Inspired by Jean Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation", the project plays with how representations of an image can become more real than an image itself. The exhibition invites you to experience the Dance of Ximulacra, where robots reinterpret two dimensional images as three dimensional dance and immersive sound. Accompanying the dance is the Ximulacra Vision Module, a data capturing robot which scans analogue film photo negatives. As the analogue photos are abstracted into digital movement, this perception and embodiment driven piece seeks to explore the interaction between artificial and natural entities to generate novel digital-analogue hybrid scenes. How can this enable a new form of shared experience of our world and what new stories or understandings can this evoke?

The photos capture how mountain forms, and their surrounding life, shift from the Karakorum range in Pakistan to the Helan Mountains in China. It is from these two perspectives, looking across this vast geographic region, that Ximulacra seeks to surmount the human constraints of culture and borders. Instead, asking these mountain scenes to tell their own stories that go beyond the human grasp. Ximulacra experiments with how humans perceive visual data and how human-machine interaction can contribute to the poetic reading of photography.

“Unadorned” - Ximulacra audio by Floa:
“Contemplating the sculpture, I understood a meditative drift of organic tones, pulses and micro melodic fragments would be the need-applicative. At best, enhancing or soothing the interaction of the robotic nature and aesthetics of the piece with the witnesser experiencing it. I wanted it to reflect on its movement, its language in “communicating” with us; breathing in the space. An unadorned presence, oscillating in the beyond”.