People/Portrait on the Fly live generative video exhibition
22 November 2024 16:00 till 08 January 2025 18:00 - Location: TU Delft Library, Main Hall | Add to my calendar
** Opening Reception: 22 November in the Main Hall **
Internationally renowned digital artists and professors from the University of Art and Design in Linz, Laurent Mignonneau & Christa Sommerer, will exhibit two live generated video works in the Library Main Hall. The combination will make you think twice about the self and flocking behaviors in a constantly moving society.
The interactive installation, People on the Fly, consists of a monitor that shows a swarm of a few thousand flies. When a person positions himself in front of the monitor, the insects build up the contour of the person. They begin to arrange and rearrange themselves continuously, thereby creating a recognizable likeness of the individual.
Posing in front of the monitor attracts the flies. Within seconds they invade the face, but even the slightest movement of the head or of parts of the face drives them off. The portraits are thus in constant flux; they construct and deconstruct. Portrait on the Fly is a commentary on our love for making pictures of ourselves (Selfie-Culture), about change, transience and impermanence.
©2015 & ©2016 Laurent Mignonneau & Christa Sommerer. Photo: Michael Maritsch, at OK Center Linz, 2022
About the speakers
Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau are internationally renowned media artists, researchers and pioneers of interactive art. They worked 10 years in Japan as Associate Professors at the IAMAS Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences in Gifu, Japan and as Researchers and Artistic Directors at the ATR Advanced Telecommunications Research Lab in Kyoto Japan. Previously they were artists-in-residence at the MIT CAVS in Cambridge, USA, artists-in-residence at the NCSA National Center for Supercomputing Applications Beckmann Institute in Champaign Urbana, IL, USA, and artists-in-residence at the NTT-InterCommunication Center in Tokyo. In 2004 they founded the Department of Interface Cultures at the University of Art and Design in Linz, Austria, where they are both professors.