Category Archive: trends

Book review: Post-Digital Print – the Mutation of Publishing Since 1894

In this book, Alessandro Ludovico re-reads the history of the avant-garde arts as a prehistory of cutting through the so-called dichotomy between paper and electronics. Ludovico is the editor and publisher of Neural, a magazine for critical digital culture and media arts. For more than twenty years now, he has been working at the cutting edge (and the outer fringes) of both print publishing and politically engaged digital art

Book review: Beyond Contemporary Art

While highlighting established artists such as Gerhard Richter, the book also includes emerging and mid-career artists whose work ranges widely. Artists such as Jeremy Wood who plots his movement across the globe through GPS tracking, Tatsuo Miyajima who does digital light displays, Eduardo Kac who does transgenic bio-art or Santiago Sierra who paid workers to shift a heavy rock back and forth are among the international artists included in this book. Often controversial, these artists push the boundaries of what would traditionally be considered art

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Book review – Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong

There is nowhere else in the world quite like Chungking Mansions, a dilapidated seventeen-story commercial and residential structure in the heart of Hong Kong’s tourist district. A remarkably motley group of people call the building home; Pakistani phone stall operators, Chinese guesthouse workers, Nepalese heroin addicts, Indonesian sex workers, and traders and asylum seekers from all over Asia and Africa live and work there–even backpacking tourists rent rooms. In short, it is possibly the most globalized spot on the planet

Uncanny algorithms and superstitious bankers

The project that Shing-Tat Chung was showing at the work in progress show of Design Interactions, explores a world in which beliefs and rituals emerge from the seemingly harmless private sphere to infect larger and more complex public systems. In times of uncertainty will the population demand an alternative logic to be implemented? This project imagines a stock market in which superstitions abound, producing uncanny algorithms and illogical bankers attired in green suit and Feng-Shui briefcases

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The Meat Licence Proposal, interview with John O’Shea

“People who are comfortable with eating meat, should be equally comfortable with killing animals.”

Because he is interested in the ethics and dilemmas of eating meat, John O’Shea is looking into schemes to achieve a more compassionate meat consumption. Since 2008, the artist has been working on Meat Licence Proposal. Under this law proposal, citizens willing to buy or consume a certain type of meat would need to obtain a licence to do so first. The only way to acquire the licence is to slaughter the animal yourself

Architecture of Fear

Architecture of Fear explores how feelings of fear pervade daily life in the contemporary media society. The cause of fear seems interchangeable and constantly fluctuating. Shifting from one thing to the next, often relating to invisible or indirect phenomena’s (terrorism, viral diseases, pollution, financial crisis), anything has the ability to become a potential threat. Rather than an immediate emotional strategy for survival fear is becoming a constant low level feeling in the background that gives rise to a new global infrastructure based on security, prevention and risk-management

Power of Making

A new exhibition celebrates the role of making in our lives by presenting an eclectic selection of over 100 exquisitely crafted objects, ranging from a life-size crochet bear to a ceramic eye patch, a fine metal flute to dry stone walling. Power of Making is a cabinet of curiosities showing works by both amateurs and leading makers from around the world to present a snapshot of making in our time

Book review – Open Design Now: Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive

n design(ing) there is a revolution ongoing that is triggered by an emerging networked community that is sharing digital information about physical products and the ubiquitous availability of production tools and facilities. It transforms design into an open discipline, in which designs are shared and innovation of a large diversity of products is a collaborative and world spanning process

rep.licants.org, a virtual prosthesis for the online introvert

rep.licants.org is a web service allowing users to install an artificial intelligence (bot) on their Facebook and/or Twitter account. From keywords, content analysis and activity analysis, the bot attempts to simulate the activity of the user, to improve it by feeding his account and to create new contacts with other users. Quick Q&A with the artist

Book review – The Politics of the Impure

This book investigates this urge for the pure, but also advocates a much deeper need for the impure, not to reinstate a new organicism or back-to-nature movement, but to trace progression to a point where all modernist values reverse, where technology becomes an agent for the impure and the imperfect. Technology, long an agent for homogeneity and purity, is now turning into one for heterogeneity and global contingency

Book review – Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market

Noah Horowitz exposes the inner workings of the contemporary art market, explaining how this unique economy came to be, how it works, and where it’s headed. He takes a unique look at the globalization of the art world and the changing face of the business, offering the clearest analysis yet of how investors speculate in the market and how emerging art forms such as video and installation have been drawn into the commercial sphere

Everything Ends in Chaos

Everything Ends in Chaos attempts to design, then reverse engineer a single, spectacular Black Swan event. Black Swan events are unpredicted but of such magnitude that they have an important impact on history. According to Nassim Nicholas Taleb who developed the theory, the rise of the Internet, World War I, and the September 11 attacks as examples of Black Swan Events

Nuclear Is Good, What will it take to convince you?

The nuclear renaissance offers a clean, near limitless energy solution that could allow us to meet CO2 emission targets (without going short as consumers).

What if we ask for protective barrage balloons, establish concrete emergency services and resign ourselves to the perceived ‘hazards’? What if we embrace pet polar bears and pineapple ice cream along with other benefits that nuclear energy could bring? And what if not; are we prepared for blackouts instead?

Magazine review: Future Exhibitions

This year’s Future Exhibitions aims at highlighting the exhibition’s spatial relationship to the visitor. How can architecture, stage design and technical innovation enhance the visitor’s overall experience? In conversation with some of the leading actors in the field, Swedish Travelling Exhibitions examines innovative techniques and explores the exhibition medium of the future

Esse, Νosse, Posse: Common Wealth for Common People

In the controversial contemporary reality the online platform “Esse, Nosse, Posse: Common Wealth for Common People” focuses on “posse”, on the mode of production and being not only of the creators presented within this context but of all the contributors of today’s common wealth , as well as on the possibilities of re-appropriation of knowledge that may occur only through knowledge itself

ART, PRICE AND VALUE – Contemporary Art and the Market (Part 1)

The exhibition at the CCCS in Florence features the work of contemporary artists which throws light on the mechanisms of the international art system. The selection explores different points of view, ranging from complete conformity to the prevailing rules of the market, to irony and sarcasm and even to an “anti-market” stance, taken by those anxious to avoid the commercial aspects of the art market entirely

Juan Freire – From the Analogue Commons to the New Hybrid Public Spaces

Modernist public spaces are in decline in our cities. The privatisation of the analogue commons has been blamed for this process, victim of a form of capitalism in which markets are understood as strategies for seizing and remaining in power by pressure groups. Freire’s brilliant talk sees beyond the current situation and deals with the reinvention of public spaces, the “hyper-realistic” culture of the network society and the re-birth of the notion of the commons