N-DRA

FILE 2024 | Interator – Sound Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival

Dennis Schöneberg – N-DRA – Germany

Created during the pandemic, N-DRA is a video that explores the nostalgia of pre-pandemic times. Through a dreamlike and psychedelic journey through the artist’s memories, it reflects feelings of loneliness, isolation and the desire for connection.

Bio

Dennis Schöneberg, German AI artist, data science student and developer of open source AI models, integrates his passion for electronic music into his creative endeavors. Merging art with technology, he explores the synergy between creativity and artificial intelligence.

Credits

Music: N-DRA by Ricardo Villalobos

Metronome
Alter-Projects and Servaire & Co have partnered to design Metronome, an oscillating installation at the London Design Biennale created to trigger memories through sounds and smells. The installation is a room with a scent-diffusing physical metronome at its centre accompanied by an ASMR soundscape by designer Steve Lastro.

بيتر غريناواي
彼得·格林纳威
פיטר גרינווי
ピーター·グリーナウェイ
피터 그리너웨이
Питер Гринуэй
The Pillow Book
Beautiful to behold and impossible to forget, THE PILLOW BOOK is auteur Peter Greenaway’s erotically-charged drama about love, death, revenge and the indelible nature of our earliest memories. Each year on her birthday, Nagiko (Vivian Wu) would became her father’s canvas, as he painted the creation myth in elaborate, elegant calligraphy on her body. Years later, she continues the practice with a succession of lovers, including a bisexual translator (Ewan McGregor) who becomes a pawn in an escalating game of vengeance against her beloved father’s exploitative publisher. Told in a series of chapters and featuring innovative cinematography and picture-in-picture techniques, Roger Ebert called THE PILLOW BOOK “a seductive and elegant story [that] stands outside the ordinary.”

cinema full

Affinity
Affinity is an immersive interactive light and sound installation inspired by the human brain. Each light globe represented a memory, as people approached Affinity different memories could be heard. When people touched the memory a light would trigger, the longer they touched the further their light would travel throughout the sculpture. Affinity features 62 different colour combinations and 112 points of interaction.

Anarchitecture

splitting house

“Of the many shows at the fabled 112 Greene Street gallery—an artistic epicenter of New York’s downtown scene in the 1970s—the Anarchitecture group show of March 1974 has been the subject of the most enduring discussion, despite a complete lack of documentation about it. Anarchitecture has become a foundational myth, but one that remains to be properly understood. Stemming from a series of meetings organized by Gordon Matta-Clark and reflecting his long-standing interest in architecture, the Anarchitecture exhibition was conceived as an anonymous group statement in photographs about the intersection of art and building. But did it actually happen? It exists only through oblique archival traces and the memories of the participants. Cutting Matta-Clark investigates the Anarchitecture group as a kind of collective research seminar, through extensive interviews with the protagonists and a dossier of all the available evidence. The dossier includes a collection of Matta-Clark’s aphoristic “art cards,” the 96 photographs that were produced by the various participants for possible inclusion in the exhibition, and images from a recently unearthed video of Matta-Clark’s now famous bus trip to see Splitting in Englewood, New Jersey.” Mark Wigley

La Vie En Rose II
“There is a saying that life is a thorny path. The title of the work, La Vie En Rose, reveals the situation paradoxically. Life doesn’t always go as planned. Going forward in life can be a struggle comparable to walking through impenetrable brambles in a dark forest. Here, both big and small difficulties we face on our journey are evoked by the thorns growing out of the walls. These elements also recall the my childhood memories in the countryside, picking up berries and getting pricked by their thorns while the character in the work represents our own selves, as we must overcome these obstacles.
In this second version of La Vie en Rose, I wanted to express a change in the mind of the main character.” JeeYoung Lee

Heimweh
‘Heimweh’ displays the breaking of waves on a sandy beach fragmented across 12 screens. The waves and their sound move gradually towards the feet of the spectator. At one point the waves turn into a green haze. ‘Heimweh’ started as a reflection on earthly life by considering what most embodies being on earth. When traveling to Mars, for instance, the major missing element would be the sea. As the waves turn green, they deform, similar to memories that get blurred over time. When the green finally subsides, the clear sky and sea emerge again with a sense of relief.

In Kahoots
“In Kahoots is an ever-changing 3D experience that in a sense feeds on itself – by reworking the artists’ source material, the algorithm constantly regenerates its own sounds and images into new art. This is the first time In Kahoots has been to Christchurch – but really, everyone who visits will experience a first. In Kahoots encourages people to literally be a part of a truly unique work of art, and create lifelong memories for audiences of all ages. It’s fun for kids, and food for thought for everyone looking for a little extra.” Nathan Pōhio

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.

Spherical Harmonics
Spherical Harmonics is about the strange power of the CGI image. It’s a fantasy under construction, full of digitally created memories, counterfeit physics and controlled accidents. A place where reality fails because it’s too perfect. Spherical Harmonics sits stylistically at a halfway point between the glossy product displays of Oxford Street and the workhouse construction of Soho’s post production scene.

video

Electronic Traces
E-TRACES, memories of dance
The shoes are based on the clone of Lilypad Arduino technology, which is designed for sewing into wearables. It appears that 3 force sensitive resistors are used as analog pressure sensors, measuring the force applied on the ground by the dancer’s feet.

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.

瓦妮莎比克罗夫特
נסה יקרופט
ヴァネッサ·ビークロフト
바네사 비크로프트
ВАНЕССА БИКРОФТ
La Membre Fantôme
For the installation ‘le membre fantôme’, vanessa beecroft takes the visitor back to the classical language of sculpture through a conceptual perspective, leading us towards an intimate gallery room inhabited by timeless statuary. shown at the 2015 venice biennale, beecroft presents a scene that is visible only at a distance, where the viewer must look through a crevice carved out of two marble walls. Through the panels, we see fragments of a stone garden, rich in archaeological allures and echoes of early twentieth century avant-garde. the archive of memory is here a tribute in bronze – placed at the centre of the installation – to marcel duchamp’s ‘étant donnés’, a reference model for her research that combines personal memories, historical and artistic impressions and a conceptual tension.

Synchrometrics

Can we design future memories for the body?
Is the body itself the apparatus for remembering cultural processes?Prospectus For a Future Body proposes new perspectives on how the body remembers and invents technological narratives. Central to the project is the study of body movement in dance: How it can evolve, adapt or re-condition to possible futures?Eternal Summer Storm explores the concept of muscle memory transfer as an alternative form of interactive cultural continuities. This concept prototype speculates on a future digital library of body movements or dance techniques that can be experienced beyond the audio-visual conventions. Eternal Summer Storm attempts to recreate legendary Japanese dancer Tatsumi Hijikata’s Butoh dance choreography and experience in ‘A Summer Storm’ (1973) from archival footages.Bionic Movement Research is a collection of experiments on the process of designing digital muscle memory for the body. Inspired by Luigi Galvani discovery (1780) of animal electricity in the human body, these experiments appropriate the techniques of electrical nerve stimulation to choreograph artificial muscle contraction and body movement.

Hash2ash
Installation touches on the themes of selfie-culture, and the fear of permanently losing the digital records of our lives due to technical failures, impermanence of data storage, or simply because of the obsolescence of the old digital file formats. Even with such compulsive overproduction of the images of ourselves we might end up with nothing but the blank memories of our past. Even the data on ourselves will eventually fade away… The installation consist of the display that prompts you to take a selfie on your phone, which it renders in digital particles on its large 1×1 meter screen. Then a moment later, your face scatters and falls apart and the real black gravel starts to fall at the bottom of the screen in perfect synchrony with the digital simulation. Gradually a dark mound builds up at the foot of the construction.

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.

failed memories, the 4th selection
doras flame
“In these images I apply the notion or phenomenon of „ lack of time”. When I started to develop the ‘Failed memories’ series, my intention was to examine and involve the notion of time as a factor into my images. To put it more simple, to visualise the factor and importance of time in the mechanisms of the memory, as without time there is no memory.”

史上第一位進入太空的藝術家
Bionic Angel
The work series “bionic angel” takes as its starting point the future transformation and technological control of human evolution. Rapid development in the field of so-called “g-r-i-n techno-logies” (genetics, robotics, information and nano-techno- logies) are changing our bodies, minds, memories, and identities, but also impact on our progeny. These technologies all converge with the aim of enhancing human performance. Prenatal genetic determination enables children to be built to plan.

FORM OF WANDER
Where the Riverfront Park recreational space extends onto the waterway, this structure is situated to host new outdoor activities and new memories of the Tampa’s active waterfront. As an inverted mangrove, the green-hued aluminum canopy announces itself among palms as a signal on the Hillsborough River. The tree-like structure appears to float between water and land.

Failed memories
‘Our brains store away images to retrieve them later, like files stored away on a hard drive. But when we go back and try to re-access those memories, we may find them to be corrupted in some way.’

Autobiography
Autobiography is an abstract meditation on aspects of self, life and writing, a non-linear approach to a life story refracting both remembered pasts and speculative futures. McGregor worked with dancers from his company in 2017 to create choreography from old writings, personal memories, pieces of art and music that have been important in his life. From these elements, 23 sections of movement material were created, reflecting the 23 pairs of chromosomes of the human genome. The choreographic events from the 23 sections were then fed into an algorithm based on McGregor’s genetic code.

failed memories

Graduate of the Danish school of design and the Central Saint Martins College of Fashion and Textile in 2000, Isabel Berglund, having already exhibited around the world, is now one of the creative artists who makes use of knitting in contemporary art. Using knitted wool to create sculptures, she creates archaic memories with the mesh, sometimes incorporating clothing fragments so you can curl up in the sculptures and experience the inside. An experimental space where human and material boundaries merge in a knitted web of emotion, her work puts the poetic insight of a child at our fingertips.

ghost_2
El artista húngaro David Szauder, conocido como Pixel Noizz, indaga los rincones de la memoria donde las ideas y los recuerdos se fragmentan, y traduce estas composiciones en fotografías “dañadas”. La serie de Szauder, que lleva por nombre Failed Memories, explora la “naturaleza imperfecta de la memoria”, la que coarta la imagen clara de los pensamientos que generamos. Cuando por alguna causa física o emocional se pierden trozos de alguno, estas lagunas inundan la imagen y la vuelven borrosa.

purkinje neuron from the human cerebellum
Ramón y Cajal’s theory described how information flowed through the brain. Neurons were individual units that talked to one another directionally, sending information from long appendages called axons to branchlike dendrites, over the gaps between them.
He couldn’t see these gaps in his microscope, but he called them synapses, and said that if we think, learn and form memories in the brain then that itty-bitty space was most likely the location where we do it. This challenged the belief at the time that information diffused in all directions over a meshwork of neurons.

Каарины Кайкконен
Forget Me Not
Kaarina Kaikkonen (born 1952) is known for installations that are modest and monumental at the same time – the scale is lofty, but the materials down to earth. Most often she uses recycled materials, such as clothes or paper. The meaning of a piece can arise from the great number and anonymity of the clothes’ former owners, such as in her jacket installations, or from the personal memories and emotions of the people who have used the objects. On the other hand, the jackets, shirts and ties she uses are connected to Kaikkonen’s deceased father, yet their sheer number steers associations towards crowds.

I TEMPI DOPPI
Trouvé uses everyday materials to fashion surprising constructions that channel memories, history and poetry. Her installations do not contain direct symbolic allusions, but attract visitors to their concrete, physical presence, infused with spectres and imaginings.more…

Lands End
Inner Landscapes is a poetry odyssey for seven actors and dancers. They travel across Philippe Genty’s memories and dreams: they fly, speak with giant flowers, hatch from a shifting ground, dance with a moon. more…

Engram
Melting Memories

NanoDanses
FILE FESTIVAL

All the people we meet during our life time – what happens to them? An old woman’s memories of her past loves come to life in this magical miniature world. The gentle, melancholy story unfolds in real time before the audience through dance and live film. A set of highly expressive dancing fingers take centre stage. Choreographer Michèle Anne De Mey and film director Jaco Van Dormael have given their imaginations free flight. The projected miniature world that forms this ”nano performance” captures every nuance of human emotion. The audience also have the opportunity to follow, step by step, the making of the live film. The carefully crafted, diminutive stage settings are brilliantly expressive.

Car 2

In Los Angeles he made a series of drawings based on a mix of old glamour images from the film industry and geometric, machine patterns. Los Angeles inspires Bas through the great social contrasts, the visual culture and, in particular, the dominant influence of the film industry. He experiences moving through the city as a journey through time. In this place, history seems distorted and memories erased.

Vaakasuora-Horizontal
The artwork shows a 11-metre tall spruce, with its branches swaying in the wind, filmed at full scale in six parts. The soundscape consists of the sound of the wind, the creaking of the trunk and birdsong. The method of display is, however, unexpected: it is shown in a horizontal position.Vaakasuora-Horizontal is a portrait of a spruce. It is an interpretation of the essence of the spruce, and the difficulty of observing and recording the life of a spruce. How can one capture the very being of a spruce? Each viewer will see the reality differently and each one of them will see the spruce trough glasses tinted by their personal memories and experiences. The artist has wanted to use this artwork to represent the German biologist Jakob von Uexküell’s idea of the parallel and concurrent existence of time and spatial worlds. The work of art, on the other hand, also moves the focus from the human being as the centre of the universe to the greatness of nature; people play a minor part in the greater picture.

Tornado Warning
Tornado Warning, draws from the filmmaker’s early memories of the tornado alerts in his childhood town of St Louis, Missouri. The piece contrasts an orderly space of grids and numbers with a chaotic environment of found images cut from old films, news footage, and the Internet. Ordinary objects fly around an empty room, swirling abstractions dominate the walls, and distorted bodies dance over images of radio waves. Seemingly in motion, the space of Tornado Warning appears unruly, alarming, violent and relentless.

Dan Pinchbeck, Robert Briscoe, Jessica Curry, Jacky Morgan, Nigel Carrington, Ben Andrews & Samuel Justice
Dear Esther

“A deserted island… a lost man… memories of a fatal crash… a book written by a dying explorer.”

“Dear Esther” is a ghost story, told using first-person gaming technologies. Rather than traditional game-play the focus here is on exploration, uncovering the mystery of the island, of who you are and why you are here. Fragments of story are randomly uncovered when exploring the various locations of the island, making each journey a unique experience.

file festival

فلوريان هيكر
フロリアン·ヘッカー
Sound Installation
In his installations, live performances and publications, Florian Hecker deals with specific compositional developments of post-war modernity, electroacoustic music as well as other, non-musical disciplines. He dramatizes space, time and self-perception in his sonic works by isolating specific auditory events in their singularity, thus stretching the boundaries of their materialization.
Their objectual autonomy is exposed while simultaneously evoking sensations, memories and associations in an immersive intensity. Some of his works incorporate psycho-acoustic phenomena, disorienting listeners’ spatial perceptions and expanding their conception about sound. Hecker’s most recent recording, Speculative Solution ( Editions Mego, 2011), brings together Hecker’s sonic practice and psychoacoustic experimentation with philosopher Quentin Meillassoux’s concept of ‘hyperchaos’ – the absolute contingency of the laws of nature.
During his residency at MIT, Florian Hecker will research a new sound piece that takes the concept of the “auditory chimera” as point of departure. Originally developed at MIT by Bertrand Delgutte, senior research scientist at the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, the concept of the auditory chimera inspires an exploration of the relationship between pitch perception and sound localization. Hecker will create a text and sound piece that incorporates the recordings of material read by students. Using an anechoic chamber he will work with students to explore the experiential nature of psycho-acoustic practice.

Artificial Paradise, Inc is an experimental film anticipating a future where a major corporation has developed a unique software, based on organic virtual reality, which holds all the lost memories of humankind. A user connects to this database of the forgotten…what is he searching for?

Future memories