CEREMONIAL FORMALITY
Frederik Heyman’s work is a balancing act incorporating multiple media – including video, installations and photogaphy – often in a digitally altered environment. In his work, Heyman explores memory and duration, using photogrammetry and 3D scanning to depict and represent the passage of time. The hallmarks of Heyman’s work are mechanical and technological: wires, wheels, scrolling LED marquees, metal frames, clamps, industrial lights, screens and cameras. Bodies–as opposed to humans–are subject to unusual dynamics with these technological trappings. In Ceremonial Formality (2020) a contortionist is encased in a metal cage while a spectator, hooked up to wires, looks on.

Bent Pool
German artists Elmgreen and Dragset have installed a sculpture that looks like an U-shaped swimming pool outside the Miami Beach Convention Center[…] Curved pieces of aluminium were used to create the unusual structure, with the two ends resting atop a concrete plinth. “Bent Pool is shaped like an inverted “U” and stands upright on a two-tier plinth,” the studio said. “The pool seems to have somehow been lifted out of the ground and stretched into a curved form.”

Poetic AI
Ouchhh created an Artificial Intelligence and the t-SNE visualization of the hundreds of books and articles [approx. 20 million lines of text] written by scientists who changed the destiny of the world -and wrote history- were fed to the Recurrent Neural Network during the training. This, later on, was used to generate novel text in the exhibition. 136 projectors shining to be a veritable oneiric experience, the ‘POETIC – AI’ digital installation uses Artificial Intelligence in the visual creation process: the forms, light, and movement are generated by an algorithm that creates a unique and contemplative digital work, an AI dancing in the dark, trying to show us connections we could never see otherwise.

mandelbrot set (zooming in)

The Mandelbrot set shows more intricate detail the closer one looks or magnifies the image, usually called “zooming in”. The following example of an image sequence zooming to a selected c value gives an impression of the infinite richness of different geometrical structures and explains some of their typical rules. The magnification of the last image relative to the first one is about 1010 to 1. Relating to an ordinary monitor, it represents a section of a Mandelbrot set with a diameter of 4 million kilometers. Its border would show an astronomical number of different fractal structures.

Crystallographica
The futuristic curves highlighted the collection’s minimalistic inspiration. The unusual creations brought to mind robotic-like fixtures, while exuding elegance and grace. We fell instantly in love with the cold yet fascinating faceted dresses.

Shirley: Visions of Reality
FILE SAO PAULO 2015
Edward Hopper movie
Inusual y rompedora película concebida como un experimento por la austriaca mente de Gustav Deutsch (Viena, 1952), el cual trae a la pantalla 13 cuadros del pintor norteamericano Edward Hopper y les insufla vida a través del protagonismo de Shirley, mujer que hace las veces de Josephine, quien fuera la fiel esposa de Hopper y sempiterno modelo de sus obras. Ella es como la encarnación de la mujer norteamericana a lo largo de los años que abarcan los lienzos elegidos, de 1931 hasta 1965.

Residual Balance

The type of objects she chooses have ranged from large antlers, brightly coloured cables, old Christmas trees, light bulbs, American basketballs, orange balloons, scientific test tubes and even butterflies. Hardy puts these everyday objects together and transforms them into unusual, almost dreamlike, environments which can be unnerving with their themes of abandonment and desolation.

Gretchen at the Potlatch Feast

“Potlatch is a festive event within a regional exchange system among tribes of the North pacific Coast of North America, including the Salish and Kwakiutl of Washington and British Columbia.”
The potlatch takes the form of governance, economy, social status and continuing spiritual practices. A potlatch, usually involving ceremony, includes celebration of births, rites of passages, weddings, funerals, puberty,and honoring of the deceased. Through political, economic and social exchange, it is a vital part of these Indigenous people’s culture. Although protocol differs among the Indigenous nations, the potlatch could involve a feast, with music, dance, theatricality and spiritual ceremonies. The most sacred ceremonies are usually observed in the winter.
Within it, hierarchical relations within and between clans, villages, and nations, are observed and reinforced through the distribution of wealth, dance performances, and other ceremonies. Status of families are raised by those who do not have the most resources, but distribute the resources. The host demonstrates their wealth and prominence through giving away the resources gathered for the event, which in turn prominent participants reciprocate when they hold their own potlatches.
Before the arrival of the Europeans, gifts included storable food (oolichan [candle fish] oil or dried food), canoes, and slaves among the very wealthy, but otherwise not income-generating assets such as resource rights. The influx of manufactured trade goods such as blankets and sheet copper into the Pacific Northwest caused inflation in the potlatch in the late eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries. Some groups, such as the Kwakwaka’wakw, used the potlatch as an arena in which highly competitive contests of status took place. In rare cases, goods were actually destroyed after being received. The catastrophic mortalities due to introduced diseases laid many inherited ranks vacant or open to remote or dubious claim—providing they could be validated—with a suitable potlatch.
Sponsors of a potlatch give away many useful items such as food, blankets, worked ornamental mediums of exchange called “coppers”, and many other various items. In return, they earned prestige. To give a potlatch enhanced one’s reputation and validated social rank, the rank and requisite potlatch being proportional, both for the host and for the recipients by the gifts exchanged. Prestige increased with the lavishness of the potlatch, the value of the goods given away in it.