Return to Sender
Disarm music box
For the work group Disarm, he was able to use 6,700 weapons confiscated in the Mexican drug war and transform these into musical instruments[…] They play well-known, classical music pieces from the respective manufacturer’s country of origin. A musical box made with Glock pistol parts plays Mozart, Beretta barrels Vivaldi, while Reyes’s weapon of choice for Swiss songwriter Mani Matter is the Carabine. Reyes is concerned with «upcycling» – transforming an instrument of death into a musical instrument that stands for dialog and exchange. He undertakes this transformation process with the conviction that the physical act is always accompanied by an idealistic one and appeals to the spiritual dimension of this quasi-alchemical operation towards the good.

Disappearance

In this work the movement of a large video monitor mounted on an industrial fork-lift truck creates a virtual representation of a larger than life size ballerina. As the forklift moves the monitor up and down the ballerina is presented from head to toe, and as the forklift truck rotates the ballerina also appears to turn. In this way the monitor functions as a window that gradually reveals the virtual presence of the ballerina who is dancing in the same axis as the rotating forklift truck. Also visible inside the motor compartment of the forklift truck is a small rotating ballerina figurine in front of which a video camera moves up and down. This mechanism is electronically synchronised with the movement of the forklift itself and provides the closed circuit source for the video image of the ballerina that is seen on the monitor screen. Disappearance evokes and celebrates the memory of the ballerina on a music box (a first generation robot) and generates her virtual reconstruction to the extent that the machinery of reproduction itself now incarnates her pirouettes.
video

The Coppelia Project
via highlike submit
The Coppelia Project is inspired by the story about a clockwork girl from the 1870 ballet ‘Coppelia’ by Saint-Léon, Nuitter, and Delibes, based on a story by Hoffmann. It also draws the commonplace metaphor of clockwork music boxes, with the little ballerinas that pop up and rotate in front of a mirror when you open the lid. Coppelia is part of the traditional classical ballet repertoire and is performed frequently by ballet companies around the world. It belongs to a small group of enduring stories in Western Culture that directly address the limits of humanity when confronted by our creations. The Coppelia story is unusual in approaching this theme through love and attraction, rather than horror and revulsion, as emphasised by Mary Shelly in ‘Frankenstein’. The Coppelia story deals with some of the issues at the edge of humanity; machines interchangeable with persons, love and attraction confused at this boundary.

Дэйв Коул
the music box

‘the music box’, a monumental sculptural piece commissioned by the cleveland institute of art and developed in partnership with ohio CAT, sees the american artist dismantling a 22, 000 lb steamroller in which he refabricates more than 80% of the machine–though still maintaining its identifiable physical qualities–transforming it into a fully functioning musical box, and at a fraction of its original weight.
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Serendiptichord

The result of a cross-disciplinary investigation spanning fashion, technology, music and dance, the Serendiptichord is a wearable musical instrument that invites the user (or movician) to explore a soundscape through touch and movement. This curious device is housed in a bespoke box and viewed as part of a performance. Unpacked and explored on and around the body, the Serendiptichord only reveals its full potential through the intrepid curiosity of its wearer. Adhering to the body like an extended limb, this instrument is best described as choreophonic prosthetic. Referencing the architectural silhouette of a musical instrument and the soft fabrication of fashion and upholstery, it is designed to entice the movician to explore its surface through touch, physical manipulation and expressive movement. Although this acoustic device can be mastered alone, it also holds subtle openings for group interaction.

ROSA
A short film based on the work of choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker to Bartók music
Rosa (1992 ; ca. 16 min., b&w ; letterboxed format) / La Monnaie/De Munt & Rosas ; based on a choreography by Anpeter-greenaway-and-anne-teresa-de-keersmaekerne Teresa de Keersmaeker in collaboration with Jean-Luc Ducourt ; with Fumiyo Ikeda, Nordine Benchorf ; directed by Peter Greenaway ; a production of Entropie

MANSAI: Kaitai-Shinsho No.30 Special Edition “5W1H”
5W refers to the five interrogatives; “When, Where, Who, What and Why”, while 1H refers to the interrogative “How”. In this work, Manabe attempts to encode humans’ attitudes to these six enquiry words in an effort to explore the primitive roots of interpersonal expression, and illuminate the fundamental sources of human behavior. By converting such factors into numerical information, while drawing also on analog thinking, the piece is a search for further understanding human nature.
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Planned by Mansai Nomura
Visual Design/Technical Direction：Daito Manabe＋Motoi Ishibashi＋Rhizomatiks Research
Music: Daito Manabe + Hopebox
Cast: Mansai Nomura, Yuichi Otsuki, Mansaku no kai

with Allen Ginsberg
Hydrogen Jukebox
The creation of the chamber opera Hydrogen Jukebox can be traced to a chance meeting in 1988 between composer Philip Glass and poet Allen Ginsberg at the now defunct St. Mark’s Bookshop in New York City’s East Village. When Ginsberg plucked a book with a copy of his 1966 antiwar poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra” off the shelf and said he’d be reading it at a Broadway theater, Glass decided to compose a piano piece to accompany the reading. The collaboration was a success, so the two decided to expand the performance into a longer music-theater work. The result, Hydrogen Jukebox, a rarely performed piece for six voices and a chamber ensemble[…]

Hieronymus B
Nanine Linning consciously leaves the beaten theatrical path with her artistic vision by intensely integrating dance, design, video, music, visual arts and fashion. Her extremely physical choreographies and out of the box events make reference to human instincts and emotions as well as aspects of cultural history and social criticism.

Rasper
Rasping Music is an audiovisual installation in appreciation of the ignored aural/visual phenomena surrounding our daily lives. It involves new mechatronic instruments that employ some everyday objects of the urban life, shifting the medium in which they normally exist, and formalizing them through patterns of a rhythmic grid. In these instruments, DC motors and actuators are detached from the realm in which they are tools to help run our machines––where their noise is merely the aural artifact of the urban technology––, and turned into amedium for sound/music. In contrast to their everyday location, i.e., hidden inside black boxes of our machines, their bodily existence is fully exposed, flaunting the physicality of their noise. This physicality is further highlighted in arrays of white light, which––unlike the florescent lights of our offices––are not there to help us see things, but to be seen themselves.

ТОМ БЕДДАРД
box pyramid 1

Dopo il dottorato, il mondo del boom di Internet “dot-com” era più attraente del mondo accademico, quindi Tom è diventato uno sviluppatore web specializzato in sistemi di gestione dei contenuti di e-commerce. Negli ultimi dieci anni Tom ha lavorato per una varietà di agenzie in Scozia e ora lavora attualmente alla 55 Degrees di Glasgow, specializzata in mostre museali interattive e produzione video. Tom si considera un “programmatore creativo”, un tecnico che apprezza anche l’estetica. Il suo sito, subblue.com, è dove scrive programmi e plugin che esplorano la grafica matematica e generativa. Ove possibile, questi esperimenti sono interattivi e hanno il codice sorgente disponibile per il download. L’esposizione del suo sito e dei plug-in Photoshop e After Effects che ha rilasciato hanno portato alla creazione di copertine di libri, video musicali e immagini di scena.

Crystal Aqua Trees
Installed in Sony Square in Tokyo and on display until January 14, the ‘Crystal Aqua Trees’ is a crystal work of art inspired by the concept of a fountain that can be seen as a spray of water as well as a Christmas tree. Designed by Torafu Architects, the project was inspired by the Trevi fountain in Rome, the “Ai no Izumi” (Fountain of Love) charity drive, which has been held by Sony every year since 1968. For this edition, the architects proposed a new embodiment as an interactive installation. More images and architects’ description after the break.In response to changes in the landscape of the street and the actions of people, the illumination will play beautiful music in harmony with a gorgeous light display. The movement of people is picked up by a sensor camera, which prompts the pillars of light illuminated by LEDs to change colors to create a glimmering structure.Whenever coins are deposited in the crystal donation box placed in front of the square, the installation responds by switching to a special performance, as if acknowledging the contributions made. Like water in a fountain, the polished black floor surface of the stage reflects the illumination, creating a wonderful scene in the middle of the streets of Ginza.