Can airspaces be owned and activated by the public? What is the size of the airspace you can own? How can we employ wind farms in a way that disrupts conventional understandings of their use?
This private collection was founded in 1955 by Mexican architect Roberto Shimizu. Most of the toys were recovered from flea markets, bazars, suppliers, etc. They range from antique toys from the late 1800’s up to popular plastic action figures, dolls and baubles from the ’70s. Some of them are a bit uncanny….
Two of our speakers explores the cultural and economic modes of (in)formal distribution both in the world of file-sharing and in Tepito, an area of Mexico city famed for its humongous street market where you can buy pretty anything, especially if pirate, stolen or counterfeit. We also had rappers performing live, a lesson on local pride and an intense introduction on critical fetishes
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In the Loop features essays and images that show the progression of knitting and discusses the topics of knitting in art, international knitting traditions, knitting as social activism, the oral history of knitting, and knitting technology
The photo series documents a traditional winter masquerade in Bulgaria that was originally aimed at frightening the evil spirits away but has now become way to welcome the new year. Estelle Hanania observed the scene from a nearby parking lot where participants changed into their costumes and masks
On day 3 of our blogathon we saw Mexico from a helicopter, were told why the city is suffering from an excess of water (rather than scarcity), listened to architects, graffiti artists, human right fighters and photographers
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Day 2 of Postopolis was free metzcal, Mexican hip hop, pollution-eating robot and Carlos Alvarez Montero’s amazing portraits of subcultures, from Mexican skinheads to US-style gangs
Ali Gadorki is the leader of Kumbia Queers, an all-ladies group which mixes influences from punk and Cumbia, a musical style and folk dance that is considered to be representative of Colombia. Now mixing these two is considered an heresy by most people in the punk and metal communities. It nevertheless works wonderfully
Habitar is a walk through new emerging scenarios in the city. It is a catalogue of ideas and images from artists, design and architecture studios, and hybrid research centres. Together they come up with a series of potential tools, solutions and languages to negotiate everyday life in this living organism that we call city
The schedule is up and before i start packing my suitcase to DF, i’d like to say a few words about the artists, architects and activists i’ve invited to talk about their work during Postopolis!
RGB features artists from highly diverse backgrounds, from household names to the newest young talents. RGB captures the UK’s explosively vibrant and unpredictable realm of graphic design, in 288 pages packed with exciting visual material
The sound exhibition ambitions to go beyond the auditory system and uses echoes, vibrations, timbres, resonances, waves to put the body of the visitor to the test
Two of them. One is the catalogue of the exhibition El proceso como paradigma – Process Becomes Paradigm. The second comes courtesy of LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre again, it’s the magazine/catalogue of Habitar, an exhibition which engages with cities where bits and flows of information shape the urban experience as much as brick and mortar
Architects Greg Lynn, Michael Maltzan, and Alessandro Poli have developed unique and imaginative responses to the questions of space travel and the inhabitation of new, extraterrestrial realities. Their odysseys, real and virtual, ultimately promise a rediscovery of life on our own planet
The term ‘hacking’ refers to the guerrilla-like nature of some actions on the internet and at the same time to equally clandestine ‘squatting’ in the physical public space
For Electrified02, the young artist decided to ‘hack’ the harbour of Ghent with a sound installation that turned twelve rusty, gigantic metal pipes stored there into didgeridoo-like sound cylinders
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
Mapping the Invisible: EU-Roma Gypsies takes the reader on a visual journey across Europe with a focus on its fastest-growing ethnic minority: the Roma. This publication is the result of a unique partnership called EU-ROMA, formed by a group of architects, designers and artists wishing to raise awareness of the diversity and richness of the Roma people
Performing space extends the theme of the exhibition to architecture. Architects are indeed increasingly interested in activating the spaces they are designing. Lawrence Malstaf and Laurent Liefooghe’s works interact with the gallery space and the visitors
The ongoing exhibition at Z33 puts the spotlight on performative trends in contemporary design. In Design by Performance the production process that leads to a product matters as much as -if not more than- the final product itself
Austin Houldsworthhas installed a 3 tonnes and 4m-tall ‘Fossilisation Machine’ in Tatton Park, a historic estate in Cheshire, England. With Two Million & 1AD, the artist is trying to create a fossil using rudimentary, human-designed machines that would substitute and speed-up the natural processes. Houldsworth’s project starts with the attempt to petrify both a Tatton-grown pineapple and pheasant, and conclude when it is a human that ends up fossilised
Exhibitions were all over the city center and that’s probably one of the major strengths of Elektra. Its collaboration with fine art galleries and art centers helped spread media art outside of its tightly-knit family and bring it to a larger audience
A collection of the latest, provocative projects from the field of digitally-enabled architecture. Oscillating between the analog and the digital, from concept to realisation this is a book that maps process
Laurent Grasso’s movie, shot in 2009 in The United Arab Emirates, looks at traditional hawk hunting. This time however, tthe hawk gets equipped with light and sophisticated surveillance equipment. The camera records every dune and village the hawk flies over. The images are fascinating but they are also threatening. Who is the man tracking the bird with an antenna? What is he trying to uncover?
Mark your calendars and join us in Mexico City! Here comes the third edition of Postopolis!, a public five-day session of conversations curated by bloggers from the fields of architecture, art, urbanism, landscape, art, music and design
The 11th edition of Elektra, Montreal’s digital art festival kicked off with the International Marketplace for Digital Arts, a professional networking event where 24 actors from the world of digital art presented their practice, festival, or organization. Here’s a blurb about 3 organizations i discovered during the maddeningly long presentation sets
The Phantom Recorder system projects a cold and damp sensation onto the skin surface, triggering the brain to hallucinate a phantom. As the phantom movement stimulates the peripheral nerves, its activity is captured by the neural implant and external wireless machinery
The exhibition tells the story of a pro skateboarder, a photographer, a draftsman, a painter, etc. A story which, although it focuses on his own life and those of the people around him, transcends the autobiographical and exposes social and societal phenomena unhesitatingly but without pointing a finger
One of the sections of the new exhibition at Laboral presents artworks that specifically require other people to engage in the realization process. The collaborative practice erodes the traditional model of creation which recognizes only one author.
This book of interviews tracks the work of curators in the field of new media art in order to consider the massive changes and developments over a relatively short period of time. They are also a celebration of the ten years that the online resource for curators of new media art, CRUMB, has been publishing interviews and other research
The works in the section called The Autonomous Automat: Beyond the Newtonian machine perform the same task over and over again. They are imbued with an almost neurotic behaviour that recalls some of J/G. Ballard’s dystopian short stories
This is probably the best exhibition of sound art i’ve ever seen. Musik für Barbaren und Klassiker breaks the traditional boundaries between concerts, sound installations, sculpture and music. The exhibition creates as such a place where the dynamic of exchange between performance and spatiality
The stars of the 28th edition of the contemporary art fair for me were paintings and more paintings
Hello Process, by Marloes de Valk and Aymeric Mansoux, is part of Laboral’s new exhibition, “El proceso como paradigma – Process Becomes Paradigm.” The show reflects the shift in contemporary art and culture from finished, stable objects to processes. Flourishing beyond the limits imposed by the market, this art is in continuous flux and execution, that has a life of its own, that grows, changes and decays
The theme of this edition of the biennale is borders, an issue at heart of many tensions and conversations in Africa.. Some of the photographers embraced the theme very literally, others adopted a more metaphorical approach
Two new projects by Tuur Van Balen. The first one involves manipulating the metabolism of pigeons and turning them from urban nuisance to winged dispensers of a soap-like substance. The second one harnesses Synthetic Biology’s potential to turn us into our own doctors and pharmacists
A global overview of the ways in which contemporary artists are drawing on kinetics, biology, robotics and information technologies to explore new forms of creative expression
Ventura Lambrate was the new hip area during the Salone del Mobile. The landscape starts with swanky renovated buildings, there’s flower wallpaper on exterior walls, silver tree in a courtyard and fresh apple pie with hot butter. At the other side of the area, it’s quite the Wild Wild West
Emily Jacir’s public intervention for the Venice Biennale was canceled by the municipal authorities without explanation. Stazione would have seen the 24 piers for the Route 1 water bus (the vaporetto that starts at the Lido stop and ends at Piazzale Roma) display the names of the stops in both Arabic and Italian, creating a bilingual transportation route up and down the Grand Canal. The Alberto Peola gallery in Turin is showing what the work would have looked like
Wind knitting factory, washing machine in the park, CCTV chandelier, furniture covered in fungi, a Pavlov’s Dog system to train a man to be a caring father? It must be RCA again!