In the robot skies
In the Robot Skies is the world’s first narrative shot entirely through autonomous drones. In collaboration with the Embedded and Artificially intelligent Vision Lab in Belgium the film has evolved in the context of their experiments with specially developed camera drones each programmed with their own cinematic rules and behaviours. The film explores the drone as a cultural object, not just as a new instrument of visual story telling but also as the catalyst for a new collection of urban sub cultures. In the way the New York subway car of the 80’s gave birth to a youth culture of wild style graffiti and hip hop the age of ubiquitous drones as smart city infrastructure will create a new network of surveillance activists and drone hackers. From the eyes of the drones we see two teenagers each held by police order within the digital confines of their own council estate tower block in London. A network of drones survey the council estates, as a roving flock off cctv cameras and our two characters are kept apart by this autonomous aerial infrastructure.

prima materia

Prima materia, as the first element, the ubiquitous starting material required for the alchemical processes, reveal transformation of our times.The matter of all forms create various transmutations, attached to laboratory processes, form and color changes in 3D, used as a model for the individuation process, and as a device in art and technology.That pure matter, existing in nature, is converted to other imperfect bodies that it interacts with, and this way is rediscovered and brought to the front by art and technology.

Glitch art
Finding his own niche between new media arts and conceptualism, Adam Ferriss creates unique digital coding that manipulates, distorts, and engineers images into psychedelic terrains. At times, his technicolor abstractions feel organic despite their technological roots – an ambiguous craft born of the RGB Tricolor separation process and pixel sorting algorithms he so carefully employs. Using these “procedural mechanisms,” Ferriss initiates iterative changes in light and pixel structure of his given source material – creating a literally infinite array of compositional possibilities that grapple with human perception during an era of ubiquitous manufacture.

Positions of the Unknown
At the very beginning of space exploration the infrastructure to monitor the whole sky was not yet developed. So in order to find out whether foreign countries launched objects, the US government started to train citizens to observe and detect possible artificial satellites. Scattered over the allied world, these amateur scientists played a crucial part in keeping track of all men-made technology orbiting earth, until “Operation Moonwatch” was discontinued in 1975 […] “Positions of the Unknown” locates the current whereabouts of these mysterious objects by simply pointing at them as they revolve around Earth. Missing the legal proof, those unidentified artefacts remain entities of pure speculation, secret companions of us and our planet. Even so they have been sighted several times and their ubiquitous presence is therefore somehow validated, they linger in a state between existence and non-existence. Quadrature’s 52 small machines constantly follow their paths and serve as silent witnesses of the unknown.

Binatone Galaxy

An installation for used cassette players which looks on their obsolescence not as an ending, but as an opportunity to reconsider their functional potential. Superseded as playback devices, they become instruments in their own right. Replacing the prerecorded content of each tape with a microphone gives us the chance to listen instead to the rhythmic and resonant properties of these once ubiquitous plastic shells. Binatone Galaxy brings the framework within which a generation purchased their favourite records to the centre of attention, revealing the acoustics of the cassette and the voices of the machines themselves.“On the walls of a white room, brightly illuminated with natural light, Stephen Cornford, and artist who describes his work as existing “at the intersection of sculpture and music”, has mounted some 30 old cassette recorders. Models from Boots, Sanyo, Robotic, one lone and gorgeously named Binatone Galaxy: they all hang on the walls, wired up, tapes loaded and ready for action. Smitten by an attack of technological melancholia, the visitor can wonder who owned these things, what pop charts did these machines once record? Were they ever placed next to pillows, late at night for surreptitious listening pleasures? What happened to the voices that once rubbed the magnetic heads of these little machines? For some artists, the speed (and resulting impact) of obsolescence on the technology we once took for granted has spawned a form of fetishism, in which the voices – the human agency – they once recorded exist in an alternate, ghostly dimension, a reminder of what once was. This is not Cornford’s theme. The fact that each audio cassette in his machines is fitted with a motion sensor and a contact mic, so that, on entry the machines whirr into action, indicates that Binatone Galaxy is very much of the here and now. Yes, Cornford has chosen old, cheap and accessible technology with which to realise this, but I suspect that he is aiming for a furrruuuzzy audio intimacy.

Cybernetic Bacteria

In the earliest stages of my work, I was intrigued by normal flora bacteria, the ubiquitous bacteria that live on us, in us, and around us. At the time this area was described as being of no commercial or medical interest – an ideal area for artistic research some might say! It threw into question for me the ways in which our scientific understanding of the world is limited by mundane things like finance, and how the limits of our understanding are drawn by factors other than curiosity.

video

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.

Наоко Ито
Ubiquitous