Cold Sleep
Right now, approximately 400 human bodies are frozen at -196 degrees Celsius in America and Russia. They are dead – legally speaking. The hope is to one day defrost and resuscitate them. The procedure is controversial. Nonetheless, cryopreservation, i.e. preserving people at extreme temperatures below zero, is an area marked by growth. The condition is sometimes referred to as ‘cold sleep’, which is also the title of Stine Deja’s first solo show in Denmark at Tranen. The exhibition is an installation of kinetic sculpture and animation. Cryopreserved bodies in thermal, yellow suits are suspended in big, circular aluminium structures revolving around their own axis on small islands in a desert landscape. In the sand lie craters where artificially inseminated cells divide. A barren desert landscape is usually seen as lifeless and abstract. In Deja’s version it becomes a place for being before or after human life, or, as the artist has it, “a population in another dimension.”

LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEM (AKA. THE FARM)
Deze artistieke provocatie probeert de ordes van grootte van kritieke ecosysteemdiensten in te schatten die fundamenteel zijn voor alle planetaire levensprocessen. Dit experiment bestaat uit 1 vierkante meter tarwe, gekweekt in een gesloten omgeving. Kritische inputs zoals water, licht, warmte en nutriënten worden gemeten, gemonitord en getoond voor het publiek. Deze procedure maakt de immense schaal van ecosysteembijdragen voelbaar en biedt een speculatieve referentie voor een afrekening van het ondergewaardeerde en overgeëxploiteerde ‘werk van de biosfeer’.

LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEM (AKA. THE FARM)
This artistic provocation seeks to estimate the orders of magnitude of critical ecosystem services fundamental to all planetary life processes. This experiment consists of 1 square meter of wheat, cultivated in a closed environment. Critical inputs such as water, light, heat, and nutrients are measured, monitored and displayed for the public. This procedure makes palpable the immense scale of ecosystem contributions, and provides a speculative reference for a reckoning of the undervalued and over-exploited “work of the biosphere.”

The coffee cup spring
The monotone repetition of the movement created by the conveyor belt recalls the pace and the landscape of animation or video games. As an extension of the conveyor, several geometric and orthogonal motifs evoking a Tetris composition are slotted together and suggest the shapes of a table, a chair or stairs. The objects are exposed on thin metal structures with fringed ends, and seem to peel off from their construction, as if they were undressing and exchanging skins, depriving themselves of sculptural depth and allowing only the surface to emerge. The technique developed by the artist to produce the sculptures inverts the usual steps of printing: first the pattern is created, then the background to which the fiberglass support is apposed. The pieces are therefore ripped off their mold, revealing their final texture, and the motif on every sculpture seems to remain the same, yet is altered by the shape of the object itself. A series of wall works using this procedure extends from the installation into the gallery space.

Globale Surveillance
Nous vivons dans un monde sous surveillance : plus personne n’oserait en douter. Mais quelle forme prennent aujourd’hui les nouveaux dispositifs de contrôle et en quoi sont-ils différents des pratiques du siècle dernier ? Comment modifient-ils notre rapport au monde et aux autres ? Vont-ils jusqu’à menacer le droit à la vie privée ? Globale Surveillance dresse une zone spatiale hypersurveillée, à l’intérieur de laquelle acteurs et spectateurs sont soumis à quantité de procédures de traçabilité rendues visibles, a contrario de nombreux mécanismes quotidiennement à l’œuvre et marqués par le phénomène angoissant de l’invisibilité.

Subdivided Cube 4
At best, a computational approach enables architecture to be embedded with an extraordinary degree of information. Structure and surface can exhibit a hyper-resolution, with seemingly endless distinct formations. The processes can generate highly specific local conditions, while ensuring an overall coherency and continuity. As such, the resulting architecture does not lend itself to a visual reductionism. Rather, the procedures can devise truly surprising topographies and topologies, offering a thousand unique perspectives. Computational architecture can defy classification, it can evoke curiosity and elicit individual interpretations. The projects presented here forecast an exuberant architecture in which the exceptional supersedes the standard.

Liminal Beings
Liminal Beings explores the concept of automaton and the different anthropomorphic forms and functions embedded within its ontology. Automata, since ancient times, have been standing on the verge of two states, developing machinic and human characteristics simultaneously – in reality, and in the collective consciousness. They are trained to execute and learn respective actions and procedures, thus creating an uncanny, awkward state, trapped in limbo between diverse conditions of existence.

parallel image
This work consists of 2500 magnetic wire cables that connect an emitter (one square meter made of epoxy resin) that consists of a 50 × 50 grid with photo sensors that have their counterparts in the receiver with a grid of bulbs. Thus the sensors detect the light and transmit in parallel each pixel (“image element”) with its corresponding brightness effect to the light bulb in the receiver. Unlike conventional electronic image transmission procedures, “A Parallel Image” uses a technologically transparent procedure, transmitting to the viewer a correspondence between the real world and its transmission.

Abysmal
Abysmal means bottomless; resembling an abyss in depth; unfathomable. Perception is a procedure of acquiring, interpreting, selecting, and organizing sensory information. Perception presumes sensing. In people, perception is aided by sensory organs. In the area of AI, perception mechanism puts the data acquired by the sensors together in a meaningful manner. Machine perception is the capability of a computer system to interpret data in a manner that is similar to the way humans use their senses to relate to the world around them. Inspired by the brain, deep neural networks (DNN) are thought to learn abstract representations through their hierarchical architecture. The work mostly shows the ‘hidden’ transformations happening in a network: summing and multiplying things, adding some non-linearities, creating common basic structures, patterns inside data. It creates highly non-linear functions that map ‘un-knowledge’ to ‘knowledge’.

daemon
The reactive audio-visual installation Daemon (in collaboration with Hansi Raber) analyzes the never-sleeping and permanent alertness of an artificial intelligence. Consisting of three semi-translucent, spatial shifted surfaces, the installation represents a solid wall when entering the space. When no visitor is in the room, the installation is in balance and visualizes infinite planned tasks and processes: rational beauty. When visitors enter the room, the installation reacts and the perfect procedure gets more and more distorted. When the visitor walks into, through and behind the surfaces, his silhouette gets merged with the projected visuals and absorbed by the surfaces.

move
File Festival
MOVE is an interactive installation divided into six distinct modules, JUMP, AVOID, CHASE, THROW, HIDE and COLLECT. Each module offers a single-user interaction, based on a verb corresponding to the action the participant is invited to perform. Each verb corresponds to a common procedure acted out by avatars during videogame play. Each module offers an interaction with abstracted shapes (circles, rectangles) behaving according to simplified rules of physics (collision, friction). Each module is color-coded with consistency, where the color red is used for the graphical element that poses the core challenge. Each module increases difficulty in a similar linear manner.What makes MOVE unusual is that unlike most computer vision or sensor based games like Eye-toy or Dance Dance Revolution, the participant IS the avatar, he is not seeing a representation of herself or an indirect result of her actions on a separate screen but instead interacts directly with the projected graphical constituents of the game. Because those graphical elements are non-representational they do not allow for a projection in a fictional space. The combination of abstracted shapes and direct interaction reinforces in the player the focus on the action itself (JUMP, AVOID, CHASE, THROW, HIDE or COLLECT) instead of an ulterior goal.

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“.