Artists Statement
Video, interactive installation
Can we imagine how the science of today might shape the world of tomorrow? You are invited to help create the world of X, a woman born in 2045, and be a part of the first demonstration of ‘xquisiteFUTURE’, a custom video software by Ollie Bown inspired by the Surrealist drawing game ‘cadavre exquis’ (‘exquisite corpse’). A mobile FUTUREpod will bring xquisiteFUTURE to the University of Sydney campus (11th-14th June) and feature live storyboarding by visual artist Valentin Manz.
scienceFUTURE is a multi-year collaborative documentary experiment that will provide a dreamlike glimpse of the future in the present. By playing with both the good and bad potentials projected into our future, participants will explore the personal joys and dilemmas extrapoloated from our partly unconscious experience of accelerating change. The goal is not so much to predict the future, as to nurture deeper and more complex attitudes towards the eternal ‘becoming’ of the present. scienceFUTURE is in an early research and development phase. Find out more at xquisitefuture.blogspot.com and dissentienceproject.wordpress.com
- Ollie Bown is a researcher, programmer and electronic musician interested in live electronic music performance, computational creativity and machine autonomy. He performs and records in a number of electronic and electroacoustic ensembles, with a focus on the realtime control of generative software elements, and autonomous software interacting through sound. Significant performances include the Bimhuis, Amsterdam, the Sonic Acts Festival, Amsterdam, The ICA, London, the AudioVisiva Festival, Milan, and the Dana Centre at the Science Museum, London. His interactive sound design has appeared in works at the Kinetica Art Fair, London, Club Transmediale, Berlin and the Future of Sound Tour, throughout the UK. He has also conducted research into the evolutionary psychology of music and the arts, using simulation models to study relevant evolutionary dynamics.
- Christine Cynn & Valentin Manz have collaborated on numerous interactive installations incorporating audience participation, large-scale sculptural environments and multichannel video installations (earthNOWbeing 2011; Bread Head with Campbell Works 2011-present). Christine Cynn has been developing new ways to catalyse and document the human imagination in order to illuminate the conflicts of desire, fear, and hope that shape our lives and our world. She is co-director and co-producer of the award-winning documentary The Act of Killing (2012) with Joshua Oppenheimer and Anonymous, with executive producers Werner Herzog & Errol Morris, recipient of the Panorama Audience Award, Berlin International Film Festival 2013; Danish Film Academy Award for Best Documentary; Copenhagen DOX:AWARD 2012; Movies That Matter Human Rights Award 2013). Cynn studied film with Dusan Makavejev and Chantal Akerman at Harvard University. Valentin Manz’s work engages viewers visually and physically in a sculptural theatre made from glass, metal, clay, and found materials such as cardboard and furniture. Manz has been a fellow at Urban Glass in Brooklyn (2005) and the Creative Glass Center of America (2007 & 2013), and shown his work in London, Munich, and New York. He studied stage design at the Slade and Central St. Martin’s College of Art, and graduated from Goldsmiths as an art psychotherapist. Christine and Valentin are both based in the UK.