highlike

QUBIT AI: Matthias Oostrik

The Forgettable Art Machine

FILE 2024 | Installations

International Electronic Language Festival

The Forgettable Art Machine is an artificial intelligence-driven video installation. When facing the panel, the public has their image captured, starting a cycle of analysis, creation and destruction. From this data, a composite emerges, slowly transforming the visitors’ image into a generative visualization. Once the cycle is complete, the composition is deleted, waiting for a new audience to be captured.

Bio

Matthias Oostrik works at the intersection of digital art, installation art, cinema and architecture. His works establish unpredictable relationships between people and their surroundings. Using digital technology, his installations allow visitors to reshape their environment and their relationships with each other. Oostrik collaborates with renowned professionals and, above all, with his audience, who often become an integral part of his work.

Credits

Co-production: Zester
IA Music: Than van Nispen

Yuri Suzuki

Crowd Cloud
Keeping the human voice at its core, Crowd Cloud distils the vowels of the Japanese language, creating a unique composition that emanates from a choir of dozens of standing horns that converse with each other like people waiting for friends and relatives. Crowd cloud is designed to provide a welcoming experience in what is often a soulless public space, momentarily turning visitors into audience members as they pass by en route to the next part of their journey.

Robert Wilson

بوب ويلسون
鲍伯·威尔逊
בוב וילסון
ロバート·ウィルソン
밥 윌슨
БОБ УИЛСОН
Arvo Pärt
Adam’s Passion
Estonian Arvo Pärt is one of the three most performed contemporary composers worldwide. His music has been described as contemplative, sacred, and timeless. “Time for us is the time of our own lives. It is temporary. What is timeless is the time of eternal life. Like the sun, we cannot look at these two directly, but my intuition tells me that the human soul is connected to both of them—time and eternity,” says Pärt. Much like Robert Wilson’s own universe, where time and space are the basic architecture of everything, it is as if these two artists have been waiting to collaborate with one another! ADAM’S PASSION will be a journey into the worlds of sound, light, visual art and performance. It will celebrate Arvo Pärt’s 80th birthday—all in a spectacular venue, the Noblessner Foundry, a vast, old industrial building by Tallinn’s harbo

Jennifer Steinkamp

From, the Future
The art is about waiting, something the entire world population knows since the onslaught of Covid-19. The title was also inspired by a dream where I told a scientist I was from the future and he believed me. My interpretation of the dream relates to my interest in the luminous thoughts of the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi, he clearly describes what our souls really are, beautiful, sacred, beyond time. I am fascinated by the existential impermanence of beauty. Beauty offers us a deep connection to the experience of life. The animation consists of cut flowers continuously falling from the sky, it can be seen by looking up to the ceiling. The title infers the signature on the note of a gift.

Judith Barry

Imagination Dead Imagine
An androgynous head is projected as if contained within a minimalist cube. Sounds of the head slowly breathing fill the space. The head is serene, waiting. Suddenly a substance pours over it from all sides, drenching it in what appears to be a bodily fluid. The spectator wants to turn away but can not, the gaze is compelled through the invocation of the scopic drive. Horror at the repulsive nature of the substance (the abject) is replaced by fascination with the beauty of what might be considered a contemporary sublime.

Bruce Charlesworth

Love Disorder
​Love Disorder is a one-room interactive environment, in which a video character talks to visitors and responds emotionally to their movements in the space. When you enter, you see a twelve-foot-high face on a video screen at the far end of the room. The face says: “I’ve been waiting for you” – or one of several other greetings. He’ll continue talking to you if you don’t move, but the emotional tone of what he says will change as you step closer to the screen – or turn away. This manipulative character uses a gamut of emotional ploys to stimulate your movement within the space. He knows if you’re coming or going, and the range of his response is varied and complex enough that most people find themselves interacting, as if directly addressed.
video

Studio A N F

Computer Visions 2
After more decades of trying to construct an apparatus that can think, we may be finally witnessing the fruits of those efforts: machines that know. That is to say, not only machines that can measure and look up information, but ones that seem to have a qualitative understanding of the world. A neural network trained on faces does not only know what a human face looks like, it has a sense of what a face is. Although the algorithms that produce such para-neuronal formations are relatively simple, we do not fully understand how they work. A variety of research labs have also been successfully training such nets on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of living brains, enabling them to effectively extract images, concepts, thoughts from a person’s mind. This is where the inflection likely happens, as a double one: a technology whose workings are not well understood, qualitatively analyzing an equally unclear natural formation with a degree of success. Andreas N. Fischer’s work Computer Visions II seems to be waiting just beyond this cusp, where two kinds of knowing beings meet in a psychotherapeutic session of sorts[…]

Yuge Zhou

Underground Circuit
Underground Circuit is a collage of hundreds of video clips shot in the subway stations in New York. Station to station, the movement of the commuters in the outer rings suggests the repetitive cycle of life and urban theatricality and texture. The inner-most ring includes people sitting on the bench waiting; the central drummers act as the controller of the movement, inspired by the concept of the Four-faced Buddha in Chinese folk religion, the god who can fulfill and grant all wishes of its devotees. For the installation, the video is projected onto the gallery floor and mapped onto a cube with relief in the middle of the projection area. The installation invites audiences to sit on the central cube as Voyeur-gods, to observe the anonymous characters in the projected urban labyrinth.

Roy Andersson

Songs from the second floor
A man is standing in a subway car, his face dirty with soot. In his right hand he carries a plastic bag with documents, or rather, the charred leftovers of them. In a corridor a man is clinging desperately to the legs of the boss who just fired him. He is screaming: “I’ve been here for thirty years!” In a coffee shop someone is waiting for his father, who just burned his furniture company for insurance money.
cinema full

Stine Deja

THERMAL WOMB
“Thermal Womb, a sculpture of figure suspended upside down that recalls the practice of cryopreservation. The structure is indeed a replica of the mechanism used by companies such as Alcor, which prepares bodies before they are submerged in liquid nitrogen—figures indefinitely frozen, waiting for technology to catch up and revive them. The film component of the work reveals a pair of bright blue eyes, whose only animation is to blink, adding a time-based layer to the otherwise static nature of the piece.” Stephanie Cristello

MELANIE BONAJO

梅拉妮·柏娜桥
waiting for something beautiful to happen

“[…]My work is an irregular impulse of experiences and aesthetic enjoyments stemming from the questions I have and the things that I know. I am not interested in a particular truth or a common reality, but I do have to understand and embody my truth, which I find from looking within. Although these things might be universal, consequently, questioning myself leads to the act of questioning you. Nothing should control the spirit…[…]”

Ruben Ochoa

WATCHING, WAITING, COMMISERATING
Working with a few basic materials; concrete, metal, and dirt, I’ve been able to develop them into a practice that continues to motivate my next body of work. Every space comes with its unique restrictions and limitations, but as reflected in my sculptures, I’m constantly finding ways to twist and meld these conceptual concerns to fit in these spaces. If not, I just cut it out.

Benedikt Groß

The Autonomous Human Drone Taxi

We keep hearing how technology will eventually solve the problem of vehicular traffic for good. Self-driving cars will only get us halfway to that future — they’re still cars, clogging up our roads, speeding down our freeways. The personal mobility future that I’m waiting for includes autonomous drone taxis that can sail high over the city, delivering me safely to my destination.

voina

kiss garbage

“We create a new and honest, heroic and monumental form of art.”
Voina means war in Russian. Voina is a collective of about twenty artists/activists who challenge the Russian establishment with their radical actions in the public space. According to Voina’s principles, the battleground of the art collective are not contemporary art galleries (“conformist art-junk”). The war takes place in the street, among dirt and ice, in police stations, in restaurants, museums, and courts.Owing to their direct method of intervention against the symbols of power and repression, they are regarded as one of the most disturbing and controversial elements of the arts scene. One of Voina members is currently waiting for trial, another member was arrested illegally during the recent demonstrations to protest against fraud in the Russian election (but he managed to escape from the police station), and yet another one had to flee from the country.

DONNA ONG

ドナ·オン
دونا اونج
Донна Онг

The Garden of Waiting Virgins

PHILIP LÜSCHEN

Waiting Room Survival

A ‘Sneak in front tool’, ‘Incognito nose stand’ and ‘Waiting Room Survival Book. Philip Lüschen has designed these objects as part of his project on waiting rooms, Waiting Room Survival. The Incognito nose stand seduces us to wait incognito in waiting rooms in places where we would prefer not to be recognized, such as a clinic for sexually transmitted diseases. And if you want to be seen by a doctor as fast as possible, Philip Lüschen has got the answer: The sneak in front tool, with which you can make everyone else in the room disappear behind the empty waiting room chairs.‘’Although the objects were designed as practical implements, when not in use they function as icebreakers. They stimulate the imagination and break through the tension and passive dynamic of waiting.‘’ The objects displayed are the result of the many studies drawn in waiting rooms, which also served as the basis for the ‘Waiting Room Survival Book’. A guide with useful illustrated strategies on how to survive a waiting room visit.
.

STELARC

drawing with robot arm
“With gene mapping, gender reassignment, prosthetic limbs and neural implants, what a body is and how a body operates becomes problematic. We generate Fractal Flesh and Phantom Flesh, extended operational systems and virtual task environments. Meat and metal mesh into unexpected and alternate anatomical architectures that perform remotely beyond the boundaries of the skin and beyond the local space it inhabits. The monstrous is no longer the alien other. We inhabit an age of Circulating Flesh. Organs are extracted from one body and inserted into other bodies. Limbs that are amputated from a dead body can be reattached and reanimated on a living body. A face from a donor stitched to the skull of the recipient becomes a Third Face. A skin cell from an impotent male can be recoded into a sperm cell. And more interestingly a skin cell from a female body might be recoded into a sperm cell. Turbine hearts circulate blood without pulsing. In the near future you might rest you head on your loved one’s chest. They are warm to the touch, they are breathing, they are certainly alive. But they will have no heartbeat. A cadaver can be preserved forever through plastination whilst simultaneously a comatose body can be sustained indefinitely on a life-support system. Dead bodies need not decompose, near-dead bodies need not die. Most people will no longer die biological deaths. They will die when their life-support systems are switched off. The dead, the near-dead, the not-yet-born and the partially living exist simultaneously. And cryongenically preserved bodies await reanimation at some imagined future. We live in an age of the Cadaver, the Comatose and the Chimera. Liminal spaces proliferate. Engineering organs, stem-cell growing them or by bio-printing will result in an abundence of organs. An excess of organs. Of organs awaiting bodies. Of Organs Without Bodies.” STELARC