NGV Triennial: meet the artists using technology to change the way we see

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NGV Triennial: meet the artists using technology to change the way we see

By John Bailey and Annabel Ross

TOSHIYUKI INOKO​
TEAMLAB FOUNDER, JAPAN

TeamLab, Moving Creates Vortices and Vortices Create Movement 2017.

TeamLab, Moving Creates Vortices and Vortices Create Movement 2017. Credit: NGV

When Toshiyuki Inoko sat down for dinner every night as a child, his grandfather would ask the same question: where did today's fish come from? He'd be happiest when the answer was "Naruto". For years young Inoko was left wondering what the deal was with these Naruto fish, and it was only as an adult that he understood that the famous whirlpools of the Naruto✓ Strait circulate plankton, minerals and other ocean elements to enrich the water tremendously. "Which are obviously very helpful to get very delicious fish," he says.

Inoko grew up in Tokushima, not far from the Naruto Strait, where he used to swim and watch fishermen at work. It helps explain why the dynamics of the whirlpool – or, as he prefers to call it, the vortex – loom large in his artistic imagination. As one of the founders of Japan's art studio teamLab, he's partly responsible for the large-scale installation at this year's inaugural NGV Triennial that will see visitors generating swirling vortices as they pass through the space.

I get the sense that Inoko has never met a silence he didn't like. In interviews he's famous for taking minutes to formulate his response to a question – I've read of one such pause stretching to six minutes. But speaking to him via a Skype link to the teamLab HQ in Tokyo, there's no chance of quiet. He's sitting in a meeting room whose glass walls open up on a creative space bustling with life, elevators never getting a moment's rest. Inoko's isn't your average boutique art studio. His staff number more than 400. TeamLab is a vortex of its own.

From programming to data crunching to animation, every technical element of a teamLab project is created in-house, and from its founding in 2001, the company's artistic output was subsidised by a commercial software development arm.

"Since 2011 we've slowly gotten recognition within the art community and are starting to find private collectors and museums and corporations who acquire our works, so the situation has improved dramatically."

Toshiyuki Inoko.

Toshiyuki Inoko.Credit: teamLab

The dual opportunities of commercial work and art-world respect have enabled Inoko to think big in recent years. His last work took as its canvas a 500,000-square-metre forest in Japan's Saga prefecture, transforming the environment without displacing so much as a leaf. It's typical of teamLab's creations, which employ interactive light displays to reconfigure the relationships between humans, technology and the natural world.

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"Using the huge old gardens and forest," he says, "a natural habitat, without touching any elements of nature, without modifying or changing or adding, we only added moving light to create interactive digital art. Without making any harm to nature, but at the same time the visitors become part of this wonderful new artwork that exists in nature. Nature is not the opposite of human. Nature and human are united and you don't see any boundaries."

An epiphany struck Inoko while making another work last year, in a remote mountain forest, experimenting with light on a waterfall.

"It slowly occurred to me that human beings are very, very bad at recognising that the nature we're looking at is the result of billions and billions of years of Earth's movements and the interaction between earth and life," he says.

"I can imagine that I'm here because of my ancestors, but it's almost impossible to imagine that our ancestors might be some sort of monkey or different kinds of creatures, that the birth of life was amoeba-like. All of these things we know in theory but we can never really feel that kind of miraculous continuity."

His Triennial entry is another intervention that dissolves the borders between the individual human body and the forces of nature. The floor of a room is rendered as water, with mirrored walls extending the seascape into infinity. The movements of people walking in the space will generate whirlpools of light that interact with one another.

, 2017. Interactive digital projection.

, 2017. Interactive digital projection.Credit: NGV

"When there's nobody in the room there's actually nothing there. When people enter the room, as they walk slowly or fast, the force of that person in certain directions will create a flow and that flow will create a rotational phenomenon on the surface of this water."

As technology-heavy as his work is, Inoko's desire to strip away the boundaries between humans, and both nature and technology are less about the novel and new and more about that urge to reconnect with the deep time of geology.

"Many of the so-called modern technologies that came after the Industrial Revolution have contributed to our perceiving the world as separated, as having boundaries within the world. So I'm going back to the pre-modern world where those modern technologies didn't exist."

Diving into his primordial playspace, he hopes, will leave a visitor feeling "that we are part of this borderless world and also that my behaviour in that world will change the appearance of the world as well. I'm directly affecting the world surrounding us. This kind of experience is similar to the world that our ancestors probably used to live in." JB

IRIS VAN HERPEN​
FASHION DESIGNER, THE NETHERLANDS

Where other artists see limits, Iris van Herpen sees nothing but possibilities. The Dutch fashion designer, who has been showing two haute couture collections a year in Paris since 2011 and whose creations are favoured by stars including Beyonce​ and Cara Delevingne​, has never let something like the apparent restrictions of a particular fabric get in the way of her vision.

"With me it mostly starts with experiments; it's really the search for transformation of a material, I'm looking for a way to make it my own," she explains in her Amsterdam atelier, surrounded by astonishing garments that have been bent to her will. "Often, using material the way it wants to be used is not what fits me."

This out-of-the-box approach to design has served van Herpen well – she was one of the first fashion designers to embrace 3D printing early in her career, in 2010.

Iris van Herpen doesn't let restrictions get in her way.

Iris van Herpen doesn't let restrictions get in her way.Credit: Jean Baptiste Mondino

In the inaugural Triennial of international art at the National Gallery of Victoria, four of van Herpen's pieces reveal how, using laser cutting, 3D printing and other techniques, the designer has created pieces every bit as whimsical and poetic (and arguably more innovative) as those made with needle and thread.

A blue dress created for Bjork​ to wear on her Biophilia​ tour in 2012 was based on a design in van Herpen's Escapism collection, her first Paris couture outing for spring/summer 2011.

The collection was inspired by the grotesque, feelings of emptiness and the strange, macabre work of American artist Kris Kuksi​.

Bjork's dress is a feat of engineering made out of 3D printed plastic film that has been bunched together to create voluminous sculptural swirls on the body. It's also remarkably light.

"I remember when Bjork got it she was amazed at how light and comfortable it was, because when you look at it you have no idea," says van Herpen.

A former dancer, van Herpen appreciates the importance of comfort and practicality; she also designs costumes for ballet and opera.

Iris van Herpen Look 14 2016 Lucid collection, autumn-winter 2016.

Iris van Herpen Look 14 2016 Lucid collection, autumn-winter 2016.Credit: Peter Stigter

It was only after enrolling at the Netherlands' prestigious ArtEZ Institute of the Arts, whose alumni include Viktor & Rolf, that van Herpen decided to focus on fashion. She wanted to work with her hands while incorporating other disciplines she loved such as art and architecture.

An appreciation for the tactile might have stemmed from her interest in craft as a child. She grew up in the tiny, remote town of Wamel, accessible only by boat. "Even Dutch people have never heard about it," she says.

There were no computers, no TV, no magazines. She didn't even own a laptop until she started her label in 2007. Everything was hand-made and handiwork still accounts for 80 per cent of her work, she says.

Her first foray into 3D printing came out of a 2010 collaboration with architectural firm Benthem Crouwel​, which had designed a museum dubbed "The Bath" in Amsterdam and asked her for a garment to accompany it.

Her original vision, a dress made to look like water, failed – the technology was not yet up to scratch. But her interest was piqued, and just as she ignores the restrictions posed by a piece of fabric, she pushes her technicians to leapfrog the limits of their machines and processes.

"A few years later, I said to the printers, 'We've been working on this so long, let's do this, let's push the button', and the printers were like, 'There's no way we can do this', but I said, 'Push it anyway', and it worked, they were completely surprised and so was I!"

Initially, her 3D-printed designs began on the computer, working from "the mind only". Today her approach is largely intuitive.

"I need interaction with the real material and the real world," she says.

"Now, I would start with a test toile to find out the structure, maybe even find out proportions. Then we translate that to the computer, either 3D scanning it or drawing it, then we make samples again in real life, laser cutting the prototypes again, translating that to the computer again, then you print it, then maybe you fit it, you tweak something again and maybe print it again … there are lots of steps involved that are all fittable, basically."

Van Herpen's visually striking designs are popular with celebrities and fashion's elite, and while van Herpen says she'll never say no to a request, she'll tweak the design to match that person's aesthetic if it doesn't quite align with hers.

"Luckily, as my work is so specific, people come to me for that," she says. "People don't come here for wedding dresses. Well, maybe. But not the ordinary ones." AR

RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER
ELECTRONIC ARTIST, MEXICO

There's a delectable irony to the way technology keeps stymieing my attempts to set up a video link with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. At first I can hear his voice but not see his face. Then we're miming a dumbshow as our screen images are left without sound. Finally we connect.

"It's my new Apple X something," he says. "This phone has a camera that you ID with your face, right? I just had dental work yesterday and so I'm inflamed and it's refusing to open because of it. It's like, you're not the guy I'm trained for."

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Lozano-Hemmer's work is at the bleeding edge of tech, full of nanotechnology and facial recognition and datapoints by the billion-load, but for all their visual and conceptual dazzle he maintains a gleeful ambivalence about the role of technology in our future. In his view, technology isn't just the conduit but is part of the conversation itself.

"To think about language we need language. Same with technology. We don't know what the world would be like without it, so the sooner we understand that investigating, probing, creating with technology is really about investigating, probing, creating about ourselves, the better."

Lozano-Hemmer grew up in Mexico but has called Montreal home for the past 14 years. "You're a better programmer in Canada because you have to spend five months indoors. In Mexico the pool is too tempting."

While he was studying chemistry at university, his friends were all actors and writers and composers and he gravitated towards designing sets for their productions. Soon enough he realised his stage pieces could grow into artworks of their own. Coming out of a performative tradition, however, meant that the relationship between his work and the onlooker is never passive.

Where much gallery work presents a canvas or screen that invites the viewer's gaze, Lozano-Hemmer's work throws that gaze back. "You're looking at something but that something is looking back at you. That looking back is not neutral and it's not innocent, especially in an age of surveillance and the revelations of Snowden and understanding that these cameras are commonplace."

Lozano-Hemmer doesn't subscribe to the techno-utopian dream of salvation via algorithm as promised by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, but neither is he in the Neo-Luddite camp warning of the Orwellian nightmare that awaits us. His works tap into both the playfulness of selfie culture and the predatorial implications of surveillance, but he also seeks to produce more complex dialogues.

"I don't have a moral or even ethical standpoint on this. It's happening and I know I'm a victim like everybody else, I don't have a vision that's an alternative to what's happening, but I do believe in the epic proportions of the discussion that needs to begin."

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer Redundant assembly 2015 interactive digital software, high definition screen, high definition video cameras. Collection the artist.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer Redundant assembly 2015 interactive digital software, high definition screen, high definition video cameras. Collection the artist.Credit: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

For the NGV Triennial, Lozano-Hemmer has created a new iteration of an earlier work, Redundant Assembly, in which six cameras record the onlooker's face and display it as a kind of post-Cubist image that presents all sides simultaneously. The new version, Recorded Assembly, takes the process a step further by introducing an element of time: now your face is mapped onto those of past viewers, too.

"Your presence there as a live participant is always in dialogue with whoever was there before," he says. "It's about seeing yourself in relationship with others."

While he rails against the dangers posed by new technology ("this is not science fiction, Facebook has literally helped the election of Trump") he also sees potential in acknowledging the performative aspect of identity and interpersonal relationships. When he observes his kids on social media, he notices how the identities they project are like channels they can change at will.

"When you believe that identity is a channel and that you can change it, fundamental questions of ethnicity and nationalism and gender become fluid, and there's some very positive things about that."

Lozano-Hemmer is fascinated by fluid dynamics, and that fascination permeates his work. While we're speaking he produces a gleaming object he describes as "a 3D-printed speech bubble". Using laser tomography and photogrammetry he captured the turbulence of air generated by a word being uttered, and printed that invisible exhalation in steel. The word I'm looking at is "au", from the French "au clair de la lune", and when he hauls out the full phrase made material, it's like an alien rocket launcher.

"What's interesting to me about this is that it's completely unrepeatable. The same person saying the same sentence one second later, the shapes that emerge out of that turbulence are absolutely unique. To me there is a degree of hope in that."

In putting the spectator at the core of his work, he aims to harness a little of that unrepeatable-ness. "We need to think of artworks as entities that are alive and are becoming something else. Not that they are something but that they're becoming something else. That the artworks are out of control." JB

JORIS LAARMAN​
DESIGNER, THE NETHERLANDS

Joris Laarman tells stories through things.

Joris Laarman tells stories through things.Credit: Thijs Wolzak

In a vast warehouse in Amsterdam's historic ship wharf, Joris Laarman and his team are completing a 12-metre canal bridge made entirely through 3D printing.

Their lab, dubbed MX3D, was opened by Laarman in 2015 specifically for the project, and around us printers screech and buzz, spitting out sparks from behind wire fences. Laarman now uses the printers for other art and design projects, and the team is also developing industrial applications, to 3D-print things such as rotor turbines and ship propellers.

"An engineering company wouldn't do this because it doesn't make sense," he says. "It's not like we go from A to B, we go from here to here to here to here," he says, zig-zagging his finger through the air.

Like his compatriot Iris van Herpen, Laarman has no time for the word "impossible". The recipient of accolades including The Wall Street Journal's Innovator of the Year Award in 2011 (shared with Elon Musk) and Wallpaper magazine's Young Designer of the Year in 2004, his visionary approach fuses emerging technologies with new materials and aesthetics in revolutionary ways.

He thinks of himself as an "author" rather than a designer or manufacturer. "People tend to call it artist; I think artist is so pretentious, I just tell stories through things," he says.

"I'm not a craftsman myself, I work with craftsmen and I work with engineers and I like to tell stories, and I work with people that are smart enough in their field to do what they need to do."

Laarman, who writes science fiction stories in his spare time, has been both fascinated and concerned by the future since he was a child.

Like van Herpen, he grew up in a remote, rural part of the Netherlands. "It was literally farmer country with nothing," he says. "I had a lot of time to dream."

He made his own roller-skates and parachutes as a child, and later received international attention for the Heatwave Radiator he produced in his final year at Design Academy Eindhoven, a novel blend of style and function.

The four Laarman works on display in the Triennial were developed by the lab he founded in 2004 with his filmmaker partner Anita Star. The Dragon Bench was printed with molten stainless steel and was the first of his large-scale projects to be printed in self-supporting lines with metal, using the wrong settings on the welding machine.

"If you can imagine something is possible, it usually is, you just have to tweak it until it works."

Dragon bench 2014 stainless steel, ed. 4/8 NGV.

Dragon bench 2014 stainless steel, ed. 4/8 NGV.Credit: Jeremy Dillon

Another of his designs, the Maker Chair, allowed consumers to print the pieces and put them together. Also showing is his Timeline, a digitally animated work that looks at industrial, technological and cultural developments spanning the Big Bang to the not-too-distant future.

"If you can zoom into milliseconds you can see high-frequency trading stocks, if you zoom out you can see population and climate change over the last 10 years," says Laarman.

Based on Intel co-founder Gordon Moore's hypothesis that computer processing power doubles on average every two years, Laarman speculates that in 2035, the world will be rife with robots.

"Artificial intelligence and computer intelligence will be smarter than us, just 15 years from now," he predicts.

Since founding the Joris Laarman Lab and the MX3D printing lab, Laarman has been able to focus on telling stories, determining his own deadlines and choosing the projects that matter to him.

"I don't really care if this chair is more comfortable than that chair, or looks nicer or is more trendy or whatever, I'm interested in history and the future and the stories these things tell.

"I think about how people look at this thing 100 years from now," he says, indicating the bridge.

"I like to show all the defects and problems we had with printing; 100 years from now you'll see our struggles, then the work becomes alive in a way." AR

TOM CRAGO​
VIDEO GAME DEVELOPER, MELBOURNE

Tom Crago, CEO of Tantalus.

Tom Crago, CEO of Tantalus.Credit: Selina Ou

It's tough to imagine Tom Crago's bucket list. He holds degrees in arts, law and business, has been a Pacific Games Champion triple jumper, has written a book and opened a Tokyo restaurant. His video game company Tantalus works with the likes of Nintendo and Disney, and his own art game features in this year's NGV Triennial. He's 41. Remember when Gen X were the aimless underachievers?

The notion of video games as art is a thorny one. When non-gamers scoff at the idea that a game can hold its own alongside more conventional artforms, fans often bristle. "It's a super-boring question," says Crago. "They are cultural objects and they're very important cultural objects just by virtue of their audience. I think there's a huge amount of potential for games to have a transformative impact on people's lives in the same way that art can and does. I think they're art but art packaged in a way that the majority of people aren't used to receiving it."

At the same time, many game-makers resist being confined by the frame of what "art" is supposed to be or do. "I sometimes think people who make games rail against the concept of games as art in the same way that many people who make games rail against the concept of narrative in games. They don't think games should be about storytelling but should be about the moment-to-moment or about flow."

As CEO of Tantalus, Crago has steered the ship of one of Australia's most successful game companies, weathering the 2008 financial crisis that saw many similar outfits flounder and adapting to the new opportunities afforded by the emerging mobile market.

His NGV entry is a personal one, though. Five years ago he decided to make something that could play at the intersection of games, art and philosophy. "I felt like I wasn't getting what I wanted from video games as a gamer, and I felt that the medium had a huge potential that I wanted to explore. Not necessarily potential in the bigger-and-better category but in the more nuanced category."

He wanted to move counter to the prevailing winds of gaming, which increasingly emphasise always-online and multiplayer connectivity. "In a world where games were becoming more social and in a world that generally is becoming more social, the contribution I wanted to make should be anti-social. It should be something that's just for you as the player.

"I remember when I was younger, the experiences I had reading books and listening to music were very isolating experiences. In creating this thing I wanted to replicate some of those moments not by writing a book or recording an album but in a medium that I felt had the potential to be even more powerful, because of agency and interactivity."

Materials 2016-17 (detail) colour virtual reality environment, sound Collection of Tantalus, Melbourne.

Materials 2016-17 (detail) colour virtual reality environment, sound Collection of Tantalus, Melbourne.Credit: Tom Crago

The result is a first-person virtual reality experience that sees a user exploring a vast ship floating on an endless ocean. It's a lonely, contemplative wander that doesn't spell out how you should respond. "There is a sense in which I want people to figure it out. You're not watching a movie. You have agency, which is kind of what the project's about."

From the outset Crago knew that he wanted to collaborate with fine artists on the work, to see what the collision of the art and game worlds would produce. He approached several people at the Victorian College of the Arts, who proposed that he make the project part of a Ph.D – what's another string to Crago's bow? – and as the work proceeded he brought in artists Mark Rodda, Viv Miller, Indigo O'Rourke, William Mackinnon and Kate Tucker to help build his virtual world.

"I worked with them extremely closely," he says. The ship is inspired by an oil painting by Rodda, for instance, which was itself the outcome of "hundreds of sketches, loads of meetings over the years. We were back and forth in each other's heads to find out what we wanted.

"I then worked with a guy who makes props for film and TV and he built a model of the ship. Then one of the 3D artists who works here at Tantalus built the model in polygons and we put it in the game. But so much that came from Mark I didn't ask for, which is the beauty of it. His ideas and his sense of what it could be were genuinely new and novel and not from the world of video games."

Crago cites other influences ranging from playwright Tom Stoppard to philosophers such as Sartre and Heidegger​, but navigating his work-in-progress suggests that these influences are atmospheric rather than literal. The only presence you'll be forced to face on his drifting galleon is your own. That's intended. "This is meant to be a space into which you can come and inhabit and there'll be a few markers along the way, but it's meant to be an experience just for you." JB

The NGV Triennial runs from December 15 until April 15, 2018.

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