Avatars
For this installation, So Kanno + yang02 composed all kinds of differently sized objects, including a telephone, a traffic cone, a plaster figure, a car, and a plant. Cameras, microphones, monitors and microcomputers are embedded in everyday objects arranged in the exhibition space, and connected to the Internet. Visitors can experience the work by logging in to / “riding“ each object via a web browser. Those objects exist as substitutes of – yet together with – real human beings (the visitors) in the same real environment that is subject to physical laws, rather than operating in a virtual space. Against the backdrop of the age of IoT, where all kinds of things are connected through networks, and artificial intelligence is about to mature, this work observes the new relationships that emerge when inorganic, non-autonomous objects transform into persons that act and perceive the world according to their own intentions.

versuch unter kreisen

This is the artistic result of a residency spent at CERN, where particles circulate on rings at great speed. The four lamps that are suspended from the ceiling also describe circles, but at varying speeds. Starting from there, every imaginable choreography is possible as well as every interpretation. The lamps describe figures that imperceptible transitions trigger one to the other. According to the artist, it’s only a question of mathematics here, though one asks oneself which one of the four incandescent lamps directs the others. And just as quick as they come into alignment as though linked by invisible ties, there is one that seems to accelerate while another can’t manage to keep up with the group. You can watch them for hours on end, hypnotised by the aesthetic beauty of physical laws. The artist, Julius von Bismarck, when receiving his prize admitted to having learned a lot at the CERN. It is likely that the scientists were also marked by his presence.
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Universe of Water Particles
Universe of Water Particles is a waterfall created in a computer-simulated environment. A virtual rock is first sculpted and computer-generated water consisting of hundreds of thousands of water particles is then poured onto it. The computer calculates the movement of these particles to produce an accurate waterfall simulation that flows in accordance to physical laws. Next, 0.1 percent of the particles are selected and lines are drawn in relation to them. The sinuousness of the lines depends on the overall interaction among the water particles and forms the magnificent cascade seen on screen.

“Entropy Wrangler,” Ian Cheng’s 2013 exhibition at Off Vendome in Dusseldorf, was an excellent introduction to the logic behind this artist’s practice. The centerpiece was a large projection in the gallery’s basement described as “a live computer simulation that changes and evolves, forever.” Like all of Cheng’s simulations, it was programmed with motion capture techniques that register the physical movements of performers that are then translated onto digital bodies. These bodies coexist as individual entities subject to the laws and dynamics of a causal, virtual world: avatars of people and common objects, like hammers and basketball players, rendered in basic three-dimensional form and caught in the zero gravity of the digital screen

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What exactly is METAMACHINE? The metaphor comes from the artistic path of Atsushi Koyama, one of the participating visual artists. While emphasising the aesthetic qualities of machines and mechanical drawings in oil paintings, Koyama merges the human body with mechanisms, creating a man-machine (similar to the notorious Tetsuo, but in a more sublimated way). As if to incorporate the beauty of the human body, Koyama’s mechanisms break away from their earthly nature. They take us to another reality, beyond utilitarian usage or function itself. Koyama’s machines act more like ‘mechanical’ (‘mechaaesthetical‘) keys to another dimension, existing outside of the physical reality and its laws.

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.

MENSKE

Even the standing room only tickets have sold out, and the raging mass of disappointed kids looks like they may start a riot: the atmosphere before Ultima Vez’s performance is akin to a rock concert. Choreographer superstar Wim Vandekeybus’s company has toured the world with their trademark vocabulary of acrobatic, extreme, often violent movement, soaked in multimedia and energetic music. Menske (meaning approximately ‘little human’), their latest work, has all the typical flaws and qualities of classic Vandekeybus. On the conservative end of political intervention, Menske is an explosive concoction of brash statements about the state of the world today, a sequence of rapidly revolving scenes of conflicting logic: intimist, blockbuster, desperate, hysterical. The broad impression is not so much of a sociological portrait, but of a very personal anguish being exorcised right in front of us, as if Vandekeybus is constantly switching format in search of eloquence. Visually, it is stunning, filmic: a slum society falling apart through guerrilla warfare, in which girls handily assume the role of living, moving weapons. A woman descends into madness in an oneiric hospital, led by a costumed and masked group sharpening knives in rhythmic unison. A traumatised figure wanders the city ruins dictating a lamenting letter to invisible ‘Pablo.’ Men hoist a woman on a pole her whole body flapping like a flag. “It’s too much!” intrudes a stage hand, “Too much smoke, too much noise, too much everything!” And the scene responsively changes to a quiet soliloquy. At which point, however, does pure mimesis become complicit with the physical and psychological violence it strives to condemn? Unable to find its way out of visual shock, Menske never resolves into anything more than a loud admission of powerlessness.