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.

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.

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.

Patterned by Nature
Patterned by Nature was commissioned by the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences for the newly built Nature Research Center in Raleigh, North Carolina. The exhibit celebrates our abstraction of nature’s infinite complexity into patterns through the scientific process, and through our perceptions. It brings to light the similarity of patterns in our universe, across all scales of space and time.

file festival 2019
‘Tempo: cor’(Time:color) consists of an immersive installation that seeks to modify our experience of time by converting hours into color. A set of chromatic clocks, each set to a different GMT time zone, projects, in a semicircle, the current time in their mathematical and chromatic representations. The conversion between these two forms of time representation is based on an algorithm composed of sinusoidal functions that modulates the RGB colors as a function of the current time, gradually modifying the intensities of blue, green and red throughout the day: at midday yellow predominates, while at four in the afternoon the hour is red; midnight is blue, six o’clock in the morning is green. Side by side, the colors projected by the clocks merge, creating an immersive experience of a continuous and circular time, between the different time zones, that crosses the entire chromatic spectrum. This installation is part of a series of works in which I investigate the relationships between human notations and codes and our experience of space-time, seeking to change the ways we understand it; in this case, visitors immerse themselves in a spatial experience of time that provokes the questioning of notations and perceptions that we usually consider axiomatic. Changing the way we represent time will change our way of experiencing it?

黒川良一
octfalls
Octfalls consists of eight hanging HD screens displaying images of a silver waterfall cascading down a cliff, while the sound of the water rushing over rocks plays over a pair of speakers attached to each screen. These screens are distributed throughout the space at varying heights, encouraging our eyes to wander freely through the installation. The stunning images and highly refined sounds immerse our senses and play tricks on our perceptions. The waterfall suddenly vanishes in vain, then reappears, shifting to another screen, a complex combination of loops in a unique sequence of orchestrated play.

CANDESCENCE
Candescence is a performative light sculpture. Acoustically responsive spheres are activated by sound and touch, designed to inhabit and alter perceptions of architectural space. The installation consists of one or multiple spheres, acting in a spatial dialogue with the audience. Human interaction triggers an ascendance of vision, light and sound in a cyclic loop of which the individual is integral.

池田亮司
이케다 료지
Редзи Икеда
Transfinite
test pattern [n˚2] presents flickering black and white imagery that floats and convulses in darkness on two screens, one on the floor and another floor to ceiling, in time with a stark and powerful, highly synchronised soundtrack. Through a real–time computer programme, Ikeda’s audio signal patterns are converted into tightly synchronised barcode patterns on the screens. Viewers are literally immersed in the work, and the velocity of the moving images is ultra–fast, some hundreds of frames per second, providing a totally immersive and powerful experience. The work provides a performance test for the audio and visual devices, as well as a response test for the audience’s perceptions.

FORM II
Form est un environnement immersif où la lumière, utilisée sous une forme minimale, simule une architecture virtuelle mouvante se déplaçant dans l’espace et jouant avec nos perceptions.

Transmotion
The term transmotion not only depicts the process of change from one state, form, style or place to another, it is also the visionary perceptions of the seasons and the visual scenes of motion in art and literature. In parallel to Iris van Herpen’s drive to visualise the invisible, her quest to question reality and urge to explore the realms of impossibility, the project aims to narrate the process that ushers change, to materialise an unconscious state of meditation.

Heart Pillow
File Festival
“Heart Pillow” is a transhuman artifact that reproduces a person’s heartbeat remotely and in real time. It allows the very pulse of life to be transferred into an everyday object – a pillow – making it serve both as an extension to the user’s body and as mimicry of life itself, playing with the perceptions we might have on how life can be defined. It raises interesting questions on the meaning of the words “emotion” and “affection” and their scalability to the various modes of interaction that may arise from an augmented object. “Heart Pillow” can be used in any situations in which transferring a heartbeat into an everyday object can be interesting or useful, such as connecting a couple that is apart, to calm down new born babies with the known feeling of their mother’s heartbeat or as an extension of the self into an everyday object as a mean of reflection.

Grounds for standing and understanding
Babak Golkar is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice, at its fundamental roots, takes aim to deconstruct, recontextualize and rearrange our perceptions of the world around us. Marked by an intellectual iconoclasm and an unbridled philosophical spirit of inquiry, many of Golkarʼs works mischievously reveal that the fixity of meaning is merely an illusion, which he systematically disassembles and exposes. Like Zen koans, Golkarʼs work seems to arrive at new understandings by setting up impossible questions; ultimately focusing on the nature of truth; a truth unobstructed by the oppositions or differentiations of language, or perspective.

Фридмен, Том
톰 프리드먼
トム・フリードマン
Tom Friedman’s art has been exhibited extensively in the United States and internationally. The quirky, and flawlessly executed work tends to defy categorization. While his art is often linked to 1960s Conceptualism and Minimal art, Friedman invents his own visual language through his almost obsessive attentiveness to detail and his striking ability to transform the familiar into the unexpected. He uses common household materials such as aluminum foil, spaghetti, fishing line, hair, Styrofoam, and Play-Doh to create works that rearrange the viewer’s perceptions of the everyday environment.

ПАТТИ КЭРРОЛЛ
帕蒂·卡罗尔
Anonymous Women: Draped
Empress
“Photographers observe, comment, criticize, and make fun of the worlds we live in by interacting with reality, and visibly displaying those perceptions in images. My training was as a straight, documentary photographer, but I stray back into the studio to make up fictional worlds.”

제이슨 피터스
ジェイソン·ピーターズ
visceral paradigm
In my work I attempt to trigger and explore both intellectual and emotional reactions to the ways in which objects interact with their surrounding environment. I try to set up a situation where nothing is as it seems, and our notions of reality are exposed as mere assumptions, based on perceptions and experiences that may or may not bear any actual relationship to the way the world works.

Gloves
Laura Splan’s work examines the material manifestations of our cultural ambivalence towards the human body. Her conceptually based projects employ a range of traditional and new media techniques. She often uses found objects and appropriated sources to explore socially constructed perceptions of order and disorder. Much of her work is inspired by experimentation with materials and processes including blood, cosmetic facial peel and digital fabrication.

Your Colour Perception
L’artiste britannique Liz West, spécialiste du light-art, a choisi d’interroger nos perceptions des couleurs en créant un gigantesque arc-en-ciel d’intérieur.
En inondant de couleurs une pièce de 500 mètres carrés au 4ème étage de la Castlefield Gallery’s New Art Spaces Federation House de Manchester, l’installation Your Colour Perception immerge le public dans un univers multicolore et bigarré, saturé de lumière.

Werner Reiterer’s works walk a fine line between sense and nonsense, exploiting art’s close proximity to life as a means of challenging literal descriptions of reality. In a manner that blurs the boundaries of art and humor, his richly engaging sculptures ask us to participate in their realization while his drawings disturb our expectations of the ordinary in imaginings of absurd proportion. And by scrambling the relationship of images and language he is able to turn our perceptions upside down and, in ways that are both entertaining and illuminating, reassert the power of art to change our lives.

The Mask of Pinocchio/Underpants with a hole
Werner Reiterer’s works walk a fine line between sense and nonsense, exploiting art’s close proximity to life as a means of challenging literal descriptions of reality. In a manner that blurs the boundaries of art and humor, his richly engaging sculptures ask us to participate in their realization while his drawings disturb our expectations of the ordinary in imaginings of absurd proportion. And by scrambling the relationship of images and language he is able to turn our perceptions upside down and, in ways that are both entertaining and illuminating, reassert the power of art to change our lives.

Double Space
The V&A will once again act as the hub to the festival that also sees exhibitions dotted around London. Highlights include British designers Edward Barber & Jay Osgerby collaborating with car company BMW for ‘Double Space for BMW – Precision & Poetry in Motion’ that will distort the view of the Raphael Gallery space and visitors perceptions through the choreographed movement of two giant reflective kinetic sculptures.

فلوريان هيكر
フロリアン·ヘッカー
Sound Installation
In his installations, live performances and publications, Florian Hecker deals with specific compositional developments of post-war modernity, electroacoustic music as well as other, non-musical disciplines. He dramatizes space, time and self-perception in his sonic works by isolating specific auditory events in their singularity, thus stretching the boundaries of their materialization.
Their objectual autonomy is exposed while simultaneously evoking sensations, memories and associations in an immersive intensity. Some of his works incorporate psycho-acoustic phenomena, disorienting listeners’ spatial perceptions and expanding their conception about sound. Hecker’s most recent recording, Speculative Solution ( Editions Mego, 2011), brings together Hecker’s sonic practice and psychoacoustic experimentation with philosopher Quentin Meillassoux’s concept of ‘hyperchaos’ – the absolute contingency of the laws of nature.
During his residency at MIT, Florian Hecker will research a new sound piece that takes the concept of the “auditory chimera” as point of departure. Originally developed at MIT by Bertrand Delgutte, senior research scientist at the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, the concept of the auditory chimera inspires an exploration of the relationship between pitch perception and sound localization. Hecker will create a text and sound piece that incorporates the recordings of material read by students. Using an anechoic chamber he will work with students to explore the experiential nature of psycho-acoustic practice.

Augmented Shadow
File Festival

Augmented Shadow is a design experiment producing an artificial shadow effect through the use of tangible objects, blocks, on a displayable tabletop interface. Its goal is to offer a new type of user-experience. The project plays on the fact that shadows present distorted silhouettes depending on the light. Augmented Shadows take the distortion effect into the realm of fantasy. Shadows display below the objects according to the physics of the real world. However, the shadows themselves transform the objects into houses, occupied by shadow creatures. By moving the blocks around the table the user sets off series of reactions within this new fantasy ecosystem. In this installation, the shadows exist both in a real and a virtual environment simultaneously. It thus brings augmented reality to the tabletop by way of a tangible interface. The shadow is an interface metaphor connecting the virtual world and users. Second, the unexpected user experience results from manipulating the users’ visual perceptions, expectations, and imagination to inspire re-perception and new understanding. Therefore, users can play with the shadows lying on the boundary between the real, virtual, and fantasy. Augmented Shadow utilizes this unique interface metaphor for interactive storytelling. Maximizing the magical amusement of AR, it is embedding an ecosystem where imaginary objects and organic beings co-exist while each of them influences on each other’s life-cycle, even though it is not in use by users. Light and shadow play critical roles in this world’s functions causing chain reactions between virtual people, trees, birds, and houses. A set of tangible blocks allows users to participate in the ecosystem. Users can influence on the system by playing with the blocks or observe the changes of the shadows as if kids were playing with an ant farm.