Unreal

Lawrence’s accompanying soundtrack is a delicate lattice; complex, opaque and entirely synthetic. Diva’s yearning vocals, sung in English and Mandarin, cast classical melodies over billowing, intricately arranged songs. Her voice is created with a Vocaloid voice synthesiser, giving it an uncanny feeling. Her confessional lyrics draw empathy from the listener, as she reveals her fears of becoming an irrelevant influencer, obsolete in a machine-driven age.

The lead single ‘ unreal’ is launched with a harrowing video adapted from the film.

Uncanny Mirror
このリアルタイムインストールは、画面、カメラ、コンピューターで構成されています。カメラ画像は、観客の顔を自分自身の不思議な表現に変換する一連の生成的敵対的ネットワークによって処理されます。これらの表現は、AIが以前に見た後、学習した顔に基づいています。鏡を見ている間、マシンは視聴者の顔をトレーニングセットに組み込み、生成する顔の外観を徐々に変更し、最初のバイアスから訪問者の分布の統計的平均に向かって逸脱します。

Uncanny State: Notion of Acceptance
In his latest exhibition Uncanny State: Notion of Acceptance, Eyal Gever presents six newly created metaphysical representations of human movement, performed by internationally acclaimed contemporary dancer and choreographer Sharon Eyal to the music of world-renowned contemporary pianist and composer Rosey Chan.

Princess of Parallelograms
What will happen when our imagination itself is externalized in machines? Artificial intelligence constructs its own world-truth that is beyond our sensory perception. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) use algorithms to synthesize and generate images in a completely new way. These images have almost uncanny aesthetic characteristics, seeming to emerge from an ocean of data, a kind of pixel soup. Rather as if we were observing the emergence of artificial “thought.” The machine learns to understand the “essence” of a thing, be it an animal, the face of a celebrity or a body of text. It is then able to generate new images of this thing, including faces of celebrities who do not exist, mutant animals, or new texts. Eventually, AI will be capable of instantaneously and dynamically emulating all representations. The era of the optical machine and the capture of reality will then be at an end, supplanted by the era of machines that generate their own reality.

Arr. for a Scene

“The sonic force of cinema’s most famous murder scene is investigated.Two foley artists recreate Hitchcock’s shower sequence, deconstructing the associations of aural signifiers, and the synesthetic power of sound. Jonna Kina contextualize this uncanny phenomenon — the “trans-sensory” quality of sound – within both Kina’s oeuvre, as well as other historical and contemporary works inside and outside the realm of art. In Arr. for a Scene (2017), Kina explores the structures and forms of cinematic sound – transforming an iconic image — the horrific shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) – into the sonic frequencies of quirky, seemingly innocent, domestic objects.” Melissa Ragona

Redundant Assembly
In “Redundant Assembly” an arrangement of several cameras composes a live-portrait of the visitor from six perspectives simultaneously, aligned using face detection. The resulting image is uncanny, detached from the laws of symmetry and the depth perception of binocular vision. If several visitors are standing in front of the work, a composite portrait of their different facial features develops in real time, creating a mongrel “selfie”.

Dali Lives
Using an artificial intelligence (AI)-based face-swap technique, known as “deepfake” in the technical community, the new “Dalí Lives” experience employs machine learning to put a likeness of Dalí’s face on a target actor, resulting in an uncanny resurrection of the moustacheod master. When the experience opens, visitors will for the first time be able to interact with an engaging life-like Salvador Dalí on a series of screens throughout the Dalí Museum.

The look elsewhere
The work, which in this video version is coupled with uncanny virtual landscapes, blurs the boundaries between the real and the simulated, while expanding the artwork into the virtual via the VR-headset wearing dancers. The artwork captures the entangled play between the participants, but also provides the viewer with a new perspective—opening a window onto the virtual dimension of the performance. The borders keep on fading, from the point where technology begins and physicality ends.

Liminal Beings
Liminal Beings explores the concept of automaton and the different anthropomorphic forms and functions embedded within its ontology. Automata, since ancient times, have been standing on the verge of two states, developing machinic and human characteristics simultaneously – in reality, and in the collective consciousness. They are trained to execute and learn respective actions and procedures, thus creating an uncanny, awkward state, trapped in limbo between diverse conditions of existence.

Ad Infinitum
Ad infinitum is a parasitical entity which lives off human energy. It lives untethered and off the grid. This parasite reverses the dominant role that mankind has with respect to technologies: the parasite shifts humans from “users” to “used”. Ad infinitum co-exists in our world by parasitically attaching electrodes onto the human visitors and harvesting their kinetic energy by electrically persuading them to move their muscles. The only way a visitor can be freed is by seducing another visitor to sit on the opposite chair and take their place. Being trapped in the parasite’s cuffs means getting our muscles electrically stimulated in order to perform a cranking motion as to feed it our kinetic energy. This reminds us that, in the cusp of artificially thinking machines, we are no longer just “users”; the shock we feel in our muscles, the involuntary gesture, acknowledges our intricate relationship to uncanny technological realm around us.

FILE FESTIVAL
Performance: Capture Part 2

In “Performance Capture: Part 2”, open source motion capture sequences are mapped onto stock low-polygonal unsmoothed 3D characters. Bodies inflate, deflate and oscillate between states, while movements shift and repeat in offset patterns as information transfers from one body to the next. In the animation, what should be used to record, simulate and create perfect virtual realities instead collapses into the uncanny, the abstract and the unreal.

Homemade RC Toy
Her new installation centers on five human-scale, remote-control sculptures that she cobbled together from metal brackets, batteries, wires, dental study props, and disassembled mannequins. Surrounding them are stepped plinths whose bright colors echo the robot sculptures’ wiring. The plinths display fetishistic agglomerations of spare parts: wheels, cables, gutted medical practice torsos, home repair parts. In their default state, the sculptures are frozen, comatose, even if all that wiring and machinery certainly suggests movement. The installation is the setting for a series of live interactions between the artist and her uncanny others.

Impulse
The Cascade Project explores matter by capturing the pattern of muons: i.e. electrically charged subatomic particles. It does so through an installation comprised of three live elements: a muon detector; a complex assemblage of pumps; and an arrangement of tubes through which fluid flows. When muons are detected, a light and connected pumps are activated, triggering the movement of an uncanny, viscous fluid through the sculptural system.

The Augmented Hand Series
The “Augmented Hand Series” (by Golan Levin, Chris Sugrue, and Kyle McDonald) is a real-time interactive software system that presents playful, dreamlike, and uncanny transformations of its visitors’ hands. It consists of a box into which the visitor inserts their hand, and a screen which displays their ‘reimagined’ hand—for example, with an extra finger, or with fingers that move autonomously. Critically, the project’s transformations operate within the logical space of the hand itself, which is to say: the artwork performs “hand-aware” visualizations that alter the deep structure of how the hand appears.

蒂姆·霍金森
ティム·ホーキンソン
تيم هاوكينسون
Möbius Ship
The ambitious and imaginative structure of Hawkinson’s sculpture offers an uncanny visual metaphor for Melville’s epic tale, which is often considered the ultimate American novel. Möbius Ship also humorously refers to the mathematical concept of the Möbius Strip. Named after a nineteenth-century astronomer and mathematician, the Möbius Strip is a surface that has only one side, and exists as a continuous curve. Its simple yet complex spatial configuration presents a visual puzzle that parallels Hawkinson’s transformation of the mundane materials into something unexpected.

tube
‘combining a transparent, gentle, woven structure, devoid of any hard angles and surfaces, with unsettling heights/vistas and uncanny spatial sensations.’NUMEN/FOR USE

Asuna (android)
A- Lab, Tokyo
Luisa Whitton is a multidisciplinary artist working in photography, text, and video. Guided by an interest in portraiture and technology, her practice involves extensive research into the power and implications of anthropomorphising technology and its precarious relationship to the uncanny.

Untitled
Sandback did not try to ground his art in history or theory alone, but followed a very personal approach. Growing up, he had an uncanny fascination with things that were strung. According to his own accounts he liked to watch his uncle Fred, an antiques dealer, cane chairs, and he remembered being captivated as a child by a museum exhibition on how to make snowshoes. As a camp counselor in New Hampshire, he loved archery and began making his own bows. He also seems to have been interested in straight lines; as a freshman in college, he carved a tall, narrow cat out of wood, prefiguring a lifelong interest in linear forms.

Balance From Within
File Festival
Jacob Tonski is a pragmatic optimist whose work explores dynamic balance through kinetic metaphors.
A self-adjusting platform makes everyone the same height, probing ideas of equality and the origins of power. A larger-than-life top spins about the room, wobbling through themes of pleasure, danger, youth and decay. A sofa teeters, standing on one leg, musing on the stability of the social structures we build.
These and other human-scale objects, both amusing and threatening, find an uncanny identity between toys and tools. The forces of time and gravity serve in these works as foils for those things we are powerless to direct in our lives, and with which we must instead dance and negotiate.

韩国艺术家
김 준 예술가
КИМ ДЖУН
fragile mermaid
“Kim Joon uses the technique of “skinning” against perfected illusion and toward an erotic but uncanny dislocation. In doing so the artist undermines the value of conformity in both embodiment and consumption. These bodies are not sealed packages, they are uneven surfaces reflecting our conflicted self-creation—in the artist’s words, “multi-layered composites of desire and will, emotion and action, pain and pleasure of self and other… a complex system of complicit activities”

크리스티나 웨스트
Atlanta-based artist Christina West creates boldly colored realistic sculptures at a smaller-than-life scale. This immersive INSTALLATION places viewers within the context of West’s menagerie of uncanny figures encouraging the designation of “misfits” to oscillate between the spectator and the sculpture.

Леандро Эрлих
莱安德罗·埃利希
Swimming Pool
[…]Erlich creates spaces with fluid and unstable boundaries. Before one tries to make sense of his sculptures and installations, one senses the uncanny. A single change (up is down, inside is out) can be enough to upset the seemingly normal situation, collapsing and exposing our reality as counterfeit. Through this transgression of limits, the artist undermines certain absolutes and the institutions that reinforce them.

크리스티나 웨스트
Intimate Strangers
Atlanta-based artist Christina West creates boldly colored realistic sculptures at a smaller-than-life scale. This immersive INSTALLATION places viewers within the context of West’s menagerie of uncanny figures encouraging the designation of “misfits” to oscillate between the spectator and the sculpture.

Говард Шатц
הווארד שץ
霍华德沙茨
هوارد كاتس
Working with uncommonly graceful and aquatically gifted dancers, models, and performers, photographer Howard Schatz has found joyous inspiration underwater. The images in H2O take advantage of water’s unique properties- light, clarity, buoyancy, and reflectivity-to create a delightfully serene and otherworldly aesthetic. At once uncanny, lithe, athletic, and mysterious, the figures in Schatz’s photographs transform the pool into studio and stage.

Craco

Tobias Stretch channels the beauty and melancholia of Hauschka’s single “Craco” in his uncanny video filmed in Philadelphia’s answer to Brooklyn’s High Line, Reading Viaduct Park. With music videos for Radiohead, Crystal Fighters and Christopher Bono to his name, the Philly-based animator is known for his distinct aesthetic and method, pairing landscape photography with life-size stop-motion puppets. “I thought right from the beginning when I saw Tobias’s work that it has a mixture of analog and handmade elements and a surreal atmosphere. In my music you have similar elements,” says Hauschka himself, aka the German pianist and composer Volker Bertelmann, who headline’s London’s Union Chapel tonight as part of his European tour. Although best known as a 21st-Century protagonist of the prepared piano practice championed by John Cage, Bertelmann “left all the preparations at home” in order to work with a pure sound on this track. Named after the Italian ghost town, “Craco” is taken from his entropy-laced album Abandoned City and played to Stretch’s own fascination with urban decay. “The music was there beforehand, but I had a bowl of music and a bowl of names and I tried to pair them up. I think the music sounded not only like an abandoned place but also like a nostalgic place and that’s why I thought it was a great match.”

Balance Study Apparatus
Jacob Tonski is a pragmatic optimist whose work explores dynamic balance through kinetic metaphors.
A self-adjusting platform makes everyone the same height, probing ideas of equality and the origins of power. A larger-than-life top spins about the room, wobbling through themes of pleasure, danger, youth and decay. A sofa teeters, standing on one leg, musing on the stability of the social structures we build. These and other human-scale objects, both amusing and threatening, find an uncanny identity between toys and tools. The forces of time and gravity serve in these works as foils for those things we are powerless to direct in our lives, and with which we must instead dance and negotiate.

Face Substitution

Faces is an interactive installation result of the work on face substitution in collaboration with Arturo Castro

“The installation is based on the idea of wishing for a new identity: when the subject first steps up, they see their face unmodified. After closing their eyes to make a wish and opening them again, they discover they are wearing a new face. The result is a mixture of a playful, surprising and some times scary experience.This installation takes advantage of the unique experience of slowly recognizing yourself as someone else playing also with the concept of the uncanny valley by showing a face that perfecly matches the visitors facial expresion but still has some lighting and texturing imperfections. This elicits everything from laughter, to surprise, or repulsion.Knowing that it takes approximately one second for someone to respond to a completely unexpected event, we store a photograph at 1.5 seconds after the swap — capturing that moment of realization.”Arturo Castro