Useless Hands

FILE 2024 | Aesthetic Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
Infratonal – Useless Hands – France

When our hands become useless, what will we choose to do with them? We can use AI to visualize the unthinkable, the strangely familiar yet indescribable forms and structures. Generative AI could be used as an amplifier of our ability to explore abstraction and surrealism rather than a simple mirror of our usual perceptions.

Bio

Infratonal is an artistic project led by Louk Amidou, a Paris-based multidisciplinary artist who works at the intersection of digital arts, electronic music and interaction design. He uses algorithms to create hybrid visual and sound pieces which aim to be performed by the human gesture as intangible instruments. He questions the artwork’s nature at the age of AI and the relationship between the artist and the algorithm.

愫君
Drawing Operations
Sougwen Chung is an internationally renowned multidisciplinary artist, who uses hand-draw and computer-generated marks to address the closeness between person-to-person and person-to- machine communication. She is a former researcher at MIT Media Lab and current Artist in Resident at Bell Labs and New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Her speculative critical practice spans installation, sculpture, still image, drawing, and performance. Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 1 is the 1st stage of an ongoing study of human and robotic interaction as an artistic collaboration.

The Collector
Born in Parkersburg, West Virginia and raised in Houston, Texas, Rachel Lee Hovnanian is a New York-based artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores contemporary notions of narcissism, obsession and intimacy, and society’s alienating addiction to modern technological advances and media.

Asuna (android)
A- Lab, Tokyo
Luisa Whitton is a multidisciplinary artist working in photography, text, and video. Guided by an interest in portraiture and technology, her practice involves extensive research into the power and implications of anthropomorphising technology and its precarious relationship to the uncanny.

dot matrix loop
Rowan Smith’s work takes the form of a multidisciplinary semiotic investigation into the ways in which cultural signs and signifiers can be read as artefacts. He examines how the meaning embedded in these artefacts fluctuates (and frequently deteriorates) in relation to ever-shifting sociopolitical contexts; often assuming a self-critical position which responds to his locality.

Matija Čop is a first-year graduate student of Fashion Design at the Faculty of Textile Design of the University in Zagreb. Before enrolling he studied Croatian Philology at the Faculty of Philosophy. With his mentor Jasminka Končić he is working on understanding fashion. In his work he speaks the language of fashion with a strong conceptual and multidisciplinary background. As he is still a student, his work up to now is occupied by the fashion object as the starting form of studying fashion garments.

Multidisciplinary in his practice, Markus Schinwald alternately uses painting, video, photography, installation, performance, theater, dance and even the art of the puppeteer. From his training as a fashion designer, the artist has retained a keen interest in the human body, exploring its capabilities and limitations, both physically and psychologically.

Clash Project
“We are I O I A. We are material designers & a multidisciplinary creative studio. Everything we create is bright, bold and playful.”

light drift
Höweler + Yoon Architecture / MY Studio is a multidisciplinary practice, operating in the space between architecture, art, and landscape. They believe in an embodied experience of architecture, seeing media as material and its effects as palpable elements of architectural speculation. While their work lies at the intersection of the conceptual and the corporeal, they are committed to both the practice-of and prospects-for architecture. Engaged in projects of all scales, they are interested in the material realities and material effects of their work. From concept to construct they are determined to realize the built idea and to test projects through the dynamic interaction between the construct and the larger public.

Requiem

In REQUIEM choreographer Nanine Linning imagines the tension between life and death, the profane and the sacred, the carnal and the spiritual. Themes, which are inextricably linked together and are at the same time absolute opposites. Inspired by Fauré’s “Requiem”, Dante’s “La Divina Commedia” and the absurd and surreal images of the artist duo “Les Deux Garçons”, Linning is searching for her own paradise on earth.REQUIEM is a multidisciplinary production with 25 dancers, live orchestra, two soloist singers, a choir, a sound artist and video. It is a triptych where the public will first walk on stage through dance installations; the dancers create a frozen, silent world.In the second part Fauré’s “Requiem” is being performed while singers and dancers follow Linnings choreography in a world of immense video images on stage. In the last part a Sound Artist will break apart Fauré’s “Requiem”. The frozen world of part one will melt and the energy of life will be released in a dynamic choreography for the choir and dancers.

the shape of sound

80 mesh – the shape of sound’ is a project that investigates fragmentation, reconstruction and repetition generated through the morphogenetic
possibilities of sound waves – visualized through the modeling of fine grain sand. the work was curated by ravenna-based cultural association
marte and born from a collaboration under the artists group CaCO3 – coordinated by daniele torcellini. the multidisciplinary artwork – informed by the research of the german physicist ernst chladni – is a device composed of three 50 x 50 cm metallic plates that are placed horizontally alongside each other, with a quantity of garnet sand (80 mesh references the particles size) homogeneously dispersed over the plates. the dishes were electrically linked to the sound waves produced by an onde martenot – an early electronic musical instrument invented in 1928 with a similar sound to a theremin – played by ratsimandresy.