Supermassive Black Holes
Supermassive Black Holes is an acoustic ceiling installation for the main lobby of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. The design is part of a series of projects in which we work with small primitives that are aggregated into a larger whole. In this case, there are over 10,000 felt cones stitched together into three gigantic, 20’ tall, hanging felt vortexes that that absorb sound through its materiality and geometry. The thousands of cone shape parts trap and disperse sound waves while softening the overall acoustic quality of the space.

Urban imprint
“If there is to be a “new urbanism… it will no longer be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent … but for the creation of enabling fields….that refuse to be crystallized into definitive form; it will no longer be about meticulous definitions, the imposition of limits, but about expanding notions, denying boundaries, not about separating and identifying entities, but about discovering hybrids; it will no longer be obsessed with the city but with the manipulation of infrastructure for endless intensifications and diversifications, shortcuts and redistributions – the reinvention of psychological space.”, Dutch architect + Harvard Professor, Koolhaas 959, writer of Delirious New York. URBAN IMPRINT is how we design a piece of this new urbanism, an augmented materiality , as we define it. An environment that is a ‘blank canvas’ to be reshaped by the future self.

ZIL

“DEVELOP A NEGATIVE INTO A POSITIVE PICTURE”

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Phygital way of designing that captures a momentum of transition between digital and physical worlds.
Digital and sustainable fashion with respect to materiality propose no-waste patterning that uses the technique of cut-ups to be assembled into a garment. Inspiration comes from the process of deconstructing historical garments and unexpected assemblage.

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

Brume
Brume is a series of works and installations by Joanie Lemercier, using a custom made device made of atomized water. Joanie frees his work from the screen and usual physical devices. He is using space and immateriality as a canvas, creating a mid air floating projection feeling. Thanks to this volumetric tool, he is modifying our frontal relationship with screen and allowing new interaction between the viewer and the projected image. Joanie Lemercier is still exploring the possibilities of this new medium with a series of experiences and chapters, questioning our view of reality. In his work, Joanie is researching timeless subjects like light, matter, geometry. With Brume, he is also interested in the link between water and light.

Smoke Dress
Fellow designer, Valerie Lamontagne, writes: “SMOKE DRESS is a collaboration between fashiontech designer Anouk Wipprecht [NL] and technologist Aduen Darriba [NL]. The dress is a wireless and wearable tangible couture “smoke screen” imbued with the ability to suddenly visually obliterate itself through the excretion of a cloud of smoke. Ambient clouds of smoke are created when the dress detects a visitor approaching, thus camouflaging itself within it’s own materiality. The SMOKE DRESS, with its loose net of metallic threads and electrical wire, works at the scale of the magical illusionists trick, permitting a hypothetical magician’s assistant to perform her own disappearing act.

States of Mind
Brussels-based artist Ann Veronica Janssens’ practice is concerned primarily with light, colour, and perception. Janssens makes very few art objects. Instead, her work attempts to escape the ‘tyranny of objects’ and what she describes as their ‘overbearing materiality’. Since the late 1990s, Janssens has filled spaces with washes of coloured light or ‘haze sculptures’: dense, illuminated clouds of vapour that render surroundings unfamiliar and sensory perception altered.

SEMICONDUCTOR
HALO is a large scale immersive artwork which embodies Semiconductor’s ongoing fascination with how we experience the materiality of nature through the lens of science and technology. Taking the form of a large cylinder, the structure houses a 360-degree projection of scientific data while an array of 384 vertical wires are played by the same data, to produce the sound. The work draws the viewer into its centre in order to inhabit the results of particle-collisions, produced by experiments taking place at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland.

APPARITION
Materiality and process are central to Rebecca Ward’s practice and evoke “architectural garments” ripped, unwoven, and re-stitched from fleshtoned canvas duck, leather hide, and silk organza. In her canvas works, the artist removes the weft (horizontal) threads of the fabric to reveal the underlying stretcher bars, highlighting the physical structure of the painting itself. Ward’s artworks reveal and obscure, and by their nature, entice viewers to closely investigate contrasts in line and material, modulations in color, and multi-dimensional layers.

LA SOCIETE DE LA PLACE DES SPECTACLES
FILE SAO PAULO 2015
Inspired from the live works of Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto (1933-) of meticulously ransacking large mirrors, Sorenson revisited the classical traditions of vanitas under the materiality of video, and generate his creative process from the destruction of consumer components.

АЙРИС ВАН ЭРПЕН
イリス ヴァン ヘルペン
FALL 2017
AERIFORM
‘Aeriform’ examines the nature and anatomy of air and the idea of airborne materiality and lightness, creating negative and positive space with shadow and light. Van Herpen also drew inspiration from the Danish underwater artists Between Music who challenge the relationship between the body and its elemental surround, in a subaquatic environment where air is absent.

Cages
Rothschild’s practice involves both conceptual and socio-political ideas alongside traditional approaches to making sculpture. Through an investigation into form and materiality, her works balance, stack, wrap and knot materials around geometric shapes and structures – such materials that often appear to transcend their physical limitations, hover between representation, symbolism and actual form. By deliberately destabilizing physical and visual characteristics in her work, Rothschild not only questions the aesthetics of art, in particular minimalism, but also those of belief in social liberation and spiritual movements.

The Sun never sets
His work is defined in sculptures, installations, drawings and music, but most of the time it‘s a symbiosis of these elements. His artistic practice is based on the creation of compositions with a specific acoustic and physical interaction, where form and sound coexist. The playful, unpredictable aspects of this interaction has his main interest. The specific qualities of music like tone, dynamics, rhythm, timbre and its swiftly immateriality create the poetic counterpart of the physical and visual.

ジェシカ·イートン
杰西卡·伊顿
polytopes
Jessica Eaton’s photographs dissect chemical and optical phenomena, the materiality of film, and the language of light itself. Eaton came to international acclaim through her Cubes for Albers and LeWitt (commonly referred to by the acronym cfaal)—a series of vibrant photographs that deconstruct her studio practice. Like the majority of Eaton’s works, these optically charged images are made by taking multiple in-camera exposures of common studio supplies. Through her abundant use of traditional analog photography practices—such as colour-separation filtering and in-camera masking—Eaton imbues her large-format images with an aesthetic more reminiscent of the paintings and drawings of hard-edge geometric abstraction than the photographs of traditional studio work.

阿克塞尔利伯
Axel Lieber uses everyday items as objects of reference and alienates their materiality by coring them semantically and then filling thus evolving empty spaces with new content. In this way, new synthetic-aesthetic crossovers and oppositions arise that enliven the sculptures and guide the viewer into an intimate sphere at the same time.

Miroir fuyant
My artistic approach takes place at the crossroads between object, sculpture and mediatics technologies: The materiality test the immateriality and vice-versa. All of that began with an important interest for the relationship which keepen by the spectator with outside relayed by screen and interfaces.

Ear Tone Box
“I am interested in transforming various mundane objects into speakers. Listening to sound through a cardboard box is very different from listening through a chair, which is very different from listening through computer speakers. In these works, I am attempting to expand aural dimensions by orchestrating flexible listening situations, which draw attention to the materiality and variation of sound as filtered through these objects.”

ダグエイケン
道格·艾特肯
Return to the Real
‘Return to the Real’ is Aitken’s device to make us think about our devices, the experiential subletting to Instagram, the squeal and squawk of social media. ‘It’s a counterpoint to that world of de-materiality and speed,’ he says, ‘and about seeking something which is unique or being in a place which is physical and tactile or a moment which is unrepeatable.’

Syphon Solutions
Alisa Baremboym is an American artist based in New York who draws her source from domesticity and the handling of objects that are affiliated to this environment. Blurring the line between photography and other mediums such as sculpture and painting, she creates hybrid objects that investigate, appropriate, and extend critical aspects of materiality, process, abstraction, and pictorial ideas.

Julia Dault is known for richly textured paintings on pleather, silk, and spandex, and for sculptural works fixed to gallery walls with string and knots. Plexiglas, formica, and Everlast boxing wraps—Dault’s materials of choice—lend her sleek abstract sculptures a raw, industrial aesthetic, while they retain a certain naturalness through their rounded organic forms. In her paintings, Dault likewise focuses on depth and materiality by building up colorful layers of paint and vinyl and then scraping parts away.

MATERIALITY
With the introduction of “Materiality,” a stunning continuation of her previous works, but with new vision and just as much revelation, Andreea manages to create another incredible tactile and visual experience. Inspired by jewelry and precious stones, the collection takes a flexible, fluid, and much more playful approach to adornment.

Without touch, we can’t connect. Without skin, we can’t touch.
Matt Keegan is a conceptual artist known for his enigmatic combinations of design, photography, text, printmaking, and sculpture. Using stenciling and printmaking techniques, Keegan isolates idiomatic phrases—for instance, “it goes without saying” or “picture perfect”—and transforms them into art objects, calling attention to the materiality of language and its open-ended possibilities.

Foldout Couch
This design proposes incongruous relationships between materiality, technique, scale, and form in order to delay a clear perception of the 1:1 construction. By pairing the formal techniques of curved folding with rigid sheet stock, finished metal with pleather fabric, and domestic upholstery details with CNC machined parts, the construction references things and spaces beyond its immediate setting.

Gravity is dead
Using 3D modeling, Vincent Mauger creates a world that is firmly grounded in the tangible matter. Wood, concrete blocks, bricks, metal or polystyrene, these materials are worked beyond what we could assume from their materiality. more…

Êxtase (ecstacy), Ascensão e Morte

With a multiple artistic production expressed in the form of drawing, sculpture, video, acting, politics, education and publications, it seeks to challenge and explore the formal structures, materiality and visuality in contact with the notions of theatricality in contemporary life.

Virtual Materiality

Transient Materialization
Created by Shih-Yuan Wang, Yu-Ting Sheng, Dr. Alex Barchiesi and Vyacheslav Kryvosheya with guidance from Prof. Jeffrey Huang at the Media and Design Laboratory LDM, EPFL / SINLAB, Transient Materialization explores the relationship between digital and material-based digital fabrication through n-hedron structure composed mainly of soap foam that is blown, through a mixture of air and helium, into a foam structure.The project questions structure’s materiality and examines its physical performance and ephemeral characteristics. In the first phase of the project the team achieved a programmable foam structure and presented various configurations of dynamic and transformable foam structures. The fabrication interacts with the algorithm, which involves a mixture of air and helium (controlled by pneumatic valves) and additive chemical substances and thickening agents.The aim of the project is to take architecture beyond the creation of static forms and into the design of dynamic, transformable and ephemeral material experimental processes.

Strange Fruit
Using both sculpture and musical performance in his practice, Kevin Beasley explores the physical materiality and cultural connotations of both objects and sound. His sculptures typically incorporate everyday items like clothing, housewares, or sporting goods, bound together using tar, foam, resin, or other materials. Often they also contain embedded audio equipment that warps and amplifies the ambient tones of their surroundings. For Storylines, Beasley has created two new works specifically for the Guggenheim’s Frank Lloyd Wright–designed building. Within this vast and open sonic environment, Strange Fruit (Pair 1) and Strange Fruit (Pair 2) (both 2015) offer an experience of intimacy, absorbing and reflecting the sound of the crowd at the scale of a personal conversation. Each work embodies this spirit of dialogue in its two-part structure—at its core are two athletic shoes, one merged with microphones, the other with speakers. Suspending these objects in space, Beasley compounds their technological interchange with additional layers of meaning, bringing to mind the urban phenomenon of shoes hanging from overhead wires or poles (itself an open-ended form of communication). At the same time the works’ titles refer to history of lynchings in the American South memorialized by Bronx schoolteacher Abel Meerepol in the 1937 protest song “Strange Fruit.” In these contexts, the hanging forms of Beasley’s sculptures resonate not only with his body, which molded them by hand, or with the bodies moving through the museum, but also with those inscribed in the problematic history of race and class in the United States.

Future Body

A stiff cyborg, fixed with a glazed and expressionless stare, dips her fingers into an alien-like amniotic fluid. Gravity shifts as droplets reverse upwards, forming a pulsing headpiece that encases her smooth, almost porcelain skull. ‘Future Body’, a new film by Nirma Madhoo, uses CGI and animated 3D modelling to explore technological embodiment, enacting it in a character that transgresses expected gender roles in a newly mechanised system of digital-infused aesthetics.
Set in the clinical, segmented interiors of a simulated hyper-real space, Madhoo’s cyborg is found dressed for battle, in pieces forming exoskeletons, a spinal scorpion’s tail and mantis-like shoes, designed by Iris van Herpen. A collision between her human and technological self is physicalised as she undergoes mitosis, splitting into two and performing a combative dance with her duplicate.
Currently showing in Melbourne in an exhibition titled ‘Fashion Performance: Materiality, Meaning, Media’, alongside work from Hussein Chalayan, BOUDICCA and POSTmatter collaborator Bart Hess, it offers a glimpse into the collapse of gender, species and machine into one another, in turn reimagining the future for fashion design and communication.

尤里铃木
يوري سوزوكي
beatvox
File Festival

By EPFL + ECAL lab in collaboration with Yuri Suzuki Direction: Nicolas Henchoz Designer: Yuri Suzuki Engineering: Gavrilo Bozovic, Fanny Riedo Software development: Gavrilo Bozovic, Fanny Riedo, Eric Morzier A microphone-controlled drumkit. Renowned as an artist for his projects questioning the materiality of sound, Yuri Suzuki has his own way of looking at augmented reality. For Berlin, he is creating an installation which will enable anyone to control a set of drums with their own voice. He harnesses the principles of augmented reality to interpret them in the realm of sound.

倉俣 史朗
glass chair

Shiro Kuramata’s approach to designing objects reflects the atmosphere of innovation in postwar Japan. By 1970, Kuramata had introduced alternative materials such as acrylic and glass into his furniture, which played on traditional ideas of materiality and form.Transparency, the appearance of weightlessness, and a Minimalist vocabulary quickly became his signature aesthetic. In 1976, Kuramata designed Glass Chair. Its reductivist and planar form reflects his interest in geometry as well as the effect of light as it transforms and illuminates the glass. Kuramata, like many of his Japanese contemporaries, looked to Western culture for inspiration. In particular, the sculptures of Donald Judd and Dan Flavin influenced Kuramata’s furniture designs of the 1970s, such as Glass Chair.