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.

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

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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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Prismverse
Hong-kong based design studio, XEX, presents ‘prismverse’, an interactive diamond-themed installation in shanghai. The installation was completed for american skincare brand, Dr. jart+, to serve as an experiential pavilion for their ‘instant V7 toning light’ at raffles city mall. The immersive installation is inspired by light rays traveling through a diamond. With a 10 meter-long LED floor and the complex geometrical tessellated mirror wall, the highly illuminated interior becomes a metaphor for the instant tone-up effect of the skin product.

Black Liquid
FILE FESTIVAL
ANIMA+
Black Liquid is an abstract 3D animation showing different aggregation states. Matter transforming from liquid into solid and shatterly.
The spectator is free to understand the video exclusively as an illustration of physical processes or as an metaphor for the human being. The interpretation of the Video is dedicated by Zakharov to the spectator himself.

DSM-VI
DSM-VI est une suite logique à notre approche artistique de création de mondes artificiels et de systèmes entièrement robotiques. Cette fois, nous voulons créer un univers qui met en scène des créatures exprimant des symptômes de comportements psychologiques «anormaux» et confrontés à de graves problèmes de «santé mentale», tels que névrose, psychose, troubles de la personnalité, paranoïa, schizophrénie, dépression, délire, etc. formes de comportement et troubles mentaux. Le titre du projet est inspiré du célèbre manuel de référence publié par l’American Psychiatric Association, le DSM-IV. Le DSM-IV (Manuel diagnostique et statistique des troubles mentaux) est considéré comme la bible de la psychiatrie moderne. Tantôt glorifié tantôt fortement critiqué, il s’agit d’un ouvrage de représentation qui décrit et classe les troubles du comportement humain et les maladies mentales. La version IV du DSM a été publiée en 1994 puis révisée en 2000. La version V est actuellement en préparation et devrait à terme être publiée en 2012. Avec ce projet, nous proposons la version VI. A l’instar de certains de nos précédents travaux conçus autour de l’idée de «la misère des machines» (voir La cour des miracles), le projet DSM-VI veut poursuivre notre travail de création sur la métaphore du vivant en interrogeant désormais la notion d’une «psychose des machines».

פיונה טאן
フィオナ·タン
Фиона Тан
فيونا تان
Rise and Fall
Fiona Tan explores storytelling, memory, and the part they play in the formation of identity throughout this exhibition of five video installations, various associated sketches and one single-channel video. Rise and Fall (2009), elongated projections onto two large, side-by-side screens, is a wordless meditation, set to music, of a woman no longer young but still conscious of her looks; she was clearly a beauty in her youth. As the video proceeds we gather that the young woman pictured on the second screen is the memory of her younger self. They often move through domestic activities (sleeping, bathing, dressing) in parallel; this is inter-cut with scenes of violently rushing water (shot at Niagra Falls, it turns out). It’s a hackneyed metaphor – the water’s endless surging as an image of time’s relentless uni-directionality – but in Tan’s hands that doesn’t seem to matter; she creates extraordinarily emotional work out of simple stories and well-worn themes.

100% Other Fibres
Through collisions of image, noise, objects, language and bodies, Heather Phillipson’s videos and sculptural installations behave as places, musical scores, poems and nervous systems – attending to how physical and affective ‘selves’ are constructed, manipulated and, above all, escape. Often rendered as walk-in conglomerations of readily accessible materials (digital images, paint, cardboard, words, audio loops and reproducible consumer detritus), her works stake out an ambiguous territory in which cultural references and emotional responses are mutually contingent and reactive. Collapsing distinctions between the forthright and the inarticulable, the banal and the ecstatic, and between metaphor and extreme literalisation, Phillipson’s work performs constant tonal shifts, disruptions and bleeds. In so doing, it oscillates between physical intimacies and conceptual distances – desire, sensuality, touching and being touched, shame, anxiety, (over-)exposure, resistant surfaces.

Endless song of silence
Nanine Linning is collaborating with renowned Russian fashion designer Irina Shaposnikova for the costumes for this new adaptation and with multimedia artist Roger Muskee for the video projections. The music is by Gorecki. In the fusion of the art forms there is a painful beauty, a longing for peace and security. Echoes of hope resound in the beautiful close-ups that are projected on two transparent film screens and blend diffusely with the live dance on stage. A wonderful metaphor for the struggle that goes with love and the farewell that follows.