Embodied Simulation

‘Embodied Simulation’ is a multiscreen video and sound installation that aims to provoke and nurture strong connections to the global ecosystems of which we are a part. The work combines artificial intelligence with dance and research from neuroscience to create an immersive, embodied experience, extending the viewer’s bodily perception beyond the skin, and into the environment.
The cognitive phenomenon of embodied simulation (an evolved and refined version of ‘mirror neurons’ theory) refers to the way we feel and embody the movement of others, as if they are happening in our own bodies. The brain of an observer unconsciously mirrors the movements of others, all the way through to the planning and simulating execution of the movements in their own body. This can even be seen in situations such as embodying and ‘feeling’ the movement of fabric blowing in the wind. As Vittorio Gallese writes, “By means of a shared neural state realized in two different bodies that nevertheless obey to the same functional rules, the ‘objectual other’ becomes ‘another self’.”

Modern Guru
Modern Guru is a translucent ovoid with four huge digital eyes, floating above a ceremonial ring of LEDs. From his mouth flows a ream of absurdist messages, and in a statement about the true nature of lived experience, a new message is delivered when visitors take a photo of Modern Guru – a missive produced only for those who seek to photograph life rather than live the moment. This immersive new media art installation uses the intersection of art and technology to explore modern paths to happiness through unique interactions with characters along a mystical journey of discovery. Visitors are asked to commit to the path – a tight and winding trail with subtle points of connection along the way – a glowing landscape of oversized, whimsical mountains that chant incantations and blink innocently from digital eyes.
Having communed with the Guru, visitors then weave their way back through this warped and strange world full of illusions and delusions, perceptions and deceptions, all the while bathing in luminescent light; embracing big, gentle forms; and following their own path up the pink tongue staircase to meet the one who oversees the whole fantastic dominion, the Sun God.

The Cage of Time

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival
Interactive installation that presents a kinetic instrument object and virtual reality glasses, functioning as a device that animates the illusion of the passage of time in virtual space. In the fabric of existence, time weaves a cage around our ephemeral moments, limiting our perceptions of the past, present and future. By embracing this paradox, we may discover that the cage of time becomes the crucible where the alchemy of experience transforms our understanding of existence.

Bio

Anna Vasof is a multi-award-winning artist who focuses on filmmaking, short videos, and time-based sculptures. VRinMotion is an artistic research project based at St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences in Austria that investigates how features of stop-motion animation and motion capture can be combined with virtual reality to enrich current artistic discourse.

Credits

VRinMotion Team: Franziska Bruckner, Christoph Schmid, Clemens Gürtler, Matthias Husinsky, Christian Munk, Julian Salhofer, Stefan Nebel, Vrääth Öhner.
Concept by: Anna Vasof.

Useless Hands

FILE 2024 | Aesthetic Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
Infratonal – Useless Hands – France

When our hands become useless, what will we choose to do with them? We can use AI to visualize the unthinkable, the strangely familiar yet indescribable forms and structures. Generative AI could be used as an amplifier of our ability to explore abstraction and surrealism rather than a simple mirror of our usual perceptions.

Bio

Infratonal is an artistic project led by Louk Amidou, a Paris-based multidisciplinary artist who works at the intersection of digital arts, electronic music and interaction design. He uses algorithms to create hybrid visual and sound pieces which aim to be performed by the human gesture as intangible instruments. He questions the artwork’s nature at the age of AI and the relationship between the artist and the algorithm.

Portraits in Black and Silver
Portraits in Black and Silver is an interactive kinetic artwork that uses BREAKFAST’s custom-engineered Flip-Disc medium. This computer-controlled installation invites you to become a part of its history. As you engage with the piece, it will record a brief clip of your interaction and play it back at a later time, cycling through all of the portraits captured. Flip-Discs are small dime-size circles that can rotate 60 times per second using electromagnets, creating abstract images of black and silver portraits. The artwork challenges your perception of what art can be and pushes the boundaries of traditional mediums.

Keigo Matsumoto, Yohei Yanase, Takuji Narumi & Yuki Ban
FILE FESTIVAL 2018
“Unlimited Corridor ” é um sistema de VR que permite a experiência de percorrer um vasto mundo virtual num espaço físico estreito, manipulando a percepção espacial. Esta obra utiliza uma técnica chamada andar visual-háptico redirecionado que utiliza a incerteza da percepção espacial humana e a interação entre visão e senso háptico.

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“Unlimited Corridor” is a VR system that allows the experience of traversing the space of a vast narrow physical virtual world, manipulating spatial perception. This work uses a technique called redirected visual-haptic spatial walking that utilizes the uncertainty of human perception and the interaction between vision and haptic sense.

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.

micro | macro
micro | macro transforms Hall E in the MuseumsQuartier into an oversized world of moving images and sounds. In his immersive installation, multimedia artist Ryoji Ikeda creates a field of imagination between quantum physics, empirical experimentation and human perception. In collaboration with nuclear scientists at CERN, Ikeda has translated complex physical theories into a sensory experience. The Planck scale is used by scientists to denote extremely small lengths or time intervals. Concepts like space and time lose their meaning beyond this scale, and contemporary physics has to rely on speculative theories. And on art. Visitors to micro | macro enter a world of data, particles, light and sound that makes the extremes of the universe perceptible to the eye and ear. In the micro world we penetrate the smallest dimensions of the unrepresentable, while in the macro world we take off into cosmic expanses that allow us to experience the infinite space beyond the observable universe. In this maelstrom of data, an acoustic and visual firework bridges the gap between theoretical understanding and sensual perception.

Роман Ермаков
live sculpture

Our perception — the only true reality. Creation as a feeling that generates the image, expressed in the form. Beauty manifesto calling to go beyond that limit imagination. The aesthetics of art can not be reduced to a clear set of building blocks with which you can strengthen or weaken the perception of contrast. Beauty should not be subjected to analysis, that is communication and the call to participate in the transformation of the emotional to the visible.The process of creating — is the alignment of the mosaic, many repetitions of simple and pure elements, which form a collection, harmonious in its incompleteness.

Principles of Motion
For Principles of Motion, UVA uses a rotating LED disc to create an abstract rotating and shifting kinematic landscape that plays with the viewer’s perception of movement and reflects the phenomenon of persistence of vision (sparkler’s trail effect / pov display). By varying the luminosity of the LED, the kinetic landscape moves and gives the viewer a sense of space and time. While observing the abstract rotating patterns and rhythms, the optic nerve of the recipient replicates the effect of an afterimage on the eye.

БОХЬЮН ЮН
윤보현
To Reverse Yourself

FILE FESTIVAL

My work poses the question: how does reality becomes exquisitely animated by certain social control systems such as politics, mass media, technology, science, and etc. It is my artistic goal to reveal how human beings are fragile and delicate in these social environments. By living in Korea, Japan and the U.S, I have first-hand experience in diverse social systems and have come to view my life experiences as raw material for my research. With my research in mind, my art utilizes the body as the tool for an intensive investigation of the public and private; examining the relationship between how people understand their body and how this understanding represents themselves in the greater context.
Currently, I am curious about human perception developing parallel with the ever-evolving progression of technological world. Thus, I question technology’s relationship to reality and illusion; asking what is reality? My work takes advantage of illusion to explore and answer this question, and often my artistic materials consist of the body and mirrors. I use mirrors for integrating reality and illusion.

Nature Morte
Nature Morte focuses on Nauman’s long relationship to his own studio, a variation on his four unique multi-projection videos, Mapping the Studio (2001). Three viewing stations, each consisting of an iPad linked to a wall-sized projection, provide an interactive exploration of the 3D studio space. Only now the artist is absent, and the participant becomes performer as he/she manipulates the large scale video projections on an iPad using touch control. The participant is free to navigate anywhere throughout the space, selecting broad vistas or individual objects. Using a hand-held 3D scanner, Nauman recorded hundreds of images that allow participants to select an object and locate close-up anything found there, and further reorient the image to see an object from above and below, and at times inside-out. The resulting mobility intensifies the experience of the viewer/performer. Presenting a static, but immersive re-creation of his studio space, Nauman’s pieces once again play at the tenuous lines between the body and space, perception and physical material.

Present Shock
Present Shock confronts the viewer with a barrage of statistical clocks representing real-time information about the world—from life-changing global events to the banal trivia of everyday existence—highlighting how the speed and volume of data in the Information Age present new challenges to our limited cognitive apparatus. Many of the statistics presented occur at timescales and spatial horizons that similarly defy our perception or comprehension. Disturbing the inertia of the here and now, they reveal the fluctuating state of dynamic transformation that characterizes life on earth.

Hansel & Gretel
Hansel & Gretel oscille entre architecture et art en explorant la perception de l’espace et le statut de l’espace public dans le contexte d’une surveillance omniprésente. Le titre fait référence au conte de fées des frères Grimm dans lequel un frère et une soeur se perdent dans la forêt – un endroit qui leur est familier. L’entrée de l’installation est une porte latérale discrète à partir de laquelle un étroit tunnel assombrissant guide le visiteur vers la vaste salle d’exercices presque complètement sombre. Des drones vrombissent au-dessus de la tête des visiteurs, suivent et transmettent leurs mouvements sur de grands écrans.

ИВ БЭЙЛИ
ENTASIS DANCE IV
My work is based on the concepts of balance and coordination. The body interests me as a perceiving mechanical structure. I use my own body as a primary tool to create pieces that experiment with equilibrium through physical, mechanical, plastic and conceptual means. My studio practice is rooted in the tradition of the artist engineer. I design and build suspended and pendular constructions that can sustain their own weight and mine as I perform with them. By climbing and inverting on the structures, I challenge my own perception and creative process.

Ascent
Ascent is a large-scale site-specific light installation that embodies a variety of archetypical and physical associations – from microscopic observations, electromagnetic wave dynamics, and atmospheric phenomena of a whirlwind to a spiritual epiphany. Most importantly, Ascent offers a unique immersive experience, that invites the viewer to become its central point, and transforms the perception of the viewer on a sensual level. The light and the fog create a monumental dynamic space that is participatory, the space that opens up a new dimension and directs the attention toward the bodily sensations in the explicit environment. The viewer is free to approach the work according to its own sensual response, but direct interaction can offer the potential to evoke a new perceptual imagination.

Light High
The installation LIGHT HIGH is aimed at guiding the perception through targeted acoustic and visual phenomena into border areas in which ambivalent experiences set in and the habitual experience of space is abolished.[…] A mirrored ceiling together with a thin reflecting surface of water on the ground and a grid arrangement of lights are creating the spatial illusion of an infinite vertical space of light and darkness. By traversing a small bridge, the visitor can cautiously discover the immersing endlessness beneath his/her feats and above his/her head.

Squint
file festival
I was inspired by how the sunlight bounces around in our artificial forest.
“Squint” is a kinetic light installation consisting of 49 mirrors that reflect lights in a bright space. The mirrors track and reflect lights on audiences’ face with composed patterns of movements. It extends the generated perception by focusing on how lights pass across our visual senses physically, and combines with our perception of images through flickering. “Squint”, which extracts various daily experiences to an abstraction brings the audience to expand their interpretation of lights and perceived imagination into a non-linear experience.
“Squint” simulates light source and intentionally shines lights on audience’s faces. Bright light is projected in the gallery, a clean bright space.
Everyday people are dynamically moving around in the city. Sunlight reflects and flickers even when it is indirect and hidden behind the artifacts. While we are traveling, we are experiencing motion. We are also experiencing the shift of light intensity, visual patterns and textures. The varieties of light forms inspire the artist to explore the potential of light textures, select and sort out the combined complexity in urban space. The artist turns them into a minimal form of light experience, while maximizing its diversity of perception.

Hibanana Studio
Liu Chang & Miao Jing
FILE SAO PAULO 2017
FILE LED SHOW
“INFINITE” is an audiovisual installation created by New York-based visual artist duo Liu Chang and Miao Jing, in collaboration with sound artist Gan Jian. “INFINITE” explores the connection between time and space, discusses about spatial gravity and its influence to human’s perception. Sound and visual elements are in completely in sync in order to contribute the immersive experience.

Bleu Remix
In his spectacle-installation Bleu Remix, Yann Marussich returns to a theme originally explored in Bleu Provisoire (2001), a spectacle in which a mysterious blue liquid oozes through the layers of his skin as though it were the final effect or by-product of his body’s inner processes. In Bleu Remix, the artist once more invites the viewer to experience an intimate journey through the corners of his body. Each time the spectacle is performed, a different (local) musician accompanies Marussich. This unique, singular confrontation establishes a new relationship between the sound and image. The meeting of the two artists brings an element of risk and uniqueness to the event, as if the music explores the spectacle repeatedly, resulting in new ways of perception.

Presence and Erasure
Presence and Erasure is a portrait machine that explores the reality of automated facial recognition and how people relate to their self-image, instinctively and emotionally. Within a given spatial domain, the artwork constantly scans for faces in the vicinity and photographs them. When the artwork’s algorithm detects a certain quality within a photograph, this image is temporarily printed at large scale by exposing a photochromic surface to light impulses. Each automated portrait remains for little more than a minute, before gradually dissolving into blankness. RANDOM INTERNATIONAL began to combine transient mark-making with automated portraiture early on in their practice, in 2008. Presence and Erasure marks the latest development in this body of work and assumes a minimal, industrial aesthetic that references their earliest studies on this theme. The physical impact of facial recognition and machine vision is emphasised by the exposure of the printing process itself, contrasted against the aesthetic of the high resolution portraits generated. RANDOM INTERNATIONAL intend this as a counter to the perception of surveillance footage as always being low quality, aiming to create a deeper reflection on the nature of surveillance today as well as the resounding cognitive and emotional dissonances.

EYJAFJALLAJÖKULL
Inspired by the icelandic volcano, which wreaked travel havoc across europe, Joanie Lemercier presents the latest incarnation of its audiovisual mapping project painted directly onto a large wall, a wireframed scenery is slowly revealed by gentle light effects. The audience’s sense are progressively challenged as optical illusions question their perception of space.

CYLINDRE
Dans cette installation étincelante intitulée Volume, l’artiste Leo Villareal a pris une poignée d’étoiles scintillantes et les a ramenées sur terre. La partie cylindrique était suspendue au plafond et contenait plus de 20 000 lampes LED en acier inoxydable réfléchissant et hautement poli, qui créaient un espace tridimensionnel dans lequel la lumière pouvait prendre vie. Les modèles d’éclairage, contrôlés par la conception du code logiciel de Villareal, se déplacent à différentes vitesses, cycles d’allumage et d’extinction et vagues de luminosité et d’obscurité. Selon un critique, « la pièce est un poème d’argile éblouissant qui attire le spectateur dans un espace abstrait profond tout en déformant la perception temporelle et visuelle. » Villareal n’est pas un débutant en matière de sculptures lumineuses étonnantes. Découvrez ce tunnel de spectacle de lumière de 200 pieds qu’il a installé sur l’allée du hall des bâtiments est et ouest de la National Gallery of Art. L’espace entre les installations de Villareal et son public est un facteur important car les spectateurs sont entrelacés avec les lumières qui pulsent tout autour.

Linie II
One second of white rope is traveling through time and space. The white rope is moving at a constant pace along the contours of an imaginary shape, traversing the whole space in several directions and angles. For following that second in the vast space, it requires the viewer to look up while moving his whole head. While passing through long distances as a straight line, it appears to be slow and content. Other passages require quick shifts of direction and the perception changes to fast and sudden movements.

The Decelerator Helmet
The technique of the Decelerator extends the awareness of time and transforms the concept of present in a constructed, artificial state. On a different Level the helmet dramatically visualizes how slowing down under all circumstances causes a loss of actuality and as idea is inconsistent with it´s Environment. Technical enhancement as a tool to give us control about our perception, asks the question how far this influence can go, before we are all lost in how we want to see reality. The Decelerator unintentionally explores how aspects of this shift to a personalized perception could change our view of the world.

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.

Earthrise
With our planet positioned at the forefront of the global agenda more than ever before, ‘Earthrise’ explores the splendour of this blue body we call home by circling towards the amalgamated awareness to maintain the grandeur of the turning sphere we traverse along. In parallel to Van Herpen’s drive towards an interconnected approach to fashion, the 19 look collection narrates the circular processes that usher change in our sentient world by weaving a symbiotic thread between artisanal tailoring and organic craftsmanship, derived from the perception of our world as one living and breathing organism.

ROTOЯ
The Rotor is equipped with a four channel speakersystem and a 360° camera. The artists control the speed of it’s rotation which directly influences the projected video-images as well as the sound-characteristics and the perception of the object itself. Acceleration & deceleration become main parameters, which enables the artists to compose an otherworldly piece that seems to follow it’s own logic. A strange communication between audio, video, object and light establishes itself and seduces the audience. There is the hypnotic movement of the sculpture while inevitable auditory and visual feedback is used as a central aesthetic element: The rotating speakers are amplified by static microphones, provoking complex feedback loops and patterns, that trigger psychoacoustic sensations.

Vertical Migration
Unsettling our perceptions of scale and otherness, Vertical Migration is an intimate encounter with a life form that bears no resemblance to human beings, though we share a planet, an ecosystem, and a future. Because of sea-level rise, humans will also be migrating vertically in the coming centuries, to higher elevations and raised buildings. The siphonophore’s story is our story. Though we can never experience its journey through the pitch-black ocean depths, we can shift our perspective to recognize that we’re connected, that our actions affect each other, and that we share a common fate.

Micro-Utopia
In response to London’s pressing housing crisis Micro-Utopia proposes a shared, immersive and interactive version of a home, where space is born from the finely-tuned sensorial interplay between the body and virtual/physical objects connected to the Internet of Things. A chair invites us to stay with it for a moment; we crawl through a demanding fireplace; our hands are washed in a bowl of digital liquid – the highly speculative model of domesticity explores the architectural implication of co-inhabiting a minimal physical infrastructure within infinitely bespoke virtual worlds. Drawing on radical art practice, interiors in historical painting and contemporary product design, Micro-Utopia is the dream of a house that is nothing, but the parameters of our perception are triggered through the metaphorical dimension of the objects we interact with on a daily basis.

Cloud Face
Humans see figures in clouds: animals, faces and even god. This kind of perception also appears in machine vision. Face-detection algorithms sometimes find faces where there are not any.’Cloud Face’ is a collection of cloud images that are recognized as human faces by a face-detection algorithm. It is a result of machine vision’s error but they often look like faces to human eyes too. Humans, yet, know these are not actual faces. Humans rather imagine faces from the clouds. Here, the error of machines and the imagination of humans meet.

SOL
SOL is a minimalistic environment, leading visitors into the reaches of their perception. The installation builds on loss of control, shifts in awareness and a feeling of dislocation and timelessness. SOL is the third work in an ongoing series of phenomenological environments, after the live performance FEED, 2005 and the installation ZEE, 2008. The all encompassing darkness of SOL is lifted, in intervals and for parts of seconds only, by animated bursts of intensely bright light. Falling back into darkness, visitors experience abundant retinal after-images, that gradually drift away until eventually the next eruption of light is triggered. In the surround sound-scape of SOL, electronic drones mix with swarming field recordings, amidst a sea of infra-bass.

Madakaripura

Digital image projection, software, real-time internet-based data, and sound
Installation shot at St. Saviour Church, London
Tromarama is an art collective founded in 2006 by Febie Babyrose, Herbert Hans and Ruddy Hatumena. Engaging with the notion of hyperreality in the digital age, their projects explore the interrelationship between the virtual and the physical world. Their works often combine video, installations, computer programming and public participation depicting the influence of digital media on the society perception towards their surroundings. They live and work between Jakarta and Bandung.

ДУ ХУ СА
ドーホー・スー。
서도호
specimen series refrigerator
348 West 22nd Street
Do Ho Suh est un artiste Coréen qui crée des installations spectaculaires en utilisant diverses matières et notamment le tissu polyester. Afin d’explorer les liens entre individualité et communauté, il utilise souvent le fils et le tissu pour investir l’espace. En déformant les perspectives et en jouant sur les propriétés même des matières utilisées, l’artiste met à l’épreuve notre perception de l’espace et notre place dans celui-ci. Époustouflant !

Please Smile
File Festival
“Please smile” is an exhibit involving five robotic skeleton arms that change their gestures depending on a viewer’s facial expressions. It consists of a microcontroller, a camera, a computer, five external power supplies, and five plastic skeleton arms, each of them with four motors. It incorporates elements from mechanical engineering, computer vision perception, to serve artistic expression with a robot.

Onion Skin
Principalement basé sur l’expérience de la réalité et les représentations de la perception de l’espace, Olivier Ratsi considère la réalité objective, le temps, l’espace et la matière comme des notions d’information intangibles.
Son travail consiste à concevoir des processus de discontinuité avec ces notions afin de pouvoir partager avec le spectateur un autre point de vue.
Par le biais de ce processus, Ratsi crée une cassure dans cette réalité objective, altérant notre perception du réel.
Toutefois cette cassure significative et perturbante est assez modérée afin de ne pas priver le spectateur de sa capacité subjective de reconstruction/reconstitution de la réalité, via son expérience et sa propre culture. Le processus de création basé sur la déconstruction des repères spatio-temporels et les dispositifs utilisant la technique de l’anamorphose, développée au cours de ses recherches, jouent principalement le rôle de déclencheurs d’émotions, qui n’ont pas seulement pour but de montrer ce que peuvent être les choses autrement, mais plutôt de questionner leurs références.

DEPART
The Entropy Gardens
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The Entropy Gardens is an artistic VR experience that explores one of humanity’s most archetypical artforms – garden making. It challenges its myths, aesthetics and modes of perception. Like a garden, The Entropy Gardens attempts to become a spatiotemporal poem — a poetic organism. In the form of a sprawling journey it constructs a hermetic, virtual garden as a poetic ecosystem — a psychic landscape that is foremost a complex audiovisual experience. It admits the visitor into a place that is equally challenging and contemplative (and of course profoundly weird).

Falin Mynd
Falin Mynd est une installation audiovisuelle dédiée à la ville de Milan qui s’inspire du concept de l’image latente dans le champ photographique: une empreinte invisible laissée par la lumière sur le film qui ne se révèle qu’après son développement. De même, les données générées par les habitants et les visiteurs de la ville de Milan produisent des paysages numériques abstraits, laissant une trace de leur analyse et interprétation en temps réel. De cette manière, le travail rend visible le lien indissoluble entre l’individu et la communauté, soulignant comment les deux entités s’influencent mutuellement en changeant la perception de la réalité qui nous entoure faite de lieux, de personnes, de couleurs et de sensations. Les données constituent ainsi une image invisible de la ville, une carte de ce qui n’est pas manifeste et qui se révèle dans Falin Mynd.

Ирина Нахова
Pilot’s head
L’exposition russe présente une œuvre ambitieuse, intitulée «Le pavillon vert», à travers laquelle Irina Nakhova (née en 1955) interagit avec l’architecture du pavillon, conçu en 1913 par Aleksey Shchusev, également auteur du mausolée de Lénine à Moscou. à partir des «installations totales» d’Ilya Kabakov, et en poussant plus loin le concept exprimé dans ses propres installations «Rooms» des années 1980, Nakhova a mis en place cinq espaces, où une interaction complexe entre l’art, l’architecture et la perception du spectateur se développe de manière surprenante , exploitant ainsi le concept original de Shchusev, qui n’a pas conçu le pavillon comme un simple conteneur, mais comme un soutien actif à la créativité des artistes.

Monolithe
Monolith est un travail expérimental non commandé, jouant avec des motifs de pixels irréguliers. Que se passe-t-il lorsqu’un écran présente une disposition non uniforme des pixels? Comment cela influence-t-il notre perception des images et de quelle quantité d’informations visuelles avons-nous même besoin pour franchir la frontière de l’abstrait au figuratif? Pour répondre à ces questions, nous avons créé une sculpture vidéo, qui fait fondre esthétiquement l’écran et le contenu. Dans un jeu entre beauté naturelle et bouleversement technique, les images de bustes classiques se transforment cycliquement en dégradés abstraits et redeviennent des images perceptibles.

Vidéosculpture XXI
Les VideoSculptures de Van der Auwera prennent une nouvelle position pour explorer les intersections de la vie numérique et physique et comment le filtrage des images dans la production, la diffusion et la digestion modifie à la fois la perception individuelle et l’expérience consensuelle. Utilisant l’écran comme matériau sculptural, ces œuvres sortent les images du cadre de manière low-tech. Ils commencent par un acte de destruction alors que l’artiste prend littéralement un couteau sur un écran pour découper des couches physiques. À l’insu de la plupart, ces couches sont des filtres qui adhèrent à chaque écran LCD. Sans la médiation de ces filtres, les images deviennent impossibles à voir à l’œil nu et le bruit blanc remplit l’espace.

Princess of Parallelograms
What will happen when our imagination itself is externalized in machines? Artificial intelligence constructs its own world-truth that is beyond our sensory perception. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) use algorithms to synthesize and generate images in a completely new way. These images have almost uncanny aesthetic characteristics, seeming to emerge from an ocean of data, a kind of pixel soup. Rather as if we were observing the emergence of artificial “thought.” The machine learns to understand the “essence” of a thing, be it an animal, the face of a celebrity or a body of text. It is then able to generate new images of this thing, including faces of celebrities who do not exist, mutant animals, or new texts. Eventually, AI will be capable of instantaneously and dynamically emulating all representations. The era of the optical machine and the capture of reality will then be at an end, supplanted by the era of machines that generate their own reality.

Vision II
David Spriggs’ Vision artwork series have a distinct focus on the senses. Accentuated by an affinity between its subject matter and the fragmentary nature of the medium, there is a tension created between form and emptiness. Appearing both as an implosion and as an explosion depending on the one’s perception, the viewer has the sense that he/she is observing a form in becoming, yet at the same time breaking down. The immersive experience created by Vision provides the audience with the impression that they are in the midst of witnessing an event, something of monumental proportions akin to the Big Bang. In changing viewpoints by navigating around the work, Vision is continually altered, breaking down at the sides so that the viewer can only see the edge planes of multiple sheets, begging the question: Is there in fact a form, or just individual images?

Through the Membrane
We define the space around us by observing and perceiving light and shadow. That is to say, our perception shapes our basic understanding of this sensory world, and hence the “reality” we believe in. If our experiential knowledge and awareness of space are challenged, would our definition of a “real phenomenon” also be changed? Through the Membrane utilizes optical polarizers to change how light passes through space. The installation does not rely on any electromechanical devices. Simply with creative use of material and structure, it presents a super-sensory experience in space where reality and illusion are inextricably juxtaposed.

Spektrum
SPEKTRUM is an interplay of light, music and the performers. The use of projections in a theatrical context was a very pleasant experience for us, for when projections are used indoors, they can be controlled so precisely that amazing changes of perspective are possible. Once the stage is perceived as a platform, once as a white cube, once the spatial perception itself is completely challenged. As the three different elements of the performance merge into one unified language, SPEKTRUM is able to be many things at once: playful and yet fierce, touching and yet disturbing. Less a narrative than an emotional and sensory experience SPEKTRUM challenges the mind of the spectator in a quite a poetic way.

Rising Awareness
Could one succeed in rising the level of awareness by sharpening one’s perception rather than repeating the vapid catchphrase, “raising awareness,” which has been coopted by an ever-growing money-raising industry that fails to improve our circumstances in a substantive way? Wearing a cocktail dress, I assembled a large kinetic structure made of wooden beams and ladders in front of the audience. I then walked and balanced on the twenty-foot wide structure at eight feet off the floor. Rising Awareness addresses my ongoing preoccupations about the physicality of experience, inhabiting the body, proprioception as the possible strongest sense of self, how spatial awareness correlates with overall awareness and self-awareness, how physicality enhances creativity, finding balance between gravity and groundlessness, a concept of happiness as the fullest expression of one’s particular cognitive potential, pushing boundaries, and the current irreverent politics of liability.

Futures
Futures uses the optical illusions created by light, sound and mirrors to transport audiences to a place where good things have happened and the future we want exists now. Futures is an immersive space in which audiences experience illusions that can reveal everything from how they process space and time to their perception of consciousness. It is a modular light installation that takes a number of forms. It is shown here as a walkway of mirrors and lights, tunnelling inwards towards a vanishing point.

Our Colour
Does colour change the way you feel? What does it feel like to be inside a rainbow? For the 2016 edition of the Bristol Biennial British artist Liz West invited visitors to drench themselves in the spectrum. West transformed architectural space and turned colour into an immersive and embodied experience by refracting light through carefully arranged coloured theatre gels. A vivid world was created, exploring human visual perception and how colour affects our emotions and our bodies.

Liminal Scope
Liminal Scope is an immersive light and sound installation, in which three rings frame the transit of light through space. The audiovisual score enmeshes harmonic frequencies, rhythmic motion,
and gradients of color, orchestrating a narrative which navigates tension and release. Our form of reality is mutually constructed by our perceptions along with their limitations. The installation’s rings form an aperture that focuses and reveals a spatial quality of light, which usually remains unseen. Liminal Scope is a meditation on these perceptual limitations as they
relate to our shared and individual perspectives on reality.

Redundant Assembly
In “Redundant Assembly” an arrangement of several cameras composes a live-portrait of the visitor from six perspectives simultaneously, aligned using face detection. The resulting image is uncanny, detached from the laws of symmetry and the depth perception of binocular vision. If several visitors are standing in front of the work, a composite portrait of their different facial features develops in real time, creating a mongrel “selfie”.