highlike

Liam Johnson

Liam was chosen for the scholarship by lead designer at Alexander McQueen, Sarah Burton. He spent his year in industry in Paris, working at Maison Margiela under John Galliano, working personally with the designer on both the artisanal and ready-to-wear collections. As a designer, his own collections often centre upon alternatives to normal fashion and instead offer remodelled silhouettes, bright colours, unexpected textures and sculptural, exaggerated forms.

OLIVIER RATSI

Perspective du cadre
Mesurant 30m x 30m x 2,4m et doté de lumières LED et de 8 canaux audio, Frame Perspective transforme un espace caverneux à la Maison de la Région. A des dates précises tout au long du festival Constellations, Ratsi a préparé un programme lumière dans l’espace, accompagné d’une composition sonore interprétée par Thomas Vaquié (voir le programme du festival pour plus de détails). Frame Perspective poursuit l’interrogation de Ratsi sur la réalité à travers la création d’espaces exploratoires et périphériques. Les formes répétitives de l’installation créent de nouvelles dimensions dans la Maison de la Région, interrompant les lignes de l’architecture. Pendant ce temps, la composition des lumières et des sons en interaction perturbe les textures sonores et visuelles de l’espace et résonne avec le visiteur sur des fréquences inexplorées. L’effet est de plonger le visiteur dans un environnement fluctuant qui relie les technologies numériques aux espaces physiques et soulève des questions sur la façon dont la réalité est construite et vécue dans les domaines numérique, physique et autres.

Kenny Wong

Squint
file festival
I was inspired by how the sunlight bounces around in our artificial forest.
“Squint” is a kinetic light installation consisting of 49 mirrors that reflect lights in a bright space. The mirrors track and reflect lights on audiences’ face with composed patterns of movements. It extends the generated perception by focusing on how lights pass across our visual senses physically, and combines with our perception of images through flickering. “Squint”, which extracts various daily experiences to an abstraction brings the audience to expand their interpretation of lights and perceived imagination into a non-linear experience.
“Squint” simulates light source and intentionally shines lights on audience’s faces. Bright light is projected in the gallery, a clean bright space.
Everyday people are dynamically moving around in the city. Sunlight reflects and flickers even when it is indirect and hidden behind the artifacts. While we are traveling, we are experiencing motion. We are also experiencing the shift of light intensity, visual patterns and textures. The varieties of light forms inspire the artist to explore the potential of light textures, select and sort out the combined complexity in urban space. The artist turns them into a minimal form of light experience, while maximizing its diversity of perception.

ARTECHOUSE

Aqueous
Inspired by the color blue’s calming qualities, Aqueous is a deep dive into our water-filled surroundings. Whether looking out at the vast horizon of the ocean or listening to the bubbling flow of a stream, water instills a sense of peace and relaxation. Through exploring the textures of liquid in all its states, this immersive installation seeks to soothe the spirit and inspire action to preserve this natural resource.

Thom Kubli

Brazil Now
BRAZIL NOW is a composition that addresses increasing militarization and surveillance within urban areas. Its geographical and acoustic reference is São Paulo, the largest megacity in Latin America. The piece is based on field recordings that capture the symptoms of a Latin American variant of turbo-capitalism with its distinctive acoustic features. Eruptive public demonstrations on the streets are often accompanied by loud, carnivalesque elements. These are controlled by a militarized infrastructure, openly demonstrating a readiness to deploy violence. The sonic documents are analyzed by machine learning algorithms searching for acoustic memes, textures, and rhythms that could be symptomatic for predominant social forces. The algorithmic results are then used as a base for a score and its interpretation through a musical ensemble. The piece drafts a phantasmatic auditory landscape built on the algorithmic evaluation of urban conflict zones.

Olivier Ratsi

Frame Perspective
Measuring 30m x 30m x 2.4m and featuring LED lights and 8 audio channels, Frame Perspective transforms a cavernous space at the Maison de la Région. On specific dates throughout the Constellations festival Ratsi has prepared a light programme in the space, accompanied by a sound composition played by Thomas Vaquié (see the festival programme for more details). Frame Perspective continues Ratsi’s interrogation of reality through the creation of exploratory and peripheral spaces. The installation’s repeating forms create new dimensions in the Maison de la Région, interrupting the lines of the architecture. Meanwhile the composition of interacting lights and sounds disrupts the sonic and visual textures of the space and resonates with the visitor on uncharted frequencies. The effect is to immerse the visitor into a fluctuating environment which connects digital technologies with physical spaces and raises questions about how reality is constructed and experienced in digital, physical and other realms.

Vvzela Kook

gods and Pilgrims

New media artist Vvzela Kook works in various audiovisual media,including performance, theatre, computer graphics and drawing to explore contemporary performing arts such as the possibility that dance and computer-generated arts could co-exist. Kook’s video works combine technology with her artistic practice to reproduce and convert urban cityscapes into an integrated virtual experience. The condensed textures in her works connect with multiple sensual levels in our perception and reintroduce the unexplored potential of video as a medium

Anke Eckardt

Between I you I and I me
BETWEEN | YOU | AND | ME is a wall of sound and light. Like any other wall, it defines an architectural space. Given its ephemeral, dynamic media – ultrasound and beams of light – the wall can be perceived only when the visitor comes close and interacts with it. Two thin membranes of light form a visible frame filled with sound. Multichannel, extremely vectored hypersonic speakers render audible various textures of broken glass: a sound architecture within the wall, comprised of juxtaposed single sound beams, whose constellation changes depending on the visitor’s position. Observed from a distance, the wall fades away: clear transparency and only faintly resonant tones attest to its non-existence.

Eliška Sky

WOMANEROES

“Eliška Sky’s tribe of ‘womaneroes’ stand bold and bright, their bodies and heads adorned in vibrant shapes, colours, and textures. Beneath the wigs and paint are women of all ages, shapes and ethnicities, photographed with a large-format camera to capture every detail, rough or smooth, with the intention for the images to eventually be printed and exhibited life-size. “It started as visual play, but transformed into a series that challenges depictions of women’s bodies,” explains the London-based Czech photographer. “In light of my own experience of working in the fashion industry, I felt the need to portray the body in new ways and forms, with an element of playfulness and humour in opposition to western media advertising”.” Marigold Warner

Bryant Nichols

Forms II
Mount Audio

Forms is a collaborative film series devised by London based, creative sound studio Mount Audio. The ongoing project sees Mount team up with leading visual artists each month to create unique audiovisual works.Forms II showcases the vibrant motion work of LA based designer Bryant Nichols. The artists’s warped figures bend and contort, twisting around one another to form abstract human structures.Inspired by Bryant’s alternate reality, Mount have created an entirely synthesised soundtrack layering rich, modulating textures to create an unsettling atmosphere. The effect is hypnotic yet disorientating.

Oscar Sol

Trinity
Trinity is an audiovisual interactive dance piece which tells the journey of a body going through different states of perception of the space. Through movement, the body is immersed in an environment of textures and audiovisual landscapes that not only accompany but will push to a transformation process.This work proposes a profound, clear and efficient interaction between its three elements: the triad of movement, sound and visuals. This interaction is understood as a dialogue which passes through different levels of intensity and transformations throughout the piece and is focused in the detection of the following qualities and patterns of movement like: forces and directions, acceleration, position, speed and body area.

Wang & Söderström

Growth
Wang & Söderström is a Copenhagen based transdisciplinary duo composed of Swedish designer Anny Wang and architect Tim Söderström. The bridging of the physical and digital realms is a major theme in their practice and they are constantly trying to challenge the boundaries between them. Fluctuating between art and design, Wang & Söderström wants to throw out pre-existing conventions regarding the digital and put emphasis on the emotional and tactile side of materials, objects and textures to give the digital a more human-relatable quality and create more meaningful connections. “By 3D scanning elements from nature, like tree trunks, leaves and plants and mixing it with surrealistic materials and behaviors, we wanted to let them continue to grow in a digital environment.”

KOHEI NAWA

كوهي ناوا
名和晃平
КОХЕЙ НАВА
stroke-yana

TRANS, the newest series of sculptures by the artist Kohei Nawa, was produced using techniques that involve the use of the computer and a 3D scanner. The artist scans people using a 3D scanner and then uses computer graphics to create works using the scanned data as a basis. Once with the scanned models, Kohei uses techniques such as texture mapping and smoothing to carve and apply reliefs to his digital models. When finalized, the 3d models are used to create molds for the final sculptures.

Liam Johnson

Liam a été choisie pour la bourse par la designer principale d’Alexander McQueen, Sarah Burton. Il a passé son année dans l’industrie à Paris, travaillant à la Maison Margiela sous John Galliano, travaillant personnellement avec le créateur sur les collections artisanales et de prêt-à-porter. En tant que designer, ses propres collections se concentrent souvent sur des alternatives à la mode normale et proposent à la place des silhouettes remodelées, des couleurs vives, des textures inattendues et des formes sculpturales exagérées.

Signe Lykke & Yoshi Sodeoka

BODY TEXTURES

“The textural work Body Textures by Signe Lykke is a beautiful sonic journey into the human body’s different cells. Cross-sectional images of cell types such as fat, protein and connective tissue form the basis of this orchestral work, and have served as an inspirational source for the different texture areas and movements. Morten Ryelund conducts the Danish Youth Ensemble.”

Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir

chromo sapiens
Icelandic artist Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir / Shoplifter has transformed a warehouse in Giudecca into a multi-sensory, cavernous environment with a cacophonous amount of her signature material, synthetic hair. Color, sound and irresistible textures guide visitors through three distinct chambers provoking an immersive experience of visual and auditory stimuli.

HIROAKI UMEDA

holistic strata
Tokyo-based choreographer and video artist Hiroaki Umeda creates mesmerizing visual environments for his visceral solo works, appearing as a fine-spun swirl of movement in a digital storm of light and sound—an elusive figure, by turns frantic and still, awash in pulsating electronic waves. In a program of acclaimed companion pieces, Haptic and Holistic Strata, Umeda’s distinctive dance vocabulary draws on a range of butoh, ballet and hip-hop. He conceives his interdisciplinary events as a sensorial whole, creating the beats and sonic textures as well as the entrancing video and lighting effects. Designed to elicit primal emotion, Umeda’s work is minimalist and radical, subtle and violent, abstract yet precise, and thrillingly physical.

Michael Pinsky

Transparent Room
Transparent Room suspends viewers in a virtual space where they see through walls to hidden rooms and city streets, and through ceilings to the sky. The room’s confining walls are replaced by projections of the outside world, its time accelerated as clouds speed by and as cars and pedestrians alike race down the street. In this caricatured passing of time, views of the cityscape and of the building’s interiors are magnified, first showing details, then textures and, finally, just single colours.

Victoria Vesna

BODIES INC
Bodies INC 2.0 is dedicated to creating ways to PROTECT YOUR THIRD EYE! Our proprietary body parts, textures and sounds are embedded with deeper meaning and energy – we give you the power you need to function successfully in the spiritual and material realms. Once you become (in)INCorated into our magical system, you will have an opportunity to apply the secret techniques and empowerments. Become a member and a door to collective emergent systems will open for you to function in multiverses now hidden from view!

KATE COOPER

Rigged
A hybrid of consumer associations, ranging from the glossy iconography of the TV commercial and the sterility of video game graphics to the luminosity of the department store poster and the smell of freshly opened cosmetics, create a subconscious lure. Her use of CGI technology in her artistic practice surpasses a simple study of digital textures (think nostalgic glitch-making) to occupy a full-fleshed, hyperreal space, usually reserved to corporate giants in advertising or entertainment.

sam o’brien

An interpretation of the textures of Iceland’s landscape, using synthetic and artificial materials to make the unnatural appear natural in the eyes of the ignorant. Paired with a silhouette inspired by the saturnian symbolism of the cube, these clothes journey from a literal, compromising analysis of the three dimensional cube to a broken down and wearable analysis of the two dimensional cube, the hexagon.

HILARY FAYE

Хилари Фэй
Faye has a magical eye for composition and colour, which especially shines through in her photography. Her collages meld objects, people, animals and landscapes together with haphazard cropping and appropriation, and the outcomes are compelling and enigmatic. She dabbles in layering and geometry; her chosen textures and tones are evocative of another era, with use of nostalgic film grains, which is at the forefront of her mixed media mantra. She has a knack of combining a myriad of elements and arranging them into a rich formation of imagery.

juuke schoorl

Rek
With ‘Rek’ (stretch in Dutch) I explore the aesthetic possibilities of the human skin through a mixture of image capturing techniques. By manipulating this curious stretchable material with various low budget materials like nylon fishing rope and cello tape I am able to temporarily shape it into surprising textures and shapes. Highlighting not only it’s flexibility and adaptability but also it’s function as our own biological upholstery that aside from it’s protective capabilities could also serve as a medium for aesthetic expression, possibly in the form of a dress less fashion.

Jo Ann Callis

Other Rooms
Since she emerged in the late 1970s as one of the first important practitioners of the “fabricated photographs” movement, Jo Ann Callis has made adventurous contributions in the areas of color photography, sculpture, painting, and digital imagery. For her, photography is another studio tool to be used, along with the sets she creates and the models she directs, to render the sensual tones and textures of fabric and food, or to animate clay figures of her own making. The persistent inventiveness of Callis’s work has made her a force in Southern California art and in recent photographic practice.

Adam Kremer

Kramer doesn’t seem to be that interested in the aesthetic tradition of photography so much as creating the right image. His pictures are exciting, even the most simple still life has an energy; the textures, form and playfulness palpable. This is an artist with a style that embraces the absurdity of life and has a humour that is utterly disarming.

Laurie Spiegel

the expanding universe
The Expanding Universe is the classic 1980 debut album by composer and computer music pioneer Laurie Spiegel. The pieces comprising The Expanding Universe combine slowly evolving textures with the emotional richness of intricate counterpoint, harmony, and complex rhythms (John Fahey and J. S. Bach are both cited as major influences in the original cover’s notes), all built of electronic sounds. These works, often grouped with those of Terry Riley, Phil Glass, Steve Reich, differ in their much shorter, clear forms. Composed and realized between 1974 and 1977 on the GROOVE system developed by Max Mathews and F.R. Moore at Bell Laboratories, the pieces on this album were far ahead of their time both in musical content and in how they were made.

Laura Lima

The Inverse
The varying thickness and gradient of color throughout renders the rope an overwhelming morass of textures, and at any level of the space from which it is viewed it’s difficult to determine if it’s one rope or many. It feels tempting to touch.more

Ricardo Barreto and Maria Hsu Rocha

Martela
FILE FESTIVAL
Tactila is an art form whose medium is the sense of touch (tact) which is independent from the all the other ones and has its own intelligence, imagination, memory, perception, and sensation. It is well known that vision and sound have hegemony in arts and in other disciplines. Tactila takes place in time and, therefore, can be recorded and have various forms of notation for subsequent executions. That is why its development became possible only now, thanks to mechatronic and robotic systems which are compatible with machine languages.
The creation of tactile works involves a (tact) composition, which can be made through handmade notation and played on a keyboard or directly on the computer of the tactile machine ( robot ).
Tactile machines can present numerous tactile possibilities through points, vectors, and textures with varying rhythms and intensities, and be run in different extensions and locations of our body.

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The first tactile machine is called “Martela”. It is a tactile robot comprised of 27 engines subdivided into three squares (3 x 3), i.e., each square has 9 engines. Each engine corresponds to a matrix point, so we have 27 tactile units that allow to touch the user’s body with various intensities.

Sonja Baumel

crocheted membrane

‘Crocheted Membrane’ experiments with creating a momentary fiction through fashion artifacts. Starting with the physical needs of one individual human body in an outdoor temperature of 10 degrees Celsius, seven hand-crocheted body forms were produced. The clothing’s texture got thinner or opened up completely on areas of the body that needed less warmth and were thicker where warmth was lacking. In this way, a fundamental change in the aesthetic and function of clothes was displayed. Fixed forms, such as trousers, were recreated into new, unique body forms. Instead of one uniform surface, the textures became alive and inimitable. “Her concept of clothing does not derive in the same way as most fashion design, from shape or historically patterned form with embedded social hierarchy and material richness, but is instead determined by the needs and sensations of the human body – performing in the same way that bacteria populations individually respond.” (Villeré 2014) The resulting fictional artifacts illustrate how we could use knowledge about our unique bacteria population to create a novel layer.

Chanjoong Kim

Cubrick

The Art Folly Cubrick by Chanjoong Kim is an interactive public space exhibited outside the walls of the Korean National Museum of Contemporary Art. A fusion between bricks and cubic forms, this abstract architecture piece is both artful and interactive.A spatial installation, this bold piece dares to test visual boundaries. A dynamically designed piece, the pavilion provides an intriguing experience for its visitors, showcasing a multitude of materialized textures. From stacked shapes to three-dimensional structural elements, this boldly built environment displays six different surfaces.With an aim to display high art outside of museum walls, The Art Folly Cubrick by Chanjoong Kim is an interactive sculptural piece few will soon forget. Gaining attention for all the right reasons, this spatial sculpture is all about art exploration.

Ryota Matsumoto

the Indistinct Notion of an Object Trajectory

Ryota Matsumoto’s drawings develop and demonstrate the hybrid/multi-layered process where varying scale, juxtaposition of different forms, intertwined textures/tones are applied to reinvent and question the spatial conditions of architectural drawings. His work explore a hybrid drawing technique combining both traditional media (ink, acrylic, and graphite) and digital media (algorithmic processing, scripting and image compositing with custom software ) .
FILE FESTIVAL

Ryota Matsumoto

First Subtle Sign of Evolving Drones

Architecture, Art & Design – Ryota Matsumoto’s drawings develop and demonstrate the hybrid/multi-layered process where varying scale, juxtaposition of different forms, intertwined textures/tones are applied to reinvent and question the spatial conditions of architectural drawings. His work explore a hybrid drawing technique combining both traditional media (ink, acrylic, and graphite) and digital media (algorithmic processing, scripting and image compositing with custom software ) .
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URS FISCHER

Урс Фишер
nomadic art tent
The nomadic sculpture that Urs Fischer created for Station to Station is something of a steamy interior dreamscape, a glittery, shimmering vision that hypnotizes with lights and textures that both welcome and disorient. In the center of the piece is a plush Hasten’s bed on which viewers lie surrounded on all sides by mirrors and cloud-like smoke. A disco ball rotates above. Is this a place for disco naps? Or is it a glamorous fantasy of decadence and visual riches? Spend some time, look at yourself in the many reflective surfaces, and feel the bedding against your skin and decide for yourself. Dreamy as it is, this space is grounded in the real world and governed by the laws of physics. This place seems like a fantasy, but it is entirely real. As one critic noted of an earlier Fischer work:In a world increasingly defined by virtual realities and digital imaging, is the creative mastery of hand manufacture merely a quaint artistic throwback — nostalgia for a lost cultural past? Is this sculpture a memorial? Given today’s ubiquitous special effects wizardry, shouldn’t art clasp technology to its bosom? There’s nothing virtual about the softness of the bed, nothing digital about the gleam of those lights or the mist surrounding you. Take off your shoes. Climb inside. This is real life.

BRIAN ENO

Брайан Ино
브라이언 이노
ブライアン·イーノ
בריאן אינו
براين إينو
Брайан Ино
Music for Airports
Initially, he referred to these quiet soundscapes as “discreet” music, and on Discreet Music (a wry deconstruction of “Pachelbel’s Canon in D”) demonstrates his basic tools: minimal melodies, subtle textures, and variable repetition. Around this time, he had also been collaborating with the German synth duo Cluster on a pair of moody, coloristic electronic albums, selections from which may be found on the Begegnungen and Begegnungen II compilations. But it was Music for Airports that finally codified these experiments into an aesthetic, and even provided a label for the sound: ambient music.