IN MEMORIAM
Joachim Sauter

1959-2021

R.I.P

ART+COM Studios

MOBILITY
THE INSTALLATION SPANS A CORRIDOR OF 7-METRES WIDTH. ON THE LEFT WALL ONE HUNDRED PROSTHETIC HANDS ARRANGED IN A MATRIX REVOLVE AROUND THEIR OWN VERTICAL AXIS, THE MOVEMENTS BEING CONTROLLED BY MOTORS. THE MIRRORS THEY HOLD REFLECT THE BEAM OF A STRONG LIGHT ACROSS THE SPACE AND ONTO THE OPPOSITE WALL. WHAT INITIALLY SEEMS LIKE AN ASYNCHRONOUS, CHAOTIC PATTERN OF MOVEMENT SOON REVEALS ITSELF AS A COMPLEX, COMPUTATIONAL
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流动性
该安装跨越了7米宽的走廊。在左墙上，排列成矩阵的一百个假肢手绕其自身的垂直轴旋转，其运动由电动机控制。他们持有的镜子将强光光束反射穿过整个空间并射向对面的墙壁。最初看起来像是一个异步的，混乱的运动模式，很快就显示出一种复杂的计算编排：首先，一百个光点围绕一个中心点移动，类似于行星的天体动力学或昆虫群的飞行模式。并创造出三维空间的印象。然后突然之间，这种有机振动会聚成一个表示运动和动作的汉字。

STEVE WILHITE
R.I.P
dancing baby
GIF (JIF)
graphics interchange format

The inventor of the Gif file has revealed that the world has been mispronouncing his creation.
Steve Wilhite, who invented the Gif file in 1987, told the New York Times that the word is pronounced “jif” not “giff”.
“The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations. They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story,” he said.
The internet has reacted strongly to Wilhite’s claim, pointing to a range of evidence from the White House announcing their allegiance via a note on their Tumblr: “Animated GIFs (Hard ‘G’)”, to simple common consensus.
Others have suggested that the hard ‘G’ relates to the acronym that the word springs from, which stands for Graphical Interface Format.
The Gif has enjoyed a surge of success in the last five years thanks to Buzzfeed-style listings of puppies and kittens and ‘live-giffing’, a form of on-the-spot reporting that had its first major outing during the 2012 presidential debates.
Wilhite may be the parent of the Gif, but most agree that the creation has outgrown its creator.
When even the White House is on the other side of the debate, it seems it might be best if Wilhite concedes defeat with grace.

Quantum memories
Quantum Memories is Refik Anadol Studio’s epic scale investigation of the intersection between Google AI Quantum Supremacy experiments, machine learning, and aesthetics of probability. Technological and digital advancements of the past century could as well be defined by the humanity’s eagerness to make machines go to places that humans could not go, including the spaces inside our minds and the non-spaces of our un- or sub-conscious acts. Quantum Memories utilizes the most cutting-edge, Google AI’s publicly available quantum computation research data and algorithms to explore the possibility of a parallel world by processing approximately 200 million nature and landscape images through artificial intelligence. These algorithms allow us to speculate alternative modalities inside the most sophisticated computer available, and create new quantum noise-generated datasets as building blocks of these modalities. The 3D visual piece is accompanied by an audio experience that is also based on quantum noise–generated data, offering an immersive experience that further challenges the notion of mutual exclusivity. The project is both inspired by and a speculation of the Many-Worlds Interpretation in quantum physics – a theory that holds that there are many parallel worlds that exist at the same space and time as our own.

OCULUS
OCULUS: A Spatial Experience Based on the Interaction of Architecture and Media Arts
An audio-visual performance based on a selection of HAS Architects works interpreted by NOHlab and Buşra Tunç
A selection of HAS Architects’ projects is presented in a performance that blends digital technology with spatial design, forming a synthesis between the past and the present within the magical atmosphere of the historical Single- Dome Hall of the Imperial Arsenal.
Taking the Single-Dome Hall as the focal point, the exhibition uses contemporary interpretations to alternate between old and new, whole and fragment, real and virtual, balanced and unbalanced states. Notions of time and space become blurred and the exhibition surrounds the visitors, offering them an unusual spatial experience.

OCULUS
Oculus was a site-specific installation designed for Istanbul Design Biennale in 2016, and exhibited in Tophane-i Amire. A selection of HAS Architects’ projects is presented in a performance that blends digital technology with spatial design, forming a synthesis between the past and the present within the magical atmosphere of the historical Single-Dome Hall of the Imperial Arsenal. Taking the Single-Dome Hall as the focal point, the exhibition uses contemporary interpretations to alternate between old and new, whole and fragment, real and virtual, balanced and unbalanced states. Notions of time and space become blurred and the exhibition surrounds the visitors, offering them an unusual spatial experience.

Cloud
The hand-bent steel substructure of the sculpture is covered in a skin of incandescent light bulbs (new and burnt out), and rear-lit from within by 250 compact fluorescent bulbs, pulling a total power of approximately 20 amps (the equivalent of two household outlets  ).Each of these bulbs is attached to a pull-string, allowing viewers to control the illumination of the structure – like lightning in the CLOUD above them.

St. Vincent – New York

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New York isn’t New York
Without you, love
So far in a few blocks
To be so low
And if I call you from First Avenue
Where you’re the only motherfucker in the city
Who can handle me

New love
Wasn’t true love
Back to you, love
So much for a home run
With some blue bloods
If I last-strawed you on 8th Avenue
Where you’re the only motherfucker in the city
Who can stand me

I have lost a hero
I have lost a friend
But for you, darling
I’d do it all again
I have lost a hero
I have lost a friend
But for you, darling
I’d do it all again

New York isn’t New York
Without you, love
Too few of our old crew
Left on Astor
So if I trade our ‘hood
For some Hollywood
Where you’re the only motherfucker in the city who would
Only motherfucker in the city who would
Only motherfucker in the city who’d forgive me

I have lost a hero
I have lost a friend
But for you, darling
I’d do it all again
I have lost a hero
I have lost a friend
But for you, darling
I’d do it all again

Taumascopio
‘Taumascopio’ is an art installation designed and realized by parisian architect-artist mattia paco rizzi for the 2014 kanal playground festival in brussels, belgium. the structure is completely covered with mirrors and as a result, offers a complete visual camouflage along the molenbeek’s canal. as its exterior panels fold, the overall massing creates a kaleidoscopic effect that reacts to heat. during the temperature’s evolution throughout the day, the surfaces present an ever-changing reflective effect. ‘the ‘taumascopio’ invites us to reflect in poetic vein on public space, like a box of delights that gives us multiple visions and allows us to see the city differently,’ says rizzi. ‘the mosaic of reflections sends our thoughts in new directions and invite us to create new ideas.’

朱塞佩 利卡里
The sky in a room
“Nature has always been a big passion and the relation of nature and man-made environments is something I often try to confront in my work. The Sky in a Room was first inspired by the forests’ fires that in 2007 destroyed a big part of the south of Europe. They were largely man-made fires, intending to generate new land available for building speculation. A sick tree was cut down by the municipality of Rotterdam, cut in smaller pieces, archived and re-built inside the exhibition space, against the architectural surfaces of the gallery. The trunk of the tree was removed in order to give the public a different physical relation to the tree itself and to the white sterilized space of the gallery. The dead tree presents its branches covered with a layer of moss and molds creating a suspended landscape.”

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.

Strange Fruit
Using both sculpture and musical performance in his practice, Kevin Beasley explores the physical materiality and cultural connotations of both objects and sound. His sculptures typically incorporate everyday items like clothing, housewares, or sporting goods, bound together using tar, foam, resin, or other materials. Often they also contain embedded audio equipment that warps and amplifies the ambient tones of their surroundings. For Storylines, Beasley has created two new works specifically for the Guggenheim’s Frank Lloyd Wright–designed building. Within this vast and open sonic environment, Strange Fruit (Pair 1) and Strange Fruit (Pair 2) (both 2015) offer an experience of intimacy, absorbing and reflecting the sound of the crowd at the scale of a personal conversation. Each work embodies this spirit of dialogue in its two-part structure—at its core are two athletic shoes, one merged with microphones, the other with speakers. Suspending these objects in space, Beasley compounds their technological interchange with additional layers of meaning, bringing to mind the urban phenomenon of shoes hanging from overhead wires or poles (itself an open-ended form of communication). At the same time the works’ titles refer to history of lynchings in the American South memorialized by Bronx schoolteacher Abel Meerepol in the 1937 protest song “Strange Fruit.” In these contexts, the hanging forms of Beasley’s sculptures resonate not only with his body, which molded them by hand, or with the bodies moving through the museum, but also with those inscribed in the problematic history of race and class in the United States.

Катарины Унгер
FARM 432 : INSECT BREEDING

By 2050 meat production will have to increase by 50%. Considering that we already use one third of croplands for the production of animal feed, we will have to look for alternative food sources and alternative ways of growing it.Farm 432 enables people to turn against the dysfunctional system of current meat production by growing their own protein source at home. After 432 hours, 1 gram of black soldier fly eggs turn into 2.4 kilogram of larvae protein, larvae that self-harvest and fall clean and ready to eat into a harvest bucket.This scenario creates not only a more sustainable future of food production, but suggests new lifestyles and food cultures.Black soldier fly adults don´t eat, the larvae can be fed on bio waste, therefore the production almost costs no water or CO2. Black soldier fly larvae are one of the most efficient protein converters in insects, containing up to 42% of protein, a lot of calcium and amino acids.

ШЕН ВЕЙ
שן וויי
沉伟
FOLDING
Shen Wei’s Werk “Folding” (hier in der Park Avenue Armory abgebildet) wurde 2002 in New York uraufgeführt
Weißbrust, weißarmig, weißgesichtig, mit langgestreckten Haarwickeln (Kopfschmuck? Sind ihre Köpfe länglich?), Tauchen die ersten Tänzer aus der Dunkelheit auf einem trüben blaugrünen Boden mit langen Röcken auf, deren Farben sie verfolgen Teilen Sie sie in zwei Gruppen auf: rot und schwarz. Die Roten sind fliegende, wirbelnde, unabhängige Kreaturen, die oft im Kongress agieren, während die Schwarzen paarweise durch Stoff (wie gruselige, tragisch verbundene Kreationen von Jake und Dinos Chapman) versiegelt sind und einen Großteil ihrer Zeit damit verbringen, sich auf unerträglich langsame Koitusakte einzulassen und noch langsamere Trauermärsche, die ihre leblosen Zwillingsliebhaber ins Schlepptau ziehen.
Die Roten haben anscheinend einen König und die Schwarzen eine Königin (die schließlich allein erscheint). Es gibt eine wunderbare Veränderung in der Dynamik später, wenn die Roten Einheit in einer ironischerweise als Gruppenverweigerung ihrer eigenen Person (Shen Wei’s eigener königlicher Charakter, nicht weniger) erscheinenden Einheit finden, während die gepaarten Schwarzen eine aufgeklärtere zu finden scheinen Individualität im Kampf ihrer Paarungen. Dies ist auch die erste Aufführung, bei der ich einen Ganzkörper-Spandex-Anzug gesehen habe, dessen Träger als Live-Action-Charakter in einem mobilisierten Basrelief auftritt, das wie eine Panne im Hintergrund erscheint in der Software dieser Binomialwelt. Vielleicht ist dieser gesichtslose Charakter die Synthese von Rot und Schwarz oder der Traum des Anbeters von einem Höchsten Wesen, zwei Teile, die zu einem Ganzen zusammengefasst sind. Vielleicht ist der Charakter nur ein kleiner Charakter, aber weil er auffällt, hat er die Kult-Qualität eines Boba Fett und ist mir in der zweiten Pause geblieben.