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Kevin Cooley

Fallen Water
Fallen Water explores questions about why humans are drawn to waterfalls and flowing water as a source for renewal. Waterfalls imbue subconscious associations with pristine and healthy drinking water, but what happens when the fountain can no longer renew itself? Is the water no longer pure? Cooley’s choice of subject matter strikes a deep chord with current social consciousness and anxieties about contemporary water usage and the drought crisis faced by the American West. Cooley references Blake’s famous quote from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as context for the diametric opposites of the current water conundrum: our deep sense of entitlement to and dire dependence on this precious commodity, coupled with a pervasive obliviousness concerning the sources which supply it. As a way to connect with his personal water use, Cooley hiked into the mountains to see firsthand the snowpack (or lack thereof), streams, and aquifers which feed the water sources supplying his Los Angeles home. This multi-channel installation is an amalgamation of videos made over numerous trips to remote locations in the San Gabriel Mountains, the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and locales as far away as the San Juan Mountains in Southwestern Colorado. These disconnected video vignettes coalesce, constructing a large water landscape canvasing the gallery walls and floors – reflecting the disparate and widespread origin of Los Angeles’s drinking water. The colorspace within the videos is inverted, turning the water pink, orange and yellow—channeling an altered vision of water—in which something is definitely amiss: a stark reminder of the current water crisis in the state of California.
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CHRIS CUNNINGHAM

Björk: All Is Full of Love

The video reaches its harmonious climax as the robots join in embrace, still being detailed by the robotic machines beside them.
Each robot was designed by Cunningham, faces reminiscent of Björk’s own delicate visage. The sterility of the room and lighting and the rendered movements of the machines contrasts with the fluid motions of the robots as they connect in a purely human method.

RYOJI IKEDA

池田亮司
이케다 료지
Редзи Икеда
Spectra
spectra is a series of large scale installations employing intense white light as a sculptural material. The installations are designed in response to specific gallery spaces or public sites selected by the artist. White light is one of the purest forms of transformation from electricity. We see a pure state of energy. Through these installations we witness how the pure transformation transforms the environment itself and ourselves.

KURT HENTSCHLAGER

Zee
File Festival 

Immersive Audiovisual Environment Artificial Fog, Stroboscopes, Pulse Lights and Surround Sound, 2008

ZEE proposes a state of tabula rasa and unfolds without a narrative or reproducible imagery.The audience wanders freely in a space filled with extremely dense fog that fully obscures all of its boundaries. Stroboscopic- and pulse lights illuminate the fog, in a softened and evenly dispersed manner, creating kaleidoscopic three-dimensional structures in constant animation. An ambient and minimal sound-scape connects to the imagery, without directly synchronizing to it.The core visual impression of ZEE is of a psychedelic architecture of pure light, an abstract luminescent landscape enveloping the visitor. Time appears to stand still.

Quadrature

Positions of the Unknown
At the very beginning of space exploration the infrastructure to monitor the whole sky was not yet developed. So in order to find out whether foreign countries launched objects, the US government started to train citizens to observe and detect possible artificial satellites. Scattered over the allied world, these amateur scientists played a crucial part in keeping track of all men-made technology orbiting earth, until “Operation Moonwatch” was discontinued in 1975 […] “Positions of the Unknown” locates the current whereabouts of these mysterious objects by simply pointing at them as they revolve around Earth. Missing the legal proof, those unidentified artefacts remain entities of pure speculation, secret companions of us and our planet. Even so they have been sighted several times and their ubiquitous presence is therefore somehow validated, they linger in a state between existence and non-existence. Quadrature’s 52 small machines constantly follow their paths and serve as silent witnesses of the unknown.

KRISTA VAN DER NIET

Криста ван дер Ниет

The work of Krista van der Niet emerges from a dreamlike state of mind, whereby her imagination brings the things around her to life. She seems to glide along the lightness of things and grasps the beauty of the pure object. During the making process objects gain a metaphysical layer of meaning. She is the guiding factor for the viewpoint of her audience, in order to convey her perception. At this moment the sculptor becomes a photographer and you stand still together with her.