ZANGEZI is a contemporary staging and reinterpretation of Russian Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov's visionary, planetary sound-based dramatic poem from 1922. The production explores central questions of our time: the tension between humans and nature, the power of language, and war and conflict as drivers of historical change. Involving an international team of renowned creators from the fields of music, visual arts, AI, performance, and technology, a spectacular live media performance unfolds.

Written after the violent upheavals of World War I, the Russian civil war and the Russian Revolution, Zangezi explores language as sound: songs, noises, onomatopoeic sounds (such as birdsong), poetic monologues and dialogues between Zangezi, human and prophet, and the natural and divine world.

In our new performance, we transport Zangezi into the current climatological, political and technological state of the planet: a world in which we strive to make sense of that which makes no sense. In this way, Zangezi powerfully resonates between the Russian Futurist moment 104 years ago and our unstable present and future.

Website ZANGEZI

reconFIGURE is a real time installation exploring how diverse human bodies are re-
imagined by computing machines. It explores the belief we place in the accuracy of
machine systems and the humour and confusion experienced when these machines
fail to create accurate representations of us. The visitors’ frontal image is first
captured by a camera, and using machine learning, transformed from a 2D image
into an animated 3D avatar in a matter of seconds. Appearing in the projection on
the wall and an unsettling sonic atmosphere, these doppelgaengers gradually seem
to move like strange creatures in an aquarium, where hidden forces throw them
around like rag dolls. As the visitors’ encounter their re-animated selves on the
screens, they bear witness to the mutations generated by the machine processes
Thus, through the transformation of bodies by way of increasingly black boxed AI
systems, reconFIGURE probes how we will negotiate the truth between our own
image and that image as reimagined by machines.

Team
Artists: Christopher Salter, Florian Bruggisser, Chris Elvis Leisi, Pascal Lund-Jensen
Produced by: Immersive Arts Space – Zurich University of the Arts

Text by Kate Story
Music & Sound by Catarina Barbieri, Limpe Fuchs, Sam Slater, Maxime Gordon
Choreography by Angelique Wilki
Scenography by Florence To
3D Animation by Timothy Thomasson

Daniel and Laurie are two people on the run from a near future world of
climate transformation. Emotionally distraught from their hidden pasts, the
pair set out on a journey through the wild landscape of Newfoundland,
Canada. While news of global climate catastrophes is broadcast on their
car radio, they drive towards the Tablelands, an extraordinary, Mars-like
landscape in the middle of Von Gros Morne National Park where one can
directly walk on the mantle of the Earth. Gradually, the climate-change
transformed landscape exerts a force on them as if it was a conscious,
living and breathing entity. It emits strange sounds, affects Daniel and
Laurie’s physical bodies and their personal relationship and in the dra-
matic conclusion of Animate, manifests the intricate interconnectedness
of humans and a natural world under the throes of radical environmental
change. Die Belebung (Animate) sits at the crossroads of performance,
installation and radio play utilizing the newest Virtual and Augmented Re-
ality technologies in order to blur the experience between the physical
and the digital world. An interdisciplinary international artistic and techno-
logical team from Montreal Canada and Berlin Germany thus takes the
audience on an extraordinary participatory journey that uses the creative
potential of new technologies to address the urgency of climate catastro-
phe.
 

A Work by Erik Adigard, Sofian Audry, FM Einheit, Dietmar Lupfer, Chris Salter, Alex Schweder and Sissel Tolaas

SENSEFACTORY is a spectacular large scale performative installation
(25 × 13 × 5 meters) combining architecture, sound, smell, light and
AI technology into a immersive multi-sensorial experience. In the
1920s, László Moholy-Nagy with the Bauhaus imagined a new kind of a
theater for the senses. In a “Mechanized Eccentric” as he called it
machine and organism should be merged. 100 years later this utopian
vision now can be experienced in an up-to-date version that uses latest
technological developments. Created by an international team of artists,
architects, designers and technologists, SENSEFACTORY sends visitors on
an exhilarating sensory journey through a colossal, ever transforming
pneumatic architectural environment that changes form and shape before
your very eyes.
The Bauhaus sought a new relationship between humans and machines – a
theater that would integrate the human spectator and actor into a new kind
of rhythmic and dynamic media process. 100 years later, we are enveloped
in these total environments of media that continually scan, surveil,
record, monitor and transform us. SENSEFACTORY reflects on our radical
times – creating a compelling event that oscillates between intensive
sensual experience and meditative reflection; physical euphoria and
nervous unease.

Concept: Chris Salter + TeZ + JNBY China
Direction/Composition: Chris Salter + TeZ in collaboration with Ian Hattwick
Clothing Design: JNBY
Technical Development: IDMIL, Director: Marcelo Wanderley, McGill University
Technical Direction: Ian Hattwick
Additional Technical Support: Julian Neri
Production: xmodal/Montreal + CAC

Haptic Field is a participatory multi-sensory installation merging contemporary fashion, wearable technology and an exploration of the senses beyond site that creates a singular and uncanny physical experience for the public. In the environment, a group of up to twenty visitors wear specially designed garments, which are outfitted with various sensing and actuating devices that enable visitors to interface with the performance space. Haptic Field thus provokes unusual and intense bodily sensations by blurring our senses of touch, sight and sound. With one’s ability to visually navigate and make sense of the world removed upon entering the installation, the visitor enters a continually shifting, hallucinatory, almost dream-like environment where nothing is what it seems and where one begins to experience other senses like touch, sound, proprioception, the experience of time and the invisible presence of others —senses that we normally ignore or forget about in our mainly visually dominated world.

Haptic Field forms part of a continued artistic exploration into the extension of the human sensorium within our contemporary technosphere. Beginning with JND (2010), continuing with Displace (2011-2013) and most recently, Ilinx (2014-2015), both collaborations with the Italian-born, Amsterdam based artist and musician TeZ, these sensory installations have been exhibited world-wide and examine how the boundaries between our different senses are, in fact, culturally constructed and how new technologies work to increasingly extend, shape and transform our sensorial experience within our socio-technical environment.

Supported by the Fonds de Recherche du Quebec - Societe et Culture and the Canada Arts Council.