Photography – Radical Atoms

V2 Summer Sessions

Martin Hieslmair — Wed, 03 Aug 2016 07:59:44 +0000

Summer Sessions are short-term residencies for young and emerging artists, organized by an international network of cultural organizations. Each summer the partners in this network for talent development collaborate to offer professional production support and expert feedback to artists in the realization of a new artwork or design. Local talents from each partner’s geographic region are scouted and selected for a residency abroad, where they are offered highly productive atmospheres and specific kinds of expertise at one of the international partners in the international network. This collaboration not only results in the development of a large number of new projects in a relatively short period, but also provides the participating emerging artists with international experience that helps them jumpstart their art and design practice.

The Summer Sessions pop-up exhibition at the Festival Ars Electronica shows a selection of outcomes realized through this international exchange of emerging talents. While the pop-up exhibition illustrates the kind of results that this pressure-cooker residency format results in, a live event will highlight the participants’ experiences abroad and the effects these had on their early careers. In doing so, V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media, the initiating partner of the Summer Sessions network, intends to inform ambitious early-career artist about the opportunities that the international network for talent development offers and is reaching out to other cultural organizations with an invitation to join the network. Furthermore, the pop-up exhibition introduces the Ars Electronica Festival audience to a selection of promising emerging Dutch artists who participated in the network. The event will close with an informal drink to continue the conversation on the opportunities for young artists and cultural organizations within the Summer Sessions network for talent development.

This event will also form a meeting point to discuss how to strategically further develop these international opportunities for emerging and young professionals with the network’s past and present partners. The partners in the 2016 edition of the Summer Sessions include Chronus Art Center (China), the National University of Tres de Febrero (Argentina), the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (Taiwan), PNEK (Norway), iMAL (Belgium), Arquivo 237 (Portugal), Kitchen Budapest (Hungary), Metamedia Association (Croatia), Interactive Media Design Lab, NAIST (Japan) and V2_ Institut for the Unstable Media (The Netherlands). This program is made possible by the generous support of the Creative Industries Fund (NL).

A Hipster Bar

Max Dovey (UK)
A Hipster Bar uses a customer image-recognition application to only admit people who are recognized as hipsters by a computer algorithm. The doors to this bar will only open if you are at least 90 percent hipster, making it the world’s first automated hipster bar. By sourcing thousands of images of hipsters (from Instagram) Max Dovey has attempted to train an algorithm to recognize the visual characteristics of a hipster.

Union Scope

Fako Berkers (NL)
Union Scope finds iconic images on the Internet from different European cultures, about topics that concern Europeans today. It displays these images by country inside a map of the European Union, revealing the cultural differences and similarities that exist within Europe around topics that concern European citizens. Searching for images online it is easy to forget that the images one finds are significantly informed by the culture one was raised in. Union Scope provides the opportunity to explore this cultural bias in image searches, revealing different cultural views on European topics.

Woof & Wow

Gaspard Bos (NL), Charlot Boonekamp (NL)
Woof & Wow develops techniques for transforming plastic bottles into woven products to be used by arts and crafts people or industrial designers. The aim of Woof & Wow is to include the world’s most disadvantaged communities in the process of design and production of products from waste, as they are moreover the ones that pick up the rest of the world’s trash. At the Festival Ars Electronica, Woof & Wow will exhibit a stool designed by Icelandic designer Marta Sif in collaboration with an arts and crafts community in Peru. The exhibition will include the custom-made tools that were used to produce it, as well as a swing made from the same material.

The Physical Mind

Teun Vonk (NL)
The Physical Mind is Vonk’s attempt to let participants experience the relation between their physical and mental states by applying physical pressure to the body. The installation consists of two inflatable objects between which a participant lies down, then to be lifted up and gently squeezed between the curves of the two objects. While the lifting creates an unstable feeling, this stressful sensation then soon contrasts with the secure feeling of being gently squeezed between two soft objects. Besides this experience for the participants, the installation also evokes feelings of empathy among bystanders who watch participants undergoing the experience.

Face Cartography

Vanessa Graf — Mon, 01 Aug 2016 15:31:08 +0000

Daniel Boschung

The composed mega-portraits are disturbing. Face Cartography is the Swiss publicity and news photographer Daniel Boschung’s latest project. He maps faces. Instead of taking pictures himself, he removes himself from the process by delegating the work to an ABB industrial robot controlled by specially customized software. The standardized portraits make a surprising impact. Each picture consists of about 600 single shots comprising 900 million pixels. The result is hype-realistic. Stubble turns into a trunk, a wrinkle into a canyon, a nostril into a cavern. These facial landscapes are dismaying—why? Emotions are completely absent. They appear only briefly, while macro photography takes half an hour. The human subject has to remain motionless while being photographed by the robot.

Photosynthegraph

Vanessa Graf — Mon, 01 Aug 2016 14:42:34 +0000

Yoko Shimizu

Photosynthegraph by Yoko Shimizu combines photosynthesis and photography to print graphic images on plants.

In the Photosynthegraph installation, a botanical lab is installed in the exhibition space. Films are attached to plant leaves, allowing chloroplasts to create starch based on the graphic patterns. The leaves are then chemically treated to visualize the graphics created by the chloroplasts. The entire development process will be demonstrated in the artist performance.

Photosynthesis is one of the most important chemical reactions in the history of our planet. It is the source of oxygen and energy, and the foundation of our food chain. Humans have utilized photosynthesis for food and industrial activities. Now we are taking one step further to expand the possibility to art and design.

The images created by the natural process are delicate and beautiful, showing us that there are still infinite possibilities for technological advance and artistic expression on this planet.

Deep Space 8K: SEEC Photography

katjani — Mon, 01 Aug 2016 10:42:12 +0000

SEEC Photography is a science-art project that investigates how light moves across objects. This happens at the speed of light and within a few nanoseconds (1 nanosecond = 0.000000001 seconds). We use a gated camera, which allows for exposure times as short as 0.1 nanoseconds to record the motion of ultra-short laser pulses across subjects that represent traditional photographic themes, like the portrait, the still life or a horse’s head—in reference to Eadweard Muybridge’s pioneering work in stop-motion photography. The main character of these archetypical forms of photography is not the subject in front of the camera but light itself, traveling across the subject, being scattered and reflected off of surfaces. We literally watch light (photo-) in the process of writing (-graphy) an image.

Not recommended for epileptics.