Through the Walls | Onassis Foundation

The exhibition Through the Walls presents two newly commissioned works, as part of the "Archive of Desire" festival by the Onassis Foundation in New York. Directly inspired by while also using Cavafy’s original poetry, “Walls” by Ali Santana and “Ekphrasis” by Matthew Niederhauser & Marc Da Costa explore all the ways through which poetry can shape what we feel and imagine.

“Walls” by Ali Santana

Ali Santana’s “Walls” is an interactive, audiovisual installation that reimagines Constantine P. Cavafy's poem of the same title as an immersive, experimental Hip Hop experience. In this installation, participants must work together to solve an interactive rhythm poem. By activating a sequence of beats, rhythms, and stanzas that combine key elements of Cavafy’s original poem, participants transform the installation into a wholly unique and expansive fractal world. ONX member Matt McCorkle has created original atmospheric audio of the experience. New York Emcee ELUCID lends his distinctive voice to Cavafy’s original text, and engages the Greek poet in a call-and-response across time.

Credits:
Ali Santana, Director & Lead Artist
Matt McCorkle, Sound Artist & Lead Collaborator
Jazia Hammoudi, Producer
Ariel Nevarez, Experiential Interface Designer
ELUCID, Emcee
Kate Stevenson, Creative Technologist & Immersive Game Design Partner
Yuan Peng, Creative Technologist & Immersive Game Design Partner

An ephemeral multi-sensory artwork that breaks boundaries and inspires new ideas.

Artist

Ali Santana

“Ekphrasis” by Matthew Niederhauser & Marc Da Costa

“Ekphrasis” is a machine learning video work and artistic research project devised by Matthew Niederhauser and Marc Da Costa. It explores how poetry can illuminate the algorithmic systems that form the backdrop of our lives and, increasingly, shape what we feel and imagine. In the work, C. P. Cavafy's poetry becomes a filter and a prompt to interrogate the visuality of today’s machine-learning tools. These technologies are the magic sorcerers of the moment, spooking and exciting us, yet drawing their material not from a supernatural world beyond, but instead from the zeitgeist of images and text that live online.

C. P. Cavafy’s poetic corpus can provide a glimpse into how artificially intelligent systems attempt to construe and interpret the more subjective edges of language. Edges that can both inspire and confound. Our results will be cataloged into a printed compendium, which will also act as a codex to an installation that will cycle through machine-learning responses to his work, including AI-driven readings and other visual renderings of select poems.

https://marcdacosta.com | https://matthewniederhauser.com

Marc Da Costa, Artist
Matthew Niederhauser, Artist

How can poetry empower us as humans to engage with the products of artificial intelligence more fully?

Artists

Matthew Niederhauser

Marc Da Costa

Matthew Niederhauser

Marc Da Costa

About ONX Studio:

ONX Studio is a hybrid production and exhibition space with a global community of members who create interactive and immersive XR works. Located in the Onassis Gallery in Midtown Manhattan, it was founded in partnership by the Onassis Foundation and New Museum’s NEW INC.

This program is part of the Onassis Foundation's "’Archive of Desire’: A Festival Inspired by the Poet C. P. Cavafy,” a multi-venue, multidisciplinary celebration of the internationally acclaimed and influential Alexandrian poet, curated by composer Paola Prestini, under the creative direction of Afroditi Panagiotakou.