highlike

Isabella Münnich

Immersed Garden
Immersed Garden is in its true sense a sunken world. Floating bodiless in an underwater garden, natural sounds guide you through an immersive surrounding, somewhere between calming and irritating, natural and artificial. It is a playful exploration of the individual conception of safety and confusion and a personal approach to aesthetic references to habits of introspection and retreat in digital environments. It was created by fusing different digital processes like photogrammetry of selected natural places around Karlsruhe and field recordings in a local natural reserve. Underwater videos hybridize with 3D scans of trees and plants while invisible frogs are croaking and humming birds are buzzing by synthetic flowers. The artistic aim was to explore the personal perception of calming and irritating, playing with the concept of immaterialness and attentiveness. The artwork creates aesthetic references to philosophical and scientific theories of introspection and identity.

Tine Bech Studio

The Kinetic Storyteller
The Kinetic Storyteller is a playful environment for social interaction consisting of a pair of swings next to each other. As participant swings on a structure, they are connected to the twitter stream of the networked landscape around them. With each kinetic swing rotation, new messages tagged with specific hashtags are presented on three large screen situated in front and to the sides of the participants.

Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos and realities:united

Contemporary Art Centre in Cordoba
BUILDING FAÇADE WITH AN INTEGRATED LIGHT AND MEDIA INSTALLATION

To transform the façade into a light and media display without fundamentally changing its solid appearance as envisioned by Nieto Sobejano turned out to be the biggest challenge in the project. The façade is accordingly designed to deliver a tactile and solid appearance in the daytime while it turns at night into a unique and dynamic communication wall that reacts very specifically to the architecture. The 100-meter façade consists of 1,319 hexagonal, recessed and pre-fabricated “bowls” on different scales. Each of the bowls serves as a reflector for an integrated artificial light source. The intensity of each lamp can be controlled individually, forming a huge irregular low-resolution grey scale display. The thorough immersion of the “pixel-bowls” – like negative impressions – in the volume of the façade turns the architectural scheme itself into a digital information carrier. During the day, the façade shows a three-dimensional landscape with no sign of being a media facade. Additionally, this tectonically modulated surface topography is characterized by a playful composition of light and shadow that constantly changes with the movement of the sun.

Irina Dzhus

DZHUS SS21
Now that sustainable consumption is a more relevant topic than ever, DZHUS has created a collection inspired by the variety of packaging, to draw attention to the importance of recycling. The SS21 designs interpret the visual and structural peculiarities of boxes, packets and wraps of all kinds. Multi-purpose use of clothing has always been crucial to DZHUS, as a revolutionary method to minimise customers’ shopping and diversify their wardrobe at the same time. All pieces from the spring/summer line are transformers, and most garments can be modified into bags in a swift and playful manner.

Thom Browne

Mens SS 2020
“After the scene shifted from a selection of 2D garments, removed to reveal Browne’s brilliant designs below, the show began in earnest. The looks, as gleefully playful as ever, took on elements of Browne’s typical offerings and elevated them to the level of supreme costume design. Several imposing silhouettes recalled dresses worn by Antoinette-era aristocracy, with gargantuan trousers and shapely sportcoats crafted to resemble distorted Ivy League staples. Elsewhere, pleated skirts emerged as a prime trouser replacement, with cropped jackets and seersucker jockstraps to introduce a sporty motif.” Jake Silbert

Ken Kelleher

Bigfoot
While variety in composition and form is evident, Kelleher further experiments with material and color. Digital rendering techniques offer endless iterative opportunities. Multiple shifts in material, especially when applied to a singular form, allow for a variety of interpretations. Kelleher explains: ‘The visual expression I try to achieve is one that is open to interpretation. In one piece someone may see something playful, or whimsical, in another it may feel menacing.’

Steve Messam

Apollo
Victor Pasmore’s ‘Apollo’ Pavilion sits at the heart of the Sunny Blunts estate in Peterlee[…] Four large orange forms intersect the pavilion at right angles to the main orientation and appear to slice through the pavilion. The blocks are drawn from the geometry of the pavilion and a nod to the remote object planes of Victor Pasmore’s work. The inflatable textiles blocks create a juxtaposition between the angular grey concrete of the pavilion and the soft, rounded, colourful forms of the installation. The intervention is deliberately bold with a strong visual aesthetic to temporarily transform the pavilion. The piece is also, on the surface, playful, tactile and accessible – encouraging the audience to look at the pavilion with fresh eyes.

Daniel Rozin

Troll Mirror
The mechanical mirrors are made of various materials but share the same behavior and interaction; any person standing in front of one of these pieces is instantly reflected on its surface. The mechanical mirrors all have video cameras, motors and computers on board and produce a soothing sound as the viewer interacts with them. Troll Mirror was commisioned by Traget and is made of pairs of pink and blue troll dolls. Every troll doll pair can rotate so that the pink or blue troll face the front. The result is a colorfull reflection of the viewer’s outline and playfull colorfull transitions

Stine Deja

Cryptic Ruins
It’s the year 21020 and a mysterious archaeological site has been uncovered in what was central London. A large communal structure seemingly dedicated to unproductive expending of energy from human bodies. Whilst we might easily identify it as a gym, our descendants are concerned with why it exists at all. By framing the 21st century compulsion towards physical fitness as a mysterious practice of the past that requires decoding, Deja’s playful film reveals something of the absurdity of contemporary urban life and questions the rationality of our obsessions.

Zoro Feigl

Abb
A playful balancing act by a robotarm. This enormous machine balancing itself on a stainlesssteel semi sphere. When the arm moves, stretches, the balance point of the entire construction shifts which makes the whole machine lean over until it -almost- tips. The robot seems curious to find its tipping point, searching for the limits of balance without ever really being able to fall over. The machine is playing a children’s game with enormous power and robotic precision.

Urbanscreen

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.

Manuel Rossner

Hotfix
In the midst of the pandemic, people experience every day that technology such as smartphones and the Internet make social distance bearable. With his AR sculpture, Manuel Rossner shows how technology can become a hotfix, a quick solution to an unexpected challenge. “Hotfix” with its bubbles and lines is a playful introduction to problem solving through gamification.

Iart

Light Cloud
The Light Cloud at the Merck Innovation Center detects visitors’ movements in the room and translates them into many different moods. The generative sculpture stimulates and facilitates intense encounters between people and technology. The room-filling installation consists of four curved strands that are concentrically superimposed and slightly shifted in relation to each other. OLED elements that are attached to the strands and controlled by sensors react to the visitors’ movements and to sound compositions. In combination, this generates a complex mosaic in which sound and light interact playfully and the viewers leave traces.

Studio TheGreenEyl 

Whispering Table
Four unique festivities celebrated by people of distinct cultures are assembled in an archetypical scene of congregation. Visitors approaching a round table filled with empty dishes discover that these are actually telling personal stories about the symbolic meaning of food and rituals. Written by a story writer, these stories are are based on interviews and research carried out for this piece. The content changes according to the dishes‘ positions and their distance to the others. Similarities and peculiarities of different food ceremonies explored in a playful and entertaining way. By changing table constellations, the visitors reveal more and more stories and become part of a participatory spectacle.

Eliška Sky

WOMANEROES

“Eliška Sky’s tribe of ‘womaneroes’ stand bold and bright, their bodies and heads adorned in vibrant shapes, colours, and textures. Beneath the wigs and paint are women of all ages, shapes and ethnicities, photographed with a large-format camera to capture every detail, rough or smooth, with the intention for the images to eventually be printed and exhibited life-size. “It started as visual play, but transformed into a series that challenges depictions of women’s bodies,” explains the London-based Czech photographer. “In light of my own experience of working in the fashion industry, I felt the need to portray the body in new ways and forms, with an element of playfulness and humour in opposition to western media advertising”.” Marigold Warner

Moritz Simon Geist

Soft Manipulator
A playful interactive installation where the audience experiments with rhythms, mechanics and objects. Everyday items like glasses, pots, as well as small music instruments are placed on a light plattform. Seven robotic mechanic devices can be manipulated interactively by the audience, manipulating the sound of the objects. The six robotic mechanics beat the objects, creating a constantly changing polyrhytmic web of sound and rhythm.

thomas lebrun

Avant toutes disparitions
“Before any disappearance“, it is urgent to live, to dance, especially to transmit. By continuing his playful exploration of the history of dance and in particular by defeating the codes of ballroom dancing, the current director of the Center chorégraphique de Tours once again imposes an intergenerational vision of his art.

Precht

Bert
“We are fully aware that architecture is this serious and profound craft with a long culture and tradition. You see that when we architects find reference for our projects in art, philosophy, literature or nature. For this project, we also looked at art to find reference. But not at Michaelangelo or Dali. Rather we looked at cartoon characters of Sesame Street or Minions. We took a playful look at this project and wanted to create a rather unique character than a conventional building. A quirky looking character that becomes part of the wildlife of a forest. I think this quirkiness can create feelings and emotions. And maybe these are attributes in architecture that are missing these days.”

LEANDRO ERLICH

Леандро Эрлих
莱安德罗·埃利希
Dalston House
The Dalston House resembles a movie set, featuring the façade of a late nineteenth-century Victorian terraced house. A mirrored surface is positioned on the on the ground lying life size façade, in a 45-degree angle. Visitiors apppear to be hanging of the building or sitting on window sills, by sitting, standing or lying on the horizontal surface. The audience plays an important and active role in the installations for Erlich. By altering the viewer’s relationship with familiar spaces, he playfully disrupts our own notion of reality,through the mirrored projection of the image, creating new possibilities and situations.

 

Tod Machover

Death and the Powers

Science fiction and poignant family drama combine in one of the most stunning, cutting-edge operas of the 21st century, with a libretto by former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, coming to the stage of the Winspear Opera House in a production directed by Diane Paulus, designed by Alex McDowell (Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report) and conducted by Nicole Paiement (TDO’s The Lighthouse).This visually spectacular robot pageant by MIT Media Lab’s Tod Machover tells the story of a terminally ill billionaire, sung by Robert Orth, who downloads his consciousness into “the System” and proceeds to use all his powers to persuade his loved ones to join him there. Without bodies, without the possibility of touch, sex, suffering, and death — are we still genuinely human?Explore these existential questions and much more in a piece Variety described as “playful, lyrical and…mesmerizing.” Also starring Joélle Harvey as Miranda, Patricia Risley as Evvy, and Hal Cazalet in his Dallas Opera debut as Nicholas.

Philipp Artus

FLORA 2

The animation in FLORA is generated by overlapping sine waves that travel through a string of lines. This wave principle often appears in nature when energy is transmitted through a medium like water, air or simply a rope. It can also be observed in the locomotion of animals and human-beings, in which kinetic energy is transmitted successively through joints.
The FLORA algorithm of is based on the discovery that a simple system of rotating lines can create endless variations of abstract shapes – ranging from curved harmonious lines to edgy and chaotic patterns. The resulting aesthetics combine computational accuracy with an organic playfulness, and tend to trigger diverse associations in the mind of the viewer.

FILE FESTIVAL
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Jessica Eaton

but does it float
The Montreal-based artist has been working in the arcane reaches of analog photography for over 14 years. Through obsessive experimentation, she has developed a method entirely her own, combining additive colour theory and what she calls “a really bastardized version of Ansel Adam’s zone system.” Eaton’s relentless inventiveness and exacting practice have made her one of the most successful Canadian artist-photographers working today. She’s represented by galleries in Montreal, LA, and New York, where she exhibits her work by turns on a bi-annual basis. Viewers and collectors are drawn to the unique tensions in Eaton’s work: the austere minimalism coupled with her daring colors; the hyper-abstraction undercut by a current of playfulness; the defiant impenetrability softened by an aura of warmth.

Katerina Drzkova

Paraphrases: Joseph Beuys
This project develops creative dialogue with artworks of other contemporary artists. These visual comments are made without any prior preparation and are sort of playful performances during which we interact not only with artworks but with audience as well.

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.

Emily Motto

Эмили Мотто
My Cell

I make playful sculptures that perform and evolve throughout, and beyond, my creation – especially in terms of their shape, and the physicality of the unstable materials that I build them from. When creating parasites I was inspired by how the materials I made and used fed off each other’s properties; the net, dough and string of my recent sculpture series structurally supporting each other, and these responses creating new, and often quite fragile, forms

maarten baas

team B
house-UP

“I have encouraged these young architects to think and work in a freer, more playful way. I have been coaching both teams and guiding the creative process, getting people to kick around archetypes and suchlike,” he said.

Adam Kremer

Kramer doesn’t seem to be that interested in the aesthetic tradition of photography so much as creating the right image. His pictures are exciting, even the most simple still life has an energy; the textures, form and playfulness palpable. This is an artist with a style that embraces the absurdity of life and has a humour that is utterly disarming.

Maria Roosen

Maria Roosen calls herself “an artist with green fingers”—fittingly, her sculptures and installations feature imagery that references both plant and human organs, often in conjunction. Though her practice incorporates wool, wood, and sometimes watercolor, Roosen is best known for her ability to manipulate hand-blown glass. She creates a playful irony in the contrast between the material’s hardness and the fluidity and voluptuousness of the shapes she creates with it.

Wayne McGregor, Olafur Eliasson & Jamie xx

Tree of Codes
Tree of Codes opens with a magical world: a pitch-black stage with moving lights decked out on the costumes of unseen dancers. It could be a starry constellation or fragments of a city as seen from an aeroplane at night, or a group of robots powered by a playful AI operating system. more

Oliver Laric

Betweenness
“Installed in the main gallery is Betweenness (all works 2018), a video montage that sorts the natural world, including a few humans, into simple, line-drawn motion graphics. There’s a frolicsome quality to the animations: when the animals move, grow, shift, and, quite literally, evolve, the scenes appear to follow a playful intuition, rather than exhibiting any scientific fact.”more

marek cecula

The creative atmosphere unleashes a multitude of possibilities for fresh and exciting product. Surprise is our greatest inspiration. The playful character of hand processes lead us to innovative and unexpected results. Prototypes and models born from the activities serve as a beginning for new ceramic objects.more

jaesik lim, ahyoung lee, jaeyeol kim and taegu lim

clear orb

“The sustainable architectural culture that aspires the coexistence of human, nature and the architecture itself” is a core value of Heerim Architects and Planners in South Korea, the team behind a sparkling orb designed for Santa Monica Pier. A finalist in the biennial site-specific 2016 Land Art Generator Initiative design competition, which promotes the uptake of energy-generating public art that informs, delights, and uplifts communities and visitors, The Clear Orb reveals a playful approach to holistic design. Using transparent luminescent solar concentrators, the installation is purportedly capable of producing up to half-a-million gallons of fresh water each year for California.

RAYMOND QUENEAU

雷蒙格诺
レイモン·クノー
רמונד קנה
Раймонд Кено
OULIPO
Cent mille Milliards de poèmes
Since its arrival (the Oulipo), the rules of the group were set out as follows: “We define potential literature as the search for new forms and structures that can be used by writers in the way they will most like.” “Potential” refers to something that exists in power in literature, that is, that is found within language and that has not necessarily been explored. The favorite tool for study and production is the contrainte, an arbitrary formal restriction that can create new procedures, new forms and literary structures that can generate poems, novels, texts. Over the years, dozens of different contraintes have been explored, from those somehow related to the riddle, such as the palindrome, the acrostic, the lipogram, of which the playful aspect has certainly not been underestimated, with forms more directly related to the codes of exact sciences, such as combinatorial calculus, set theory or graph theory. Among the numerous definitions of the Oulipo provided by the members themselves, one is very elegant and significant: “An Oulipiano is a mouse that builds the labyrinth from which it is proposed to come out later”. Queneau often explained that some of his works might seem simple pastimes, simple jeux d’esprit (mind games), but he remembered that topology or number theory also arose, at least in part, from what was once called “funny mathematics“.

MAR CANET & CARLES GUTIERREZ

videomaton
File Festival

The initial idea was to engage audiences with the classical paintings. The installation tries to transform the classical portraits into memorable and playful experiences. In short, by looking into a mirror a face of participant is captured by the system. Next, the captured face travels into one of the classical portraits. Hence, the viewer is invited into the gallery in order to recognize him or herself in one of the paintings. In other words, the art piece replaces the original painted faces by the faces of the audience. To be more specific, the authors have created an original face-morphing that integrates itself into the well-know portraits, like Meninas by Goya. To put in a nutshell, the common experience of modern art is replaced by a novel, playful and enjoyable encounter. The installation creates a framework of expression where audience spontaneously and freely interact in front of a mirror knowing that they are recorded. The results are experience by all audience in the gallery. The project was produced in 2011 as a commission of interactive art project for the new City Council of Madrid curated by Chema Conesa. “Videomaton” was presented in the opening of new City Council of Madrid located in the Cibeles square. The installation was exhibited for a year in the institution. The aim of the exhibit was displaying the famous art pieces of Madrid museums in a novel way.

JEREMY BAILEY

ДЖЕРЕМИ БЭЙЛИ
제레미 베일리
ג’רמי ביילי
ジェレミー·ベイリー
Important Portraits

Powered by humor and computer vision, his work wryly critiques the uneasy relationship between technology and the body while playfully engaging the protocols of digital media.

PAUL MCCARTHY

بول مكارثي
保罗麦卡锡
פול מקארת’י
ポール·マッカーシー
폴 맥카시
Пол Маккарти
Train, Mechanical
“Train, Mechanical, is a fully-automated mixed-media work in which the sculpted likeness of George W. Bush engages in serialized bestiality with a number of pigs. The manufactured ménage-à-trois is completed by a lateral, third-party pig, who penetrates the fore-facing pig in the ear (a sexual maneuver described by Christopher Walken in an SNL skit as “Shin-Shee-Shin-Shee”). The piece functions as both a political satire and a parody of popular amusement park rides like Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean. With “process as sculpture” as a subtext, McCarthy addresses nuanced cultural mechanisms in a vocabulary which retains essential, playful relevance to the practice of art making”. S.Humphrey

MARCIO AMBROSIO

Oups!
Oups!
FILE SAO PAULO 2007
Capturing and tracking camera, animated image integration and projection
Created in 2007. Oups! was born from the wish to mix new technologies and classic animation in a playful and artistic way. Each animated sequence has a script and the visitor interacts and transforms himself into an actor of this story.
When the visitor enters in a defined space, a camera records his image and projects it on a screen in front (like a mirror) in real size and time. The visitor sees himself integrated to an animation setting that follow his movements. He founds himself immersed in a creative universe of images and sounds. The animation sequences that feed this universe are stored in a video library, new animations may be added to enrich the project. Oups! universe is playful and naive, accessible to all publics and ages.
video
VIDEO 2

CHRIS SUGRUE

delicate boundarie

This interactive installation imagines that the worlds inside our digital devices can move into the physical world. Small bugs made of light crawl out of a computer screen onto the human bodies that make contact with them, often surprising their audience as they try to abandon a virtual existence. The magic of the illusion takes shape as the audience lets them explore their bodies, crawling from one person to the next in a strangely intimate way. As digital technologies have become embedded in everyday life, the line between the virtual and real is increasingly blurred. Delicate Boundaries playfully explores our expectations and understanding of interfaces and interactivity.