Empyrean Passage

Empyrean Passage is reminiscent of both a theoretical black hole and portal into the celestial worlds. Empyrean (notice the pyre in the word) is the final and fiery level of heaven as depicted by Dante- or aether in Aristotle’s cosmology. The form is constructed like a giant hoopskirt and gracefully moves in the wind creating a gossamer lighting effect overhead. While this project is an oculus to the heavens, more focus is usually paid to more terrestrial stars in this neighborhood.The interior of the spiral is designed with aqua and black dashes. The dashed interior creates optical effects with the eyes and at certain times of the day shifts your perception of the sky’s color.This project utilizes extremely “green” electroluminescent lighting. The entire sculpture consumes less electricity than a household nightlight and operates on a photo cell. Special thanks to the City of West Hollywood, Andrew Campbell, Maria Lusia de Herrera, Greg Coons, Glen Bundrick / Luminous Film.

Pan, Tilt and Zoom
Three motorized CCTV dome cameras are installed on the gallery floor. The built-in auto-tracking function makes the cameras follow any motion in the room. While moving its lens the center of the weight of the device shifts and the whole camera starts to roll on the floor. As a result the software is confronted with even more motion which needs to be tracked. From time to time the cameras bump into each other or start to follow and trigger each other movements.

Dirty Geometry:Cloud
Dirty Geometry: Cloud is a six-panel folded screen generated using algorithmic computation with random variables. Between the drawing and the surface lies an infra-thin space perpetually reconstituted; one hue replaces another as the light shifts outside; becoming more intense, now

The exterior view of the figure and “point of view shot” are synchronised onto two projection surfaces. If a protagonist leans his head it shifts the observer’s view correspondingly. Observer, figure and object all interact. Netzhammer is not only a master of the erotic of touch, his images awaken unease: they show decay and perishability as well as regularity in the flow of life, which the subject cannot escape, much as expansion and transcendence are desired.

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A visão externa da figura e o “ponto de vista” são sincronizados em duas superfícies de projeção. Se um protagonista inclina a cabeça, ele muda a visão do observador de forma correspondente. Observador, figura e objeto interagem. Netzhammer não é apenas um mestre do erótico do tato, suas imagens despertam desconforto: mostram decadência e perecibilidade, assim como regularidade no fluxo da vida, da qual o sujeito não pode escapar, por mais que se deseje expansão e transcendência.

Linie II
One second of white rope is traveling through time and space. The white rope is moving at a constant pace along the contours of an imaginary shape, traversing the whole space in several directions and angles. For following that second in the vast space, it requires the viewer to look up while moving his whole head. While passing through long distances as a straight line, it appears to be slow and content. Other passages require quick shifts of direction and the perception changes to fast and sudden movements.

Bigfoot
While variety in composition and form is evident, Kelleher further experiments with material and color. Digital rendering techniques offer endless iterative opportunities. Multiple shifts in material, especially when applied to a singular form, allow for a variety of interpretations. Kelleher explains: ‘The visual expression I try to achieve is one that is open to interpretation. In one piece someone may see something playful, or whimsical, in another it may feel menacing.’

SOL
SOL is a minimalistic environment, leading visitors into the reaches of their perception. The installation builds on loss of control, shifts in awareness and a feeling of dislocation and timelessness. SOL is the third work in an ongoing series of phenomenological environments, after the live performance FEED, 2005 and the installation ZEE, 2008. The all encompassing darkness of SOL is lifted, in intervals and for parts of seconds only, by animated bursts of intensely bright light. Falling back into darkness, visitors experience abundant retinal after-images, that gradually drift away until eventually the next eruption of light is triggered. In the surround sound-scape of SOL, electronic drones mix with swarming field recordings, amidst a sea of infra-bass.

Abb
A playful balancing act by a robotarm. This enormous machine balancing itself on a stainlesssteel semi sphere. When the arm moves, stretches, the balance point of the entire construction shifts which makes the whole machine lean over until it -almost- tips. The robot seems curious to find its tipping point, searching for the limits of balance without ever really being able to fall over. The machine is playing a children’s game with enormous power and robotic precision.

Open Sky
Using giant sheets of mirror-polish stainless steel, Smith’s structure reflects the ever-changing sky. He describes that ‘Open Sky’ is “inspired by the constant shifts in light, color, and form that are presented in the natural and built environment.” The piece is designed to get visitors at the design week to interact with the natural environment and to spark a sense of adventure.

Contours
Contours proposes a distancing through de-familiarization of what has become concrete by way of image and language. Active contradiction and abstraction are central to the works through a mixture of variables often seen in opposition or as dis-harmonious. Through the presentation of puzzling symbols, both familiar and skewed, a legible illegibility is produced: information being transmitted, but the immediate read obscured and hidden from sight. Through this, current sight-lines are made visible allowing for critical reflection, while simultaneously revealing the flexibility of language and image in order to engender the possibility of alternative understandings of the world: a crucial consideration in context of our contemporary global social and political shifts.
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Repeat
In the midst of the promises and fears surrounding robots and Artificial Intelligence, especially in the manual labour sector, Repeat attempts to imagine the illusory dance moves of the so-called augmented body tainted with the gender stereotypes of human ballet duets. Repeat shifts the performing body of the assembly line into the performing body onstage, unceasingly carrying out its tasks. The body meshed with the industrial exoskeleton tolerates and sustains strenuous tasks but ironically, it enables those actions to be repeated even more. Repeat uses passive industrial exoskeletons that are currently deployed in the workplace. This ain’t no fiction, this is the future promised to the human worker.

For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit
‘For, in your tongue, I cannot fit,’ gives voice to 100 poets who have been jailed through time for their writing or their beliefs. The haunting work highlights the fragility and vulnerability of our right to freedom of expression today—and the bravery of those who struggle to resist. Visitors will encounter 100 microphones suspended over 100 metal rods, each piercing a verse of poetry. Over the course of an hour, each microphone in turn recites a fragment of the poets’ words, spoken first by a single voice then echoed by a chorus which shifts across the space.

Array [wave]
Wave depicts a sculptural volume unfolding over time – the Shape of Light seized in perpetual movement. It uses ephemeral and intangible materials – light and sound – and can be traversed by the observer, immersing them into the shapes cast by the undulating light columns. The work creates a malleable experience of scale: it shifts between object and environment depending on the observer’s position inside, outside, or at the boundary of the installation.

Lost Dimension
Lost Dimension Non-dimensional Cities is an immersive cinematic experience in which participants journey through an endlessly unfolding virtual cityscape that expands over all axes. This dimensionless cityscape is constructed from a large collection of point clouds and sounds. While the user is standing on the controller pod and navigates through this virtual world, a sense of physical instability takes over and the platform becomes an anchor to hold on to. The building blocks of the world are generated from depth map information and panoramic photographs obtained from Google Street View’s API. Depending on the user’s position in the virtual world these blocks are dynamically repositioned on a three-dimensional grid. By subtle manipulation of motion and sound, perspective distortion and shifts in balance Lost Dimension unquestionably re-calibrates the viewer’s perception of dimensionality.

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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THE BED EXPERIMENT ONE

Witness as the covers are pulled back to reveal the rites and rituals of the untamable Homo Sapiens in its favorite nesting place — a giant bed! Like a bizarre nature documentary THE BED EXPERIMENT tracks four males and four females, who while confronting their deepest fears and desires, balance the witty and weird against the painfully true to life.

“As the piece proceeds, the focus shifts from mating rituals to the antics of lovemaking, from the battle of the sexes to baby worship, and from dreams of conquest to nightmares of disembowelment. The bed turns from the cradle of civilization into a hospital cot, from a sultry desert to a tundra of monsters. As the scenes evolve — the performance is a 60-minute continuum — the tone mysteriously oscillates between extremes of farcicality or pathos. How the performers effect these wondrous transformations is one of the Adaptors’ most singular professional secrets”. Alan M. Kriegsman

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.

geist.xyz
A synthetic ghost shifts simulated textiles from passive matter to live organisms. They behave like apparitions in an artificial choreography, with movements that are imaginary yet familiar. Like a constant metamorphosis, the same sequence gets transformed over and over again. At each step, all aspects of the designs are modified, from algorithmic pattern to color scheme to fabric behaviour. The results are meandering layers of style changes. A linear montage shows the intricate details. Shuffled layers of metronomic sounds emphasize the transformation fluctuating in and out of sync.

captives
“Captives is an ongoing series of digital and physical sculptures, a contemporary interpretation of Michelangelo’s unfinished series “Prigioni” (1513-1534) and his technique of “non-finito”.
The work explores the tension and equilibrium between form and matter, man-made objects of perfection and complex, chaotic forms of nature. Whilst referencing Renaissance sculptures, the focus of this series shifts from pure figurative representation to the articulation of matter itself. As in the original “Prigioni” the classic figures are left unfinished, documenting the very history of their creation and transformation.

triple point
Since the 1990s, Sarah Sze has developed a sculptural aesthetic that transforms space through radical shifts in scale, colonizing peripheral spaces, engaging with the history of a building, and altering the viewer’s perception and experience of architecture through large scale, site-specific interventions.

Nhu Xuan Hua is a Parisian photographer based in London. Her work embodies a visual language that is cross-disciplinary in its approach, reflecting her artistic practices that extend beyond photography into mixed-media and sculpture. Nhu Xuan’s world is always on the edge, it catches the elusive moment when the perception shifts from real to surreal . This interests into arts led her to a signature which goes beyond fashion photography.

DAYDREAM V.02

DAYDREAM is an audiovisual installation that generates space distortions. Relationship between space and time, accelerations, contractions, shifts and metamorphosis have been the lexical field of the project. This installation aimed at establishing a physical connection between the virtual space and the real space, blurring the limits and submerging the audience into a short detachment from reality. Lights generate abstract spaces while sounds define the echoes of virtual spaces. Daydream is an invitation to contemplation. The frontality of the installation leads the visitors to a passive position.

100% Other Fibres
Through collisions of image, noise, objects, language and bodies, Heather Phillipson’s videos and sculptural installations behave as places, musical scores, poems and nervous systems – attending to how physical and affective ‘selves’ are constructed, manipulated and, above all, escape. Often rendered as walk-in conglomerations of readily accessible materials (digital images, paint, cardboard, words, audio loops and reproducible consumer detritus), her works stake out an ambiguous territory in which cultural references and emotional responses are mutually contingent and reactive. Collapsing distinctions between the forthright and the inarticulable, the banal and the ecstatic, and between metaphor and extreme literalisation, Phillipson’s work performs constant tonal shifts, disruptions and bleeds. In so doing, it oscillates between physical intimacies and conceptual distances – desire, sensuality, touching and being touched, shame, anxiety, (over-)exposure, resistant surfaces.

Canoe
The work here in Dawson is like an old vehicle in which I’ve put a new engine. Entitled Canoe, it consists of an approximately 20 foot long trough of water, that resembles some kind of boat. This provides a means for a gunwales tracking mechanism to slowly, endlessly paddle its way back and forth. It was first constructed in 2001 in a studio beside Halifax harbour. It draws visual inspiration from the bridges and water vessels of this port. Conceptually, it grew from an interest in technological obsolescence: how things (like canoes) make shifts from utility to leisure.
It has experienced several major rebuilds since 2001. Most of them have been practical, but for Dawson I’ve opted for an experimental configuration that changes significantly the nature of the work. Previously, Canoe has only ever been shown indoors. Normally in runs on rechargeable batteries, with a continuous, smooth motion. In Dawson, it is shown outdoors, alongside the Yukon river, showing up in an absurd way the paleness of its artificial river. Here, the primary source of power is sunlight.
Making use of the long northern day, solar panels receive light, storing energy in an array of super-capacitor cells. At this time, Canoe remains still. A custom circuit monitors the amount of charge, and when a predetermined trigger point is reached, it is dumped into Canoe’s electric motor in a burst, allowing it to make a few strokes. Then Canoe rests, while the charging cycle begins again. Motion is intermittent, entirely dependent on the amount and intensity of sunlight. It ranges from near standstill in overcast conditions to perhaps 1 or 2 strokes every minute in full light. The technical term for this type of circuit is a relaxation oscillator. I like this term because, if you remove it from its technical context, it points back to ideas about leisure and utility.

SIMULACRA
file festival

“SIMULACRA” is an optophysical experimental arrangement. At its heart are four LCD monitor panels, which are assembled in the form of a hollow square, and installed at eye level in the middle of the room. The ensemble appears internally gutted, overgrown and embraced. A tangle of cables and control devices pours out of the middle of the square. All around it several magnifying lenses dangle from chains. The imageless glaring ray of the monitors looks as if the images had fallen out of them. What remains is the essence of the medium: Light.It is an impressive, wondrous experience when images suddenly appear from the pure white by the mere glance through a seemingly transparent film. But if you turn the lens in front of your eyes, the polarizing structure of the film creates wild color shifts or even complementary negative images.

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.

Endangered Species
Best-known for her videos and animated films combining drawn art, music and occasionally scratched or reworked cinematic images, Camille Henrot’s work blurs the traditionally hierarchical categories of art history. Her recent work, adapted into the diverse media of sculpture, drawing, photography and, as always, film, considers the fascination with the “other” and “elsewhere” in terms of both geography and sexuality. This fascination is reflected in popular modern myths that have inspired her, such as King Kong and Frankenstein. The artist’s impure, hybrid objects cast doubt upon the linear and partitioned transcription of Western history and highlight its borrowings and grey areas. In the series of sculptures Endangered Species, for example, the artist has created objects inspired by African art by using pieces from car engines; placed on tall pedestals, these slender silhouettes with zoomorphic allure make reference to the migration of symbols and forms as well as to the economic circulation of objects. This survival of the past, full of misunderstandings, shifts and projections (as shown in the slideshow Egyptomania, the film Cynopolis, drawings of the Sphinx, and even in the photographs of prehistoric flints) troubles cultural codes and conventions. In this way, Camille Henrot’s work questions mental resistances and the past’s resonance, whether it be drawn from myth or from reality.

Do You Remember When?

The hole and exposed earth of Do You Remember When? becomes a spiritual, cultural and physical portal – a point of transformation between worlds – from which emerges an Indigenous worldview engaging a discourse on sustainability. The block of concrete on the pedestal – the foundation of the institution constructed on top of tribal lands – functions as a trophy celebrating Indigenous intervention in opposition to a Western scientific worldview. The closed-circuit audio broadcast of a Pee Posh social dance song performed by the collective provides the psychosocial soundtrack of the transformation process. The work shifts the sustainability from a focus dominated by Western science to a balanced approach inclusive of Indigenous knowledge systems.

Known Universe, Constellation: Zubiate/Pell
My principal strategies are, the transformation of common objects into other recognizable objects, extreme scale shifts, and the juxtaposition of disparate materials and images.I have converted items from the home into landscapes or sites of natural and industrial processes to show the interaction of nature, culture, and origins, and constructed models of internal organs from common materials to position these connections within the body.

Symphony in D Minor

‘Symphony in D Minor’ is an interactive sound and video installation on an epic scale. A thunderstorm contained within a series of large hand cast resin sculptures, each individual form is a unique instrument hanging from the ceiling. Suspended just within reach and activated by touch, the viewer sets the symphony in motion by pushing the forms through the air to trigger the various sound elements of the storm. Sensors relay individual recordings of thunder, lightning, wind and rain with alternating intensities to a full-scale sound system. Acting as both conductor and musician, the viewer creates an evolving composition out of atmospheric sounds, forging an environment that envelops the audience. Housed within each piece are 2 video projectors employing mapping software to evenly fill the surface of the forms. Like giant illuminated pendulums each sculpture radiates video projections that in their dormant state display abstractions of water droplets and slow moving clouds. As the sensors detect movement different ranges initiate more visual elements of the storm. Once activated, the form then shifts to a swirling torrent of clouds.

steven reich
Piano Phase

Not having two pianos at his disposal, Reich experimented by first recording a piano part on tape, and then trying to play mostly in sync with the recording, albeit with slight shifts, or phases, with occasional re-alignments of the twelve successive notes against each other. Reich found the experience satisfying, showing that a musician can phase with concentration.