MSHR is the artistic collective of Birch Cooper and Brenna Murphy, which emerged from the Oregon Painting Society collective in 2011. The duo builds and explores sculptural electronic systems that result in installations, performances or a hybrid format of both, integrating interface design with generative systems and a unique formalist approach.
In Planet LEV, they present Concentric Core Reflector, a looming fractalized structure acting as a glowing central portal that leads to an interior cavern where synthetic forms reflect organic systems.
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Fractal Fantasy is a creative platform founded by Sinjin Hawke and Zora Jones in 2014, which spans from code experiments and web-based instruments to garment production and interactive installations.
The project has always made a priority of crafting dazzling visual environments and future facing music. From boundary pushing interactive experiments like “Uncanny Valley”, browser based visual synthesizers like “Liquid Entropy”, to the critically acclaimed visual album “First Opus”, the Fractal Fantasy website hosts interactive experiences that let you explore computer generated environments or examine painstakingly detailed figures close up, accompaniment by Hawke and Jones’ glossy, high-definition club tracks, many of which make you feel like they’re moulding themselves into different shapes in front of you.
Now, following Zora’s album “Ten Billion Angels”, Sinjin & Zora bring the protagonist of the artwork to Planet LEV: Tentacle Queen, a four-armed goddess that towers over the participants of the festival, ready for battle.
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With their new work SPIN, visual artist Lucas Gutierrez and composer Robert Lippok conduct their interdisciplinary research in the fields of time, nature and technology.
The terms Physis / φύσις (nature) and Téchne / τέχνη (art and craft), as used by Aristotle in his treatise Physics, became a trigger point for the development of this audio-visual installation: “The critical distinction between art and nature concerns their different efficient causes: nature is its own source of motion, whereas techne always requires a source of motion outside itself.”
Within its two rings, SPIN creates a meditation space where sounds of nature and civilization meet, and chaos, silence, wildness, peace, evolution and disaster are in constant motion.
Lucas Gutierrez is a digital artist and industrial designer based in Berlin. He has been engaged in various disciplines, from lectures, workshops and audio- visual performances to video art projects focused on the new paradigms of digital culture. Deeply involved in the remix culture and real time AV projects in which he blends influences of different contexts – from post-work anthropology to the abstract quotes from 3D modeling for industrial design. His narrative is often quoting current social fears and dystopias, but mostly using the language of colorful, chaotic metaphysics.
His most recent talks and performances were in Sonar+D and MUTEK (Argentina/Mexico), ZKM – Zentrum für Kunst und Medien Karlsruhe, NYU Berlin, exhibitions at The New Infinity | Berliner Festspiele | Immersion, XS Gallery (Poland), Aperto Raum and CTM / transmediale (Berlin, Germany).
Robert Lippok
Robert Lippok’s work in music and sound channels the rawness of his East German industrial and dissident punk and postpunk roots in both East and reunified Berlin (as cofounder of the bands Ornament und Verbrechen and To Rococo Rot).
Pouring that molten energy into his solo work, he has produced a body of music that engineers that force into an array of architectural forms. 2018’s critically acclaimed full-length “Applied Autonomy” (Raster Media) follows 2011’s “Redsuperstructure” (RasterNoton), and builds on collaborations with musician Klara Lewis (at a residency at EMS studio in Stockholm) and visual contributions by Lucas Gutierrez.
Lippok has also been relied upon as a spontaneous and inventive live music and audiovisual performer. That includes appearances at festivals like MUTEK, Unsound, L.E.V, GAMMA Festival St. Petersburg, at Berghain and Funkhaus Berlin, work with the 4DSOUND spatial audio system, collaborations with Doug Aitken at Serpentine Gallery London, choreographer Constanza Mac- ras at Akademie der Künste Berlin, German architect Arno Brandlhuber at NBK Berlin.
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Sabrina Ratté brings Monades to Planet LEV, a series of works made with 3D scans of her own body, that become the raw material to be digitally sculpted, deconstructed and re-contextualized.
Many inspirations have formed this project, such as the concept of the cyborg by Donna J. Haraway, Hans Bellmer’s drawings, Greek Mythology, as well as an underlying reflection on self-portrait and the place of the body in the digital world.
The result is a series of digital cyborg/goddesses, captive within the limitations of their own subjectivities, that embody the philosophic concept of monade, where each individual is a fragmented mirror of a larger reality.
Sabrina Ratté
Sabrina Ratté is a Canadian artist living in Paris. Her practice includes video, animation, installations, sculptures, audio-visual performances and prints. Mixing analog technologies, photography and 3D animation, she investigates the influence of digital and physical spaces and the interplay between these surroundings and subjectivity. She was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award (CAN) in 2019 and 2020 and she is represented by Charlot Gallery in Paris and Ellephant Gallery in Montreal. Her work has been presented internationally by various institutions including Laforet Museum (Tokyo), Musée National des Beaux-arts du Québec (Quebec City), Thoma Foundation (Santa Fe), PHI Center (Montreal), Whitney Museum of Art (New York), Chronus Art Center, (Shanghai), Museum of the Moving Image (New York).
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LEV XRmass presents the online opening of a new artistic installation by Boris Divider, located at the virtual universe Planet LEV.
Spheral.cluster is an exclusive audiovisual installation for domes, created by Boris Divider with the collaboration of LEV Festival, designed to be projected on a virtual dome environment via VR technology, but also suitable for a real dome or planetarium event.
In its development process, every visual piece was being triggered in real-time combined with all the sound material, letting the artist create a full improvised and unique arrange for this exclusive installation, where all audiovisual layers are interlinked and mixed together. In fact, this installation is a selection of several pieces arranged for this event from the main AV live “spheral.dome”. The artistic concept is fully related to the musical composition generated by the artist’s own performance, between elements and tracks from the original soundtrack.
The visual result is an experience of textures made of basic shapes that become complex when the different visual components are mixed with the sound pattern architectures, making the audience feel inside a fully alive element.
About Boris Divider:
Boris Divider is the stage name for Boris Sáez, was born in Madrid in 1975. His works, focused on electronic and electroacoustic sequential music, are an essential pillar to understand the trajectory of this musician, producer and visual composer who, after devoting more than a decade to club electronic music and becoming a benchmark for international standing in the electro-techno scene, has been transforming and consolidating an execution and a theme that is closer to audiovisual installation and audio and video synchronism.
Boris Divider’s audiovisual performances during the last years include events such as MiRA Festival 2015, La Casa Encendida, Mugako at (Artium) Vasque Museum of Contemporary Art, Volumens 2015 at Museu Valenciá de la Il-lustració i la Modernitat, (MEH) Museum of Human Evolution, Circulo de Bellas Artes de Madrid.
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Taiwanese experimental music producer and performer Meuko! Meuko! collaborates with
fellow Taipei-based multimedia performance collective NAXS Corp. to create the online VR installation and AV show Ghost Island: Innervision.
Working from the live project Ghost Island, that made the opening performance for Transmediale (DE) and toured over twenty countries and festivals including Sónar (HK), Primavera Sound(ES), and Hyperreality (AT), Meuko! Meuko! and NAXS Corp. present an online Live AV show inside of LEV-build VR world.
For the AV performance, NAXS creates a dystopian world full of abandoned statues, floating ruins, stray dogs and hieroglyphics based on 3D-scanned streets and temples, while Meuko supplies a soundtrack of experimental sonic dreamscapes.
This mythical cyber-world can also be visited through an online virtual reality experience curated by Meuko and NAXS. An immersive VR universe where, as music traverses its antiutopian ruins, you may find that this is not a fantasy or a fable, but the mythological reality in which we all live.
Meuko! Meuko!
Taipei based artist Meuko! Meuko! is an experimental music producer and Live performer. She started performing solo in 2015 and then in 2017 under the monocle Meuko! Meuko! with A/V sets created in collaboration with ‘ Naxs corp.’ Each performance combines improvisation with conceptual ideas of noise, clubbing, strange sounds, field recordings that conjure at times ritualistic performances with sources tracing back to Taiwan’s own spiritual landscape.
NAXS Corp.
NAXS Corp. is a Taiwan based, network embedded art collective founded in 2015. Focused on the accelerated transformation of human experiences, NAXS investigates the dialectic relation between posthuman mythology, animism ritual practices, creating its fictional framework for the internet society.
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Heterotopies is the first collaborative project by Elías Merino y Sergio Millán: a three-dimensional abstract space conformed by generative colossal audiovisual structures.
In Heterotopies, visuals and music are subjected to different processes: in the first process (hidden for the public) a computer vision system analyses and interprets the activity from the internet browser. AI uses shapes, color and movement to map and create the appearance, colour and texture of the three-dimensional sonic and visual topologies. In the second process, these structures are reconstructed, relocated, and their AV behaviour in space-time is guided by a realtime generative shading system.
The result is an experience of infinite potential realities. A synthetic audiovisual space for refugees from the real world.
Elías Merino
Elías Merino is a Spanish composer, sonic artist, researcher and multidisciplinary practitioner. His recent and ongoing projects are included in a certain range of different aesthetics within installation, composition and exploratory digital sound, that Elías develops under different monikers. From algorithmic abstract computer music, to contemporary unusual electronics and instrumental music. Elías Merino is one half of the audiovisual duo SYNSPECIES.
His work has been exhibited, performed and diffused across the US, UK, Spain, France, Czech Republic, South America, Romania, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Taiwan, Sweden, Poland, Finland or The Netherlands. He has performed in festivals and venues such L.E.V. Festival, Semibreve, Cafe OTO, Lunchmeat Festival, Sonica, MNAC – National Museum of Contemporary Art Rumania, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, MCARS, or Philharmonie de Paris among others. His recorded albums have been released in different labels including leerraum, Superpang or Room40 among others.
Elías is part of ENCAC (European Network for Contemporary AV Creation) artist roster, and his work is supported by Arcadi Île-de- France. Elías Merino holds a Masters Degree in sonic arts and PhD in composition at CeReNeM (Centre for Research in New Music)
Sergio Millán
Sergio Millan is a graphic designer by default, DIY guerrilla fighter, synth developer and, occasionally, visual artist. Coming from an interaction design background, he has spent the last years researching different approaches in visual creative coding with various programming languages: from websites to interactive glitch applications, or GLSL Shaders.
He is a founder member of T37, a hackspace that hosts synth DIY workshops in Madrid. As a collective, they design DIY Eurorack module kits for workshops. They have given workshops in Madrid, Barcelona, London and Berlin. Sergio has also taken part in several installation works with Jae Ho Youn at Galeria Labyrinth (Poland), with Guillem Bayo and Luix Bot in Automaticas at MedialabPrado (Spain) , to name a few.
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