Exhibition
The main exhibition of Print Screen 2019 puts The Unseen at center stage, in an attempt to peer through its camouflage. From the hidden eyes that watch us from the drone in the skies to the voices that call our name from the deepest parts of the internet. We search for the obscure, the microscopic, the nanometric, the buried, and that which lurks behind the scenes.
Main Building
Tuesday | 19.11 | 23:30 - 20:00
Wednesday | 20.11 | 23:30 - 19:00
Thursday | 21.11 | 23:30 - 19:00
The main exhibition is divided into the following themes:
Tubes
We are used to regarding the internet as a virtual environment, a cloudlike weightless apparatus that isn’t associated with any geographic place. The information distribution processes are hidden. Information flows to us mysteriously - arriving at our screens, as if by magic, only to disappear again at the touch of a button. The works in “Tubes” wish to expose internet technologies and bring them into the center of the room, restore their physicality and emphasize their material and aesthetic forms. They intend to remind us that the choice to keep the information infrastructure unseen is not only practical but political. After all, there are those who profit from the system’s seemingly magical and invisible appearance. This is because the information is actually “somewhere”, but the access to it is restricted and controlled by some obscure, authorized people.
Online
Matan Mittwoch
In this video, an illuminated rope is vigorously hurled at the floor, whip-cracking with every blow. Mittwoch takes advantage of simple cognitive biases and sensory distortions. While the light is switched off, the sound and image resemble a live wire discharging electricity, yet when the light is on, we see a jump-rope, a plaything associated with childhood. The title of the work Online is also ambiguous. Are we presented with a physical manifestation of light and electricity, which are at the heart of the data transmission processes on the net or maybe this work is ״about a line״?
Stretching the Limits
Vardi Bobrow and
Prof. Orit Shefi
in collaboration with the Fetter Museum of Art and Nanoscience
Artist Vardi Bobrow and Prof. Orit Shefi from the Bar Ilan University's Faculty of Engineering, observe the recovery processes of damaged neurons, which comprise stretching and growing. Prof. Shefi utilizes nanometric structures in an attempt to influence the directions and forms in which neuronal trees grow for rehabilitation and healing purposes. Bobrow explores in her creative work, the properties and uses of everyday industrial materials such as office elastic bands. This dialogue between the two led to a joint investigation into the properties that enable networks and knots to stretch, grow, and develop, in the brain and in different materials. The festival's visitors are invited to participate in the discourse, enable networks and knots to stretch, grow, and develop. The project was curated by Tal Yizrael.
Total Reflection
Nimrod Astarhan
The work transcodes the network activity of cellular phones, computers, and other devices in its proximity to light flowing in translucent acrylic tubes. The tube structure has been shaped according to the critical angle of “total reflection”. This phenomenon is what makes the water-to-air surface in a fish-tank look like a perfectly silvered mirror when viewed from below the water level, and it is also exploited by optical fibers used in telecommunication cables.
Directors: Boaz Levin, Ryan S. Jeffery
Germany / USA, 2015,
54 minutes. English
Fragments
on Machines
Emma Charles
Fragments on Machines reveal the physical framework and materiality of the Internet, a vast network often thought and spoken about solely in abstract terms. The title is adopted from a text by Karl Marx, in which he seeks to trace the inversions that mark the relationship between man and machine in the production process of capital whereby, through increased automation, the machine ends up no longer as a tool at the hands of the workers, but as an increasingly dominant power. Taking New York City as its central focus and interwoven with a fictionalized narrative, the film observes the evolution of architecture in the city to accommodate the material nodes and connectors that comprise the physical manifestation of the “virtual” world.
All That is Solid Melts Into Data
Equal parts building and machine, a library and a public utility, data centers are the unwitting monuments of knowledge production of the digital turn. This documentary video traces the historical evolution of the structures that make-up “The Cloud”, the physical repositories for the exponentially growing amount of human activity and communication taking form as digital data. While our “smart tools” and communication devices become increasingly smaller, thinner, and sleeker, the physical infrastructure they require grows larger, affecting and shaping the physical landscape and natural resources. The rhetoric surrounding the so-called “Big Data” proclaims it as the solution to every problem faced by either government or private industry. This film looks to the often-overlooked materiality that “The Cloud” is reliant upon, in order to elucidate its social, environmental, and economic impact, and call into question the structures of power that have developed out of the technologies of global computation.
MotU #9
Ruth Schnell
The work MotU #9 from the series Mirrors of the Unseen (MotU) challenges the supposed credibility of the visible. The habitual process of seeing is infiltrated by words and icons made of light; they seem to emerge from a flickering LED stick and float, hologram-like, in front of the surrounding architecture. Nothing can get in the way of these translucent images. They are present, and yet at the same time do not exist; only individual perception makes them accessible to the viewer.
Ruth Schnell´s works generated with so called light sticks interfere with our conventional ideas about seeing. The artist exploits the persistence of human vision: The photoreceptors in the retina cannot separately resolve individual images that appear in a frame rate higher than 20 images per second. For the presentation on the light stick, words, icons, but also photographs abstracted down to a silhouette are divided into points which are displayed sequentially along the vertical rows. Gazing directly at the object the spectator sees a throbbing flicker emitted by the vertically arranged LEDs. Observers in motion perceive the afterimages, thus several, already past situations, as a single present. Only the performative act of moving actuates this “present” and therewith the work as a collaborative process. The content addresses the fields of social movements, surveillance, algorithms, and implications of perceivability.
She-nvisible
A few months ago, the internet was abuzz when Apple inc. admitted that it uses Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant, to record its users. The voice of the lovely lady that only wishes to be of service, turned out to be a cover, behind which a commercial company performs acts of espionage against its clients. Ever since communication technology and modern marketing techniques have been put to use, the voice of the imagined woman at the other end of the line was perceived as the caring, sympathetic voice of a motherly figure, and was thus used to build trust, create cooperation, increase satisfaction, and overcome reservation. With the rise of artificial-intelligent technologies watching us, studying our behavior, and updating the system, it’s no wonder that they have been embellished with feminine qualities.
The works in this room examine the abstract, synthesized, imagined, and mediating feminine image, the magical power it holds, and the ways it’s employed and appropriated to deceive, manipulate, and control.
Terms of Service
Constant Dullaart
In Dullaart’s work, a female voice - perhaps human? perhaps machine? - recites the terms of service of Google’s various products. The famous search-box transforms into a mouth, and the texts that no one ever reads are delivered in a feminine soliloquy. Hi-Tech companies are well informed about research showing that female voices invoke more attention, empathy, and obedience than their male counterparts. Dullaart uses the same knowledge not to confuse and deceive, but rather to reveal the legal terms and conditions that control our lives while we use these sites.
Sleeping in our Beds
Yael Frank
A gust of air from the fan reveals the message “Sleeping in our Beds”. A written text that suddenly appears on the wall is a common visual trope in horror films, such as The Shining, in which people are haunted by ghosts. In these films, the presence of the writing on the wall emphasizes the ghost’s ability to affect the physical space, alludes to future incidents, and usually precedes another, much more violent apparition of the ghost. This is why the message here may invoke fear and bewilderment. Who wrote it? Who is asleep and what happens at home during times of slumber? Frank charges the haunted house with a message about a cozy and intimate situation, using colorful cheerleading pom-poms, maybe hinting at the feminine, benevolent character of the ghosts. But is this enough to reassure us about those who watch and listen to us while we sleep?
How do you See Me?
Heather Dewey-Hagborg
We live in a world in which cameras are everywhere, constantly watching us. These systems know a tremendous amount about us - but what do we know about them? How do you see me? is a way of looking back and trying to learn how this alien intelligence so attentive to our every move is structured, internally. In this work, Dewey-Hagborg utilized algorithms to generate self-portraits that are recognized as her face, although they look nothing like her, or like any human face. The abstract representation of "her face," is vastly different, even alien to human knowledge. And this also shows us that we should exercise extreme caution in handing control over to artificial intelligence, or automated systems, that we cannot intuitively relate to or understand.
LAUREN
Lauren McCarthy
McCarthy attempts to become a human version of Amazon Alexa, a smart home intelligence for people in their own homes. The performance lasts several days. It begins with an installation of a series of custom-designed networked smart devices (including cameras, microphones, switches, door locks, faucets, and other electronic devices) in someone’s residence. She then remotely watches over the person 24/7 and controls all aspects of their home. She aims at being better than an AI because as a person, she can understand the resident and anticipate their needs. The relationship that emerges falls in the ambiguous space between human-machine and human-human.
LAUREN is a meditation on the smart home, the tensions between intimacy vs privacy, convenience vs agency it presents, and the role of human labor in the future of automation.
Loophole
Noa Gur
Loophole extends between darkness and light, between the anonymity of the silhouette and a recognizable outline. Here, the artist has produced a self-portrait that is constantly moving, spinning on its axis like a mechanical mannequin. It may also be regarded as an ethnographic visual object that proclaims its otherness and its distinctiveness; an object one would like to regard as imploring us to categorize it in a way that may fix its meaning, to analyze and reduce it to the limitations of our knowledge. At the same time, it is a portrait devoid of excessive information, presenting the viewer only with an engulfing two-dimensional silhouette that tries to breach its designated bounds. An aperture or patch in the artist’s portrait turns into two gaping holes that may stand for her absent eyes, looking at us without looking. Gur is swallowed up by the black silhouette that gapes before us, demanding in vain to observe us as we observe her revolving around an invisible axis, bereft of distinguishing features yet distinctly present. (Text by Rotem Rozenthal)
Megapixels
Adam Harvey
MegaPixels is an independent art and research project by Adam Harvey and Jules LaPlace that investigates the ethics, origins, and individual privacy implications of face recognition image datasets and their role in the expansion of biometric surveillance technologies. In this work, which was created for the 2019 Print Screen Festival, Harvey took the facial image repositories used by biometric identification companies and presented the information back as animated portraits showing the key landmark points that detection algorithms found to be significant for facial recognition.
The basic embarrassment of strangers in the closed and confined space of the elevator is at the heart of this work. Stamler creates a meeting between the elevator passengers at the Digital Art Center and a virtual and unidentified woman figure who dispels the silence by asking semi-psychological questions about our mental state. The generic and direct questions were inspired by websites that promise us to discover the secrets of life, while here we are re-thinking about the elevator as a new observation space for our existential condition.
Itamar Stemler
Stuck
Bad
Thoughts
Ruth Patir, Ana Wild
Ana Wild and Ruth Patir's "Bad Thoughts" is a girls' choir in the form of a talking computer farm. The work is a reflection on the relationship between service delivery, intimacy and power relations, nouns and gender affiliation. The installation features eight girls' voices, emanating from eight computer cases. The girls will talk to an imaginary audience and attempt to discuss “the future of our relationship” with them.
Eye in the sky
The drone is in the spotlight of this exhibition. This unmanned aerial vehicle has transformed from a weapon and spyware at the service of armies and intelligence organizations to a remote-controlled third eye available to the masses. Not only do drones rewrite the rules of war, but they also challenge geophysical borders as well as the human right to privacy and protection from the unseen. In the realm of photography, they expand the visual scope, transforming photographers into superheroes who can use them to watch from the sky and to infiltrate places too dangerous for human feet. The artists in this room explore the drone as an aesthetic, well-designed object and as the subject of political and social conflicts concerning freedom and human rights in the 21st century
Restricted Zone: Temple Mount
A no-fly zone (NFZ) encircles the Temple Mount / Al-Aqsa area (approximately 3 km in diameter). It is classified by the Civil Aviation Authority as "LLP11 Restricted Zone: Temple Mount”. The geographic coordinates of the restricted zone are programmed into the drone’s GPS system, preventing it from taking off within the area or flying into it. Through the eye of the drone, the work exposes the outlines of an invisible wall in Jerusalem as it raises questions about the new relationship between technology, theology, and politics.
The project was originally developed for Mekudeshet Festival, 2018, Jerusalem’s Season of Culture.
Eran Sachs - Sound \ Video Installation Batt-Girl - Interactive Design David Opp - Sound \ Video Installation Barak Brinker - Drone Photography
Hagit Keysar
The mythological Phoenix is rendered as a golden chimera, its head replaced with an ominous surveillance camera. The bird meets its inevitable demise above a consumer-electronics store, perched above a jellyfish-like creature composed of intricate Beuax-Arts architecture, hovering gracefully among the clouds. Trapped in a contentiously looping cycle, the work alludes to the cycles of destruction and creation of modern capitalism. The second work, Scroll is a seamlessly looping video installation. We are presented with an endless column of plastic, architecture, fur, and fabric. Taking on organic qualities the structure repeatedly spores futuristic seeds, suggesting technology itself as a reproducing life form. Maintaining an unsettling ambiguity the work calls into the question the boundaries between technology and the natural.
The Phoenix & the Medusa + Scroll
Jonathan Monaghan
White-Hot is a series of three audio interviews, which explore the optical, legal, and ideological apparatus of the Infra-Red gaze. Thermal cameras have long penetrated consumer-based markets and pop-culture. In the presented interviews with a drone sensor operator, a criminal defense attorney, and a media scholar, Keren asks us to look closely at the militarized aspects and consequences of a temperature-based visual regime. Attorney Kenneth Lerner discusses America’s Fourth Amendment and thermal technology’s threat to privacy. Brandon Bryant, who served in the US Air Force, shares his daunting military experience using infrared cameras. Between infrared’s white-hot and black-cold polarities, Bryant describes humans transforming into targets, as if in shadow puppetry. MIT theorist Lisa Parks argues that a transition is taking place in which a visual regime based on visible light is shifting into a regime based on temperature, and considers how temperature-based optics affect conceptions of racial and ethnic differences and the registration and perception of violence and death.
*These interviews were originally shown as part of Tali Keren’s solo exhibition ״Heat Signature״ in New York.
Tali Keren
White Hot
Making Rye, Gneiss Outcropping and Ferns #2B
Clement Valla
In China, Scholar's Rocks are prized objects because they embody the dynamic transformational processes of nature. In these videos, two inverse directions in 3d imaging are collapsed into a single model: simulation (the copy without an original) versus scans (the copy from the material world). The result creates new and different sorts of spatial vision. The video contains a 3d scan of rock outcropping, a heavy, stable and solid material form. A simulated cloth, light and pliant, glides over the scanned rocky landscape and conforming to and softly hugging it. The simulated cloth becomes a picture surface, like a sensitized photo film warped in three dimensions. The resulting image warps our sense of space and time.
Mor Afgin
255, 0, 0 && 255, 0, 255
The work comprises DIY, open-source, downloadable drone parts. Afgin downloaded the original files, changed and reinvented them as futile drone skeletons, presented as if hovering up, against the wall, on custom designed devises.
Into The Rabbit Hole
The white rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland symbolizes the spark of curiosity that ignites us and leads us on a strange, thrilling, disturbing, and at times chaotic and irresponsible search expedition in search of the true nature of reality. In a variety of interactive experiences, in this part of the exhibition, the audience is invited to actively participate in experiments and encounters that explore our perception of reality. The rabbit hole is manifest in the use of optical and digital technologies that reveal to us nanoscopic virtual environments and minuscule dimensions, elusive to the human eye. The artists lead us to a wonderland, thus sparking our imagination, while simultaneously teaching us about the true nature of our world.
Halo
Karolina Halatek
The title of the work refers to the natural optical phenomenon seen around the sun or moon, produced by light in interaction with ice crystals. In the exhibition, the place of the celestial body is given to the viewer, who becomes a central part of the piece. Halatek works involve human perception to unveil new dimensions of existence that are on the edge of human knowledge, unknown territories that balance between seen and unseen. The creative process of constructing light resembles an experimental lab where the final outcome of designing the art experience becomes unpredictable and unique. In partnership with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.
Towards the Big Bang
Zvi Sahar
Klaipėda Puppet Theatre in collaboration with ensemble Itim
We decided to start the collaboration between Klaipeda Puppet Theater and ensemble Itim at the beginning - the Big Bang. Every evening, we will take computers and electronic equipment and smash them to bits, reveal their inner parts, and take them back in time to a state of chaos: particles scattered in space. In the distinctive style of the PuppetCinema (‘Salt of the Earth’, ‘Planet Egg’, among others) we’ll create little Big Bangs that will evolve into new worlds: motherboards will evolve into cities, electric cables into under-water worlds, and electronic particles into living creatures. We will work in time cycles so that each “Bang” will expose particles to create a living world that will result in yet another “Bang”. Visitors are encouraged to bring old household appliances and smash them with us!
Trailer:
BECOMING / Open-Lab
Daniel Landau in collaboration with Maya Magnat
A VR behavioral experiment
The Mediated Body Lab (Interdisciplinary Centre Herzliya) is launching a new Open-Lab project in collaboration with Print Screen Festival. Festival visitors are invited to participate in a behavioral VR experiment, exploring the complex relationship between body, technology, and Identity. The experiment is part of the Lab’s core investigation of the impact VR can have on both the private and societal spheres. The experiment takes 15 minutes, and it will be run throughout the festival.
Link for registration
Caution,
Children
Amnon Wolman
A work for three microphones and radio, which deals with the way market forces follow potential buyers. The microphones are placed in the space so that they record all noises, allowing the audience to influence what is being recorded. A faraway scream or a whisper to the microphone would be broadcast on the radio clearer than a far-off conversation or the sounds of birds and the children outside. The sound broadcast on the radio is made up of distorted excerpts from the recordings themselves.
Saltanimals
Caroline Maxwell, Dr. Gili Cohen-Taguri,& Noa Cahaner-McManus
An art and science mystery in collaboration with the Fetter Museum of Art and Nanoscience
Caroline Maxwell’s painting materials are water from the Dead Sea and Utah’s Great Salt Lake. The unique texture and tone of her paintings are the product of water evaporation and salt crystallization. The work presented in the festival is a three-way dialogue between the artist, the crystallographer, Dr. Gili Cohen-Taguri, and the paper conservator, Noa Cahaner-McManus. Together they try to decipher the elements that compose Maxwell’s paintings and to uncover the mysterious collaborators that affect the changes in color over time. Participants are invited to join the scientists in their detectivelike scientific decryption process using microscopes and other ideas. Curator: Tal Yizrael
Creative Writing, for Technophobes
Ran Golan
Our writing is no longer solely our own, as every word is coded, cataloged, and stored on some faceless server. Privacy, at least in the historical sense of the word, has ceased to exist. So how can we write freely and privately in this digital day and age? Golan recommends using a tool abandoned because of technology - stenography (shorthand). Once a common alternative writing system, stenography has been all but forgotten, kept alive only by a handful of users. Visitors are invited to try this method for themselves and to create a personal letter that will stay forever private and beyond the reach of technology.
Dorsi
Inbar Hagai
In this virtual reality work, we are in the moment after an almost random disaster, a moment when the earth opened its mouth and sucked almost everything. The people no longer exist but everything is strangely waiting for something to happen, or maybe not? Hagai explores in her installation, the ability of virtual reality technology to move from documentary to surrealistic and allows us to utilize our VR glasses to embark on a journey in a kind of dream environment, toward collective memories and primal fears.
Noosphere
Ronen Tanchum and Yoav Cohen
In the center of the work is a single, two-and-a-half-meter LED ball surrounded by depth cameras and projected with generative work - created in real time with the audience.
Noosphere is a collective consciousness, arising from the interactions between human beings, the network of sensations and feelings shared by all of us. It is evolving towards greater integration that ends in pure singularity.
The Noosphere, from the moment it is placed in physical space, is performing slow degrabable death. In order to preserve the "perpetual fire" it requires human “informational” proximity to keep it alive, create a cult around it and feed it with new data and information through its sensors. Each of the visitors to the space around the ball sphere its physical-digital imprint to keep the flame alive, as if throwing another toothpick into the digital fire.
Things that Happen in The Dark
In Western culture, darkness is the point of origin from which creation begins. The dark is also the starting point of the four works in this section. Dance, theater, sound, and performance artists selected four obscure spaces within the Center for Digital Art, through which they examine the ways in which the darkness challenges out senses, eludes us, relaxes us, raises issues of trust between artists and audience, as well as envokes fear, fantasy, and unseen desires into consciousness.
Dark Room
Ido Feder and dancing: Amit Tine, and La Collectiz!: school #2: Roni Kagan, Amit Landau, Kobi Swissa, Roni Rahamim, Mishel Shalha, Noa Keller, Tal Cohen
Recently, contemporary radical dance and performance have turned to explore the darkness. Different artists use darkness to inspire speculative experiences about freedom, so they can investigate the objection to the logic of light, identified with the West. The objection to light is the reaction to the decay of Western culture as it turned the project of enlightenment into consumerist capitalism that is destroying the Earth. In Dark Room, a group of artists, whose body is their medium, investigates the paradox of disappearance, not necessarily to constitute a new political order, but rather to prepare for a moment in culture when the darkness will be, once again, a necessity for survival. In this work, we go underground to take shelter, there we try to recruit fantasy and anxiety brought about by darkness, and find bravery to hold the conjecture that we might never get out of this cave.
Main Building
At 20:00-23:00
Ultra-Sensory
Carmel Bar,
Michal Evyatar
When we eat, all of our senses are heightened in order to verify whether the object that is about to be put in our mouth is edible or not. To do so, we examine its shape, color, aroma, and ultimately its flavor. In the room you are about to enter, you will find familiar products, but their look has been altered. Energy waves flood the space and change our relationship to the different products, and at the molecular level, they change the relationships within the product itself. Come in, smell, look, touch with your hand and tongue, and take a moment to understand what it is that you’re tasting.
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W.A.I.L
Yoav Barel
Noam Temkin - sound designer and collaborator
Main Building
At 20:00-23:00
Lamentation ceremony - a homage to an encounter between the late musician Ahuva Ozeri and a whale. When Ozery was still a young girl, her mother would send her to serve as a wailer at memorial services. After losing her vocal cords to cancer, she studied the technique that whales use to produce sound without vocal cords and used this method to sing. The audience is invited to an audio-visual performance, a tribute to Ozeri’s special ability to use her wailing to create a transformative spiritual experience for her audience, through which the process of moוrning could be realized - from the emptiness left behind to a new space that’s been opened with a potential to be fulfilled.
The
Invisible Story
Elinor Milchan, Adi Ezroni, Ronit Muszkatblit with Music by Keren Ann Zeidel
“There, deep at the bottom of the pond,
was a big red heart that was not invisible at all!
And it was beating!
Ba-Bam… Ba-Bam…Ba-Bam…”
excerpt from the Invisible Book (2017)
“The Invisible” is an audio/visual adaptation reflecting elements from Keren Ann Zeidel and Elinor Milchan’s children book: “The Invisible Book”
The work, immersive storytelling, is created in collaboration with Ronit Muszkatbilt, Adi Ezroni, and Zvi Sahar together with the creators of the book. Presented as an excerpt towards a larger journey installation intended for children and adults alike, the work re-imagines storytelling as an experience and brings the viewer into an introspective way of seeing, endlessly refracting on our own human evanescence.
