Until 11 August 2019

Without us being aware, the body continuously adjusts itself to the gravitational pull. Artist Teun Vonk created an installation that lets you experience gravity anew. Immerse yourself in the transforming space of A Sense of Gravity and explore how your body reacts to the visual, tactile and bodily sensations. As you set foot on solid ground afterwards, your sense of gravity changes in a spectacular yet subtle way.

Teun Vonk asked himself: How can I challenge the perception of gravity?
With A Sense of Gravity, artist Teun Vonk created an installation that lets you experience gravity anew. For two years, Vonk researched how our human bodies perceive and react to gravity. Without us being aware, the body continuously adjusts itself to the gravitational pull and keeps itself in balance. This process seems effortless and self-evident. 

Teun Vonk asked himself: How can I challenge the logic of gravity, of the bodily perception of gravity, with a machine or installation? Can I expand the boundaries of our everyday perception of gravity?

Lying on his back on an elevated, floating platform in his studio, Vonk reflected on gravity and weightlessness. He realized that our bodies anticipate and adjust to what you see around you and the surface you walk on. It seems self-evident, especially since we spend most of our everyday life in interior spaces, with levelled floors. The artist set out to create a space that is not static, but that changes in size and shape. This interferes with the logic of spatial perception, ‘waking up’ your body’s sensory system and influencing gravity perception. Vonk experimented with visual and bodily sensations, taking his own physical reactions as a starting point. In close collaboration with designers and programmers, the artist developed the prototype for this immersive installation.

This technological, futuristic looking machine harbours a dynamic, soft space that invites the viewer to submit to a very personal physical experience. The entire body’s sensibility is engaged, an awareness that changes the viewer’s sense of gravity in a spectacular yet subtle way.

A Sense of Gravity is developed with support of CBK Rotterdam, Mondriaan Fonds, V2_lab for the unstable media and STRP.

Teun Vonk
FILE

Until 28 July 2019

Nemo Observatorium 02002 - Styrofoam particles are blown around in a big transparent PVC cylinder by 5 strong fans. Visitors can take place one by one on the armchair in the middle of the whirlpool or observe from the outside. On the chair, in the eye of the storm it is calm and safe.Spectacular at first sight, this installation turns out to mesmerise as a kind of meditation machine. One can follow the seemingly cyclic patterns, focus on the different layers of 3D pixels or listen to its waterfall sound. One could call it a training device, challenging the visitor to stay centred and find peace in a fast changing environment. After a while the space seems to expand and one's sense of time deludes.

Shrink 01995 - Two large, transparent plastic sheets and a device that gradually sucks the air out from between them leave the body vacuum-packed and vertically suspended. The transparent tube inserted between the two surfaces allows the person inside the installation to regulate the flow of air. As a result of the increasing pressure between the plastic sheets, the surface of the packed body gradually freezes into multiple micro-folds. For the duration of the performance the person inside moves slowly and changes positions, which vary from an almost embryonic position to one resembling a crucified body.
At IOMA Beijing there will be 5 Shrinks and the bodies of 5 performers.

The Archaeologies are remains of the creation process of various projects. Lawrence Malstaf constructs nearly all projects from A to Z his own studio. This requires a lot of technical research often through a challenging process of trial and error. Yet it is precisely in these errors he finds inspiration and ideas for new projects. 
With the care of an archaeologist he presents artefacts and traces of these errors, objects found on the floor and in the corners of his studio and he exhibits these artefacts as a pseudo-archaeological documentation. Each cabinet documents a different installation presented in a video. 
Next to exhibitions, several installations have been integrated in stage-performances. The text fragments on the drawings are quotes from these theatre- and dance performances. 

Curated by Chen Yunbing

Lawrence Malstaf

The future may be dark, but it comes with arresting visuals and powerful sounds: a synesthetic theater shock in the time of climate change.

Few in recent years have created disconcerting stage landscapes with as strong images as Kris Verdonck. The Belgian visual artist and theater maker has often been interested in existential questions and post-apocalyptic scenarios (at Kampnagel most recently in 2008). In his new intense and contemplative theater experience, he tackles the question of what it means to exist while awaiting an impending ecological catastrophe. What if nature becomes a nightmare and the quiet becomes endless? When we are actually gone? This work is thus a perfect sensory counterpart to our focus on climate-change-related cultures and ideologies.

In the transit zone between visual art and theater, installation and performance, dance and architecture, Verdonck embarks on a synesthetic trip to the end of the world with, among others, long-time ROSAS dancer Mark Lorimer, performer Ula Sickle and noise-cellist Leila Bordreuil. Like ghosts, they populate a magicbox-like theater landscape of impressive visual power – and, in our era of climate dystopia, remind us of the frailty of art and of human existence. A synesthetic theater shock in the time of climate change.

Kampnagel
Kris Verdonck/A Two Dogs Company
ICK Amsterdam

A huge boulder hangs from the ceiling. As soon as the sun shines, it starts to rotate on its own axis. DETAIL is an installation by the Belgian theatre artist Kris Verdonck, presented for the first time at this year’s Kunstfest. A closed cycle of fascinating, but only apparent simplicity. In the tension between poetry and technology, weight and movement, mass and energy, the installation makes reference to fundamental questions of life. The rotating boulder thus becomes a symbol for acceleration and exhaustion, progress and ephemerality. Walter Gropius predicted that human ability to alter nature could become so enormous, that what we gain through technological advances might no longer be in proportion to what we could lose.

Kunstfest Weimar
Kris Verdonck

The 20th century witnessed a radical transformation of the image through technical media. Beginning with the scandal of photography, which consisted of images generating themselves, the media changed the overall character of art.

The 30th anniversary of the ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe is the occasion to present the most fascinating works of a collection, which is considered one of the most important media art collections in the world. With more than 500 objects, the exhibition shows for the first time the diversity of the arts in the face of changing media, including photography, graphics, painting and sculpture as well as computer-based works, film, holography, kinetic art, Op Art, sound art, visual poetry and video art.

Through its perspective spanning all genres and media, the exhibition »Writing the History of the Future« opens up a new perspective on the art of the 20th and 21st centuries on more than 6,000 square meters.

tele-present water  - 2011 draws information from the intensity and movement of the water in a remote location. The wave intensity and frequency collected from the buoy is scaled and transferred to the mechanical grid structure, resulting in a simulation of the physical effects caused by the movement of water from this distant unknown location. This work physically replicates a remote experience and makes observation of the activity of an isolated object, otherwise lost at sea, possible through direct communication

ZKM | Center for Art and Media
David Bowen

Until 29 September 2019

winds - Landscape and weather have long shared an intimate connection with the arts.  Each of the works here is a landscape: captured, interpreted and presented through a range of technologies. The four artists in this exhibition have taken, as their material process, the movement of wind through physical space & time. They explore how our perception and understanding of landscape can be interpreted through technology.  

tele-present wind - 2019 - This installation consists of a series of 84 x/y tilting mechanical devices connected to thin dried plant stalks installed in a gallery and a dried plant stalk connected to an accelerometer installed outdoors. When the wind blows it causes the stalk outside to sway. The accelerometer detects this movement transmitting the motion to the grouping of devices in the gallery. Therefore the stalks in the gallery space move in real-time and in unison based on the movement of the wind outside.

New Media Gallery
David Bowen

Until 2 October 2019

The exhibition 'Artificial Creators: inspired by nature' brings together the creations of five artists inspired by nature that have been modified and co-produced by AI. Their work questions how we work with machines to establish new forms of relationship beyond the utilitarian and explores innovative ways of expression that produce new ways of seeing. 
Curated by Blanca Pérez Ferrer, supported by Falmouth University.

tele-present wind - 2018 - This installation consists of a series of 126 x/y tilting mechanical devices connected to thin dried plant stalks installed in a gallery and a dried plant stalk connected to an accelerometer installed outdoors. When the wind blows it causes the stalk outside to sway. The accelerometer detects this movement transmitting the motion to the grouping of devices in the gallery. Therefore the stalks in the gallery space move in real-time and in unison based on the movement of the wind outside.

5twigs - 2017 - This installation consists of 5 found twigs that were three dimensionally scanned and then printed in translucent plastic. Each original twig was then mounted in opposition to its artificial counterpart.

EDEN PROJECT
David Bowen

Until 30 November 2019

With rare exceptions, art objects are created to be experienced visually. The Other Four is an exhibition experience that negates the visually dominant art experience hierarchy by presenting artwork designed specifically to engage the other four senses. Visitors to The Other Four will be able to touch the other side of the world, listen to conversations in the walls of the museum, feel and react to life-like cellular signals through handheld mechanical devices, and listen to unique sounds emitted by each planet in our solar system. Curated by John Schuerman.

David Bowen, the other side
Once every week his installation creates a three-dimensional carving of the current ocean surface conditions and cloud formations on the opposite side of the earth from the location of the gallery space. Using satellite data from the Nasa Earth Observing Information System and the GPS coordinates of the gallery, the installation obtains a current image of an approximately six hundred square mile area on the opposite side of the earth from its location. Using custom software this image is converted into a three-dimensional model which is then carved in pink foam by a CNC machine hanging upside down in the gallery space. Every week a new carving is created and displayed on the gallery walls adjacent to the installation. Viewers are encouraged to touch the foam carvings giving them the ability to touch the opposite side of the earth during the exhibition.

Plains Art Museum
David Bowen