Empyrean Passage

Empyrean Passage is reminiscent of both a theoretical black hole and portal into the celestial worlds. Empyrean (notice the pyre in the word) is the final and fiery level of heaven as depicted by Dante- or aether in Aristotle’s cosmology. The form is constructed like a giant hoopskirt and gracefully moves in the wind creating a gossamer lighting effect overhead. While this project is an oculus to the heavens, more focus is usually paid to more terrestrial stars in this neighborhood.The interior of the spiral is designed with aqua and black dashes. The dashed interior creates optical effects with the eyes and at certain times of the day shifts your perception of the sky’s color.This project utilizes extremely “green” electroluminescent lighting. The entire sculpture consumes less electricity than a household nightlight and operates on a photo cell. Special thanks to the City of West Hollywood, Andrew Campbell, Maria Lusia de Herrera, Greg Coons, Glen Bundrick / Luminous Film.

Inextinguishable fire
The title of the piece references Harun Farocki’s 1969 film of the same name, which approaches the impossible task of effectively depicting the horror of napalm on film. Cassils’s gesture of self-immolation speaks to both the desire for–and the impossibility of–knowing such horror, even while decisively aiming to approach it. Though the stunt is a simulation of violence, it still presents real danger. This possibly volatile situation–and the attempt to control it–is captured to create an image where danger, empathy for those experiencing violence, and the privilege of removal from such circumstance operate simultaneously in one transparent performance.

DATA
In “DATA”, SpY offers a reflection on the rapid and widespread inclusion of algorithms in numerous aspects of our lives. In this audio-visual work, digital abstraction is used to explore and interpret how predictive tools operated through algorithms and artificial intelligence are highly beneficial in terms of aspects such as communication, research and medicine, but can also lead us to lose some of our freedoms if they are not used ethically.
Through this immersive audio-visual format, SpY explores new tools such as the holographic fabrics used to give the graphics an amazing sense of weightlessness. A 15-metre high screen made from this fabric was installed in one of Madrid’s smallest streets between the walls of the buildings.

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.

Pianographique
Pianographique is a series of collaborations of real time visual artist Cori O’Lan and Maki Namekawa. The visualisations are not videos that are more or less synchronous to the music and it is also not the musician’s playing to prefabricated material, they are jointly created together in the moment of the performance. As with most of Cori O’Lan’s visualizations, all graphic elements are derived directly from the acoustic material, i.e. the sound of the music. For this purpose, the piano is picked up with microphones and these signals are then transformed by the computer into a multitude of information about frequency, pitch, volume, dynamics, etc… This information, in turn, is used to control the graphics computer, create graphical elements or modify them in many ways. Since these processes take place in real time, there is a direct and expressive connection between the music and visual interpretation. The visualization is actually not “created” by the computer but much more by the music itself – the computer is rather the instrument, the brush operated, played by the music.

Emotive city
Emotive City is a framework to explore a mobile and self-organizing model for the contemporary city. Models of the past are limited and should not operate, as blueprints for our urban future, a new generation of design enquiry by necessity must address the challenges of today. The fixed and finite tendencies that once served architecture and urbanism have been rendered obsolete. Today the intersections of information, life, machines and matter display complexities that suggest the possibility of a much deeper synthesis. Within this context, architecture is being forced to radically refactor its response to new social and cultural challenges with an environment of accelerated urbanization. We propose a framework that participates and engages with the information-rich environments that are shaping our lives through a model of living that we call an adaptive ecology.

Psychometrics
Late capitalist networked culture is obsessed with improving performance. TED speakers are cult idols, sharing their commandments for success and productivity. On social networks our friends become brands, and brands become our friends. Self-help books are interchangeable with business philosophies. In the conference room – and the weekend supplements – we learn how to shape ourselves, how to be consistent, how to operate. Reduce entropy. Maximise consistency. Become an industry of one. You are an engine. One day you’ll fly away.

Upload not complete
The work magnifies the process of virtual and real fusion, which is the process of uploading human consciousness to digital space. When the visual perception has been lost, can people still recognize the body through the touch and sound of wind, sound and vibration everywhere? Experiencers use non-visual senses, experience media art, and cooperate with the Taiwanese Non-Visual Aesthetic Education Association to create a digital space where the computer can fully understand the location of the experiencer in the space, allowing the experiencer to listen, move, touch objects, feel the vibration and come to know the space.

T4T LAB
RADICAL RAUMPLAN
The real but withdrawn qualities of the raumplan of the Muller House can be understood as the unknown excess of the object. This is the space of the architectural project that exists beyond the limits of human cognition. Although this space is finite, it is vast and abundant. Any attempt to enter into this space must be somehow framed. As a metaphor, or a vehicle to frame the unknown excess, we take in part the idea of viewing, which is epistemologically important to the raumplan. Using this framework, our project attempts to go beyond our cognitive limitations and enter into the unknown space of the architectural project. From here, we can extract new spatial phenomena that can be notated into the known layer, to be understood by the architectural audience. For us, this means using a series of metaphors to frame our exploration of the unknown and attempt to extract new phenomena that engage the raumplan independent of its relationship to a human subject. This allows us to operate in a jective framework, allowing for an understanding of the object autonomously.

Eyeris
Eyeris is a cultural prosthetic that renders the user dependent on human touch for sight. While many of today’s digital devices extend our abilities to connect with each other, disability of our current digital devices can been seen through our loss of tangible human interaction. I made this piece in trying to explore the importance of human interdependency in a society living under the myth of autonomy driven by technological symbiosis between man and computer. Eyeris is a mechanically operated electronic device powered by digital input that is deliberately over-engineered to call attention to the social behavioral conditioning imposed on us through less discreet technological devices that we assimilate on a daily basis.

The Immortal
A number of life-support machines are connected to each other, circulating liquids and air in attempt to mimic a biological structure.
The Immortal investigates human dependence on electronics, the desire to make machines replicate organisms and our perception of anatomy as reflected by biomedical engineering.
A web of tubes and electric cords are interwoven in closed circuits through a Heart-Lung Machine, Dialysis Machine, an Infant Incubator, a Mechanical Ventilator and an Intraoperative Cell Salvage Machine. The organ replacement machines operate in orchestrated loops, keeping each other alive through circulation of electrical impulses, oxygen and artificial blood.
Salted water acts as blood replacement: throughout the artificial circulatory system minerals are added and filtered out again, the blood gets oxygenated via contact with the oxygen cycle, and an ECG device monitors the system’s heartbeat. As the fluid pumps around the room in a meditative pulse, the sound of mechanical breath and slow humming of motors resonates in the body through a comforting yet disquieting soundscape.Life support machines are extraordinary devices; computers designed to activate our bodies when anatomy fails, hidden away in hospital wards. Although they are designed as the ultimate utilitarian appliances, they are extremely meaningful and carry a complex social, cultural and ethical subtext. While life prolonging technologies are invented as emergency measures to combat or delay death, my interest lies in considering these devices as a human enhancement strategy.This work is a continuation of my investigation of the patient as a cyborg, questioning the relationship between medicine and techno- fantasies about mechanical bodies, hyper abilities and posthumanism.

SHIBUYA HYPER CAST. 2
Shibuya Hyper CAST. 2 is a showcase of most cutting-edge urban innovations combined into one building. Shibuya CAST., an existing development designed by noiz, has been an urban lab of mixed function and culture located in the middle of one of the hottest areas in Tokyo. This hypothetical project has started for the 5-year memorial celebration of the CAST., to project future possibility of the building, the area, our society, and potentially a form of future city. It demonstrates how cities of the future could be structured and operated. The project is based on urban studies in the area of mobility, social welfare, administration, funding, security, sustainability and more. Shibuya Hyper CAST. 2 translates the best features of vibrant downtown districts into vertical language of ever-growing cities of the future.

Until I die
This installation operates on unique batteries that generate electricity using my blood. The electric current produced by the batteries powers a small electronic algorithmic synth module. This module creates generative sound composition that plays via a small speaker. The blood used in the installation was stored up gradually over 18 months. The conservation included a number of manipulations to preserve the blood’s chemical composition, color, homogeneity and sterility to avoid bacterial contamination. The total amount of blood conserved was around 4.5 liters; it was then diluted to yield 7 liters, the amount required for the installation. The blood was diluted with distilled water and preservatives such as sodium citrate, antibiotics, antifungal agents, glucose, glycerol etc. The last portion of blood (200ml) was drawn from my arm during the performance presentation, shortly before the launch of the installation.

Samplingplong
File Festival

Randomly selected, acoustically usable finds (electronic junk, relays, plastic toys,compressed air valves, pneumatically operated components) are combined with cables and tubes. Via a device controlled by computer, they are turned into interactive instruments. An improvised ensemble evolves, from which – per mouse-over and mouse-click -short miniature compositions of dense rhythmic clicks, hisses, whirs, hums and crackles can be elicited. A tapestry of sound bursts forth from the floral-like web of cables and tubes. The installation can be used by the projected mouse-cursor: rolling over the improvised instruments causes small sound events. Activating the installation by rolling over its parts enables the user to play spontaneous improvisations. Clicking these objects starts short programs of loop-like compositions. Small “techno-compositions en miniature”, rhythmic patterns of analog (or real) sounds; a physical low-tech simulation of electronic, digital music, perhaps an ironic comment on interactivity.

ماریکو موری
森万里子
Мори, Марико
Tom Na H-Iu
Tom Na H-iu is a three-dimensional glass work almost 3 meters in height. It is networked to the Super Kamiokande neutrino observatory operated by the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, University of Tokyo, enabling it to interact and respond when the observatory captures a neutrino. On detecting a neutrino, such as those emitted by stars in our galaxy as they die in supernova explosions[…] Tom Na H-iu represents a modern standing stone that conveys the death of a star, meanwhile hinting at the birth that follows – as if to suggest to the viewer that our existence is in resonance with the universe. When we view this work that emits peaceful light amidst darkness, we can project ourselves into the darkness and gain a sense that we are standing quietly in the flow of eternal time.

The Augmented Hand Series
The “Augmented Hand Series” (by Golan Levin, Chris Sugrue, and Kyle McDonald) is a real-time interactive software system that presents playful, dreamlike, and uncanny transformations of its visitors’ hands. It consists of a box into which the visitor inserts their hand, and a screen which displays their ‘reimagined’ hand—for example, with an extra finger, or with fingers that move autonomously. Critically, the project’s transformations operate within the logical space of the hand itself, which is to say: the artwork performs “hand-aware” visualizations that alter the deep structure of how the hand appears.

top shot helmet
The Top Shot Helmet alters one’s spatial perception. Wearers see themselves from above and must guide their movements and orient themselves from this perspective. The device consists of a round helmet, above which floats a helium balloon attached to the helmet with strings. The balloon carries a small video camera operated by radio signal, which points downward with a wide-angle lens. The view captured by the camera is projected onto a pair of video glasses in the helmet. Wearers of the helmet can only see the image produced by these glasses and must use this to make their way through a given space. By moving the head, the person wearing the helmet can turn and tilt the balloon and camera. A handle on the helmet makes it possible to adjust the height of the balloon and thereby adjust one’s field of vision.

The Coming World
The twelve costumes created by Yogyakarta-based artist Mella Jaarsma operate both as an installation and as a set of separate, wearable items. The set comes alive once a week as a part of a performance in which actors wearing the “uniforms” transform into half human-half animals strolling through the Museum and holding each other on leashes.

Freedom Table & Democracy Chair
Suspended from the ceiling of the exhibition space, a blue office chair and a simple table each swing in a circular orbit. At times the movement of table and chair is closely aligned, at other times out of sync. Moving in a rhythm of dance-like accompaniment, the two objects seem to have attained weightless freedom.
The table and chair originate from the gallery. Computer-operated motors determine their precise circular paths, which have marginally deferred frequencies.

Pauline van Dongen researches the body in a technologically textured space. After graduating from ArtEZ, Academy of the Arts in Arnhem, the Netherlands, she started her own womenswear label in 2010. Pauline operates a meticulous research of the behaviour of experimental and high-tech materials, combining new technologies with traditional techniques to constantly renovate craftsmanship. Working closely with companies from the field of science and innovation, Pauline aims to merge fashion and technology giving life to scientific creations.

Hidden Gems
Transforming the mopo oil reserve base, south korean designer hyuntek yoon of nooyoon has created a cultural and recreational cluster on the site. Located in sangam, north west of seoul, the abandoned area was previously filled with waste until the 2002 work cup which saw it turn into an an ecological park, digital media city, and world cup stadium. ‘Hidden gem’ seeks to revitalize the last piece of waste-land for public use. The project is based on the following questions: how can five oil tanks be transform to embed recreational programs and how can multiple activities interrelate and operate with each other?