SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL – One of the most significant art and technology events in Latin America, FILE — International Electronic Languages Festival — celebrates its 20th anniversary on Paulista Avenue with 250 works, including wearing virtual reality (VR) goggles, artificial intelligence, gigantic and interactive installations.
Showing what is new is FILE’s hallmark, which has grown continuously in its 48 editions.
In addition to games and works using the most advanced virtual reality goggles, the festival that blends art and technology features 12 installations, 13 works in the Circular Cinema category, 22 of Led Show, 70 of video art, 26 of hypersonic, ten of web art, 37 GIFs and 77 animations.
Get to know the FILE features
The gigantic installation “A Sense of Gravity,” by the Dutch artist Teun Vonk, allows visitors to experience a new form of perceiving gravity.
For two years, the artist researched how human bodies perceive and react to gravity. He designed a futuristic and technological machine that houses a dynamic and soft environment and invites the viewer to submit to an unusual and intimate physical experience: an individual perceptual experience for those inside the work and, simultaneously, a show for those outside it.
“Scope” consists of two glasses and VR (Virtual Reality) headphones, connected to each other by a rigid sculpture approximately 180 centimeters long.
As the two spectators move through physical and virtual space, they guide and influence each other with their heads through the structure that unites them.
The work promotes an innovative combination of physical strength and virtual reality, in which spectators are immersed in water and fight against the current. Artist Kristin McWharter offers the interaction of new technologies with spectators in her works.
The installation “Tempo: cor” (Time: color), released worldwide at FILE, comprises seven colored clocks, each in a time zone, converting the hours into colors.
Created by Brazilian artist Pedro Veneroso, the work suggests the study of the relationship between time and colors. The aim is to experience time more as an acute reality and less as a mathematical quantification and to question the codes and notations considered as axiomatic.
Unreleased, the animated film “Sunshowers” is inspired by “Dreams,” by Akira Kurosawa, and produced by artificial intelligence.
All objects in the video, both natural and artificial, are equipped with artificial intelligence that decides, in real time, the actions and paths in the script, leading to different outcomes. The work explores the concept of animism and techno-animism, which are at the forefront of modern animation.
Art and technology in DNA
This year, FILE is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the most famous and innovative school in the history of art, where artists, designers, and architects performed at the beginning of the 20th century: the Bauhaus.
The work entitled “Das Total Tanz Theater” (The Total Dance Theatre) provides a stage that completely involves the audience, making them an integral part of the performance. Its content highlights repositories of new concepts in the fields of optics, mechanics, and acoustics, and transfers the historical experiences of the Bauhaus stage to a real-time, interactive virtual environment.
The collective Interactive Media Foundation constitutes yet another feature in virtual reality displayed on the show. “Inside Tumucumaque” welcomes visitors to experience the beauty and vulnerability of the unique ecosystem and the extraordinary skills of creatures living in the Tumucumaque conservation area, located in northwestern Brazil, up close and in real time.
On accessing the clearing, in a virtual reality environment, visitors can experience the senses of the creatures living there, immersed in the ecosystem of the Amazon forest: the vampire bat, black caiman, harpy, tarantula, bird-catching spider, and poisonous frog.
Twenty years of FILE
Among the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of FILE, the most innovative figure of the high Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, is also praised in a video art installation by Rino Stefano Tagliafierro, reinterpreting “The Last Supper”.
In “The Last Supper Alive”, the artist, a specialist in giving motion to characters from the paintings of great masters of Renaissance and Symbolism, calls to a journey through one of the most fascinating frescoes in art history.
The project is an emotional tale in which the represented characters come to life and move smoothly and elegantly in a rarefied atmosphere. The gestures are emphasized according to the suggestion of movement that Leonardo painted. The light and space surrounding the characters are also actors in the work, projecting the spectator’s imagination into the painting.
FILE is on display until August 11th at the Fiesp Cultural Center.
Admission to the festival is free and opening hours are from 10 AM to 10 PM from Tuesday to Saturday and from 10 AM to 8 PM on Sunday.