FLUX presents outstanding screen based work that pushes the limits of creative practices in media arts by artists Heather Barnett, Jake Elwes, Karel Bata, Kristina Pulejkova, Paul Brown, Sean Clark, Tivon Rice and Zarah Hussain.
The FLUX moving image program will be screened the the theatre of the Royal College Kensington Campus on the Saturday 13th, Monday 15th and Wednesday 17th between 10am-5pm. The moving image program will also be show as part of the exhibition during the other days of the show.
The FLUX moving image program will be screened the the theatre of the Royal College Kensington Campus on the Saturday 13th, Monday 15th and Wednesday 17th between 10am-5pm. The moving image program will also be show as part of the exhibition during the other days of the show.
Heather Barnett
The Physarum Experiments, Study No.026: Intraspecies Fusion, 2018 Digital video What happens when a brainless intelligent organism meets a genetically similar self? Will the encounter be hostile, ambivalent or harmonious? In this time-lapse film the many-headed slime mould, Physarum polycephalum, reveals the complexity of its internal chemical communications. As it navigates its environment, the biocomputational inner workings are revealed through a pulsating oscillatory rhythm. https://heatherbarnett.co.uk/work/the-physarum-experiments/ @HeatherABarnett Jake Elwes
Cusp, 2019 2 min (extract from 13 minute loop)4K digital video with audio A familiar childhood location on the Essex marshes is reframed by inserting images randomly generated by a neural network (GAN*) into this tidal landscape. Initially trained on a photographic dataset, the machine proceeds to learn the embedded qualities of different marsh birds, in the process revealing forms that fluctuate between species, with unanticipated variations emerging without reference to human systems of classification. Birds have been actively selected from among the images conceived by the neural network, and then combined into a single animation that migrates from bird to bird, accompanied by a soundscape of artificially generated bird song. The final work records these generated forms as they are projected, using a portable perspex screen, across the mudflats in Landermere Creek. The work both augments and disrupts the natural ecology of the location, as flocks of native birds enter a visual dialogue with these artificial ones. *Neural networks are programming models which are biologically inspired and learn from observing data. GANs (generative adversarial networks) are neural networks which learn to mimic through generation and refinement.. https://www.jakeelwes.com/project-cusp.html @jakeelwes Karel Bata
Platform 6, October 31, 2018 HD, 3D video Platform is a series of films and installations created using a high speed camera modified to allow the synthesis later of stereo 3D. I have been developing this technique for a couple of years. The process (along with a few other tweaks) stretches time and transforms a mundane everyday situation into a mysterious world of living 3D statues, revealing within it hidden beauties inaccessible to those present at the time. Each piece is different in content and tone depending on what is happening on the day or evening in question. A hot summers’ day will yield something very different from Halloween. Choice of lens and exposure also add a ‘look’. Though the process is more than a little random (which is challenging and fun) it requires some skill and vision to mould into finished pieces later. To me the pieces suggest a transience to our lives whilst paradoxically hinting at something more enduring. https://karelbataartist.wordpress.com/tag/platform/ Kristina Pulejkova
The Lizard Gaze, 2018 Full HD, 05:10 min Two lizards offer their view on ancient Greek sculpture and the classical ideals of art. In Greek mythology, the birth of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of beauty is that she is born from the foam of a wave. Philosophers and artists of Ancient Greece have devoted their lives to capture the awe of the ideal human form through their respective mediums. 2800 years later, another sculpture of Aphrodite’s head emerges on a beach, waves crushing in the background. This one, however is built by a 3D printer. It is a replica, that had to go through a pipeline of processes from scanning the original artefact, to digitising the 3D form, to translating shape to code that then is read by the printer, which finally pieces the shape back into the physical world. The 3D printed Aphrodite as well as the scanned 3D model are not made out of marble like the original, but of plastic polymers. Unlike the impenetrable marble sculpture, these are porous shapes, husks that can be explored on the inside. With this new-found space inside objects due to digital processes, there is the question of how can we best explore and appreciate the insides of these pieces? Enter the Lizards. Here, the Lizards are seen as artistic digital disruptors, completely disregarding the value of harmonious forms, set by the classical standards of beauty. They have changed the sense of sight for the sense of touch and hearing. Swapped form for terrain. The film questions whether with the rise of digital processes of 3D printing and modelling, another way of seeing and appreciating art is needed. The Lizards are seen as symbols for the other – the non-human gaze on art. As the lizards are presented through 3D animation and robotic models, their gaze represents the emergence of machine vision and its impact on how we look at art in the future. http://kristinapulejkova.com/the-lizard-gaze-2018/ @tinapulejkova Tivon Rice
Environment Built for Absence (an unofficial/artificial sequel to J.G. Ballard's "High Rise"), 2018 HD video, computer generated text, sound, 17:45mins Beginning in early 2018, the demolition of the Netherland’s Central Bureau of Statistics office provided a type of slow cinema for railway passengers traveling between The Hague and Amsterdam. Over the following year, as the building was methodically deconstructed from the top down, I visited the site each month to document the gradual erosion. Using a drone and a digital mapping process, photogrammetry, I created an archive of virtual 3D models. As the building’s architecture and its inevitable collapse were reminiscent of English Author J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel High Rise, I further sought to accompany this scene with the voice of a machine learning system trained on the complete corpus of Ballard’s writing. This recurrent neural network generates texts that describe the materials, invisible bodies, and possible narratives residing within the broken grounds of the building. This A.I. speaks about the ghosts hiding in the cracks of urban spaces. Made possible by The Modern Body Festival (NL), Yukun Zhu, Google Artists and Machine Intelligence (US), Maxwell Forbes, and the University of Washington Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (US). Narration by Kevin Walton. http://www.tivonrice.com/absence.html |
Heather Barnett
Resilient Topographies #1: the peninsula of Paljassaare, 2007 Digital video A film by Heather Barnett (working with Physarum polycephalum) in collaboration with ecoLogicStudio.Commissioned for Anthropocene Islands, bio.Tallinn (Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2017). The true slime mould Physarum polycephalum is a nomadic information system. As it creeps across its terrain it makes continuous micro-decisions about surrounding atmospheric conditions and resource distribution. With no brain or sensory organs, this amorphous cellular mass computes the complexities of its environment through chemical signals. It is a highly adaptive biological barometer. In Heather Barnett’s film, made as an artistic interpretation of the modelling concepts of ecoLogicStudio, the slime mould interacts with the informational landscape of the peninsula of Paljassaare, Tallinn. It is a symbolic response to a reimagined landscape, the slime mould adapting to the changing topography. Small plasmodia fuse together to form a critical mass, thereby improving its chances of survival through collective cooperation. Pulsing and flowing across the landscape, we follow the superorganism as it computes efficient routes and calculates dynamic networks. This is a tale of adaptive resilience, of biological strategising in a changing world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRzRXUTkgP0 @HeatherABarnett Jake Elwes
dada da ta, 2016 2.5 min extract (from 20 minute loop) Digital Video with audio In 'dada da ta' over 50 hours of interviews have been sourced from YouTube then processed using the IBM Watson AI speech to text programme to transcribe the interviews and a custom-made computer programme to extract in time order the instances of the participants speaking in numbers and then remove the words from the source videos – leaving the interview’s chronology intact yet reduced to a stream of numbers: “One, one billion, one million, one hundred million, two billion, one, two hundred, ten thousand, eighteen thousand, two, two, two, ten, fifteen, nine thousand.” Elon Musk. https://www.jakeelwes.com/project-DaDaTa.html @jakeelwes Kristina Pulejkova
Red, 2018 Full HD, 05:59 min Red addresses the science fiction trope of terraforming through comparing humanity’s destructive environmental impact to reverse terraforming. Terraforming or Earth-shaping is the human ability to make other planets habitable by Earth-like life. Using 3D animation and satellite images of Mars as well as red areas from around our planet, the work reveals humans’ lack of responsibility for the loss of nature on Earth, while nurturing the imperialist fantasy of colonizing Mars, and making it our next home planet. A scientific theory called ‘Panspermia’ suggests that life on Earth came from Mars, carried on meteorites. The presence of an asteroid belt stretching between the two planets would make for a ‘microbial highway’. If the theory gets confirmed, then life would have already left the barren terrains of Mars and colonised the Earth billions of years ago. The work imagines a near future scenario and uses a red Pantone hue titled 2028CP to frame the work in the year 2028, four years after Elon Musk’s first manned Space X expedition had landed on Mars. Here, the red Pantone takes on a two-fold role: prophetic as well as a binding role point out the billion-year-old connection between the two planets. http://kristinapulejkova.com/red-2018/ @tinapulejkova Paul Brown
Four Dragons, 2012 5:00mins Extract of Generative Work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovIHS6Mzf_c Sean Clark
Circles, 2018 5:00mins Extract of Generative Work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6TgE-7m6H4 Zarah Hussain
The Beauty of Abstraction, 2005 3:34mins This animation was commissioned by Cartwright Hall in Bradford in 2005. I animated a traditional geometric pattern using flash and some basic computer code for the changing of the colours. http://zarahhussain.co.uk/index.php?page=30 |