L’Alter-monde
Evocación de un jardín cibernético diseñado en múltiples escenarios, Realness contempla una potencial simbiosis entre el ser humano y un estado de naturaleza redescubierta. A través de la ecosofía y el mutualismo entre especies, este trabajo explora la posibilidad de identificarnos con una naturaleza mutante, un estado de devenir vegetal o la experiencia de vidas infrahumanas.
En los ojos del animal
En los ojos del animal, un viaje a través de la cadena alimentaria, es una interpretación artística de las perspectivas sensoriales de tres especies británicas. Creada con escáneres Lidar, vehículos aéreos no tripulados (UAV) o drones y cámaras de 360 ° a medida, la pieza está configurada en un paisaje sonoro binaural utilizando grabaciones de audio provenientes de Grizedale Forest en el norte de Inglaterra.
FLORALIA I
Inspired by the writings of Donna J. Haraway, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Greg Egan, the work plunges us into a speculative future, where samples of then extinct plant species are preserved and displayed in a virtual archive room. Through editing and visual strategies, this archive room is sporadically transformed under the effect of interference caused by the memory emanating from the listed plants, revealing traces of a past that continues to haunt the place. Floralia is a simulation of ecosystems born from the fusion of technology and organic matter, where past and future coexist in a perpetual tension of the present.
BOB
Cheng’s work explores mutation, the history of human consciousness and our capacity as a species to relate to change. Drawing on principles of video game design, improvisation and cognitive science, Cheng develops live simulations – virtual ecosystems of infinite duration, populated with agents who are programmed with behavioural drives but left to self-evolve without authorial intent, following the unforgiving causality found in nature.
Photo: Andrea Rossetti
Great Animal Orchestra
The Fondation Cartier invited United Visual Artists to collaborate on The Great Animal Orchestra, exhibition that celebrates the work of musician, bio-acoustician and scientist Bernie Krause. Krause has been recording animals for 45 years and has amassed a collection of more than 5,000 hours of sounds recording of over 15,000 individual species in their natural habitats from all over the world. UVA’s creative approach linked together the various exhibition content elements throughout the basement space — soundscapes, spectrograms and art works — into a cohesive, immersive experience that three-dimensionalises Krause’s recordings and suggests scenes from the natural world. The spectrograms form an abstract landscape, an interpretation of the various global locations and times of day that Krause made the original recordings in a way that envelops the audience and encourages them to linger in the space.
Labor
What does labor smell like? Labor is a dynamic, self-regulating art installation that re-creates the scent of people exerting themselves under stressful conditions. There are, however, no people involved in making the smell – it is created by bacteria propagating in the three glass bioreactors. Each bioreactor incubates a unique species of human skin bacteria responsible for the primary scent of sweating bodies: Staphylococcus epidermidis, Corynebacterium xerosis and Propionibacterium avidum. As these bacteria metabolize simple sugars and fats, they create the distinct smells associated with human exertion, stress and anxiety. Their scents combine in the central chamber with which a sweatshop icon, the white t-shirt, is infused as the scents are disseminated. The scent intensifies throughout the exhibition.
PANGOLIN DRESS
The Pangolin Scales Project demonstrates a 1.024 channel BCI (Brain-Computer Interface) that is able to extract information from the human brain with an unprecedented resolution. The extracted information is used to control the Pangolin Scale Dress interactively into 64 outputs.The dress is also inspired by the pangolin, cute, harmless animals sometimes known as scaly anteaters. They have large, protective keratin scales covering their skin (they are the only known mammals with this feature) and live in hollow trees or burrows.As such, Pangolins and considered an endangered species and some have theorized that the recent coronavirus may have emerged from the consumption of pangolin meat.Wipprecht’s main challenge in the project’s development was to not overload the dress with additional weight. She teamed up 3D printing experts Shapeways and Igor Knezevic in order to create an ‘exo-skeleton’ like dress-frame (3mm) that was light enough to be worn but sturdy enough to hold all the mechanics in place
IN-OUT/Paradis artificiels
music specially composed by Jacopo Baboni Schilingi
software written by Claude Micheli
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Trans-Natures ”é uma exploração poética da ligação entre natureza e artifício. Na continuação de uma abordagem iniciada no final dos anos 1990, ele se baseia na observação do reino vegetal e sua transposição imaginária para o mundo digital. Esta natureza artificial, cujas formas lembram vegetação rasteira, combina várias espécies de árvores, arbustos, ramos e folhagens. Seu desenvolvimento e formas são inspirados em “diagramas de árvore”, sistemas de organização de dados que utilizam o princípio de raízes, troncos e galhos. Essa natureza, com suas formas ora realistas, ora abstratas, é gerada ad infinitum por meio de software escrito por Claude Micheli. As plantas brotam ao acaso, florescendo e morrendo ao comando de vários “códigos morfogenéticos”. O jardim se renova e se transforma constantemente. Formas vegetais fluidas se desenrolam no espaço enquanto arborescências de galhos abrasivos crescem implacavelmente, parecendo às vezes explodir da tela. A obra brinca com o senso de limites espaciais de seus visitantes. Imerso em sua esfericidade envolvente, sua concepção de longe e de perto é reconfigurada, aberta ao infinito.
Botanical Pavilion
To realize the ‘Botanical Pavilion’, Kengo Kuma worked alongside Geoff Nees — a melbourne-based artist and curator who has also worked on a number of architectural pavilions. Made in the japanese tradition of wooden architecture, where pieces interlock, held by tension and gravity, the structure at the NGV triennial features a tessellated interior lined with timber collected from trees felled or removed over several years at Melbourne’s royal botanic gardens. Some of the trees used within the architecture pre-date european settlement, while others signal the development of the gardens as a site of scientific research and botanical classification. Prioritizing natural phenomena over scientific order, the botanical species used are color-coded, rather than following any taxonomic order. this approach offers a statement by the designers against the reductive nature of science during the colonial era — a mindset at odds with many indigenous cultural beliefs and knowledge systems.
In the Eyes of the Animal
In the Eyes of the Animal, a journey through the food chain, is an artistic interpretation of the sensory perspectives of three British species. Created using Lidar scans, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones & bespoke 360° cameras, the piece is set to a binaural soundscape using audio recordings sourced from Grizedale Forest in the north of England.
Cusp
A familiar childhood location on the Essex marshes is reframed by inserting images randomly generated by a neural network (GAN*) into this tidal landscape. Initially trained on a photographic dataset, the machine proceeds to learn the embedded qualities of different marsh birds, in the process revealing forms that fluctuate between species, with unanticipated variations emerging without reference to human systems of classification. Birds have been actively selected from among the images conceived by the neural network, and then combined into a single animation that migrates from bird to bird, accompanied by a soundscape of artificially generated bird song. The final work records these generated forms as they are projected, using a portable perspex screen, across the mudflats in Landermere Creek.
Meander
Meander is a large-scale immersive testbed environment constructed within a historic warehouse building at the centre of a residential highrise development in Cambridge, Ontario. The meshwork scaffolds which comprise the testbed are organized as a series of species within an artificial ecosystem, gently flexing and responding to the movement of viewers. Similar to natural environments such as rivers and clouds, large groups of parts pass physical impulses and data signals back and forth, enabling the entire environment to work as an interconnected whole. The innovations in Meander suggest ways of making adaptive, sensitive buildings of the future.
The Hive Kew Gardens
“The proposal involves the idea of ’temporary’ in an interesting way. It uses the temporary aspect of the installation to carefully engage with the purpose and short and long-term needs of the land,” said the judges. Originally designed for the Expo 2015 from Milan, The Hive was transferred to Kew Gardens, in central London, for two years, where it was part of an event space. Designed to give visitors a glimpse into the life of working bees, the pavilion was built with 169,300 individual aluminum components equipped with hundreds of LED lights. As the meadow surrounding the structure grows, several species of plants begin to flourish, bringing with them the sounds of real bees that enhance the multi-sensory experience of the pavilion.The aesthetic and symbolic installation represents its namesake, with the aim of showing visitors the importance of protecting the honeybee.
Scale
‘scale’ is an interspecies art project: an audience-interactive installation that involves nocturnal electric fish from the Amazon River Basin. Twelve different species of these fish comprise a choir whose sonified electrical fields provide the source tones for an immersive audiovisual environment. The fish are housed in individual tanks configured in a custom-built sculptural arc of aluminum frames placed around a central podium. The electrical field from each fish is translated into sound, and is thus heard — unprocessed or with digital effects added, with immediate control over volume via a touchscreen panel — through a 12-channel surround sound system, and with LED arrays under each tank for visual feedback. All software is custom-designed. Audience members interact as deejays with the system. Amongst the goals of the project is our desire to foster wider public awareness of these remarkable creatures, their importance to the field of neurological research, and the fragility of their native ecosystem.The project leaders comprise visual/conceptual artist Marlena Novak, composer/sound designer Jay Alan Yim, and neural engineer Malcolm MacIver. MacIver’s research focuses on sensory processing and locomotion in electric fish and translating this research into bio-inspired technologies for sensing and underwater propulsion through advanced fish robots. Novak and Yim, collaborating as ‘localStyle’, make intermedia works that explore perceptual themes, addressing both physical and psychological thresholds in the context of behavior, society/politics, and aesthetics.
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.
ArchaeaBot: A Post Climate Change, Post Singularity Life-form
“ArchaeaBot: A Post Singularity and Post Climate Change Life-form” takes the form of an underwater robotic installation that explores what ‘life’ might mean in a post singularity, post climate change future. The project is based on new research about archaea (the oldest life forms on Earth) combined with the latest innovations in machine learning & artificial intelligence creating the ‘ultimate’ species for the end of the world as we know it.
hollow
Katie Paterson and Zeller & Moye’s public artwork, Hollow, is made out of 10,000 samples of different tree species and was unveiled in Bristol in early May. The BBC followed Katie over a ten-month period as she assembled the wood collection and created the artwork. Sourced from all around the world, her samples include the oldest tree in the world, a tree that survived a nuclear blast and many trees that are now extinct.
ammonite washbasin
This unique washbasin by HighTech Design was inspired by the spiral shape of ammonite shell. In case you didn’t know, Ammonites are an extinct species of free-swimming molluscs who lived in the ancient oceans around the same time that the dinosaurs walked the Earth and disappeared during the same extinction event[…]
Халиль Чишти
Pursuit
El artista pakistaní Khalil Chishtee ha encontrado en las bolsas de plástico, de esas que llevamos en los supermercados o usamos para tirar la basura, la materia prima idónea para modelar sus increíbles esculturas antropomorfas, muchas de las cuales resultan realmente espeluznantes a la vista y dan la impresión de ser especies de momias o de cadáveres en descomposición, erguidos o colgados de la pared. El escultor asegura que “El arte no siempre tiene que ser bonito”.
THE DOG DAYS ARE OVER
THE DOG DAYS ARE OVER will be a work that tries to reveal the person behind the dancer. To reach this, a very complex, mathematical, dynamic and tiring choreography is constructed, which is performed almost completely in unison. The difficulty degree of the choreography is so high, that the dancers eventually will go wrong. It is there where the mask falls. The dancer is defined as an idle and purely executing species, striving for perfection.
Parabolhomme
A perspectiva da clonagem e da automação – dois tópicos aos quais o artista apela em mais de suas obras – acaba levando à reinvenção da vida selvagem e faz com que o artista imagine esse reino animal derivado como consequência do consumo excessivo. A diversidade de formas e as cores chocantes criam um bestiário de animais robóticos que lutam contra os elementos naturais. Mas as esculturas revelam não apenas a dinâmica da sobrevivência; eles também mostram como os animais podem ter mudado de território e podem estar procurando encontrar mais recursos para melhorar sua própria espécie. À medida que as espécies vêem seu espaço vital diminuir, apegadas a nada natural e presas em lugares desconhecidos e irreconhecíveis, elas parecem abraçar a mutação.
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.
Nomadic Plants
Vegetation and microorganisms live in symbiosis inside the body of the Nomadic Plants robot. Whenever its bacteria require nourishment, the self-sufficient robot will move towards a contaminated river and ‘drink’ water from it. Through a process of microbial fuel cell, the elements contained in the water are decomposed and turned into energy that can feed the brain circuits of the robot. The surplus is then used to create life, enabling plants to complete their own life cycle. As Gilberto wrote in our email conversation, “The nomadic plant is a portray of our own species. It also deals with the alienated transformation of this new hybrid species that fights for its survival in a deteriorated environment.”