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VICTORINE MÜLLER

维克托里娜米勒
‘I’m interested in creating moments of sensitivity, moments when our defenses are down and we are open to new things. moments of powerful concentration. … I create zones, put forward pictures, show processes that touch the viewer, that invoke associations on various levels, transport people into a different state, so that things hidden may become visible, accessible, opening up possibilities – to demonstrate something that is not said and cannot be said, but that is’.

ANDY LOMAS

Morphogenetic Creations
Created by a mathematician, digital artist and Emmy award winning supervisor of computer generated effects – Andy Lomas, Morphogenetic Creations is a collection of works that explore the nature of complex forms that can be produced by digital simulation of growth systems. These pieces start with a simple initial form which is incrementally developed over time by adding iterative layers of complexity to the structure.The aim is to create structures emergently: exploring generic similarities between many different forms in nature rather than recreating any particular organism. In the process he is exploring universal archetypal forms that can come from growth processes rather than top-down externally engineered design.Programmed using C++ with CUDA, the series use a system of growth by deposition: small particles of matter are repeatedly deposited onto a growing structure to build incrementally over time. Rules are used to determine how new particles are created, and how they move before being deposited. Small changes to these rules can have dramatic effects on the final structure, in effect changing the environment in which the form is grown. To create these works, Andy uses the GPU as a compute device rather than as a display device. All the data is held in memory on the GPU and various kernel functions are called to do things like apply forces to the cells, make cells split, and to render the cells using ray-tracing. The simulations and rendering for each of the different animated structures within this piece take about 12 hours to run, Andy explains. By the end of the simulations there are over 50,000,000 cells in each structure.The Cellular Forms use a more biological model, representing a simplified system of cellular growth. Structures are created out of interconnected cells, with rules for the forces between cells, as well as rules for how cells accumulate internal nutrients. When the nutrient level in a cell exceeds a given threshold the cell splits into two, with both the parent and daughter cells reconnecting to their immediate neighbours. Many different complex organic structures are seen to arise from subtle variations on these rules, creating forms with strong reminiscences of plants, corals, internal organs and micro-organisms.

KANNO So / yang02

Avatars
For this installation, So Kanno + yang02 composed all kinds of differently sized objects, including a telephone, a traffic cone, a plaster figure, a car, and a plant. Cameras, microphones, monitors and microcomputers are embedded in everyday objects arranged in the exhibition space, and connected to the Internet. Visitors can experience the work by logging in to / riding each object via a web browser. Those objects exist as substitutes of – yet together with – real human beings (the visitors) in the same real environment that is subject to physical laws, rather than operating in a virtual space. Against the backdrop of the age of IoT, where all kinds of things are connected through networks, and artificial intelligence is about to mature, this work observes the new relationships that emerge when inorganic, non-autonomous objects transform into persons that act and perceive the world according to their own intentions.

wim wenders

two or three things i know about edward hopper
As part of their spring exhibition Edward Hopper, which focuses on the iconic representations of the infinite expanse of American landscapes and cityscapes of one of the 20th century’s most important American painters, the Fondation Beyeler in Basel will show Wim Wenders’ new 3D film installation.
Organized by the Fondation Beyeler in cooperation with the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the major repository of Hopper’s work.

Fred Sandback

Untitled
Sandback did not try to ground his art in history or theory alone, but followed a very personal approach. Growing up, he had an uncanny fascination with things that were strung. According to his own accounts he liked to watch his uncle Fred, an antiques dealer, cane chairs, and he remembered being captivated as a child by a museum exhibition on how to make snowshoes. As a camp counselor in New Hampshire, he loved archery and began making his own bows. He also seems to have been interested in straight lines; as a freshman in college, he carved a tall, narrow cat out of wood, prefiguring a lifelong interest in linear forms.

Chad Knight

Reconcile
“I think I became a visual artist at conception[…] It is more who I am as a person than what I do. However, the reason I make digital art is that I have a very overactive, noisy mind. Creating modern art is one of the few things that allow me to present. I skateboarded professionally for 16 years. During that time, it served as my creative outlet. Now that I do not have the opportunity to do it as often, combined with being less enthusiastic about broken bones, my visual art explorations have become my new outlet.”

Joe Diebes

Oyster
oyster is a new opera (in progress) about a surprising precursor to last.fm and Pandora. In the 1960’s, renowned American folklorist Alan Lomax developed a wildly ambitious system called cantometrics for coding and analyzing folk songs from every corner of the world. The opera is structured as a public lecture of Alan Lomax’s folk song analysis as demonstrated by four singers, who embody the IBM360 mainframe computer used to correlate his vast amounts of data. Working with the BOTCH vocal ensemble, I am reconstructing the folksong styles from regions as disparate as Bali, West Africa, and Central America using only the data from Lomax’s study. Things like melodic complexity, vocal blend, and nasality, are adjusted by the singers as they circumnavigate the globe. This data vocalization is further mediated by the ensemble’s distinctive extended vocal techniques, and is accompanied by a film narrative that unravels connections between cybernetics, surrealism and ethnography. The film also features a wide range of material drawn from the Alan Lomax archive at The Library of Congress.
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oyster will be performed by BOTCH ensemble: Christina Campanella, Michael Chinworth, John Rose, and Saori Tsukada

SUSAN CLUSENER

Fruit Series
“I am fascinated by the physical-ness of things: how a flame moves, how trees bend, how water feels on the skin. I am especially fascinated by the invisible forces at work in living things. In particular, those forces associated with growth and renewal, but also its other side, death and decay.”

WIN VANDEKEYBUS & ULTIMA VEZ

SPIEGEL
‘I like to challenge my obsessions by imposing new rules on them,’ he says. The easy way is never an option: ‘I like things difficult, so as to be able to enjoy it afterwards and to be able to say that it was all worthwhile.’
Which is why, after 25 years of Ultima Vez, Vandekeybus still loves creating performances. ‘Sometimes I can’t face the start of the process. There’s always that stress and sleepless nights with five ideas running around in my head at the same time, but then the production’s own world takes shape and it instantly becomes captivating and fun again.’

Peter Flemming

Canoe
The work here in Dawson is like an old vehicle in which I’ve put a new engine. Entitled Canoe, it consists of an approximately 20 foot long trough of water, that resembles some kind of boat. This provides a means for a gunwales tracking mechanism to slowly, endlessly paddle its way back and forth. It was first constructed in 2001 in a studio beside Halifax harbour. It draws visual inspiration from the bridges and water vessels of this port. Conceptually, it grew from an interest in technological obsolescence: how things (like canoes) make shifts from utility to leisure.
It has experienced several major rebuilds since 2001. Most of them have been practical, but for Dawson I’ve opted for an experimental configuration that changes significantly the nature of the work. Previously, Canoe has only ever been shown indoors. Normally in runs on rechargeable batteries, with a continuous, smooth motion. In Dawson, it is shown outdoors, alongside the Yukon river, showing up in an absurd way the paleness of its artificial river. Here, the primary source of power is sunlight.
Making use of the long northern day, solar panels receive light, storing energy in an array of super-capacitor cells. At this time, Canoe remains still. A custom circuit monitors the amount of charge, and when a predetermined trigger point is reached, it is dumped into Canoe’s electric motor in a burst, allowing it to make a few strokes. Then Canoe rests, while the charging cycle begins again. Motion is intermittent, entirely dependent on the amount and intensity of sunlight. It ranges from near standstill in overcast conditions to perhaps 1 or 2 strokes every minute in full light. The technical term for this type of circuit is a relaxation oscillator. I like this term because, if you remove it from its technical context, it points back to ideas about leisure and utility.

Mo H. Zareei

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.

Richard Vijgen

The Architecture of Radio
In case you’ve ever wondered exactly what lies beyond the realm of the visible, Dutch designer Richard Vijgen has created a new app that is able to visually portray the network of radio waves that lies below the surface. The app was created as a part of Vijgen’s new ”The Architecture of Radio” exhibition at Germany’s ZKM, and combines technologies from GPS, OpenCellID, and NASA’s public satellite feeds to amalgamate a rendering of the data webs all around us. The app was intended to give a physical portrait of the very data waves that rule the modern day, according to Vijgen: “We cannot see the very thing that is defining our time, and that concerns me.” The designer went on to note “as technology is becoming more and more transparent, I think data visualization can help us to relate to things that are invisible, yet play an important role in our lives.”

Du Zhenjun

Babel

The first synonym for disorder that appears in the dictionary is babel, with a lowercase letter
Du Zhenjun transforms the world into a new tower of Babel, but don’t you think this Earth already is? Isn’t there already too much disorder, injustice and misunderstanding?
The first synonym for disorder that appears in the dictionary is babel, with a lowercase letter. Nor are all the consequences of the confusion wanted by God here, as if to justify this adjective. We embody pride and supremacy over the world, the same one that He wanted us to inhabit.
In the images proposed by Du Zhenjun we observe a standard composition: in the center there is always an interpretation of the Tower, various shapes, various structures, various visions. Then a gray atmosphere hovers all around, the atmosphere of reality. A mass of things, people and buildings. They are parts of photographs, or rather of journalistic reports, of war and more.
We do not identify the origin of the light source, it is in the air: everything is illuminated, as in the composite prints of the late nineteenth century, ancestors of photomontage.

Mette Ingvartsen

The Artificial Nature Project
In The Artificial Nature Project a new encounter between human and non- human performers emerges from the following questions:What does it mean to make a choreography for materials where human movement is no longer in the center of attention?How can one address the force of things, materials, objects and matters as something that acts upon humans?What is the relationship between the animate and the inanimate world?
The outcome is a performance that literally throws things around. Materials fly through the air giving rise to a landscape that constantly transforms itself. Throughout the performance the view is persistently changing: a calm contemplative site may turn into an energetic chaos of stuff being projected into space. Or, a flood wave becomes a storm of confetti whirling through the air, rushing over the stage. The theater stage gets covered with and traversed by various objects and raw materials, creating a disastrous mess of small, thick, light, big, heavy, thin, breakable and resistant things.

HANNES VAN SEVEREN

“Hannes Van Severen makes the connection between reality and imagination in his work. The artist starts with an existing, everyday object, usually a piece of furniture, which he then transforms and changes. In this way, he deprives the object of its original functionality and allows its aesthetic value to prevail. As a result, the original usefulness of the everyday object no longer predominates, but his work nevertheless continues to be a visual reference to the original. With this paradoxical construction, Hannes Van Severen creates a fictitious world of images with alternative, intrinsic meanings and potential. The observer has to let go of the explanatory and allow his or her imagination to take flight. In combination with the personal experience of the observer, a richer dimension of the reality experienced will emerge with the new reading and interpretation of things that are apparently obvious. With this transformation, Van Severen wants to break down our recognition, to question the obviousness of our reality, and to show us the absurdity that surrounds us. Like the cubists and the surrealists, the artist divides into pieces and rearranges  an existing reality, which means that he can be described as a saboteur of the obvious.” Stef Van Bellingen

LARRY FLINT

What A Way To Go!(Movie)
painting machines (Scene)

Paul Newman as “Larry Flint”, an ex-patriot artist living in Paris. Shirley MacLaine as “Louisa”, looking for the simple life._”Larry” develops abstract painting machines consisting of a controllable arm with a paint-brush “hand”._He explains to “Louisa”, “The sonic vibrations that go in there. And that gets transmitted to this photoelectric cell which gives those dynamic impulses to the brushes and the arms. And it’s a fusion of a mechanised world and a human soul.””Larry” uses a siren, horn, alarm bell, bongo, sledge hammer and a pneumatic jack hammer amongst other things as random sound sources for his abstract art.