Activatar

Activatar's September Exhibition is live. This month includes a single channel video by , a 360 immersive video by .knoetze and an augmented reality installation by .
The app is FREE to DOWNLOAD and all projects are playable and fully contained within the app.

Additional project info available at www.activatar.org

Activatar's September Exhibition is live. This month includes a single channel video by Barnett Cohen, a 360 immersive video by Francois Knoetze and an augmented reality installation by Leo Castaneda.

The app is FREE to DOWNLOAD and all projects are playable and fully contained within the app.

Additional project info:
Barnett Cohen
The Urgency of Quiet, 2018

The Urgency of Quiet is an excerpt from a longer performance/video that mines the space between self and thought. The prevailing assumption that we are what we think dates back to Descartes and remains a source of inevitable suffering for many. Clinging tight to the ego results in existential pain. Breaking the link between self and thought—even if only through a shift in perspective—yields relief, liberating language from its role as a simple conveyor of ideas. Words then become raw material, the fodder for poetry. The Urgency of Quiet merges theatrical gestures with speedy editing to reveal the ebb and flow of meaning: one phrase might resonate loudly within one ear; another may trigger implicit or explicit memories; additional words perhaps go unheard. Consciousness or rather the stories we tell ourselves is fundamentally contextual.

Francois Knoetze
Virtual Frontiers, 2016

Virtual Frontiers was created over two months on location in Grahamstown, South Africa. The work combines representations of the town's history, experiences of the present, and imaginings of the future. The VR films are a loosely-woven phamtasmagoria of interviews, candid footage, re-enactments, archival media, and improvised performance.
The films look at the town as a collision point: here, seven of South Africa’s nine biomes are found. Here, too, ocean and land became a site of convergence for sea creatures and plants 300 million years ago. And here, the first brutal clashing of the British invaders with the AmaXhosa in 1820; the forced assimilation and appropriation which ensued, and the continued violent legacy of colonialism in the ‘post-colonial’ era. Virtual Frontiers is an attempt to make sense of the effects and systems which organize the way people experience this space.

Leo Castaneda
Item Display Booth, 2018

Item Display Booth is an augmented reality showroom for sculptural machines used for viewing virtual reality environments. In this virtual space, figures merge into machines, furniture, and body extensions in order to enter their own virtual worlds. The distinction between human and object is blurred by both the figures' lack of interaction with their external environment, as well as the ubiquitous unifying monochromatic textures pulled from my paintings, photos and drawings. Personal photos from Colombia and the Brazilian Amazon sit next to appropriated images from diverse sources on the internet, screen grabs of process-pieces, and symbols from my upcoming videogame. These various origins and histories blend together into abstract textures and patterns, the resulting aesthetic a sci-fi, modernist, gray-scale psychedelia. It is a space somewhere between the past, present and speculative future that deploys and deconstructs the socio-economic, racial, mythological and post human anatomies embedded in the structure of emerging technologies.

Activatar

Activatar's August exhibition: August and Everything after is curated by Tina Sauerländer.

It’s summertime. We are on holidays, hanging out on the beach, by the lake or in a cozy bathtub. Finally, we have some time and space for ourselves to ponder about what passed and what will happen after the summer.

The works of the exhibition create private immersive moments and reflect on personal lives and social states of being. Bianca Kennedyennedy, Faith Holland and Tamiko Thiel Thiel speculate on what it could mean to share private spaces, on intimately caring about digital devices and on adapting to new conditions of our surroundings.

Now, I grab my kitschy watermelon air mattress to float on the calm sea. I bask in the warmth and the sun sets in a beautiful pink glow. I listen to the Counting Crows and think about love and loneliness, friendship and meaningfulness, about believing. About yesterday and tomorrow. See you in September.

The app is FREE to DOWNLOAD and all projects are playable and fully contained within the app.

Activatar