Elemental

Minimaforms & DRL Elemental Research Group

FILE SÃO PAULO 2025: SYNTHETIKA – Art and Technology – Video Art
Electronic Language International Festival

Elemental – United Kingdom

Within the contemporary condition, new conceptual terrains emerge that raise questions of agency and intelligence within a deep ecology of our environment. The work explored examines environmental phenomena in the service of sustaining life. The following video is an extract from a work-in-progress film produces exploring the technology phenomenon in attempt to expand the conversation on climate matters.. 

BIO

Dr. Theodore Spyropoulos is an architect and educator. He is the Director of the Architectural Association’s world-renowned Design Research Lab (AADRL) in London and a resident artist at Somerset House. He previously chaired the AA Graduate School and was a Professor of Architecture at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt and a visiting Research Fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies. 

MIT Media Lab, Stanford University
This work explores a dynamic future where the accessories we wear are no longer static, but are instead mobile, living objects on the body. Engineered with the functionality of 18 robotics, this “living” jewelry roams on unmodified clothing, changing location and reconfiguring appearance according to social context and enabling multitude presentations of self. With the addition of sensor devices, they transition into active devices which can react to environmental conditions. They can also be paired with existing mobile devices to become personalized on-body assistants to help complete tasks. Attached to garments, they generate shape-changing clothing and kinetic pattern designs–creating a new, dynamic fashion.
It is our vision that in the future, these robots will be miniaturized to the extent that they can be seamlessly integrated into existing practices of body ornamentation. With the addition of kinetic capabilities, traditionally static jewelry and accessories will start displaying life-like qualities, learning, shifting, and reconfiguring to the needs and preferences of the wearer, also assisting in fluid presentation of self. We envision a new class of future wearables that possess hybrid qualities of the living and the crafted, creating a new on-body ecology for human-wearable symbiosis.

Networked Ecosystem
In Networked Ecosystem, natural phenomena have been replaced by digital and artificial systems as forces that drive development: Electricity/battery = sustenance, WIFI signals = nutrition, Lidar data = fire/heat. Data Organisms populate this digital ecosystem as native life forms in the form of bots, AI’s, and avatars. Visitors to this networked landscape develop new kinds of digital senses to experience data as environmental changes, and interact with the simulated world and each other in an ever-changing online environment.

Liminal Lands
Liminal Lands is an environmental multiplayer experience shared by four people at the same time. Each person transforms into the basic elements controlling life across the landscape: Algae, salt, water and mud. As they embark on a communal ritual experience, people morph and change throughout their journey, exploring each new world from a changed perspective of the landscape. Visitors move across different scales and global weather conditions, shedding their human perspective as they are pulled into six different realms inspired by the macro-landscape.

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.

Planet City

Planet City, by Los Angeles-based film director and architect Liam Young, explores the productive potential of extreme densification, where 10 billion people surrender the rest of the planet to a global wilderness. Although wildly provocative, Planet City eschews the techno-utopian fantasy of designing a new world order. This is not a neo-colonial masterplan to be imposed from a singular seat of power. It is a work of critical architecture – a speculative fiction grounded in statistical analysis, research and traditional knowledge.
It is a collaborative work of multiple voices and cultures supported by an international team of acclaimed environmental scientists, theorists and advisors. In Planet City we see that climate change is no longer a technological problem, but rather an ideological one, rooted in culture and politics.

Meta-prosthesis
‘Meta-prosthesis’ explores the potential of synthesising the natural and artificial to increase the performance of environmental design. Through capitalising on the formal and compositional expressions derived from animalistic attributes, the performance of materials and environment can be enhanced. The project for a theraputic centre has a highly-articulated envelope which is achieved by manipulating the geometry, from the microscale to the macro. This includes: material typology, texture typology, surface typology and building typology. The resultant patterns are informed, generated and tested through computational algorithms and scientific understanding to satisfy different programmatic criteria, regulating the environment.
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The Unseen Collection
Experimental fashion studio The Unseen has produced a range of accessories that alter in response to environmental changes using inks developed from its colour-shifting wearable sculptures. Bowker has previously embedded her specially developed ink into feathered, leather and gemstone-encrusted headdresses. The Unseen also presented a sculptural jacket that changes colour depending on the wearer’s mood.

Encapsulated environmental system: Paludarium YASUTOSHI
This machine is fully equipped with a mist machine as if wrapping plants in a fog from both sides and drip feed-water system which can be activated depending on the situation in order to maintain the condition of a plant and control inside temperature and humidity. Also the cylindrical shape can fully capture the natural light by 365°angles from glasses, and it can correspond to plant growth by having the series’ largest scale of height. Fans on the ceiling play a role of wind, and a plant can listen music from the waterproofed speakers. The machine takes in essential elements – rain, wind, light and sound – by artificial means and completes a small world where its ecological cycle is condensed. It enables us to admire the beauty of the plants by not being affected by external environment.

One Two Three Swing!
One Two Three Swing! challenges society’s apathy towards the political, environmental and economic crises of our age. The installation is experienced in three states: apathy, production and movement. The state of apathy compromises a large pendulum suspended by a 20 metre cable from ceiling and swinging above a 770 square metre carpet in a colour scheme inspired by British currency. Occupying the far end of the hall is the state of production, a factory station where swing seats are assembled, stamped and stored prior to distribution and use. Emerging from the state of production, an orange line formed of sets of interconnected, three-seated swings invite and frame the movements of users.

Vanitas Machine

The installation VANITAS MACHINE addresses the desire for eternal life and the potential of life-prolonging measures. Based on a candle which – by means of technical intervention – burns down very slowly, vanitas machine creates a contemporary analogy to the endeavour of prolonging the human lifespan with the help of science and technology.Being one of the classical vanitas symbols, a burning candle recalls the futility of the moment, the transience of human life and the certainty of the end of all existence. But is this end really still inevitable?In the course of the last two centuries, average human life expectancy has increased significantly in the industrialised countries. Moreover, in the context of scientific research the biological causes of ageing are being explored. Numerous theories of aging have already been developed pointing both towards physiological as well as environmental factors.One of the first theories of ageing was the so-called »metabolism theory«, which claims that the lifespan of organisms is reciprocally related to energy turnover and therefore connected to calorie intake, oxygen consumption and heart rate: The higher the metabolic rate, the shorter the lifespan of the organism.

Swamp Radio
Swamp Radio gets beyond our anthropocenic reality, and maintains connections between the humans and other species. By artistic interventions and transmitting interfaces, the Swamp Radio is turned into a social media megaphone for invisible and inaudible actors of nature. The artists are installing microbial fuel cells, environmental monitoring sensors and transmitting devices to transform the swamps into dynamic power plants and the 21st century multi-voiced broadcast media.

Нед Кан
Tornado
A 10-foot tall vortex is formed by air blowers and an ultrasonic fog machine inside a sculpture installed in the atrium adjacent to the Winter Garden. The vortex continually changed shape in response to the surrounding air currents.These fluctuations gave the vortex an erratic and life-like appearance. Viewers were encouraged to alter the shape of the vortex with their hands. The calm, central core of the vortex is clearly evident.
Kahn’s interactive scientific projects leave little doubt about his command of meteorological processes. Through his immense technical ability, he demonstrates the versatility of turbulent systems, such as the vortices of wind and water. He employs diverse mechanical, pneumatic and electrical technologies to design, build and refine his installations. This is how he constructs dazzlingly complex but comprehensible images of nature that respond to viewers, conform to architectural structures, and reveal environmental conditions.

ELECTRIC SKIN

The Electric Skin explores the possibility of creating a wearable that extends the functionality of the skin to sense electromagnetic fields (mostly within the radio spectrum) and translate that information into touch sensation. The wearable consists of two main functional parts: 1) A matrix of omnidirectional antennas that act as sensors and probes and 2) corresponding electrodes that stimulate the skin of the wearer. Through this artificial “skin” or “exoskeleton”, the wearable changes our experience, perception, and understanding of space and movement, and in doing so, our interactions. The project speculates on the possible co-evolution of man and technology and draws attention to the role of environmental influence on our own bodily development and behavior.

THINK AND SENSE

Under the theme of Zen, this artwork represents a part of the philosophy of Zen with three-dimensional data created with photogrammetry technology composed of the most minimalistic landscape of “dots” and the soundscape of “undulations,” with the cooperation of Toryo Ito, vice priest of Ryosokuin, Kennin-ji Tacchu temple, Kyoto. The generated image reflecting the environmental information of the exhibition space creates “interaction between the environment and the image,” just like the trees and leaves swinging in the silence in the garden of a Zen temple.

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Credit Concept / Technical Direction: Shuhei Matsuyama Point Cloud System Design:Takamitsu Masumi Sound Design: Intercity-Express (Tetsuji Ohno) Photogrammetry Shooting: Naoya Takebe Photogrammetry Engineering: Katsuya Sakuma

The Unseen Collection
Lauren Bowker describes herself a materials alchemist. After developing a pollution sensing compound while studying at Manchester School of Art, she went on to study textiles at the Royal College of Art in London and created a series of inks which change colour in response to heat, light, wind and environmental changes.

Soft Skin
‘Soft Skin’ is a research project developed by Lubna Alayeli, Nina Jotanovic, Ceren Temel, and Farah Alayeli from the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia. The work investigates the possibilities of using air inflation in architecture as an active response to changing environmental parameters. The ‘skin’ is composed of a specially developed composite made of thin layers of flexible silicone and elastic fabric. The material system consists of dozens of inflatable cells combined in larger groups. As parameters change — light and wind in this instance — the cells can inflate or deflate in real time. By acting in real time, it is able to reduce wind vibrations and wind drag, and control light infiltration.

Limbo
Arnt Jensen
File Festival
FILE GAMES

Limbo is a 2D sidescroller, incorporating the physics system Box2D to govern environmental objects and the player character. The player guides an unnamed boy through dangerous environments and traps as he searches for his sister. The developer built the game’s puzzles expecting the player to fail before finding the correct solution. Playdead called the style of play “trial and death“, and used gruesome imagery for the boy’s deaths to steer the player from unworkable solutions.

Christo Vladimirov Javacheff (1935–2020)
R.I.P
Wrapped Reichstag/Verhüllter Reichstag
Their work was typically large, visually impressive and controversial, often taking years and sometimes decades of careful preparation — including technical solutions, political negotiation, permitting and environmental approval, hearings and public persuasion. The pair refused grants, scholarships, donations or public money, instead financing the work via the sale of their own artwork.

when you are close to me i shiver
sound design: Alexander Martinz
“when you are close to me I shiver” is an algorithmically controlled live simulation, a real-time generated virtual reality that takes place in a version of the future in which humans, out of desperation, gather in masses on the last remaining piece of land. Inspired by the walrus scene in the documentary “Our Planet” narrated by David Attenborough and produced by Silverback Films, the project proposes an intense scenario encompassing our environmental and personal crises. It reflects on how we identify and connect ourselves in different realities while addressing the human condition in a world in ecological and therefore social crisis. On the tablets, virtual cameras scan the environment from various point of views, like surveillance drones. On the main screen, a similar camera randomly targets and focuses on different situations while a familiar voice-over narrates the tragic story.

摄影师Mark Dorf创作了一组作品“环境职业”（Environmental Occupations），这一系列的作品探讨了人类创造者的角色及其与自然环境的关系。在他的每一幅作品中，巨大的混凝土形态，抽象极简雕塑作品上的图案——都让人想起了Donald Judd 和 Richard Serra 的作品——他去除了任何形式的表达，而是去关注物体的几何形态以及制作它们的材料。
这些人造物庞大而又强迫的形态与它们所置身的安宁平静的自然环境形成鲜明对比，并把它们从自然背景中抽离出来，为固有的现实提供了扭曲的图像。

Flying sculptures
Thomas Lanfranchi uses lightweight materials to create environmentally responsive sculptures. Many of his projects have been wind blown, taking the form of kites or wind socks. He has installed these pieces at sites across France and on buoys at sea. On a recent visit to Australia he made a journey around the outback, creating and documenting a new airborne sculpture each day to suit the site. Working with a type of plastic commonly used for shopping bags, Lanfranchi is able to make very large structures that are capable of being supported by the lightest breeze.

茜森山
森山茜
cubic prism
Gently responding to wind movements and rain drops, ‘cubic prism’ by stockholm-based designer akane moriyama is a large cube-based structure made out of three different colors of textiles. suspended between two buildings at the goldsmith hall in the university of texas, austin, the piece reacts to environmental factors, as the geometry of a rigid cube is replaced with soft semi-transparent fabrics.

“The connections between humans and the built environment interest me, serving as the primary source material for my work. I formulate calculated assessments of my environment, ultimately manifesting connections between art, architecture, design and environmental systems.”

PATTERNMOLDING
Kawenski is a freelance designer and has worked on various projects as a consultant for start-up programs to the apparel and accessories industries. Her present design work focuses on using sustainable materials to design apparel and accessories made in an environmentally sensitive manner.

STORM KING PARK
SOMA is an international collective of architects, designers and creatives established in New York. With its focus on incorporating craft, digital technologies and environmental responsability, the firm’s designs and work have attracted critical acclaim for their boundary pushing nature. more…

Multiple Identities, Sustainable Development
The focus is on multiple identities. There are pale, milky plastic pipes attached to the ceiling of the concrete interior, inside which, moved by fans, roll white balls. One after the other. If the one arrives, a new one is sent to another tube.Such works breathe inner unity. This closeness is sometimes a closeness, if not encryption. Because the language of contemporary installation art is foreign and difficult to read. The viewer’s gaze likes to evaluate subjectively and is always shaped by environmental influences such as culture, trends, styles, beliefs, experiences and politics. This makes the interpretation uncertain, it becomes subjective, often tempting to misconduct. Because anyone who claims that the work of art is created in the eye of the beholder and means that everyone, regardless of where they come from and how educated, can make a valid statement about a work of art is wrong. What Marcel DuChamp meant is that it unfolds in the eye of the beholder. But this development should not mean that simply opening the eyes also brings with it knowledge and insight. These qualities are developed through active participation, through perception. This, in turn, is not only feasible through the visual stimulus in the eye. It is possible, however, if you know who the artist is, what he is doing, what he wishes to express and with which underlying design principles the view is guided in what way to what. Only then does the processing take place, a connection of the causal relationships, which ultimately leads to art in the eye of the beholder. To an inner feeling outside of the spontaneous feelings.

Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art
This building proposal challenges the traditional definition of a museum and the conventional relationship between building and site. The ground floor of the building is reduced to a nominal footprint, enclosing only enough space for basic services, structure and ticketing functions. The ground plane is primarily reserved for exterior public space, including an art park, Hall of Fame, and garden walk. The bulk of the program and building mass are split by the open ground floor. Half of the building is coupled with the earth while the other half hovers in the air. The purpose is twofold; to minimize the damaging effects of extreme local weather by harnessing environmental flows toward productive outcomes and to re-conceptualize the identity of a modern art museum. The manicured roof plane of the below ground program is pocketed with water absorbing vegetation and catchment systems, while the hovering museum above expands to form open atriums, allowing diffuse light to brighten the space and passive airflow to comfortably condition the building.The program of the museum is interconnected. The Contemporary Museum of Art, Children’s Museum of Art and Administration are located within the floating mass. The lecture hall, parking, art resource center, library and classrooms are located below ground. The programs below ground are easily accessible and directly connected through vertical circulation tubes, providing both structural support for the floating mass above and space for movement systems, such as escalators, stairs and elevators between levels. All of the below ground programs are flooded with diffuse light passing through skylights that penetrate the landscape.

Structure volante

Thomas Lanfranchi uses lightweight materials to create environmentally responsive sculptures. Many of his projects have been wind blown, taking the form of kites or wind socks. He has installed these pieces at sites across France and on buoys at sea. On a recent visit to Australia he made a journey around the outback, creating and documenting a new airborne sculpture each day to suit the site. Working with a type of plastic commonly used for shopping bags, Lanfranchi is able to make very large structures that are capable of being supported by the lightest breeze. When they are destroyed after the exhibition an object the size of a blue whale collapses into a carrier bag.

Cybertecture Egg
Cybertecture is the revolutionary concept that provides a symbiotic relationship between the urban fabric and technology. Pioneered in 2001, Cybertecture forges both the hardware of the built environment and software systems and technologies from the micro to macro scales of development.The genesis of Cybertecture is in response to man’s progress into the 21st century, where working and living environments need to adapt and evolve to cope with the demands of modern working life. It plays an integral part in this evolution by providing awareness and connectivity via seamless integration of technology into the fabric of space.Cybertecture designs, from technology, products and interiors to systems, buildings and masterplans, allow flexibility and accessibility to inform, adapt, react, communicate, manipulate and control environments, whilst being sustainable and environmentally considered in application and context.Cybertecture embraces the future through continuous innovation and evolution of design and technology. It provides a myriad of solutions, all of which are diverse in individual application but holistic to the overall user environment, and always being integrated with innovation being pursued.

אדוארדו סרור
Boat
Festival Serrinha

Eduardo Srur, from São Paulo, started painting, but stood out in urban interventions. His works use the public space to draw attention to environmental issues and daily life in the metropolises, always with the objective of expanding the presence of art in society and bringing it closer to people’s lives. The city is your research laboratory for the practice of artistic experiences; the public and governments are his target. Srur’s set of works serves as a guide for poorly managed spaces and urban errors. Above all, they are conceptual criticisms that awaken awareness and look at a new aesthetic and understanding of the visual arts.

environmental occupations

Woven water

I am interested in chaos and complexity theories, where simple units form complex systems and if you follow those systems it somehow connects us to the universe. In Woven water: submarine landscape I want to create the illusion of the ocean and its currents. The piece is commenting on the environmental impact tourism has on animals and our planet. Although the feeling evoked in a viewer ‘immersed’ in the artwork is peace and tranquillity, the frozen and dry nature of these sea creatures hints at their ghostlike and melancholic end.