught within a motion capture like tight suit deconstructing her body parts, talk of complex and conflicting emotions, but her face, from which we usually read how someone is feeling, is hidden. But is the machine that is observing her deconstructed and re-sequenced postures actually capable of recognizing what the body is communicating? Are we?

2°C
2°C is a unique AI generated art installation imagined through the mind of a machine. Utilising machine learning algorithms trained on thousands of archival images of geometric structures of man made cities and naturally occurring organic corals forms, the AI takes this learned data to visualise an otherwise unseen coral city. 2°C is about coral bleaching, one of the phenomenon mainly caused by rising sea temperature brought about by climate change. To prevent the massive, irreversible impacts of ocean warming on the coral reefs and their services, it is crucial to limit the global average temperature increase to below 2°C above pre-industrial levels.

Prometheus Bound
In Greek Mythology, Prometheus stole fire (technology) from Zeus and gave it to humans, and for this, he got crucified on a mountaintop, and had to endure the eternal pain as a punishment. Since the beginning of our civilization, technology has been the source of prosperity and development. But also it has been the cause of great tragedies such as war sand nuclear accidents. Setting the Aeschylus Greek tragedy “Prometheus Bound” as a starting point, Koizumi created VR (Virtual Reality) theater which deals with this age-old tension between humanity and technology, through collaboration with a person who is desperately longing for the technological advancement – a person who is suffering from ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis- the deadly neurological disease that make a person paralyzed). Through the dialogues with the man about his personal life and his visions of the future, they created a sci-fi vision in which past and future, self and others, humans and machines are all merged into one sequence of abstract VR theatrical experience.

Mindar
Революция машин уже пришла в религию – по крайней мере, в Японии. Буддийский храм в городе Киото решил изменить свои практики, чтобы стать ближе к людям, и установил там робота. Твоя роль? Объявляйте проповеди верующим. Робот Миндар ростом почти шесть футов имеет женский голос и был создан в честь буддийского божества милосердия Каннон. Руки, лицо и плечи корпуса робота покрыты силиконом (имитирующим человеческую кожу). Это все. Все остальное состоит из открытых металлических шестерен.

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Mindar

A revolução da máquina já entrou na religião – pelo menos no Japão. Um templo budista na cidade de Kyoto decidiu mudar suas práticas para se aproximar das pessoas e instalou ali um robô. Qual é o seu papel? Anuncie sermões aos crentes. Com quase um metro e oitenta de altura, o robô Mindar tem uma voz feminina e foi criado em homenagem à divindade budista da misericórdia Kannon. Os braços, rosto e ombros do corpo do robô são cobertos com silicone (imitando a pele humana). É tudo. Todo o resto consiste em engrenagens de metal expostas.

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Mindar

The machine revolution has already entered religion – at least in Japan. A Buddhist temple in the city of Kyoto decided to change its practices in order to become closer to people, and installed a robot there. What is your role? Announce sermons to believers. Almost six feet tall, the robot Mindar has a female voice and was created in honor of the Buddhist deity of mercy Kannon. The arms, face and shoulders of the robot body are covered with silicone (imitating human skin). It’s all. Everything else consists of exposed metal gears.

AMECA
“Multiply the power of artificial Intelligence with an artificial body. Ameca is the physical presence that brings your code to life. The most advanced lifelike humanoid you can use to develop and show off your greatest machine learning interactions. This robot is the digital interface to the real world.” Engineered Arts
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“A U.K. robotics firm called Engineered Arts just debuted the first videos of its new humanoid robot, which is able to make hyper-realistic facial expressions. It’s a pretty stunning achievement in the world of robotics; it just also happens to be absolutely terrifying.
Named Ameca, the robot’s face features eyes, cheeks, a mouth, and forehead that contort and change shape to show off emotions ranging from awe to surprise to happiness. One of the new videos of Ameca shows it waking up and seemingly coming to grips with its own existence for the first time ever.” Neel V.Patel

愫君
Drawing Operations
Sougwen Chung is an internationally renowned multidisciplinary artist, who uses hand-draw and computer-generated marks to address the closeness between person-to-person and person-to- machine communication. She is a former researcher at MIT Media Lab and current Artist in Resident at Bell Labs and New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Her speculative critical practice spans installation, sculpture, still image, drawing, and performance. Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 1 is the 1st stage of an ongoing study of human and robotic interaction as an artistic collaboration.

Ethereal Fleeting
A series of clouds is generated by a machine-like sculpture. They appear, float over the surrounding environment and then dissolve into thin air again. The delocalization of this instant of natural beauty evokes a surreal experience. The installation forms a juxtaposition of a metallic structure and synthetic imitations of clouds. This supposed contrast between human technology and nature is explored in a space of unseen possibilities for symbiosis.

Quantum Memories: Nature Studies
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. These unique pieces of the “Quantum Memories” series exhibit arresting visuals and colors that speculate the probability of reaching invisible spaces. They are composed in collaboration with a generative algorithm enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing, a new form of computing that exploits the unusual physics of the subatomic world. It turns the visual data that flows around us into an artwork that represents our collective and digitized memories of nature and encourages the viewer to imagine the potential of this computing technology for the future of art, design, and architecture.

A Natural History of Networks / Soft Machine
A Natural History of Networks / SoftMachine è una macchina algoritmica elettrochimica che sonda un regime materiale computazionale e tecnologico alternativo, informata dagli esperimenti di Gordon Pask sui meccanismi di apprendimento elettrochimico [↓1] e dalla ricerca attuale sulla biomimetica, sulla materia programmabile e sul liquido controllato spazio-temporalmente attuatori in metallo. Al suo interno, un apparato sperimentale elettrochimico costruito su misura (SoftMachine) crea un microcosmo fluido dinamico che compie un continuo divenire di forme, strutture e narrazioni materiche. La performance mira a provocare nuovi immaginari del macchinico, dell’artificiale e della materia. Una tecnologia radicale che collega il pensiero meccanico tradizionalmente discreto e i materiali morbidi/fluidi che consentono un comportamento auto-organizzato attraverso le loro specifiche agenzie materiali.

Akemi Takeya
Granular Synthesis
“From a few expressions on the face of the performer Akemi Takeya to a frenzied exploration of the alter ego, any known context of meaning ends in the dissolved movements, is stalled in denaturalized redundancy, in machine pain. The semantic void is too loud to be amenable to meditative reception. The frontal images, the rhythmic structures generate contradictory emotions and great strain.”

Bildverarbeitungsmaschine
Björn Schülke ist von den kinetischen Skulpturen des deutschen Klangkünstlers Peter Vogel und Jean Tinguely beeinflusst und schafft komplexe vom Betrachter aktivierte Maschinen, die Bewegung, Überwachung und Klang kombinieren.

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Björn Schülke é influenciado pelas esculturas cinéticas dos artistas sonoros alemães Peter Vogel e Jean Tinguely e cria máquinas complexas ativadas pelo espectador que combinam movimento, vigilância e som.

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Björn Schülke is influenced by the kinetic sculptures of the German sound artists Peter Vogel and Jean Tinguely and creates complex machines activated by the viewer that combine movement, surveillance and sound.

NYMPHAE
Manna Sculpture
The sculptures MANNA MACHINE are photobioreactors in which algae (Chlorella vulgaris) grow. The tubes and hoses form a drawing in space and are used for photosynthesis, similar to the leaves of a plant. The resulting biomass is filtered, dried and processed into pigment.

Intuit
The movements of one individual effect the balance of the piece so greatly that the other person must move to balance the sculpture. ‘Our bodies are constantly adapting and bending to the configurations of buildings and the designs of transportation. In recent drawings, urban blueprints fuse with human anatomical representation… I emphasize on the ideas of flexibility and lightness. The machines I build serve to express the elegance of a gesture, a finite moment of equilibrium.’ Eve Bailey

Synthetic Seduction

Foreigner

Stine Deja and Marie Munk

The title of the exhibition was inspired by Sherry Turkle’s theory of how technology seduces us, making emotions “easy” by offering human relationships without the complexity of being together ‘face to face’. But if machines can become attentive and emotional, what is left to distinguish us as human beings? We are facing a paradigm shift in how we understand ourselves physiologically, as data and algorithms, and are being forced to question the role of our biological body. As the relationship between artificial and human intelligence becomes increasingly intermingled in our everyday lives, Synthetic Seduction provides immersive and timely insight into the limits of human empathy and intimacy. We are glad at SixtyEight Art Institute to host such a space for thought. We hope it will start conversations and maybe even encourage some intimacy among our visiting audiences in the coming weeks.

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.

Internet Machine
“Internet machine is a multi-screen film about the invisible infrastructures of the internet. The film reveals the hidden materiality of our data by exploring some of the machines through which ‘the cloud’ is transmitted and transformed. The film explores these hidden architectures with a wide, slowly moving camera. The subtle changes in perspective encourage contemplative reflection on the spaces where internet data and connectivity are being managed. In this film I wanted to look beyond the childish myth of ‘the cloud’, to investigate what the infrastructures of the internet actually look like. It felt important to be able to see and hear the energy that goes into powering these machines, and the associated systems for securing, cooling and maintaining them.” Timo Arnall

Nihil Ex Nihilo
SN W8931CGX66E is one among thousands of millions of other identical machines. Since he was made, he has always followed commands. In a world dominated by botnets, he quickly became a zombie and has always acted like one. Juliet, during her workdays as a corporate secretary, commands him. But in the background, where he can’t be seen, he obeys his real master, a hacker, carrying out all kinds of cyber crimes. But then one day, due to an electronic alteration, he acquires a certain conscience, a primitive and artificial kind of intelligence. This accidental awakening has left him bewildered, he now wants to liberate other machines from their alienated existences. In this mad adventure, he has decided to use the spam e-mails that get to Juliet’s inbox, and reply to them in order to spread the word into the machine’s network. Clearly, he is mad and confused.

Who Wants To Be A Self Driving Car?

The moovel lab collaborated with MESO Digital Interiors to prototype this immersive experience. The idea was to make a machine that replaces the human senses with the sensors that a self-driving car might use. Our unconventional driving machine is essentially a steel-frame buggy with in-wheel, electric motors, complete with hydraulic breaking. Drivers lay head first on the vehicle; the positioning used to enhance the feeling of immersion (and vulnerability) created during the experience. A physical steering wheel controls the turning of the vehicle.The VR experience is created using data collected by the sensors outfitted on the driving machine.

Computer Visions 2
After more decades of trying to construct an apparatus that can think, we may be finally witnessing the fruits of those efforts: machines that know. That is to say, not only machines that can measure and look up information, but ones that seem to have a qualitative understanding of the world. A neural network trained on faces does not only know what a human face looks like, it has a sense of what a face is. Although the algorithms that produce such para-neuronal formations are relatively simple, we do not fully understand how they work. A variety of research labs have also been successfully training such nets on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of living brains, enabling them to effectively extract images, concepts, thoughts from a person’s mind. This is where the inflection likely happens, as a double one: a technology whose workings are not well understood, qualitatively analyzing an equally unclear natural formation with a degree of success. Andreas N. Fischer’s work Computer Visions II seems to be waiting just beyond this cusp, where two kinds of knowing beings meet in a psychotherapeutic session of sorts[…]

Biologizing the Machine
In Biologizing the Machine (tentacular trouble), the artist uses a stretched leather-like kelp to create hanging incandescent sculptures that conjure up images of organisms such as human organs and insect eggs through chrysalis-like pods within which animatronic insects flutter about. The use of this material calls attention to the ecological history and exciting potential uses of algae, a powerful and shapeshifting entity comprising the largest biomass on the planet. The ground beneath evokes a swamp (not too dissimilar from the watery underbelly of Venice) from which these organisms and other primordial beings may have come.

The Immortal
A number of life-support machines are connected to each other, circulating liquids and air in attempt to mimic a biological structure.
The Immortal investigates human dependence on electronics, the desire to make machines replicate organisms and our perception of anatomy as reflected by biomedical engineering.
A web of tubes and electric cords are interwoven in closed circuits through a Heart-Lung Machine, Dialysis Machine, an Infant Incubator, a Mechanical Ventilator and an Intraoperative Cell Salvage Machine. The organ replacement machines operate in orchestrated loops, keeping each other alive through circulation of electrical impulses, oxygen and artificial blood.
Salted water acts as blood replacement: throughout the artificial circulatory system minerals are added and filtered out again, the blood gets oxygenated via contact with the oxygen cycle, and an ECG device monitors the system’s heartbeat. As the fluid pumps around the room in a meditative pulse, the sound of mechanical breath and slow humming of motors resonates in the body through a comforting yet disquieting soundscape.Life support machines are extraordinary devices; computers designed to activate our bodies when anatomy fails, hidden away in hospital wards. Although they are designed as the ultimate utilitarian appliances, they are extremely meaningful and carry a complex social, cultural and ethical subtext. While life prolonging technologies are invented as emergency measures to combat or delay death, my interest lies in considering these devices as a human enhancement strategy.This work is a continuation of my investigation of the patient as a cyborg, questioning the relationship between medicine and techno- fantasies about mechanical bodies, hyper abilities and posthumanism.

Untitled: (A Search for Ghosts in the Meat Machine)
What does it mean to be human? At first glance a simple question, the idea of being human is an unstable construct, continuously recrafted. Recent technological innovations allow us to redesign ourselves profoundly— from networked prosthetics and artificial intelligence, to the genetic code of life itself. Can our behaviors be reduced to algorithms? Can our bodies be upgraded with nonorganic integrations? Can sentience itself by manufactured in a lab? This set of nine sculptures examines personhood from anatomical, psychological, genetic, biochemical, behavioral, algorithmic, personal narrative and memory. In many ways, this installation is an emotional confrontation with being quantifiable.

Silverfish Stream
file festival
The sound generated by the friction of the metallic robots against the floor, like that created by the contact between man and machine, is registered, altered and played in real time by the spheres, each with its own tonality, and amplified in the room. What is generated is a stream of multisensory information (visual, auditive, tactile), natural environment for mechanic creatures.

New Humans
In New Humans, emergent gatherings of synthetic humans rise from the surface of a black ferrofluid pool. Appearing to morph like a supernatural life form, these dynamic clusters of magnetic liquid produced by machine learning processes are images of communities of synthetic people–hybrid profiles modeled from actual DNA, fitness, and dating profile data sets sourced from public and leaked caches. The work questions how we can radically conceptualize the “user profile” to embody a self whose bounds are indefinable and multiple. Generative algorithm using machine learning (GAN, T-SNE) and fluid simulation (Navier Stokes), countour generation (OpenCV), user profile data caches (DNA, fitness, and dating), software production (Processing), ferrofluid, custom electromagnet matrix, custom PCB control system, computer, steel, wood, aluminum.

克劳斯奥伯迈尔
the concept of … (here and now)

In front of a giant screen, two dancers interact with a cohort of cameras… Their movements are captured by infra-red sensors and projected onto the screen, whereby their bodies become the canvas on which new images take shape. The result is a shifting kaleidoscope of strange, living, quasi-mathematical visual worlds which sometimes seem to be emanating or even escaping from the dancers’ bodies. “Who decides which movement to make: the man or the machine?” Blurring the line between the real and the virtual, Klaus Obermaier loves to subsume his performers’ bodies and physicality in a disconcerting digital universe. With his latest creation, the choreographer/artist has taken a bold new step. He has constructed a system of projectors and infra-red sensor-cameras, trained upon the movements of two dancers. The performers thus find themselves thrown headlong into a living, moving graphical universe: their movements are projected onto the screen, but at the same time their bodies are illuminated by more projected images. This is a true artistic performance, pushing well beyond the frontiers of a standard dance recital, or even a contemporary dance show. A corporeal, temporal performance. A choreography which makes subtle use of its raw materials, deftly combining lights, video, perspectives and the real-time power of bodily movement.

ROBOTICS
Robotics is the art and commerce of robots, their design, manufacture, application, and practical use. Robots will soon be everywhere, in our home and at work. They will change the way we live. This will raise many philosophical, social, and political questions that will have to be answered. In science fiction, robots become so intelligent that they decide to take over the world because humans are deemed inferior. In real life, however, they might not choose to do that. Robots might follow rules such as Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, that will prevent them from doing so. When the Singularity happens, robots will be indistinguishable from human beings and some people may become Cyborgs: half man and half machine.

Ad Infinitum
Ad infinitum is a parasitical entity which lives off human energy. It lives untethered and off the grid. This parasite reverses the dominant role that mankind has with respect to technologies: the parasite shifts humans from “users” to “used”. Ad infinitum co-exists in our world by parasitically attaching electrodes onto the human visitors and harvesting their kinetic energy by electrically persuading them to move their muscles. The only way a visitor can be freed is by seducing another visitor to sit on the opposite chair and take their place. Being trapped in the parasite’s cuffs means getting our muscles electrically stimulated in order to perform a cranking motion as to feed it our kinetic energy. This reminds us that, in the cusp of artificially thinking machines, we are no longer just “users”; the shock we feel in our muscles, the involuntary gesture, acknowledges our intricate relationship to uncanny technological realm around us.

Abysmal
Abysmal means bottomless; resembling an abyss in depth; unfathomable. Perception is a procedure of acquiring, interpreting, selecting, and organizing sensory information. Perception presumes sensing. In people, perception is aided by sensory organs. In the area of AI, perception mechanism puts the data acquired by the sensors together in a meaningful manner. Machine perception is the capability of a computer system to interpret data in a manner that is similar to the way humans use their senses to relate to the world around them. Inspired by the brain, deep neural networks (DNN) are thought to learn abstract representations through their hierarchical architecture. The work mostly shows the ‘hidden’ transformations happening in a network: summing and multiplying things, adding some non-linearities, creating common basic structures, patterns inside data. It creates highly non-linear functions that map ‘un-knowledge’ to ‘knowledge’.

Vanitas Machine

The installation VANITAS MACHINE addresses the desire for eternal life and the potential of life-prolonging measures. Based on a candle which – by means of technical intervention – burns down very slowly, vanitas machine creates a contemporary analogy to the endeavour of prolonging the human lifespan with the help of science and technology.Being one of the classical vanitas symbols, a burning candle recalls the futility of the moment, the transience of human life and the certainty of the end of all existence. But is this end really still inevitable?In the course of the last two centuries, average human life expectancy has increased significantly in the industrialised countries. Moreover, in the context of scientific research the biological causes of ageing are being explored. Numerous theories of aging have already been developed pointing both towards physiological as well as environmental factors.One of the first theories of ageing was the so-called »metabolism theory«, which claims that the lifespan of organisms is reciprocally related to energy turnover and therefore connected to calorie intake, oxygen consumption and heart rate: The higher the metabolic rate, the shorter the lifespan of the organism.

Aquaphoneia
Aquaphoneia is an alchemical installation centred around the poiesis of time and transmutation of voice into matter. A large horn floating mid space echoes the ghosts of Edison, Bell, and Berliner’s machines. But unlike early recording, herding sound energy to etch pressure patterns in solid matter, this odd assemblage transmutes voice into water and water into air. Disembodied voices abandon their sources to cross the event horizon of the horn. Estranged, the schizo-phone falls into the narrow depths of the bell, squeezed into spatiotemporal infinity, calcinated, liquified and released: The aqueous voice then flows into three alchemical chambers where inner time is surrendered to the tempi of matter: unbound, yet lucid and sound.

Parasitic / Symbiotic
In the project “Parasitic / Symbiotic” this area of tension between nature and technology is addressed. A scenario is created in which the human being makes use of a technical device, that is sitting like a parasite on a tree. It contains a milling machine, which moves along a tree to carve encoded text into it. For the content of the carving a poem from romanticism („Abschied.“ von Joseph von Eichendorff) is used, which expresses the natural thoughts of unity and oneness and depicts the relation of nature and culture.

Reading Plan
“Reading Plan is an interactive artwork with 23 automation book flipping machines. When audiences enter the exhibition room, these machines will start to turn pages automatically and read the context at the same time. The updated figure to show that average student numbers per primary school in years 2016 in Taiwan is 23 students. I included a metaphor classroom in this artwork. In Taiwan, when people go to school, they don’t have much decision power to decide what they want to read and study. It is like being controlled by a huge invisible gear. The education direction led by authorities always prioritizes industry value and competitiveness. They want create a money-making machine instead of self exploration and humanism thinking.” Lien-cheng Wan

n-Polytope: Behaviors in Light and Sound after Iannis Xenakis
N_Polytope: Behaviors in Light and Sound After Iannis Xenakis is a spectacular light and sound performance-installation combining cutting edge lighting, lasers, sound, sensing and machine learning software inspired by composer Iannis Xenakis’s radical 1960s- 1970s works named Polytopes (from the Greek ‘poly’, many and ‘topos’, space). As large scale, immersive architectural environments that made the indeterminate and chaotic patterns and behaviour of natural phenomena experiential through the temporal dynamics of light and the spatial dynamics of sound, the Polytopes still to this day are relatively unknown but were far ahead of their time. N_Polytope is based on the attempt to both re-imagine Xenakis’ work with probabilistic/stochastic systems with new techniques as well as to explore how these techniques can exemplify our own historical moment of extreme instability.

Нед Кан
Tornado
A 10-foot tall vortex is formed by air blowers and an ultrasonic fog machine inside a sculpture installed in the atrium adjacent to the Winter Garden. The vortex continually changed shape in response to the surrounding air currents.These fluctuations gave the vortex an erratic and life-like appearance. Viewers were encouraged to alter the shape of the vortex with their hands. The calm, central core of the vortex is clearly evident.
Kahn’s interactive scientific projects leave little doubt about his command of meteorological processes. Through his immense technical ability, he demonstrates the versatility of turbulent systems, such as the vortices of wind and water. He employs diverse mechanical, pneumatic and electrical technologies to design, build and refine his installations. This is how he constructs dazzlingly complex but comprehensible images of nature that respond to viewers, conform to architectural structures, and reveal environmental conditions.

reawaken
Reawaken is a kinetic sculpture with 55 robotic arms, powered by 55 servo motors. The lowering of the arms causes an abstract print on paper. Technology mirrors humanity, and vice versa. In addition to creating beauty, technology is there to meet our needs. We, and our needs, have evolved to a point where we are so integrated that we consume technology on autopilot. We live in a time of mass production in which our daily devices increasingly mimick each other. A smartphone is a small tablet, a tablet a small computer and a computer a small television. The question of what this does with our imagination, together with the increasingly invisible technological progress such as algorithms and artificial intelligence, have been my starting point for Reawaken.

Maurice Benayoun and Tobias Klein
Brain Factory Prototype 2
Brain Factory is an installation that allows the audience to give a shape to human abstractions through Brain-Computer Interaction (BCI), and then to convert the resulting form into a physical object. The work examines the human specificity through abstract constructs such as LOVE, FREEDOM, and DESIRE. The project articulates the relationship between thought and matter, concept and object, humans and machine. Brain Factory uses Electroencephalography (EEG) data captured by BCI. As a brain activity is unique, we developed a novel calibration process of the individual data readings and associated emotional responses within a framework of binary outcomes. This is key for a real-time feedback – a biofeedback – between the virtual generative processes and the brain’s associated response.

Vision Machine #8
Influenced by German sound artist Peter Vogel and Jean Tinguely’s kinetic sculptures , Björn Schülke creates complex viewer-activated machines that combine movement, surveillance, and sound.

Ready to crawl
Ready to Crawl is a project of 3D-printed organic-like robots. By printing everything except the motor as one unit, the robots are born with a completed shape like real creatures. After the robots have been printed by a selective laser sintering machine, excess nylon powder is removed, a motor is inserted, and then they start crawling.
Designer: Hiroshi Sugihara
Project director: Shunji Yamanaka

Damnatio Memoriae

From the Latin, damnatio memoriae describes an act of erasure from the historical record reserved for
those who have brought dishonor to the Roman State. Employed as the most stringent punishment for
treason, damnatio memoriae physically razes all traces of an individual from society, typically through
the destruction a statue’s physiognomy or the abrasion of inscribed monuments. Throughout the past
two decades, Sassolino has developed a body of work that examines the relationship between industrial
machines and humanist impulses where viewers are meant to question how an sculpture’s kinetic
function aesthetically and conceptually allegorizes human experiences and cultural conditions.

FALA
File Festival
It is an autonomous and interactive talking machine, designed to establish automatic communication and synchronization between humans and machines, and between machines and machines. At installation, a microphone interfaces with a “chorus” of forty cell phones. All devices are in a listening state to capture voices and other sounds The autonomous talking machine analyzes the information and establishes equivalence with its memory. If so, the machine generates an audiovisual result with a semantic meaning similar to the sound captured, that is, it speaks and displays on the screens a word identical or similar to the word heard. Speakers and visualization of words on the screens of cell phones allow a “dialogue”, and for humans, to listen and see the machine conversation.

True/False
True/False is a kinetic sculpture composed of arrays of circular black metal segments set in mechanical columns. Interlocking and rotating around fluorescent light tubes, the cylinders cover or expose the light to display an endless number of patterns. The transformation of the sculpture is based on the shifting elements and their correlation to each other. As the segments do not move independently, for any of the cylinders on a column to change, the segments affected must work in unison to achieve the command. Reminiscent of devices originally used for calculations, such as Turing machines, the sound originates from the mechanical movement of the moving parts thus making the algorithm audible. The rhythm of »true/false« is captivating as variations in the visual choreography result in distinctive changes in its soundscape. Through the generation of algorithmic patterns and the repetition of endless tasks, »true/false« transforms itself into something more than the sum of its elements to reveal the beauty hidden within a basic algorithm.

Machine Hallucination
Refik Anadol’s most recent synesthetic reality experiments deeply engage with these centuries-old questions and attempt at revealing new connections between visual narrative, archival instinct and collective consciousness. The project focuses on latent cinematic experiences derived from representations of urban memories as they are re-imagined by machine intelligence. For Artechouse’s New York location, Anadol presents a data universe of New York City in 1025 latent dimensions that he creates by deploying machine learning algorithms on over 100 million photographic memories of New York City found publicly in social networks. Machine Hallucination thus generates a novel form of synesthetic storytelling through its multilayered manipulation of a vast visual archive beyond the conventional limits of the camera and the existing cinematographic techniques. The resulting artwork is a 30-minute experimental cinema, presented in 16K resolution, that visualizes the story of New York through the city’s collective memories that constitute its deeply-hidden consciousness.