ACT Festival 2019: FoodHack

The 2019 ACT Festival, held under the theme of “FoodHack,” focuses on “food”, one of the highly creative and advanced cultures. The ACT Festival 《FoodHack》 presents what today’s artists think about food and their ideas about alternatives that can help us fight growing environmental pollution. The exhibition, together with the 2019 International Symposium on Electronic Art, introduces the results of the “Creators in Lab X ISEA 2019.”

<aerobanquets rmx>, loosely based on a book 『Futurist Cookbook』 published in 1932, provides the audience with a chance to experience mixed senses including taste, vision (VR), and the sense of touch. In collaboration with chef Chintan Pandya, the artist introduces novel, multi-sensory dishes inspired by futuristic food. 

<yaloo seaweed garden> pays attention to “seaweeds,”, an ingredient closely linked to Asian countries’ traditional values and cultures. In the digital media work, seaweeds appear as a motif to build a world which is visually exaggerated and technically very affluent.

Minje Jeon thought that taking photos of food and posting them on Instagram with hashtags such as #food and #foodporn became a culture. The work started with such questions: “What is driving people to continue to do so?”, “If people’s greed or desire is one of the driving forces, in what shape can it be expressed?” 

Unhappy Circuit displays a live performance in which dishes are made based on recipes created by artificial intelligence (AI). To create a new recipe, AI learns from text data which contains people’s recipes. At the same time, the process of AI learning from data is being shown to the audience in the form of a visualized content with sounds. Looking at new dishes made of meat by AI, the audience is prompted to give a thought to our carnivorous culture.

For the artist, a kitchen is a laboratory where one can carry out creative experiments with fire, water, a table, a storage, and even a range of chemical ingredients. The artist explores sub-themes such as ingredients, tools, processes, technologies, and knowledge sharing, all in relation to “making,” in order to show that a kitchen can serve as a maker space. And the process and results are suggested in “Kitchen Makerspace Cookbook”.

<the appendix human> is a project that explores and imagines the appendix, one of human’s vestigial organs. Researchers say that the appendix affects people’s immune system, and the appendix is known to be closely related with our health and diet. In this sense, this project explores a new relationship and possibilities between our life and the appendix.  

<human makgeolli> is an art work which shows, through microorganisms, that living organisms within our body are present in food, and that living organisms in food also exist in our body. For the work, the artist used the individual microbial community of the late Lee Kyung Hae, a farmer and activist, to make Makgeolli, based on microbiology and forensic science. As a result, an individual’s microbial community has been successfully turned into an art piece.

Air Floating Media imagines future Japan where individuality and diversity are more respected than today. And it expresses ‘food for individuals to enjoy hobbies’, and ‘food to enjoy favorite contents’ beyond ‘food to live’ through AR (Augmented Reality). The work realizes AR which can be experienced with naked eyes.

<hidden layer> (2019) is a place-specific interactive installation, which collects data of spaces such as artificial cities and nature. In the work, many biosensors that collect information about the environment are installed in the space, and the data are converted into a physical form or a light. The data are visualized into a large grid or a mesh comprised of beams of light, and sounds are also created based on real-time sound waves on the site. 

<plantconnect> by Carlos Castellanos is a system built for interaction between humans and plants. It is based on our acts of breathing, the bioelectrical and photosynthetic activities of plants, and computational intelligence. This project explores new possibilities through information delivery, communication, and mutual connection between materials, humans and non-humans. 

Ralph Borland’s work attempts to combine his exploration of Gwangju’s local crafts and design culture with a number of subcultures including electronic engineering, sound systems, hacking, and toymaking. The artist’s unique perspective and skills at design, sculpture, and manufacture meet Gwangju’s culture, to be embodied in the form of small robots.

Sound visual performance <quantum-ton> is the 3rd chapter of the artist’s “Hyper Serial Music” project. The project combines serialism, one of important musical composition methods of the 20th century, with contemporary technologies, such as artificial intelligence. Hyper Serial Music leverages structure, complexity, and loudness to challenge the limit of human auditory perception and cognition, while visually structualizing relationships in quantum energy.

<the age of digital /analogue> is composed of scenes that Lu-SISI captured while travelling across the United Kingdom from 2011 to 2015. The artist recorded the heritage of British Industrial Revolution and the application of industrial robotics in car manufacturing, as well as the sublime scenery of Snowdonia and the Isle of Skye. Incorporating a range of performative and live elements, the audiovisual performance features video clips of machines, landscapes, industrial facilities, and animations, as well as archived materials.

<impermanence> consists of glitch noises and 3D graphic particles that are constantly changing and regenerated.

〈Wave)  is based on the hypothesis that the ocean is the origin of life. The beginning and the end of life were depicted using organic forms of waves.

〈Anthropogenic〉 is an audiovisual work of art that captures the destructiveness of artificially transforming nature. The work is an imperative for us to face the contemporary disaster that we are now living in the self-destructive age called Anthropocene.

<interférence (string network)> is an audiovisual performance, showing a real-time electroacoustic work of art. Using devices composed of a network of strings and sensors, Alexis Langevin-Tétrault creates a world that incorporates industrial noises and electronica and acousmatic music. 

<lost, but not lost forever> is a sound performance that uses old media devices to create new soundscapes. The work asks a question about life expectancy of a medium. “Is there a media that has yet to die?” “What’s the new medium that is going to conquer the world?”

<breath> is an interactive installation/performance that operates with human breaths. Made of DIY circuits and electronics scraps, the device converts breaths of the audience into the flickering of light bulbs and sounds and thus brings life to inanimate objects. An embodiment of life and death, the work explores the fluctuating relationships between humanity, nature, and the machine.

Audiovisual life performance <coding in atypical places> is based on live cinema coding and experimental music. A mixture of algorithmic music, generative video, and light controls weaves a non-linear narrative set in a post-internet era Mexico City featuring a "cyber decora" girl.