Artists Profile

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Ulf Langheinrich (DEU), Granular Synthesis Modell 5, Video Installation

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Ulf Langheinrich (1960, Wolfen, Germany) is a visual artist and composer. His work is mainly concerned with non-narrative environments and performances focusing on a specific approach to time, space and body. Since 2016 he is the Artistic Director of the International Festival for computer based art CynetArt in Dresden, Germany.

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MODELL 5, premiered in a first version 1994 at the ICC London, has been described as one of the most beautiful experiments in bringing digital video to a theatrical setting. Using a technique derived from the principals of the sound design technique called granular synthesis but applied to the rather fat grains of single video frames (visual content and sound), GRANSYN manages to evoke from a few expressions on the face of the performer Akemi Takeya, a frenzied exploration  of  the alter ego within touching distance.

 

Boedi Widjaja (SGP) – Palimpsest, 2012, video and sound installation

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Boedi Widjaja (b. 1975, Solo City, Indonesia) lives and works in Singapore. Trained as an architect, he spent his young adulthood in graphic design, and turned to art in his thirties. His works often connect diverse conceptual references through his own lived experience of migration, culture and aesthetics; and investigate into concerns regarding diaspora, hybridity, travel and isolation. The artistic outcomes are processual and conceptually-charged, and embrace multiple mediums ranging from drawings to installations, sound and live art.

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First performed in digital art festival Bains Numeriques #7, 'Palimpsest' was made in response to the notion of digital technology as exterior to human consciousness. The work pulls digital technology into the artist's interiority, his corporeality is primitively manifested in the kinetic sound performance. Invested into the electronica music is the presence of raw human material; an iterative loop between onstage visual artist and offstage musician takes place. The 40-min performance was conceived after both artists travelled to Fort Canning Hill, a historic hill in Singapore's city centre, that has seen repeated building and demolition in a short span of time. 'Palimpsest' begins with an almost bare stage, and a screen that stretches across its length. Boedi Widjaja's movements and actions onstage trigger sounds processed into the music real-time by David Letellier offstage. Widjaja's physicality alters Letellier's composition and is in turn moved by the music. Widjaja scatters rocks onto the floor; unfurls a 10m roll of paper, rests it on top the rocks, then whips and punctures it with a soaked cloth; and using the cloth paints on the broken paper. This is the first 20 minutes. Second half of the performance sees Widjaja approaching the screen with inked sticks. He hits the screen, drags the stick across, and pounds repeatedly, painting the screen totally black.

 

Cynthia Delaney Suwito (IDN), Knitting Noodles, Noodle Installation

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Cynthia Delaney Suwito, born in 1993, Indonesia, is a practicing artist based in Singapore. She recently completed her Bachelors in Fine Arts (first class honors) at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore.

Cynthia sees the city and the life we live everyday as a source of inspiration. Exploring time, mobility and daily rituals, she creates artworks in the form of conceptual installations. She believes that many of the menial things we do every day are results of complicated city systems. Systems that were created to make life easier. But as a result of the fast pace of society, they are often overlooked and people perform those tasks without any form of consciousness.

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Slowly working with a package of instant noodle, this performance knits each thread of instant noodle one at a time. Instant noodles are a delicacy that is consumed almost in every country of the world and therefore instant noodles are an object that can represent the worlds culture; its preference for instant and comfortable things regardless of its health values. The act of knitting instant noodles aims to contrast the concept of precious time. By using this object that is supposed to make things faster and easier, it actually makes the process of knitting slower and more difficult. Creating a slow and tense movement of knitting, viewers are invited to slow down as they carefully watch the slow knitting grow.
 

Valerio Vincenzo (ITA), Investigation #6 – storage, photo and video installation

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Valerio Vincenzo was born in Naples, Italy in 1973. He lives and works between Paris and Milan. Before becoming a photographer in 2004, he worked as a strategy consultant in France and then as administrator for the French NGO Action Against Hunger in Indonesia. He currently collaborates with the international press while leading a number of artistic projects.

 

Digital Verifications, a journey inside digital photography.

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What is a digital picture?

Valerio Vincenzos activity is to document the world. But how can he document the world if he doesn't know how a digital camera works, which is the tool he uses to document the world? What legitimacy does he have as a photographer when he uses a sophisticated tool that for him is a black box in which he has to believe? Under these conditions, how can he claim to represent reality, to be a witness to his era?
He had the urgency to divert his attention from the world and focus it on the digital camera. In doing so, he adopted a conceptual approach similar to the one that the Italian photographer Ugo Mulas used between 1969 and 1972 on an analogue, film-based camera with his verifications.

 

At the MEDIA ART GLOBALE 2019, Valerio Vincenzo will present “Investigation #6 – storage” a photo and video installation of a medical check of a broken hard drive.

 

Eduardo Kac (BRA), The Edunia, 2009

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Eduardo Kac is internationally recognized for his telepresence and bio art. A pioneer of telecommunications art in the pre-Web '80s, Eduardo Kac (pronounced "Katz") emerged in the early '90s with his radical works combining telerobotics and living organisms. His visionary integration of robotics, biology and networking explores the fluidity of subject positions in the post-digital world. At the dawn of the twenty-first century Kac opened a new direction for contemporary art with his "transgenic art"--first with a groundbreaking piece entitled Genesis (1999), which included an "artist's gene" he invented, and then with "GFP Bunny," his fluorescent rabbit called Alba (2000).

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The central work in the "Natural History of the Enigma" series is a plantimal, a new life form I created and that I call "Edunia", a genetically engineered flower that is a hybrid of myself and Petunia. The Edunia expresses my DNA exclusively in its red veins.

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The new flower is a Petunia strain that I invented and produced through molecular biology. It is not found in nature. The Edunia has red veins on light pink petals and a gene of mine is expressed on every cell of its red veins, i.e., my gene produces a protein in the veins only. The gene was isolated and sequenced from my blood. The petal pink background, against which the red veins are seen, is evocative of my own pinkish white skin tone. The result of this molecular manipulation is a bloom that creates the living image of human blood rushing through the veins of a flower.

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The gene I selected is responsible for the identification of foreign bodies. In this work, it is precisely that which identifies and rejects the other that I integrate into the other, thus creating a new kind of self that is partially flower and partially human.

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“Natural History of the Enigma" is a reflection on the contiguity of life between different species. It uses the redness of blood and the redness of the plant's veins as a marker of our shared heritage in the wider spectrum of life. By combining human and plant DNA in a new flower, in a visually dramatic way (red expression of human DNA in the flower veins), I bring forth the realization of the contiguity of life between different species.

 

XXLAB (IDN), SOYA C(O)U(L)TURE

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XXLab is a female collective focusing on art, science and free technology facilitated and supported by HONF Foundation from Yogyakarta, Indonesia. They came from various backgrounds such artists, designers and programmers. Soya couture is one of their new researches and experiments. They are researching and developing an alternative energy, food and biomaterial from soya liquid waste using programmable bacteria and tissue culture to turn soya liquid waste in to edible cellulose, biofuel and bio leather. This soya liquid waste could be an alternative to reduce pollution and food, textile and energy consumption in the future.

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SOYA C(O)U(L)TURE is a research based product developed by XXLab. The research aim was to grow and to program an alternative energy, food and bio material from soya liquid waste using bacteria and tissue culture. Tofu and tempeh made from soya beans are common food for Indonesian people, healthy food that contains a lot of protein and is made through a biological process. Indonesia has a lot of tofu and tempeh productions from small scale (home industry) to large scale (factory). These productions produce liquid waste that pollutes and poisons the water and rivers. XXLAB’s project aims to reduce the water pollution and to help the poverty, by creating and grow edible cellulose, biofuel and bio leather that could be used as an alternative source for energy, food and textile, as well to reduce the water pollution. This project is produced by a low cost, open and organic material, and could develop in to various valuable products in any home kitchen with DIY (Do It Yourself) or DIWO (Do It With Others) methods. This could also become an alternative for a sustainable economic to increase or produce an income for women in the low income area.

 

Julian «Togar» Abraham (IDN), Cak IIINNNGGG, 2019, Sound Installation

 

Julian Abraham “Togar” (b. Medan, IDN, 1987) is an artist, musician and pseudo scientist. Words like generative, manipulating, dematerialization are often used to identify his work. Connecting one thing to another, expressed in complex algorithms, have enabled his experiences in how art, the environment, science and technology relate to one another to provide new tools to educate and engage both the artist and the society.

Perhaps the most prominent and recurrent concern in Togar’s practice are the physical, technological and social-historical aspects of sound; present both as medium and issue. Stemming from Togar’s body of work surrounding sound, Cak IIINNNGGG comes out of a journey in search of how sounds are being exercised and practiced within gallery spaces in Indonesia throughout time. Cak IIINNNGGG is a culmination point for Togar in catching up with the late artist Danarto’s practices. Danarto was an eccentric artist by all means. As a writer, he caused quite a stir both in the literary and the art scene in Indonesia due to his concretism, pantheism and, at times, sufism approaches. One of his works that Togar first got in touch with was a short story titled Cak Ngung (1979), which confused and intrigued him at the same time.

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Consisting of a mixture of ‘readable’ narrative text, several drawings that somehow mimic sound effects, drawings of futuristic objects and arrangements of syllables much like concrete poetries, this short story— as Danarto labels it—was first published in a literary weekly and later on in the monograph of Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia (Indonesia New Art Movement). The short story Cak Ngung came in form of what we call a mixture between scenario-writing and concrete poetry as it was designed pretty precisely for each sizes of its publishing media. In the story, the repeated sound ‘cak’ came from the Balinese chant as part of the touristic Kecak dance. It seems like there was a group practicing that dance not far from the home cook restaurant in which the main character in the story was hanging out with his German friend. Their conversation was around future technology as well as electronic music. The second part of the work title, ‘IIINNNGGG’, came from Togar’s solo exhibition title at Cemeti – Institute for Arts and Society in December 2018. The title is meant to be pronounced in a prolonged manner—hence the repetition of each letters. Like the suffix ‘ing’ that can be added to so many verbs, it also indicates its presence and continuity. It indicates an ongoing something or a task in action.

 

Jakob K. Steensen, Aquaphobia, VR and video installation

Jakob Kudsk Steensen is a Danish artist and art director based in New York City. He is concerned with how imagination, technology and ecology intertwine. In a practice that emphasizes field work and collaboration, Kudsk Steensen develops VR and video installations that invite viewers into new ecological realities. He collaborates with NGOs, researchers, residencies, and artists across disciplines, and ventures on intense excursions where he collects organic material to convert into digital worlds through a variety of digital processes. Inspired by ecology-oriented science fiction and conversations with biologists and ethnographers, his projects are ultimately virtual simulations inhabited by mythical beings existing in radical ecological scenarios.

 

AQUAPHOBIA uses VR to connect inner psychological landscapes with exterior eco-systems. The work is inspired by psychological studies of the treatment of aqua phobia – fear of water- as an entry point to transform perceptions of our relationship to future water levels and climates. You follow a water microbe guiding you through five stages of a breakup story, mixed with references to five steps patients treated for fear of water go through, and five parts of a virtual replica of Louis Valentino Jr. Park and Pier in Redhook, Brooklyn, from subterranean mud tunnels to a bridge extending over future rising waters.

The virtual landscape combines red-clay materials with pre-urban plant species in Brooklyn and futuristic settings. The virtual landscape is developed from satellite images and soil and rock types Jakob Kudsk Steensen collected and photographed in his studio, later to be used as digital textures in the virtual world of AQUAPHOBIA. While journeying through the landscape, mud, water, subterranean infrastructures, roots and plants intertwine with one another to form a symbiotic landscape the person visiting the virtual simulation of AQUAPHOBIA experiences.

While travelling through the landscape, an alien morphing aquatic entity follows you around and emit scuba diving sounds and recites a poem, which tell a breakup story between the landscape and its virtual visitor. Ultimately, AQUAPHOBIA uses VR to mix past and future geological periods, and the work personifies a landscape through a break-up story.

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Budi Ubrux, Indonesia Kaya 2019, Augmented Reality, supported by WIR Group

Budi Haryono, better known as Ubrux, rose to fame when he created his iconic language made with newspaper headlines, which he finely hand-copied covering the entirety of his images on canvas to express poignant thoughts and comments.

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Utterly creepy and profoundly unsettling, the haunting images likening the mummy world, warn and criticize, initially repression and corruption, and later news media that tend to increasingly overwhelm and manipulate real facts, ultimately causing human intellect to malfunction. Extending this language to foreign newspaper language — and not limiting himself to canvas, his iconic language also put an accent on sculptures, furniture and installations.

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Born in 1968 in Bantul, Yogyakarta, the dropout art school initially worked making banners. After a two-year stint in Switzerland as a billboard painter, he held a solo show in Baden, Switzerland. Back in Indonesia, his painting Immacologi won the prestigious Philip Morris Art Award prize (2000). It featured newspaper wrapped heads as a metaphor of image-making desires.

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In MAG 19 Ubrux collaboration with WIR group presents a new way to enjoy art through augmented reality. Along with the shift from classic newspaper to online media, Ubrux`s artworks could represent the wave of the media art movement in the 21st century. MAG proudly presents two of Ubrux’s artworks: the CAR and the Nasi Bungkus for the first time in augmented reality.

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Farhanaz Rupaidha (IDN), Deconstruction Reconstruction: Babel

Farhanaz Rupaidha an artist from Bekasi who lives and works in Indonesia. She has presented her works in various venues and events in Indonesia, Sweden, Japan, Spain, Italy, China, Malaysia, Thailand and the USA. She mainly works with video installation and algorithmic/generative art through video channels amalgamation and the combination of the interactivity of image and sounds.

Farhanaz Rupaidha participates in the Media Art Globale 2019 by presenting her newest exploration within the infinite cycle of technology through the concept of code visualization. Her work entitled «Deconstruction Reconstruction: Babel» is a series of 6 android apps that encourage people to interact with it by tapping or dragging the mobile device's screen to let the code visualize in a certain form. The idea of this work is the beautification of codes. The downloading and collecting activities are also coherent with a current phenomenon in Indonesia where people like to download digital objects from the internet in order to manipulate them into what they believe to be the truth.

 

Kinara Darma (IDN), Being Content, Interactive Installation, 2019

Kinara Darma is a collaborative art project that works around narrative art. They are not bound to a single medium and currently explore different media to deliver their messages. Kinara Darma often talks about perspectives and human behavior towards a certain issue.

For MAG 2019, Kinara Darma will explore their concern on social media versus human behavior through an interactive installation.

Social media is changing us; it is shaping our genetics. Social media sites are now being used by one-third of the entire world. Brain scans show that the regions of the brain that correlate with substance addiction are at play with internet dependence. Both addictions cause conflict within the social regions of the brain that control emotional processing, attention span and decision making. Nowadays, social media culture has shaped our generation into becoming a full shared source of content generation. As simple as sharing their daily life, this social media generation’s view is torn between what it is important to share, what they want to be look up as, what people want to see in them and what affects them (or others) after sharing their life to public. Some says that happiness is not real excepts when it is shared, but then looking at a life sharing habits on social media leads to a question: are you really content after sharing stuff on social media or you just being a content to other person swiping up your feed? In this artwork, we want to share a story about sharing life to public, just like in social media. Then we will invite people to interact with the installation. We want them to look at the story closer and let them find a message hidden behind the story by their physical appearance.

 

Reza Zefanya Mulia (IDN), The Work of Art in the Age of Instastory, Glazed stoneware, ready-mades, multichannel video, 2019

Reza Zefanya Mulia is a contemporary artist and social media specialist who graduated from Visual Arts Education major at State University of Jakarta. The main focus of his practice lies on art appreciation issues, specifically in Indonesia. He often works with a three dimensional approach such as ceramic and ready-mades, he also explores the possibility to use texts in his artistic practice.

 

Continuing his project on art appreciation issues in Indonesia’s art scene, the further investigation of Reza Zefanya Mulia is to see how art appreciation would work in the age of 15-second content sharing on social media. This particular idea seeks the possibility on how an artwork could be appreciated properly when it has been developed into a short-term digital content that might only last for 24 hours in a person’s social media platform. Furthermore, this also raises the question whether such an act could do justice for both, the exhibited artworks and the artists themselves. This installation brings two contrasting objects—a set of ceramic sculptures that are built entirely by hand and a set of readymade gadgets that show the latest technology development in content sharing. This piece shows the differences between something carefully made and something instant. The visuals of the gadgets show a distorted version of the sculptures, appropriating the gesture of gallery visitors who would alter the artworks into their own creation for social media contents.

 

Hysteria (IDN), Dissonant, 2019, Augmented Reality based video

Hysteria is an artist collective that is concerned with issues of cities, young people, and communities. Hysteria emphasizes artistic production based on the results of daily knowledge research in the community. Its vision is to foster a good cultural ecosystem for that. Besides artistic work Hysteria also acts as a community laboratory that has the tendency to work across disciplines, favoring the freshness of ideas, as well as small practices that are latent and intensive. It not only always acts between the poles of art and non-art negotiations, Hysteria also emphasizes art work that is part of social interventions to promote a better civilization. Hysteria has been active since 2004 pioneering networking hubs of artists and urban activists on a national and international scale. At present Hysteria is also developing the Peka Kota platform, that wants to encourage citizens getting involved in city planning and formation.

 

Being present in the midst of new communities with different cultures, different traditions, different city contours, and different histories, not only makes alienation of non-local communities, but creates gaps and barriers with local communities. Getting to know the background of a new culture is also a real step to get someone closer to his new environment, so that there is no feeling of marginalization for certain groups.

An artwork is one way to build interpersonal interactions to get to know each other, socialize with each other. In this case we are trying to bring the rite of watching films in Indonesia, called "Layar Tancap", to the public as a medium to start a conversation. Indonesia as a developing country has a quite different visual appreciation rite, a rite that develops from city to city and becomes a past tradition that is always relevant to be discussed.

Layar Tancap is a concept of screening a film in one village after the other and the screening is usually held on an open field. The film is fired from a projector machine in a car towards a white screen stretched with bamboo as support. This screening is normally carried out at a time when local residents hold certain ceremonies or certain events, and the Layar Tancap becomes a free for all entertainment.

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Besides togetherness, the screening is a liquid medium for outsiders to join, sit, fall asleep, and stand up, in any position, as comfortable as possible. In our project this time, Augmented Reality also becomes the transmitter of visual content that will talk a lot about how people feel about their city, Heidelberg. The Layar Tancap concept above has been the main inspiration in this project to use Augmented Reality as a visual media transmitter.

 

Notanlab (Agus Novianto) (IDN), Kikoeru

Agus Novianto is an interaction designer, creative technologist and media artist, with extensive experience of technical and visual directing for numerous projects and events. He is strongly inspired and influenced by Japan’s pop-arts culture and technology. His artwork creations have been featured in various arts events and festivals. He interest in technology is in its relationship with culture and its effect on society and in many cases that can be communicated in things other than code.

The installation “Kikoeru” listens to shared thoughts, interprets states of mind and translates the data gathered into an audiovisual installation capable of representing the collective emotional state of the net and its changes on the basis of events that take place around Indonesia.

The emotional state of each and every one of us is conditioned by impulses and stimuli from the outside world, from the people we relate to and from our experiences, constantly modifying our perception of ourselves and what lies around us. Ever more often, these interactions take place through digital social channels and networks, turning into data which may be listened to, interpreted and used. Suffice to access a social network, pick up a smartphone or simply surf the web to make personal and private information public, thus feeding ‘Big Data’: enormous pools of information containing all that which is inputted into the network. The news and thoughts of users spread across social networks in real time. And so an event with worldwide implications immediately involves millions of people sharing their own opinions and emotions: happiness, anger, sadness, disgust, amazement or fear. Thus, imagining Internet as a living organism, we might think that its emotional state may be given by the overall emotions shared by users at any given time.

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The aim is to make the flow of data and information visible that are constantly being created by users, and that may be heard and interpreted by anyone, in the attempt to stimulate a reflection on the opportunities and dangers of the digital revolution that we are currently going through. Big Data may in fact be used to monitor the spread of an epidemic in real time, or to prevent a crime and improve the safety of a city; likewise, they may also be exploited by companies and institutions to store – often unknown to us – infinite quantities of information on our own private lives. We believe that gaining awareness of these mechanisms may be of help in the protection of individual and collective free speech.

 

Prison Art Programs PAPs (IDN), The Sandal United – Memories and Identity Code

A stark prison is not usually a place to find inspiration, but for Indonesian artist Angki Purbandono presented by Mizuma Gallery, it was a very different experience. His short time in prison for marijuana use laid down some important stepping stones in his scanography career and importantly for him it provided an environment to share his knowledge and love of art giving birth to the prison art program.

Sandal is the simplest form to represent each individual held in prison as the imagining of prison art. Since the conception of Prison Art Movement in 2013, the idea [The Sandal United] has been a prominent trigger to monumentalize all occurrence happening inside a prison. Sandals perpetually become an object that represents the individuality of inmates in a prison. Why, then, does identity become a significant factor in the daily life of imprisonment? The answer demands an introspective reflection back to a billion years of evolution that eventually cemented humankind's connection with the idea of identity and the way in which that idea is appreciated across different species.

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Before the revelation of sex was embedded in the consciousness of all living creatures, for billions of years, all life on earth reproduced asexually by the means of mitosis. This results in every offspring having an identical signature as its predecessor. The introduction of genetic hybridization which then opens the dawn of individual differences is in itself a marvel for all creatures on earth. The drive to procreate and bestow a life of individuality to its progeny marks the start of creative development. Through the lens of anthropology, this serves as a foundation of adaptability and the motivation to survive any transformative events.

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Inside the life of imprisonment, even though the use of sandal is as mundane as to be expected, prisons have a very methodical system of uniformity. Same clothes, same haircut, same meal plan and so on; places like this pose a high risk of identity loss and the degradation of individuality. Unexpectedly, sandals become a memory instrument and more importantly, they act as an extension of the inmate's individuality. This code has an unlimited spectrum in the continuum of time and space that are entangled one to the other. (Peter Dantovski and Angki Purbandono)

 

Natasha Bertig (NLD), Instant Warnet, 2019, Live-action Role Playing Game

Natasha Berting is a mediamaker and writer currently based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Her research-based practice often deals with the intersections betweentechnology, art and culture. She holds an MFA in Experimental Publishing from the Piet Zwart Institute (NL) and a BFA in Graphic Design from the Willem De Kooning Academy (NL).

Instant Warnet is a live-action role-playing game which pokes and prods at networks of harassment on social media. In this collective performance, you are invited to assume fictional characters on the massively multiplayer arena of Instagram, with the goal of disrupting and defusing some of its more hostile practices and spaces.

Composed entirely of found tactics, scenarios and language used by the world’s most cunning trolls, buzzers and campaign operatives, Instant Warnet is an experiment which aims to turn the tables on online toxicity. It also functions as an intervention, exposing the contemporary weaponization of social media, and offering new modes of resistance for targeted netizens and bystanders alike.

 

Mélodie Mousset (FRA), HanaHana, 2017, VR installation

Mélodie Mousset (*1981 in Abu Dhabi) is a french artist based in Zurich, Switzerland. She studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Rennes, EBAR, France, Ecole Cantonale d‚ Art de Lausanne, ECAL, Switzerland, the Royal College of Arts, London, and completed her Masters of Fine Arts at the California Institute of the Arts CALARTS in Valencia, California. Oscillating between virtual and physical realms, Mélodie’s artistic investigations around the body unfolds in surrealist narratives through numerous media: performance, video, installation, photography, sculptures and interactive media. technology and self.

HanaHana – from the Japanese: ‘blooming, flower’ – was inspired by manga One Piece, in which the character Nico Robin has the power to infinitely reproduce her own body parts on any surfaces thanks the magic of the Hana Hana no Mi ‘devil fruit’. The experience grants the player with the same powers, allowing them through the "devil" power of VR technology to self-multiply and extend their thousand arms into endless dizzying architectural structures like wild plants.

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Initiated in 2016, HanaHana evolved from a VR prototype application winning-award, to a beta exhibited worldwide to a complete immersive physical installation with a multi-player social-network, allowing players to meet and collaborate real time in the surreal metaverse. The hand, at the center of the artistic experience is a timeless and universal symbol for technical transformation, collaboration and empowerment. We create technological organ to expend ourselves, our bodies, our mind, to reach out further horizon. VR is a prosthetic which gives us extraordinary abilities while amputing us from others, playing around with these considerations, I decided on using a woman hand as my core material for the creative process, the sole building block of a whole world created by a community of player. What if Hands like apples or potatoes had their own agenda, and if VR technology was in fact plotted by Hands for Hands to break free from human condition and organic decrepitude and fertilize the wild digital?

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