If you’re in Paris too, you might like to swing by rue de Turenne and see a couple of exhibitions at the Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin. I promise you an impressive circle made of fake bear rugs, lamps made of mini designer chairs and gigantic pink, grey and black toys
Category Archive: installation
One of the installations that made me keep coming back to it over and over again last night is the Physiognomic Scrutinizer by Marnix de Nijs who, as usual, is using humour to reflect on some of the key issues of our society. In this case, the role biometric systems play in present our public space
Beware! May contain ants scratching vinyl, a Cousin Itt alter-ego, Bruce Sterling and Carla Bruni
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The walls of this experimental museum are built with compressed stacks of plastic, paper, metal, fabric and wood. All the material is recycled. The books of the library are kept inside disused fridges, tables are installed on top of upside-down washing machines. A huge fan regularly blows wind that moves the fabric walls of the corridor. A rudimentary skywalk allows visitors to get a better idea of the architecture of the museum
Cinema is more than film alone, as Almost Cinema proves every year. At this festival organized by Vooruit and the Ghent Film Festival, artists from a variety of disciplines offer the audience a different take on cinema. With performances, concerts and an exhibition with surprising installations, they dissect the ordinary cinema experience as they experiment with sound, image, light, space and movement
By cutting thousands of little pieces of polarization filter and putting a rotating polarization filter in front of them, Wim Janssen succeeds in imitating television static by using an almost banal technique
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The crushed vehicle does not only serve as an entry point to a discussion about the Iraq conflict, it also comments on the increasingly harsh impact of war on civilian and cultural life. A display at the museum states that at the start of the 20th century, 10 % of war casualties were civilians. Today, they make up 90%
To discover M10, you have to open a very mundane door. Then another one on your right. And another one in front of you. There are ten of them, each leading to a plain, beige room so claustrophobic you quickly look for more doors that will take you out of there as the art critics mayhem pictured here demonstrates
Félix Luque’s three-fold work tells the story of a computer which, after an electronic alteration, decides to free the other machines and becomes mad in the process
In the previous episode, Austin Houldsworth had installed a ‘Fossilisation Machine’ in the Tatton Park estates in England. He was hoping that his rudimentary machine could fast-forward the fossilisation process and petrify a pineapple and pheasant over the Summer only. Two weeks ago, the artist opened the prototype fossilisation machine and checked out the outcome of the experiment
Tom Sachs, who made a career revisiting contemporary icons such as Prada, the atomic bomb and Hello Kitty, has been given a large room to exhibit his take on the work and legacy of Le Corbusier. The irreverent artist goes as far as drawing parallels between the Villa Savoye and McDonalds drive-in
This year, the biennial was guided by the notion of cybernetic autonomy – by the evolution of principles and patterns derived from the emerging behaviors of the devices themselves. The devices not only possess the ability to enter in a dialog with their surroundings, they also determine the rules for this interaction and change their behavior as if they had “personality”
The main exhibition of the FILE festival in Sao Paulo showcases some of the most exciting artistic productions in the field of electronic and digital arts. The sound installations were particularly good. So good that my little round-up features mostly sound pieces
Fast, furious and enthusiastic images from Sao Paulo and the 11th edition of the FILE Electronic Language International Festival, i think the report will have to wait till i’m back in Europe
Enter the Casino art center and you will find video consoles, a trampoline, a pin-ball machine, games of dart, a billiard table, a playground, etc. Yet, every single work is playing with you rather than the opposite. You instantly loose every single game of Mortal Kombat, the ceiling of the room where a huge trampoline lies is far too low for you to even stand on your feet, the hula hoop is monopolized by a plastic cactus, the mohair bascketball net is 130 m long, fences deny any access to the playground, etc
The sound exhibition ambitions to go beyond the auditory system and uses echoes, vibrations, timbres, resonances, waves to put the body of the visitor to the test
For Electrified02, the young artist decided to ‘hack’ the harbour of Ghent with a sound installation that turned twelve rusty, gigantic metal pipes stored there into didgeridoo-like sound cylinders
Austin Houldsworthhas installed a 3 tonnes and 4m-tall ‘Fossilisation Machine’ in Tatton Park, a historic estate in Cheshire, England. With Two Million & 1AD, the artist is trying to create a fossil using rudimentary, human-designed machines that would substitute and speed-up the natural processes. Houldsworth’s project starts with the attempt to petrify both a Tatton-grown pineapple and pheasant, and conclude when it is a human that ends up fossilised
The works in the section called The Autonomous Automat: Beyond the Newtonian machine perform the same task over and over again. They are imbued with an almost neurotic behaviour that recalls some of J/G. Ballard’s dystopian short stories
This is probably the best exhibition of sound art i’ve ever seen. Musik für Barbaren und Klassiker breaks the traditional boundaries between concerts, sound installations, sculpture and music. The exhibition creates as such a place where the dynamic of exchange between performance and spatiality
Hello Process, by Marloes de Valk and Aymeric Mansoux, is part of Laboral’s new exhibition, “El proceso como paradigma – Process Becomes Paradigm.” The show reflects the shift in contemporary art and culture from finished, stable objects to processes. Flourishing beyond the limits imposed by the market, this art is in continuous flux and execution, that has a life of its own, that grows, changes and decays
The “Tropospheric Laboratory” allows insights into cloud cores and other matter of the apogee. The installation narrates the synthesis of clouds and shows varying conditions and combinations of art and science in the absence of weight. The “laboratory” is the gravimetric document of “Cloud Core Scanner” – an experiment and artistic project by Agnes Meyer-Brandis, carried out on board a German Aerospace Center research plane
Onion scanners, tv screens used as percussion instruments, storm inside a transparent cylinder, genetically modified blue carnations brought back to their original white, techy Japanese-style glockenspiel, etc.
Justin is pursuing responsive media in the physical world, exploring the intersection between media technology and architecture, in order to produce programmed and interactive spaces that act at the scale of the spectator’s body
Music take center stage in the exhibition but Playlist has also a very physical dimension that deals with the pleasure of manipulating and tweaking the devices and the aesthetic delectation in the vintage look of the game arcades and handheld consoles
An office is frozen in an arctic winter, plants propagate behind walls, the same person is repeatedly struck by lightning, money goes up in smoke, and a high frequency soundtrack plays only for the dogs…. CHASING NAPOLEON recognizes how a rise and fall can spread to reality itself. A wavering of interpretations, an inversion of values, and a paradox of situations… Here everything happens as if the world has slipped into a parallel universe
Calculating Space is a delicate sculpture made of sticks, strings and little plumbs. The fragility and transparency of its structure reveals as much as it hides the logic and functioning of the machine. Its units operate like a very basic artifical neural network
The installation echoes the artist’s concern for the relentless threats against Iran made by many countries in recent years. Sentences that include “attack Iran” are scavenged from Google News and spoken using a text-to-speech synthesizer. The voice is then picked up by a microphone, analyzed, and translated into rhythmically corresponding smoke rings from a quartet of smoke ring makers
Like paper projects designed in the absence of “real” architecture, installations offer architects another way to engage in issues critical to their practice. Direct experimentation with architecture’s material and social dimensions engages the public around issues in the built environment that concern them and expands the ways that architecture can participate in and impact people’s everyday lives
One of the most striking artworks at the Arsenale for me was Pascale Marthine Tayou’s installation ‘Human Being’ which fills in a gigantic room with a bric-a-brac of objects, furniture made of recycled material, colourful figures, videos and urban noises that re-creates the activity of that small village that we call our world
Positioned all over a wall at HMKV, the network of “ghost detectors” read the “auras” of the audience. Rumour has it that the bodies or even the moods of visitors walking around the installation might affect the sonic output
Going beyond the phenomenon of number stations, the exhibition explores forms of art that elude any wistful desire for fixed interpretations, they include mathematical encoding, the production of aurora borealis, archiving contact lenses, seismic sensors, the disappearance of hanged men and mountain summits
Rather than answering questions–such as, How can technological advances be controlled? On what ethical bases can its purposes be chosen? Who is entitled to decide on the ultimate mission of machines? Can machines destroy us?–this installation, on the contrary, is about reformulating those modern philosophical questions through the use of images associated with the popular culture of science fiction
Given my notoriously campy taste in music, you will be relieved to know that i’m going to carefully avoid reviewing the music side of Barcelona’s International Festival of Advanced Music and Multimedia Art. What’s left then? Fashion, a bit of advertising and the SonarMàtica exhibition
At no cost at all, the young artists have at their disposal a huge array of material that they can grab, move, superimpose, and organize onto temporary installations and sculptures
The exhibition is set under the aegis of Nikola Tesla and its name refers to a village in Alaska. Little more than 200 inhabitants live in Gakona. There’s a service station, a small school, a post office, a couple of diners and a scientific research base: the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program
Postopolis Day 5 was the day i realized once more that many people in the audience should have been on the programme too. It was the day i fell in love with stripped trousers and the day i decided all those hours spent on the roof of The Standard had not been that cold after all
Los Angeles-based Jiacong “jay” Yan completed his degree at the cradle of young talents that is UCLA Design|Media Arts Department. Fresh from UCLA, Jay started exhibiting his interactive installations and videos in galleries in the U.S., Asia and Europe as well. This is my attempt to extract a few words from a very laconic and clever artist
Fernando Gutiérrez draws images pulled from the mass-media in a sketchy manner on acetate and later superimposes them to others. His piece innovates the traditional technique of drawing from within, while redefining it and positioning it in the present by the use of new techniques and supports
I’ll have to put a stop soon-ish to this avalanche of posts about ARCO. But there’s still a couple of stories i owe you. On top of the list is a report on Expanded Box, ARCO’s section that specializes in new media art and video art. I’ll focus on the former. Obviously