Description
Conceived nearly two decades into the 21st century, AnalogDream e.V. is an artist collective born out of the increasingly technological and decreasingly fixed, binary world that we, as a society, are constantly creating for ourselves. We operate at the intersection of contemporary art and engineering, focusing our diverse range of skills and expertise on exploring how both fields can mutually enhance the capabilities of the other. AnalogDream e.V. brings together painters, coders, dancers, engineers, audio artists and filmmakers to pose a myriad of urgent questions through both the artwork we produce and the means by which we produce it.
On a thematic level, our work investigates the ways in which we endure, but can also overcome, the intertwined violence of gender, religion and shame inflicted onto our bodies as they exist within contemporary Western societies governed by these structural forces. Since 2018, we have been exploring these issues through a number of mixed media performative installations we collectively produce and exhibit from our base in Berlin. Distinct to our work, each performance makes use of various AI sensory hardware that we are continually developing to expand the ways in which our artwork can be displayed and interacted with. When paired with founder Jonathan Apelbaum’s large-scale oil and canvas portraiture, these technologies communicate with nearly 2000 LEDs behind each ‘cognitive painting’, changing their compositions depending on how we program them to respond to specific external stimuli. As each painting detects either the motion in its surroundings, the soundwaves in the room or perhaps the pulse of a nearby body, it is often the choreographed performer(s) which serve(s) to truly and uniquely bring each composition to life. Influenced by their peripheral surroundings, the colours, images, words and stories each painting emits are constantly evolving and conversing with the various performative elements of the installation and its audience. Soon enough each painting assumes a cognition of its own, challenging - in real time - the very conception of what a painting can or should be.
As a collective, we are equally committed to exploring how collaboration between actors from different fields and social backgrounds can diversify the ways with which we can experiment across artistic and technological production. What happens to a painter’s craft when a light technician multiplies the layers of his canvas? How might a body’s digitised reflection alter the way it chooses to move? Can software be choreographed with dance composition? And what arises when engineers begin to create devices that enhance a performer’s capabilities?
Conscious of artificial intelligence’s propensity to increase social inequalities, AnalogDream e.V. strives to utilise technology to empower both its members and its audiences. Through the combination of our minds, talent and creativity we hope to sublimate humanity, its diversity and its vulnerability through our art. Ultimately, we seek to materialise at least a vision of society where humanity transcends its current afflictions to become more honest and accepting of itself.
