Video Installation: Thanasis Trouboukis
Curator: Danai Anagnostou
Public Programme: Marianne Savallampi
Could buildings have intelligence? If so, how will they remember us in the future?
The Shell is a video installation based on the hypothesis that buildings will have artificial intelligence in the future. It explores scientific and speculative links between architectural and cellular memory, through the creative depiction of intelligent spaces.
The location leads a liquefied narrative. The architecture of the cooling tower becomes distorted through alterations of its sonic landscape and visual effects. The tower is shown to have developed its own artificial ambient intelligence, responsiveness, and sensitivity to other beings and their behaviors. It draws a simulation of sense and sensibility, manifested in concrete stagnant structures that are quietly softening, shapeshifting and evolving. It devises a semi-fictional intelligent space to embody non-verbal communications between buildings and the ecosystems within which they exist.
The work questions the symbiotic and antagonistic bonds between humans, AI, and post-industrial landscapes.
Thanasis Trouboukis explores cinema on the fluid border between fiction and documentary. His work questions memory, reality, dreams and the ambiguity between them. His short films have participated in several international film festivals and art exhibitions.
Danai Anagnostou is a Doctoral Researcher and Creative Producer based in Helsinki, Finland. She is a co-founder of Kenno Filmi. She is the curator for the Society of Cinema at the Museum of Impossible Forms. In 2020, Anagnostou began her Doctoral Studies at Aalto University, School of Film, Television, and Scenography, where she studies hybrid models for production, curation, and education in the field of filmmaking.
Marianne Savallampi is an art historian and curator based in Helsinki. She has a MA in art history from the University of Glasgow, UK, and a MA in Curating from Aalto University, Finland. She is currently the co-artistic director at Museum of Impossible Forms culture centre in Kontula, Helsinki. Her practice involves operating in the crossings of art, politics and activism, with focus on queer and feminist issues.
The work is supported by Arts Promotion Center Finland, TAIKE and The Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture, AVEK. The artist and the curator would like to thank Delphine Duez and Valentin Leblanc (White Boat Pictures) and Laura Boxberg (The Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux).
Thanasis Trouboukis
The Shell
Hippolyte Studio
7–30 January 2022
photo: Thanasis Trouboukis, 2021