highlike

Ryoji Ikeda

micro | macro
micro | macro transforms Hall E in the MuseumsQuartier into an oversized world of moving images and sounds. In his immersive installation, multimedia artist Ryoji Ikeda creates a field of imagination between quantum physics, empirical experimentation and human perception. In collaboration with nuclear scientists at CERN, Ikeda has translated complex physical theories into a sensory experience. The Planck scale is used by scientists to denote extremely small lengths or time intervals. Concepts like space and time lose their meaning beyond this scale, and contemporary physics has to rely on speculative theories. And on art. Visitors to micro | macro enter a world of data, particles, light and sound that makes the extremes of the universe perceptible to the eye and ear. In the micro world we penetrate the smallest dimensions of the unrepresentable, while in the macro world we take off into cosmic expanses that allow us to experience the infinite space beyond the observable universe. In this maelstrom of data, an acoustic and visual firework bridges the gap between theoretical understanding and sensual perception.

Studio Above&Below

Aquateque
Aquateque è un cortometraggio che esplora il fiume Ruhr attraverso una varietà di nuove tecnologie multimediali. Il progetto combina strumenti AI e AR per esplorare modi sostenibili di creare materiali digitali che fondono natura e calcolo. Il variegato ecosistema circostante viene catturato attraverso strumenti di programmazione audio, visivi e 3D e trasformato in uno spazio aumentato generativo.

HUANG YI & KUKA

Ein Duett von Mensch und Roboter
Huangs Pionierarbeit ist geprägt von seiner Faszination für die Partnerschaft zwischen Mensch und Roboter. Kontinuierliche Bewegung verwebt er mit mechanischen und multimedialen Elementen zu einer Tanzform, die mit dem Datenfluss korrespondiert, den Performer zum Tanzinstrument macht.

Kati Katona

Kati Katona est une artiste multimédia basée à Budapest. Son travail est axé sur la génération, animation procédurale et 3D, art de l’installation interactive, mappage de projection et conception sonore. Kati s’inspire fortement des éléments de la nature, des structures biomorphes et des algorithmes trouvés dans la nature. En tant qu’artiste visuelle, elle a participé à divers projets audiovisuels, tels que Zagar AV Experience et se concentre constamment sur l’expérience des dernières technologies.

NXI GESTATIO: NICOLAS REEVES, DAVID ST-ONGE & GHISLAINE DOTÉ

Paradoxal Sleep
File Festival
O projeto “Paradoxal Sleep” integra uma série de obras na qual grandes cubos robotizados, medindo 2,25 m3, funcionam como estruturas flutuantes usadas como plataformas para vários projetos multimídia e performances. No FILE 2012, a equipe da NXI GESTATIO apresentará um único cubo que irá se mover nos espaços expositivos. O cubo reajustará constantemente sua posição medindo a distância entre as paredes ao redor.

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The “Paradoxal Sleep” project integrates a series of works in which large robotic cubes, measuring 2.25 m3, function as floating structures used as platforms for various multimedia projects and performances. At FILE 2012, the NXI GESTATIO team will present a single cube that will move in the exhibition spaces. The cube will constantly readjust its position by measuring the distance between the surrounding walls.

Peter Buczkowski

Echo Echo
Echo Echo è un’installazione multimediale interattiva che utilizza gli assistenti virtuali per creare un eco digitale. Attivato dall’interazione umana, ogni dispositivo ascolta il suo predecessore e risponde di conseguenza. Nel corso di questa eco digitale, l’input originale diventa sempre più alienato. Simile al gioco Telephone (tedesco: Stille Post), le informazioni che riceviamo alla fine molto spesso non hanno nulla a che fare con il messaggio originale. Il lavoro è un approccio giocoso e un commento su uno dei problemi più grandi delle nostre attuali vite digitali.

SETUP

Tube
S E T U P is a stage design and lighting design international studio founded by Znamensky Dmitry, Novikov Stepan and Zmunchila Pavel. The studio works in the field between contemporary art, lighting design and programming with a mission to explore the expressive opportunities provided by new digital technologies. S E T U P aims to create installations and multimedia works that can sharpen the physical perception of the environment and help explore more possibilities of image manipulation. Our creative product is high-tech multimedia work, concepts and laser installations. Our studio is open for experiments and is ready to cooperate with various artists to find the right visual interpretations for their work.

Cory Arcangel

Cory Arcangel es un joven artista multimedia norteamericano con sede en NY. Él crea sus obras a través de la pintura, la música, el vídeo y la transformación de videojuegos. Arcangel a menudo utiliza la estrategia de apropiación artística creativa, re-utilizando materiales existentes, para crear nuevas obras de arte. Su obra explora la relación entre la tecnología digital y la cultura pop.

FLORA&FAUNAVISION

Giardino Della Luna Magenta
Progettata per stimolare la conversazione sulla sostenibilità, le competenze tecnologiche e multimediali in modo giocoso e intuitivo, questa installazione video interattiva comprende tre distinti ambienti visivi (Sunrise Garden, Moon Garden, Magenta Moon) arricchiti con elementi intuitivi e interattivi in ​​tempo reale. L’ambiente e l’esperienza straordinari sono affiancati da contenuti ed eventi online che affrontano argomenti che vanno dall’incitamento all’odio ai cambiamenti climatici, affiancati da un ampio spettro di contenuti online, conferenze e workshop in loco.

RYOJI IKEDA

Micro Macro
micro | macro trasforma il padiglione E del MuseumsQuartier in un enorme mondo di immagini e suoni in movimento. Nella sua installazione immersiva, l’artista multimediale Ryoji Ikeda crea un campo di immaginazione tra fisica quantistica, sperimentazione empirica e percezione umana. In collaborazione con scienziati nucleari del CERN, Ikeda ha tradotto complesse teorie fisiche in un’esperienza sensoriale. La scala di Planck viene utilizzata dagli scienziati per indicare lunghezze o intervalli di tempo estremamente ridotti. Concetti come spazio e tempo perdono il loro significato oltre questa scala e la fisica contemporanea deve fare affidamento su teorie speculative. E sull’arte. Visitatori di micro | macro entra in un mondo di dati, particelle, luce e suono che rende gli estremi dell’universo percettibili all’occhio e all’orecchio. Nel micro mondo penetriamo nelle più piccole dimensioni dell’irrappresentabile, mentre nel macro mondo decolliamo in distese cosmiche che ci permettono di sperimentare lo spazio infinito oltre l’universo osservabile. In questo vortice di dati, un fuoco d’artificio acustico e visivo colma il divario tra la comprensione teorica e la percezione sensuale.

VTOL

Letzter Atemzug
Ich verstehe passive Instrumente als verschiedene Multimedia-Objekte, für die weniger Management als Koexistenz erforderlich ist, basierend auf Beziehungen, die aus einer gegenseitigen „hybriden“ Symbiose hervorgehen. Das Funktionsprinzip des Objekts ist recht einfach: Die ausgeatmete Luft (ihr Druck und ihre Durchflussrate) aktiviert den generativen Prozess, der von den Ausatmungsparametern abhängt und von der Luftbewegung im Organ gesteuert wird. Das Objekt erfordert keine spezielle Spieltechnik, obwohl jede Änderung der Atmung (entweder vorsätzlich oder durch physiologische Faktoren verursacht) direkt von der Spieldynamik und auch von allen anderen Parametern abhängt, die zur Erzeugung des Schallflusses verwendet werden.

Maotik

Erratic Weather
Despite some world leaders skepticism, climate change is a reality and the world isn’t just warming, in some parts of the planet the weather is becoming more erratic. During the last years, our generation has started to observe the effects and consequences of this shift, witnessing violent and unexpected climate phenomenons. Erratic Weather is a digital art project aiming to represent changing atmospheric conditions into an immersive multimedia experience. During the performance, the system uses various source of weather information retrieved from an online database and processed on real time to generate a visual and a surround sound composition. During 30 minutes the audience will experience the life cycle of swirling phenomenons such typhoon, hurricane and tropical cyclone , demonstrating the devastating power of the nature and the emergency to preserve it.

vtol

last breath
I understand passive instruments to be different multimedia objects that do not require management so much as co-existence with them based on relations born of a mutual “hybrid” symbiosis. The operating principle of the object is fairly simple – the exhaled air (its pressure and flow rate) activates the generative process, which depends on the exhalation parameters and is managed by the air movement in the organ. The object does not require any special game technique, although any change in the breathing (either premeditated or caused by physiological factors) is directly dependent on game dynamics and also on all the other parameters used to generate the sonic flow.

HUANG YI & KUKA

A DUET OF HUMAN AND ROBOT
Huang’s pioneering work is steeped in his fascination with the partnership between humans and robots. He interweaves continuous movement with mechanical and multimedia elements to create a form of dance which corresponds with the flow of data, effectively make the performer a dancing instrument.

Viktoria Modesta

prototype
Viktoria Modesta is bionic artist, multimedia performance artist, creative director, DJ and a supporter of future innovations. Her work explores modern identity through performance, fashion, avant garde visuals, technology and science.

WILSON SUKORSKI

Celestium
The Orqestra de Laptops de São Paulo (OLSP) is formed by ten hyper instrumentalists who “play” laptops equipped with the highest technology available, in interfaces as well in software. This orchestra generates a multimedia show entitled “EvEnTo 3 Movimentos para Orquestra”, by Wilson Sukorski.
FILE hypersonica

NOPER & SAINT MACHINE

FEED ME
FEED ME is a ludic experiment that explores the relation between the artwork and its public. With a self-ironical approach, the project is calling the subjects of monstrous and perpetually insatiable Tra to her feeding ritual: the entire exhibition is a live organism that feeds on the energy produced by the movements of the public. It is an interactive multimedia capsule that carries a dynamic platform where everything moves, pulses and reacts to motion on a common rhythm. The exhibition space is structured in narrowing concentric circles, creating several worlds that include each other and cocoon around a magical protection space, thus the public is activated on several levels.

Mathieu Merlet Briand

Google red marble

Digital native et issu d’une famille d’agriculteur, Mathieu s’intéresse à l’influence des technologies sur la perception de notre réalité contemporaine. Il s’interroge sur la matérialité d’internet et ses représentations. Il cherche à traduire l’expérience du web surfer, l’imagination de l’internaute face à ce flux infini d’informations.
Dans ses projets se dégagent de façon récurrente des questions environnementales. Inspiré par la lecture de l’essai philosophique d’Ariel Kyrou « Google God » de 2010, il interroge cette image presque divine associés aux géants du web.
Il utilise comme médium les big datas. Via ses algorithmes qu’il développe, par des processus de recyclage et des analogies à la nature, il façonne des flux de données afin d’en créer des matérialisations tangibles. Abstractions, reliques, cristallisations ou fragment du World Wide Web, son travail protéiforme se matérialise principalement en sculptures et installations multimédia.
Influencé autant par l’histoire de l’abstraction, les artistes du Land Art, que par les Nouveaux Réalistes, ses créations sont associées au Culture Digital, au mouvement Post-Digital ou Post-Internet Art.

 

YING GAO

Indice de l’indifférence
Montreal-based fashion designer and professor at UQAM, recipient of the Phyllis-Lambert Design Montréal Grant, Ying Gao questions our assumptions about clothing by combining urban design, architecture and multimedia. She explores the construction of the garment, taking her inspiration from the transformations of the social and urban environment.

lizzie fitch and ryan trecartin

whether line
Commissioned by Fondazione Prada for its Milan venue, “Whether Line”, the large-scale multimedia installation, conceived by Lizzie Fitch (USA, 1981) and Ryan Trecartin (USA, 1981), represents the first output of a creative process begun in late 2016, investigating the perpetual promise of “new” terrain and the inherent instability of territorial appropriation.

Assume Vivid Astro Focus

Two men heels gold pants
Assume Vivid Astro Focus, an artist collective oozing in an overflow of psychedelic energy, has been making a name for themselves within the art scene since 2001. They have recently published a book that documents six years of their projects, which consists of a combination of multimedia installations and performance art.

Eyal Gever

Break Wall Sim
Eyal Gever is an artist who combines technology and art to create sculptures based off of 3D software technology that he uses to produce animations and 3D renderings to compliment his work. Gever has over 18 years experience implementing his ideas into 3D software technologies and server/web-based products, primarily in the area of interactive real time multimedia communication software as well as 3D creation and animation.

LAS HERMANAS IGLESIAS

Sisters and artists Lisa and Janelle Iglesias collaborate under the moniker Las Hermanas Iglesias, mining their family history and shared experiences to create multimedia and often performance-based works. Their art considers issues such as cultural heritage, the body, and competition, often with a hint of absurdity folded in.

Stéphane Thidet

Au Bout Du Souffle
Stéphane Thidet is a French artist who takes regular, everyday objects and transforms them into absurd, fantastical, slightly disorienting installation pieces. Although his work may be slightly off-putting at first, Thidet’s consistently humorous touch lends his installations a sense of accessibility and charm. Thidet is a multimedia contemporary artist, who apart from installations, also works in photography, video and sculpture. Many of his pieces were inspired by toys or games from childhood and play with ideas in popular culture and entertainment.

Peter Coffin

פיטר קופין
ピーター·コフィン

Interested in the way people perceive and interpret, Peter Coffin’s conceptual interdisciplinary practice plays with both the limitations and possibilities of our perception. Drawing on art history, science, psychology, and epistemology, Coffin creates multimedia works that reassemble the world around us in a way that makes us question our preconceptions and gain new perspective.

REMAINS

gloWArp
Tecnologie oggi offrono infinite possibilità di azione in ambito museale e spesso queste sono volte solamente alla spettacolarizzazione. Per questo motivo lo Studio Glowarp ha sviluppato un proprio protocollo di attuazione di una metodologia in ambito museale chiamato A.R.I.M. (Augmented Reality In the Museum) e si avvale della collaborazione di storici, archoelogi ed esperti di comunicazione per la creazione di narrazioni e storytelling digitali che puntino al senso dell’intervento lasciando alla spettacolarizzazione un ruolo importante ma non centrale nella progettazione multimediale.

BOUNCE STREETDANCE COMPANY

Insane in the brain

‘Insane in the Brain’ is a reworked producion of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as a feast of stunning street dance. Injecting a healthy dose of contemporary styles fused with breathtaking hip hop moves. ‘Insane in the Brain’ features a pulsating soundtrack with cuts from Missy Elliot, Dizzee Rascal, Gotan Project, David Holmes and Cypress Hill. Inventive set design and choreography are mixed with film and multimedia sequences to produce a fast-paced show that is funny, moving and packed with high-octane dance.

Steven Holl Architects

Ecology and Planning Museums

Entering on the ground level to the ecology museum reveals a projection next to the restaurant and retail areas. an elevator takes guests to the top level where their descent through the three ecologies – earth to cosmos, earth to man, earth to earth – begins, connected through a series of ramps.
the earth to earth exhibit on the bottom floor features a plane that turns clockwise, moving slowly down towards the ocean ecology space appropriately situated under the reflecting pond of the exterior plaza. the earth to earth section contains four outdoor green terraces as temporary exhibit spaces that change with the seasons.The shared public square also marks the entrance to the planning museum where visitors are greeted by a large model of the eco-city and another temporary display area. a multimedia system makes the next sequence of program, the theory and practice zones, come to life with dynamic informative videos, images, and sounds, all located on the second level. mechanical escalators transport guests to the third floor where one-way display is turned into an interactive relationship with the viewer. this is accompanied by a 3D cinema and a restaurant with views out towards the sea. on the top storey one can find the green architecture, landscape and water resources exhibits as well as access to the vegetative roof-scape offering offering unmatched views.

highlike book

launch interactive book

FILE – Electronic Language International Festival and SESI publishing house launch the “highlike book”. This is a yearbook on global contemporary ART and CULTURE. Its first edition has 584 pages with 577 artists from 35 countries. The “highlike book” encompasses several aspects of contemporary culture, providing the user a new form of appreciation of an art book. This is a book connected to the cloud. All information, images, videos and texts, is connected to their on-line counterparts in several languages, in a hybrid book which maintains its physical aspects and the virtual simultaneity of multimedia information. Its main purpose is to provide users with a new way of access culture in a global diversified view on the contemporary creativity in its transversal and heuristic aspect, by means of technologies currently available.

Daniel Wiener

Twist and Shout
Der Multimediakünstler Daniel Wiener kreiert farbenfrohe Skulpturen und konstruiert fließende, geschwungene Formen, die an Tagträume und fantastische Landschaften erinnern. Wiener zieht es vor, Erwartungen zu untergraben, und bevorzugt abrupte und überraschende Gegenüberstellungen in seiner Arbeit. Die in seinen Werken üblichen amorphen Wirbel und vage vertrauten Formen rufen Unbehagen und Unbehagen hervor, auch wenn sie Intrigen und Neugierde hervorrufen.

Heiner Goebbels

The experience of things
Diese Dokumentation begleitet die Entstehung des Musiktheaterstücks „Stifters Dinge” von Heiner Goebbels und macht die Zuschauer zu Augen- und Ohrenzeugen eines kreativen Arbeitsprozesses, der den Künstler auch und vor allem als Techniker fordert: Ganz ohne Schauspieler und Musiker schafft Goebbels ein modernes multimediales Gesamtkunstwerk, das auf Texten Adalbert Stifters basiert und so unterschiedliche Elemente wie ethnografisch-historische Aufnahmen aus Papua-Neuguinea von 1905, automatisch spielende Klaviere und Geräusche von aneinander reibenden Betonplatten in der Tradition der musique concrète kombiniert und diese Tradition neu zu definieren vermag. Zur Londoner Premiere schrieb The Telegraph:” Stifter‘s Dinge: who cares what it is? It‘s terrific” – Stifters Dinge: Wen kümmert es, was das ist? Es ist großartig.

MARCO ROSO

disability foot work

The latest in a new breed of non-discriminating multimedia artists. She paints, draws, sculpts, makes videos, conceptual art, and net art all with her feet.

WIM VANDEKEYBUS & ULTIMA VEZ

MENSKE

Even the standing room only tickets have sold out, and the raging mass of disappointed kids looks like they may start a riot: the atmosphere before Ultima Vez’s performance is akin to a rock concert. Choreographer superstar Wim Vandekeybus’s company has toured the world with their trademark vocabulary of acrobatic, extreme, often violent movement, soaked in multimedia and energetic music. Menske (meaning approximately ‘little human’), their latest work, has all the typical flaws and qualities of classic Vandekeybus. On the conservative end of political intervention, Menske is an explosive concoction of brash statements about the state of the world today, a sequence of rapidly revolving scenes of conflicting logic: intimist, blockbuster, desperate, hysterical. The broad impression is not so much of a sociological portrait, but of a very personal anguish being exorcised right in front of us, as if Vandekeybus is constantly switching format in search of eloquence. Visually, it is stunning, filmic: a slum society falling apart through guerrilla warfare, in which girls handily assume the role of living, moving weapons. A woman descends into madness in an oneiric hospital, led by a costumed and masked group sharpening knives in rhythmic unison. A traumatised figure wanders the city ruins dictating a lamenting letter to invisible ‘Pablo.’ Men hoist a woman on a pole her whole body flapping like a flag. “It’s too much!” intrudes a stage hand, “Too much smoke, too much noise, too much everything!” And the scene responsively changes to a quiet soliloquy. At which point, however, does pure mimesis become complicit with the physical and psychological violence it strives to condemn? Unable to find its way out of visual shock, Menske never resolves into anything more than a loud admission of powerlessness.

doris chase

Circles II
Doris Chase has achieved international stature as a pioneer in the field of video art since she moved from Seattle to New York City in 1972. An artist of remarkable and continuous creativity, Chase now divides her time between her video headquarters in New York and a Seattle studio where she works on new projects in painting and sculpture.Beginning as an innovative painter and sculptor in Seattle in the 1950s, Chase created sculpture that was meant to be touched and manipulated by the viewer. Chase then developed large-scale kinetic sculptures in collaboration with choreographers, and her art was set in motion by dancers. In New York, her majors contribution to the evolution of artists’ video has been her work in videodance. On videotape, dancers and sculpture evolve into luminous abstract forms which represent some of the most sophisticated employments of video technology by an artist of the 1970s. In the 1980s, Chase began working in the nascent genre of video theater. In these productions, she uses the imtimacy of the video screen to achieve a new synthesis of visual and dramatic art. Her video theatre compositions present multicultural and social commentary, utilizing scripts by writers such as Lee Breuer, Thulani Davis, and Jessica Hagedorn in the “Concepts” series. Collaborating with actresses Geralding Page, Ann Jackson, Roberta Wallach, Joan Plowright, and Luise Riner in the “By Herself” series, she focuses on the viewpoints and experiences of older women. Today, coming full circle, Doris Chase in Seattle is exploring a renewed interest in painting and sculpture as well as in the modernist aesthetic she never really ceased pursuing, even during her most adventuresome multimedia years.

REYNALD DROUHIN

РЕЙНАЛЬД ДРУХИН
LANDSCAPE MONOLITH

MONOLITH is the title of French multimedia artist Reynald Drouhin’s latest art project which consists of a series of digitally manipulated images of stunning natural landscapes. In the middle of picturesque sunsets and serene Arctic landscapes, Drouhin pastes a mysterious prismatic shape and then flips it, thus creating a mind-boggling visual effect of an otherworldly transparent object hovering in desolate locations. The entire project is an ingenious appropriation of the famous monolith from Stanley Kubrick’s film ”2001: A Space Odyssey” where mysterious dark rectangular objects (dubbed as monoliths) were scattered across the solar system by an unknown alien civilisation which seemed to guide humans along a risky interplanetary journey. Reynald Drouhin’s MONOLITH series captures exactly the double nature of Kubrick’s monoliths: the inverted shapes in the photographs seem to be a window to another dimension, a physical anomaly which distorts the nature around it, and is both menacing and inviting.

REYNALD DROUHIN

Рейнальд Друхин

Der 1969 geborene zeitgenössische Künstler Reynald Drouhin lebt und arbeitet in Paris und unterrichtet Multimedia an der School of Fine Arts in Rennes. Er studierte Bildende Kunst an den Beaux-Arts de Paris (DNSAP und Masters in Hypermedia Multimedia, 1998) und an der Universität Paris 1 (Maîtrise, 1994). Seine Praxis umfasst digitale Werkzeuge, Fotografie, Video, Installation und Skulptur. Er ist nicht zufrieden mit einem dedizierten Raum (dem des Internets, einer Projektionsfläche oder der Räumlichkeit einer Galerie), sondern erfasst wiederum verschiedene Möglichkeiten und versucht so, etwas anderes als das Sichtbare zu enthüllen, wie einen parallelen Raum, gespenstisch, seltsam, oder er hat sich aus kodifizierten Daten ergeben. Er hat an Veranstaltungen teilgenommen, die von Digital Arti (2011), auf der Rennes Biennale (2010), beim File Festival (2013) Media Art, organisiert wurden. Ghost Walk “(2009) und„ Es war einmal… “(2007) in der Galerie der schönen Künste in Lorient („ Ohne Titel “, 2006) in der Galerie Biche de Bere („ Natural / Digital “, 2005), bei Confluences (2003), in der Public Gallery (2001), beim Belfort International Urban Multimedia Arts Festival (2000), auf der Montreal Biennale und bei der von Champ Libre organisierten internationalen Veranstaltung Video & Electronic Art (Montreal, 2000 und 1999) und bei ISEA (Chicago, 1997).

RICARDO BARRETO, MARIA HSU and AMUDI

feel Me tactile interactive bed
File Festival
“feelMe” is a work that for the first time remotely transmits the tactile sensation. Our work provokes the exploration of the sense of touch while promoting the interaction between two people mediated by a machine. The work is constituted of two surfaces, or “beds”: the first one (tactile transmission unit), in which one of the participants, layed down, imprints marks to its surface by pressing it with the weight and movement of the different parts of his/her body; these impressions will be captured and transmitted to the other participant, who lies in the second “bed” (tactile reception unit) and receives them simultaneously in the same positions and in proportional intensities, however, in negative, that is, when the surface in the first bed sinks, it rises in the second one, promoting a touch. The first body touches the second one, and the “beds” may be a few meters or thousands of kilometers apart from each other. Between the bodies, dozens of occult sensors, microcontrollers, engines (lineal actors), computers and a program that orchestrates that tactile communication. We allow the participant to experiment the possibilities of encounter between bodies through the digital world, with a different approach from the one provided by virtual reality. We want to explore the tactile perception separately in its “corporal way”, and only in future works to propose the expansion/extension of multimedia perception with the inclusion of tactile perception.

NANINE LINNING

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.