TRANSFER Download Installation GIF from Haus der elektronischen Künste in Basel, featuring ‘SIGNALS’ by Rick Silva and Nicolas Sassoon

The TRANSFER Download streetches 48′ feet in length powered by Christie Digital with support from Metro Tech Reps.

The TRANSFER Download is a virtual exhibition format that presents a ‘download’ of artists exploring simulation, algorithm, procedural animation and online practice. Each instantiation of The Download is unique – multiple artworks are installed in one hyperspace, creating a layered salon-style exhibition format developed in 2016 at the Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco and exhibited again as part of The Current Museum in NYC before traveling to Haus der elektronischen Künste in Basel and the Chronus Art Center in Shanghai in 2017.

The works selected for the Download at NADA New York 2018 showcase a generation of 3D experimentalism, to spark a discussion of power, technology and images in the 21st century. The artists employ commercial tools to critical ends – presenting simulations of the body, post-human forms, dystopian landscapes, speculative AI, and disorienting architectures. In this selection of works, perfection falls apart, and in this opening the artists propose new possibilities.

“Seductive digital surfaces speak more to this age of technology when they fall apart, revealing their construction at the hands of imperfect people and imperfect machines.” From ‘Goodbye Uncanny Valley’ by Alan Warburton

The TRANSFER Download’s immersive 3-channel display is controlled by a tablet which allows viewers to select a work from the playlist, offering a large-format catalog of contemporary artworks. Originally conceived by Harvey Moon and Kelani Nichole to exhibit TRANSFER artists, the virtual installation platform is being adapted in 2018 to display a wider selection of moving image, 360° and immersive works at art fairs, foundations and museums.

FEATURED ARTWORKS at NADA NEW YORK

LU YANG – ‘Electromagnetic Brainology’
In Buddhism, the four great elements are fire, earth, water, and air. Lu Yang reimagines the elements as superhero gods, each corresponding to a different part of the human central nervous system. This is an adaptation of a 3D motion-tracking performance. Character Design, Game Design, Performance Design by LuYang; Technical Support, Development by MetaObjects; Motion Capture Dance by Ken Chung. (2018, 3-Channel HD Video with Audio from Realtime 3D Performance with Motion Capture)

CLAUDIA HART – ‘The Flower Matrix’
Hart reinterprets the “labyrinth of the minotaur,” a mythological maze from which there is no escape. An intensely embodied and incessantly unfolding narrative of signs and symbols – the icons of power, money, addiction and control – are a simulation of casino-capitalism, both seductive and oppressive. (2018, Virtual Reality artwork for the Oculus Rift and 3-Channel Video with Audio, Music composed by Edmund Campion, cello by Danielle DeGruttola)

AES+F – ‘Inverso Mundus’
Characters act out scenes of absurd social utopias and exchange masks, morphing from beggars to rich men, from policemen to thieves. Female inquisitors torture men on IKEA-style structures. Children and seniors are fighting in a kickboxing match. Inverso Mundus is a world where chimeras are pets and the Apocalypse is entertainment. (2015, HD Video with Audio, 3-Channel Trailer)

ALEX MCLEOD– ‘Ready to Die’
Non playable characters struggle to exist in a procedurally animated space, squishing, looping, and failing only to repeat their actions eternally. (2018, HD Video, 3-Channel)

THEO TRIANTAFYLLIDIS – ‘Seamless’
Bio-mimetic robots and wild animals co-inhabit a landscape of limited resources in this live simulation, continuously negotiating the boundaries of their habitation. The random encounters between different species – nonviolent realization of each other’s existence – are the moments of interest. (2017, 3-Channel live simulation, custom software with sound design by Diego Navarro)

EVA PAPAMARGARITI – ‘Precarious Inhabitants’
An interspecies dialogue on interconnected issues surrounding amorphy, liquidity, invasive species, plasticization, biomimetic behavior, body malformations on amphibians based on real cases, and the ontology of recording and tracking devices. (2017, 3-channel Video with Audio)

RICK SILVA & NICOLAS SASSOON – ‘SIGNALS’
Drawing from scientific oceanic survey, virtual reality and ecology, SIGNALS reflects on environmental inquiries, concepts of monumentality and alteration. Sassoon and Silva explore the depiction and alteration of natural forms through computer technology in this series of immersive audio-visual renderings of seascape environments. (2015, 3-Channel HD Video with Audio)

SABRINA RATTE – ‘Biomes’
Biomes are portraits of post human environments where uncanny life forms materialize and slowly detach themselves from the horizon, to finally melt into their respective landscapes. (2017, Single-channel Video with Audio)

PUSSYKREW – / ‘ RLIQ ‘ /
Imagine the post-gender augmented living bodies that transcend our understanding of technology, human emotions, and consciousness. Pussykrew summons the audience into the hybrid universe where newly evolved organisms are expressing love and affection. The work inquires into the relationship between gender, technology, embodiment and possible futures. (2018, 3-Channel CGI Video with Audio)

SNOW YUNXUE FU – ‘Slant’
Fu paints her perception of the Sublime in the Techno age. The digitally simulated monochromatic abstraction and hyper-reflective liquid forms occupy the virtual pictorial space as a triptych, emerging and concealing the shifting human figures within. (2018, 3-Channel HD Video with commissioned sound by Daniel Brookman.)

director@transfergallery.com