Black-collared Starling 烏領椋鳥 (Hong Kong)

An-Ting e Ian Gallagher

FILE SÃO PAULO 2025: SYNTHETIKA – Art and Technology – Shorts Films AI
Electronic Language International Festival

Black-collared Starling 烏領椋鳥 (Hong Kong) – Taiwan | United Kingdom

An-Ting blends bird song recordings, experimental electronic music, soundscapes, and driving beats. Ian Gallagher employs cutting-edge artificial intelligence technologies to document the duo’s experiences, with live visuals that react in real time to An-Ting’s music.

BIO

An-Ting 安婷 is a versatile artist who moves between piano, electronic compositions, and various other forms of artistic expression. She transforms her life experiences into musical creations, exploring the relationship between humanity, nature, and the spiritual universe.

Ian Gallagher studied Theoretical Physics in Edinburgh before completing a PhD in Complex Systems at the University of Manchester. He has been deeply involved in Manchester’s music scene, working as a sound engineer, show producer, and performer on stage, collaborating with artists such as Daniel Johnston and Neva Dinova.

This work was supported by the British Council and the organization Cryptic Glasgow.

Unreal

Lawrence’s accompanying soundtrack is a delicate lattice; complex, opaque and entirely synthetic. Diva’s yearning vocals, sung in English and Mandarin, cast classical melodies over billowing, intricately arranged songs. Her voice is created with a Vocaloid voice synthesiser, giving it an uncanny feeling. Her confessional lyrics draw empathy from the listener, as she reveals her fears of becoming an irrelevant influencer, obsolete in a machine-driven age.

The lead single ‘ unreal’ is launched with a harrowing video adapted from the film.

50Myconnect

Myconnect “offers the experience of a symbiosis of connection between humans, nature and technology. The spectator becomes an actor by lying in a capsule, equipped with a helmet and body sensors measuring the variations in his rhythm This data is modulated and transmitted to a closed universe of mycelium culture (white mushroom) to produce alterations using electrical resistance. These variations in turn generate signals, sent back to the person in the form of vibration, sound and light. Each cycle can be different depending on whether the experience is stimulating or calming. This type of perceptual exchange enabled by technology reveals how much the human being is an integral part of the complex network that links him to his environment.

بوب ويلسون
鲍伯·威尔逊
בוב וילסון
ロバート·ウィルソン
밥 윌슨
Боб Уилсон
VOOM PORTRAITS
ISABELLA ROSSELLINI

…Robert Wilson does not portray only famous personalities, such as Isabella Rossellini, Brad Pitt, or Caroline von Monaco, but also unknown people and animals who have until now escaped artistic representation, such as a street dancer or a frog. In precisely these stagings, Wilson’s complex visual and sound languages reach their climax, namely, a celebration of empathy: anonymous people become divas, neutral beings achieve cult status. Wilson’s video portraits thus have a cognitive function. Within the history of portrait painting and photographic portraits, especially staged photography, his staged portraits present not only a pinnacle of accomplishment, but also, first and foremost, a climax that is groundbreaking.

Silk
The installation is tracking the real time changes in the market activities related to cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Litecoin – independent and uncontrolled by any state peer-to-peer payment systems. Constantly changing currency rate of of Bitcoin against major world currencies is influencing the strain of strings in installation and the way the picks are hitting them. The robotic system of the artwork is directed by a computer algorithm: influenced by dynamic changes of data, the installation sounds like a complex sound instrument.

High Tide
For her show High Tide, which was most recently exhibited at the Centre Pompidou, Humeau sculptured a collection of futuristic marine mammals and set about imagining what they might sound like if they could recount complex narratives. With mechanical clicks and whistles, similar to those made by whales and dolphins, Humeau’s creations tell of a great flood – an apocalyptic deluge that sparked the birth of their culture. “These floods”, she explains, “might be the consequence of climate change and rising oceans and the air becoming toxic. Maybe the great flood is actually us. As humans, we are the flood.”

Simple Harmonic Motion study #5d

Behind the different incarnations, at the heart of the project lies the concept of creating complexity from simplicity. Through the use of custom software, a number of ‘agents’ are created and assigned a simple behavior. Each follow an extremely simple repetitive pattern of movement and sound. On their own, each agent is relatively monotonous, basic and mechanical. The repetition duration, motion and sound of each agent is precisely tuned such that the collection of all agents moving together, creates a unique, evolving and complex composition – both visually and sonically. The seed of inspiration comes from the motion of pendulums and other fundamental oscillatory phenomena which exhibit simple harmonic motion. The project extracts and amplifies these complex patterns, both through visual abstraction and emphasis; and also through sonifying the phenomena and creating musical patterns driven by the same equations that dictate the behaviour.