highlike

United Visual Artists

ユナイテッド·ビジュアルアーティスト
美国视觉艺术家
our time

Our Time (2016) is the latest large-scale installation by United Visual Artists investigating our subjective experience of the passing of time. How long is a moment? At what rate does time actually pass? The work joins a series of kinetic sculptures that began with Momentum (2013); an installation designed as a ‘spatial instrument’ that was to reveal the relationship between expectation and perception when intersected with a physical space.
Our Time defines a physical environment where pendulums swing at a pace apparently unhindered by the laws of nature and where no single time measurement applies. The installation combines movement, light and sound as a multi-sensory, multi-dimensional canvas the visitor can enter. Pendulums swing, each to their own rhythm, as time flows through the grid. With light tracing the path and sound its echo, the passing of time becomes almost palpable.

Alex Ekman

COW

Ekman talents extend to the lighting and stage design and his eye for structuring an environment is unerring. There is no set as such, excepting the plaster cow which dangles overhead, but the stage surface has its share of movement as little island-blocks rise up and pits sink down. The extreme tilting of the stage at one point causes unfortunate Bauch to roll, cow-like, almost into the pit. COW has its iconic Ekman moment in the scene that opens on a stage full of swirling dancers in white skirts set in a magical silvery mist. Mikael Karlsson, whose music partners the piece provides a subtle and evocative soundscape. He offers a hint of percussive rhythm picked up by the dancers who launch into an ecstatic dance: a stage full of whirling dervishes, until they collapse exhausted.

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Ekmans Talente erstrecken sich auf die Beleuchtung und das Bühnenbild, und sein Auge für die Strukturierung einer Umgebung ist unfehlbar. Es gibt kein Set als solches, außer der Gipskuh, die über ihnen baumelt, aber die Bühnenoberfläche hat ihren Anteil an Bewegung, wenn kleine Inselblöcke aufsteigen und Gruben sinken. Das extreme Kippen der Bühne an einer Stelle führt dazu, dass der unglückliche Bauch kuhartig fast in die Grube rollt. COW hat seinen legendären Ekman-Moment in der Szene, die auf einer Bühne voller wirbelnder Tänzer in weißen Röcken in einem magischen silbernen Nebel beginnt. Mikael Karlsson, dessen Musikpartner das Stück ist, bietet eine subtile und eindrucksvolle Klanglandschaft. Er bietet einen Hauch von perkussivem Rhythmus, der von den Tänzern aufgenommen wurde, die einen ekstatischen Tanz beginnen: eine Bühne voller wirbelnder Derwische, bis sie erschöpft zusammenbrechen.

 

HENTSCHLÄGER AND LANGHEINRICH

Akemi Takeya
Granular Synthesis

“From a few expressions on the face of the performer Akemi Takeya to a frenzied exploration of the alter ego, any known context of meaning ends in the dissolved movements, is stalled in denaturalized redundancy, in machine pain. The semantic void is too loud to be amenable to meditative reception. The frontal images, the rhythmic structures generate contradictory emotions and great strain.”

Yuge Zhou

Midtown Flutter
Midtown becomes a flattened, uniform construct for this play of texture, rhythm and interruptions.My installation is inspired by the concept of architectural relief (a technique where the sculpted elements remain attached but raised above the background plane). Audiences experience a gradual shift in the appearance and depth of the installation from a flat image to a three-dimensional view with protruding geometric shapes.

RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER

Рафаэль Лозано-Хеммер
拉斐尔·洛萨诺 – 亨默
ラファエル·ロサノ=ヘメル
라파엘 로자노
רפאל לוזאנו, המר
Pulse Room

Pulse Room is an interactive installation featuring one to three hundred clear incandescent light bulbs, 300 W each and hung from a cable at a height of three metres. The bulbs are uniformly distributed over the exhibition room, filling it completely. An interface placed on a side of the room has a sensor that detects the heart rate of participants. When someone holds the interface, a computer detects his or her pulse and immediately sets off the closest bulb to flash at the exact rhythm of his or her heart. The moment the interface is released all the lights turn off briefly and the flashing sequence advances by one position down the queue, to the next bulb in the grid. Each time someone touches the interface a heart pattern is recorded and this is sent to the first bulb in the grid, pushing ahead all the existing recordings. At any given time the installation shows the recordings from the most recent participants.

ISABELLE SCHAD

COLLECTIVE JUMPS / COLLECTIVE JUMPS (EXCERPTS)
Projekt von Isabelle Schad und Laurent Goldring
’The group’s body is made out of many. We exercise practices that have the potential to unite instead of individualize. We understand these practices as a relationship to oneself and to one another, as a pathway. These practices are biological ones, cellular ones, energetic ones. We look at freedom in relation to form : to form that is made of and found by an inner process and its rhythms. Rhythm creates the form. Therefore, there is multitude, multiplicity, subjectivity, and variation : variation within repetition.We look at freedom as the essence of happiness. We experience happiness when the flow of movement can be done together and be maintained. We look at freedom that is guaranteed once everyone within a group can find form in a subjective way. Therefore, there is a specific relation to the term equality : Everyone can be equal, once subjectivity in one‘s own respective rhythm is guaranteed within the form.’I.Schad

Ricardo Barreto and Maria Hsu Rocha

Martela
FILE FESTIVAL
Tactila is an art form whose medium is the sense of touch (tact) which is independent from the all the other ones and has its own intelligence, imagination, memory, perception, and sensation. It is well known that vision and sound have hegemony in arts and in other disciplines. Tactila takes place in time and, therefore, can be recorded and have various forms of notation for subsequent executions. That is why its development became possible only now, thanks to mechatronic and robotic systems which are compatible with machine languages.
The creation of tactile works involves a (tact) composition, which can be made through handmade notation and played on a keyboard or directly on the computer of the tactile machine ( robot ).
Tactile machines can present numerous tactile possibilities through points, vectors, and textures with varying rhythms and intensities, and be run in different extensions and locations of our body.

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The first tactile machine is called “Martela”. It is a tactile robot comprised of 27 engines subdivided into three squares (3 x 3), i.e., each square has 9 engines. Each engine corresponds to a matrix point, so we have 27 tactile units that allow to touch the user’s body with various intensities.

JON MCCORMACK

flicker

Flicker is an immersive electronic environment of generative image and sound. A collaborative work with Oliver Bown. Based on biological models of firefly behaviour, Flicker generates an ever shifting rhythmic, meditative environment to the viewer. Flicker uses 4 channels of synchronised high definition video and 8 channels of sound to immerse the viewer in a phenomenologically rich environment of artificial life. The work is a large-scale agent-based simulation, with each agent providing a rhythmic pulse at regular intervals. Agents try to synchronise their pulse with other agents in their immediate neighbourhood. The collective pulsations of groups of local agents are spatially sonified with int exhibition space. Over time, large groups synchronise at different rates, leading to complex visual and aural structures, syncopating and constant shifting in to a long term complexity.

SS12 Studio Rashid

HyperveloCity

HyperveloCITY is a fast forward connected cultural organism that grows on top of the subway stations in downtown Los Angeles. The movement time line of the users (pedestrians, students, cars and train) is used as the operational strategies of the buildings framework. Velocities and rhythms are used to generate a new perception of space. The distance of the institutions would generate a wider field of influence in a dense cityscape. The main three volumes are an urban art museum, educational institution and a new convention centre, all separated one kilometer from each other. The various components of HyperveloCITY are connected by way of a the underground train system. The project is structured to emphasize the use and efficiencies of the public transport system and create not-so-often-seen public spaces and realms in densest part of downtown Los Angeles.

Stephen Cornford

Binatone Galaxy

An installation for used cassette players which looks on their obsolescence not as an ending, but as an opportunity to reconsider their functional potential. Superseded as playback devices, they become instruments in their own right. Replacing the prerecorded content of each tape with a microphone gives us the chance to listen instead to the rhythmic and resonant properties of these once ubiquitous plastic shells. Binatone Galaxy brings the framework within which a generation purchased their favourite records to the centre of attention, revealing the acoustics of the cassette and the voices of the machines themselves.“On the walls of a white room, brightly illuminated with natural light, Stephen Cornford, and artist who describes his work as existing “at the intersection of sculpture and music”, has mounted some 30 old cassette recorders. Models from Boots, Sanyo, Robotic, one lone and gorgeously named Binatone Galaxy: they all hang on the walls, wired up, tapes loaded and ready for action. Smitten by an attack of technological melancholia, the visitor can wonder who owned these things, what pop charts did these machines once record? Were they ever placed next to pillows, late at night for surreptitious listening pleasures? What happened to the voices that once rubbed the magnetic heads of these little machines? For some artists, the speed (and resulting impact) of obsolescence on the technology we once took for granted has spawned a form of fetishism, in which the voices – the human agency – they once recorded exist in an alternate, ghostly dimension, a reminder of what once was. This is not Cornford’s theme. The fact that each audio cassette in his machines is fitted with a motion sensor and a contact mic, so that, on entry the machines whirr into action, indicates that Binatone Galaxy is very much of the here and now. Yes, Cornford has chosen old, cheap and accessible technology with which to realise this, but I suspect that he is aiming for a furrruuuzzy audio intimacy.

Arvo Part

АРВО ПЯРТ
Silentium
Tabula Rasa – II.

The second movement of Tabula Rasa, “Silentium,” or silence, is composed in the key of D minor, giving the impression of a V-I cadence in relation to “Ludus” in A minor. The movement begins with an arpeggiated D minor second inversion chord, played by the prepared piano. “Silentium” expands as a mensuration canon. Pärt divides the instruments into three sections; solo violins, violin I and violin II, and viola and cello. Each pair, divided into melodic and tintinnabuli voices, begin on a central pitch, and move at a different rhythmic speeds. Pärt expands the music by adding one pitch above and below the central pitch of each pair in each successive section. Every time the solo violins reach their central pitch, “D,” the piano again plays a D minor chord and the contrabass plays an octave “D.” Once each of the sections reach their expanded octave range, they fade out of the texture. The solo violins, moving at the slowest rhythmic speed, reach their octave span in measure 130, and then begin a downward descent of a D minor four-octave scale.

MARNIX DE NIJS AND EDWIN VAN DER HEIDE

SPACIAL SOUNDS

Spatial Sounds (100dB at 100km/h) is an interactive installation that is capable of very intelligent behavior. Not only can the arm spin quickly or slowly, it can also make very well-defined movements in both directions. On the one hand, Spatial Sounds (100dB at 100km/h) lives a life of its own; on the other, it reacts very directly to the people in its space. The sensor can detect how close the visitors are and where they are in relation to the arm. When the installation scans the space, it makes inspecting movements and generates sounds that symbolize this scanning. It produces remarkably short, loud pulses and ‘listens’ to the reverberations from the empty space. The pulses combine different frequency ranges and rhythmical patterns. When visitors enter the room, they are detected immediately. The installation reacts in both a musical and a gestural way. The sounds relate directly to both the position of the arm and the dynamic ‘map’ of the space and the visitors. These sounds are very physical. For example, when the speaker is pointing at someone, it will generate a specific sound. This is also the case at high speeds and with several people in the room. However, the sounds and movements of the arm also tempt visitors to move around. Different locations in the space represent different sounds, as does the distance of the visitors to the rotating arm.

LEON THEREMIN

ליאון טרמין
레온 테레민
Лев Термен
théremin

he invented an electronic device known as the theremin, which was a unique musical instrument that could be played without physical contact. Rather than plucking strings or pressing keys, the musician need only move their hands around antennas located on the device.The device became a popular curiosity and he proceeded to tour Europe in order to demonstrate it. In 1928, he moved to New York City in the United States, where he played a theremin in the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1928. In 1929, he was granted a patent for the device by the United States. He decided to give RCA the rights to manufacture and sell the theremin for a lump sum payment and a percentage of the sales.In the early 1930s, Theremin purchased a laboratory in New York that he used for experimenting with electronic musical instruments. One of the products of his lab was the Rhythmicon, which was purchased by Henry Cowell, a composer. In 1930, a group of ten “thereminists” performed at Carnegie Hall.Theremin also began researching a method to cause lights and sound to respond to the movement of dancers. His system became popular with ballet and dance clubs throughout the country.