Feral File  WETWARE

What if it were possible to synthesize hormones in the kitchen? Imagine if this was as easy and simple as cooking a meal. Housewives Making Drugs (2017) is a fictional cooking show by Mary Maggic where the trans-femme stars, Maria and Maria teach the audience at home step-by-step how to cook their own hormones. They perform a simple urine-hormone extraction recipe while amusing the audience with their witty back-and-forth banter about body and gender politics, institutional access to hormones, and everything problematic with heteronormativity. Choosing the kitchen as the appropriate battleground for tackling body/gender politics and institutional access, the cooking show aims to challenge/subvert patriarchal society and speculate on a world with greater body sovereignty for all.

Featuring:  JADE PHOENIX and JADE RENEGADE as Maria and Maria
Created by:  MARY MAGGIC, MANGO CHIJO TREE, THE JAYDER
Written by: MARY MAGGIC, JADE PHOENIX, JADE RENEGADE
Extras: AUDREY MERCADO ORTIZ, CHRISTINE WANG, VINCE RABAJA, PHYL ETIENE JOHNSON, MANGO CHIJO TREE as The Assistant
Music: LEAH ANN MITCHELL
Estro-gin Song by MANGO CHIJO TREE

Housewives Making Drugs #12

Contested Zone (1993) by VNS Matrix is a digital image created for the 1993 project ALL NEW GEN. Part artwork, part computer game, ALL NEW GEN was released as a CD-ROM and distributed widely in Australia and internationally. The CD-ROM was also exhibited as the centerpiece of the ALL NEW GEN installation with lighboxes, soundworks, photography, sculptural elements, video and a Bonding Booth for pleasurable distraction.

Join the cyber warrior All New Gen and the renegade tribes of the Contested Zone to sabotage the databanks of Big Daddy Mainframe and launch the New World Disorder. Enter the Contested Zone, a labyrinth of bizarre and mysterious cyberworlds, where the future is now, and Big Daddy Mainframe is in control. Manipulating the minds of the online masses through his nasty neural nets, BDM is expanding his transplanetary empire and nothing will get in his way. But resistance is not futile! All New Gen, an omnipresent being (computer virus, bio simsystem, intelligent mist) is on a mission with the renegade tribes to sabotage the info core of the insidious data dictator. All New Gen is assisted on her mission by the DNA Sluts, a band of renegade Sheroes; along with ferals, data deviants, cortex crones and code warriors.

For more context, please visit: <a href="https://vnsmatrix.net/projects/all-new-gen" target="_blank" class="link">https://vnsmatrix.net/projects/all-new-gen</a>


Contested Zone #12

She Who Sees The Unknown (20212022) is a research-based project, which uses 3D modeling, 3D scanning, 3D printing, and storytelling to re-create monstrous female/queer figures of Middle Eastern origin, using the traditions and myths associated with them to explore the catastrophes of colonialism, patriarchism, and environmental degradation in relation to the Middle East. MAJLIS AL-JINN: Huma, a chapter of She Who Sees The Unknown, includes a 3D rendering video of Huma, a jinn known in various Middle Eastern tales as a demon who brings heat to the human body and earth. She is pictured as a demon with three heads and one or two tails depending on her illustration in different manuscripts. In addition to this video, the work presented on Feral File includes a selection of Islamic manuscripts and archival materials.

MAJLIS AL-JINN: Huma + The Archive #12

This is not love. This is sex. Shu Lea Cheangs feature-length cyberpunk sci-fi porn film I.K.U. (2000) tells the story of the internet porn enterprise Genom Corporation that dispatches I.K.U. coders to collect orgasm data, developing the ability to sell profitable and addictive on-demand orgasms. I.K.U. is a phenomenon that wants to refuse definition . As much trans-genre as it is trans-gender, I.K.U. also wants to merge video and film into a fresh digital universe large-scale enough to overwhelm the viewer. In conjunction with the film release, Cheang created an interactive website called Expand, an interface (2001) with stills from I.K.U. Using horizontally expanding and glitching panels to reveal I.K.U. coders such as Reiko or Tokyo Rose, Expand, an interface challenges the censorship in cinema versus online. The website is no longer online, and this screen recording was recaptured by Shu Lea Cheang in 2022, alongside stills from the film as well as the interface.

IKU: Expand, an interface #12

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

Cao Shu&rsquo;s poetic piece &ldquo;The One Who Lived Yesterday&rdquo; uses vivid simulation to illustrate a scene of distorted time, as well as the oscillation between objective data and subjective memories. Using computer pre-rendered images, the piece explores the possibilities of digital existence, multi-angle views, and spatial narration.

In the piece, a voice runs through the film featuring an anonymous, dream-like speaker who tells a story about yesterday. The voice seems to come from a different place, echoing the perspective of a &ldquo;Progress-tracer&rdquo; to some degree, from a different &ldquo;incarnation,&rdquo; while the speaker himself is hiding. Each of its incarnations is the shape of &ldquo;this yesterday,&rdquo; and yesterday just made up the future.

3D53D

The One Who Lived Yesterday #19

The circle is a simple, intuitive, and common image. It possesses eternal secrets, like the transcendental number, &pi;, the exact value of which remains as elusive as ever; we&rsquo;ve used many ways to calculate it, but we&rsquo;ve never managed to arrive at its precise value, however close we may have gotten.
&ldquo;The circle&rdquo; is an &ldquo;absolute truth&rdquo; lying right before our eyes. We have countless ways of approaching it: the cyclotomic method, infinite series and continued fraction, etc. Among these, the most incredible one was devised by the brilliant mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, whose remarkable insight produced a series for &pi; that seems irregular at first, but is both accurate and converges extraordinarily rapidly. Still, humans are not the only ones who have insight; an A.I. program developed by Google, the &ldquo;Ramanujan Machine&quot;, can solve mathematical constants like &pi; without any prior information, because it has the ability to reveal hidden mathematical structures to produce intuitive, Ramanujanian formulae.
I installed a Ramanujan Machine. I set it up, let it run, and came up with several formulae. Like Ramanujan&apos;s intuitive formulae, these A.I. formulae are called &ldquo;conjectures&quot;, which are &ldquo;shortcuts&quot; to absolute truth. They say if I could prove one of them, they would name it after me.
It is fortunate that I could not prove these formulae; I will not obscure the miracle of mathematics with failed words and arrogant power.
I know that new shortcuts do not increase or decrease the infinites paths to absolute truth, that the symbolic poems we sing do not enhance or diminish the nature of truth.
I believe I can waste every single representation of existence.
Let them exhaust your seas in vain. Let them exhaust the sun, seen through Ramanujan&apos;s magical eyes, in vain.
As I perceive eternity.

All the formulas in this web program are found by the Ramanujan Machine. You can browse all the 81 formulas, and find your comfortable perspective to immerse yourself in the ocean of representation composed by &ldquo;forms and concepts&rdquo;, doing nothing but feel it.


 











81

In endless flow of truth, there are innumerable conjecture. #19

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 #19

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 #19

He Zike&rsquo;s &ldquo;E-dream: We&rsquo;ll stay, forever, in this way (2020 selected)&rdquo; can be seen as a connecting portal between the real and the simulated. This real-time website hosts an intelligent program that constantly adapts stories written and broadcasted by the media. Information is then processed into dialogue which creates a fragmented story between Jack and Rose&mdash;the two protagonists of the site, whose interview with the media will never end.

This work is made possible by a deep learning algorithm that follows a set of rules. While dramatically playing text from mainstream English international news, it simultaneously translates the results, and searches for associated sounds and images on Chinese websites. As a result, the original meaning of the news gradually dispels, transforming from documentary records into ambiguous narratives. Over time, the content of the piece varies due to current events and changes in the media world.

The program has been running online since 2018, and this special video edition was created from hundreds of thousands of results in 2020.

  :  2020  Jack  Rose   

  

20182020

E-dream: Well stay, forever, in this way (2020 selected) #19

&ldquo;Abstract Oracle Miner 0009328437&quot; is an iteration of Guo&apos;s installation work, &ldquo;Abstract Oracle Generator.&quot; The &ldquo;miner&quot; is a virtual device producing different acronym combinations, which act like prophecies responding to questions raised by participants&mdash;or whoever is wandering in the digital world. Through rendering several complex 3D scenes, the algorithm takes the hardware performance evaluation values as random seeds to generate a &ldquo;virtual oracle.&quot; During the process, the temperature of hardware running the webpage may rise, the cooling fan may generate noises and the image rendering may slow down. In other words, the &ldquo;oracle&quot; takes the offering from the hardware&mdash;the foundational structure of the virtual world, reminding viewers that the &ldquo;virtual&quot; is by no means effortless, weightless, or light as a feather. The &ldquo;oracle&rdquo; produced by the computing power consumption is objectively &ldquo;better&quot; than other forms of human divination, and the abstraction of the conjured visions can expand participants&rsquo; imagination.

Please view in full screen.

 0009328437



Abstract Oracle Miner 0009328437 #19

&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 #19

For Your Eyes Only aims to stimulate a conversation with contemporary artists about the future of human visual culture, and to investigate how they are working, in different ways, on the development of a visual language capable to resist machine vision and its implications, and to improve human visual communicationa post-AI, posthuman human vision. The exhibition includes images of diverse nature and origin, submitted as answers to questions of how humans will continue to see and understand images differently than machines do. The images in this exhibition can be used like answers, but they are rather proofs. They have been sent by a human to another human, each of them carrying much more than what I asked for. They are not delivering an answer, they are the answer. Try to read them, and youll soon find out that they have as many readings as readers. Enjoy, theyre for your eyes only. Domenico Quaranta

Feral File  For Your Eyes Only

Anna Carreras generative art often challenges the conventional aesthetics of the medium by generating visual outputs that are both abstract and referential, organic and artificial. Her color palette and aesthetics reveal a closer look at Mediterranean craftsmanship and landscape. Ganxillo is a generative piece inspired by her grandmothers practice of crochet textiles. Like crocheting, coding is a step-by-step handcraft, creating patterns and drawings from small geometrical stitchesa never ending, repetitive process; a mantra that generates beauty. When you observe the resulting patterns, several abstract images may emerge, becoming the starting point for new narratives and memories. Press numbers and keys, or click your mouse, to discover the pieces interactive elements.

Ganxillo #60

Fractura picks up on the modes of representation that image transformation enables. Just as Pop Art took over and somehow shifted the world of visual advertising, Gamma slightly dislocates technological images so that they reveal something other than what they are meant to. And similar to the way Pop artists were enthusiastic about the trivial world of signs, Gamma is taken with the unintentional beauty of machine art. Featuring a rotating cyborghian, genderless head, Fractura displays the classic elements of Gammas GIFs: line drawings, flat 3D objects, rotating models, body parts, an indexed color palette, all of which generate characters that somewhere on the internet have been defined transsexual Bellmeresque zombiedroids.

Fractura #60

According to the art critic Arthur C. Danto, To see something as art requires something the eye cannot decryan atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld. Since 2014, Jonas Lund has been making abstract paintings using elements sampled from paintings by other emerging artists, optimized for market success. The morphing animations in Smart Cut are made out of images from this series that were not selected for production: works as part of the process, works as they were before they got good, left-over abstractions. Turned into animations, these discarded imagesnot art, according to Lund"s artistic theoryhave been selected by a smart cut algorithm as the best ones and automatically pieced together.

Smart Cut #105

In ancient Persian literature,    (Moon-faced) was a genderless adjective used to define beauty in both men and women. In contemporary Iran, it refers to the beauty of women only. Something similar happened, in the world of images, to the Qajar dynasty portrait paintings: the modernization of Iran, the influence of the European tradition of realistic painting, and the use of of camera technology and therefore photography as a model, overshadowed and ended the queer representation of genders that historically characterized these paintings, largely known for their gender-undifferentiation. For her project,   Moon-faced, Allahyari uses a carefully researched and chosen series of keywords with a multimodal AI model to generate a series of videos from the Qajar Dynasty painting archive (1786-1925). Through this collaboration, the machine program learns to paint new genderless portraits, in the effort to undo and repair a history of Westernization that ended the course of nonbinary gender representation in the Persian visual culture. The music in this video was composed by Mani Nilchiani.

  Moon-faced #96

Like the webcam videos Cortright has been working on since 2007, smoking-vase-1 was filmed with no post production, just live use of standard webcam software. Similar to Instagram or Snapchat videos, the effects are part of the original recording, but by contrast, smoking-vase-1 is not part of a networked system designed for data mining and facial recognition. The looping animation is slow, simple, and with a focus on beauty, which led Cortright to her choice of subject as well as the obsolete filter. To shoot smoking-vase-1, Cortright used an old 2014 Mac OS, which gives the image a vintage flavor. A favorite subject of her digital paintings, flowers are featured here as a fragile metaphor of time passing, of a relationship between the real and digital sphere that is ever evolving, never the same.

smoking-vase-1 #59

Patterns of Activation (gardens of the galaxy) is a GIF assemblage of images from various datasets the artist indexed on a citizen science platform, where volunteers are asked to index, draw on, and categorize images from various datasets, usually with the goal of training image processing AI algorithms. The images Novitskova worked on mostly include wildlife cam photos, astronomy, snail embryos, and monkey blood cells. If the overabundance of instrumental, machine-readable images may cheapen any meaning or aesthetic value, Novitskova actively digs some poetry out of these datasets. Such poetry comes from a combination of technology and the reality that it attempts to capture: glowing eyes of animals that reflect the flash-light of the camera, digital low resolution artifacts, accidentally stunning compositions of galaxies and forests, etc. The GIFs mechanical speed is faster than the usual human perceptionit is functional to the machine gaze, but in itself it creates a new type of poetic image, too.

Patterns of Activation (gardens of the galaxy) #44

To create a complete 360 representation of a real human figure, visual effects companies utilize 3D imaging technology. One can then unwrap the scanned texture into a 2D plane, much like a world map. In I I, Jon Rafman alters a selection of these unwrapped head textures and animates the transformation in the style of VFX breakdown reels, typically used to showcase the special effects in movies and games. The result is a jarring conglomeration of characters, a carnivalesque cast of commodities. Rafman"s work is the reverse of anthropomorphism: I represent the reified experience of the self and others as mere objects and images. Rafman states that these custom textures will evolve into wearable skins designed for 3D avatars, which, in turn, may eventually be purchased and used to inhabit the various metaverses. In a world where most of one"s time is spent in online worlds, avatars become increasingly crucial to constructing our identities. The dividing line between our real and virtual bodies has already blurred. As we spend more of our existence in front of a screen, our web personas become more significant to who we are than our physical bodies. When one wears a mask long enough, it is absorbed into ones character.