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QUBIT AI: Marc Lee & Shervin Saremi

Speculative Evolution, Prototype 1

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival
Speculative experiment on a future ecosystem under strict control. The narrative takes place in a simulation, 30 years in the future, where artificial intelligence and synthetic biology collaborate to optimize an environment for cultivated species. An AI-powered simulator helps visitors generate new species to balance the ecosystem. Inspiration comes from the book Under the White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert and artists’ stories about life on a damaged planet.

Bio

Marc Lee is a Swiss artist focused on real-time rendered audiovisual installations, AR, VR and mobile applications, critically exploring creative, cultural, social, ecological, political and speculative themes. His work has been exhibited in important museums and new media art spaces. Shervin Saremi is an Iranian musician and audio engineer specializing in sonic computing, procedural sound design and production. Currently researching immersive audio at UdK Berlin.

Kino

MIT Media Lab, Stanford University
This work explores a dynamic future where the accessories we wear are no longer static, but are instead mobile, living objects on the body. Engineered with the functionality of 18 robotics, this “living” jewelry roams on unmodified clothing, changing location and reconfiguring appearance according to social context and enabling multitude presentations of self. With the addition of sensor devices, they transition into active devices which can react to environmental conditions. They can also be paired with existing mobile devices to become personalized on-body assistants to help complete tasks. Attached to garments, they generate shape-changing clothing and kinetic pattern designs–creating a new, dynamic fashion.
It is our vision that in the future, these robots will be miniaturized to the extent that they can be seamlessly integrated into existing practices of body ornamentation. With the addition of kinetic capabilities, traditionally static jewelry and accessories will start displaying life-like qualities, learning, shifting, and reconfiguring to the needs and preferences of the wearer, also assisting in fluid presentation of self. We envision a new class of future wearables that possess hybrid qualities of the living and the crafted, creating a new on-body ecology for human-wearable symbiosis.

bohyun yoon

БОХЬЮН ЮН
윤보현
To Reverse Yourself

FILE FESTIVAL

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.

XU ZHEN

徐震是当今中国最有趣,最有前途的艺术家之一。 徐震是一位概念画家,是一位概念画家,他的作品经常采取挑衅性的雕塑,置和干预的形式,面对当代中国和中国的社会政治禁忌,这是一位顽强的艺术家,对全球信息有强烈的需求,并且具有跨多种平台和媒体制作作品的独特能力。

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Xu Zhen is one of the most interesting and promising artists in China today. Xu Zhen is a conceptual painter and a conceptual painter. His works often take the form of provocative sculptures, installations and interventions. Faced with contemporary China and China’s social and political taboos, this is a tenacious artist. There is a strong demand for global information and the unique ability to produce works across multiple platforms and media.

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Xu Zhen è uno degli artisti più interessanti e promettenti in Cina oggi. Xu Zhen è un pittore concettuale e un pittore concettuale. Le sue opere assumono spesso la forma di sculture, installazioni e interventi provocatori. Di fronte alla Cina contemporanea e ai tabù sociali e politici della Cina, questo è un artista tenace. C’è una forte richiesta di informazioni globali e la capacità unica di produrre opere su più piattaforme e media.

 

Mark Dorf

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.
video

Liu Wa

2020 Got Me Like
As COVID-19 speeds around the world and continues to shut down more cities, people begin to consume Internet culture in order to escape the apocalyptic anxiety in 2020, allowing Internet memes to go viral across the globe. Built upon social media, this work merges everyday sentiments with classical movie scenes to deconstruct the common imagination of “apocalypse” in entertainment industry. The video also incorporates the artist’s footage during protests, turning memes into public commentary and political satire. In this eventful year, meme does more than hijacking and decontextualizing meanings, it has become a form of silent revolt against the absurd.

Rasa Smite & Raitis Smits

Swamp Radio
Swamp Radio gets beyond our anthropocenic reality, and maintains connections between the humans and other species. By artistic interventions and transmitting interfaces, the Swamp Radio is turned into a social media megaphone for invisible and inaudible actors of nature. The artists are installing microbial fuel cells, environmental monitoring sensors and transmitting devices to transform the swamps into dynamic power plants and the 21st century multi-voiced broadcast media.

Shu Lea Cheang

Avatar of the artist
Taiwan in Venice 2019
“For those who don’t know her, Shu Lea Cheang is a figure of Net art and the cyberfeminist movement that emerged in the 1990s. Living in New York at the time, she was also an active member of the activist video collective Paper Tiger Television (as was French filmmaker Nathalie Magnan). Since then, Cheang’s work has dealt with “concerns including sex, futures, gender, ecology, money, media, and food [to] encompass film, installation, online work, social processes, and direct intervention in the sociopolitical, technical and aesthetic systems, and the imaginaries which co-compose them,” writes Matthew Fuller

ANN HAMILTON

アン·ハミルトン
앤 해밀턴
the event of a thread

Ann Hamilton is a visual artist internationally recognized for the sensory surrounds of her large-scale multi-media installations. Using time as process and material, her methods of making serve as an invocation of place, of collective voice, of communities past and of labor present. Noted for a dense accumulation of materials, her ephemeral environments create immersive experiences that poetically respond to the architectural presence and social history of their sites.

olga de la iglesia

woman 27
Olga is part of a new generation of young women reshaping the art world from Barcelona. Using social media platforms to gain creative traction, and either blurring the lines between creative genres, she describes herself as an “imager”. Fashion with a documentary edge, strange still-lifes against brightly colored backgrounds, and monochromatic arrangements of ordinary objects. Teo Sandigliano

MIAO XIAOCHUN

МЯО СЯОЧУНЬ
缪晓春
مياو شياو تشون
THE FAR SHORE

Miao Xiaochun was born in 1964 in Wuxi, China. He undertook an MFA at Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China graduating in 1989, before embarking on a second MFA at the Kunsthochschule Kassel, Kassel, Germany, graduating in 1999. An influential figure in China’s wave of new media art, Miao Xiaochun is an artist primarily concerned with appropriation and East-West dialogue. For example, his photographs, assembled through a computer program, are sprawling panoramas of China’s social masses.

DAVID HAMMONS

Bliz-aard Ball Sale
David Hammons was born in 1943 in Springfield, Illinois. An African-American, he is a conceptual installation artist using his found-object media as a platform for Dadaist social commentary, primarily on racial themes. Hammons places himself as an artist between Arte Povera and Marcel Duchamp. He has risen to prominence while at the same time consciously avoiding the attention of critics, galleries, and museums, preferring to do things in the street.

DOUG AITKEN

ダグエイケン
道格·艾特肯
Return to the Real
‘Return to the Real’ is Aitken’s device to make us think about our devices, the experiential subletting to Instagram, the squeal and squawk of social media. ‘It’s a counterpoint to that world of de-materiality and speed,’ he says, ‘and about seeking something which is unique or being in a place which is physical and tactile or a moment which is unrepeatable.’

doris chase

Circles II
Doris Chase has achieved international stature as a pioneer in the field of video art since she moved from Seattle to New York City in 1972. An artist of remarkable and continuous creativity, Chase now divides her time between her video headquarters in New York and a Seattle studio where she works on new projects in painting and sculpture.Beginning as an innovative painter and sculptor in Seattle in the 1950s, Chase created sculpture that was meant to be touched and manipulated by the viewer. Chase then developed large-scale kinetic sculptures in collaboration with choreographers, and her art was set in motion by dancers. In New York, her majors contribution to the evolution of artists’ video has been her work in videodance. On videotape, dancers and sculpture evolve into luminous abstract forms which represent some of the most sophisticated employments of video technology by an artist of the 1970s. In the 1980s, Chase began working in the nascent genre of video theater. In these productions, she uses the imtimacy of the video screen to achieve a new synthesis of visual and dramatic art. Her video theatre compositions present multicultural and social commentary, utilizing scripts by writers such as Lee Breuer, Thulani Davis, and Jessica Hagedorn in the “Concepts” series. Collaborating with actresses Geralding Page, Ann Jackson, Roberta Wallach, Joan Plowright, and Luise Riner in the “By Herself” series, she focuses on the viewpoints and experiences of older women. Today, coming full circle, Doris Chase in Seattle is exploring a renewed interest in painting and sculpture as well as in the modernist aesthetic she never really ceased pursuing, even during her most adventuresome multimedia years.