ACT Festival 2016: Heterotopia—Common spaces unseen

Heterotopia means the spaces where people and objects overlap or are located in different ways. In addition, it refers to another name of enjoyment and creation which mirrors familiar worlds (Homotopia) maintained with unified order and system. The second thematic exhibition of ACT Center 《Heterotopia—Common spaces unseen》has the theme of unfamiliar spaces which exist in reality, but which are different from reality. 

<node 5:5 [prototype]> is an audiovisual installation consisting of video projection, kinetic laser module, and wave field synthesis.

Mixed Reality Lab’s project is made to provide experience digital tangible cultural asset possessed by Asia Culture Institute through virtual reality. 

<walking the forest of ritual instruments> started from imagining what it would it be like if passively made memories are selectively deleted and regenerated. The work is processed to make sure that audience can forget albeit briefly when they face installations. Washing equipment which selectively erases passively made memories and regenerates them resembles a ritual.

This work is made to show that emoji (emotional pictorial symbol) characters exist as an entity. The artists move emojis into reality and the audience meets  and sees the emojis in person and understand them better. 

<culture map g> is an application which discovers open culture spaces existing in Gwangju and connects people of various areas who gather there centering on the spaces. The application is designed to connect people to people, space to space, and community to community to ensure that each culture and thinking are respected and shared.

<mug laeya> is made up word created by combining ‘mug’ from a 'mug cup' and 'Laeya' from 'myot-ie-gue-laeya' which means ‘what should it be like?’ in the local dialect of Korean. 

The <public art lab zebra> project discusses the variety of culture through creative music played as live music and spatial emotion in container boxes. The internal space of the container box becomes the stage space, and patterns which can match any place are applied to external space.

<the storytelling machine> is an interactive media piece of art for audiences of all ages. This work randomly arranges images and texts created by the public. 

Performance displayed art and technology expanded through 10 teams of wearable technology performance, and audiovisual performance.

<ljós> (‘Light’ in Icelandic) is a live media performance produced by Fuse* studio which researches relationships between light, space, sound, and movement in the digital performing art area. Dance performer Elena Annovi is located in the center of the theater, and enters the surreal dream space through image and sound where the audience responds in real time and interacts.

<metamorph> shows the process in which the face of “Kate”, 3D character provided by “Poser pro” changes through sound. The sound is controlled by irregularly random signals and dissembles the face of “Kate” into dots, lines, and textured surfaces. The dissembled face of “Kate” is neither a man nor a woman. As the face is repeatedly dissembled and assembled through sound, it continually changes into different faces. In this process, uncanniness occurs, the uncanny emotion is the purpose of the sound itself.

<sombra> is the result of cooperation between Takami Nakamoto and Mexico studio and it is based on digital art and interactive design. On the performance stage, live music of Takami strikes a balance with light projection, and generation effect of shadow for a show of strong atmosphere.

The performance starts as a horizontal line projected on the screen tremors. The line drastically multiplies as if to discharge its energy. Similarly, when Umeda on stage trembles, the covert energy withheld in his body is transmitted from the pelvis to the spine, to the arms, and lastly to the digital screen situated at the rear, in which the energy is visualized by curved lines reminiscent of a solar corona.