A few words and many images about two exhibitions i saw in Madrid a few weeks ago. One is all about the American landscape. The other shows hairdressers and butchers living in Galicia decades ago
More than 2 years ago, i was interviewing Marguerite Humeau about her attempt to bring back to life the voice of extinct creatures by reconstructing their voice box. She started by giving her voice back to Lucy (aka Australopithecus Afarensis), one of the first hominids. Since then, the resuscitation endeavour has expanded to more extinct animals. A mammoth, the Walking Whale and the Terminator Pig have now joined the loud party. The prehistoric creatures where recently in Eindhoven for the STRP biennial where they performed live for the first time together with Dutch musician and DJ Jameszoo. Sadly, i missed the performance. But that gave me a good excuse to contact Marguerite and get more details about her work
The participating artists not only play with distortions of the “real”, but also pioneer new ways to interact with their work. The formal exploration of new interfaces is as much part of their preoccupation, as is the content of their work, and the kind of commentary on the current state of reality we live in
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If you’re a curator or an artist involved in art and technology you’ve probably heard about Medialab Prado. Chances are, you’ve even been there for one of their workshops. Medialab Prado is conceived as a citizen laboratory for the production, research and dissemination of cultural projects that explore collaborative forms of experimentation and learning that have emerged from digital networks
The Art of Walking: a field guide is the first extensive survey of walking in contemporary art. Combining short texts on the subject with a variety of artists work, The Art of Walking provides a new way of looking at this everyday subject
n this photo series, Robert Harding Pittman acutely documents the exportation of the Los Angeles-style model of urban development to other countries such as Spain, France, Germany, Greece, United Arab Emirates and South Korea.
From the construction boom up until the current building crisis.
Anonymization presents under an implacable light a landscape of anonymity made of shopping malls, vast parking lots, arrays of unfinished houses that look exactly the same, green golf courses in the middle of desert areas, etc
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Kira is a performer whose work i’ve encountered a number of times in biotech art context. I’ve been particularly drawn to the works that address the ethics of human/animal interactions and more generally our complex relationships with animals. The most discussed of her work is probably inthewrongplaceness, an intimate performance that Kira developed on her return from a residency at SymbioticA in 2004. Realizing the similarities between the pig’s skin and her own, Kira danced skin to skin with a dead pig and invited members of the audience to touch both her own and the skin of the nonhuman animal,
A few years later, Kira presented the performance, Falling Asleep With a Pig in which she cohabited with a live pig called Deliah in a specially constructed sty
I’ve managed to keep it under control so far but i’ve got quite an obsession with the work of Marcel Dzama. The world he creates mixes childhood nostalgia, violence, sex and history (without necessarily knocking you down with historical references) in the most sinister and seducing way.
Luckily for Londoners, the David Zwirner gallery has just opened a show about Dzama’s latest work: Puppets, Pawns, and Prophets. The main protagonists are helpfully listed in the title
From enhanced-CCTV surveillance to bench handles, various tracking and prevention systems are employed in controlling the users of public space. These systems are often neatly designed and seamlessly integrated in the existing architecture, acting in a persuasive way on its users. While preventing unwanted interactions between the authorities and citizens, these systems leave no space for discussion or disobedience
In Tarnac. Le chaos et la grâce, Joachim Olender explores a police and judicial blunder that hit France in November 2008 when a group of policemen wearing black balaclavas stormed into the small village of Tarnac and arrested a group of people who were later accused of being far-left terrorists plotting to overthrow the state
From Last Meals on Death Row in Texas to suitcase droppings in Tokyo
“I did start it as a reportage project but after I found myself walking around supermarket carparks making barking noises to try and awaken sleeping dogs that were not actually there, I set up the shots. But I now realise that is the right thing. It’s very important that it’s lit and looks cinematic, dreamlike almost”
Art13 London, which took place a few weekends ago inside the stunning Olympia Grand Hall, demonstrated, if need be, that not all art fairs are created equal and that you can bring something different if you have enough taste and a clear vision
Curator and creative producer Ulla Taipale will be talking about ‘Biofilia – Base for Biological Arts’, a new a biological art unit interweaving artistic and bio-scientific explorations. The learning and research environment opened at Aalto University, Finland in January of this year and i’ve been looking forward to hearing more about Biofilia ever since
Year after year, i go to Kinetica with enthusiasm. I might find it a challenge to spot the real gems in a sea of (sometimes) artistically questionable works but that’s part of the fun. Kinetica might not be the Mecca for art & science that some bloggers and journalists describe (too many holograms!) but it’s certainly a good place to discover kinetic, electronic, and robotic art. It also has a friendly, open atmosphere that makes it surprisingly easy to have a chat with artists, art dealers and other exhibitors
As usual in this kind of international photo competition, there’s a couple of winning shots about Palestine, some portraits of magnificently coiffed people, plenty of violent deaths, prisoners living in dire conditions and almost half of these talented photographers are Italian. I’m very impressed by the Afrometals series, btw
Star Wars movie sets silently decaying in the deserts of Tunisia, eccentric monuments on Peru’s public squares, decline of Lima’s (analogical) record industry, fragments of technological obsolescence, etc. Six artists show work that consider the -sometimes fictitious- relationship between historical monuments and urban ruins
The theme of this year’s exhibition is City of Cyborgs. Not the city of androids, clunky clones and man/machines contraptions but the city we are already walking through, smartphones in our pockets, implants in our bodies for some and ready to get our hands on Google glasses. City of Cyborgs in STRP speak means animatronics, opera for prehistoric creatures, a forest of interactive lasers, tapas made from edible solar cells, absurd mega machines and lots of dance. The high tech, the low tech, the digital, the organic and everything in between and beyond.
My guest at Resonance today is Austin Houldsworth, a young designer with whom we are going to discuss money, its physical disappearance and the financial crimes that could be committed within a completely electronic marketplace
his month Foam has a show titled Primrose – Russian Colour Photography and the word “Russia” always does it for me. The exhibition charts Russia’s attempts to produce coloured photographic images from the 1860s to 1970s. Room after rooms, the visitor realizes that photography is a cogent filter to reveal the history of a country in the course of a century
Very few artists manage to translate scientific phenomena into stunning images as elegantly as Carsten Nicolai. If you’re in London, don’t you dare miss Observatory at Ibid Projects.
The works on show visualise diverse physical occurrences. From the ground floor to the top floor, the installations, videos and photographic pieces investigate phenomena that get further and further away from our daily experience
My guests at Resonance today are creative technologists Asa Calow and Rachael Turner, Hello Rachael and Asa!
Asa and Rachael are the founders of the MadLab. Madlab is the short name for Manchester Digital Laboratory, a remarkably active community space for science, technology and art located in Manchester Northern Quarters. Luckily for me, Rachael and Asa are currently in London, where they are heading a series of workshops and events as part of their residency at The Arts Catalyst
There are stuffed toys quietly seating around a rug as if they were having a picnic. Handmade dolls have been dismembered and used to create a wall composition. There’s also a banana man, colour exercises based on asinine adult humour magazines, bird houses of various architecture styles, etc. Which sounds cheerful, except it’s not. It’s nostalgia, except that it’s a bit dirty and bedraggled
A quick interview with artist Abelardo Gil-Fournier and film maker Raúl Alaejos who are working on a documentary series dedicated to three programming languages -Processing, Open Frameworks y Pure data- that have increased the role of coding in the practice of artists, designers and creators around the world
KK Outlet is now showing Franck Allais’ comical Subverting The City, a series of street photos featuring city boys dressed in their usual grey suit attire from the waist up but in skirts and heels from the waist down.
And i was going to leave you with this when i realized i might as well add a quick sequences of of images illustrating exhibitions i’ve seen around town recently
Verlag für moderne Kunst has launched a collection of art audio CDs. I’m coveting the Jake and Dinos Chapman, the David Lynch one and crying my eyes out because the Jonathan Meese is in german only (although i did enjoy listening to the audio snippet in which he talks about stuff that are metabolisch and pornografisch.)
The one i had to have right here right now is the audio CD of conversation excerpts with Jeremy Deller
My conversation with speculative architect Liam Young is going to focus on Under Tomorrows Sky, a project that was born last Summer, at the MU Foundation in Eindhoven, where Liam was joined by a group of scientists, technologists, futurists, science fiction writers and even special effects artists to collectively imagine and build a room sized miniature model of a fictional, future city
‘What does performance have to do with architecture?’ and ‘How can a building perform, and how can we perform a building?’ Call me an ignorant but i had never heard about Performing Architecture so i’m gathering here a few notes i wrote down during the Late at Tate night
Sassolino’s works have danger, mechanical tension, darkness and make the spectator vaguely uneasy (“Is this going to break? Will i be hurt? Shouldn’t it take one step back?”) In fact, the artist also explained that the beams vibrate but they hold the pressure. The system actually gets in motion when a visitor gets closer to the work. And that’s when, as the artist puts it, a kind of Sadomasochistic moment emerges: the visitor would like to see some dramatic collapse of the wooden structure but doesn’t dare to get too close to it
From atmospheric installations to intangible sculptures that you can move around – and even through – visitors can experience light in all of its spatial and sensory forms. Individual artworks explore different aspects of light such as colour, duration, intensity and projection, as well as perceptual phenomena. They also use light to address architecture, science and film, and do so using a variety of lighting technologies
This week we’ll be talking factory lines, outsourced production and the contemporary art system with artist Jeremy Hutchison. Last year, Jeremy was all over the blogs (including mine), newspapers and art exhibitions for his Err project.
The artist sent emails to manufacturers around the world, asking them to produce a fairly common item, a pair of shoes, a comb, a football, a spade or chair. However, he added a special requirement: the product had to be intentionally imperfect
Michail Vanis’s project suggests that our romantic ideas and ideals regarding nature – a nature that has to be preserved exactly as it is- are holding us back from finding new ways to interact with the world surrounding us. Vanis’ Neo-nature project invites us to reconsider our relationship to nature and adopt a more rational approach to ecological thinking and to conservation
Today i’m stuck in Turin, it’s been snowing all day long and i’m not complaining but i don’t feel like going out to see exhibitions. I’m thus going to point you to an online exhibition over at dARTboard, a digital art space that the Vilcek Foundation created to ‘celebrate the accomplishments of foreign-born artists living in the United States and working in the realm of digital art.’ This year’s featured artist is Marc Böhlen who’s showing two works that investigate the relationship between people and automated systems
As we develop the tools to manipulate and engineer new forms and systems of life, the exhibition considers our historical and contemporary entanglements with nature, technology and the economy, and how these relationships influence emergent forms in biological and synthetic matter, through new sculpture, installation and moving image works
Charlotte has donated parts of her body to stem cell research. Her tissue and blood samples are now in a lab where they will be transformed into induced pluripotent stem cells and from there into a range of completely different substances. A second self of Charlotte will be created, made from a collage of in vitro body parts.
The project is called Ergo Sum and it recently received the Designers and Artist’s for Genomics Award. It will be exhibited this Summer in The Netherlands. But until then, Charlotte is in the studio to tell us more about this work.
Illustrations of an alternative world where bespoke sports events replace traditional warfare as a means of solving seemingly chronic conflicts. Each sport is designed to reflect the cultural and geopolitical characteristics of the opposing sides, in this case North Korea vs South Korea + Japan + USA, and India vs Pakistan
From abstract and conceptual visual interpretations of structures to more traditional architectural renderings, the featured work is divided into thematic chapters, ranging from ‘Adapt/Reuse’ to ‘Clandestine” ‘Mobile” ‘Radical Lifestyle’, ‘Techno-Sustainable’, and ‘Worship’. Along with arresting and awe-inspiring illustrated content, every chapter also features an essay exploring its respective themes.
Highlighting visions that exist outside of established channels of production and conventions of design, Architectural Inventions showcases a wide scope in concept and vision, fantasy and innovation
OpenPositioningSystem aims to offer an alternative to the dominant global positioning systems or other navigation systems which are controlled by governments, network companies or in the case of GPS by the U.S. military. Developed in the same spirit as OpenStreetMap, OpenPositioningSystem would be open, accessible to anyone and collaboratively run by citizens.
Zoe has spent the past year exploring the scientific and technological developments in Artificial Reproductive Technologies. She particularly looked at questions such as “Will the techniques themselves have the potential to fundamentally change the way we perceive parenthood and reproduction? How will the stories we tell children evolve?” In the show, we will be talking artificial uterus, the orphan child who had 5 parents, artificial gametes, and premature babies exhibited in freak shows
This morning i went to the press view of the exhibition i was most looking forward to this month: Light Show at the Hayward Gallery. The exhibition explores the experiential and phenomenal aspects of light by bringing together sculptures and installations that use light to sculpt and shape space in different ways. It’s not just an exhibition of bulbs and luminosity, it’s about colour, volumes, spatial perception, natural phenomena recreated using technology, kinetic and even politics