The designers will be talking about the aesthetics of scientific experiments but also about the human capabilities in sensing future events. They’ve explored this slightly debatable topic with a series of experiments inspired by the experimental evidence for the existence of physiological precognition, depicted the Sensing the Future paper written by Daryl J. Bem a social psychologist and professor emeritus at Cornell University.
Category Archive: installation
Conducted and presented as a scientific experiment TNM challenges the participants to consider the outrageous proposition of algorithmic prejudice. The responses range from fear and outrage to laughter and ridicule, and finally to the alarming realization that we are set on a path towards wide systemic prejudice ironically initiated by its victim, Turing
I had an exchange of emails with Mario De Vega to talk about Thermal, a performance in which he uses microwave ovenss to alter the molecular composition of different materials. The work also uses custom-built hardware to sonify the electromagnetic activity produced by the overheating of the content of the ovens
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HeHe took the invitation to turn FACT (the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology in Liverpool) inside out literally. Their new piece used the exhibition space to extract gas from the ground underneath the gallery and suggest that in the future we might want to bypass big energy companies and extract our own fossil fuels ourselves in our back garden
Adam Brown is a conceptual artist working with scientists to create art pieces that use robotics, molecular chemistry, living systems and emerging technologies. He recently demonstrated how bacteria can, over a period of one week, digest the toxins of gold chloride and spit out nuggets of 24-karat gold
Sascha Pohflepp is an artist and designer interested in the myths and realities shaped by science and technology. During the radio show, we will be talking space exploration, and more specifically space gardening but we will also talk science fiction, complex science and impossible projects
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In the context of omnipresent telecommunications surveillance, “The Pirate Cinema” makes visible the invisible activity and geography of peer-to-peer file sharing. The project is presented as a control room that reflects P2P exchanges happening in real time on networks using BitTorrent protocol. The installation produces an improvised and syncopated arrangement of files currently in exchange
Today on ResonanceFM, Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead will be talking about how to handle and archive materials found on the web, the absence of any image documenting war in certain parts of the world, spam and other jolly subjects
In-Potentia exposes, in the most limpid and absurd way, how science is blurring what we are used to regard as clear-cut categories, such as where life begins and ends or what constitutes a person. Or in Guy Ben-Ary’s words:
What is the potential for artists employing bio-technologies to address, and modify, boundaries surrounding understandings of life, death and person-hood? And what exactly does it mean culturally, artistically, ontologically, philosophically, politically and ethically to make a living biological brain from human foreskin cells?
Drones / Birds: Princes of Ubiquity taps into the debate of an increasing autonomous technology, connected to machinic vision, the post-human and the New Aesthetic. Core to the exhibition are digital artifacts and instances of the computational or digital in nature. Birds as objects reflecting our contemporary relation with technology
The participating artists not only play with distortions of the “real”, but also pioneer new ways to interact with their work. The formal exploration of new interfaces is as much part of their preoccupation, as is the content of their work, and the kind of commentary on the current state of reality we live in
Sassolino’s works have danger, mechanical tension, darkness and make the spectator vaguely uneasy (“Is this going to break? Will i be hurt? Shouldn’t it take one step back?”) In fact, the artist also explained that the beams vibrate but they hold the pressure. The system actually gets in motion when a visitor gets closer to the work. And that’s when, as the artist puts it, a kind of Sadomasochistic moment emerges: the visitor would like to see some dramatic collapse of the wooden structure but doesn’t dare to get too close to it
From atmospheric installations to intangible sculptures that you can move around – and even through – visitors can experience light in all of its spatial and sensory forms. Individual artworks explore different aspects of light such as colour, duration, intensity and projection, as well as perceptual phenomena. They also use light to address architecture, science and film, and do so using a variety of lighting technologies
Today i’m stuck in Turin, it’s been snowing all day long and i’m not complaining but i don’t feel like going out to see exhibitions. I’m thus going to point you to an online exhibition over at dARTboard, a digital art space that the Vilcek Foundation created to ‘celebrate the accomplishments of foreign-born artists living in the United States and working in the realm of digital art.’ This year’s featured artist is Marc Böhlen who’s showing two works that investigate the relationship between people and automated systems
Three large-scale installations that experiment with scientific phenomena and pay homage to Nikola Tesla. The works can be experienced without mediation but each of them also conveys several layers of meanings and readings, whether you’re intrigued by the technical description or by the sheer beauty of the sparks, lightening bolts, and sonic properties of the works
FACT gallery has just opened WInter Sparks, The exhibition features large-scale installations by artists who use scientific experiments as a raw material. The figure at the core of the work exhibited is the one of the engineer whose inventions and ingenuity shaped the 20th century technology: Nikola Tesla. There are only three installations in the show, each of them large-scale, impressive and attempting to make scientific processes visible. I’m going to single out Evolving Spark Network and write about the others in my next post
Hertz makes robots controlled by cockroaches, video game systems that you can literally drive around, he gives talks about Zombie Media and has just crafted a magazine about critical technical practice and critically-engaged maker culture that puts us all (us being media people) to shame
This week, i’m talking with architect, artist and curator Ruairi Glynn about cybernetics, interactivity, puppetry and machines with a mind of their own
This year, even GAMERZ, an art&tech festival with a name that promises tis visitors much joy and entertainment, didn’t want to turn its back to the times of fear and uncertainty we are living. The festival was as playful as ever but with a slightly darker tone and with a selection of artists whose works question the worrying changes at work in society
LABoral’s latest show is all about performance and installation art but they are never dissociated from the role that the public takes in the exhibition space. Implicitly or explicitly. Physically or psychologically
By reinventing an obsolete low-tech sound wave generator in this all-digital age, Bzzz ! serves as a commentary on the history of technology and a tribute to unprocessed, unsampled analog sound : in a word, the raw sound of electricity
Five Thousand Generations of Birds was an exhibition located in the archipelago of Fitjar, on the West coast of Norway, – a landscape consisting of 381 islands, isles and reefs.
Curators Silje Linge Haaland and Andrea Bakketun assigned an island to each participating artist with the mission to produce a temporary and site specific work
Technoviking became a Youtube hit in 2007, accumulating tens of millions of views across the original upload and the countless reposts, remixes, take-offs and fan films that followed. Recreating Technoviking as an airfilled avatar that will inflate and deflate according to the buzz it generates on Twitter (use #technoviking), Meme Junkyard asks us to consider what it means to ‘go viral’ and, be it a cat playing piano or David After Dentist, what becomes of an overnight YouTube sensation months or years after the fact
Time machines, false memory, earthly landscape, moon rock gardening, flying saucers, lunacy, galactic adventures and the occasional rabbit. That’s the world sketched by Sue Corke and Hagen Betzwieser. Roughly speaking, Sue is a printmaker and Hagen is a ‘New New Media’ artist but together they are more than the sum of their parts, they are We Colonised the Moon.
Interview express with Chris Salter about n-Polytope. The light and sound environment combining cutting edge lighting, lasers, sound, sensing and artificial intelligence software technologies was inspired by composer Iannis Xenakis’s radical 1960s-1970s works named “Polytopes”. As large scale, immersive architectural environments that made the indeterminate and chaotic patterns and behavior of natural phenomena experiential through the temporal dynamics of light and the spatial dynamics of sound, the polytopes still to this day are relatively unknown but were far ahead of their time: a major landmark in the history of the audio-visual arts and performative architectural practice
This year’s edition of the FutureEverything festival in Manchester brought a well-known and much discussed phenomenon to the fore: participatory culture. From Wikileaks to Iceland’s crowd-sourced constitution, to the Arab Spring, participatory technologies have demonstrated their powerful political potential. The world of culture is harnessing the same connected energies with projects that involve citizen scientists cataloging celestial bodies in the Milky Way galaxy, crowd-curated photo exhibitions and of course the many projects created by artists and designers who either directly use collective action or bring it under a new light
An architectural Time Machine by architect Heechan Park explores how to create an architectural time-based event.
As the machines blow vapour rings that double as ephemeral scent zones, the public not only experience a visual performance of smoke vortices travelling through space, but they also perceive scents that are temporally spatialised and visualised
Ollie Palmer’s Ant Ballet is a three-year research project into control systems, paranoia and dancing insects, and has culminated in the world’s first ballet to exclusively feature ants. The projected insects is part of the FutureEverybody Art Exhibition at the 1830 Warehouse in Manchester
One of the works on show at the AV Festival this month is the extremely long-term project that sees Agnes Meyer-Brandis training a flock of young geese to fly to the moon. The whole training started last Spring and according to her schedule, the birds will go on their first unmanned flight to the satellite in 2024
A wire brush spins around randomly, threatening your open-toe sandals. A motion activated vacuum pump sucks out the air from a sealed gallery space: the longer the viewers remain inside, the less air for them to breathe. A cobble stone is rotating on a rope. The sole purpose of that kettle is to spread red acrylic paint on your shoes. An electric fence used to control livestock on farms criss-crosses the path that leads to an art gallery or the bar. Elsewhere a randomly activated tripwire awaits visitors…
It took me longer than most to discover the work of Anri Sala but once i looked into it, i started seeing his work everywhere. A few months ago, i was invited to the Absolut Art Award in Stockholm to see some of his videos, attend a screening with popcorn of 1395 Days without Red and interview the artist. A few weeks after, Anri Sala had a solo show at the Serpentine Gallery in London. The show is now closed. I’ve waited far too long to write about Anri Sala’s work
I like GAMERZ because it’s eclectic, because it makes me discover plenty of artists i had never heard about before but also because it reminds me that festivals should be left more often in the hands of artists. They take risk, follow their whim, trust other artists barely out of the academy, and care little about sticking to genres and formulas
This year, the organizers and curators at STRP had the admirable and timely idea of setting up an exhibition that brought the spotlight on the history of Dutch art and technology. The show was both a celebration of the talent of media artists in The Netherlands but also a gesture of support towards the Dutch new media institutes (namely V2_, Waag Society, STEIM, Mediamatic, WORM, Submarine Channel, NIMk) whose survival is threatened by drastic (and short-sighted) governmental cuts
Delusions of Self-Immolation, aka ‘the suicide machine’, was a built by Erik Hobijn in the 1990s to set members of the public on fire. Literally
The exhibition is divided into 4 sections that sometimes intertwine and overlap. I’ve already explored the chapter about artists in the laboratory. Here’s my notes on the artists who leave the lab to explore nature and on those who are looking for alternative uses of existing technology
A tornado recreated inside an exhibition room, an exercise in Health & Safety violation and a mock-up that illustrate a physics theory that questions the laws of gravity inherited from Newton
For Z33, design collective Numen / For Use left the gaffer tape in Vienna and Zagreb and used nets to turn the whole exhibition space into a giant playground that can be explored horizontally as well as vertically. The idea might look incredibly simple but the result evokes floating architecture and flexible “landscape” as much as jungle gym
To understand how mysterious jumping fish can survive in a puddle with trucks driving through it, Mateusz Herczka recreated a South American puddle in an unheated Belgian space. The huge cube of glass and metal contains a reconstruction of a puddle found in the middle of a road in Guyana, with a truck wheel rolling through it. His work is documented in an exhibition which recently opened in Antwerp
Le Cadavre Exquis, a digital re-interpretation of the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse and the parlour game Consequences. In the interactive installation designed by Brendan Oliver and Brendan Randall, members of the public are invited to record a short stop-frame animation as a response piece to a previously recorded submission. The texual narrative is then created by online participants
The work of Kris Verdonck focuses on the confusion of man in an estranged world due to technological development. The tension between man and machine, between living species and dead materials creates an atmosphere of Unheimlichkeit or eeriness. This ‘current state of the world’ – with its environmental problems, ecological disasters and wars – is the central theme through his oeuvre