Suzanne Lee is the Founder of BIOCOUTURE, the first ‘living materials’ design consultancy. The last time i met Suzanne, she was cultivating bacteria into green tea and harvesting layers of cellulose which, once dried looked like leather that she then used to make garments.
Suzanne’s work has now taken an even more ambitious dimension as she is building an open innovation resource to enable collaboration within the global biological materials community
This brilliant little exhibition considers the connections between craft practice and sound art in the ‘digital age’. Exploring the physicality of sound, the works are characterised by both their sonic properties and materiality
In the art world, attitudes to drawing have changed. Drawing became a way of making a statement as an artist, of showing masterly skill – something that up to then had been most commonly associated with painting. After centuries in the shadow of its more illustrious fine art relatives, drawing started to be appreciated for its own sake, as an art discipline, an end in itself, an art form
Ototo is an experimental printed circuit board (PCB), which, combining sensors, inputs and touchpads, allows you to easily create your own electronic musical instrument
An attempt by photographers Ioana Cîrlig and Marin Raica to document the remains of communist industrialisation in central and eastern Romania. Decades ago, these areas were attracting workers from all around Europe but the collapse of Ceauşescu regime left these communities to their own devices and the mining towns are now fighting unemployment and poverty
Award-winning science communicator Professor Marcus du Sautoy and actress and mathematician Victoria Gould use mathematics and the theatre to navigate the known and unknown reaches of our world
In the late 1960s, Tony Ray-Jones traveled across his country in a VW camper to document the leisure and pleasures of the English. He was a man who lived by his own rules. One of them was to never take a boring photo. There are dozens of images in the exhibition and none of them is remotely insipid
William Bondin’s proposal involves a colony of self autonomous creature-like structures, called Morphs, which very slowly navigate public parks. Their moves are not just dictated by a set of pre-programmed rules, they also rely on their physical and social environment
Scott is the author of The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance. Hacking the Future of Money. The book “applies economic anthropology, gonzo exploration, hacker philosophy, DIY culture, and a bit of mischievousness to the world of high finance.”
We’ll talk about the book, the bitcoins and other radical approaches to global finance of course but also about Scott’s plan to start a London-based school of financial activism
In early modern Japan, 1600-1900, thousands of sexually explicit works of art were produced, known as ‘spring pictures’ (shunga). The exhibition examines the often tender, funny, beautiful and accomplished shunga that were produced by some of the masters of Japanese art
How much does the practice of video games affect our imagination and the way we perceive reality? Are video games shaping our perception of reality or is it our perception of reality that shapes the imagination behind video games?
Plotting expeditions from London, Paris, Berlin, Detroit, Chicago, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, Bradley L. Garrett has evaded urban security in order to experience the city in ways beyond the boundaries of conventional life. He calls it ‘place hacking’: the recoding of closed, secret, hidden and forgotten urban space to make them realms of opportunity
VisualLeader 2013, The Best of Magazines And Internet displays the works of the nominees and winners of last year LeadAwards, Germany’s most prestigious print and online media award. Photo reports, fashion shoots, advertisement, blogs, etc. That made for a great afternoon so without further ado…
The Living Mirror is a ‘bio-installation’ that combines magnetic bacteria with electronics and photo manipulation to create liquid, 3D portraits
I haven’t seen that many exciting exhibitions in London over the past few weeks. I was however, bowled over by the photos of Philip-Lorca diCorcia at the David Zwirner Gallery. The East of Eden series brings side by side biblical references and the dark side of the American dream
Addie made a painting using a drone as a brush, enrolled a stern industrial robot to rock a baby cradle, asked online sexcam performers to replicate classical paintings, and built a chandelier using CCTV cameras
Tomorrow the episode of the radio show will focus on online language and communication, algorithms, forms of mediated intimacy, and distributed art works. Amongst others!
Art of the 1980s oscillated between radical and conservative, capricious and political, socially engaged and art historically aware
For her project Ergo Sum Charlotte Jarvis donated blood, skin and urine to the stem cell research laboratory at the University of Leiden. These donations have been transformed into stem cells, which in turn have been programmed to grow into cells with different functions such as heart, brain and vascular cells.
The result is a biological self-portrait; a second self; biologically and genetically ‘Charlotte’ although also ‘alien’ to her – as these cells have never actually been inside her body
The designers will be talking about the aesthetics of scientific experiments but also about the human capabilities in sensing future events. They’ve explored this slightly debatable topic with a series of experiments inspired by the experimental evidence for the existence of physiological precognition, depicted the Sensing the Future paper written by Daryl J. Bem a social psychologist and professor emeritus at Cornell University.
Conducted and presented as a scientific experiment TNM challenges the participants to consider the outrageous proposition of algorithmic prejudice. The responses range from fear and outrage to laughter and ridicule, and finally to the alarming realization that we are set on a path towards wide systemic prejudice ironically initiated by its victim, Turing
The book is as much about fantastical creatures as it is about pseudoscientists making radical claims about the world, sneering at evidence-based research and undermining the teaching of science in the process
a video archive of global dissent which explores four decades of social disobedience: from the uprising in Italy in 1977 to the anti-globalization protests and to the insurrections in the Middle East
The robotic installation consists of large groups of autonomous water vehicles. With roughly 50 individuals in a population, the robotic agents interact with each other and their environment to form a simple ecosystem. Their collective, emergent behaviour resembles the social interactions in a community of living creatures
Positioning automatically controlled cameras at strategic points around the launch pad–some as close as seven hundred feet–he recorded images of take-offs that capture the incredible power and transcendent beauty of the blast that sends the shuttle hurtling into space. Winters also takes us on a visual tour of the shuttle as a marvel of technology–from the crew spaces with their complex instrumentation, to the massive engines that propelled the shuttle, to the enormous vehicle assembly building where the shuttles were prepared for flight
“A common idiosyncratic habit in all birds is their inevitable punk nature to shit over our most precious belongings.”
A group of male zebra finches underwent this experiment with rigorous commitment
Digital media are disappointing for books. All books look the same on an iPad, for example. On a monitor, a book isn’t thick or thin, big or small. Features such as a Japanese binding, embossing, letterpress printing, or gilt edging are only possible in print. Consequently, it isn’t surprising that young, contemporary designers, publishers, typographers, illustrators, and editors are enthusiastically ringing in a new era for printed books.
Fully Booked: Ink on Paper is a collection of books and other printed products that celebrate the distinctiveness of design, materials, techniques, workmanship, and production methods–and push their limits
In the face of impending climate crises, environmentalists are standing with the Bio-Conservatives or with the Techno-Progressives.
However, a number of emerging factors suggest possible alternatives for the relationship between environmentalism and science. Among these are the DIYBIO or Biopunk movements and the campaign for open access to science, as well as headless and cell-based networks of activists such as Anonymous
Artist Pratchaya Phinthong has shipped to a London art gallery the replica of a skull that almost 100 years ago provided key evidence to support Darwin’s theory of human evolution, replacing it with an identical model purchased online. He has additionally invited the museum guide, Kamfwa Chishala, to travel to London and relay the complex history of the skull to Chisenhale Gallery visitors, as he does in Lusaka
At the moment of being heard brings together works and performances by a group of international artists, musicians and composers engaging with sound and modes of listening
This book reflects on anti-copyright, porn, creative industries, post- punk, Arts and Crafts and constructivism, cooking as contemporary art, Oulipo, post-digitality, mezangelle, Anonymous and 4chan, Fluxus, amateurism, file sharing networks, pop culture, 17th century poetry, electroacoustic music, Neonazi communication guerilla, Rotterdam, romanticism, electronic literature, Mail Art, ontology, Super 8, Rosicrucianism and conceptual art
Photography is widely associated with truthfulness yet it has also been employed throughout its history as a means of telling stories and evoking the imaginary
Drawing on the work of a diverse group of contributors, from art historians, anthropologists, and political theorists to artists, filmmakers, and architects, Sensible Politics situates aesthetic forms within broader activist contexts and networks of circulation and in so doing offers critical insight into the practices of mediation whereby the political becomes manifest
Judging from the programme, the exhibition should make for a very entertaining Summer distraction (whether you’re interested in fashion and aftershave or not): inflatable architecture, virtual painting using visitors body movements, pulsating kinetic sculpture, floor to ceiling ultra violet-light installation, robot and a bit of street art thrown in for good measure
I had an exchange of emails with Mario De Vega to talk about Thermal, a performance in which he uses microwave ovenss to alter the molecular composition of different materials. The work also uses custom-built hardware to sonify the electromagnetic activity produced by the overheating of the content of the ovens
The event brought together two men who share a passion for whales. One is environmental scientist and marine biologist Mark Peter Simmonds who investigates and raises awareness about an issue that is far away from our sights: the threats to the life of marine mammals caused by the increasing emissions of loud noise under water. The other is artist and inventor Ariel Guzik who has spent the last ten years looking for a way of communicating with cetaceans
“The glitch makes the computer itself suddenly appear unconventionally deep, in contrast to the more banal, predictable surface-level behaviours of ‘normal’ machines and systems. In this way, glitches announce a crazy and dangerous kind of moment(um) instantiated and dictated by the machine itself.” Rosa Menkman
The exhibition explores how artists since the 1940s to the present day have used drawing to address ideas critical and current to their time, ranging from the politics of gender and sexuality, to feminist issues, war and censorship
I knew about Bitcoin, i had heard of the Tor software that enables online anonymity but other than that, i felt that there was precious little i knew about the Deep Web, the vast submersed side of the World Wide Web that countless people are using in perfect anonymity every day to buy goods that neither ebay nor amazon will ever sell you and to exchange services that never appear when you do a google search. The more i looked into online black markets, the more intrigued i was. I thought that the easiest and fastest way to get a better understanding of the issue would be to interview Arthur Heist
Marco Donnarumma is a young performer and sound artist who gained fame across the world for a series of performances and instruments that use open biophysical systems to explore the sonic dimensions of the human body. His interactive instrument Xth Sense won the first prize in the Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Competition and was named the 2012 “world’s most innovative new musical instrument”
