COMPRESS ROAD

Vahid Qaderi & Razieh Kooshki

FILE SÃO PAULO 2026: Inter-creativity – Art and Technology – MUSIC
Electronic Language International Festival

Compress Road – Austria

The project began with an observation about contemporary spaces, both digital and natural: many environments repeat themselves at different scales. Cities, interfaces, virtual worlds, and nature itself share similar structural patterns. The road became a metaphor for moving through these layered systems, suggesting a compression of time, memory, and navigation.

BIO

Vahid Qaderi is an Iranian media artist, electronic musician, and visual artist based in Linz, Austria. His practice spans sound design, music production, AR/VR, video games, 3D animation, and interactive audiovisual and video art. His work has been presented at festivals including Ars Electronica, the Geneva International Film Festival, and Radar Festival. 

Razieh Kooshki is an Iranian interdisciplinary artist based in Linz, Austria. Her practice focuses on generative interactive visuals, VR experiences, and video art, exploring the relationship between sound and non-narrative moving images. Her work has been presented at festivals including Ars Electronica, the Geneva International Film Festival, and Radar Festival.

BODY SKETCHES

Zach Lieberman

FILE SÃO PAULO 2026: Inter-creativity – Art and Technology – Installations
Electronic Language International Festival

Body Sketches – United States

American artist Zachary Lieberman explores the poetry of code. In this interactive installation, visitors’ movements and gestures are transformed into digital drawings generated in real time. Every interaction is unique and disappears in the same moment the spectators change position. 

Within the exhibition, the work serves as a metaphor of a personal imprint in the future. Every visitor leaves a trace that instantly changes the environment around them, becoming part of a shared story.

BIO

Zach Lieberman is a pioneer of creative coding, turning invisible forces into interactive digital poetry.

Drama House
File Festival

“Drama house” is a house when the simple ring at the doorbell can have unpredictable consequences; event, one is stranger then another and in the same time all, what happens with habitants belongs to everyday life. Sometimes these circumstances are a little bit exaggerated. Spectator stands in front of low fence with a door-gate. There are 8 doorbells on it. The act of ringing provokes an action in an apartment window. Based on chance and the choices that viewers make, the project explores the contemporary trends in the construction of a narrative and the interplay between diverse informative sub-layers effected through the impact of digital, non-linear media. It also questions the very process of story telling and at the same time considers the way of audience reading. It investigates the differences of individual and collective perception. In other words, the sequence and choices that each viewer selects reflect his own perspectives and behavioral patterns, thus makes the viewer much more than an active participant. By interacting with the installation the viewer is engaged in the creative process: re-telling the ever-changing story through the utilization of the primary capability of the digitization: reshaping the information. Therefore, each participant walks away with a unique, slightly different vision, each shaped according to his own choices and directions. Interactive media and the digital environment of the DH and its narrative function through a recognizable metaphor that makes access to the information meaningful: a house as a conceptual society model and an apartment as a private space. This reference transforms the objects and stories in the project into the metaphors and reminds us of the art cultural function: as a site of memory of the social collective imagination and as a site of representation and power.

XENO: UNDERTOW

Hsujing

FILE SÃO PAULO 2025: SYNTHETIKA – Arte e Tecnologia – Videoart
Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica

XENO: UNDERTOW – China / England

XENO: UNDERTOW is an experimental short film that employs stream-of-consciousness narration and AI-generated surreal visual art to explore the identity struggles and inner turmoil of cross-cultural migrants in mainstream society. Through metaphor, the film depicts a whale forcibly displaced from the boundless azure sea, cast into a desert of shifting sands. This imagery symbolizes the challenges cultural migrants face in adapting to dominant cultures and the profound sense of identity loss.

BIO

Hsujing is a contemporary artist and digital artist & director. His primary research focuses on the integration of technology and art, as well as speculative creative outputs. He is skilled in combining diverse techniques for artistic creation. His works blend elements of classicism with science fiction, not only envisioning future landscapes but also revealing persistent realities.

sorrow

Fran Orallo

FILE SÃO PAULO 2025: SYNTHETIKA – Art and Technology – Video Art
Electronic Language International Festival

sorrow – Spain

The work consists of a video glitch that shows a distorted body making dramatic movements. The project questions the idea of identity and identification with one’s own body, showing a disjuncture when it comes to representation. The work is a metaphor that represents the violence exerted on a dissident body. The video is collected within the field of self-portrait since the body rep resented is the artist’s own body.

BIO

Fran Orallo lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. He studied art at UPV, Valencia, Spain, and New Media Art at City of Glasgow College, Scotland. His work focus es on experimentation with the field of video and animation. He has exhibited his work both in Spain and abroad, participating in biennials, collective exhibitions, and festivals in more than 40 countries.

Breathing
File Festival
Breathing is a work of art based on a hybrid creature made of a living organism and an artificial system. The creature responds to its environment through movement, light and the noise of its mechanical parts. Breathing is the best way to interact with the creature.
This work is the result of an investigation of plants as sensitive agents for the creation of art. The intention was to explore new forms of artistic experience through the dialogue of natural and artificial processes. Breathing is a pre-requisite for life, and is the path that links the observer to the creature.Breathing is a small step towards new art forms in which subtle processes of organic and non-organic life may reveal invisible patterns that interconnect us.Breathing is a work of art driven by biological impulse. Its beauty is neither found isolated on the plant nor in the robotic system itself. It emerges at the very moment in which the observer approaches the creature and their energies are exchanged through the whole system. It is in that moment of joy and fascination, in which we find ourselves in a very strange dialogue, that a life metaphor is created.Breathing is the celebration of that moment.

Akihito Ito + Issey Takahashi
FILE FESTIVAL 2018
story changes in the body as it acclimates to a new rhythm. Participating in the installation can bring about unexpected emotional responses that also affect heart rate variability and, thereby, get recorded, too. The reason why the gift-box is used as an indicator of the heartbeat is because it is a metaphor of a “Gift.

LIMINAL
FILE FESTIVAL
LIMINAL est une installation interactive qui vient mettre en image l’inexorable passage du temps. Elle cherche à réifier la frontière entre le présent et le passé. Dans un espace sombre, une arche lumineuse. Il s’agit d’un portail temporel: lorsque l’interacteur traverse cette démarcation, son reflet projeté sur le mur adjacent se voit déployé dans le temps grâce à la technique du slit-scan. Telle une métaphore visuelle – le passé qui s’empare sans cesse du présent – l’image projetée se termine inexorablement dans la blancheur éthérée de l’oubli. Dans un sens, l’œuvre souligne que toute lumière est passé – le scintillement que nous voyons dans le ciel nocturne n’est qu’un instantané révolu du firmament : la lumière est la manifestation d’événements qui ont déjà eu lieu.

frequencies (light quanta)

The project is part of an ongoing process entitled «frequencies», exploring basic sound and light dichotomic systems. Here, frequencies (light quanta) stems from a fascination towards science, light, and granular synthesis allowing to create clouds/grains of sounds. The conceptual focus lies in the quantum — the smallest measurable value of energy —, on the smallness of matter. The whole project is based on the possible conceptual relationships between basic quantum physics principles applied to the audio-visual creative process: particles, probabilities, wave/particle duality and discontinuity. Metaphorically structured around these notions, the audio-visual composition stems from 100 sound and light micro-sequences that develop themselves, generating an ever expending but yet disruptive form in time and space. With the use of randomness, the vectorial graphics are always creating new ways to look at the visual, physically superimposing pattern images.

Yoro Park – Site of Reversible Destiny
“The couple first fully explored Reversible Destiny in what is regarded as their seminal gallery piece, “The Mechanism of Meaning,” an ever-evolving manifesto-cum-artwork begun in 1963, comprising 80 panels that they refined and added to over decades, many of them high-concept diagrams and puzzles with instructions and text (“A Mnemonic Device for Forgetting,” “Think One, Say Two”), made primarily of acrylic and mixed media on canvas. In an accompanying précis to the work, which was exhibited at the Guggenheim in 1997, they prescribed “no more irretrievable disappearances” and declared death “old-fashioned.” Critical opinion differs on how seriously the pair, whose work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and Paris’s Centre Pompidou, took the grandiose quest to end death. But if it was intended as metaphor, neither of them ever let on. Indeed, though Arakawa himself died at 73, in 2010, and Gins four years later, at the age of 72, defying death became the defining work of their lives.” Marie Doezema

Natural Plastic
FILE FESTIVAL
Natural Plastic is a metaphor for the delicate balance between man and nature.

EXO

EXO is Tabor Robak’s new project. Synthetic meditation that mixes Samsara’s like visuals with demoscene techniques, EXO is a visual feast. A first-person experience reaching transcendental levels, literally and metaphorically. Available for both PC and MAC. Born in Portland, Oregon, Robak lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The way we were
Not only does Arcangelo Sassolino transform failure into art, but he manages to make the art of failing a profound part of the art of living. He goes even further in the awareness of risk. He is aware that his experiments may not hold up to the forces that he himself puts in place but this possible collateral damage wants to represent an additional value, becoming precisely the existential metaphor of the concepts of risk and failure. His installations explore the behavior and mechanical limits of matter, he forces their characteristics to distort their shape, gravity, pressure, friction, statics, and of each possibility Sassolino contemplates the risks of collapse with its precise timing and programming.

Micro-Utopia
In response to London’s pressing housing crisis Micro-Utopia proposes a shared, immersive and interactive version of a home, where space is born from the finely-tuned sensorial interplay between the body and virtual/physical objects connected to the Internet of Things. A chair invites us to stay with it for a moment; we crawl through a demanding fireplace; our hands are washed in a bowl of digital liquid – the highly speculative model of domesticity explores the architectural implication of co-inhabiting a minimal physical infrastructure within infinitely bespoke virtual worlds. Drawing on radical art practice, interiors in historical painting and contemporary product design, Micro-Utopia is the dream of a house that is nothing, but the parameters of our perception are triggered through the metaphorical dimension of the objects we interact with on a daily basis.

Freies Geleit
Zieh deine Schuhe aus, lege deine Sachen in das Tablett und entleere deine Taschen. Was passiert, wenn wir zweifelsohne den Sicherheitsbestimmungen des Flughafens unterliegen – oder anderen, weniger offensichtlichen Protokollen in der Gesellschaft? Dies ist eine der Fragen, mit denen sich der Künstler Ed Atkins in einer neuen Arbeit befasst, die speziell für den X-Rummet-Veranstaltungsort des SMK produziert wurde. Die Videoarbeit Safe Conduct des britischen Künstlers Ed Atkins ist eine Burleske von Videos mit Anweisungen zur Flughafensicherheit. Atkins mischt angeeignetes und CGI-Material des Künstlers, das auf Ravels “Bolero” gesetzt ist. Ein Karussell aus Protokollen, die Körper buchstäblich und metaphorisch zu Schlachthöfen und Metalldetektoren machten.

Dromos

Dromos is a metaphoric AV Performance that takes its concept from the philosophical work of P. Virilo who is mostly known for founding the idea of Dromology (science of speed). Dromos invites audience to a criticism experience of the ’peed’ role that impacts all aspects of our daily lives. During 40mns, it focuses people attention on this essential factor that shapes our world. With its message, Dromos invites you to wonder about your relationship with progress. It’s an unconventional work with an original sensorial approach, placing the audience inside an immersive environment.

基督教波尔坦斯基
בולטנסקי
クリスチャン·ボルタンスキー
Кристиан Болтански

Homage

R.I.P 1944-2021

Preoccupied with collective memory, mortality, and the passage of time, Christian Boltanski creates paintings, sculptures, films, and mixed-media installations that approach these themes in a range of styles, symbolic to direct. Boltanski often makes metaphorical use of found objects, as in No Man’s Land (2010), an enormous pile of discarded jackets set to the soundtrack of thousands of human heartbeats, suggesting the anonymity, randomness, and inevitability of death. In Monuments (1985), electrical bulbs cast a seemingly bittersweet light on pictures of child holocaust victims. Describing his interest in personal histories, Boltanski has said, “What drives me as an artist is that I think everyone is unique, yet everyone disappears so quickly. […] We hate to see the dead, yet we love them, we appreciate them.”

Arrival

“Arrival’s narrative plays out in four languages: English, Mandarin, Russian and Heptapod. Though they are not spoken in the film, we learn that Louise is also fluent in Farsi, Sanskrit and Portuguese (and possibly others). The language learning process and the growing translingual bond between Louise and the heptapods forms the film’s narrative arc and the majority of its plot. Thus language, and specifically the mechanics of ←215 | 216→multilingualism, is Arrival’s central theme. Within this context, the ability to communicate across language barriers is an asset, and the flexibility to navigate new linguistic challenges is invaluable. The heptapods are pure science fiction, but serve a powerful metaphorical function. As Emily Alder (2016) writes in The Conversation, “ultimately, Arrival is less about communicating with the aliens than with each other – internationally but also individually […] The film’s message is that difference is not about body shape or colour but language, culture and ways of thinking. It’s not about erasing that difference but communicating through it”. Gemma King

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语言学习过程以及路易丝与七足动物之间越来越多的跨语言联系形成了电影的叙事弧线和大部分情节。 因此，语言，尤其是←215的机制| 216→使用多种语言是到达中心的主题

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Процесс изучения языка и растущая межъязыковая связь между Луизой и гептаподами составляют повествовательную дугу фильма и большую часть его сюжета. Таким образом, язык и, в частности, механика ← 215 | 216 → многоязычие – центральная тема Арривала.

توماس هيرشهورن
托马斯·赫塞豪恩
תומס הירשהורן
トーマス·ヒルシュホルン
abschlag

Thomas Hirschhorn’s “Abschlag” installation, which occupies the first room on the main floor, offers a lesson in how not to engage with the Russian milieu: the Swiss artist constructed part of a typical Petersburg apartment block out of cardboard inside the full-height space, ripped off its façade, and deposited the refuse at its base, revealing shabby interiors lined with original avant-garde masterpieces (on loan from the nearby Russian Museum) by the likes of Malevich and El Lissitky. The references allude to a politically radical Russian past; the construction debris acts as a metaphor for history. Though Hirschhorn suggests a recovery of the revolutionary communist spirit of the 1920s, he falls prey to a historically revisionist fetish: citing the Russian avant-garde as a generative point for vanguard culture in the West, and offering it as a source for renewed progressivism in Russia. Hirschhorn seems woefully unaware of the Putin government’s branding campaign, one that aims to sell the Russian avant-guard as a nationalist movement in line with the regime’s own values (perhaps he didn’t watch the Sochi opening ceremony). Hirschhorn ultimately proves Zhilayev right — with its political pretenses, “Abschlag” aspires to make a grand gesture against conservatism, but fails because its critique has already been co-opted..
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Esthétique du système
Les travaux de cette série font partie d’un vaste projet de recherche de FIELD, explorant les algorithmes d’apprentissage automatique les plus pertinents dans des illustrations à base de code […] Nous avons commencé une exploration plus approfondie des informations moins accessibles qui existent, telles que les articles scientifiques et des publications de code open source, pour développer une compréhension du fonctionnement interne de ces algorithmes, et le traduire en métaphores visuelles qui peuvent contribuer à un débat public.

Ad lib
Die Klangskulptur Ad lib. kombiniert eine medizinische Maschine für die automatische Lungenbeatmung mit einigen Orgelpfeifen, die einen musikalischen Akkord im konstanten Rhythmus des mechanischen Atems spielen, und schafft so ein künstliches Organ, das metaphorisch ein mechanisches Requiem ist, das unaufhörlich klingt. Der Titel des Werkes Ad lib., Eine Abkürzung für den lateinischen Ausdruck “ad libitum“, ist eine musikalische Beschriftung, die dem Interpreten Ermessensspielraum bei der Interpretation gibt und es beispielsweise ermöglicht, bestimmte Takte der Partitur “nach Belieben“ zu wiederholen. Die Skulptur soll sich auf die Situation beziehen, in der Menschen, die unter kritischen Gesundheitszuständen leiden, ihr Überleben an ein Atemgerät gebunden sehen und daher im Ermessen derer, die sich um sie kümmern.

T4T LAB
RADICAL RAUMPLAN
The real but withdrawn qualities of the raumplan of the Muller House can be understood as the unknown excess of the object. This is the space of the architectural project that exists beyond the limits of human cognition. Although this space is finite, it is vast and abundant. Any attempt to enter into this space must be somehow framed. As a metaphor, or a vehicle to frame the unknown excess, we take in part the idea of viewing, which is epistemologically important to the raumplan. Using this framework, our project attempts to go beyond our cognitive limitations and enter into the unknown space of the architectural project. From here, we can extract new spatial phenomena that can be notated into the known layer, to be understood by the architectural audience. For us, this means using a series of metaphors to frame our exploration of the unknown and attempt to extract new phenomena that engage the raumplan independent of its relationship to a human subject. This allows us to operate in a jective framework, allowing for an understanding of the object autonomously.

digital sculptures

Motion sculptures for CCTV Documentary Channel is a digital metaphor of phenomenal blinks and moments that life consists of. A visual performance of organic and vital substance, animated using data of actors movements. Dents visualize four different themes. Motion sculpture of steel reflects old Chinese adage that true power is mastering yourself. Youthful energy of dancers evolve into beautiful organic sculpture.

ODYSSEUS AND THE BATHERS

Far from the traditional pastoral scenes that are evoked by the exhibition’s title, the New York-based artist has conjured a bright and minimalist series of kinetic sculptures at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens.For the new works, the artist drew inspiration from Ancient Greece. This was not only through the titles of his work, which play on the names of characters from The Odyssey, but also through an exploration of the characteristics of the protagonists.Abstract and enigmatic, Paul Chan artfully brings the philosophical tethering of Ancient Greek thought to a modern and relatable new setting. Odysseus’ drive to return to his home after the Trojan War, and the way in which he navigates the journey, becomes a poignant metaphor for contemporary experience.

Ad lib
The sound sculpture Ad lib. combines a medical machine for automatic pulmonary ventilation with a few organ pipes that play a musical chord to the constant rhythm of the mechanical breath, creating an artificial organ that is metaphorically a mechanical requiem that sounds incessantly. The title of the work Ad lib., an abbreviation of the Latin expression “ad libitum”, is a musical caption that gives the performer discretion of interpretation, allowing for instance to repeat “at will” certain bars of the score. The sculpture aims to refer to the situation in which people, who suffer from critical health conditions, see their survival tied to a breathing machine and, therefore, to the discretion of those who are taking care of them.

Safe Conduct
Take off your shoes, place your belongings in the tray and empty your pockets. What happens when we unquestioningly subject to airport security regulations – or other, less overt protocols in society? This is one of the questions addressed by artist Ed Atkins in a new work produced especially for the x-rummet venue at the SMK. The video work Safe Conduct by British artist Ed Atkins is a burlesque of airport security instruction videos. Atkins mixes appropriated and CGI footage of the artist’s own devising, set to Ravel’s ‘Bolero’. A carousel of protocol, rendered bodies – both literally and metaphorically – abattoirs and metal detectors.

Algorithmic Architecture
This short film is intended to encourage a creative audience to seek out Kevin Slavin’s talk Those Algorithms Which Govern Our Lives. It employs an effect which takes place in Google Earth when its 3D street photography and 2D satellite imagery don’t register correctly. This glitch is applied as a metaphor for the way that our 21st century supercities are physically changing to suit the needs of computer algorithms rather than human employees.

Latent Space
In Latent Space fine lines weave virtual spaces around the viewers. The architecture that manifests is highly fragile — the space grows, shrinks, collapses. The acoustic dimension is also deeply spatial — slowly morphing soundscapes float around the dome, enveloping the observers in sound and image. The omnipresence of the virtual realm is transposed into the physical space of the dome to unmask the often proclaimed boundlessness of digital space. The work tests and investigates the spatial effects of the dome, which serves as a metaphor for the virtual net that always surrounds us.

REI – Listening to Silence
This work consists of a jet-black sphere containing 16 speaker units, six loudspeakers suspended from the ceiling, and a cubic structure. It creates an acoustic space by reverberating the sound of water from the sphere and the surrounding environment using four omnidirectional micro- phones installed on both the structure and the loudspeakers. The oceans evaporate, rain falls, and rivers continue to flow forever without any kind of consciousness. REI moves from the conscious to the subconscious by superimposing the sound echoing from one’s own body and the sound of water echoing from the sphere, which is a metaphor for this world.

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

Dawns, Mine, Crystal

The exhibition title Dawns, Mine, Crystal – a direct reference to the work of Raymond Roussel, a pioneer of experimental writing – establishes an intersection of a ‘world of materials’ with complex layers of metaphors and symbols. For Kim, material is not merely a basis for creating forms and images, but a main protagonist for creation itself.

System Aesthetics
The works in this series are part of an extensive research project by FIELD, exploring the most relevant machine learning algorithms in code-based illustrations […] We have started a deeper exploration of the less accessible information that is out there, such as scientific papers and open source code publications, to develop an understanding of these algorithms’ inner workings, and translate it into visual metaphors that can contribute to a public debate.

Guerre

A struggle that seems to be of particular relevance today. A metaphorical title, poetry of the line and of colour, that highlights the challenge that each of the parties represents. A kind of symbolic correspondence that flirts with our world, with our history, our human condition. War opens up perspectives of matter, a struggle both real and poetic that blends lines and directions, inscribing the trace, the hue, in the flesh of the dancing body but also in a seductive paradox between line and colour.

كورنيليا باركر
科妮莉亚·帕克
קורנליה פרקר
コーネリア·パーカー
코넬리아 파커
Корнелии Паркер
two rooms
For some years Cornelia Parker’s work has been concerned with formalising things beyond our control, containing the volatile and making it into something that is quiet and contemplative like the ‘eye of the storm’. She is fascinated with processes in the world that mimic cartoon ‘deaths’ – steamrollering, shooting full of holes, falling from cliffs and explosions. Through a combination of visual and verbal allusions her work triggers cultural metaphors and personal associations, which allow the viewer to witness the transformation of the most ordinary objects into something compelling and extraordinary.

Library
The library is a potent metaphor for knowledge that evokes images of organization, study, research and discovery. Libraries build relationships and connections and act as catalysts or laboratories for creative thoughts. Chun’s project is inspired in part by Jorge Luis Borges’ celebrated text, ‘The Library of Babel’ that compares the library to the universe with the grand idea that it is a repository for all knowledge and every individual truth. The universe is governed by an order that we can perceive only partially yet it evokes ideas of the infinite and the eternal – like matter it is neither created nor destroyed – it just is.

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What exactly is METAMACHINE? The metaphor comes from the artistic path of Atsushi Koyama, one of the participating visual artists. While emphasising the aesthetic qualities of machines and mechanical drawings in oil paintings, Koyama merges the human body with mechanisms, creating a man-machine (similar to the notorious Tetsuo, but in a more sublimated way). As if to incorporate the beauty of the human body, Koyama’s mechanisms break away from their earthly nature. They take us to another reality, beyond utilitarian usage or function itself. Koyama’s machines act more like ‘mechanical’ (‘mechaaesthetical‘) keys to another dimension, existing outside of the physical reality and its laws.

Autumn Winter 2019
Rose Danford-Phillips admits it: as the daughter of gardeners, she draws her inspiration from nature. And when she evokes her love for lace, she speaks about a “delicate sensation of petals” … With her skill at vegetation metaphors, she explains that she transformed a magnificent piece of Sophie Hallette lace into a “rampant vine” for her graduate collection at the Royal College of Art. Either by combining it with a fringed silk to reinforce the idea of an uncontrollable, wild nature or by hand-embroidering it onto plastic to create a sense of nature recreated in a laboratory. “Lace tells a story” she says and hers transports us into a poetic, feminine and modern tale.

Prismverse
Prismverse is an installation inspired by light rays travelling in a diamond with Brilliant cut – a form that produces phenomenal brilliance with maximized light directed through its top. With a complex geometrical tessellated mirror wall, the highly illuminated interior becomes a metaphor for the instant tone-up effect of Dr.Jart+ V7 Toning Light.

蒂姆·霍金森
ティム·ホーキンソン
تيم هاوكينسون
Möbius Ship
The ambitious and imaginative structure of Hawkinson’s sculpture offers an uncanny visual metaphor for Melville’s epic tale, which is often considered the ultimate American novel. Möbius Ship also humorously refers to the mathematical concept of the Möbius Strip. Named after a nineteenth-century astronomer and mathematician, the Möbius Strip is a surface that has only one side, and exists as a continuous curve. Its simple yet complex spatial configuration presents a visual puzzle that parallels Hawkinson’s transformation of the mundane materials into something unexpected.

Contours
London-based creative laboratory Bare Conductive was invited to team up with designers Fabio Antinori and Alicja Pytlewska in order to develop a large-scale metaphor for the idea of breathing life into a collection of responsive textile skins. ‘Contours’ is at the core of the interactive tapestry installation; a series capacitive sensors are applied to the suspended fabric substrates using conductive paint. These sensors react to the presence of a person within the vicinity and track their movements, outputting a constantly modulated ambient soundscape reminiscent of medical research environments. The abstract geometric ornamentation connects the tapestries’ individual sensors to form giant panels, serving as an acoustic feedback loop that alludes to the relationship between science and the body.

BALANCE
Temporary sculptures, perpetual motion, focus, energy and balance. mandalas are deconstructed shortly after their completion. This is an allegory, done as a metaphor of the impermanence of life. An incredible kinetic sculpture is built of palm branches by the sculptor, it is amazingly held together only by a feather.

Espejismos
Glenda Leon’s work includes various techniques such as drawings, video art, installations, sculpture and photography. Glenda León encourages the viewer to approach the object from a poetical perspective. This way, she reveals the metaphoric part of everyday life objects and is interested in revealing antagonisms like silence or sound, visibility or invisibility; public or private; and ephemeral or eternal.

INFINITUM
INFINITUM is an immersive art – architectural installation presented at the Sharjah Art Museum on the occasion of the Islamic Arts Festival 2019/20, 22nd Edition. Arches are typical in Mosques’ design. […] Islamic Arches buildings are typically constructed of stone, wood being rarer in the original Middle Eastern homelands of the Umayyads. The rows of Columns and Arches give a visual impression of limitless space, as a metaphor of the progress for human civilization, maximizing spiritual symbolism and visual appeal – progressing towards an ideal civilization. It refers to centuries of human civilization and the creation of prospective in social spaces and the openness to open possibilities of human life.

Visual Orgasms
popcorn
Visual Orgasms exaggerates this mandate to ‘make-visible’ by creating excessive moving image collages that depict metaphors for orgasm with no actual depiction of sex.
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Jacob’dream: a luminous path
San Francisco-based electronic-media artist Jim Campbell creates work that combines film, light emitting diodes (LEDs) and sculptural elements. His choice of materials is often complex, and he uses them to create imagery that is allusive and open-ended. His exploration of the distinction between the analog world and its digital representation metaphorically parallels the difference between poetic understanding versus the mathematics of data.

Balance From Within
File Festival
Jacob Tonski is a pragmatic optimist whose work explores dynamic balance through kinetic metaphors.
A self-adjusting platform makes everyone the same height, probing ideas of equality and the origins of power. A larger-than-life top spins about the room, wobbling through themes of pleasure, danger, youth and decay. A sofa teeters, standing on one leg, musing on the stability of the social structures we build.
These and other human-scale objects, both amusing and threatening, find an uncanny identity between toys and tools. The forces of time and gravity serve in these works as foils for those things we are powerless to direct in our lives, and with which we must instead dance and negotiate.

BOMBYX MORI
Bombyx Mori alludes to the silk caterpillar, which has become entirely dependent on human beings for survival. Here, the natural body and the artificial process are inextricably linked: a poignant metaphor for this sculptural interpretation of one of the pioneers of modern dance and performance art.more…

TETRAGRAMMATON
A dialogue between these two artists on themes of myth, ritual and meaning, as much about their exhaustion and propensity to bewilderment as any potential they may inhere, for recuperation for and by language, culture and society. Joey’s work, ‘Religiously observant’, is inspired by alchemical and occult ideas, the world of spirits and hallucinations. The wall print features a gold CGI blazon of the Tetragrammaton It references the Sumerian mythology of the Annunaki a race of ancient chthonic fertility Gods, subsequently inscribed in a series of publications by Zecharia Sitchin (a kind of elder statesman of conspiracy theorists worldwide) as descendants of aliens, who enslaved the human race to extract gold from the earth. John’s work similarly ranges over territories of opposition: between ancient and contemporary; mythic and kitsch; between the viscid and primordial. It takes as its subject the vector of congealment, in the Marxist sense of the way labour power is congealed in commodities and so forth, extending this metaphor into an aesthetics of myth and ritual, emptied out, flattened, compacted like a sedimentary layer of anthropocene garbage, for the post-historical epoch.The sound component provides an aural complement to this structure of refuse, exhaustion and abjection. Mixing pre- or post-linguistic utterances, grunts, groans, screaming: a kind of secular glossolalia chaotically interwoven with whalesong, deep techno and political oratory.

Generator
A story about a tourist drowning in the Mediterranean, the transition of the body from life to death/a>, and a metaphor-laden sock puppet.

ماریکو موری
森万里子
Мори, Марико
Infinite Energy
Redefining the architecture of the space Louis Vuitton are eight monumental pieces by internationally-renowned japanese artist mariko mori. The exhibition ‘Infinite Review’ amasses sculptures and experiential installations in a series of works that metaphorically reflect the never-ending circulation of life and death as well as fragments from the artist’s personal experiences. Towering above visitors and traversing the space between the floor and ceiling are a triptych of luminous spirals. The soaring ‘infinite energy’ series is a visualization of an invisible force, felt and seen through their unseen participation with gallery entrants.