As Winter takes hold we continue with our ART AFTER DARK program on the Bunjil Place Outdoor Screen. For our June edition we are thrilled to be exhibiting Longing and Forgetting, a collaboration of dance, sound and video between Thecla Schiphorst, Philippe Pasquier and Matt Gingold.
Header Image: Thecla Schiphorst, Philippe Pasquier and Matt Gingold, Longing and Forgetting 2013 - 2023, still from digital video.
Bunjil Place Outdoor Screen
1 June – 28 June , 5.00 pm – 7.00 pm daily
Longing + Forgetting
Longing + Forgetting [LAF] explores the ways in which machines are ascribed intelligence, whilst humans are increasingly treated like machines. Combining physical and algorithmic choreography with architectural projection, the work questions the relationship between the inanimate and the animate: how are our bodies measured and controlled by the structures of technology? And what traces do our bodies leave on the structures around us?
Dance on film – indeed film itself – is deeply tied to the origins of ‘capturing’ and measuring human movement. As a precursor to motion pictures, the chronophotography of Étienne-Jules Marey, and more famously it’s use by Eadweard Muybridge to capture the walk cycle of people and animals, were entirely motivated by measuring the body and comparing the human with the non-human.
Film also offers the possibility of extending dance and augmenting human movement, as witnessed in the layering and echo of bodies in Norman McLaren’s Pas de deux, and the algorithmic re-animation of the walk cycle by physically rotating projectors in Dumb Type’s media installation work, Lovers (1994).
Longing + Forgetting combines these histories of optical control and filmic expansion of the body, extending it to the architectural scale. Both critiquing and using machine learning, we wanted to create a work that animated architectural dance through projection technologies, but also evoked an immediate, emotional and embodied response.
Here the walk cycles of Muybridge are extended to other modes of traversing space: crouching, crawling, inching, swinging across the facades of buildings. As bodies are doubled, tripled, quadrupled, endlessly searching for something that is never really found, these ghostly apparitions re-animate the facades they are projected onto.
Their jerky movements, bounding boxes, repetitive actions, aerie stares – and the motif of hugging empty space and falling backwards – are both representative of the technologies increasingly used to surveil our bodies and lives, and the underlying technologies used to algorithmically choreograph the performance itself. The sound is also modulated and triggered by these spatial movements, with a sonic pallet of sub-vocalisations – moans, groans, breathe – mixed with time-stretched, computer-generated phenomes that evoke sci-fi engine rooms; epic spaces filled with the sounds of human efforts.
Longing + Forgetting is a collaboration between media artist Matt Gingold, Philippe Pasquier, a world leading expert in machine learning and director of the Metacreation Lab, and Thecla Schiphort, a pioneer of digital choreography who co-created Lifeforms, the choreographic software used by Merce Cunningham.
Credits
Concept: Matt Gingold, Philippe Pasquier and Thecla Schiphorst
Video Design & Code: Matt Gingold
Sound Design: Philippe Pasquier
Choreography: Thecla Schiphorst
Set Design: Greg Snider
Associate Producer: Kristin Carlson
Lighting Design: Ben Rogalsky
Editing & Animation: Josh Burns & Matt Gingold
Code Development: Matt Gingold
Performers: Shannon Cuykendall, Matt Duncan, Sarah Fdili Alaouim, Meghan Goodman, Marcus Marshall, Joshua Ongcol, Priya Rajaratnam, Bladimir Santos Laffita, Nathalie Sanz, Cara Siu, Yawen Wang, and Martin Wong.
Matt Gingold
Matt Gingold is a transdisciplinary artist weaving together audiovisual installation, performance and critical theory. Their practice focuses on creating intimate experiences of – and with – technology. Gingold is inspired by critical research into science, technology, the ai/aes/ethics of digital cultures, trans/mad/ness and non/human complexity.
With a practice that cuts across installation and performance, their work explores our ‘enchanted’ relationships to technology against the inescapable history of science as (and of) racism, gender, psychiatric and class oppression.
Matt has been invited to create work for numerous major arts companies and festivals, including Ars Electronica (AT), Seoul Festival (KR), Club Transmediale (DE), ANTI Festival (FL), MONA, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, the National Portrait Gallery of Australia, Sydney Theatre Company and the Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney International Arts Festivals.
Their collaborative practice has received several Prix Ars Electronica awards in the categories of Interactive Art (2012) and Artificial Intelligence & Life Art (2023), and a Green Room Award for Best Video Design (2015). They have undertaken extended residencies at the Ars Electronica Futurelab (2012, AT), Symbiotica (2021/22 AU) and Werkleitz (2015, DE) alongside two research fellowships in the fields of creative computation and machine learning at Simon Fraser University (CA, 2012-2014), The Open University (UK, 2017-2018), and holds a Graduate Certificate of AI (Deakin University, 2020).
In 2023 they presented works at DADDA (WA), Frame Biennial (VIC), the Tokyo Biennial (JP) and undertook a 6-month residency at the Asia Culture Centre in South Korea exploring the sonic connections between labour automation and histories of human and machine listening.
Philippe Pasquier
Philippe Pasquier is a multidisciplinary media artist, a researcher, an educator, and a community builder based in Vancouver (Canada). He is a Professor at Simon Fraser University's School for Interactive Arts and Technology, where he directs the Metacreation Lab for Creative AI. He is pursuing a multidisciplinary research-creation program focused on generative systems and applied AI for creative tasks.
The Metacreation Lab artistic work has been shown in prominent venues on six continents, including at Ars Electronica (Austria), Centre Pompidou (France), Eastern Block (Canada), Earzoom festival (Slovenia), ISEA2012 (Turkey), ISEA2014 (Dubai), ISEA2016 (Honk Kong), ISEA2017 (Manizales), Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal (Canada), Mutek Festival (Canada), Plus One Gallery (USA), Space One (Korea), Sydney Biennale (Australia), Vooruit (Belgium), ZKM (Germany), ICST (Switzerland), and Akbank (Turkey).
Along with the Metacreation Lab fellows, and international collaborators, Philippe has co-authored over 200 peer-reviewed contributions presented in the most rigorous scientific venues. His MOOC class on Generative Art and Computational Creativity on the Kadenze platform is serving thousands, and he has preached an anthropocentric and instrumentalist approach to technological automation and augmentation in venues across the globe.
Philippe's projects are also finding industrial applications in the creative software industry at large and have gained support and recognition from more than 20 scientific or cultural institutions including the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), MITACS, the Canadian Council for the Arts (CCA), the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the Australian Council for the Arts, the French Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, and the European Community.
