In the coming weeks, i’m going to cure my nostalgia for Pictoplasma with a series of posts focusing on several character designers/artists. As you will see, they are quite different from each other.
I’ll kick off the series with Joshua Ben Longo. I can’t remember having smiled so much while reading an interview i was about to post on the blog
“Our ability to generate information now far exceeds our capacity to understand it. Finding patterns and making meaningful connections inside complex data networks has emerged as one of the biggest challenges of the twenty-first century. In recent years, designers, researchers, and scientists have begun employing an innovative mix of colors, symbols, graphics, algorithms, and interactivity to clarify, and often beautify, the clutter.” And look! Even Jeremy Deller’s been invited to the party
TIAM is a proposal for a computer program which generates fairy-tale plots. Based on the work of Vladimir Propp, who reduced the structure of Russian folk-tales to 31 basic functions, TIAM aims to question the limitations and implications of attempts at programming language and narrative.
Because the program is unable to deliver a finished story, rather only a crude synopsis and illustrations, users have to improvise, filling the gaps with their imagination and making up for the technology’s shortcomings
The exhibition explores how contemporary art relates to and comments on local traditions, regional customs and symbols from folk culture. Whether the artists point the finger at the loss of traditions and the commercialization of folk culture or play with the elastic boundaries that separate ‘high’ from ‘low’, what their work made me realize is that nowadays most of my/our contacts with folk culture take place in the polished context of an art gallery or a museum
Le Cadavre Exquis, a digital re-interpretation of the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse and the parlour game Consequences. In the interactive installation designed by Brendan Oliver and Brendan Randall, members of the public are invited to record a short stop-frame animation as a response piece to a previously recorded submission. The texual narrative is then created by online participants
If you find yourself in Amsterdam too, don’t miss Battered at Melkweg’s photo gallery. For obvious reason, the exhibition has the support of the Finnish Institute of Culture rather than the Finnish board of tourism. The photo series by Harri Pälviranta shows men (and a few women too) in the middle of or after a physical fight in the streets of Turku. The powerful flash leaves nothing to imagination. It’s bloody, messy, a few teeth have probably been lost and the subjects will wake up the day after with ecchymosis all over their face
New Media, Postmedia is not just an attempt to explain the current status of the artistic research with new technologies, but also a militant endeavor to help it get the critical consideration it deserves; it’s not just a description of the present, but also an attempt to change the future, suggesting new critical and curatorial strategies
Before going through the series of winners of World Press Photo, i had never heard of narco cinema. But then again each time i’ve discovered a cinematographic (sub)genre recently it was thanks to photography. In late 2009, i found about Nollywood cinema through Pieter Hugo’s work. This year Fabio Cuttica brought me to Narco Cinema
Erupting volcanoes, drug wars, famine in Niger, aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, children suffering from Agent Orange disabilities, abortions performed by untrained practitioners in Kenya but also lucha libre for women, traveling cinema in India and couchsurfing in Brooklyn
Good Wives and Warriors is the creative partnership of Becky Bolton and Louise Chappell, who met while studying at the Glasgow School of Art. Right now the creative duo is based in London but the young ladies have traveled the word to paint mandalas, collaborate with design companies, create ads, think about the cosmos, cover walls with paintings or simply exhibit their illustrations
The work of Kris Verdonck focuses on the confusion of man in an estranged world due to technological development. The tension between man and machine, between living species and dead materials creates an atmosphere of Unheimlichkeit or eeriness. This ‘current state of the world’ – with its environmental problems, ecological disasters and wars – is the central theme through his oeuvre
To enter garden installation EXOTE, part of Kris Verdonck – EXHIBITION #1, visitors have to wear protecting clothes. They can then walks on the bark soil between plants and parrots, just like a nature explorer. The terrestrial plants, crustraceans, insects, fish, amphibians, birds and other organisms they encounter are all “Invasive Alien Species”, they thrive outside their natural distribution area and threaten biological diversity
A few weeks ago, i was in The Netherlands to see the result of the first competition. You might remember that i had interviewed the 3 winning artists/designers just as they were about to start developing their projects (The Miscroscopic Opera, 2.6g 329m/s, aka the ‘bulletproof skin’ and System Synthetics) so i was curious to see whether the final pieces lived up to their (and my!) expectations
Bread on robotic legs, rich people playing games of war wearing pin-up masks, knitted communist-era apartment blocks, etc. If you assumed that Polish art is all doom and gloom, think again
Identity has always been a recurrent issue for human beings and it even becomes more important within a society where globalisation and standardisation gain the upper hand. Everyone tries to find his way among these blurred identities. Today more and more people decide to escape reality in order to make up a new identity
In a bold self-experiment aimed at blurring the boundaries between species, Marion Laval-Jeantet was injected with horse blood plasma. Over the course of several months, the artist prepared her body by gradually introducing into her bloodstream horse immunoglobulins, the glycoproteins that circulate in the blood serum, and which, for example, can function as antibodies in immune response. The artist called the process “mithridatization”, after Mithridates VI of Pontus who cultivated an immunity to poisons by regularly ingesting sub-lethal doses of the same
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
One of the photos that Catherine Hyland was exhibiting at the graduation show is part of the Wonderland series which documents what is left of an amusement park conceived in 1998 to become the largest of its kind in Asia but left to decay after funding was cut. The other two photos are equally fascinating: one evoke the manufactured landscape of Edward Burtynsky, the other brings you to a much quieter yet somehow uncanny universe
Artist Rodrigo Derteano’s autonomous robot plows the desert ground to uncover its underlying color, using a technique similar to the one of the Nazca lines, the ancient geoglyphs located in the Nazca Desert in southern Peru. Guided by its sensors, the robot quietly traced the founding lines of a new city that looks like a collage of existing cities from Latin America
If you happen to be in or around Sao Paulo this Summer don’t miss FILE, the Electronic Language International Festival that takes place at the FIESP Cultural Center and all over the Avenida Paulista till late August. And because FILE makes it its duty to attract the general public and not just the art&tech aficionados, the event is not only free but also packed with surprising installations, games, videos and events
This week, i’m having a chat with Lieven Standaert, the designer behind Aeromodeller2, a project which explores the possibility to build a 90-meter, zero-emission, airship that will never need to land to get its fuel, creating hydrogen from the elements it encounters and anchoring when it needs to replenish its energy in a renewable way. Aeromodeller2 might not be the most efficient nor the fastest airship but it leaves more space to imagination, dream and aspiration than anything Boeing can come up with
Shaped like flying saucers, the Nanodrizas are floating autonomous robots which measure, in real time, the environmental conditions of polluted water surfaces. The data collected is then transmitted for interpretation and analysis. Once the level and nature of pollution has been identified, the nanodrizas directly intervene by emitting synthesized sound and releasing bacterial and enzymatic remedies in the eco-system that, ultimately, should regulate the quality of the water
As usual, the FILE festival in Sao Paulo mixes and matches immersive installations, animations movies, performances, machinimas, besides works of web art, documentary, and other goodies you expect from this ambitious new media art festival. This year, however, i’ve been particularly blown away by the least techy works in the exhibition.
I’ll come back to them in the coming days but i’d like to kick off my reports from the festival with a few words about ADA – analoge interactive installation, by Karina Smigla-Bobinski
Designers Emily Hayes and Karen Mabon were fascinated by the work of neuropsychologist Chris Moulin who has recreated the sensation of Déjà Vu in a laboratory. One of his female patients suffers from chronic déjà vu. Moulin identified that the only method that enabled the patient to avoid the distressing illusion of familiarity was the paradox of repeating the same day and experiences over and over again. The designers have constructed a set for this chronic deja vu sufferer, complete with marks on the floors, visual instructions and specially-designed objects
The exhibition “Gambiólogos – Kludging in a Digital Era” gathered objects, sculptures and installations that explore the concept of technological gambiarra: they adapt, reinvent recycled and found materials using electronic technologies and much improvisation
The exhibition presents the provocative idea that art and journalism are two sides of a unique activity; the production and distribution of images and information. The exhibition brings to the surface how images and information are communicated, and the aesthetic principles used in the act of transmission
A couple of years ago, Nils Völker built a robot out of Lego parts that replicates the way we look. The resulting large scale images demonstrate how differently the same objects have been perceived. The robot was the one work that attracted me to Nils Völker’s portfolio but it’s his creative path that started with communication design and moved to the use of physical computing in contexts as different as advertising and art exhibitions that kept my attention
Sorry for being so silent over the past few days. A combination of medicine-proof flu and weak wifi at the hotel have thrown me into the arms of Jo Nesbo again and i’ve only emerged from this lethargy now. So here’s a last and light post about the ongoing London Street Photography Festival where i discovered Anahita Avalos’s tableaux of everyday life in Villahermosa, Mexico
With prosthetics, robotics, cybernetics, virtual reality, transplants, and neuroscience altering the way we perceive and experience space, the body has re-emerged as an important architectural site. See Yourself Sensing reports the experiments of artists and designers on the intimate scale of the body, and explores the influence of such experimentation on architecture, installation and new media
The project is based on two opposing inspirations; research trips to learn about intentional communities like the Amish, who carefully select technologies for their community, and an extrapolation of current scientific research which embraces technological alteration of nature. The outcome of the project is a fantastical caravan, a nomadic module of illusionary freedom, which explores our belief in technological progress
Presenting animation as a distinctive and highly influential force in the development of visual culture, Watch Me Move offers a timely insight into animation as a cultural and socio-political phenomenon and will delight visitors of all ages
French nanny Vivian Maier relentlessly photographed New York and Chicago. She didn’t show her work to anyone, died in poverty, and left behind 100,000 negatives. Her work was discovered when a young estate agent bought the content of her storage locker. Now, with some 90% of the archive reconstructed, Maier’s work is part of a renaissance in interest in street photography
Watching rows of small portraits on a beige background might not be your idea of an exciting afternoon but Taryn Simon’s body of work provides strong narratives that immerse visitors into the story of feuding families in Brazil, a polygamous Kenyan healer living with his nine wives and 32 children, victims of genocide in Bosnia, South Koreans abducted by North Korean agents, the body double of Saddam Hussein’s son Uday, children living in an orphanage in Ukraine, and the reviled descents of 24 European rabbits in Australia
Cost is still a major limiting factor for low-carbon energy technologies. The Energy Pilots research program develops hypothetical business models by borrowing proven techniques from other sectors, and adapts them to fit the financial difficulties of specific low-carbon technologies
This exhibition brings together 3 pioneers of sound art, Max Eastley, Takehisa Kosugi and Walter Marchetti. Each artist has developed a distinct approach to the problem of representing immateriality, while sharing a lightness of touch, approaching sound with patience, restraint and fidelity. As well as presenting new and historic work, the exhibition features live performance, and material from the artists’ archives
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
Rhode presents five animations that take the chair designs of Dutch designer and architect Gerrit Rietveld as a starting point. Most of the time the protagonists of his short silent sketches have no qualms in abusing the famously uncomfortable piece of furniture
What should a robot smell like? Kevin Grennan has augmented three existing industrial robots with ‘sweat glands’. Each uses a specific property of human sub-conscious behaviour in response to a chemical stimulus. The contrast between the physical anti-anthropomorphic nature of the machines and the olfactory anthropomorphism highlights the absurd nature of the trickery at play in all anthropomorphism
Back to Berlin where a few weeks ago i was visiting the DMY design festival. As i explained the other day, the most exciting part of the exhibition was the MakerLab where visitors could discover, discuss and handle new technologies, materials, tools, open-source ideas and concepts. In the middle of this happy creative feast, a group of young smiling girls were introducing visitors to the joys of mushroom cultivation. All ‘in the comfort of their own home’
Heathrow Heritage is a series of excursions run in cooperation with the activists, historians and residents living around the London airport. Lisa Ma also enrolled the complicity of the airport deacon who invites stranded passengers for bike tours around the ancient villages threatened by the expansion of the airport
