ENESS

We are super excited to be featured in the Balloon Museum catalogue: AIR WE ARE! It’s an action-packed 200 pages of the best of the best inflatable artists from around the world including .and.concrete, , , , .fantastique, , , and many more.
Massive thanks to for believing in our work and providing a platform for so many incredible artists, studios and artworks.

Modern Guru and the Path to Artificial Happiness has been longlisted in the Dezeen awards! From over 4130 entries from 82 countries our project is now one of 141 interior projects that are in the running to win an award this year in the interior category. Stay tuned, the shortlist and winners will be announced in mid-October.

Modern Guru and the Path to Artificial Happiness raises questions about finding happiness in the digital age and the future of religion, art and human endeavour with the advent of AI. With exhibitions in France, Amsterdam, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Australia thus far, we are so excited about all the Guru love. Thank you we’re got all our fingers and toes crossed for these awards! 🤞🤞🤞

Modern Guru and the Path to Artificial Happiness has received an honourable mention in a recent round of FRAME magazine awards! This hugely successful art experience has been exhibited around the world including France, Amsterdam, Singapore, Taiwan and is currently in Australia and Thailand simultaneously. Modern Guru and the Path to Artificial Happiness is an immersive new media exhibition that uses the intersection of art and technology to explore modern paths to happiness through a warped world of digital technology and AI.
Thank you we love you! Image credit:

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Modern Guru and the Path to Artificial Happiness is currently showing at YAM Yarrila Arts and Museum in Coffs Harbour.

In this iteration of Modern Guru, we travel deeper into the strangeness of AI, highlighting its carnivorous appetite for human creative output. As AI trawls through the history of human cultural endeavour - mapping and mimicking human artistry - we ask: what does it create but outcomes that currently appear hollow in contrast to human-made artworks where the hand of the artist is authentic and palpable?

Our exhibition sits alongside two contemporary new media exhibitions, the biofuturistic Serendipia by Kathryn Cowen (.cowen) and Gareth Jenkins (); and Electric Dreams a group exhibition of some of Australia’s leading light artists including Taree Mackenzie, Jason Sims () and Brendan Van Hek.

See Modern Guru and the Path to Artificial Happiness at YAM .coffs until 10 November 2024.

At the entrance to Modern Guru for i Light Singapore 2024, visitors were met by two towering eight-metre-tall trees – members of the AI Wayward Forest. It is hard to tell whether they are standing guard by the Guru or growing thornily around the temple of the Guru’s truth. Deliberately eerie, this eeriness references forests of warning in folklore to foreshadow and symbolise the future of AI and what it may mean for humans and our sources of happiness. Inside his new soft-form temple – made for this unique space – Guru grants messages to his visitors in an intimate environment, dispensing advice to people one-on-one. Thank you to the curators for another amazing experience. Images courtesy of i Light Singapore 2024.

We have been named one of the top 50 public art stars featured in the new publication The Economic Power of Public Art! Published by Codaworx - America’s global hub of the commissioned art world - this important book showcases up-to-the-minute statistics about the public art industry internationally. Facts and statistics include: the type of artwork being created; the ranges of spaces for which projects are commissioned; average budgets; the reasons why commissioners commission artwork and more. Massive thanks to for including us and for your future-leading work. Codaworx is sending this latest publication to curators and commissioners across the world. Check out www.codaworx.com for more info.

Iwagumi Air Scape has descended on the Promontory at Marina Bay as part of i Light Singapore 2024. Iwagumi (岩組 a Japanese term for “rock formation”) is our most ambitious inflatable installation to date, comprising 16 gigantic air-filled inflatable boulders that warp visitors’ sense of scale, volume and monumentality. In this way we bring nature into the urban environment as art; and this art demands that viewers recontextualise the role of nature in their lives through the contrast of wilderness and urbanity.

Check out Iwagumi Air Scape on The Promontory at Marina Bay 31 May-23 June 2024. Photo credits: Finbarr Fallon and Shiya Studio.

Thousands of delighted festival-goers are loving Airship Orchestra, which is bringing a contemporary inflatable aesthetic to the Taoyuan Lantern Festival in Tainan, Taiwan. The Festival coincides with the 400-year celebrations of the historic city with traditional lantern installations including The Dragon Comes to Taiwan and other local creations inspired by Tainan’s rich heritage. The local river is also being illuminated with an entire festival theme of ‘River of Luminescent Reminiscence’ dedicated to its celebration. This vibrant explosion of light, culture and tradition is illuminating the cityscape until 3 March.

We are super excited to be in Volume 3 of The Place Economy. The visionaries have created another page turner bringing together global placemakers on a range of topics to express the irrefutable link between visionary placemaking and better-performing economies, higher profits, and happier, healthier communities.

We’re featured in the public art chapter - Creative Returns - alongside incredible institutions like Mexico’s Meterorite Museum (); and internationally renowned artists including and ; as well as cultural thinkers such as from Cultural Capital.

Massive thanks to Andrew Hoyne and his team for featuring us and for propelling the placemaking conversation globally.

Airship Orchestra in deep snow is so pretty! We love seeing our artworks shine in different contexts and this year in Sapporo brought the serious wintery vibes. We’ve had the opportunity to exhibit in desert oases, tropical cities, icy festivals, urban jungles and beach towns - and many more. Thank you to our wonderful partners Sapporo International Arts Festival for this snow-capped outing in Sapporo. We have many exciting projects brewing this year in contexts we’ve never before exhibited - keep dem eyes peeled 👀. Massive thanks Henry Gosper for the gorgeous images and for braving the cold for the best shots.

A little bittersweet goodbye to Modern Guru and the Path to Artificial Happiness in Taiwan! For 3.5 months our more than 1000 square metre show delighted Taiwanese art lovers. One of the biggest immersive experiences to date, tens of thousands of visitors progressed through the journey of ritual, realisation and revelation meeting new characters along the way - including Forest Dancer, the Sun God, and the Wayward Forest. People Instagrammed their hearts out; posed with mountains of Modern Guru printed quotes; tucked away meaningful quotes in their wallets for daily meditation; and a local girl band even shot their music video inside the installation!

Massive and unending thanks to our incredible partners Inception and Eslite Spectrum for this opportunity and to Te-Fang Wang 汪德範 for the beautiful images.

《AI靈感大師：澳洲3D光影觸動樂園》
Modern Guru and the Path to Artificial Happiness
▩ Exhibition ended 29 September 2023-14 January 2024
▩ Venue: Eslite spectrum Xindian store, 3F Eslite lab (No. 70, Section 3, Zhongxing Road, Xindian District, New Taipei City)
▩ Organiser: Eslite Spectrum Corporation ＠eslite
▩ Artwork: ENESS
▩ Curator: INCEPTION

#亞洲最大誠品 #誠品

Wishing you all a Happy New Year! Thank you for all your support throughout the year. We can’t wait to share our journey and stories with you here and in the real world in 2024.
#2024

Modern Guru - the key character in Modern Guru and the Path to Artificial Happiness - has dispensed his wisdom in France, Taiwan and currently in Amsterdam. Modern Guru prints AI generated messages from his mouth when visitors take his photo. It’s fascinating for us to experience what our visitors do with these messages - some people sit on the floor and spend hours reading through every message; others wrap messages around them for photoshoots; and still more rip off the message that means the most to them. What would you do?
Head to the until 21 January to receive some wisdom of your own. Thank you to Janus van den Eijnden for the images.

We are delighted to be one of twenty high-profile light artists featured in this year's Amsterdam Light Festival responding to the theme: Loading... Revealing Art, AI and Tech. This intimate iteration of Modern Guru glows brightly from its site by the canal. The journey consists of Modern Guru and his Whispering Mountains set in and around a modern pre-cast concrete and glass viewing area. And, in a uniquely Amsterdam way, the program of works can be viewed on land or water. Head to the Amsterdam canals for an astounding survey of contemporary light art until 21 January 2024. Thank you to and to for the beautiful images.

Spiritus Sonata is in New York as part of the Let's Fly exhibition! With Spiritus Sonata, we stepped into the realm of animism, the ancient spiritual belief that all things including animals, humans, plants, lakes, rocks and weather have souls or spirits. 'Spiritus’ is variously translated from Latin, Hebrew and Greek to mean breath or ‘spirit sense’. With this combination of breath and spirit, animating the inanimate and investing our characters with digital souls, we aim to inspire viewers to care about these creatures, and by extension, all of the inanimate objects and creatures around them. Keen as ever to push the possibilities of inflatables; here not only have we achieved inflatables inside inflatables but the air used to inflate the creatures is also used to create sounds from their nose extensions, an instrument that operates like an old church pipe organ, another subtle link to worship and a joyful, playful feature. If you're in the big apple be sure to pop in - Spiritus Sonata will be in town until 14 January 2024. Massive thanks as always to our client and thank you to for the beautiful images.

The Sun God is a special new character created for the Taiwan exhibition of our art experience Modern Guru and the Path to Artificial Happiness. The Sun God surveys the installation from the top of a long flight of inflatable steps that represent his tongue. Fifty separate inflatables make up this extensive feature, one that is strong enough to withstand many audience members simultaneously scaling its expanse to meet the Sun God. Across the experience, every technological feat is integrated with story. The Sun God's tongue is difficult for audience members to tackle, but does this effort lead visitors on a path to truth-telling or deception? Stay tuned for the next character that visitors meet along this journey of ritual, realisation and revelation.

Thank you to our incredible partners Inception and Eslite Spectrum for this opportunity and to Te-Fang Wang 汪德範 for the beautiful images.

《AI靈感大師：澳洲3D光影觸動樂園》
Modern Guru and the Path to Artificial Happiness
▩ Exhibition ends 14 January 2024
▩ Venue: Eslite Spectrum Xindian store, 3F Eslite lab (No. 70, Section 3, Zhongxing Road, Xindian District, New Taipei City)
▩ Organiser: Eslite Spectrum Corporation ＠eslite
▩ Artwork: ENESS
▩ Curator: INCEPTION

#亞洲最大誠品 #誠品

We are deeply excited to be in FUTURE Issue 44! The FUTURE Issue looks to artists at the vanguard for a sense of what the wide-open future of art and society might look like. We are honoured to be included in work alongside Serwah Attfuah , Michael Candy Boris Eldagsen Jenny Holzer Patricia Piccinini .piccinini Agnieszka Pilat and Jordan Wolfson and more. Check it out!

We also had heaps of fun speaking at the Vault Launch panel with Vault Editor Alison Kubler and artists Serwah Attafuah and Jonny Scholes

Modern Guru and the Path to Artificial Happiness has debuted as a ticketed art experience in Taiwan. Our mystical journey has tripled in size from its initial French gallery debut into a more than 1000 square metre wonderland. New characters have been introduced including Forest Dancer, the Sun God, and the Wayward Forest. Modern Guru has renewed powers and is now bi-lingual: producing quotes in both English and Mandarin as well as sitting in a mammoth vestibule custom-made for this experience. Visitors progress through the journey of ritual, realisation and revelation that poses questions about AI, the spiritual realm and the true nature of lived experience and how we attain happiness in a world saturated with digital content.
Thank you to our incredible partners Inception and Eslite Spectrum for this opportunity and to Te-Fan Wang 汪德範 for the beautiful images.

《AI靈感大師：澳洲3D光影觸動樂園》
Modern Guru and the Path to Artificial Happiness
▩ Exhibition ends 14 January 2024
▩ Venue: Eslite spectrum Xindian store, 3F Eslite lab (No. 70, Section 3, Zhongxing Road, Xindian District, New Taipei City)
▩ Organizer: Eslite Spectrum Corporation ＠eslite
▩ Artwork : ENESS
▩ Curator: INCEPTION

#亞洲最大誠品 #誠品

Together Forever is in Naples as part of the Balloon Museum's touring PopAir exhibition! Together Forever is about living together with tolerance and compassion in a world full of tensions like war and population growth. Together Forever includes some surprising elements: the more pleasant smells from living in a social world are emitted from the characters' socks including popcorn, bubble gum, cut grass and the smell of baking bread. Additionally, when the piece sits idle for a few moments and the characters are left all alone they become scrambled, strobic and intense - a statement about the isolating effect of digital culture and its fracturing influence on real social bonds. Together Forever is in Naples until 7 December.

Frame magazine has us covered! We are chuffed to be included in issue #44 ‘Spatial Therapy’, which is all about the positive effect that beautifully designed spaces have on well-being. We love and are super grateful. Modern Guru and the Path to Artificial Happiness (featured in the issue) debuted at in Rennes, France has just opened at the Eslite Spectrum Xindian Store (29 Sept-14 Jan 2024) and will head to the Amsterdam Light Festival in November.

A little creative flourish from the artist's mouse. We're often asked about our process and this is a small bit about how it goes down. We find that regular motifs surface in new works such as our iconic eyes, Koi fish and trees. Sometimes these motifs come together in wild and unexpected ways like here with Cupid pedestal-style presenting his little Koi fish to the world. Note: No AI was involved in this creative process and no Koi or Cupids were hurt in the ex*****on of this design.

Yay we're in We feel really privileged to be in the Small Spaces Big Ideas edition for A Solar-Powered Bench That Spins Ever So Slowly alongside artists using recycled materials, architects at the forefront of sustainable design approaches and landscape architects creating inspiring spaces like edible gardens.

While the world keeps spinning we will keep dreaming of inventions that bring joy and goodness to public spaces.

Calling all Arcade babies: if your fingers get twitchy and your tummy gets squishy (in a good way) when you hear these names: Space Invaders, Galaxian, Asteroids, Frogger, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong (you know who you are) then head to King Street in Brisbane to experience our scaled-up Arcade consoles.

For Esc. With Us our industrial designers performed the impressive feat of embedding LED screens and playable joysticks in inflatable forms to create the otherworldly phantasm of oversized Arcade games ballooning up from the footpath to serve your gaming whims. And our programmers distilled the essence of all the best games into our own versions. Remember, it's not over until it's Game Over and then is it really ever over? Thanks for the pics Max Isobe! For more: