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PARMEGIANI

ベルナール・パルメジャーニ
La Creation du Monde
This is a sprawling, ambitious painting in sound modeled on the birth of the universe. Moving from roiling, gaseous clouds of hiss and static through sharp peels of detailed, unrestrained texture, this is acousmatic music at its very finest, literally creating a universe of sound out of thin air.

SNARKITECTURE

The Beach
The Beach is an interactive installation that reimagines the familiar natural and cultural elements of a day at the beach, to create an unexpected and memorable experience for people of all ages. Visitors ascend a ramp before entering an all-white enclosure, where the floor descends towards the highlight of the experience – an ocean of over one million recyclable, antimicrobial plastic balls. A pier extends out into the sea’, allowing people to stand in the center of the space and watch others, while an island invites exploration and discovery. Visual cues such as deck chairs, lifeguard chairs, umbrellas, and signage recall elements of the typical beach-going experience.

Fuse

Treu
Treu is a real-time audiovisual installation that elaborates on the multiple meanings and implications of the concept of trust. On a macro level it observes how historical events have influenced its course and considers how this can evolve in the future. On a micro level, it, explores how the presence or absence of trust can shift the perception of our individual realities.
Trust is a fundamental element of our society. Politics, economics, and our whole modern system are not material realities – they are psychological constructs based on the trust in individuals, in institutions, in the market. We decide to believe in the value of money, to undertake social changes only if we trust the inventions of our collective imagination.
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Patricia Olynyk

Oculus
Oculus is a large-scale, collaborative light sculpture that depicts a colossal abstracted drosophila eye, replete with compound faceted surfaces. It both recalls the circular opening at the apex of a cupola and alludes to a surveillance device or drone hovering in mid-air. Oculus is inspired in part by a series of scanning electron micrographs produced in a transgenic lab while researching human and non-human sensoria. The work evokes affective encounters with scale such as viewing miniature particles through the lens of a microscope or wandering through monumental physical environments. As each viewer’s reflection plays across the sculpture’s undulating surface, the apprehension of the self affects both individual and collective behavior in unexpected ways. This affective dynamic plays on the precariousness of our coexistence with other lifeforms in the world, one that is always contingent upon viewers’ bodies and the variability of the environment around them. The act of gazing at Oculus also puts into play the reciprocal condition of both seeing and being seen.

Shilpa Gupta

For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit
‘For, in your tongue, I cannot fit,’ gives voice to 100 poets who have been jailed through time for their writing or their beliefs. The haunting work highlights the fragility and vulnerability of our right to freedom of expression today—and the bravery of those who struggle to resist. Visitors will encounter 100 microphones suspended over 100 metal rods, each piercing a verse of poetry. Over the course of an hour, each microphone in turn recites a fragment of the poets’ words, spoken first by a single voice then echoed by a chorus which shifts across the space.

janet echelman

1.78 madrid
Per festeggiare i 400 anni di storia di Plaza Mayor nella capitale spagnola è comparsa, dal 9 al 19 febbraio 2018, un’opera dell’artista Janet Echelman (1966, Tampa, Florida). Il risultato è stato straordinario: un’opera d’arte, sospesa nel cielo, il cui titolo è 1.78. 1.78, è il tempo in microsecondi che, secondo gli scienziati della Nasa, rappresentano il tempo trascorso il giorno del terremoto del Giappone nel 2011, un evento sismico così potente da mutare gli equilibri terrestri accelerando la rotazione del pianeta.

MIAO XIAOCHUN

МЯО СЯОЧУНЬ
缪晓春
مياو شياو تشون

The large-scale nine-panel installation, Microcosm, is based on Hieronymus Bosch’s 15th century masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights. Microcosm is an imaginative reinvention of the sumptuous landscape of sin, salvation, and tawdry visions of those who never made it to paradise. The structure and narrative pattern of Bosch’s triptych, such as the architecture of heaven, earth and hell, as well as the basic forms of Bosch’s pictures, have been preserved in Miao Xiaochun’s work. But new digital means and computer technologies have allowed Miao Xiaochun to explore a contemporary visual vocabulary. He abolishes the traditional fixed single-point perspective aesthetic, instead favoring the Chinese tradition of multiple points of view in a single landscape.

Kevin Beasley

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.

MANUELA DONOSO AND LUISA PEREIRA

The Harmonic Series

File Festival

Created by Manuela Donoso and Luisa Pereira, The Harmonic Series is a collection of mechanical devices , software, sculptures and prints that explore the relationship between musical and visual harmony.Inspired by the nineteenth century mathematician Jules Lissajous who invented a device to visualize sound vibrations using two tuning forks and a beam of light reflected from one mirror to the next to a screen, Manuela and Luisa have re-created and extended this experiment using recent tools. An electronic version of the device replaces the tuning forks with microphones and speakers, allowing people to sing different musical intervals, and contrast the resulting figures with the more chaotic ones generated by percussive sounds. An application plays groups of three notes and plots 3d Lissajous figures for their frequency ratios. The frequency ratios for major, minor and diminished chords are 4:5:6, 10:12:15 and 20:24:29 respectively. These chords were plotted using the app, and then printed as posters and sculptures that reveal a tight relationship between aural and visual harmony.