Ars Electronica 2020 the world’s largest festival for Art, Technology and Society simply wants to know what to do now? For the first time they are asking this difficult question not only in Linz but at 120 locations on all continents. Covid has not stopped the festival, rather it has inspired a new evolution. The Ars Electronica Festival “Kepler’s Gardens, is a global journey mapping the ‘new’ world.
The Ars Electronica Garden Los Angeles is Telluric Vibrations, a festival with an exhibition, workshops and symposium based at the UCLA Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Gardens as well as in virtual venues like Mozilla Hubs, Zoom and YouTube.
Dates: September 9 – 13 2020
Harvestworks partners with UCLA Art Sci Center to present our Artists Studios on Governors Island during Telluric Vibrations on September 9, 2020.
Schedule for Harvestworks Artists Studio Presentations on September 9
3:00 – 3:30 EDT / 12:00-12:30pm PST / 21:00-21:30 CET : LIVE
Luciferins by Katherine Bennett
Influenced by the cultural shifts that technology creates, this series of fiber installations imagines a future dystopia warped by technology. The surreptitious collection of personal data has led to a humanity controlled by the machine. Luciferins is one project in the series. Luciferins—inspired by bioluminescent fish and the plethora of invisible network traffic that surrounds us—is an interactive environment of fiber structures, filling a 15 x 15 foot space. As viewers move through the environment, the fiber structures closest illuminate with graphical animations. After a short period of time in one location, a portal opens to show network communication packets, which are invisibly traversing the space. Sonic field recordings play in a 7-channel sound system. Sound is interlaced with shortwave radio recordings. The portal opens only for a few seconds before returning the room to its normal state. Luciferins makes our digital networks perceptible when they are often imperceptible. Luciferins’ becomes visible by bodily movement. It gives viewers a sense of the invisible activity that surrounds them—just as a swimmer would make a dwelling of sea sparkle appear by swimming through it. Luciferins seeks to not only be an experience, but to open up the conversation about control and privacy in one of our last frontiers.
3:30 – 4 pm EDT / 12:30-1:00pm PST / 21:30-22:00 CET : LIVE
Autonomous Prism by Jakob Dwight
The tour of Jakob Dwight’s studio will look at his most recent progress on his Autonomous Prism collection of thousands of algorithm-derived abstract “paintings” and his iOS N’CHI smartphone app. The most recent iteration of the app is standalone mico-curriculum heavily informed by futures studies and foresight education that aims to give educators, their young users and students a way to investigate an increasingly challenging future, as well as devise viable strategies for dealing with that through sci-fi world-building simulation. N’CHI chronicles the long held interaction of several hominid species on a newly discovered exoplanet. N’CHI Users will take up Nation and Group avatars to navigate a continuum of challenges thrown at them by their hostile new world reported in news feeds and interactive maps, and fight for their nation’s survival through the capture of various forms of energy and the strategic macromanagement of national resources. Players can bring their avatars and nations to life through the poetic display of their artifacts and cultural capital in curated and scheduled live and in-app art installations, exhibitions, and rituals.
4:00 – 4:30 pm EDT / 1:00-1:30pm PST / 22:00-22:30 CET : LIVE
Brain Works by Muyassar Kurdi
Brain Works is an interdisciplinary piece which includes large scale paintings, sound (voice and viola), and dance. In recent times the project has been stripped down to a more minimal approach– one which demands urgency with the body even more. Brain Works is centered on memory, visual rhythm, subtlety, and gravity while honoring the futuristic and the ancient; it aims to unify disciplines by connecting movement, color, and sound. Current collaborators include Joanna Mattrey on viola and dancer Miriam Parker who will perform outside on governors island this fall.
4:30 – 5 pm EDT / 1:30-2:00pm PST / 22:30-23:00 CET : LIVE
Audio Chandelier by Dafna Naphtali
AUDIO CHANDELIER: POLYÉLAIOS, a multi-channel interactive sound installation by Dafna Naphtali, featuring a kinetic audio speaker sculpture created in collaboration with metalsmith/designer Ayala Naphtali. Individual “grains” of nearly static sound are dispersed via the speaker sculpture in an immersive sonic experience, as undulating audio “pixels” illuminate and refract moments in time, eliciting reminiscent soundscapes of environmental / electronic fields of crickets, unruly flowing brooks, rain-rhythms, bird song and unruly percussion. This multitude of isolated sounds form a new sonic whole, ranging from turbulence to stillness. In Audio Chandelier works since 2010, Naphtali has created both performances and fixed media installations. This new interactive installation was created during a 2019 artist residency at Harvestworks Digital Media Arts, along with a first-time collaboration with the metalsmith/designer Ayala Naphtali.
5:00 – 5:30 pm EDT / 2:00-2:30pm PST / 23:00-23:30 CET : LIVE
Light as a Feather by Charlotte Mundy
A brief musical excerpt and demonstration of the simple robotic mechanisms used in the multi-sensory composition Light as a Feather. This work links visual, tactile and olfactory ideas with a fixed musical composition. An invisible female choir whispers, laughs, growls and sings from the corners, at times causing winds to blow, lights to glow and scented mist to be excreted from the walls. Colored paper strips and growing vines cascade from the walls, dancing and crinkling in the unearthly wind. This project is inspired by the medieval innovator and abbess Hildegard of Bingen, whose work argues our physical senses, spirit and intellect are all closely connected and interdependent. The artist will briefly describe her work in philosophy, music and science, and speak about how all of her work stemmed from her care for the community of nuns that she lived with, and for the ecosystem in which her convent was situated. Questions the artist is asking are: How can we combine already-available technologies in new, playful, strange, heartfelt ways? How can we create a sense of connection and playfulness in an installation with no live human performers?
5:30 – 6 pm EDT / 2:30-3:00pm PST / 23:30-0:00 CET : LIVE
New Work by Joseph Morris and Alexandra Goldberg
At the Harvestworks residency on Governors Island, Alexandra Goldberg and Joseph Morris will collaborate to create new work that uses art and technology to make human phenomena visible. By creating novel interactions with the body and technology, they’re working to explore themes of introspection, subjectivity, and connection between people and spaces. Both are artists with multidisciplinary creative practices that overlap in creating work that engages with immateriality, presence, and material experience. Goldberg’s recent Tactile Performances combine movement, textile construction, and writing to make internal human phenomena of mourning, trauma, and transformation visible. Through an algorithmic light installation, Morris’s new work Space within Spaces exposes and makes visible to viewers infinitesimally small distances between subatomic particles. With their time on the island, the artist duo will combine their practices to create work that probes our relationship with technology and emotion.
6:00 – 6:30pm EDT / 3:00-3:30pm PST / 0:00-0:30 CET : LIVE
SCREAMNOW: Inside/Out by Valérie Hallier
Inspired by the French Medieval “crieur public”, ScreamNow is the first public screaming booth of an upcoming series. The artwork takes a fundamental yet repressed human expression to generate visuals. ScreamNow : Inside/Out reflects our current social distancing and deeply transformative times. The new set up expands in space with a studio, adding the concept of Inside/Out to the project’s original purpose of offering a sanctuary for people to scream their heart out. The screams generated from inside are released outside, shielded by the open booth structure. Recorded via a microphone in the booth, the screams are processed inside of the studio. Flower petals picked outside are covering the walls of the studio where the recorded screams are transformed into visuals and projected back in and out of the booth. The screamer can instantly visualize the power generated by her voice. Hallier’s work explores how control and its release color the dynamics between the natural, the human and the technological realms. Her multimedia work aims to break away from the patriarchal hegemony of vision as our primary sense. By stimulating all senses, the artist’s goal is to offer spaces where meaningful experiences can be created and new scenarii on being can be imagined.
More about the schedule for Telluric Vibrations can be found on their website in the SCHEDULE.