ReCollection

Weidi Zhang & Rodger Luo

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

ReCollection – China | United States

ReCollection is an interactive installation that uses artificial intelligence to construct synthetic collective visual memories from natural language input. The work blurs the line between memory and imagination through experimental visualizations and AI systems, prompting reflection on how narratives of memory are shaped by emerging technologies.

BIO

Weidi Zhang is a new media artist and designer based in Los Angeles and Phoenix. She is an Assistant Professor of Immersive Experience Design at Arizona State University. Her interdisciplinary research explores speculative assemblages at the intersection of immersive media, experimental data visualization, and interactive AI art. Dr. Jieliang (Rodger) Luo is the CEO and Head of Research at Minus AI, a research-driven startup focused on leveraging AI technology to empower the creative industry. He holds a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Technology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has previously served as a Senior Principal Research Scientist at the Autodesk AI Lab.

Kelly Luck
Strangeland 1 (excerpt)

FILE 2024 | Aesthetic Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
Kelly Luck – Strangeland 1 (excerpt) – United States

From a surrealist point of view, the main attraction of generative AI, for the artist, is its lack of memory. At any given moment, she only has the current frame and instructions on how to proceed, similar to free association in dreams. This work is part of a series of long-term environments designed to immerse the viewer in a constantly evolving and never-ending landscape, inviting relaxation and engagement.

Bio

As part of the first generation to grow up around computers, Kelly Luck quickly became fascinated with the creative possibilities of this new technology. Her journey has ranged from pixel art and graphic ‘hacks’ to the 90s demoscene, 2D and later 3D graphics, and now the modern tools of digital art. With the emergence of generative AI, it endlessly explores how technology continues to blur the line between imagination and reality.

ad/ab Atom

Kurokawa then analyses, filters and distorts this data into an artistic rendering of an atomic space in which the laws of quantum mechanics would theoretically be visible. “The term ‘ad’ in the title means ‘to/toward’ etymologically as a prefix in words of Latin origin and ‘ab’ means ‘away from'”. he explains. “It is recombinant of neologism ‘adatom/abatom’ which means ‘to atom/from atom’, where the laws governing nature blur“.

PLEXUS
Aurélien Bory is a Toulouse-based choreographer working at the intersection of dance, circus and visual art. In Plexus, he encloses the Japanese dancer Kaori Ito in a forest of tensioned vertical cables. It’s as if she’s in a transparent cuboid cage. We can see her, but her image is blurred by the shimmer of Arno Veyrat’s lighting as it moves across the cables. Ito strains against these confines, writhing, flailing and hurling herself against the cables. Every sound is hugely amplified, so with her every movement we are assailed by a high-tensile jangling and groaning. At intervals she subjects her environment to furious challenge, racing backwards and forwards within the limited inner space so that the cage rocks on its axis. At other times she positions herself between the cables so that they bear her weight, and hangs there like an exhausted insect, faintly articulating her limbs.

OCULUS
OCULUS: A Spatial Experience Based on the Interaction of Architecture and Media Arts
An audio-visual performance based on a selection of HAS Architects works interpreted by NOHlab and Buşra Tunç
A selection of HAS Architects’ projects is presented in a performance that blends digital technology with spatial design, forming a synthesis between the past and the present within the magical atmosphere of the historical Single- Dome Hall of the Imperial Arsenal.
Taking the Single-Dome Hall as the focal point, the exhibition uses contemporary interpretations to alternate between old and new, whole and fragment, real and virtual, balanced and unbalanced states. Notions of time and space become blurred and the exhibition surrounds the visitors, offering them an unusual spatial experience.

Flow Through

“Flow Through takes as its departure point Bahar Yürükoğlu’s experiences during her travels to the Arctic Circle in 2015, both in the summertime, when the sun doesn’t set, and during the winter months, when darkness prevails. In the exhibition, the artist creates fictional spaces based on the dualities she observed in the Arctic region; blurring the boundaries between presence and absence, past and future, nature and civilisation, as well as cyclical movements and inevitable transformations, these installations, photographs and videos test the viewer’s perceptive capacities, and demand that the dichotomy between the subject and the object is set aside”. Duygu Demir

The Search of The Glow
Sprinkling the mist while attaching the tree trunk. Interweaving a scenery with the forest which is inside the deep mountain. Sight with clarity or blur. Light stream lead the mysterious mist to venture the forest. Found a light object under the crowd of trees which is constructed by blend woods. Wood sticks are overlapping and winding as a hollow pinecone. Its construction and pattern go well with the line of the treetop. It’s a whispering between human and the nature.

Electric Chair

The distinctive work of Sam Buxton is dominated by his innovative use of advanced materials and technologies. From his immensely popular MIKRO series (miniature fold-up sculptures, laser cut into thin strips of stainless steel through an acid etching process) to his explorations concerning interactive intelligent surfaces on the familiar objects around us, his work has continually managed to blur the lines between art, science and design.Through his work, which has regularly involved relatively common objects ranging from business cards to a dining table, Buxton has demonstrated an ability to see potential in what others take for granted. His on-going efforts in developing objects that can communicate, display information and react to the actions of the user, demonstrate his commitment to investigating the delicate relationship between the human body and its environment. Buxton’s fusion of art and science has resulted in a highly innovative and unique range of personal designs, many of which, have utilized the latest, most advanced materials and technologies available.

OCULUS
Oculus was a site-specific installation designed for Istanbul Design Biennale in 2016, and exhibited in Tophane-i Amire. A selection of HAS Architects’ projects is presented in a performance that blends digital technology with spatial design, forming a synthesis between the past and the present within the magical atmosphere of the historical Single-Dome Hall of the Imperial Arsenal. Taking the Single-Dome Hall as the focal point, the exhibition uses contemporary interpretations to alternate between old and new, whole and fragment, real and virtual, balanced and unbalanced states. Notions of time and space become blurred and the exhibition surrounds the visitors, offering them an unusual spatial experience.

2000 Cliparts

Oliver Laric’s work seeks to parse the productive potential of the copy, the bootleg, and the remix, and examine their role in the formation of both historic and contemporary image cultures. This process is intimately tied to his intuitive, idiosyncratic brand of scholarship, which he presents through an ongoing series of fugue-like expository videos (Versions, 2009—present), and further elaborates through his appropriated object works, videos, and sculptures, all of which are densely conceptually layered and often make use of recondite, technologically sophisticated methods of fabrication. Straddling the liminal spaces between the past and the present, the authentic and the inauthentic, the original and its subsequent reflections and reconfigurations, Laric’s work collapses categories and blurs boundaries in a manner that calls into question their very existence.

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.

Synaptic Bliss
Begun in 2003, the series of works collectively known as “SYNAPTIC BLISS” explore ideas of a digital consciousness that allows for the simultaneous perception of multiple perspectives and scales, as well as the blurring of the distinctions between the body and its environment, the exterior and the interior, and the organic and the artificial. The works in this ongoing series include a variety of media, ranging from architectural installations, to video projections and environments, as well as digital prints and hand-woven rugs.