A Sense of Crisis: Andy Lomas, Matteo Zamagni
Montag, 12. Juni 2017 - 19:00 Uhr
Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien
Lecture Andy Lomas | Morphogenetic Creations
Inspired by the work of Alan Turing, Ernst Haeckel and D'Arcy Thompson, Morphogenetic Creations is an ongoing series of art works that explore how intricate complex structure and motion can be created emergently using computer generated models of morphogenesis.
The aim is for deep emergence, with rules for growth specified at the level of interactions between individual cells. Digital simulation techniques are used to algorithmically encode the rules, and processes are run over many thousands of time steps. Typical final structures consist of up to a hundred million individual parts, yielding levels of detail that would be difficult or impossible to obtain using more conventional techniques.
The results are both alien and familiar. Using a combination of evolutionary methods and machine learning, the space of possibilities is explored to discover areas of rich emergent behaviour. Creating forms using unnatural selection: survival of the intriguing instead of the fittest.
Andy Lomas is a digital artist, mathematician, and Emmy award winning supervisor of computer generated effects. His art work explores how complex sculptural forms can be created emergently by simulating growth processes. Inspired by the work of Alan Turing, D'Arcy Thompson and Ernst Haeckel, it exists at the boundary between art and science.
He has had work exhibited in over 50 joint and solo exhibitions, including at the Royal Society, SIGGRAPH, Japan Media Arts Festival, Ars Electronica Festival, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo, Watermans and the ZKM. His work is in the collections at the V&A and the D'Arcy Thompson Art Fund Collection, and was selected by Saatchi Online to contribute to a special exhibition in the Zoo Art Fair at the Royal Academy of Arts.
In 2014 his work Cellular Forms won The Lumen Prize Gold Award, as well as the Best Artwork Award from the A-Eye exhibition at AISB-50, and an Honorary Mention from the jury at the Ars Electronica Festival.
He is a Visiting Lecturer at UCL, The Bartlett School of Architecture and a Visiting Research Fellow at Goldsmiths University of London. His production credits include Walking With Dinosaurs, Matrix: Revolutions, Matrix: Reloaded, Over the Hedge, The Tale of Despereaux, Avatar, and he received Emmys for his work on The Odyssey (1997) and Alice in Wonderland (1999).
Lecture Matteo Zamagni | Collective reformations
Chaos has become a common synonym of the world. In places where the internet is available, informations are spreading across keeping people informed about current situation, but most often are accompained with a huge portion of misinformation. At a stage where there is no sharp distinction between what's real and what's not, a need for change is felt from every part of the world, especially in the arts where such pressure is expressed with very straightforward statements. It is considered that as many as 80% of the people will be sucked in cities in a few years, intensifying the amount of pressure on citizen's shoulders.
New solutions are currently in the making and more have yet to come. One of which consist of creating sustainable localized communities around the world acting as small microcosms. Communitarian experiences however are not new, during the 19th century, many of them were born but the majority of them collapsed in less than few months; This underlines the importance to have strong infrastructure upon which to build such experiments.
Matteo Zamagni is a new media artist based in London. He expresses his ideas through multi-media platforms: Video Direction, real-time and off-line graphics and interactive installations; The root of his projects comes from ongoing research into the connections between spirituality and sciences. He explores the boundaries between the physical and the invisible dimensions, the macro and micro scale of matter, the conscious and unconscious mind. He has been working for various new media artists and studios such as Quayola, Field.io and Hito Steyerl.