The Sea

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival

The Sea is an extraction of a complex natural phenomenon, resulting in an artificial emulation that develops a life form of its own. Just like the sea with its endless waves, this artificial system follows the impact of an immersive state, leading to a unique vision of an artificial generator. Despite appearing chaotic, it is capable of generating associations ranging from the movement of waves to science fiction scenarios.

Bio

Paul Gründorfer develops process-related systems and explores variable or unstable conditions in the occurrence of sound when exposed to amplification, feedback, and multiple signal streams. His works focus on processes that evolve in a social space. Leo Peschta is an artist and researcher. During his studies, he worked in various fields of media arts, including sound, installations and software, developing over the years a special interest in robotics and machinery.

Credits

Austrian Embassy

The Half
New media artist group, Intermedia Chef is trying to explore dynamic artwork generated by computer-controlled sound in the aspect of data visualization. The sound installation artwork transits sound wave into physical movement. Overmore, they are aiming that the sound wave energy turns out a kinetic type of visual art.

Wave wall
A wall of 122 wind-activated pendulums are each magnetically coupled with its neighbors so that the whole wall moves as a slowly undulating surface similar to a large piece of fabric rippling in the wind. In winds greater than 15 knots, the wall’s coherent wave-like movement becomes more chaotic as the pendulums break their mutual magnetic coupling. The pendulums can also be manually activated.

Tele-Present Water
This installation draws information from the intensity and movement of the water in a remote location. Wave data is being collected in real-time from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data buoy station 46075 Shumagin Islands Alaska (53°54’39” N 160°48’21” W). The wave intensity and frequency is scaled and transferred to the mechanical grid structure resulting in a simulation of the physical effects caused by the movement of water from this distant location.

Kissing Data Symphony
Intimacy Data Symphony is a poetic ritual for intimate experience of Kissing and Caressing each other faces, multi-sensory and socially shared in public space of merging realities. In live experiments with Multi-Brain BCI E.E.G. head-sets, visitors are invited as Kissers (or Caressers) and Spectators. Brain activity of people kissing and caressing is measured and visualized in streaming E.E.G. data, real-time circling around them in a floor projection. Simultaneously, the Spectators brain waves are measured, their neurons mirroring activity of intimate kissing and caressing movements, resonating in their imagination. The Spectators brain activity data are interwoven in the data-visualization. Brain activity of all participants, mirroring each others emotional expressions and movements, in interpersonal and aesthetic ways, co-create an immersive visual, Reflexive Datascape.

Array [wave]
Wave depicts a sculptural volume unfolding over time – the Shape of Light seized in perpetual movement. It uses ephemeral and intangible materials – light and sound – and can be traversed by the observer, immersing them into the shapes cast by the undulating light columns. The work creates a malleable experience of scale: it shifts between object and environment depending on the observer’s position inside, outside, or at the boundary of the installation.

Two Hundred and Seventy
Through the combination of an everyday material with precise technology the mixed media installation fills the whole columned hall from the 19th century with its fluid movement and peculiar sound. Concavely arranged and floating above the spectators heads the form of the artwork seems to pass the skylight like the sun’s rays. Subdivided into nine columns, the nearly 70 square metres large piece of art follows a site-specific choreography determined by a program. Its moving surface is made from 270 white garbage bags, being inflated and deflated. In this way shapes and the boundaries of the installation itself start to dissolve. “Two Hundred and Seventy“ is the first installation with an undisguised view behind the scenes and onto the origin of the wavelike and organic movement: 1080 fans, lots of cables and 45 circuit boards

Tunnel
File Festival
“Tunnel” is a kinetic, immersive and interactive sculpture, composed of 92 porticos that become disordered in function of the position and body mass of the interactor. Numerous users can simultaneously enter and interact with the machine. Interactors agency the machine via their position and weight. An example of interaction is: you go into the “Tunnel” and stand by one of the side walls. In this case, the relative position and the gravitational force of your body provoke variations of floor height. The floor inclines up to 5º, the associated porticos progressively rotate in the corresponding direction and angle, and this propagates ondulatory movements throughout the entire installation. For the outside observer, the internal movement or your displacement in relation to the installation produces kinetic optic effects.

holistic strata
Tokyo-based choreographer and video artist Hiroaki Umeda creates mesmerizing visual environments for his visceral solo works, appearing as a fine-spun swirl of movement in a digital storm of light and sound—an elusive figure, by turns frantic and still, awash in pulsating electronic waves. In a program of acclaimed companion pieces, Haptic and Holistic Strata, Umeda’s distinctive dance vocabulary draws on a range of butoh, ballet and hip-hop. He conceives his interdisciplinary events as a sensorial whole, creating the beats and sonic textures as well as the entrancing video and lighting effects. Designed to elicit primal emotion, Umeda’s work is minimalist and radical, subtle and violent, abstract yet precise, and thrillingly physical.

The weight of light
Light, as we usually interpret it, is an element without mass and gravity. For “the weight of light” a physics engine simulates the kinetic forces of a moving object. This mass is projected on a wave shaped structure in virtual space. The moving object is represented as a light particle in physical space. Gravity, mass, density and friction affect velocity and acceleration of these light particles. As the particles movement is based on a simulation, it does not have to adhere to the physical realities we know from everyday life. Therefore the installation goes beyond expected behaviour. Thus the matter of light traverses a reinterpretation of our known reality.

White Water and Dust
Set to the piano scores by Erik Satie and other composers, White Water is a lyrical dance of pure movement that flows beautifully as its title suggests. The curtain opens to a projected colour image of a flowing river; it slowly transforms into black and white. In serenity and in turbulence, whiteness of waves and ripples streams out of the blackness. Green netting and girds used for digital design interrupt the flow of water, thus revealing the process of creating virtual images and illusion of light, providing a pleasant surprise to the dance.
Cloud Gate
Cloud Gate is the name of the oldest known dance in China. In 1973, choreographer Lin Hwai-min adopted this classical name for the first contemporary dance company in the greater Chinese-speaking community.

Waves
FILE FESTIVAL
A long piece of rope generates 3D waves floating in space by the physical action of its movement: the rope which creates the visual waves also simultaneously creates the sound by cutting through the air, making up a single element. The installation is affected by those who watch it. When the audience moves around it they influence the movements of the rope, generating visual and acoustic sound waves from harmonic patterns to complex ones.

Floating Point Waves
Floating Point Waves is an environment of strings, water, solo performance, real-time video, and live electronic music that unveils the relationship between the human body and natural elements. Movement, water, and light respond to one another as an organic causal chain unfolds, echoing that of our own natural world. Startling performance and exquisite design reverberate through the space, framing a landscape where beauty coexists with darkness.

In Search of Vanished Blood

Malani’s work is influenced by her experiences as a refugee of the Partition of India. She places inherited iconographies and cherished cultural stereotypes under pressure. Her point of view is unwaveringly urban and internationalist, and unsparing in its condemnation of a cynical nationalism that exploits the beliefs of the masses. Hers is an art of excess, going beyond the boundaries of legitimized narrative, exceeding the conventional and initiating dialogue. Characteristics of her work have been the gradual movement towards new media, international collaboration and expanding dimensions of the pictorial surface into the surrounding space as ephemeral wall drawing, installation, shadow play, multi projection works and theatre.

The Artificial Nature Project
In The Artificial Nature Project a new encounter between human and non- human performers emerges from the following questions:What does it mean to make a choreography for materials where human movement is no longer in the center of attention?How can one address the force of things, materials, objects and matters as something that acts upon humans?What is the relationship between the animate and the inanimate world?
The outcome is a performance that literally throws things around. Materials fly through the air giving rise to a landscape that constantly transforms itself. Throughout the performance the view is persistently changing: a calm contemplative site may turn into an energetic chaos of stuff being projected into space. Or, a flood wave becomes a storm of confetti whirling through the air, rushing over the stage. The theater stage gets covered with and traversed by various objects and raw materials, creating a disastrous mess of small, thick, light, big, heavy, thin, breakable and resistant things.

振り子の合唱団
CYCLOID-E

This piece, which comprises a series of tubular pieces arranged horizontally and activated by a motor, generates a particular sound through its movement, which is unexpectedly harmonic. The artists have taken their interest in the mechanisms that generate wave motions as a starting point to create this sculpture: five metal tubes joined together feature sound sources and sensors that allow them to emit different sounds based on their rotations.
The sculpture runs through a series of rhythmic movements, like a dance, creating, in the words of the artists themselves, “a unique kinetic and polyphonic work, in the likeness of the “Cosmic Ballet” to which the physicist Johannes Kepler refers to in his “Music of the Spheres” in 1619.” This work is part of the reflection on the possible interactions between sound and movement developed by the artists since 1999, using electronic devices and inspired by the aesthetics of industrial machinery.