Smart Hans

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival
Max Haarich (Project Smart Hans) – Smart Hans – Germany

The Smart Hans project is a synthetic reincarnation of Clever Hans, a horse that became famous in the early 20th century for apparently answering mathematical questions by tapping its hoof. The interactive installation features an animated horse that can guess any number in its mind through posture recognition. At the same time a fun joke and an illustration of why we worry about artificial intelligence.

Bio

Max Haarich is an artistic researcher, ethicist and consultant focusing on artificial intelligence and web3. He studied communication science at RWTH Aachen and critical thinking at the University of the Underground. After his studies, he researched artificial superintelligence at RWTH Aachen and later worked as a communications manager at Europe’s leading startup hub.

Credits

Team: Anja Borowicz Richardson (UK), Bruce Gilchrist (UK), Akshita Gupta (IND), Max Haarich (Artistic Lead/DE), Martina Huynh (NL), Asad Imtiaz (PAK), Muhammad Qasim Khan (PAK), Adrian Ludwig (DE), Pekka Ollikainen (FI), Raphael Pickl (DE).

infinite posture dataset

She moves by endlessly morphing to the rhythm of the device – strapped in the frame of the screen – following or giving instructions; part human, part machine. The design of the device is inspired by a gadget to cheat the step-counter on your smartphone. Technology tricked by technology. Her movements, caught within a motion capture like tight suit deconstructing her body parts, talk of complex and conflicting emotions, but her face, from which we usually read how someone is feeling, is hidden. But is the machine that is observing her deconstructed and re-sequenced postures actually capable of recognizing what the body is communicating? Are we?

#define Moon_
[#define Moon_ ] consists of 9 rotating kinect light installations. It presents different postures of moon shape, exerting new sense experiences. The audience is allowed to explore through various ways of looking and bring curiosity to the installation by watching from different angles. By thinking of the science spirit, once again, viewer can define and understand the concept of this work of their own.

Posture dei tulipani
Carl Kleiner crea contenuti editoriali eleganti per marchi di moda e lifestyle, e questa sensibilità si manifesta nella sua serie di foto e video Postures che presenta tulipani disposti ad arte. Utilizzando minime aste di metallo, piegate alle estremità e agli angoli strategici, Kleiner mette in mostra le curve aggraziate dei lunghi colli dei fiori e petali e foglie delicatamente arruffati. Un ulteriore senso di movimento viene instillato attraverso il video in stop-motion, che combina le foto dei sottili cambiamenti dei fiori in una danza drammatica.

Work in progress
The motionless figure of an androgynous giantess occupies almost the entire gallery space in her entangled posture. On its body and around it, small scaffolding grows upwards. But the construction site is deserted. Only the figure, which resembles an avatar, remains in a calm state. A state of “being in between”. Between day and night. Between dream and reality or even between life and death? It almost seems as if the figure is still being brought back to life. One is inclined to think of Mary Shelley, whose novel character Victor Frankenstein created an artificial human being 200 years ago – in a time of great upheaval and discovery. Today we find ourselves once again at a turning point in society and technology, which makes us question ourselves as well as platforms on which we construct our selfs… Is that what Evelyn Bencicova and Enes Güç are alluding to here?

CYBERDANCE

This net art by Ricardo Barreto and Paula Perissinotto offers us a split, fragmented, impossible dance, in a divided, multiplied space. Cyberdance consists of the combination and recombination of elements that represent the different parts of the human body. A mannequin was photographed as a model in different positions. These images were later converted to the animated form, allowing users to combine them in different ways, as well as link them to different dance terms, to the names of postures and positions of classical ballet. On a page divided into frames containing fragments of the mannequin, we can see his head, legs, torso and arms rotating, while allowing us to subdivide each frame by clicking on it, each frame composing an aberrant doll whose fragments dance, silently, independent one from the other. There is no music, no rhythm, no space. It is a digital dance, a dance in which time and space have become a platform.

Nadi Generative Art
Nadi is a Digital display of Kinetics and Energetics of Body Movements involved in Yoga. The visuals are created by investigating the flow of data, using the human body as a vehicle. With the support of computer vision technologies, a visual trail is formed by tracking the body movements during yogic postures. Inspired from Indian Yogic Science, we have visually depicted aspects of light, matter and energy in our forms. The generative nature of the visual comes from the digital juxtaposition of the poses that the body generates with each pose.

Карлом Кляйнером
Tulips Postures
Carl Kleiner creates sleek editorial content for fashion and lifestyle brands, and that sensibility shows in his photo and video series Postures which features artfully arranged tulips. Using minimal metal rods, bent at strategic ends and angles, Kleiner showcases the graceful curves of the flowers’ long necks and gently ruffled petals and leaves. A further sense of movement is instilled through the stop-motion video, which combines still photos of the blossoms’ subtle changes into a dramatic dance.

SPACE INBETWEEN
The series of spatial structures are a combination and overlapping of basic architectural-elements (roof, floor, wall, window, and ladder) and furniture feature (platform with different level for seating, laying, leaning). The shape and form represent contemporary architecture with simplicity of form but complex spaces. These structures can be seen as a transition between inside and outside. It provides variety of posture and different level with intimate space.

parenthesis
re-lying combines reclining and lying down, creating an anti-gravity posture with many health benefits

理查德·杜邦
리처드 듀퐁
Manipulating 3-D scans of his own body on the computer, Mr. Dupont then marries digital fabrication methods like rapid prototyping and computer numerically controlled milling with traditional plaster casting and other laborious hand work to make figures that can appear both archaic and futuristic. One of his standing nudes, similar in posture to the Kouros statues from ancient Greece, appears to melt into ripples when viewed on one axis, suggesting the psychic experience of man in the modern world.

Space Inbetween
“The series of spatial structures are combination and overlapping of basic architectural-elements (roof, floor, wall, window, and ladder) and furniture feature (platform with different level for seating, laying, leaning). The shape and form represent contemporary architecture with simplicity of form but complex spaces. These structures can be seen as a transition between inside and outside. It provides variety of posture and different level with intimate space.”

Le recital des postures
Deepening her understanding of the movement of attention, the germination of figures and the idea of Postures as containers, Yasmine Hugonnet explores the practice of ventriloquism. Her work has been oriented by few important encounters such as Peter Goss, Odile Rouquet, and Lisa Nelson. more…

Posture Is Everything

WORKS ON PAPER III: The Shape of Missing Violence
Each of the participants is required to hold a knife and stay still. They stand in front of a wall within a “frame” which is made of black adhesive tape in rectangle shape. When the performance starts, the artist adjusts their postures and, later, uses the same black adhesive tape to “fill” everything within the frame. Afterwards, the wall and the bodies of the participants are covered with black tapes, while their heads and the knives are still visible; then, their heads are covered with black tape and, finally, the knives are covered as well. Once participants realize that their body is completely covered, they can move slightly, expanding the tapes from “inside” (not destroying them) and come out from the tapes. They leave the knife, which is stuck on the wall, behind the tapes. In the end, the shapes of the leaving traces of their bodies are shown while the knives are invisible.

理查德·杜邦
리처드 듀퐁

Manipulant des scans 3D de son propre corps sur l’ordinateur, M. Dupont marie ensuite des méthodes de fabrication numérique comme le prototypage rapide et le fraisage à commande numérique par ordinateur avec le moulage en plâtre traditionnel et d’autres travaux manuels laborieux pour créer des figures qui peuvent paraître à la fois archaïques et futuristes. L’un de ses nus debout, similaire dans sa posture aux statues Kouros de la Grèce antique, semble se fondre en ondulations lorsqu’il est vu sur un axe, suggérant l’expérience psychique de l’homme dans le monde moderne.

Life Posture No.1

extase (ecstacy)

L’Extase est un travail ou sculpture et performance sont en symbiose. Encrés en une surface de proportion divine, chaque point de soutient constitue l’empreinte d’une zone érogène de l’artiste. Douze cannes ici sont dédiées à une muse masculine. Se référant à Ste Thérèse du Bernin, Luce de Tetis ainsi soutenue est portée en posture extatique.