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Kurt Hentschläger
KURT HENTSCHLÄGER (AT/US)
FEED.X
INTERNATIONAL DIGITAL ART FESTIVAL
USINE C - 11 PM
JUNE 13 - 15, 2019 Montreal, Canada
BIO - KURT HENTSCHLÄGER
New York based Austrian artist Kurt Hentschläger creates immersive, audiovisual installations and performances.
Between 1992 and 2003 he worked collaboratively within the artist duo "Granular-Synthesis".
Hentschläger’s works have characteristically been visceral and immersive, as in ZEE and FEED, with extreme perceptual effects, composed from light, sound and fog.
These works physiologically affect the viewer's experience. His CLUSTER series builds on the uncanny, by portraying 3D representations of humanoid creatures that can only exist in dynamic flux, seeming to swirl and flow like the wind, apparently unhinged from the screen that they are projected on. His most recent, emerging body of work including MEASURE and ORT is tracing the concept of nature and appropriation of nature in the 21st century.
In 2012 he was commissioned, as part of the Cultural Program of the 2012 London Olympics / London Festival, to create CORE, a large-scale, symphonic installation.
Most recently he premiered SOL, an immersive audiovisual installation at Halle Berghain in Berlin in January 2017 and is working on ORT, a public project in Le Havre, a 360 projecton onto Oscar Niemeyer’s "Le Volcan" building, premiering October 2017.
From 2013-2018 he taught as a full time Visiting Artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
FEED.X
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIER
FEED.X is a performance set in an artificial environment, without human performers in the flesh. It is visceral in nature.
The precursor, FEED, was conceived in 2004, designed to convey a duality of the real and the rendered (processing) space.
FEED.X, 14 years later, makes less of a sensual distinction between the real and the simulated, instead staging a more unified, though still hybrid reality, wherein boundaries continue to collapse. This is the new prosthetic hybrid real: physical, yet still simulated; natural, yet still constructed.
FEED.X passes through two seemingly opposite stages. The first half of FEED.X - delivered in a traditional, frontal screening configuration - is misleading in relation to later events. Using generative animation, 3D figures fly and dance on a projection screen, like a flock of birds on drugs, following what to be a semi-autonomous, semi-conscious choreography. They race, float and crash into one other in an erratic gravity shifting world, each voicing off drone sound through- and while moving.
After about 20 minutes, the second part of the work transforms into an otherworldly amalgam of thick, artificial fog, intensely bright pulse and strobe light, inducing a total loss of spatial and visual orientation. A digital-analogue sound-scape, built from visual pattern feedback plus ample sub-bass, heightens the sublimely loaded atmosphere.
FEED.X points to the limits of human perception, employing both sensory deprivation and sensory overload, to immerse its audience in a seemingly infinite, kaleidoscopic architecture, a realm of pure light and sound.
The number of places is limited.
CAUTION:
This immersive performance is not suitable for people suffering from epilepsy or claustrophobia. A disclaimer document must be signed by each spectator before entering the venue.
© Kurt Hentschlager – 2018
OgreBullet and Max/MSP
Programming: Rob Ramirez Ableton
Live and Max for Live Design: Ian Brill
Project Assistance: Alp Seyrekbasan
Production: Humanew LLC
Co-production and touring: Richard Castelli - Epidemic
