Living Archive

The Living Archive is an experiment between Studio Wayne McGregor and Google Arts and Culture – a tool for choreography powered by machine learning which generates original movement inspired by Wayne’s 25-year archive.

アンヌ·テレサ·ドゥ·ケースマイケル
АННЫ ТЕРЕЗЫ ДЕ КЕЕРСМАКЕР
Quatuor N°4
The movement vocabulary of “Quartet No. 4” (originally part of a longer evening, “Bartok/Annotations”) is simple, with elaborations on walking and turning movements that incorporate everyday motion (smoothing hair, opening out the hands, a quick unpolished handstand) and folk dance-like skipping, hopping and heel-clicking jumps.

توماس هيرشهورن
托马斯·赫塞豪恩
תומס הירשהורן
トーマス·ヒルシュホルン
abschlag

Thomas Hirschhorn’s “Abschlag” installation, which occupies the first room on the main floor, offers a lesson in how not to engage with the Russian milieu: the Swiss artist constructed part of a typical Petersburg apartment block out of cardboard inside the full-height space, ripped off its façade, and deposited the refuse at its base, revealing shabby interiors lined with original avant-garde masterpieces (on loan from the nearby Russian Museum) by the likes of Malevich and El Lissitky. The references allude to a politically radical Russian past; the construction debris acts as a metaphor for history. Though Hirschhorn suggests a recovery of the revolutionary communist spirit of the 1920s, he falls prey to a historically revisionist fetish: citing the Russian avant-garde as a generative point for vanguard culture in the West, and offering it as a source for renewed progressivism in Russia. Hirschhorn seems woefully unaware of the Putin government’s branding campaign, one that aims to sell the Russian avant-guard as a nationalist movement in line with the regime’s own values (perhaps he didn’t watch the Sochi opening ceremony). Hirschhorn ultimately proves Zhilayev right — with its political pretenses, “Abschlag” aspires to make a grand gesture against conservatism, but fails because its critique has already been co-opted..
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TH-42PH10EK x 5
Five screens were installed by the artist as pendulums that swing continuously. As soon as all five have come to a standstill, they are pulled back into their original positions with the help of cable winches and are made to swing again – triggered by pulling a rip cord, a performative act that cannot take place without human intervention and which involves the exhibition supervisor in the installation. Each cycle, which lasts approximately 45 minutes, ends as soon as all five screens have come to a standstill and no more sound is produced by their movement. The sound is produced by the amplification of the friction to which the joints of the moving pendulum are subjected. Multiplication thus creates five oscillating loops that merge into one another with a time offset.

LAMP

Joschi Herczeg and Daniele Kaehr, originally from Switzerland, surprise the world of photography by capturing movement for the fraction of a second that makes up an explosion.To do this, the two friends used very specific pyrotechnic systems and have even create a custom detonator device, connected and synchronized directly to their camera.

Sound City
Suspended from the ceiling by two springs and equipped with an oscillating weight fixed inside its body, a Sound City loudspeaker shakes in a disorderly manner in space. The music it plays reacts directly to the movements as if the musicians were inside the loudspeaker and trying in vain to adapt their playing to the turbulences. The originality of the movements comes from the pulsations and interferences produced by the interaction of two coupled harmonic oscillators (the spring and the pendulum) not having the same natural frequency. The two pneumatic jacks to which the springs are attached control the amplitude of the swings.

True/False
True/False is a kinetic sculpture composed of arrays of circular black metal segments set in mechanical columns. Interlocking and rotating around fluorescent light tubes, the cylinders cover or expose the light to display an endless number of patterns. The transformation of the sculpture is based on the shifting elements and their correlation to each other. As the segments do not move independently, for any of the cylinders on a column to change, the segments affected must work in unison to achieve the command. Reminiscent of devices originally used for calculations, such as Turing machines, the sound originates from the mechanical movement of the moving parts thus making the algorithm audible. The rhythm of »true/false« is captivating as variations in the visual choreography result in distinctive changes in its soundscape. Through the generation of algorithmic patterns and the repetition of endless tasks, »true/false« transforms itself into something more than the sum of its elements to reveal the beauty hidden within a basic algorithm.

Mai Hi Ten Yu
Yamaha artificial intelligence (AI) technology enabled the world-renowned dancer Kaiji Moriyama to control a piano by his movements. The AI adopted in the system can identify a dancer’s movement in real time by analyzing signals from four types of sensors attached to a dancer’s body. This system has an original database that links melody and movements, and, with this database, the AI on the system creates suitable melody data (MIDI) from the dancer’s movements instantly. The system then sends the MIDI data to a Yamaha Disklavier™ player piano, and it is translated into music.

Cliff Hanger

Jeff Shore and Jon Fisher started their collaborative practice in 2002. Trained as a visual artist, Jeff Shore develops the visible sculptures and mechanisms, while Jon Fisher builds the electronics, writes the software, and creates the original soundtracks; for this he uses both digital and analog audio sources. The result of their collaboration is a series of kinetic devices and installations that generate live animated video and musical compositions. Similar to cinema storytelling, the movement in the pieces relate to the accompanying soundtrack or animation, and similar to a theater of automata, the pieces create precise and captivating sequential events. Bridging high and low-tech devices and instruments, the collaborative team creates mechanically activated moments of wonder, explores the relationship between automatism and chance, and comments on the impact of technology interfaces in our lives.

레이 놀드 레이놀즈
РЕЙНОЛЬД РЕЙНОЛЬДС
Secrets Trilogy
Secret Machine

Secret Machine is the second of the Secrets Trilogy; a cycle exploring the imperceptible conditions that frame life and is preceded by Secret Life (2008) and followed by Six Easy Pieces (2010)
In Secret Machine a woman is subjected to Muybridge’s motion studies. She is treated in the same fashion as in the original Muybridge photography: with Greek aesthetic in a Cartesian grid. A short time after Mybridge’s studies, Duchamp painted Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) attempting to show time on a flat surface. He is expanding cubism and painting into another dimension: time. Time is about movement and change, like our experience of reality. Without change life does not exist. Photography does not capture this experience. In Secret Machine different filming techniques are compared to the motion of the body. The film camera becomes another measurement tool in a way a video camera cannot. The intention was to make an art piece from the point of view of a machine, specifically a camera.
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Amelia

Edouard Locke

“Directed and choreographed by Locke in 2002, Amelia, is a beautiful piece of dance on film that won awards and critical acclaim at numerous festivals when it came out. Amelia features a hypnotic, original, minimalist score written by David Lang for violin, cello, piano and voice, and lyrics from five of Lou Reed’s most famous works that he created in the 60s for the Velvet Underground. It is beautifully shot from multiple angles, some dizzying and swooping, in a space that was tailor-made for the film itself. The shadows and lighting in tandem with the shots and the movement add layers of beauty to the stark visuals.” Sarah Elgart

מרדיית המונק
Мередит Монк
ميريديث مونك
16mm Earrings
Meredith Monk’s groundbreaking performance work, 16 Millimeter Earrings, was a seamless integration of live performance, objects, film, vocal and instrumental music, movement, text, recorded sound, and light. It marked several, notable “firsts” for Monk: thinking of sound as an overall environment, working with her voice and visual images as primary elements, creating a full sound score, and incorporating film into a live work. The piece was a breakthrough in her quest to discover a visual/sonic/poetic performance form that could weave together multiple modes of perception. Responding to the original performances in 1966, art critic John Perrault wrote in the Village Voice, “Images, movement, film, words and sounds in Miss Monk’s new work are so skillfully interwoven and inter-related that no description can substitute for the kind of magic that she has managed to produce. The whole stage is her canvas and she uses every bit of it. 16 Millimeter Earrings has to do with surfaces, all seen as if through glass or reflected in a mirror. The surface of the human body. The surface of the erotic and the emotional. The radical juxtaposition of apparently contradictory surfaces- film, flesh, colors, and sound- becomes a witty method of deliberation and deliverance, and of complete art.”
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