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United Visual Artists

ユナイテッド·ビジュアルアーティスト
美国视觉艺术家
our time

Our Time (2016) is the latest large-scale installation by United Visual Artists investigating our subjective experience of the passing of time. How long is a moment? At what rate does time actually pass? The work joins a series of kinetic sculptures that began with Momentum (2013); an installation designed as a ‘spatial instrument’ that was to reveal the relationship between expectation and perception when intersected with a physical space.
Our Time defines a physical environment where pendulums swing at a pace apparently unhindered by the laws of nature and where no single time measurement applies. The installation combines movement, light and sound as a multi-sensory, multi-dimensional canvas the visitor can enter. Pendulums swing, each to their own rhythm, as time flows through the grid. With light tracing the path and sound its echo, the passing of time becomes almost palpable.

SpY

DATA
In “DATA”, SpY offers a reflection on the rapid and widespread inclusion of algorithms in numerous aspects of our lives. In this audio-visual work, digital abstraction is used to explore and interpret how predictive tools operated through algorithms and artificial intelligence are highly beneficial in terms of aspects such as communication, research and medicine, but can also lead us to lose some of our freedoms if they are not used ethically.
Through this immersive audio-visual format, SpY explores new tools such as the holographic fabrics used to give the graphics an amazing sense of weightlessness. A 15-metre high screen made from this fabric was installed in one of Madrid’s smallest streets between the walls of the buildings.

MARC FORNES

WORLD EXPO 2017 ASTANA
This surface is ultra-thin: just 6 mm of aluminum. If an egg were scaled up to the same height Minima | Maxima, it would be much thicker. Towards the base of the structure, the rolling surface begins to softly corrugate, its zig-zag angles gently rising into a full pleat as they meet the ground platform. The visual threshold of this transition — from pleated base to smooth and doubly-curved, continuous surface — is subtle, yet its structural effect is significant in achieving the height of 43′.

Sheri Simons

After All
After All is a wooden, robotic interpretation of the Phonautograph, a 19th century apparatus created by the Frenchman, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. His invention predated Edison’s phonograph by 17 years and promised a new kind of visual literacy for those who could learn to read, translate, and recite its mechanically created marks. The air pressure from a voice speaking into a cone pushed and deformed the surface of a sensitive diaphragm to which a boar’s bristle was attached. Inflection in the voice moved the diaphragm and the bristle touched a revolving soot-covered wheel, scratching marks in response to air pressure changes. The marks could be ‘read back’ by those literate in a sound-to-writing technique.

Ka Fai Choy

Synchrometrics

Can we design future memories for the body?
Is the body itself the apparatus for remembering cultural processes?Prospectus For a Future Body proposes new perspectives on how the body remembers and invents technological narratives. Central to the project is the study of body movement in dance: How it can evolve, adapt or re-condition to possible futures?Eternal Summer Storm explores the concept of muscle memory transfer as an alternative form of interactive cultural continuities. This concept prototype speculates on a future digital library of body movements or dance techniques that can be experienced beyond the audio-visual conventions. Eternal Summer Storm attempts to recreate legendary Japanese dancer Tatsumi Hijikata’s Butoh dance choreography and experience in ‘A Summer Storm’ (1973) from archival footages.Bionic Movement Research is a collection of experiments on the process of designing digital muscle memory for the body. Inspired by Luigi Galvani discovery (1780) of animal electricity in the human body, these experiments appropriate the techniques of electrical nerve stimulation to choreograph artificial muscle contraction and body movement.

fuse

FALIN MYND
Falin Mynd is an audiovisual installation dedicated to the city of Milan that draws inspiration from the concept of the latent image in the photographic field: an invisible imprint left by the light on the film that is revealed only after its development. Similarly, the data generated by the inhabitants and visitors of the city of Milan produce abstract digital landscapes, leaving a trace from their analysis and interpretation in real-time. In this way, the work makes visible the indissoluble bond between individual and community, highlighting how the two entities influence one another changing the perception of the reality surrounding us made of places, people, colors, and sensations. The data thus constitute an invisible image of the city, a map of what is not manifest and which is revealed in Falin Mynd.

Raven Kwok

1194D^3
Initially started as a tweak of 115C8 in 2013, one of Kwok’s Algorithmic Creatures based on finite subdivision, 1194D is an experiment on multiple geometric creatures co-existing within a tetrahedron-based grid environment. In 2017, The project was improved and revised into an immersive triple-screen audiovisual installation as 1194D^3 for .zip Future Rhapsody art exhibition curated by Wu Juehui & Yan Yan at Today Art Museum in Beijing, China. The entire visual is programmed and generated using Processing. All stages are later composed and exported using Premiere.

Tod Machover

Death and the Powers

Science fiction and poignant family drama combine in one of the most stunning, cutting-edge operas of the 21st century, with a libretto by former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, coming to the stage of the Winspear Opera House in a production directed by Diane Paulus, designed by Alex McDowell (Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report) and conducted by Nicole Paiement (TDO’s The Lighthouse).This visually spectacular robot pageant by MIT Media Lab’s Tod Machover tells the story of a terminally ill billionaire, sung by Robert Orth, who downloads his consciousness into “the System” and proceeds to use all his powers to persuade his loved ones to join him there. Without bodies, without the possibility of touch, sex, suffering, and death — are we still genuinely human?Explore these existential questions and much more in a piece Variety described as “playful, lyrical and…mesmerizing.” Also starring Joélle Harvey as Miranda, Patricia Risley as Evvy, and Hal Cazalet in his Dallas Opera debut as Nicholas.

ANN HAMILTON

アン·ハミルトン
앤 해밀턴
the event of a thread

Ann Hamilton is a visual artist internationally recognized for the sensory surrounds of her large-scale multi-media installations. Using time as process and material, her methods of making serve as an invocation of place, of collective voice, of communities past and of labor present. Noted for a dense accumulation of materials, her ephemeral environments create immersive experiences that poetically respond to the architectural presence and social history of their sites.

Hussein Chalayan

フセイン·チャラヤン
ЧАЛАЯН
후세인 샬 라얀
Intel connected accessories

Designer Hussein Chalayan partnered with Intel to bring wearable tech to his spring/summer 2017 fashion week show. Five models walked the runway alongside visual projections that showed their stress levels on the walls. All of it was made possible by vital information sent through the wearable tech they sported on the runway.

Hansi Raber & Andreas Lutz

Algorithm Cinema
Daemon

FILE FESTIVAL

Machines and artificial intelligence have permeated virtually every aspect of our lives and consistently are about to conquer the last bastions of human autonomy. Do machines represent the more contemporary, ultimately perhaps even better humanoids and mankind gradually gets absorbed by this perfect system?
The audio-visual installation “Daemon” analyzes the never-sleeping and permanent alertness of an artificial intelligence.
FILE LED SHOW

ilanio and iimuahii

ILANIO REUBIN AND ELENA SLIVNYAK
SUPREME BEINGS FASHION SHOW

The Supreme Beings Fashion Show will reveal the avant-garde concepts of two local fashion designers, Ilanio Reubin of Ilanio and Elena Slivnyak of IIMUAHII, at the spacious SOMArts Cultural Center on Thursday, March 1st. The two runway shows will showcase 8 imaginative looks from each designer, as well as two short improvisational performances by Butoh (contemporary Japanese) dancers which we find very fitting for the two creatives.Though different in aesthetic, both designers hail from similar backgrounds and aim for analogous goals. Ilanio (San Francisco Art Institute) and Elena (Academy of Art) both found the retail and fashion corporate worlds too constrictive and mass-produced, and thus ventured into their own imaginative ones.
Ilanio works to create “visually stunning fashion concepts that explicitly disregard wearability, saleability, and practicality; that embrace advanced definitions of sexuality and gender; and that defy the commercially-mandated boundary between the fashion and art worlds.” For Elena of IIMUAHIII, her avant-garde aesthetic is manifested in an intricately-crafted sportswear line.Although we’re dreaming of being in Paris (but really, when are we not?), we’re excited to watch Ilanio and IIMUAHII strut and represent San Francisco’s undeniable talent in their nontraditional fashion show and hope to see you all there as well!

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