EGO

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival

The mirror stage in psychology explains how the Ego forms through objectification, where one’s visual appearance comes into conflict with emotional experience, a concept called ‘alienation‘ by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The interactive installation EGO reenacts and reverses this process by distorting the mirror image based on the user’s movements, highlighting the tension between the real and the symbolic, the Ego and the It, subject and object.

Bio

Klaus Obermaier is an interdisciplinary artist, director and composer who creates innovative works in the performing arts, music and installations using new media. Stefano D’Alessio researches social issues induced by the internet and explores how the web and its derivatives influence human behavior and the body. Martina Menegon creates intricate assemblages of physical and virtual elements, exploring the contemporary self and its hybrid corporeality.

БОХЬЮН ЮН
윤보현
To Reverse Yourself

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My work poses the question: how does reality becomes exquisitely animated by certain social control systems such as politics, mass media, technology, science, and etc. It is my artistic goal to reveal how human beings are fragile and delicate in these social environments. By living in Korea, Japan and the U.S, I have first-hand experience in diverse social systems and have come to view my life experiences as raw material for my research. With my research in mind, my art utilizes the body as the tool for an intensive investigation of the public and private; examining the relationship between how people understand their body and how this understanding represents themselves in the greater context.
Currently, I am curious about human perception developing parallel with the ever-evolving progression of technological world. Thus, I question technology’s relationship to reality and illusion; asking what is reality? My work takes advantage of illusion to explore and answer this question, and often my artistic materials consist of the body and mirrors. I use mirrors for integrating reality and illusion.

Doppelgänger
When one spacecraft embarks on its journey, another is launched at the same time in a parallel reality. Alice, a solitary astronaut, is teleported to a distant planet, and so is her double. When Alice and her ship return, she assumes her mission has failed and she has somehow returned home; but she has, in fact, arrived at a world where everything is the reverse of what she once knew. Doppelgänger presents a nuanced and layered parable that powerfully addresses the slippery notion of objective truth, and the position of the ‘other’ in contemporary society.

بوب ويلسون
鲍伯·威尔逊
בוב וילסון
ロバート·ウィルソン
밥 윌슨
Боб Уилсон
SHAKESPEAR`S SONETTES
Staging Shakespeare, not dramatic but lyrical: that was the intention of the American director Bob Wilson in Sonnets de Shakespeares (Sonnets de Shakespeare), a show on display at the Berliner Ensemble. To that end, Wilson is associated with American-Canadian composer and musician Rufus Wainwright. The result is a variety night, with reference to all genres of entertainment, from the commedia dell’arte to television sketches, passing through the cabaret. If in the Elizabethan era female roles were played by men, Bob Wilson did the same, creating this reverse practice: actresses play male roles. This inversion – Queen Elizabeth 1st, on her throne, declaiming a sonnet with a deep voice and Shakespeare himself, as a young man and an elder, in female voices – further intensifies the farcical tone of the show. So much so that even the sporadic number of transvestite actor Georgette Dee, microphone in hand, does not disagree much of the Shakespearean surroundings.

Imagery Resonance
“This work-in-progress piece is about reverse oscilloscope synthesizer. When I used the ilda laser protocol to manipulate the laser graphic, I found it turned the vector graphic to stereo audio first , then the laser point started drawing by X and Y axis coordinates. So I reverse the system and made a live-control set to make 3d model data into sound.” Yeh Ting Hao

Empire State
Empire State is a kinetic A.I. artwork visualizing the current time-of-day and weather at the Empire State Building in New York. The imagery was created from running a sketch through an Artificial Intelligence model to generate two variations on the image, each printed on each side of the discs. The piece visualizes the current time-of-day and weather by animating clouds, rain, light/shadow, by rotating sections of discs to the reverse side. When one walks up to the piece, they will see their image reflected back at them, further embedding them to the connection between where they are and the current state in NYC.

Clignotement inversé
Imaginez que votre tête soit capturée dans un appareil photo. Il fait complètement noir. Ce n’est que lorsque l’obturateur s’ouvre et se ferme que vous voyez le monde en un éclair. L’obturateur se déplace si vite que rien n’a le temps de bouger. Tout ce sur quoi vous pointez votre regard devient comme une photographie. Un souvenir. Quelque chose qui a été, mais qui n’est plus. Vous voyez les gens comme des personnages figés, des rues entières comme des moments intacts. La vie comme une sorte de spectacle. «Reverse Blinking» crée cette expérience. C’est un casque complètement fermé avec deux volets devant les yeux. Ils sont contrôlables par l’utilisateur. Le clignotement inversé fonctionne sur piles et peut être utilisé librement à l’intérieur ou à l’extérieur du musée. Il est préférable de l’utiliser là où il y a beaucoup de mouvement et de monde. «Reverse Blinking» fait partie d’une série d’œuvres d’art, à travers laquelle l’artiste essaie d’ajouter des effets vidéo et photographiques à notre façon naturelle de voir.

Reverse Blinking
Imagine that your head is captured inside a photo camera. It is completely dark. Only when the shutter opens en closes, you see the world in a flash. The shutter moves so fast that nothing has time to move. Everything where you point your gaze at, becomes like a photograph. A memory. Something that has been, but isn’t anymore. You see people as frozen figures, whole streets as untouched moments. Life as a sort of dia show. “Reverse Blinking” creates this experience. It is a completely closed helmet with two shutters in front of the eyes. They are controllable by the user. Reverse Blinking works on batteries and can be freely used in or outside the museum. It is best used where there is a lot of movement and people. “Reverse Blinking” is part of a series of art works, through which the artist tries to add video and photographical effects to our natural way of seeing.

Jonattas Poltronieri, Luis Mello, Pedro Venetucci & Rofli Sanches
Phantom Limb

Just like the original box, the installation is a rectangular unit where the user inserts his arm and is urged to move it in different ways. The similarity with the original object disappears as, instead of having a mirror to provide the image that motivates the interaction, there is a screen that mediates the user’s view and the place where his arm actually is. The displayed image of the user’s arm can be reversed, distorted and coloured, among several modifications to simulate in a rich way the strangeness of not having control over a member, and to question whether what is seen is an accurate portrayal of the real body. Although deep and subjective, the topic addressed in this experience is easy and accessible in its interaction, offering various sensory feedbacks to the user. Through it, it is proposed that we experience and reflect upon the disconnection between thought and body, intention and action, sensation and reality.

FILE SAO PAULO 2015

Ad Infinitum
Ad infinitum is a parasitical entity which lives off human energy. It lives untethered and off the grid. This parasite reverses the dominant role that mankind has with respect to technologies: the parasite shifts humans from “users” to “used”. Ad infinitum co-exists in our world by parasitically attaching electrodes onto the human visitors and harvesting their kinetic energy by electrically persuading them to move their muscles. The only way a visitor can be freed is by seducing another visitor to sit on the opposite chair and take their place. Being trapped in the parasite’s cuffs means getting our muscles electrically stimulated in order to perform a cranking motion as to feed it our kinetic energy. This reminds us that, in the cusp of artificially thinking machines, we are no longer just “users”; the shock we feel in our muscles, the involuntary gesture, acknowledges our intricate relationship to uncanny technological realm around us.

Accessories for Wearing Emotions
Head Accessory of Tears
I have heard somewhere that it is not yet fully understood why people shed tears.
We shed tears when feeling sad, moved, sometimes happy.
I do even when feeling angry.
We cannot control our emotions.
They sometimes cannot be stopped from overflowing to the outside even before we internally register them although they should exist within and surely derive from the inside of us.
It is as if they do not even pass through our brain – As if it is an involuntary action,
like in sports, where the body moves before we tell it to.
However, what would happen when we trace the process in reverse?
I tried to make it work from the outside in.
(Like, we sometimes pretend to be okay with an unwilling smile.)
I want to see what would happen on the inside of us if we “wear” emotions on the outside.
Hazuki Katagai

Telepathy 2012-2112
“TELEPATHY” immerses the viewer in the heart of a fiction where telepathy would become the predominant means of communication at the expense of means of current communication. The ten glass helmets enable to visualize a telepathic communication, by definition invisible. “TELEPATHY” proposes to reverse the current trend which consists in basing its communication on technology, and in exchange it reveals the parapsychological and subjective communication of psychic phenomena.

Astronomical Bodies

Astronomical Bodies is based on the research of Dr. Terence Kee of the University of Leeds. He proposes that that a reactive form of phosphorus arrived on the early Earth via meteorite impacts. His research found that phosphorus from space was more suitable for the chemical reactions to develop complex life. Astronomical Bodies reverses this process and tries to transform phosphorus harvested from the body — in the form of kidney stones and urine — into manmade meteorites. Rather than the traditional idea of transpermia addressed in a host of science fiction writings and films, Astronomical Bodies proposes that the galactic transferal of life-promoting chemicals is a natural process that we can facilitate.

Inverso Mundus
The title of the work, Inverso – both an Italian “reverse, the opposite” and the Old Italian “poetry,” and Mundus – the Latin “world,” hints at a reinterpretation of reality, a poetic vision. In our interpretation, the absurdist scenes from the medieval carnival appear as episodes of contemporary life in a multichannel video installation. Characters act out scenes of absurd social utopias and exchange masks, morphing from beggars to rich men, from policemen to thieves. Metrosexual street-cleaners are showering the city with refuse. Female inquisitors torture men on IKEA-style structures. Children and seniors are fighting in a kickboxing match. Inverso Mundus is a world where chimeras are pets and the Apocalypse is entertainment.

Мэтт Кеньон
مات كينيون
매트 케년
マット・ケニヨン
Supermajor
In Supermajor, a rack of vintage oil cans sits innocuously on the gallery floor. A punctured can, located somewhere mid-stack, has sprung a leak. The oil flows out in a steady trickle, cascading onto the pedestal below; a golden-brown pool forms at its base. Upon closer inspection, however, the oil is not originating from the can. Instead, its stream is reversed. Drop-by-drop the oil flows upwards, defying gravity. At times, droplets even appear to hover in mid-air. Returning to its source, the upward ascent of oil continues uninterrupted as if neither the can’s reserves of the nor the puddle’s can ever be depleted.
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منير فاطمي
Evolution or Death
Fatmi inverts spectacular representations of identity by rendering them mundane and within reach of a subject that may scramble any conclusive narrative. Fatmi’s work counters strategies of interpellation that identifies a subject with an ideology prior to that subject’s ability to place their identity in or beyond a particular ideology. Fatmi parodies the various interpellations of colonialism and capitalism that seek to define others according to symbolic narratives. In Evolution or Death, 2004, (fig. 4) two Anglo-European looking subjects imitate suicide bombers with books and papers taped around their abdomens. One holds open a trenchcoat and another holds up a book that looks like a detonator attached to wires. Fatmi reverses the situation. These are not the suicide-bombers from Arab and Muslim countries. Instead, they appear to be of European descent in a European street or modern room in casual clothing.

Ким Симонcсон
little bubble gum
Finnish artist Kim Simonsson is a ceramic sculptor based out of Helsinki who creates adolescent characters carrying out mischievous acts. “Authority in it’s many forms fascinates me and in my works I want to reverse the common beliefs by making the weak powerful.” -Kim Simonsson

“I move, reverse, manipulate the rules so that they cannot integrate in any frame. My measure is dynamic, it always ties and unties, endlessly exceeding itself. I overflow, going past the initial measure. The resulting drift becomes my new measure and imposes on me another frame, a palette with rigid outlines. I am confronted to strict and solid delimitations. One more time bored of being subjected to the measure.”

Marina Hoermanseder developed her art throughout her time at Esmod Berlin International University of Art and mastered her handcraft at Alexander McQueen.”I go wherever my creativity takes me” says Austrian fashion designer Marina Hoermanseder. For her diploma collection she therefore did not hesitate to use discomforting inspirations such as orthopaedic devices and serious skin conditions. Vegetable-tanned leather is double-sided and painted red on the reverse to create patterns where sections are flipped over.

Putting The Pieces Back Together Again

The kinetic installation “Putting the Pieces Back Together Again” is a complex system with self-organizing and emergent behaviour, at the same time it is an artistic inquiry and meditation on contemporary scientific methodology. The installation investigates non-hierarchical communication and collective behaviour by implementing such a system physically through many electro-mechanical actors.
The Installation consists of 1250 stepper motors arranged in a two dimensional grid of two by two meters. Each motor is equipped with a pointer made from white acrylic glass. The radii of the pointers are chosen to intersect with the pointers of its neighbours. All motors are excited with the same alternating current that let them move initially in a random direction. Each actor is at the same time sensing its environment. In the event of a collision the pointers reverse their turning direction. This is achieved through a custom motor control circuit. Through the interplay of many entities a complex behaviour emerges on the surface of the installation. By manipulating the signals during runtime the system will form spontaneous pattern on its surface. It seems like they are negotiating it’s position with nearby actors. By this the system is showing behaviour of self-organization. The installation drifts through various activation levels during its run time by this it constantly evolves new formations and constellations (crystallization).

autoreverse

the Reversed Eye

‘The Reversed Eye’ is a cheek-controlled wearable device made by Jiun-Shian Lin in 2013. It provides participants upside-down left-right reversal sight and rear vision in their everyday life, attempting to turn the ordinary life experience into an aesthetic one.

米歇尔·塞格雷
oracle in reverse

Future Body

A stiff cyborg, fixed with a glazed and expressionless stare, dips her fingers into an alien-like amniotic fluid. Gravity shifts as droplets reverse upwards, forming a pulsing headpiece that encases her smooth, almost porcelain skull. ‘Future Body’, a new film by Nirma Madhoo, uses CGI and animated 3D modelling to explore technological embodiment, enacting it in a character that transgresses expected gender roles in a newly mechanised system of digital-infused aesthetics.
Set in the clinical, segmented interiors of a simulated hyper-real space, Madhoo’s cyborg is found dressed for battle, in pieces forming exoskeletons, a spinal scorpion’s tail and mantis-like shoes, designed by Iris van Herpen. A collision between her human and technological self is physicalised as she undergoes mitosis, splitting into two and performing a combative dance with her duplicate.
Currently showing in Melbourne in an exhibition titled ‘Fashion Performance: Materiality, Meaning, Media’, alongside work from Hussein Chalayan, BOUDICCA and POSTmatter collaborator Bart Hess, it offers a glimpse into the collapse of gender, species and machine into one another, in turn reimagining the future for fashion design and communication.

제이슨 피터스
ジェイソン·ピーターズ
Reverse Polarities

reverse of volume