The main exhibition of the FILE festival in Sao Paulo showcases some of the most exciting artistic productions in the field of electronic and digital arts. The sound installations were particularly good. So good that my little round-up features mostly sound pieces
Category Archive: installation
Fast, furious and enthusiastic images from Sao Paulo and the 11th edition of the FILE Electronic Language International Festival, i think the report will have to wait till i’m back in Europe
Enter the Casino art center and you will find video consoles, a trampoline, a pin-ball machine, games of dart, a billiard table, a playground, etc. Yet, every single work is playing with you rather than the opposite. You instantly loose every single game of Mortal Kombat, the ceiling of the room where a huge trampoline lies is far too low for you to even stand on your feet, the hula hoop is monopolized by a plastic cactus, the mohair bascketball net is 130 m long, fences deny any access to the playground, etc
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The sound exhibition ambitions to go beyond the auditory system and uses echoes, vibrations, timbres, resonances, waves to put the body of the visitor to the test
For Electrified02, the young artist decided to ‘hack’ the harbour of Ghent with a sound installation that turned twelve rusty, gigantic metal pipes stored there into didgeridoo-like sound cylinders
Austin Houldsworthhas installed a 3 tonnes and 4m-tall ‘Fossilisation Machine’ in Tatton Park, a historic estate in Cheshire, England. With Two Million & 1AD, the artist is trying to create a fossil using rudimentary, human-designed machines that would substitute and speed-up the natural processes. Houldsworth’s project starts with the attempt to petrify both a Tatton-grown pineapple and pheasant, and conclude when it is a human that ends up fossilised
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The works in the section called The Autonomous Automat: Beyond the Newtonian machine perform the same task over and over again. They are imbued with an almost neurotic behaviour that recalls some of J/G. Ballard’s dystopian short stories
This is probably the best exhibition of sound art i’ve ever seen. Musik für Barbaren und Klassiker breaks the traditional boundaries between concerts, sound installations, sculpture and music. The exhibition creates as such a place where the dynamic of exchange between performance and spatiality
Hello Process, by Marloes de Valk and Aymeric Mansoux, is part of Laboral’s new exhibition, “El proceso como paradigma – Process Becomes Paradigm.” The show reflects the shift in contemporary art and culture from finished, stable objects to processes. Flourishing beyond the limits imposed by the market, this art is in continuous flux and execution, that has a life of its own, that grows, changes and decays
The “Tropospheric Laboratory” allows insights into cloud cores and other matter of the apogee. The installation narrates the synthesis of clouds and shows varying conditions and combinations of art and science in the absence of weight. The “laboratory” is the gravimetric document of “Cloud Core Scanner” – an experiment and artistic project by Agnes Meyer-Brandis, carried out on board a German Aerospace Center research plane
Onion scanners, tv screens used as percussion instruments, storm inside a transparent cylinder, genetically modified blue carnations brought back to their original white, techy Japanese-style glockenspiel, etc.
Justin is pursuing responsive media in the physical world, exploring the intersection between media technology and architecture, in order to produce programmed and interactive spaces that act at the scale of the spectator’s body
Music take center stage in the exhibition but Playlist has also a very physical dimension that deals with the pleasure of manipulating and tweaking the devices and the aesthetic delectation in the vintage look of the game arcades and handheld consoles
An office is frozen in an arctic winter, plants propagate behind walls, the same person is repeatedly struck by lightning, money goes up in smoke, and a high frequency soundtrack plays only for the dogs…. CHASING NAPOLEON recognizes how a rise and fall can spread to reality itself. A wavering of interpretations, an inversion of values, and a paradox of situations… Here everything happens as if the world has slipped into a parallel universe
Calculating Space is a delicate sculpture made of sticks, strings and little plumbs. The fragility and transparency of its structure reveals as much as it hides the logic and functioning of the machine. Its units operate like a very basic artifical neural network
The installation echoes the artist’s concern for the relentless threats against Iran made by many countries in recent years. Sentences that include “attack Iran” are scavenged from Google News and spoken using a text-to-speech synthesizer. The voice is then picked up by a microphone, analyzed, and translated into rhythmically corresponding smoke rings from a quartet of smoke ring makers
Like paper projects designed in the absence of “real” architecture, installations offer architects another way to engage in issues critical to their practice. Direct experimentation with architecture’s material and social dimensions engages the public around issues in the built environment that concern them and expands the ways that architecture can participate in and impact people’s everyday lives
One of the most striking artworks at the Arsenale for me was Pascale Marthine Tayou’s installation ‘Human Being’ which fills in a gigantic room with a bric-a-brac of objects, furniture made of recycled material, colourful figures, videos and urban noises that re-creates the activity of that small village that we call our world
Positioned all over a wall at HMKV, the network of “ghost detectors” read the “auras” of the audience. Rumour has it that the bodies or even the moods of visitors walking around the installation might affect the sonic output
Going beyond the phenomenon of number stations, the exhibition explores forms of art that elude any wistful desire for fixed interpretations, they include mathematical encoding, the production of aurora borealis, archiving contact lenses, seismic sensors, the disappearance of hanged men and mountain summits
Rather than answering questions–such as, How can technological advances be controlled? On what ethical bases can its purposes be chosen? Who is entitled to decide on the ultimate mission of machines? Can machines destroy us?–this installation, on the contrary, is about reformulating those modern philosophical questions through the use of images associated with the popular culture of science fiction
Given my notoriously campy taste in music, you will be relieved to know that i’m going to carefully avoid reviewing the music side of Barcelona’s International Festival of Advanced Music and Multimedia Art. What’s left then? Fashion, a bit of advertising and the SonarMàtica exhibition
At no cost at all, the young artists have at their disposal a huge array of material that they can grab, move, superimpose, and organize onto temporary installations and sculptures
The exhibition is set under the aegis of Nikola Tesla and its name refers to a village in Alaska. Little more than 200 inhabitants live in Gakona. There’s a service station, a small school, a post office, a couple of diners and a scientific research base: the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program
Postopolis Day 5 was the day i realized once more that many people in the audience should have been on the programme too. It was the day i fell in love with stripped trousers and the day i decided all those hours spent on the roof of The Standard had not been that cold after all
Los Angeles-based Jiacong “jay” Yan completed his degree at the cradle of young talents that is UCLA Design|Media Arts Department. Fresh from UCLA, Jay started exhibiting his interactive installations and videos in galleries in the U.S., Asia and Europe as well. This is my attempt to extract a few words from a very laconic and clever artist
Fernando Gutiérrez draws images pulled from the mass-media in a sketchy manner on acetate and later superimposes them to others. His piece innovates the traditional technique of drawing from within, while redefining it and positioning it in the present by the use of new techniques and supports
I’ll have to put a stop soon-ish to this avalanche of posts about ARCO. But there’s still a couple of stories i owe you. On top of the list is a report on Expanded Box, ARCO’s section that specializes in new media art and video art. I’ll focus on the former. Obviously
Castellon’s Contemporary Art Space has recently opened a delightful exhibition that re-invents architectural space through the most intangible strategies: mist, light, colour and sound
An uncanny installation currently on view at LABoral uses the strategies of the Electronic Voice Phenomenon, voice and pattern recognition, and face tracking to generate voices, and images from apparently closed, silent and empty spaces and systems
Cinema Sim is not an exhibition about cinema, but rather about the idea and concept of cinema and how contemporary artists imbue their works with creative and aesthetic principles that hark back to the cinematic language and its means of expression
Robert Kusmirowski’s UHER.C is a classical, archaic sculpture that has gone berserk: it is both the nightmarish and joyous side of machine
Cultural Resistance, Psychological Exploration and Material Intervention are the key themes of an exhibition that the famous designer duo El Último Grito has curated at the LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial
Lessons learned from a media art exhibition mounted inside a ‘traditional’ art museum
84 giant pieces that had to be suspended from the tower’s ceiling by a total of 140 cables -some of them as thin as 3 mm- form Splash, a sculpture which freezes in solid form the kinetic properties of water hitting a surface
The bold and unescapable installation, inspired by a controversial enterprise of a Gazprom initiative to build a direct gas pipe from Russia to Germany, highlights a series of political issues that impact architecture
8 projects developed over 2 weeks in Mexico D.F. use hardware and software tools to create prototypes that explore the relations between machines and humour/laughter
Vicente Guallart’s contribution to the biennale is a research project that explores the potential of information technology to reorganize the habitability of the world. From a single small object to the planet itself
Matthew Ritchie’s structure is ‘a ruin from the future’. The project combines science, art, architecture, music and film into the first semasiographic building, an architectural language that directly expresses its content through its structure
The U.S. are all over the newspapers because of the upcoming presidential elections. Yet, most of us know very little of the art and culture of the area that lies between the East Coast and the West Coast. And what we think we might know of it is often just a bunch of cliches. The aim of the exhibition is to offer a more subtle picture of the ‘Heartland’ but it is also to questions traditional definitions of cultural centers and peripheries