highlike

Kenny Wong

Squint
file festival
I was inspired by how the sunlight bounces around in our artificial forest.
“Squint” is a kinetic light installation consisting of 49 mirrors that reflect lights in a bright space. The mirrors track and reflect lights on audiences’ face with composed patterns of movements. It extends the generated perception by focusing on how lights pass across our visual senses physically, and combines with our perception of images through flickering. “Squint”, which extracts various daily experiences to an abstraction brings the audience to expand their interpretation of lights and perceived imagination into a non-linear experience.
“Squint” simulates light source and intentionally shines lights on audience’s faces. Bright light is projected in the gallery, a clean bright space.
Everyday people are dynamically moving around in the city. Sunlight reflects and flickers even when it is indirect and hidden behind the artifacts. While we are traveling, we are experiencing motion. We are also experiencing the shift of light intensity, visual patterns and textures. The varieties of light forms inspire the artist to explore the potential of light textures, select and sort out the combined complexity in urban space. The artist turns them into a minimal form of light experience, while maximizing its diversity of perception.

Anicka Yi

In Love with the World
“I wanted to expand on the ideas from Venice, to explore the poetic and philosophical potential of machines. How can humans and machines be companions and kin of one another, not fulfill this master-slave binary of machines or humans as overlords to the other.”Anicka Yi

Eve Bailey

Rising Awareness
Could one succeed in rising the level of awareness by sharpening one’s perception rather than repeating the vapid catchphrase, “raising awareness,” which has been coopted by an ever-growing money-raising industry that fails to improve our circumstances in a substantive way? Wearing a cocktail dress, I assembled a large kinetic structure made of wooden beams and ladders in front of the audience. I then walked and balanced on the twenty-foot wide structure at eight feet off the floor. Rising Awareness addresses my ongoing preoccupations about the physicality of experience, inhabiting the body, proprioception as the possible strongest sense of self, how spatial awareness correlates with overall awareness and self-awareness, how physicality enhances creativity, finding balance between gravity and groundlessness, a concept of happiness as the fullest expression of one’s particular cognitive potential, pushing boundaries, and the current irreverent politics of liability.

MAURICE BOGAERT

Het Wezen van de Stad
For a couple of years now I’ve been developing a series of works that engage, each in different ways, with what I propose to call filmic architecture. In these works, I explore the relationships between scale models, sets, architecture, and the moving image. Starting point is was the question: would it be possible to do a remake of a film, let’s say Ridley Scott Alien, with a set that would allow one to do so in one single shot? How to translate the combination of spaces, montage and shifts in size and angle as we see them in the film into the actual spatiality of a set that would allow one to shoot the film in a single continuity without the cut and paste of montage? This brought me to the idea of the Morphed Set as both a potential plan for a work and an intellectual exercise or figure of thought. Sometimes my works are extremely large “walkthrough INSTALLATIONS” – at other times, they are infinite small scale models and prototypes.
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TZUSOO

SCHRÖDINGER’S BABY
Schrödinger’s Baby(2019/20), TZUSOO alludes to the popular thought experiment devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. Schrödinger proposed a scenario in which a cat is locked in a box with an unstable radioactive atom that could potentially begin to emit radiation and release a toxic gas. However, there is no way to say with certainty when or indeed whether this will happen without opening the box. The result is a paradox, with Schrödinger asserting that the cat enters a state of superposition that makes it impossible to say whether it is alive or dead.The South Korean artist translates this famous paradox into the reality of her own life, creating a digital baby in virtual space. Based on her inner grappling with potential motherhood, TZUSOO bought the digital model of a developing embryo, refining it according to her own ideas. She is free to determine the sex, skin colour and other characteristics or to dispense with all specifications so as to avoid stereotyping. In Schrödinger’s Baby, TZUSOO thus discuss core aspects of her work including reflection on gender and origin for which she also draws on her personal experience as a South Korean artist in Europe.

EJ Hill

A Monumental Offering of Potential Energy
Hill’s installation and performance, A Monumental Offering of Potential Energy (2016), places him atop a plywood platform embedded in the sculpture, which resembles a classic wooden roller coaster. Embodying the abstracted vehicle for which the track is laid, Hill’s physical presence in the work is undeniable and a central part of a 512-hour long performance that runs the course of the exhibition.

SAM BUXTON

Electric Chair

The distinctive work of Sam Buxton is dominated by his innovative use of advanced materials and technologies. From his immensely popular MIKRO series (miniature fold-up sculptures, laser cut into thin strips of stainless steel through an acid etching process) to his explorations concerning interactive intelligent surfaces on the familiar objects around us, his work has continually managed to blur the lines between art, science and design.Through his work, which has regularly involved relatively common objects ranging from business cards to a dining table, Buxton has demonstrated an ability to see potential in what others take for granted. His on-going efforts in developing objects that can communicate, display information and react to the actions of the user, demonstrate his commitment to investigating the delicate relationship between the human body and its environment. Buxton’s fusion of art and science has resulted in a highly innovative and unique range of personal designs, many of which, have utilized the latest, most advanced materials and technologies available.

David Colombini

Attachment
This poetic machine prints your message and a code on a sheet A6, slips it into a biopolymer cylinder attached to a balloon, which is finally released into the air. Then, the balloon will travel haphazardly to a potential recipient.
Where did the idea come from? The basic idea was to take a stand against the current use of «smart» technologies by creating a poetic concept, using current technology that allows us to communicate differently and rediscover expectation, the random, and the unexpected.
For the record, I have always been attracted by what is in the air and remember having won a balloon release contest when I was about ten years old. My balloon flew from Switzerland to Austria, this definitely left an impression on me and perhaps influenced the idea of this project.

THEODORE SPYROPOULOS

BEHAVIOURAL COMPLEXITY

Design Research Laboratory (AADRL) and the experimental design studio Minimaforms examining a behavior-based agenda that engages experimental forms of material and social interaction. Cybernetic and systemic thinking through seminal forms of prototyping and experimentation will situate the work through continued experiments that have manifested since the early 1950s as maverick machines, architectures and computational practices exploring the generative potential of self-regulating phenomena as proto-architectural environments. Through explicit models of interactions, observable patterns and proto-animalistic agency; the research will discuss the capacity of these systems to evolve, adapt and self-structure through computation.

Objective Realities

automato.farm
FILE FESTIVAL 2018
As things become smarter and connected, their roles in people’s lives are challenged. Things become closer and closer to us, eventually becoming “users” themselves. How will we understand objects’ needs and perspectives and potentially design for them?

Oliver Laric

2000 Cliparts

Oliver Laric’s work seeks to parse the productive potential of the copy, the bootleg, and the remix, and examine their role in the formation of both historic and contemporary image cultures. This process is intimately tied to his intuitive, idiosyncratic brand of scholarship, which he presents through an ongoing series of fugue-like expository videos (Versions, 2009—present), and further elaborates through his appropriated object works, videos, and sculptures, all of which are densely conceptually layered and often make use of recondite, technologically sophisticated methods of fabrication. Straddling the liminal spaces between the past and the present, the authentic and the inauthentic, the original and its subsequent reflections and reconfigurations, Laric’s work collapses categories and blurs boundaries in a manner that calls into question their very existence.

BITCRAZE

Crazyflie
The Crazyflie quadcopter was started late 2009 as a competence development project in the Swedish consulting company Epsilon AB in which all three of us where employed. This project was done on our free-time with component cost handled by Epsilon. In 2010 we finally decided to send to a video of the Crazyflie to Hackaday.com and that’s when things really took off. More development was done and we decided to make a Crazyflie kit that could be manufactured and sold as an open source development platform. To finance the development and manufacturing of the kit we created Bitcraze AB. At this point we felt that the project had outgrown the Daedalus Projects and decided to launch Bitcraze.se. The Daedalus projects website still exists to show off and advertise other Epsilon competence development project but the Crazyflie now lives in Bitcraze.Crazyflie is a small quadcopter that stated with a simple idea: get an electronic board to fly. We are three electronic engineer from Sweden and we wanted to make a small flying machine that could fly indoor (Sweden is often cold outside ) and with as few mechanical parts as possible. The result of this idea was a small quadcopter that uses its electronic board as main mechanical frame and with motors glued to the PCB:This fist prototype was as simple as possible while following our initial target to be small with the minimum of mechanical thought. After a couple of month of programming and debugging it actually flew and had some success when Hackaday featured it. This prototype was however a lot more frustrating to fly then it appears: each crash was potentially fatal for one or many motors. That made it quite stressful to fly as it would not allow mistake and we eventually broke all 3 prototypes (the red board is the 2.4GHz radio and was also a weak point).