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
Category Archive: installation
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
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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 SonarMÃ tica 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
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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
Castellon’s Contemporary Art Space has recently opened a delightful exhibition that re-invents architectural space through the most intangible strategies: mist, light, colour and sound
An uncanny installation currently on view at LABoral uses the strategies of the Electronic Voice Phenomenon, voice and pattern recognition, and face tracking to generate voices, and images from apparently closed, silent and empty spaces and systems
Cinema Sim is not an exhibition about cinema, but rather about the idea and concept of cinema and how contemporary artists imbue their works with creative and aesthetic principles that hark back to the cinematic language and its means of expression
Robert Kusmirowski’s UHER.C is a classical, archaic sculpture that has gone berserk: it is both the nightmarish and joyous side of machine
Cultural Resistance, Psychological Exploration and Material Intervention are the key themes of an exhibition that the famous designer duo El Último Grito has curated at the LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial
Lessons learned from a media art exhibition mounted inside a ‘traditional’ art museum
84 giant pieces that had to be suspended from the tower’s ceiling by a total of 140 cables -some of them as thin as 3 mm- form Splash, a sculpture which freezes in solid form the kinetic properties of water hitting a surface
The bold and unescapable installation, inspired by a controversial enterprise of a Gazprom initiative to build a direct gas pipe from Russia to Germany, highlights a series of political issues that impact architecture
8 projects developed over 2 weeks in Mexico D.F. use hardware and software tools to create prototypes that explore the relations between machines and humour/laughter
Vicente Guallart’s contribution to the biennale is a research project that explores the potential of information technology to reorganize the habitability of the world. From a single small object to the planet itself
Matthew Ritchie’s structure is ‘a ruin from the future’. The project combines science, art, architecture, music and film into the first semasiographic building, an architectural language that directly expresses its content through its structure
The U.S. are all over the newspapers because of the upcoming presidential elections. Yet, most of us know very little of the art and culture of the area that lies between the East Coast and the West Coast. And what we think we might know of it is often just a bunch of cliches. The aim of the exhibition is to offer a more subtle picture of the ‘Heartland’ but it is also to questions traditional definitions of cultural centers and peripheries
The artist of the paraSITE plastic shelter revisits the sad fate of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project, evoking the end of segregation in Missouri, the Twin Tower and the failure of an utopian urban community
A sculpture garden of everyday objects deprogrammed of their original function, embedded with new intelligence and transformed into surrealist and surprising readymades.
In big cities, groups of people decide to occupy then inhabit buildings which were left unfinished and abandoned because of economic crisis, ups and downs of the estate market, war, cataclysm, etc, giving way to an unexpected collaboration between construction industry and invention prompted by necessity
Andreas Broeckmann, one of the curators of media_city Seoul reflects on crucial questions such as: Should media art be defined only by the technical media in use? Does it have any sense nowadays to organize specific media biennales and festivals?
With some 70 artists showing their work, the 5th edition of Seoul International Media Art Biennale is a very satisfying but also very overwhelming experience, especially because the event features so many pieces that require time and reflection, and so many artists whose work i had never heard of
My favourite art and tech festival for the creative exploration of urban public space has moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Was that really a good idea?
Johannes Gees’ action salat is a very relevant interaction in the xenophobic political climate in Switzerland
When a snuff movie for mouse and cursor meets a sewing machine and a paper shredder all they can talk about is the effect that a symbolic death in a computer game can have in the physical space
Free ice cream made to taste like memory and spectacle, giant helium-filled balloons that makes you feel 35 kg lighter and an hypnotizing performance on ice
Philippe Rahm re-created, inside a room, the climate and exact daylight that the city of Bolzano would experience in the absence of global warming. The installation demonstrates how today, you can still obtain a ‘natural’ climate but only through artificial means
A famous architect and a no less renowned group of activists participate to what is probably the best section of the itinerant European Biennial of Contemporary Art. Hop on the pirate bus!
A telephony-based memorial to the people who have died as a result of the ‘coltan wars’ in the Congo. Coltan is mined for an essential component of mobile phones that is now more valuable than gold
Two site-specific projects at the Contemporary Art Space in Castellon engage with the theme of ‘remodeled spaces and minimal interventions.’ One is a semi-transparent space for mediation, the other is a community of plants
Everyone will tell you that the quality of art you can see or buy at the 798 art area in Beijing is getting scarcer by the day. Yet, the ex-factory district remains a unique and irresistible place. There’s even a new media art gallery
Bright catalogs the state of the art of illumination and its use in architecture, design and interactive installations. Some projects are so astonishing that you forget the building underneath the light show, others act more as subtle enhancement of a building or environment
Beer and lemonade, shampoo, medicine, munitions, cardiac valves, car paint and brake discs, matches, desserts and bubblegum, pills, bread, etc. Over three years, Christien Meindertsma tracked the products made from parts or even tiny particles of pigs. Her quest provided her with 187 products and led her to a tattoo artist, dentist, farmer and weapon specialist
The International Symposium on Electronic Art takes place biannually in various cities throughout the world. This year, the main exhibition features 16 works developed specifically for ISEA2008 by international and local artists. Priscilla Bracks reports from Singapore