Useless Hands

FILE 2024 | Aesthetic Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
Infratonal – Useless Hands – France

When our hands become useless, what will we choose to do with them? We can use AI to visualize the unthinkable, the strangely familiar yet indescribable forms and structures. Generative AI could be used as an amplifier of our ability to explore abstraction and surrealism rather than a simple mirror of our usual perceptions.

Bio

Infratonal is an artistic project led by Louk Amidou, a Paris-based multidisciplinary artist who works at the intersection of digital arts, electronic music and interaction design. He uses algorithms to create hybrid visual and sound pieces which aim to be performed by the human gesture as intangible instruments. He questions the artwork’s nature at the age of AI and the relationship between the artist and the algorithm.

Magnus Westwell

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What do you picture when you listen to music? This raw and rhythmically driven  piece  takes us inside the mind of  Magnus  Westwell and how  they  visualize  music.
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Qu’est-ce que tu imagines quand tu écoutes de la musique ? Cette pièce brute et rythmée nous plonge dans l’esprit de Magnus Westwell et de la façon dont ils visualisent la musique.
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Was stellst du dir vor, wenn du Musik hörst? Dieses rohe und rhythmisch getriebene Stück führt uns in die Gedanken von Magnus Westwell und wie sie Musik visualisieren.

digital sculptures

Motion sculptures for CCTV Documentary Channel is a digital metaphor of phenomenal blinks and moments that life consists of. A visual performance of organic and vital substance, animated using data of actors movements. Dents visualize four different themes. Motion sculpture of steel reflects old Chinese adage that true power is mastering yourself. Youthful energy of dancers evolve into beautiful organic sculpture.

Breaking News: Flooding of the Louvre
Natural disaster increasingly linked to a climate change has arrived to the museum of Louvre, which responds to the flooding of Paris in 2018. The artwork also respresents the issue of cultural leftover. Recycling is the main value of the process. By destruction of model that was a part of previous project Put Your Head into Gallery, the leftovers are reconstructed and new meanings and possibilities are created. The flooding of the Louvre Museum speaks about news culture and our fluctuating perception of disasters as it is seen through media. The scale of the disaster is often difficult to assess from news coverage. In the work “Breaking News” flood goes slowly into the room of the Louvre, letting the viewer to gradually watch the destruction of interior. it brings the viewer shochinkly close to what has not happened but easily could have, viewer sees the before and after effect in a highly visualized manner, which is as convincing and threatening, as fake.

Hertzian Landscapes
Hertzian Landscapes (2019) is a live visualization of the radio spectrum. Unlike visible light, waves in the radio spectrum cannot be perceived by us directly yet this space is teeming with human activity. Hertzian Landscapes employs a digital receiver to scan large swaths of radio spectrum in near real-time and visualizes thousands of signals into a panoramic electromagnetic landscape. Users can zoom in to specific frequencies by positioning themselves in front of the panorama as if controlling a radio tuner with their body, giving them a sense of walking through the spectrum.

Atmospheric Forest
Atmospheric Forest is a large scale VR point-cloud installation that visualizes and sonifies the relations between the forest and climate. It reveals the interaction patterns between the pine-tree emissions in Pfynwald, an ancient Swiss Alpine forest, and weather conditions in this valley, effected by drought. The trees do not only produce oxygen, but they are living bodies who breath too. I.e., they emit part of carbon dioxide, sometimes even up to 20 perc. from what they have consumed. When trees die, they release all the carbon they have collected during their lives back into the atmosphere. Atmospheric Forest explores the effects of drought on local forest ecosystems, and how such stress situations influence production of resin and volatile emissions (such as usual pine-tree scent).

MOL
MOL (2018) takes up the ancient technique of memorizing information by placing symbols and signs along a mental path through an imagined house from room to room. Interested in the way technology affects both our sense of and need for memory, Nymann attempts to capture her own active and associative thinking by reconstructing her path through her abandoned childhood home. In the work, she visualizes her past experiences through the placement of anchor objects—which, according to the ancient Greco-Roman method of loci, shape the way we perceive the external world—suggesting that in our increasing reliance on technology to memorize for us, we allow others to form our view of the world.

Neuro Surge
Measuring about 9 meters in height, the work pierces through the atrium of the ‘shiseido’ ginza building from the first to the second floor and creates an unprecedented display of light with the use of new advanced fibers. WOW inc. attached 150 fibers with a .9 millimeter diameter to a laser module. The laser module transmits light through the fibers, which can be controlled by touch. The interactive work visualizes the complex transmission of sensory nerves and information into a dynamic light show.

Telepathy 2012-2112
“TELEPATHY” immerses the viewer in the heart of a fiction where telepathy would become the predominant means of communication at the expense of means of current communication. The ten glass helmets enable to visualize a telepathic communication, by definition invisible. “TELEPATHY” proposes to reverse the current trend which consists in basing its communication on technology, and in exchange it reveals the parapsychological and subjective communication of psychic phenomena.

Wind of Boston: Data Paintings
Wind of Boston: Data Paintings is a site-specific work that turns the invisible patterns of wind in and around Boston into a series of poetic data paintings within a 6’ x 13’ digital canvas. By using a one-year data set collected from Boston Logan Airport, Refik Anadol Studios developed a series of custom software to read, analyze and visualize wind speed, direction, and gust patterns along with time and temperature at 20-second intervals throughout the year.

池田亮司
이케다 료지
РЕДЗИ ИКЕДА
Data-verse
Ryoji Ikeda’s new trilogy data-verse, commissioned by Audemars Piguet, is an audiovisual symphonic suite that attempts to encompass the tiniest (elementary particles) to the greatest (Universe) scale in Nature.Data-verse is the ultimate chapter of Ikeda’s audiovisual series that first began in 2000, which focuses on his own data-driven research and aesthetics.Through his mathematical composition and aesthetics, massive scientific data set will be processed, transcribed, converted, transformed, de/re/meta-constructed and orchestrated to visualize and sonify the different dimensions that co-exist in our world between the visible and the invisible.

The Harmonic Series

File Festival

Created by Manuela Donoso and Luisa Pereira, The Harmonic Series is a collection of mechanical devices , software, sculptures and prints that explore the relationship between musical and visual harmony.Inspired by the nineteenth century mathematician Jules Lissajous who invented a device to visualize sound vibrations using two tuning forks and a beam of light reflected from one mirror to the next to a screen, Manuela and Luisa have re-created and extended this experiment using recent tools. An electronic version of the device replaces the tuning forks with microphones and speakers, allowing people to sing different musical intervals, and contrast the resulting figures with the more chaotic ones generated by percussive sounds. An application plays groups of three notes and plots 3d Lissajous figures for their frequency ratios. The frequency ratios for major, minor and diminished chords are 4:5:6, 10:12:15 and 20:24:29 respectively. These chords were plotted using the app, and then printed as posters and sculptures that reveal a tight relationship between aural and visual harmony.

transmutation
In the weird and wonderful world of humanoidquantum mechanics, dimensional transmutation describes a phenomena which changes the state of a parameter by adding dimensions to its dimensionless condition. This experimental film applies this principle to visualize the complex interactions between atmosphere and climate. It utilizes a six-dimensional framework, comprised of regular space-time augmented with climate data collected between 1993 and 2011. Changes in global tropospheric temperature, mean sea level, and atmospherical co2 concentration are mapped onto the color palette, shape, and stereoscopic depth of a video clip, depicting a low-lying shoreline in Indonesia, threatened by rising sea levels. The film begins ‘flat’, but over time, with increasing co2 concentration in the atmosphere, its stereoscopic depth expands, and the landscape opens up to the observer, while temperature and sea-level changes modify color and shape.