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    A Swarm of Blocks Flocks to Human Presence in DRIFT’s Interactive Installation

    All images courtesy of LUMA Arles, shared with permission

    A Swarm of Blocks Flocks to Human Presence in DRIFT’s Interactive Installation

    September 11, 2024

    Art Nature

    Grace Ebert

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    Working as DRIFT, Dutch artists Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta (previously) have built their practice around excavating the intersection between nature and technology. In “Murmuring Minds,” a new installation on view at LUMA Arles, the pair utilizes the swarming patterns of birds, bees, and other social organisms to create an interactive work that responds to movement.

    Representing the human desire for cohesion, clarity, and organization, sixty compact rectangular blocks scuttle across the gallery floor. Each component is autonomous and algorithmically programmed to follow the viewer or scatter in their presence. The mechanical installation highlights an ever-changing interplay between the viewer and the collective, exploring how one informs the other.

    “Murmuring Minds” is part of DRIFT’s Living Landscape exhibition, which features a large-scale digital work that similarly responds to human motion. As viewers walk in front of the screen, a flock responds to them as predators, first coming together and then rapidly flying toward the audience The artists said in a statement:

    We developed the interactive dynamics into four types that we have observed in both nature and human society: The Leader, The Hunter, The Vortex, The Machine. The installation is an experiment and a question on how we generate choices, what our decisions are, and how these affect larger structures. How do we define leadership and control in a contemporary context?

    If you’re in Arles, you can experience the works through September 29. Otherwise, find more from DRIFT on Instagram. (via designboom)

    “Murmuring Minds” (2024). Photo © Finn Bech

    “Coded Nature” (2022). Photo © Finn Bech

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    Eerie Graphite Drawings Encase Aliens and Sci-Fi Experiments in Looming Stacked Towers

    
    Art

    #aliens
    #drawing
    #graphite
    #science fiction
    #technology

    September 21, 2021
    Grace Ebert

    “Engineering Consciousness.” All images James Lipnickas, shared with permission
    New Haven, Connecticut-based artist James Lipnickas conjures towering sci-fi structures filled with futuristic labs, clashes with aliens, and massive laser beams shooting from rooftops. Working in graphite, Lipnickas uses heavy shading to shroud his architectural renderings in mystery and unfamiliarity as tentacled creatures crack through the walls and humans become science experiments. “This series really grew out of my interest in advanced technologies integrating with humans and how it shapes us moving forward,” he says.
    Amidst the machines and eerie contraptions, the artist interrupts each building with a level containing a garden bed or an illuminated tree grove. “The future holds many unknowns (technology and lifeforms).  We can’t forget the natural world while we move further from it,” he says.
    Before the end of the year, Lipnickas will show some of his works at Chicago’s Vertical Gallery and in a few virtual exhibitions with WOW x WOW. You can find more of his drawings, and keep an eye out for an expansion of the series shown here, on his Instagram. (via Jeroen Apers)

    “Through Different Identities” (2021)
    “Way of the Future” (2021)
    “Intelligent Machines” (2021)
    “More than Human” (2021)
    “A Simulated Reality”
    “Techno Human” (2021)

    #aliens
    #drawing
    #graphite
    #science fiction
    #technology

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