highlike

Random International

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.

Push 1 stop and Woulg

Interpolate
Interpolate incorporates live coding and generative processes to create an audio/visual performance where visuals control audio, and audio controls visuals. Stark, minimal, generative 3D geometry and particle systems take the audience through the music, conveying the physicality of the sound while mapping out the emotional landscape of the melodies. To interpolate means to determine an intermediate value or term in a series by calculating it from surrounding known values; on stage Push 1 stop and Woulg send data wirelessly to each other in order to be able to patch new interactions between audio and visuals in real time, and interpolate the missing data between sound and image.

LUCYANDBART

露西·麦克雷和巴特·赫斯
Люси Мак Рае и Барт Хесс

“Lucyandbart” is a collaboration between artists Lucy McRae and Bart Hess. In it they imagine human bodies and faces physically altered with a shocking but artistic realism. Globules of foam, asymmetric spines… fascinating and repugnant simultaneously, the pictures become even more disturbing because they don’t hint at the emotional state of the subject. Each transformed human looks blankly back at you, neither horrified or surprised or excited about their change of form, but merely present and allowing it to be shown to you.

LUCYANDBART

露西·麦克雷和巴特·赫斯
Люси Мак Рае и Барт Хесс

Imagine human bodies and faces physically altered with a shocking but artistic realism. Globules of foam, asymmetric spines… fascinating and repugnant simultaneously, the pictures become even more disturbing because they don’t hint at the emotional state of the subject. Each transformed human looks blankly back at you, neither horrified or surprised or excited about their change of form, but merely present and allowing it to be shown to you.

TERMINALBEACH

The Heart Chamber Orchestra
File Festival – Hipersonica 

In the TERMINALBEACH Heart Chamber Orchestra (made up of artists Erich Berger and Peter Vatava), twelve musicians played pieces from the heartbeat, recorded by an electrocardiogram from data sent by sensors placed on their bodies. As the live score created in real time from the physical and emotional states of the musicians, their beats further influenced the resulting musical composition. In this way, the biological feedback loop becomes a self-generating, organic and evolving system, which creates a musical score and a show that adopts the form of open or network art, in which chance and interdependence, thus how emotional changes and computational reasoning create a biological and psychological dynamic at the same time.

Lilla LoCurto & Bill Outcault

The willful marionette
the willful marionette (2014) was created by artists Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcault during a residency with the University of North Carolina Charlotte, working with the College of Computing and Informatics as well as the College of Art and Architecture. The marionette is 3d printed from the scanned image of a human figure and responds engagingly in real time to spontaneous human gestures by reading a viewer’s movements and expressions. Its strings are manipulated by motors and software and there are two depth sensors that read and analyze the behaviors and gestures of participants. The puppet’s subsequent actions are designed to elicit further responses, creating an exchange focusing on the frailty and insecurities of the human participant and raising issues of contemporary relevance. The intention of the project was not to create so much a perfectly functioning robot but rather to imbue an obviously mechanically actuated marionette with the ability to solicit a physical and emotional dialog with a viewer.

QUBIT AI: Klaus Obermaier, Stefano D’Alessio & Martina Menegon

EGO

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival

The mirror stage in psychology explains how the Ego forms through objectification, where one’s visual appearance comes into conflict with emotional experience, a concept called ‘alienation‘ by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The interactive installation EGO reenacts and reverses this process by distorting the mirror image based on the user’s movements, highlighting the tension between the real and the symbolic, the Ego and the It, subject and object.

Bio

Klaus Obermaier is an interdisciplinary artist, director and composer who creates innovative works in the performing arts, music and installations using new media. Stefano D’Alessio researches social issues induced by the internet and explores how the web and its derivatives influence human behavior and the body. Martina Menegon creates intricate assemblages of physical and virtual elements, exploring the contemporary self and its hybrid corporeality.

Hybe

Light Tree: Interactive Dan Flavin
HYBE’s Light Tree: Interactive Dan Flavin re-illuminates the minimalist fluorescent light tubes of Dan Flavin from the 1960s, through digital technology. Experimenting with light and its effect, Flavin explored artistic meaning in relationships between light, situation, and environment. The readymade fluorescent light fixtures he used created space divided and adjusted by light and composition, offering a newly structured space with light. HYBE’s work expands the logic of Flavin by reinforcing the physical property of light through interactive media. It presents an escape from traditional lighting, as light and color changes when touched by viewers. Lighting here is divided into front and back, and colors are programmed to maintain complementary colors. The front lighting constantly interacts with colors on a back wall through visual contrast and mixture. A random change and diffusion of light with the involvement of viewers provokes tension extending and segmenting space, turning space into a forum for emotional perceptual experience.

Maurice Benayoun

Maurice Benayoun and Tobias Klein
Brain Factory Prototype 2
Brain Factory is an installation that allows the audience to give a shape to human abstractions through Brain-Computer Interaction (BCI), and then to convert the resulting form into a physical object. The work examines the human specificity through abstract constructs such as LOVE, FREEDOM, and DESIRE. The project articulates the relationship between thought and matter, concept and object, humans and machine. Brain Factory uses Electroencephalography (EEG) data captured by BCI. As a brain activity is unique, we developed a novel calibration process of the individual data readings and associated emotional responses within a framework of binary outcomes. This is key for a real-time feedback – a biofeedback – between the virtual generative processes and the brain’s associated response.

Wang & Söderström

Growth
Wang & Söderström is a Copenhagen based transdisciplinary duo composed of Swedish designer Anny Wang and architect Tim Söderström. The bridging of the physical and digital realms is a major theme in their practice and they are constantly trying to challenge the boundaries between them. Fluctuating between art and design, Wang & Söderström wants to throw out pre-existing conventions regarding the digital and put emphasis on the emotional and tactile side of materials, objects and textures to give the digital a more human-relatable quality and create more meaningful connections. “By 3D scanning elements from nature, like tree trunks, leaves and plants and mixing it with surrealistic materials and behaviors, we wanted to let them continue to grow in a digital environment.”

NANINE LINNING

BACON

He painted the abysses of the human soul: the British artist Francis Bacon. Basic mechanisms of relationships such as desire, domination and exclusion he presented with merciless honesty and painful beauty.
With her piece, Nanine Linning fathoms the emotional cosmos of Bacon`s paintings and detects in their uncompromising depiction an analogy with her own art. With excessive physicality, the choreography explores fundamental patterns of behavior, which blur the line between human and feral bearing by their archaic and merciless nature. From an almost disturbing proximity the spectator witnesses the struggle of the individual for affiliation.At the same time fascinating and disturbing, the piece celebrates its comeback on stage fourteen years after its first release. BACON, which received the »Swan« for the best Dutch choreography, returns with revised choreography and new video- and light design.

Anna Horcinova

INposition
In the photo project INposition (2013), which was shot by a Hasselblad 501CM camera, she’s using playful manipulation of physical fragments to express existentialism or the limits of body and mind. Anna Horcinova staged her models – mostly dancers in physically difficult dance poses expressing an emotional state of mind together with a gesture. And with the help of the body she tries to cross the imperceptible boundaries between her subject and the world around it.

Luiza Kurzyna

Sunset Park
Luiza Kurzyna is a Brooklyn-based artist working on both paper, and immersive sculptural installations. Inspired by relationships within nature, Luiza combines the many ways that living things relate to each other (for example, through touch, mating rituals or gender roles) with elements of fantasy. Growing, bulging and decaying forms give objecthood to emotion and life’s transitions. The fantastic elements are intuitive, abstract; they create a space where the emotional inside can merge with the physical outside.

MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ

مارينا ابراموفيتش
玛丽娜·阿布拉莫维奇
מרינה אברמוביץ’
マリーナ·アブラモヴィッチ
Марина Абрамович

Marina Abramović was born in 1946 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Since the beginning of her career, during the early 1970s where she attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, Abramović has pioneered the use of performance as a visual art form. The body has been both her subject and medium. Exploring the physical and mental limits of her being, she has withstood pain, exhaustion and danger in the quest for emotional and spiritual transformation

EMIL ALZAMORA

埃米尔·阿尔萨莫拉
ЭМИЛЬ АЛЬЗАМОРА

“The human form is a constant within my work. I often exaggerate or distort it to reveal an emotional or physical situation, or to tell a story. Limitation and potential are as human as the flesh, yet hardly as tangible. In my works I strive to make visible this interaction.”

DONATO PICCOLO

Mal di Testa
His art investigates various natural and emotional phenomena, often using technological and mechanical tools to create his works. Through a thorough study of human cognitive faculties, Piccolo’s art analyses the perceptive aspects of the natural world. His artwork investigates natural, physical, biological, and scientific phenomena which are the basis of living, employing their emotional aspect as a tool. He lives and works in Rome, Italy.

Heather Phillipson

100% Other Fibres
Through collisions of image, noise, objects, language and bodies, Heather Phillipson’s videos and sculptural installations behave as places, musical scores, poems and nervous systems – attending to how physical and affective ‘selves’ are constructed, manipulated and, above all, escape. Often rendered as walk-in conglomerations of readily accessible materials (digital images, paint, cardboard, words, audio loops and reproducible consumer detritus), her works stake out an ambiguous territory in which cultural references and emotional responses are mutually contingent and reactive. Collapsing distinctions between the forthright and the inarticulable, the banal and the ecstatic, and between metaphor and extreme literalisation, Phillipson’s work performs constant tonal shifts, disruptions and bleeds. In so doing, it oscillates between physical intimacies and conceptual distances – desire, sensuality, touching and being touched, shame, anxiety, (over-)exposure, resistant surfaces.

EMIL ALZAMORA

埃米尔·阿尔萨莫拉
Эмиль Альзамора

“The human form is a constant within my work. I often exaggerate or distort it to reveal an emotional or physical situation, or to tell a story. Limitation and potential are as human as the flesh, yet hardly as tangible. In my works I strive to make visible this interaction.”

Erik Hobijn

Delusions of self-immolation

The installation Delusions of self-immolation will lead a great number of visitors to ask themselves where the boundaries of their own body lie and why one would wish to discover them. Erik Hobijn has built a machine in which one may almost look death in the face, and that, equipped with fire and water spraying devices, sets light to the victim and extinguishes the flames, standing in the middle of a platform. During the course of the festival Erik Hobijn will give demonstrations.The borders of the body are hard to define in terms of averages, because they are closely related to the psyche that demonstrates the physical limits. Despite its extremely physical nature, the way in which it is experienced is determined by personal fears, dreams and desires. Erik Hobijn’s machine unleashes such strong emotional responses because it forces the person to be the guardian and researcher of their own body limits. It is a life of initialization toward self development, with its own warmth and beauty..

Heidi Kumao

Protest

“Protest” is from the project, “Misbehaving: Media Machines Act Out”(2002-2007), a series of mechanical girls’ legs, each with their own prescribed and programmed behavior. In each tableau, an electronically controlled, mechanical being protests with a voice of erratic physical gestures and projected video imagery. As a combination of robotics and performance, they represent girls who disobey or resist expectations. Unlike machines designed for perfect job performance, these machines will declare their fallibility, impatience, approval, and disapproval through small gestural acts. In these tableaus of protest and transformation, the machine is spirited, emotional, thoughtful, and irregular. “Protest” consists of aluminum, mechanized pairs of 6 year-old girl’s legs fitted with shoes and standing on a table top. An electronic circuit and proximity sensors make her responsive to the presence of viewers for whom she stomps loudly and erratically

AYA HAIDAR

Stitching The Stories We Dare To Tell
My investigation of the limitations of a visual language within fine art leads me to explore the fundamental elements of language that contribute to a story. This overlap plays on one’s senses of memory and imagination. I place myself at the centre of the work, both physically as the object and emotionally as the subject.