Useless Hands

FILE 2024 | Aesthetic Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
Infratonal – Useless Hands – France

When our hands become useless, what will we choose to do with them? We can use AI to visualize the unthinkable, the strangely familiar yet indescribable forms and structures. Generative AI could be used as an amplifier of our ability to explore abstraction and surrealism rather than a simple mirror of our usual perceptions.

Bio

Infratonal is an artistic project led by Louk Amidou, a Paris-based multidisciplinary artist who works at the intersection of digital arts, electronic music and interaction design. He uses algorithms to create hybrid visual and sound pieces which aim to be performed by the human gesture as intangible instruments. He questions the artwork’s nature at the age of AI and the relationship between the artist and the algorithm.

AVA

Ava’ is Troika’s first sculptural manifestation of their exploration of algorithms. ‘Ava’ is the physical result of emergence and self organisation brought about by ‘growing’ a sculpture through the use of a computer algorithm that imitates the emergence of life by which complexity arises from the simplest of things. As such the sculpture probes at the nature of becoming, existence and our strive to understand and replicate the complexities of life.In a landscape where our personal data is a raw material, and where we, humans, have become subordinate spectators of algorithms and a computerised infrastructure, we ask the question how much or little are we capable of influencing our surrounding reality, how much is predetermined, how much is down to chance.

STEVE WILHITE
R.I.P
dancing baby
GIF (JIF)
graphics interchange format

The inventor of the Gif file has revealed that the world has been mispronouncing his creation.
Steve Wilhite, who invented the Gif file in 1987, told the New York Times that the word is pronounced “jif” not “giff”.
“The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations. They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story,” he said.
The internet has reacted strongly to Wilhite’s claim, pointing to a range of evidence from the White House announcing their allegiance via a note on their Tumblr: “Animated GIFs (Hard ‘G’)”, to simple common consensus.
Others have suggested that the hard ‘G’ relates to the acronym that the word springs from, which stands for Graphical Interface Format.
The Gif has enjoyed a surge of success in the last five years thanks to Buzzfeed-style listings of puppies and kittens and ‘live-giffing’, a form of on-the-spot reporting that had its first major outing during the 2012 presidential debates.
Wilhite may be the parent of the Gif, but most agree that the creation has outgrown its creator.
When even the White House is on the other side of the debate, it seems it might be best if Wilhite concedes defeat with grace.

Waves
WAVES is an attempt to return to basic experiences provided by light and sound. The intersecting waves of ligh and sound are creating a multi-layered spectrum, which allows us to experience ourselves and others as different wavelengths: either intertwining or dissolving.

田中功起
Everything is Everything

The eight-channel video installation, Everything is Everything, was created for the first time to be shown at the 2006 Taipei Biennial, curated by Dan Cameron. For this work, the artist and two assistants spent a total of eight days recording their interactions and interventions with readily available items, including hangers, glasses, towels, air mattresses and toilet paper, all found in the city of Taipei. The physical properties of these objects have been tested (a metal hanger is stretched to the breaking point) or their uses have been expanded (a level placed on two table legs becomes an improvised obstacle). Tanaka and his assistants experimented with these objects several times indoors and in public, and their explorations were compiled into eight separate video loops lasting from 1:19 to 1:50 minutes. Tanaka’s narrowly cut frame of each scene often features performers from the neck down or removes them completely from the scene, thus focusing the viewer’s attention on the simple, repetitive objects and acts being performed.

FLORA 2

The animation in FLORA is generated by overlapping sine waves that travel through a string of lines. This wave principle often appears in nature when energy is transmitted through a medium like water, air or simply a rope. It can also be observed in the locomotion of animals and human-beings, in which kinetic energy is transmitted successively through joints.
The FLORA algorithm of is based on the discovery that a simple system of rotating lines can create endless variations of abstract shapes – ranging from curved harmonious lines to edgy and chaotic patterns. The resulting aesthetics combine computational accuracy with an organic playfulness, and tend to trigger diverse associations in the mind of the viewer.

FILE FESTIVAL
gif

ppp-creatures-generator
Asao Tokolo studied at the AA School of Architecture in London following graduation from Tokyo Zokei University in 1992. His decorative patterns based on the concept of ‘connection’ stem from September 11, 2001, and he continues to work in fields straddling art, architecture, and design. He designs and creates simple geometric crests and patterns that can be drawn with a ruler and compass, and three dimensional forms using the same principles.

Ada
File Festival
Similar to Tinguely’s “Méta-Matics”, “ADA” is an artwork with a soul. It acts itself. At Tinguely’s it is sufficient to be an unawarely struggling mechanical being. He took it wryly: the machine produces nothing but its industrial self-destruction. Whereas “ADA”, by Karina Smigla-Bobinski, is a post-industrial “creature“, visitor-animated, creatively acting artist-sculpture, self-forming artwork, resembling a molecular hybrid, such as a one from nanobiotechnology. It develops the same rotating silicon-carbon-hybrids, midget tools, miniature machines able to generate simple structures. “ADA” is much larger, esthetically much more complex, an interactive art-making machine.

THERE IS A GHOST
BOB WILSON
Os retratos em vídeo tomaram forma em 2007, após mais de dois anos de trabalho de Wilson com a VOOM HD Networks […] Eles são repetidos em rotação contínua para não ter um começo e um fim, criando uma obra de arte em quadros. O resultado final no monitor é semelhante ao de uma fotografia. Os “retratos”, que duram de 30 segundos a 20 minutos, parecem imóveis, mas os personagens realmente realizam pequenas ações – um movimento simples, um piscar de olhos, um toque no pé – que ampliam o potencial narrativo do retrato tradicional, aproximando-o da história cinematográfica, sem perder a aura de fixidez icônica que caracteriza o retrato pictórico de todos os tempos.

the bird continuum
From 1991 to present, Yao Huifen’s embroidery has won dozens of provincial and national arts and crafts awards. She was elected as “China’s 2013 Annual Representative of the Arts and Crafts Industry”. She pioneered the “simple needlepoint” technique, and made in-depth explorations into Chinese freehand ink painting embroidery.

كيم سون هيوك
Ким Сун Хек
The way to happiness
I’m a artist in South Korea. I received a master’s degree of sculpture by University of Seoul in 2011. Then I had twice solo exhibition( Drawn by Life, Simple Truth ) as well as many group exhibiton until today. My childhood dream was to be an good artist. I make a constant effort to achieving my dream in the present. I want to say through my artwork what about human in the nature world. Everyday, anywhere I realize that we are so little men in the works of God. So I seek the smallest artist under the sky.

Bettina pavilion
The Bettina is a limited-edition architectural pavilion designed for REVOLUTION that debuted at Design Miami in 2015. It is simple in silhouette yet also a complex three-dimensional form. Recalling the iconic style and pyramidal form of the classic white tent, the contemporary pavilion is simultaneously geometrically taut and sensually draped across the structural frame. Each profile peak is extruded diagonally making a roof of two ridges that appear different from every angle.

Cinque Terre

Ljiljana Majkic from Sarajevo is presenting her collection for winter 2011-2012. Collection was named CINQUE TERRE like the Mediterranean coastal town which has inspired her to create this collection as it is a place of unique beauty and architecture with warm coloured, simple geometric facades.This collection has simple, sculptural form, poetic spirit and eclectic character and it was created with a same passion and commitment as the previous one. Her search for new, original design and new shapes has resulted in a series of sensual models.Overall visual experience of her models is the desire to create something that will last longer than one season, so creating for Ljiljana is not only following the trend, or restrict what the trend is set as a rule. Her fashion is characterised by the expression of eclectic styles, and free artistic and creative expression.

Betweenness
“Installed in the main gallery is Betweenness (all works 2018), a video montage that sorts the natural world, including a few humans, into simple, line-drawn motion graphics. There’s a frolicsome quality to the animations: when the animals move, grow, shift, and, quite literally, evolve, the scenes appear to follow a playful intuition, rather than exhibiting any scientific fact.”more…

פיונה טאן
フィオナ·タン
Фиона Тан
فيونا تان
Rise and Fall
Fiona Tan explores storytelling, memory, and the part they play in the formation of identity throughout this exhibition of five video installations, various associated sketches and one single-channel video. Rise and Fall (2009), elongated projections onto two large, side-by-side screens, is a wordless meditation, set to music, of a woman no longer young but still conscious of her looks; she was clearly a beauty in her youth. As the video proceeds we gather that the young woman pictured on the second screen is the memory of her younger self. They often move through domestic activities (sleeping, bathing, dressing) in parallel; this is inter-cut with scenes of violently rushing water (shot at Niagra Falls, it turns out). It’s a hackneyed metaphor – the water’s endless surging as an image of time’s relentless uni-directionality – but in Tan’s hands that doesn’t seem to matter; she creates extraordinarily emotional work out of simple stories and well-worn themes.

L’Horloge d’une vie de travail

L’horloge d’une vie de travail (2008) est un simple horloge, quoique très précis et de taille imposante, révèle sa nature de dispositif logique lorsqu’on découvre qu’il s’agit du décompte quotidien de toute un vie de travail. La vie et le travail de qui ? Quel est le rapport entre la vie et le travail ? Les heures, les minutes, les secondes sont-elles des unités nécessaires et suffisantes pour résumer l’activité d’un homme ? Cette mesure indifférente, distante, ne serait-elle pas le portrait le plus lucide des conséquences possibles d’un idéal où vie et production se confondent ?

emerging colorspace
Julian Adenauer and Michael Haas
Emerging Colorspace was a robotic drawing installation, realized by the Berlin based duo of artists, designers and inventors Julian Adenauer and Michael Haas, aka Sonice Development, as part of the Red Never Follows exhibition the Saatchi Gallery in London last summer. A new version of the studio’s Vertwalker, a machine with the ability to move on vertical surfaces, walking on buildings, and crawling on interior walls. The machine autonomously applied paint to the wall using a marker, referencing the vertical streets in Minority Report, the flying cars in Bladerunner and 5th Element, or Spiderman, the Silver Surfer and the Green Goblin – just to name a few sources of inspiration that expressed the supernatural. Thousands of lines drawn with different colors gradually formed an increasingly dense colorspace that emerged during the more than 200 exhibition hours, while the wandering behavior of the machine followed simple algorithmic rules with random elements. The result was a web that constantly changed, and never looked the same, exploring new territories and the future in a way ordinary mortals can’t.

تويو ايتو
伊东丰雄
טויו איטו
伊東豊雄
도요 이토
Serpentine Pavilion

“Otro ejemplo de esta evolución estructural es el pabellón que proyecté en el verano de 2002 para la Serpentine Gallery de Londres, una follie que duraba sólo tres meses y que hice en colaboración con el ingeniero Cecil Balmond. Balmond llama “estructura no lineal” a sus ideas. La forma usual de analizar estructuralmente un cubo de 18 metros de lado es primeramente dividir en cuartos cada cara y después subdividir cada cuarto en cuartos. En lugar de ello, el método de análisis de Balmond implicaba inscribir cuadrados telescópicos, uno dentro del siguiente, manteniendo las líneas continuas de fuerza que pueden extenderse sobre las caras verticales del cubo en una proliferación de líneas “al azar”. Se elimina así la necesidad de cualquier estructura inicial de pilares y vigas, pues en esta estructura no hay distinción alguna entre pilar, viga o arriostramiento. Siguiendo esta vía, este esquema promete suprimir las jerarquías espaciales existentes liberando a la arquitectura de su larga y pesada historia para ofrecernos una apertura cada vez mayor. Del mismo modo, el hecho que fuese una estructura temporal, que existió sólo durante tres meses, significaba que no se necesitaba puerta alguna y tan sólo algunos de los huecos debían acristalarse de un modo muy sutil. Esto también permitió que los visitantes disfrutaran del espacio relajadamente intentamos construir con cierta libertad. El pabellón de la Serpentine Gallery, el pabellón de Brujas y el edificio TOD de Aoyama son todos intencionalmente abiertos. Cecil Balmond es un genio de la geometría que tiene su propia y excepcional lógica. Justo hace poco tuve una larga conversación telefónica con él sobre un proyecto que estamos haciendo en Inglaterra y le pregunté:”¿no podríamos simplemente dibujar líneas al azar sin girar el cuadrado como hicimos en la Serpentine Gallery?”. Pero él insistía: “No, necesitas un algoritmo. Tienes que girar el cuadrado de acuerdo con alguna regla”. Es extraño, incluso las líneas dibujadas al azar recurren a las costumbres. Las reglas hacen algoritmos. Al manipular las reglas obtienes cosas que nunca hubieras pensado”.

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).