Saturation Sampler
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s work Saturation Sampler, uses AI computer vision to track onlookers and extract the most saturated color palettes from their bodies and clothes, creating a gridded composition from the footage where viewers catch glimpses of their reflections in the pixelated field. With the widest color gamut available and an unparalleled 160-degree viewing angle, Luma Canvas delivers a unique viewing experience unlike any other. The direct emissive nature of the display’s LEDs creates a visceral and material encounter with Lozano-Hemmer’s interactive work, meaningfully situating his digital work within the physical realm.

Cyberia

Performance & live computer generated simulation

A postmodern fairytale, Cyberia takes place somewhere in a cold distant East, stretching between and endless imaginary realm and a vast physical space. It is a westwards journey towards a promised future with no arrival and no return. There is no here or there, only a twilight zone between a departure point and a simulated destination. Between digital video projections and a physical setting, using the mechanics of a video-game engine with a motion capture suit, Cyberia is the simulation of an endless pre-climax state where a performer and a CG avatar dance as one to the rhythms of an imaginary West. In a world oversaturated by digital data –mysticism and paranormal are as popular as ever. Emerging technologies are increasingly incorporated in a form of postmodern spiritualism, as Arthur C. Clarke points out: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Frame Perspective
Measuring 30m x 30m x 2.4m and featuring LED lights and 8 audio channels, Frame Perspective transforms a cavernous space at the Maison de la Région. On specific dates throughout the Constellations festival Ratsi has prepared a light programme in the space, accompanied by a sound composition played by Thomas Vaquié (see the festival programme for more details). Frame Perspective continues Ratsi’s interrogation of reality through the creation of exploratory and peripheral spaces. The installation’s repeating forms create new dimensions in the Maison de la Région, interrupting the lines of the architecture. Meanwhile the composition of interacting lights and sounds disrupts the sonic and visual textures of the space and resonates with the visitor on uncharted frequencies. The effect is to immerse the visitor into a fluctuating environment which connects digital technologies with physical spaces and raises questions about how reality is constructed and experienced in digital, physical and other realms.

Thixotropes
They’re called Thixotropes. Compositions comprised of eight illuminated mechanized structures create choreographies of lighting effects that alternate form warm to cold light. Designed by London based design firm Troika, these suspended systems merge technology with art and explore the realm in which rational observations intersect with the metaphysical and surreal. Each of the structures is shaped as a composition of intersecting angular and geometric forms, made of thin tensed banding lined with rows of LED’s. The constructions continuously revolve around their own axis thereby materializing the path of the light and dissolving the spinning structures into compositions of aerial cones, spheres and ribbons of warm and cold light while giving life and shape to an immaterial construct.

The Eidolon Splits
The Eidolon Splits explores the construction of human form and identity within a narrative realm. It reflects and embodies the screen as a portal and contact surface both as a physical and a virtual device.

Latent Space
In Latent Space fine lines weave virtual spaces around the viewers. The architecture that manifests is highly fragile — the space grows, shrinks, collapses. The acoustic dimension is also deeply spatial — slowly morphing soundscapes float around the dome, enveloping the observers in sound and image. The omnipresence of the virtual realm is transposed into the physical space of the dome to unmask the often proclaimed boundlessness of digital space. The work tests and investigates the spatial effects of the dome, which serves as a metaphor for the virtual net that always surrounds us.

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.”

Im Wald
“The images are disarmingly precise, convincing representations of physical impossibilities. Summoning the camera’s role as a truthful witness to reality is among the reasons that the Blumes—who both trained as painters—chose photography for their project, in order to smuggle the fantastic into the realm of the plausible[…]”more…

Rasper
Rasping Music is an audiovisual installation in appreciation of the ignored aural/visual phenomena surrounding our daily lives. It involves new mechatronic instruments that employ some everyday objects of the urban life, shifting the medium in which they normally exist, and formalizing them through patterns of a rhythmic grid. In these instruments, DC motors and actuators are detached from the realm in which they are tools to help run our machines––where their noise is merely the aural artifact of the urban technology––, and turned into amedium for sound/music. In contrast to their everyday location, i.e., hidden inside black boxes of our machines, their bodily existence is fully exposed, flaunting the physicality of their noise. This physicality is further highlighted in arrays of white light, which––unlike the florescent lights of our offices––are not there to help us see things, but to be seen themselves.

The Architecture of Radio
In case you’ve ever wondered exactly what lies beyond the realm of the visible, Dutch designer Richard Vijgen has created a new app that is able to visually portray the network of radio waves that lies below the surface. The app was created as a part of Vijgen’s new ”The Architecture of Radio” exhibition at Germany’s ZKM, and combines technologies from GPS, OpenCellID, and NASA’s public satellite feeds to amalgamate a rendering of the data webs all around us. The app was intended to give a physical portrait of the very data waves that rule the modern day, according to Vijgen: “We cannot see the very thing that is defining our time, and that concerns me.” The designer went on to note “as technology is becoming more and more transparent, I think data visualization can help us to relate to things that are invisible, yet play an important role in our lives.”