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Robert Henke

Phosphor
Focused rays of ultraviolet light paint temporary landscapes on a layer of phosphorous dust on the museum floor. Operating on concepts of erosion and mutation, the installation changes its behaviour and visual appearance during the exhibition period. Each trace of light leaves a mark on a virtual mountain range, like water slowly washing out deep canyons. With a little help from alchemy and quantum physics, matter acquired a memory: translating time into space

Kate Cooper

Infection Drivers
Infection Drivers (2019) explores the body under attack. In this work, a CGI figure struggles to move and breathe in a translucent suit, which takes her body through transmutations of stereotypically masculine and feminine physiques as it inflates and deflates. In a time of increased public surveillance through facial-recognition software and biometric data  mining, Cooper’s high-definition world invites us to investigate and perhaps find freedom in the technologies often used to constrain us.

Playmodes Studio

“Espills” is a solid light dynamic sculpture. Built using laser beams, laser scanners and robotic mirrors, it is inspired by crystalline formations. A set of geometric figures that float in the air and which suggest, in an abstract way, the transmutation of matter from chaos to order. Dust becoming crystal, being eroded and becoming sand again.

MATTHIJS MUNNIK

Microscopic Opera

Les micro-organismes peuvent-ils aussi être des artistes? Comment notre relation à ces créatures change-t-elle, après qu’elles sont vues dans un contexte artistique et théâtral? À la recherche d’un micro-organisme qui aurait les qualités d’un interprète, j’ai été présenté à C. elegans; un petit ver, de moins d’un millimètre de longueur, qui se déplaçait aussi élégant que son nom l’indique et la première créature à avoir séquencé tout son génome. J’ai été intrigué lorsqu’un chercheur m’a dit que, pour distinguer les vers au microscope, il utilisait différentes mutations qui modifiaient la façon dont ils se déplaçaient. Certains se déplacent en spirale, d’autres ont roulé ou ont des contractions et certains sont devenus morbides obèses à cause de leurs mutations. Dans mon installation, j’ai cinq boîtes de Pétri remplies de cinq vers mutés différents, chacun se déplaçant légèrement différemment. Ces cinq groupes d’interprètes sont filmés avec un microscope USB diffusé en direct sur les cinq écrans. J’ai écrit un logiciel spécial qui suit les vers et traduit leurs mouvements en sons, faisant d’eux les interprètes non avertis de la musique dans le monde macroscopique au-dessus de leurs têtes. Alors que les chercheurs sont presque comme des dieux pour ces vers impuissants, les contrôlant de leur première à leur dernière division cellulaire , j’espérais donner aux vers le pouvoir de nous affecter également dans notre monde.

Claire Malrieux

Climat General College des Bernardins
Se référant à l’« Hypothèse Gaïa » de James Lovelock, Malrieux transforme la figure de Gaïa en une machine climatique autonome qui affiche un espace dynamique et organique, construit selon des flux de données empruntés aux principaux modèles climatiques prédictifs. A travers différents scénarios programmatiques, l’artiste met en évidence l’influence de l’homme sur son environnement, un environnement en perpétuelle mutation dont la fin ne peut être programmée. Car si l’entrée dans l’anthropocène marque la fin d’une Terre en extension, elle marque surtout le début d’autre chose : une situation différente dans le temps et dans l’espace. Un espace où le décor est en mouvance et dans lequel l’histoire humaine s’adapte et évolue.
L’usage simultané du dessin et des algorithmes permet de visualiser des interactions et des causes à effets habituellement invisibles, de les décoder et d’en interroger les enjeux.

Ian Cheng

BOB

Cheng’s work explores mutation, the history of human consciousness and our capacity as a species to relate to change. Drawing on principles of video game design, improvisation and cognitive science, Cheng develops live simulations – virtual ecosystems of infinite duration, populated with agents who are programmed with behavioural drives but left to self-evolve without authorial intent, following the unforgiving causality found in nature.

Photo: Andrea Rossetti

Driessens & Verstappen

Breed
Breed (1995-2007) is a computer program that uses artificial evolution to grow very detailed sculptures. The purpose of each growth is to generate by cell division from a single cell a detailed form that can be materialised. On the basis of selection and mutation a code is gradually developed that best fulfils this “fitness” criterion and thus yields a workable form. The designs were initially made in plywood. Currently the objects can be made in nylon and in stainless steel by using 3D printing techniques. This automates the whole process from design to execution: the industrial production of unique artefacts.
Computers are powerful machines to harness artificial evolution to create visual images. To achieve this we need to design genetic algorithms and evolutionary programs. Evolutionary programs allow artefacts to be “bred”, rather than designing them by hand. Through a process of mutation and selection, each new generation is increasingly well adapted to the desired “fitness” criteria. Breed is an example of such software that uses Artificial Evolution to generate detailed sculptures. The algorithm that we designed is based on two different processes: cell-division and genetic evolution.

Nick Ervinck

Plant Mutation
The idea of mutation and manipulation has always appealed to Nick Ervinck’s imagination. In the ‘plant mutation’ series, he uses 3D experiments to explore ideas of both organic and genetically engineered life forms. Nick Ervinck created an openness that will attract the viewer to consider his work from different angles. These works have both a poetic and a critical social dimension. On the one hand, the sculptural contradictions, such as inside/outside and rough/smooth, make these works purely poetic. The visual language of these organic sculptures has a surprising impact.

Eirik Brandal

Waldian
Waldian is a standalone, wall hanging sound and light fixture capable of playing a near infinite amount of melodic permutations over a predetermined musical scale, complemented by emerging light patterns from twelve separate LEDs spread across the sculpture. In technical terms, Waldian contains two oscillators, an envelope generator and a voltage controlled amplifier, all controlled by impulses from a network of logic gates akin to those of early computers. These impulses are essentially the nerves in the electronic ecosystem, deciding over pitch and amplitude changes as well as creating bursts of light to highlight the entrances of each note. Finally, there is a tube overdrive stage that creates harmonic and subharmonics based on how far away the two oscillators are from each other in frequency. Most parameters are customizable, such as the aforementioned pitch, amplitude and overdrive, but the responsiveness and envelope of the light bursts can also be adjusted, directly affecting the appearance of the light patterns.

nohlab

prima materia

Prima materia, as the first element, the ubiquitous starting material required for the alchemical processes, reveal transformation of our times.The matter of all forms create various transmutations, attached to laboratory processes, form and color changes in 3D, used as a model for the individuation process, and as a device in art and technology.That pure matter, existing in nature, is converted to other imperfect bodies that it interacts with, and this way is rediscovered and brought to the front by art and technology.

Nicolas Sassoon and Rick Silva

Signals
SIGNALS is a collaborative project by artists Nicolas Sassoon and Rick Silva that focuses on immersive audio-visual renderings of altered seascapes. Sassoon and Silva share an ongoing theme in their individual practices; the depiction of wilderness and natural forms through computer imaging. Created by merging their respective fields of visual research, SIGNALS features oceanic panoramas inhabited by unnatural substances and enigmatic structures. The project draws from sources such as oceanographic surveys, climate studies and science-fiction to create 3D generated video works and installations that reflect on contamination, mutation and future ecologies.

Navid Navab

Aquaphoneia
Aquaphoneia is an alchemical installation centred around the poiesis of time and transmutation of voice into matter. A large horn floating mid space echoes the ghosts of Edison, Bell, and Berliner’s machines. But unlike early recording, herding sound energy to etch pressure patterns in solid matter, this odd assemblage transmutes voice into water and water into air. Disembodied voices abandon their sources to cross the event horizon of the horn. Estranged, the schizo-phone falls into the narrow depths of the bell, squeezed into spatiotemporal infinity, calcinated, liquified and released: The aqueous voice then flows into three alchemical chambers where inner time is surrendered to the tempi of matter: unbound, yet lucid and sound.

MATHILDE ROUSSEL

ماتيلد روسيل
玛蒂尔德罗素
Матильда Руссель
Lifes of Grass
Mathilde Roussel est une artiste française travaillant à Paris. Son travail “questionne la nature humaine dans ce qu’elle a de plus imperceptible”. Chacune de ses œuvres dévoile en effet des évolutions, mutations souvent discrètes qui s’opèrent pourtant en chacun de nous. Pour ce faire, ses installations reposent le plus souvent sur des matériaux et idées très simples mais néanmoins frappantes..

Tatsumi Hijikata

Hosotan

Hijikata conceived of Ankoku Butoh from its origins as an outlaw form of dance-art, and as constituting the negation of all existing forms of Japanese dance. Inspired by the criminality of the French novelist Jean Genet, Hijikata wrote manifestoes of his emergent dance form with such as titles as ‘To Prison’. His dance would be one of corporeal extremity and transmutation, driven by an obsession with death, and imbued with an implicit repudiation of contemporary society and media power. Many of his early works were inspired by figures of European literature such as the Marquis de Sade and the Comte de Lautréamont, as well as by the French Surrealist movement, which had exerted an immense influence on Japanese art and literature, and had led to the creation of an autonomous and influential Japanese variant of Surrealism, whose most prominent figure was the poet Shuzo Takiguchi, who perceived Ankoku Butoh as a distinctively ‘Surrealist’ dance-art form.

LAB[AU]

Calculations, permutations and notations
LAb|au| developed a transdisciplinary and collaborative approach based on different artistic, scientific and theoretic methods, examining the transformation of architecture and spatio-temporal structures in accordance to the technological progress within a practice entitled ‘MetaDeSIGN’. Metadesign [ meta = information about information ] displays the theme of space-constructs relative to information processes – architecture as a code. It concerns the transposition of inFORMational processes in n-dimensional form.

JON RAFMAN

New Age Demanded
“Inspired by classical Greek busts, Jon Rafman uses computer software to digitally render three-dimensional forms. The forms act as the structural surface on which two-dimensional Internet-sourced images are applied. The series is presented as large-scale archival pigment digital prints. Each print is created with its own specific texture and sculptural mutation. Rafman uses historically recognizable works from canonized artists like Mark Rothko, Georgia O’Keeffe, Piet Mondrian, and Wassily Kandinsky as the subjects of his appropriations.”

MOTOHIKO ODANI

元彦小谷美纱
小谷元彦
Мотохико Одани
Phantom Limb

Motohiko Odani est un artiste japonais vivant à Tokyo où il expose régulièrement ses oeuvres. Multi disciplinaire, ce créatif s’exprime aussi bien en sculpture, photographie ou vidéo, où il traite de la mutation des hommes et des animaux. Ses sculptures, à la fois étranges et fascinantes, s’inspirent de mondes fantastiques et ne peuvent laisser indifférent.

EXONEMO

Body Paint
series (white)

Exonemo’s work allows the public to take some sort of revenge at technologies that are increasingly complex and important in our daily life, demystifying it through destruction, error and mutation processes before eventually reappropriating it in a creative way. Akaiwa and Sembo never consider progress an end in itself, but as an ever changing tool retaining the power to break the conscience of both the artist and public, increasing it tenfold with a heavy dose of unexpected and creating a new beauty.

Arnold Schönberg

In a twelve-tone composition, every note can be accounted for as being a member of the original series or one of its permutations, providing unity to the piece as a whole. Additionally, a twelve-tone series is a repository of intervals and can be seen as an outgrowth of atonal music with its emphasis on interval over chord or scale. The basic premises of twelve-tone music are as follows: 1- All twelve notes of the chromatic scale must occur; 2-No note can be repeated in the series until the other 11 notes of the chromatic scale have occurred (exceptions include direct repetition of a note, trills, and tremolos); 3-The series can be inverted, retrograded, and the inversion can be retrograded; 4-The order of notes in a series remains fixed, without reordering.

GIUSEPPE RANDAZZO

Джузеппе Рандаццо
transmutation
Transmutation#01 is a generative system composed of two interacting multicellular agents in a Voronoi spatial configuration. Each cell owns a color/saturation information. The cells interact with each other and with the other agent. The two agents are different. The circular one, the most active and in evolution, constantly tries to reorganize its shape and color structures, connecting similar colors in concentric formations. Moreover the saturation and shape of its colors aggregates are influenced by the duration and proximity of the interaction with the other pluricellular agent, whose motion is abstract and immutable. The metaphor at the heart of this system is a reference to the subject of the 2012 Gender Docufilm Festival in Rome, from which the video was commissioned, that precisely addresses the issues related to the the reengineering and the transmutation of the sexual, physical, mental identity, through the collision / confrontation with the external reality. Coded with Processing, rendered with 3Delight (via Processing). In collaboration with Filippo Ulivieri, music by Massimo Dolce.

KIMIKO YOSHIDA

كيميكو يوشيدا
吉田公子
키미코 요시다
קימיקו יושידה
КИМИКО ЙОШИДА

A unique artist with sophisticated style, Yoshida’s Asian influenced self portraits are unprecedented. Her work evokes pertinent questions as to the role of women in modern Asia and is strongly driven by feelings of transformation and fleeting:
“ … when I was three, my mother threw me out of the house. I left clutching a box filled with all my treasures. I went to a public park. The police found me there the next day. Since then, I’ve always felt nomadic, errant, fleeing.”
“Art is above all the experience of transformation. Transformation is, it seems to me, the ultimate value of the work. Art for me has become a space of shifting metamorphosis. My Self-portraits … are only the place and the formula of the mutation.”

De Ceulaer Maarten

Mutation Series – Sofa

« I try to base my designs on a strong, simple and pure concept. I want to surprise, to make people smile in a very subtle way. I try to question what I see around me, and translate that in an object. I think poetry, humour and communication of ideas are very important aspects of my designs, but at the same time I want to make useful and functional objects with that way of thinking. Conceptual as they may start, my designs have to be more then just ideas. A good concept in a good product is what I try to achieve. » De Ceulaer Maarten

GILES ASKHAM

Aquaplayne
file festival

Aquaplayne lays out a new field of expression by extending the framework for immediate experience. The horizontal plane bypasses recognition and “sets up” an interactive surface, making a play of art by providing the viewer with instant access to the creative flow. In the movement from observation to participation we interface with an intelligent canvas through the automatic rendering of action into effect. The “body in motion” plays across a field of sensation, making the ripples of possibility appear as an ever-changing artwork. Unlike the action painter, whose technique is to offload creative energy in the painterly gesture, the activator retrieves what has already been deposited as data and brings it to the surface, aquaplaning on a stream of information. The virtual is restored to the actuality of expression, brought back to life in the flux between cause and effect, between code and composition. The calibrated experience of Aquaplayne is the art of permutation, the programmed initiative played and replayed as the artwork in formation.

VOLKER KUCHELMEISTER

transmutation
In the weird and wonderful world of quantum mechanics, dimensional transmutation describes a phenomena which changes the state of a parameter by adding dimensions to its dimensionless condition. This experimental film applies this principle to visualize the complex interactions between atmosphere and climate. It utilizes a six-dimensional framework, comprised of regular space-time augmented with climate data collected between 1993 and 2011.Changes in global tropospheric temperature, mean sea level, and atmospherical co2 concentration are mapped onto the color palette, shape, and stereoscopic depth of a video clip, depicting a low-lying shoreline in Indonesia, threatened by rising sea levels.The film begins ‘flat’, but over time, with increasing co2 concentration in the atmosphere, its stereoscopic depth expands, and the landscape opens up to the observer, while temperature and sea-level changes modify color and shape.