Fly Us to The Moons

On the artist LIA´s journey to the moon, the algorithms go crazy: appearing before our eyes are very agile, sickle-shaped arms that develop a life of their own. They move back and forth, up and down. Spaces of association open their doors to worlds of insects, science fiction, and hypnosis. In the background, circular patches that could be moons. The color palette is reduced to shades of white, gray, and blue while the sickles move ever faster and begin to leave behind their finely detailed traces on the screen. Their forms positively burn into the image and in doing so, follow their own rhythms, at times pulsating hectically, at times breathing thoughtfully.

At first the abstract forms seem organic and then disappear again in a mosaic of mere traces. We listen in on the spherical sounds of the artist and composer Damian Stewart, whose unusual soundscape further supports the unreal and forbidding aspects of the images. A soft rattling blends into the music, the spaceship seems to be vibrating. As though on a trip into the unconscious, we are drawn into the maelstrom of sound and movement until in the end, the standstill merges into a black image and the journey to the moon comes to an abrupt end.

The multimedia, software, and internet artist LIA uses the open-source software "openFrameworks" to give rise to the images generated here on the computer, which seem to be the master of the film. Somewhere between the memory of M. C. Escher´s images and the computer code´s independent existence, a fascinating play of form and color arises between black and white. Fly Us to The Moons presents a fascinating further development and expansion of LIA´s previous, computer-generated, algorithm-based works. (Toby Ashraf)

Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt