Update_4 Biennial

Update_4 at iMAL

iMAL presents the artworks from the following artists

Dombis Pascal (FR) - Crack

The video installation ‘Crack’ creates an important paradigm of our time. Through the many ongoing crises - political, financial, technological and environmental - we observe that the entire western environment seems to be in cracks: the world is cracking, Wall Street is cracking, God is cracking, man is cracking... and art is also cracking ! To present his artwork, Dombis developed an installation consisting of two monitors connected to two vibrating motors broadcasting thousands of internet pictures that he found by typing the word 'crack' in the Google search engine.

Fischer Ulrich (CH) - Walking the edit (Brussels)

Ulrich Fischer works in interactive media. 'Walking the edit' is an innovative system allowing people to generate thanks to a smartphone application their own movies by walking. This projects combines an audiovisual database and a person's walk path in an urban environment. The analysed path is then presented by a movie that tells a story about the visited places. Each individual walk will generate it's own unique movie, translating automatically the form of the walk (velocity, direction, patterns) into the form a documentary movie integrating videos, texts and sounds, through the mechanisms of the embedded "editing engine". The resulting movies can be found on the website of the project and be shared with a larger public.

A Brussels adaptation will be exhibited at iMAL. Based on about 1.000 video clips made by Brussels-based artists in the Canal area, this version can be experienced during the exhibition with iPhones. Check on the Brussels project page.

Jacobs Aernoudt (BE) - Miniatuur

Aernoudt Jacobs works on sound installations and 'Miniatuur' is an installation which plays with the physical laws of sound. Mechanisms  that create and produce sound are revealed by twenty-five miniature sound objects placed on a table. A part of the object has a small speaker and a rotating reflector. Speakers strengthen the natural sounds such as wind, crickets, water ... The reflector modulates these sounds in a purely acoustic manner by acting on the physical aspects: air, reflection and movement. The rotating movement of the reflector distorts, disrupts and bounces the physical properties of sound waves. The sound changes dynamically, depending on the movement of the flywheel.

Janssen Wim (BE) - Static

'Static' is based on the phenomenon of television noise or snow, images that can be considered as abstract and figurative. It is not an intended image, but an artifact of a technology. A physical phenomenon. What usually is seen as something specific to the creation of an image is made tactile. To create his artwork, Janssen cuts a polarizing filter into small rectangles of 1 cm, like large pixels. These fragments are mounted between two large rectangular pieces of plexiglass. At first glance, the screen looks like a slightly obscured glass. However, in front of this screen, there is a slowly rotating disc, also treated with a polarization filter. When the display is seen through the disk, it turns into a semi-transparent area of television noise.

Jiang Nova (NZ) - Ideogenetic machine

Ideogenetic Machine is an interactive installation that puts the portraits of visitors in an algorithmic produced comic. This comic is produced live by means of software. Using a kinect camera, the portraits of the participants are captured and integrated in a database of drawings of the artist. Participants are invited to actively play a role in the story through performance and collaboration. The software also adds empty speech bubbles which the participants can later fill with their own invented dialogues. Thus each participant can experience how it feels to be the main character and to design his own unique comic.

Lee HeeWon (SK) - 108

'108' is a multimedia installation in which the image is formed by the movement of the letters and creates a pure typographic film. The acoustic sound is produced by 108 music boxes. Each musical note is equivalent to a typographic symbol. Words and phrases accompany the sounds of the music boxes. The entire system is based on a software.

Schmitt Antoine (FR) - Pixel noir

Pixel Noir is a generative visual installation in which a moving swarm of white pixels are projected onto a white wall with a big black pixel. A generative choreography accompanies the white pixels. A language of psychological and physical strength is created and endless variations of dynamic obsessive relationships between the entity in motion and the stationary black square canvas are explored. The contact with the white pixels against the physical dark matter is a direct reference to the 'Carré noir sur fond blanc' of the artist Kasimir Malevich. The work revolves around Schmitt's research on movement which reflects on the relationship between programmed art and the history of art.

Levesque Julien (FR) - Street Views Patchwork

Julien Levesque creates artworks which put sites like Facebook, Myspace, Google and Youtube in question, in both a playful and a critical way at the same time. In 'Street Views Patchwork', he combines Google Street View landscapes' photos from different time zones around the world. These photos are digitally connected to each other and alternate every few seconds so that each time a new imaginary landscape is created.