Slow Motion Car Crash

Jonathan Schipper’s work provides an alternative way of experiencing the world by slowing down physical events to almost imperceptible movement. His slow motion car crash sculptures are actual cars moving at speeds of 7mm per hour into a choreographed collision. The spectacular moment of the car crash is rendered safe and almost static. With a dramatic inevitability that reflects our own mortality, over the course of the Festival month the car is eventually destroyed.

Slow room
To bring a life form to a singular lack of motion is to kill it. Museums are repositories of the past. Ideas that lived outside are rendered dead in the careful buildings. Just as dead as the grizzly in the diorama at the Met is the Lichtenstein at the MoMA. The ideas reach a peak and trade their vitality, their life, for an expanded lifespan. The SLOW ROOM was envisioned as an answer to this dilemma… to be in motion to live and die in the museum… to be a part of the system while denying and rejecting the stasis… to embrace the chaos to make the entropy an ally is to understand a fundamental nature of the Universe. SLOW ROOM will live and it will die.

Chronos XXI
Chronos the god of time, permanently destroys and recreates. He who symbolises evanescence and return, was the thematic point of departure for the creation of the kinetic media installation Chronos XXI. The piece is a ‘finger exercise on antiquity’ by our Creative Director Joachim Sauter and was created during his residency at Villa Massimo in Rome. A pendulum continuously swings in front of a monitor. This motion controls the slow synthesis and destruction of depictions of Chronos on the monitor. Chronos appears in various interpretations by painters of the late Renaissance, Baroque and Classicism – as a man who disrobes Veritas, as a performer of volatile music, or docking Cupid’s wings, or as children and crop eating, a scythe and an hour glass carrying, beardy and winged old man.
video

Waterfall
video art
FILE FESTIVAL
Waterfall presents the viewer with a single static shot of a majestic waterfall. Over the course of the piece a number of diminutive figures walk slowly into the shot on the gravel bar at the bottom of the falls. They have come to pay their respects to the waterfall, we might call them pilgrims – we might call them tourists. Their slow-motion performances appear to be a mixture of the comedic and the devout.

The Swing

In The Swing, a 3D game avatar becomes Rococo fleshy decadence. In this multi-screen animation, the avatar swings on a seat suspended from the sky, in super Mannerist slow time. Her wooded surroundings ebb and flow at different rate, imitating stop-motion. Years pass in a matter of moments. The avatar is the driver of all of these cycles, but a driver scarcely in control – she is instead, a Mother Nature heading straight for what she suspects might be oblivion. The Swing is a multi channel installation, in nine, five and three screen versions.

sound: Kurt Hentschlager

Jacobson’s Fabulous Olfactometer
Created by Susanna Hertrich, Jacobson’s Fabulous Olfactometer (JFO) is a sensorial prosthesis that mimics mammalian ‘flehmen’ when air pollution levels are high. The prosthetic is designed around a new human sense modeled after a mammalian sense organ called the vomeronasal or “Jacobson’s” organ. This olfactory sense organ enables certain animals to sense odourless chemicals. When a mammal senses chemicals, it lifts its upper lip to expose this organ. This behaviour is called ‘flehmen’ (wikipedia).Two air chemical sensors located at the top part of the prosthetic register small particles (smoke) and CO2 levels. This data is fed into an Arduino board. When air pollution levels are registered as ‘high’, two stepper motors on either side of the head set exaggerated bone gears in motion and the wearer’s lip is slowly pulled upwards. Thus, JFO enables its wearer to ‘sense’ airborne chemicals and modifies his/her face similar to mammalian flehmen.Sensing and data processing is achieved using an Arduino with a Smoke detector (fine particles) & a Co2 sensor. The device also includes Adafruit stepper motor shield, two stepper motors and a custom designed gears carved from camel bone.