Polyarrythmia is an album or an exhibition or a selection of pieces, or maybe just a narrative in sound. None of the compositions have a strict metronome; there is no click or clock. The album as a whole has interlocking peaks, micro-moments and movements, and then larger arcs, which meet and then disperse. To me, that is very much what rhythm is, thus the name Polyarrythmia.

Polyarrythmia could be a musical. The whole record has this cabaret connotation, with the sounds doing odd things, stepping up or doing a weird little trick, or waving its hand and having a mustache. It can also be perceived symphonically, an orchestra of unknown instruments. After all, maybe we still have to figure out what sound is. Maybe it helps to reconsider that idea. Hopefully some people will experience this exhibition not just as sound-based, but as something physical as well, a reconsideration of perceptual signal flow. Jan St. Werner

Feral File  Polyarrythmia

&ldquo;I think of &lsquo;Seizures Palace&rsquo; as an opera track. It has all these symphonic, harmonic moments, but they are all rendered. I didn&rsquo;t sample an orchestra or any existing music, it just so happened that its spectral richness and certain harmonic changes within it made it sound very orchestral. I wanted there to be drama and for it to really build up and be rumbling and romantic. I was surprised that all of that was possible just by working with computer-generated sound.&rdquo; &mdash; Jan St. Werner

Seizures Palace #11

This exhibition borrows its name from Willliam Gibsons first published short story, Fragments of a Hologram Rose. As the story notes, when a hologram is cut into pieces, even the smallest section still contains the whole of the image. In a similar way, plant cuttings and an edition of digital works can both hold these mirroring elements of origin and multiplicity. The artists featured in the exhibition were asked to imagine and create their own sci-fi plants. Like botanists from a parallel future, these artists cultivated their fictions into existence. They sub-scattered seed pods, pruned polygon cuttings, gave their models plenty of volumetric lighting, and soaked them in fluid simulations. The 3D objects in this exhibition have secret pathways and telepathic tendrils. They bloom on neon skins and disperse nano mold spores through LCD screens. Like an ikebana of poisonous flowers in zero gravity, they hover in the expanse as a collection of fragmented flora files. Rick Silva

Feral File  Fragments of a Hologram Rose

What remains when everything else is gone?

&ldquo;Forest Transmission&rdquo; is an animated painting that explores the intersection of collectibles, faded memories, and the future of our planet.

This painting contains elements created in collaboration with kytGan, a generative adversarial network (styleGAN 2) trained on a database of the first six years of kyttenjanae&rsquo;s art. The kytGan outputs are cross-trained on various datasets to produce the desired results, generating a final stylized latent walk cycle.

Forest Transmission #59

&ldquo;&lsquo;Acrylic Interval&rsquo; is rhythmically the most intriguing piece on Polyarrythmia. It&rsquo;s based on a session I did with NuPG [the New Pulsar Generator], a software synthesizer invented by Marcin Pietruszewski. I chopped up the most interesting moments and added other sounds, mostly made with Reaktor and Razor, a software created by Erik Wiegand a.k.a Errorsmith, plus tools from Dietrich Pank and Mike Daliot. These are the software I use for almost everything. I wanted to do a rhythmic stream, something that drummers could play along with. It doesn&rsquo;t have a strict metronomic clock, but it implies one. It starts with this staccato kind of thing, and then it goes off beat and fully disperses, then builds up again. It even has a kind of implicit grand finale.&rdquo; &mdash; Jan St. Werner

Acrylic Interval #11

Were used to following instructions. The pandemic has only increased our need to be told what to do: Everywhere, lines of security tape delimited the spaces we could go, or where we could sit. While we navigate a changing environment, looking for directions and adapting to circumstances, we try to improve, to learn something new, to keep calm, to do more exercise. Meanwhile, the platforms and apps we use apply the algorithms designed by their developers to cater to our needs, customize our experiences, and gently influence our behavior. Instructions follow: As we move into the future, there will continue to be more indications, regulations, and control placed over us. The artworks in this exhibition explore our relationships with digital devices and information systems from the perspectives of both humans and machines, as a way to reflect on how our present time is governed by codes, regulations, and defaults. Pau Waelder

Feral File  Instructions Follow

Driven by an interest in exploring and criticizing what labor has become in the information economy, Guido Segni has directed his attention to crowdworkers by turning them into actors in video performances and photography projects. In &ldquo;24/7,&rdquo; he focuses on the online marketplace Fiverr, in which freelancers advertise their services for one-off gigs. Initially set with a base price of $5 per gig, it has attracted many workers who carry out simple tasks for small amounts of money, under unequal labor conditions and with almost no rights to the products of their labor.

To create &ldquo;24/7,&rdquo; Segni ran a script for a week (24 hours over 7 days), scraping and downloading videos by the workers publicizing their services on fiverr.com. A selection of these clips is cut together into a long advertising video, to which the artist has added the tune of The Internationale, the socialist anthem that calls for the union of all workers. With a dose of irony, the artwork brings to light current forms of labor in conditions similar to those that led to the creation of workers&rsquo; movements. However, here there is no possibility of creating a union, as every individual seller must compete with others to complete tasks in order to get a few bucks.

24/7 #17

Shortcuts are fast leaps across information scaffolds; cartridges for accelerated time. Shortcuts imply lower costs, since they train us to become beings who are not used to staying still, pondering, or meandering. Shortcuts symbolise strategic success, and energy-saving efficiency. But in the year 2020a time of global uncertaintywe gained a new perspective on what we shortcut into. The lesson is that perhaps we need to rethink our priorities, and develop an alternative blueprint that does not prioritize shortcuts. The exhibition The Long Cut features works that investigate the remote, latent, and liminal space of technologies, and how this awareness can trigger alternative pathways and maps for our shared technological reality. More importantly, it investigates how artists find their own way of living with the hybridity of the physical and the digital. Iris Long

Feral File  The Long Cut

&ldquo;Satellite&rdquo; is an artwork created after Lin Ke had a dream about becoming a camera carried by a spaceship. The non-human perspective in the dream inspired this journey into the pixel galaxy. The desktop image is Lin Ke&rsquo;s private studio, and the digital screen is his cosmos. The overwhelming and drifting pixelated &ldquo;stars&rdquo; conceal the subtle existence of one pixel that moves horizontally. &ldquo;Now, the cursor is on it, you can see it now, moving at First Cosmic Velocity. Please focus your eyesight on it, and let all other stars fade away with the progress bar.&rdquo;

Photoshop

Satellite #33

&ldquo;&lsquo;Contrafictionary&rsquo; reminds me of a Microstoria [Jan&rsquo;s former band with Markus Popp] track from the 1990s that sounded deliberately non hi-fi and was all about leaving certain frequencies out, shifting harmonic and rhythmic content in contradicting directions. &lsquo;Contrafictionary&rsquo; is somehow mysterious; it doesn&rsquo;t reveal itself and has all these unexpected and idiosyncratic transitions.&rdquo; &mdash; Jan St. Werner

Contrafictionary #11

Working with AI art sometimes feels like gazing into a pond of water. In a still pond, we see a clear, gently blurred version of ourselves staring back at us, while turbulent waters return rippled echoes of our shape. These changing reflections of ourselves are similar to images generated from data, which can be hyperrealistic depictions of the original, or images that are surreal and barely recognizable, as errors creep in. This exhibition looks at the way artists represent nature and humans, using the latest machine learning technologies to conjure seascapes, imaginary marine creatures, autumn leaves, and musings on the human form. Masks and faces akin to the grotesque rear their heads, reminding us of the early errors of these technologies and the eternal human fascination with depicting ourselves. These artists present AI as a tool to craft new reflections on perennial subjects, as well as a creative partner, conjuring new landscapes, creatures, and forms. Luba Elliott

Feral File  Reflections in the Water

&ldquo;Solstice Sky Dream&rdquo; by Daniel Ambrosi presents a vision of sunset at sea, where DeepDream technologies add further layers of texture to the stillness of sea waves and the moodiness of the late evening sky. The camera sets the scene in broad strokes and then proceeds to zoom into the various sections of the image, providing us with an immersive understanding of the view. The feelings of dreaminess are translated through the DeepDream technology, which gives the scene surreal undertones, while the clearly distinguishable subject matter of the sea and sky root the piece in reality, taking the viewer on a journey into a potentially familiar, yet newly interpreted vision.

Solstice Sky Dream #32

&ldquo;&lsquo;Glissbob&rsquo; is a &ldquo;pop-y&rdquo; song. It&rsquo;s a track I made when lockdown went heavy. I sent it to Justin Vernon [of Bon Iver] one night because I thought it would resonate, and he sent it back the next morning with his voice on the track. Kyle Resnick added trumpet, and it had some processed samples from C+C Music Factory. Naeem [formerly known as Spank Rock] put down vocals and wrote lyrics. But in the end, nobody was really sure about what to do with the result. I later listened to it without the samples, without Justin, without Naeem, without Kyle, and I thought that it was probably the most consistent version after all. So I mixed it &nbsp;with Andi [Toma] without these additions, and that&rsquo;s now the version on Polyarrythmia.&rdquo; &mdash; Jan St. Werner

Glissbob #13

Glissbob #11

Shi Zheng&rsquo;s &ldquo;Free Fall Study III&rdquo; documents experiments in falling simulation from the video installation &ldquo;Free Fall.&rdquo; The vertical, narrow perspective of the work captures computer-simulated white sheet masks that keep falling downwards. As another layer in the work, a computer-vision recognition system surveils and detects how the image is moving. The facial recognition system then identifies whether the image of each falling mask matches the features of a human face. Numbers between 0.0 and 1.0 represent the approximation value of &ldquo;human&quot; identified by the machine compared to &ldquo;real human.&rdquo;

In today&rsquo;s highly observed, studied, and analyzed world, vision machines powered by algorithms exist everywhere. Meanwhile, visual images are gradually becoming a computational product that has impacted the way we see and understand the world, and &ldquo;meat vision&rdquo; has to be mixed with and controlled by computer vision. The face-detection algorithms in this work programmatically translate complex human face information into numbers, which end up overly simplifying the diversity of what a face looks like. Thus, the falling &ldquo;masks&rdquo; in the work not only physically embody products&mdash;including facial processing and digital filters&mdash;but also epitomize what it means to be &ldquo;human&rdquo; in our data-flooded era.

III01    vision machinecomputational productcomputer vision

Free Fall Study III #64

Free Fall Study III #33

Over the course of 15 years, Martin John Callanan collected all the instructions he gave to the image editing software Adobe Photoshop: each and every action, edit, change, or mistake that the artist made to any and all images for himself or others, on any computer. &ldquo;Each and Every Command&rdquo; is the complete log of all the edits made between December 23, 2003, through March 13, 2019&mdash;presented in human-readable text on a single, 15,562 pages-long PDF file, as well as in a plain text document. The full list of instructions, which comprises 4,589,564 words, is the equivalent to more than eight times the Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

In a methodical and overwhelmingly detailed form, the artwork paints a precise illustration of the artist&rsquo;s work, creating a painstakingly accurate, yet incomplete, account of his creative process. This impressive and somewhat absurd collection of data can be read as a critical comment on the widespread assumption that the quality of an artwork is to be measured in terms of labor, and also as an acknowledgement of the role that software plays in today&rsquo;s artistic practice.

Each and Every Command #17

Above&Below tells elegant stories about nature with code. &ldquo;Steering Pixels&rdquo; was born through a fluid simulation interpreted from a GAN, which was trained on hundreds of images of ever-changing water surfaces&mdash;data collected and sculpted by the artists. Taking computer vision to analyse motion of pixels of a neural network outcome, a fluid system initially inherits the velocity and therefore flow of the system. Using machine vision and machine learning techniques to document changing environments, computerised systems allow to not only create 1:1 replicas of environments or copies of real worlds, but allow for multiple, unexpected, and diverse perspectives.

Above&Below1:1

Steering Pixels #33

Jake Elwes&rsquo;s &ldquo;CUSP - Marsh Birds&rdquo; is part of his CUSP series, where a familiar childhood location on the Essex marshes is reframed by inserting images randomly generated by a neural network into this tidal landscape. The machine has been trained on a photographic dataset, learning the qualities of marsh birds and in the process producing images that fluctuate between species, with unanticipated variations emerging without reference to human systems of classification. The animation migrates from bird to bird, accompanied by a soundscape of artificially generated bird song. The setting of the AI-generated work on a screen in a natural environment enables a rare form of dialogue between native birds and the artificial ones, augmenting and disrupting the ecology of the location. In this edition we watch 12 mash birds from the project as they flow between recognizable forms and dissolve into textures of water and mud.