highlike

Alex Ekman

COW

Ekman talents extend to the lighting and stage design and his eye for structuring an environment is unerring. There is no set as such, excepting the plaster cow which dangles overhead, but the stage surface has its share of movement as little island-blocks rise up and pits sink down. The extreme tilting of the stage at one point causes unfortunate Bauch to roll, cow-like, almost into the pit. COW has its iconic Ekman moment in the scene that opens on a stage full of swirling dancers in white skirts set in a magical silvery mist. Mikael Karlsson, whose music partners the piece provides a subtle and evocative soundscape. He offers a hint of percussive rhythm picked up by the dancers who launch into an ecstatic dance: a stage full of whirling dervishes, until they collapse exhausted.

.

Ekmans Talente erstrecken sich auf die Beleuchtung und das Bühnenbild, und sein Auge für die Strukturierung einer Umgebung ist unfehlbar. Es gibt kein Set als solches, außer der Gipskuh, die über ihnen baumelt, aber die Bühnenoberfläche hat ihren Anteil an Bewegung, wenn kleine Inselblöcke aufsteigen und Gruben sinken. Das extreme Kippen der Bühne an einer Stelle führt dazu, dass der unglückliche Bauch kuhartig fast in die Grube rollt. COW hat seinen legendären Ekman-Moment in der Szene, die auf einer Bühne voller wirbelnder Tänzer in weißen Röcken in einem magischen silbernen Nebel beginnt. Mikael Karlsson, dessen Musikpartner das Stück ist, bietet eine subtile und eindrucksvolle Klanglandschaft. Er bietet einen Hauch von perkussivem Rhythmus, der von den Tänzern aufgenommen wurde, die einen ekstatischen Tanz beginnen: eine Bühne voller wirbelnder Derwische, bis sie erschöpft zusammenbrechen.

 

FUJIKO NAKAYA

中谷芙二子

fog sculptures
ok-offenens kulturhaus linz

In 1970 Nakaya created her first fog sculpture when commissioned by the group Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T) to make a work for the Pepsi Pavillion of the Osaka World Exposition. In creating a work of white mist enclosing the building, Nakaya became the first artist to have used fog as a sculptural medium. E.A.T is an organisation devoted to facilitating working relationships between artists and engineers. Nakaya worked with American engineer Thomas Mee to create the fog for her Osaka commission, the technique for which she has continued to use, with minor moderations, for her subsequent fog sculptures since.Whilst Nakaya has also worked in film and video, it is her use of fog for which she is best known. Nakaya has used pure-water fog to create installations, performances, stage-sets and environmental park designs, often collaborating with other artists or with performers, choreographers and composers. Nakaya’s interest in fog has developed from its relation to our visual sense. In a thick fog we become disorientated, frustrated at our inability to see. In this way, Nakaya’s sculptures activate our other senses, to compensate for our loss of sight.

ABSALON

cellule No. 5
Absalon’s best known works, the Cellules, rewrite Cezanne’s “treat nature as the cylinder, the sphere and the cone” to read “treat architecture as the cell, the bunker and the turret.” Not that the Cellules are straightforwardly architecture: they equally evoke Minimalist sculpture, Matt Mullican’s maquettes, Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbauen and the Concrete sculptures of George Vantongerloo. But the model that the Cellules most overtly evoke is the monastic cell. The Cellules were fabricated in wood, cardboard and plaster, and painted entirely white; their average proportions are roughly those of a caravan, and the catalogue informs us that there is always an area in which one can stand up. Their interiors are fitted–fitted rather than furnished–with unobtrusive minimal representations of desks, seats, beds, etc.

carsten holler

Decimal Clock
dans Decimal Clock (White and Pink), les instincts rationalistes de Höller se tournent vers la division du temps. L’horloge fonctionnelle, qui représente 10 heures, 100 minutes et 100 secondes, nous rappelle que l’homogénéisation globale du temps n’a eu lieu que récemment en réponse au degré sans précédent d’interconnexion planétaire. Decimal Clock (White and Pink) fait signe aux expériences avec le temps décimal pendant la Révolution française et rend hommage aux efforts visant à la comparabilité et à la régularité temporelles. Pourtant, il reconnaît également diverses manières non occidentales de mesurer le temps et, plutôt que de les voir comme une menace pour l’empire de la raison , les célèbre comme une expression enrichissante de la diversité de notre existence dans le temps.

Schweigman & en Cocky Eek

Spectrum
How intensely can you experience colour? Colour as a phenomenon which you don’t just see, but which totally absorbs… Spectrum is a spatial installation that makes colour tactile and tangible.
Fall backwards into a black hole and reawaken in an infinite spectrum. An immersive experience which will give you a whole new perspective on the coloured cycles of our everyday light. Following Blaas and Curve, Spectrum completes a triptych centred on white space, each piece created with spatial designer Cocky Eek in collabaration with Schweigman&. In Blaas you crawl through an inflatable balloon; in Curve you enter an endlessly spiralling tunnel. Spectrum starts by asking: how can we make the colour physically tangible?

Matt Roberts

Dazzle Camouflage
Dazzle Camouflage is a mode of camouflage that uses confusion rather than concealment as its method. Developed in the early 20th century, Dazzle Camouflage was often added to naval ships, which were painted to feature perplexing black and white patterns. In these uncertain times with access to immense amounts of information and when terms such as fake news, deep fakes, alternative facts are becoming part of our lexicon, we often find that the true meaning of our inquiries as with all our desires is concealed by confusion. To participate a user can enter a search word or hashtag to search Twitter. The frequency of the word on Twitter is used to generate black and white patterns. The software will continue to search for the word on twitter and create more complex patterns as the frequency of the word increases.

Emmanuel Van Der Auwera

Videosculpture XXI
Van der Auwera’s VideoSculptures take a new position to explore the intersections of digital and physical life and how the filtering of images in production, dissemination, and digestion alter both individual perception and consensual experience. Using the screen as sculptural material, these works break images out of the frame in a low-tech manner. They start with an act of destruction as the artist literally takes a knife to a screen to carve away physical layers. Unbeknown to most, these layers are filters that are adhered to every LCD screen. Without the mediation of these filters, images become impossible to see with the naked eye and white noise fills the space.

SANKAI JUKU

山海塾

butoh

TOBARI

“Over the 90 minute performance, I feel no less than transported. There are eight male performers, including Ushio Amagatsu himself. The dancers often move slowly, with incredible muscular control, fluidity and elegance. And suddenly the spell will be broken and they’ll run across the stage, their painted bodies leaving clouds of white powder hanging in the air like a shadow or ghost. Slow sustained movements are countered with tiny, minute gestures of the fingers. Hands are often gnarled, the joints contorted with incredible tension. It is mysterious, hypnotic and strange. The countenance of the performers is most arresting – behind the white paint, their faces reveal the fragility, humility, vulnerability and truth of their humanity.”Day Helesic

ASTRID KROGH

Mare Tranquilitatis

Mare Tranquillitatis – the title of this optical fibre sculpture of cosmic dimensions refers to a lunar mare that is situated within the Tranquillitatis basin on the moon. Very slowly and barely perceptible, this work takes on varying hues of yellow and white, creating the strange and poetic impression that the work is actually breathing,imitating the sensation that the moon is actually alive in the night sky.

NILS VÖLKER

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

László Moholy-Nagy

Light Space Modulator

“This piece of lighting equipment is a device used for demonstrating both plays of light and manifestations of movement. The model consists of a cube-like body or box, 120 x 120 cm in size, with a circular opening (stage opening) at its front side. On the back of the panel, mounted around the opening are a number of yellow, green, blue, rot, and white-toned electric bulbs (approximately 70 illuminating bulbs of 15 watts each, and 5 headlamps of 100 watts). Located inside the body, parallel to its front side, is a second panel; this panel too, bears a circular opening about which are mounted electric lightbulbs of different colors. In accordance with a predetermined plan, individual bulbs glow at different points. They illuminate a continually moving mechanism built of partly translucent, partly transparent, and partly fretted materials, in order to cause the best possible play of shadow formations on the back wall of the closed box”. László Moholy-Nagy

Roy Andersson

World of Glory
World of Glory is a 1991 Swedish short film written and directed by Roy Andersson. Its original Swedish title is Härlig är jorden, which means “Lovely is the Earth”, and is the Swedish title of the hymn “Fairest Lord Jesus”. The narrative portrays a man in white make-up who guides the viewer through his life in a bleakly stylised world. The film was Andersson’s critical comeback to cinema, after many years in advertising

KEITH ARMSTRONG

Shifting Intimacies
An interactive/media artwork for one person at a time. Each participant enters a large, dark space containing two circles of projected film imagery presented within an immersive sound environment. One image floats upon a disc of white sand and the other on a circle of white dust. Participants’ movements direct and affect the filmic image and spatialised audio experience. Throughout the work a layer of dust (an artificial life form) slowly eats away and infuses itself deep into the imagery and sound. Each person has 10 minutes alone with the work. Their movement through the space continually affects speed, quality, balance and flow within the work. At the end of the experience they are invited to climb a lit platform and cast dust back onto the images below.

FRANCK SORBIER

On stage, the ample white strapless dress of a still model serves as a screen for all kinds of projections that echo those of a big screen in the background. “Mixing 3D video with certified fairy tale stories and tailoring tradition” is the idea of the atypical Mountain Ash. Intel technology brings to life on the fabric all kinds of patterns simulating embroidery or painting on silk: stripes of neon lights, butterflies flapping their wings, “mapping” of crystal tassels or the northern lights …

 

Cocolab

White Canvas
“CoCoLab engages in the area of programming languages. We provide frameworks for the analysis and the transformation of programs. Our technology is based on know-how from compiler construction. The frameworks contain parsers and preprocessors which convert source code to abstract syntax trees and symbol tables. These data structures are the foundation of program analysis and program transformation.”

Jeppe Hein

杰普·海因
ЙЕППЕ ХАЙН
ЈЕПЕ ХЕИН
Distance

An immense circuit, conceived as a graphic composition, is extended across a forest of fine metal pillars. Arabesques, spirals and nodal interconnections support a track for a hundred or so white balls, razing the ground or very high up in the air. An infrared sensor detecting the arrival of each visitor triggers the propulsion of a ball, which then journeys through the vast visual and sonic landscape. The installation draws on different sources evoking a primitive industrial imaginary, such as the machines of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Tinguely’s assemblages, and the fairground universe of roller coasters and pinballs.

James Whitaker

Joshua Tree Residence

Whitaker has envisioned an “exoskeleton” made of shipping containers painted bright white. The containers appear like a starburst, with cuboid forms pushing out in all directions.The home is intended to offer a connection to the sun-baked landscape, while concurrently providing a sense of protection and privacy. Square windows frame views of the blue sky and rugged terrain. In some areas, faceted ceilings give the effect of being inside a crystalline form.

Philippe Parreno

ФИЛИПП ПАРРЕНО
فيليب بارينو
菲利普·帕雷诺
H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS
H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS includes a vast collection of sculptural lighting that suspends from the cavernous ceiling. glowing white shapes informed by the design of movie marquees hang above visitors in bundles and as single geometries, casting dynamic patterns on the ground. as a participant walks through the site, they meet video installations, projections, pianos, chairs, speakers and sounds, all which have been carefully orchestrated to produce an immersive, sensory, and constantly-unfolding creative environment.

Merce Cunningham

简宁汉
מרס קנינגהם
マース·カニングハム
머시 디스 커닝햄
МЕРС КАННИНГЕМ
« Scenario » de Merce Cunningham
Rei Kawakubo’s humorous costumes toy with the idea of physical distortions, such as humps and big rear ends. They are in mostly vertical blue stripes on white, or in pale green and white-checkered patterns. For much of the dance, five or six dancers twist and pose, each in his or her own space, with a rush of additional dancers to the stage toward the end of the performance. The bold electronic musical score is by Takehisa Kosugi.

Tomas Saraceno

توماس ساراسينو
托马斯·萨拉切诺
トマスサラセーノ
Aerocene

In the desert of New Mexico, artist Tomás Saraceno realized the very first human flight in a zero carbon solar-powered hot air balloon, propelled by Studio Tomás Saraceno and curated by Rob La Frenais. For three hours without touching the ground, the balloon rose into the air without the usual burner, its black fabric heated by the sun and the infrared rays reflected by the white dunes.
.

RYOJI IKEDA

池田亮司
이케다 료지
Редзи Икеда
Transfinite
test pattern [n˚2] presents flickering black and white imagery that floats and convulses in darkness on two screens, one on the floor and another floor to ceiling, in time with a stark and powerful, highly synchronised soundtrack. Through a real–time computer programme, Ikeda’s audio signal patterns are converted into tightly synchronised barcode patterns on the screens. Viewers are literally immersed in the work, and the velocity of the moving images is ultra–fast, some hundreds of frames per second, providing a totally immersive and powerful experience. The work provides a performance test for the audio and visual devices, as well as a response test for the audience’s perceptions.

Ralf Baecker

Putting The Pieces Back Together Again

The kinetic installation “Putting the Pieces Back Together Again” is a complex system with self-organizing and emergent behaviour, at the same time it is an artistic inquiry and meditation on contemporary scientific methodology. The installation investigates non-hierarchical communication and collective behaviour by implementing such a system physically through many electro-mechanical actors.
The Installation consists of 1250 stepper motors arranged in a two dimensional grid of two by two meters. Each motor is equipped with a pointer made from white acrylic glass. The radii of the pointers are chosen to intersect with the pointers of its neighbours. All motors are excited with the same alternating current that let them move initially in a random direction. Each actor is at the same time sensing its environment. In the event of a collision the pointers reverse their turning direction. This is achieved through a custom motor control circuit. Through the interplay of many entities a complex behaviour emerges on the surface of the installation. By manipulating the signals during runtime the system will form spontaneous pattern on its surface. It seems like they are negotiating it’s position with nearby actors. By this the system is showing behaviour of self-organization. The installation drifts through various activation levels during its run time by this it constantly evolves new formations and constellations (crystallization).

KARINA SMIGLA-BOBINSKI

SIMULACRA
file festival

“SIMULACRA” is an optophysical experimental arrangement. At its heart are four LCD monitor panels, which are assembled in the form of a hollow square, and installed at eye level in the middle of the room. The ensemble appears internally gutted, overgrown and embraced. A tangle of cables and control devices pours out of the middle of the square. All around it several magnifying lenses dangle from chains. The imageless glaring ray of the monitors looks as if the images had fallen out of them. What remains is the essence of the medium: Light.It is an impressive, wondrous experience when images suddenly appear from the pure white by the mere glance through a seemingly transparent film. But if you turn the lens in front of your eyes, the polarizing structure of the film creates wild color shifts or even complementary negative images.

Ballet Preljocaj

AND THEN, ONE THOUSAND YEARS OF PEACE
And Then, One Thousand Years of Peace is a huge, ambitious monolith of a work. First created by Angelin Preljocaj for the Bolshoi Ballet in 2010, it takes inspiration from the vision of apocalypse conjured by St John in the biblical Book of Revelation.There are no horses galloping across the stage or horned beasts. But Preljocaj sets himself a barely less daunting task: choreographing the essential meaning of apocalypse, as a cataclysm so profound it lays bare the very essence and history of human nature.Preljocaj launches his work with a shattering opening sequence. Ten women drive through hard, slicing, geometric formations; lights flash, electro-percussive music reverberates; and the air becomes as thick and swarming as a tropical thunderstorm as the movement accelerates towards its convulsive climax.Out of this intensity emerges a Garden of Eden tranquillity, where men lope and flutter in delicately animalistic moves, and two women in white tunics play like lazy cherubs.

DILLER + SCOFIDIO

The Blur Building (an architecture of atmosphere)
The Blur Building is a media pavilion for Swiss EXPO 2002 at the base of Lake Neuchatel in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland.From piles in the water, a tensegrity system of rectilinear struts and diagonal rods cantilevers out over the lake. Ramps and walkways weave through the tensegrity system, some of them providing a counterweight for the structure. The form is based on the work of Buckminster Fuller.The pavilion is made of filtered lake water shot as a fine mist through 13,000 fog nozzles creating an artificial cloud that measures 300 feet wide by 200 feet deep by 65 feet high. A built-in weather station controls fog output in response to shifting climatic conditions such as temperature, humidity, wind direction, and wind speed.The public can approach Blur via a ramped bridge. The 400 foot long ramp deposits visitors at the center of the fog mass onto a large open-air platform where movement is unregulated. Visual and acoustical references are erased along the journey toward the fog leaving only an optical “white-out” and the “white-noise” of pulsing water nozzles. Prior to entering the cloud, each visitor responds to a questionnaire/character profile and receives a “braincoat” (smart raincoat). The coat is used as protection from the wet environment and storage of the personality data for communication with the cloud’s computer network. Using tracking and location technologies, each visitor’s position can be identified and their character profiles compared to any other visitor.In the Glass Box, a space surrounded by glass on six sides, visitors experience a “sense of physical suspension only heightened by an occasional opening in the fog.” As visitors pass one another, their coats compare profiles and change color indicating the degree of attraction or repulsion, much like an involuntary blush – red for affinity, green for antipathy. The system allows interaction among 400 visitors at any time.Visitors can climb another level to the Angel Bar at the summit. The final ascent resembles the sensation of flight as one pierces through the cloud layer to the open sky. Here, visitors relax, take in the view, and choose from a large selection of commercial waters, municipal waters from world capitals, and glacial waters. At night, the fog will function as a dynamic and thick video screen.

JENNIFER RUBELL

جنيفر روبل
제니퍼 루벨
ジェニファールベル
Portrait of the Artist

Jennifer Rubell, the American artist and niece of Studio 54 co-founder Steve Rubell, brings a maternal touch to this year’s Frieze Art Fair with her autobiographical piece Portrait of the Artist. The pristine white nude, cast from steel-reinforced fibreglass, reclines like an odalisque at the Stephen Friedman Gallery stand. The sculpture is a replica of Rubell’s own eight-months-pregnant body, except it is eight metres high: the large belly, which is carved out to leave an egg-shaped void, can accommodate a fully grown adult. Spectators are able to clamber into the artwork and curl up inside as if they are the artist’s unborn child.Rubell’s intention was to create a monumental gesture of unconditional motherly love. There is a feminist statement here, too: Rubell has appropriated a style and scale historically reserved for male leaders to show, she says, “an emotion that is intensely personal and un-heroic”. The artist adds that watching members of the Frieze audience enter in the sculpture’s womb is “tremendously satisfying” – in her eyes the enlarged form was “incomplete until the first viewer entered”. Amid the hustle of Frieze’s mini-city there is something undeniably appealing about the opportunity to put your feet up in the foetal position in the name of art. Not to mention the comfort factor.

HOWARD SHORE

The Hobbit An Unexpected Journey Soundtrack
Tracklist:
00:00:00 – My Dear Frodo
00:06:58 – Old Friends
00:12:18 – An Unexpected Party
00:16:00 – Axe or Sword?
00:21:56 – Misty Mountains
00:23:30 – The Adventure Begins
00:25:28 – The World is Ahead
00:27:37 – An Ancient Enemy
00:32:28 – Radagast the Brown
00:37:13 – Roast Mutton
00:40:50 – A Troll-hoard
00:43:43 – The Hill of Sorcery
00:47:28 – Warg-scouts
00:50:25 – The Hidden Valley
00:54:10 – Moon Runes
00:57:24 – The Defiler
00:58:32 – The White Council
01:05:48 – Over Hill
01:09:22 – A Thunder Battle
01:13:11 – Under Hill
01:15:00 – Riddles in the Dark
01:20:15 – Brass Buttons
01:27:50 – Out of the Frying-Pan
01:33:40 – A Good Omen
01:39:20 – Song of the Lonely Mountain
01:43:22 – Dreaming of Bag End