Contact Zone Level 2: A Screening by Miriam Simun and Talk with Nora N. Khan
Event Details: Date: Saturday June 22nd Time: 5PM-7PM Location: Onassis ONX
Project description
Contact Zone (Level 2) is an infinitely iterating computer-generated animation with original soundtrack, projected in 270 degrees. Two sites of rewilding collide—the Swiss Alps and the artist’s intestines—while an AI monitors them, itching to intervene. The animation is populated by imaged creatures generated by computer models, conjured by text-to-image AI algorithms, and captured by automated camera traps in the forest. It is accompanied by a seven-chapter soundtrack that uses sonic strategies of repetition, interruption, and release in weaving together ecological and mythological histories with philosophies of seeing, knowing, and controlling. The animation unfolds in endless permutations as the algorithm assembles the narrative order; field recordings; location, time and weather; creature actions; and camera views in ever-new variations, enabling fresh meanings to emerge.
~ Introduction and Perceptual Exercise in Attention-Deconcentration
(a soviet psychological technique to access "un-ideological perception" - designed to counter CIA MK-Ultra LSD spy control project)
~ Screening Contact Zone (Level 2) in 270 degrees
*screening single iteration, 42 minutes
~ Discussion with Nora N. Khan
I play with Nora's words in the soundtrack of the work, so I am very happy she will join us to play with mine! Nora will be fresh off a trip to La Becque (Switzerland) - the mountain featured in the work.
~ Reception to follow
Contact Zone (Level 2)
Infinitely iterating computer-generated animation with original soundtrack, projected live from the world in 270 degrees
Each iteration is 42 minutes, infinite iterations
An infinitely changing computer-generated animation. Two sites of rewilding collide—the Swiss Alps and the artist’s intestines—while an AI monitors them, itching to intervene. The animation is populated by imaged creatures generated by computer models, conjured by text-to-image AI algorithms, and captured by automated camera traps in the forest. It is accompanied by a seven-chapter soundtrack that uses sonic strategies of repetition, interruption, and release in weaving together ecological and mythological histories with philosophies of seeing, knowing, and controlling. The animation unfolds in endless permutations as the algorithm assembles the narrative order; field recordings; location, time and weather; creature actions; and camera views in ever-new variations, enabling fresh meanings to emerge.
CONTACT ZONE (Level II) was made possible with support from the Media Arts Assistance Fund, a regrant partnership with the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and Wave Farm, and Onassis ONX Studio. Contact Zone Level 1 was originally commissioned by ARE YOU FOR REAL, an initiative of Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Giulia Binicurated by Giulia Bini and Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás. Research for the project was supported by Creative Capital and La Becque's Principal Residency Program.
"Who?", "Says What?", "In What Channel?", "To Whom?", and "With What Effect?" expanded: Contact Zone (Level 2)
We are caught in a steady flow, following a lynx. The layered soundscape aligns with the wavelengths of the digital image. Ecological and technological elements blend to generate a dynamic interplay that continually reshapes our understanding and experience. Feeling as sensing in an environment that appears on the verge of collapsing. It’s a quasi-quantum narrative whose complexity radiates from multiple levels of virtual and actual reality. World-building at its finest.
In Miriam Simun’s Contact Zone (Level 2), fragments of texts and other sources prompt the formation of a perpetually evolving computer-generated animation, where two sites of rewilding—the Swiss Alps and the artist’s intestines—collide under the watchful eye of an AI eager to intervene. An intelligence designed to create its own solutions and shifting priorities. Contact Zone (Level 2) immerses us in an experience that intertwines ecological and mythological histories with excerpts from multiple authors, spanning philosophies of seeing, knowing, and controlling.
Simun structures the work’s seven-chapter loop in the following sequence: “Who from which there belongs here?”, “Feeling and not naming,” “A lust that cannot be satisfied,” “Monitor the carnivore,” “Where dream meets flesh,” “Intercellular lifestyles,” and “Everything you miss when you only look for what you know.” These chapter names appear to be the exchangeable components of a revised model of communication and world-creation, expanding and exploding Lasswell’s five fundamental questions: "Who?", "Says What?", "In What Channel?", "To Whom?", and "With What Effect?"
The animation unfolds in infinite permutations as the algorithm dynamically rearranges the narrative order, permanently altering or softly disrupting the channel, impact, affect, and the roles of sender and receiver. “Rewilding,” whispers the narrating entity, “is fundamentally an attempt at re-complexification.” The digital textures of organic and inorganic ecosystems and actors overlap and recombine backgrounds, surfaces, and interfaces of migration and transitioning—a combinatorial augmentation through mirroring. We witness the real-time machine-learning process as ecological and technological units dissolve and reconstitute before our eyes in technologically driven narratives.
Celebrating somatic, technological, and ecological versatility, Contact Zone Level 2 frames its politics of vision as a way of rethinking our environment and its biological and technological agents. We follow the journey of the lynx and penetrate the human’s intestine to finally encounter a lynxed human, silent monumental goddess of symbiosis, ready to digest intercellular worlds and shapeshift accordingly. A symbol of the demiurgic impulse, standing among other signifiers of textured and lured agents in a machinic ecosystem. We know it’s not the end: the lynxed human stands as the guardian for the portal of the next hybrid horizon, a Fully Automated Contact Zone.
~ Giulia Bini, Curator and Head of Program at EPFL
ABOUT THE ARTIST AND THE WRITER:
Miriam Simun is a visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice uses science, somatics, scent, power, poetry and humor to create art works in various formats, for example - video, installation, painting, performance, and communal sensorial experiences. Simun’s work has been presented internationally, including Gropius Bau, New Museum, MIT List Center for Visual Art, Momenta Biennale, New Museum, Himalayas Museum, Rauschenberg Project Space and Bogota Museum of Modern Art. Recognized internationally in publications including the BBC, The New York Times, The New Yorker, CBC, MTV, and Flash Art International, the work has been supported by Creative Capital and the Foundations of Robert Rauschenberg, Joan Mitchell Foundation, Gulbenkian and Onassis. Simun holds degrees from the MIT Media Lab (Design Fiction group), NYU's ITP Program, the London School of Economics &Political Science, and is currently an Workspace artist-in-resident at LMCC and a fellow at Onassis Foundation’s ONX Studio
Nora N. Khan is a curator, editor, and writer of criticism on digital visual culture and theory of emerging technologies. She is the Co-Curator of the Biennale de L’Image en Mouvement 2024, A Cosmic Movie Camera, with Andrea Bellini, hosted by Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève. Her books are Seeing, Naming, Knowing (Brooklyn Rail) and with Steven Warwick, Fear Indexing the X-Files (Primary Information). Forthcoming are AI Art and the Stakes for Art Criticism (Lund Humphries) and Kingdom (Primary Information). She has served as editor at Rhizome, Topical Cream, and HOLO, and as professor in Digital + Media at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she was nominated for the John R. Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching. Her writing has been honored by a Critical Writing Grant given through the Visual Arts Foundation and the Crossed Purposes Foundation and a Thoma Foundation Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, and supported by residencies at La Becque and Eyebeam.
CREDITS
Concept, script, voice, sound and production: Miriam Simun
3D artist and programming: Ker Chen
Original field recording at Les Pléiades: Nicole L’Hullier
Composition and audio production of Monitor the Carnivore: DE13
“Hutsul drymba melodies” by Mol'far Nechay, recorded by Maria Sonevytsky
“Traditional Mayan Music of Guatemala” by Musica Maya AJ
“Little Samba of the Mind” by Igor Tkachenko
Event Production and Lights: Matthew Toups
Event Production Assistance: Aaron Santiago