Thin Air Programme

110 Hz is known as the ‘human pitch’. Buddhist and Hindu mantras are often chanted in the same frequency, while archeologists have discovered the use of the frequency to induce trance states in many cultures. Clar is particularly interested in how 110 Hz resonance can enhance the activity of the right brain, which is the centre for art, spirituality, emotion and imagination.

James Clar

James Clar is an artist who works with light and technology. He is interested in how new media technologies shape human behaviour. Many of his works play with perception using sculptural elements that appear to warp between dimensions, using multi-channel video installations, lasers, LEDs and 3D printing. He combines these elements to create complex narratives that reference mythology and global history toquestion our engagement with digital culture.

Clar’s work has been included in exhibitions at Glucksman Museum, Dublin, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, Pera Museum, Istanbul, Sam Francis Museum and MACBA, Barcelona and SeMA, Seoul, and the Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London.

An immersive sound element underlines the shifting multisensory environment, creating synaesthetic perceptions of infinite space, silence and death.

404.ZERO

404.zero is a collaboration between the artists Kristina Karpysheva and Alexandr Letsius. The duo specialises in real-time, generative, and code-based art, which is presented in large-scale installations, performance and music. They combine noise with randomised algorithms to stimulate visceral and awe-inspiring reactions. Through their use of digital technology, they question the power structures of the Anthropocene and global politics, revealing them as invisible yet impregnable environments of the contemporary condition.

The duo’s work has been shown at venues around the world, including Prague, Mexico City, Seoul, Lima, San Francisco and in New York’s Times Square. They have shown in festivals and exhibitions including MUTEK, Gamma Festival, Electric Castle, Japan Media Arts Festival and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

The installation is built from a complex lighting architecture, which creates ever-shifting boundaries in light and shadow. A comment on the increasing polarisation of our world, the changing environments expose the unreality of the borders and differences that separate us.

S E T U P

S E T U P is an acclaimed international studio merging the lines between multimedia art, lighting & stage design, and performance programming. The studio was founded by Znamensky Dmitry, Novikov Stepan, Zmunchila Pavel and Kochnev Anton in 2018. The team is driven by their mission to explore the expressive opportunities provided by new digital technologies. Working with light, programming and sculpture, the group creates installations that sharpen physical perception. They are especially interested in image and spatial distortion, using high-tech media to transform the spaces they work in.

S E T U P works at the intersection between contemporary art and lighting design. Their multimedia practice has seen them work with musicians including Skrillex and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers.

The installation projects phantoms of light in the air; graphic objects that float through real space. Built using a complex web of crossing beams of light and mirrors, Light Barrier is a haunting reflection on spectacle and illusion. The haze of the room reveals the moving shapes of the code that drives the work. Combining the semi-material images of Kimchi and Chips with the speculative narrative of An Angel of History in search of Cyclops Vision, the work offers considerations on new ways of seeing or visual perception.

Kimchi and Chips with Rosa Menkman

Kimchi and Chips is a Seoul-based art collective founded in 2009 by Mimi Son and Elliot Woods. Their large-scale installations explore the intersection of art, science and philosophy. Rather than separating these disciplines, the duo combine Buddhist philosophy with computer coding, electromagnetics and optical systems. Son and Elliot are recognised as pioneers in volumetric imagery and advanced 3D projection. As well as presenting their ideas through their installations, they share them as open-source software that are used by other creative practitioners and popular software toolkits.

Kimchi and Chips have presented their work at the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MMCA Korea), ZKM Center for Art and Media, Somerset House, Ars Electronica, ACC Gwangju, Zeche Zollverein, SxSW and Resonate Festival.

Rosa Menkman is a Dutch artist and researcher interested in the possibility of the glitch. Defined as a noise artefact that results from an accident in either digital or analogue media, glitches can provide insight into the otherwise obscure alchemy of media resolutions. Menkam is the author of Glitch Moment/um (2011), Beyond Resolution (2020) and recently edited the Im/Possible images reader (2023). In 2019 she was awarded the Collide Arts at CERN Award.

Module 1 is a portrait studio, which invites viewers to take their picture. Images from a live camera are filtered through a set of visual algorithms to create unique group portraits. Module 2 invites you to speak, sing, and yell into a microphone, and see the sound converted into images using audio analysis, speech recognition, and fractals.

Students from Goldsmith’s, University of London will be working in collaboration with the UCLA Arts Conditional Studio. Throughout the run of the show, they will be present in the space, facilitating the piece and giving audiences a deeper understanding of the mechanics at work.

UCLA Arts Conditional Studio

The UCLA Arts Conditional Studio is an arts collective composed of researchers and students within the School of the Arts and Architecture at the University of California Los Angeles. The studio aims to address the technological, political, social, and artistic consequences of computation by bringing together practitioners to teach and learn, collaborate and comprehend, use and misuse the technology that surrounds us. Their work creates a playful space for participants to engage algorithms common in computation and computer graphics.

The UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture was founded in 1939 as a centre for interdisciplinary art in Los Angeles. Notable alumni include John Baldessari, Mary Kelly and Paul McCarthy.

The installation changes its behaviour and visual appearance during the exhibition period. Referencing erosion and mutation, each trace of light leaves a mark on a virtual mountain range.

At the hidden digital core of the installation, a piece of code represents that imaginary landscape. Every beam of light projected onto it behaves like a drop of water, finding its way down to the valley. While doing so, it slightly changes the mountain’s shape. The evolution of the image during the exhibition period is unpredictable, but driven by simple universal laws and mathematical functions. Inspired by Benoît Mandelbrot’s fractal geometry, early algorithmic art and contemporary big data models, Henke has developed the software and the mathematical processes for Phosphor.

Robert Henke

Robert Henke is a digital artist who works with algorithmically generated images, laser installations and early personal computer hardware. A co-creator of the cult music software Ableton Live, Henke has redefined the way we create and experience electronic music. Inspired by radical club culture, his own electronic music project Monolake was at the heart of the new electronic music scene emerging in Berlin after the fall of the Wall in 1989.

Henke’s installations, performances and concerts have been presented at Tate Modern, London, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, MoMA PS1, New York, MUDAM, Luxembourg, MAK. Vienna, Palazzo Grassi, Venice, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Australia, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, STRP Biennale in Eindhoven, and at festivals including Unsound, CTM, MUTEK, Sonar and New Forms Festival.

These dimensions dictate the structure, built to mount hundreds of lasers. The lasers visually plumb the space with light and atmospheric haze resulting in geometric patterns that change as viewers move within the sculpture.

Matthew Schreiber

Schreiber is a multi-disciplinary artist best known for his large-scale laser light sculptures. Visitors are often invited to enter the environments he creates, and interact physically with his work. Interested in how physics, technology and perception can alter our experience of the world, he reimagines light and space to explore unseen forces. Recurring subjects within Schreiber’s work include novelty, the occult, and spectacle.

Schreiber has exhibited internationally, with solo exhibitions at Cornell University and the NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale. His work has been included in group exhibitions at MIT Museum in Cambridge, MA, the Perez Art Museum in Miami, and Galerie Almine Rech in Paris.