A few tips if you’re going to the Salone del Mobile, Milan’s international furniture fair this weekend. Zona Tortona smells a bit of a hasbeen area now that the big guys, the heavy glitter and the trashy panini di porchetta have moved in. The cool kids are showing their magic elsewhere in the city
A group show at Gagosian London aiming to analyze how JG Ballard was influenced by art and how in he turn influenced a whole generation of artists and the public imagination as a whole…
On June 30, the Democratic Republic of Congo will celebrate the 50th anniversary of its independence from Belgium. Photographer Carl de Keyzer traveled through the country following the “Guide Du Voyageur du Congo Belge”. Published in 1954, the touristic guide presented Congo as the ideal holiday destination with stunning scenery, brand new roads, musement parks for white people only, missions, factories, etc. These places have now lost much of their former glory, they are either ruins or used for identical or different purposes
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I’m taking the solemn oath that for the next edition of the Transmediale festival i will spend less time talking nonsense to everyone i meet at the bar and follow much more closely the video screenings as well as the performances. Because this year’s the programme was stunning
The Reverend Ethan Acres has made it his mission to “put the fun back into Fundamentalism.” He has more verve than a tv preacher, more charisma than a whole drive-in chapel and far more dynamism than a gospel aerobic instructor. The Reverend uses art to accompany his sermons and spread the Word large and wide, linking it to ancient traditions of sacred art
Future Obscura brings together a group of diverse artworks which explore the complex condition of futurity through the lens of image-making. Clear boundaries of the time continuum are broken down by artists whose work allows us to peer into the “low light of the future”
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Vegetation and microorganisms live symbiotically inside the body of this robot. The robot draws water from a contaminated river, decomposes its elements, helps to create energy to feed its brain circuits and the surplus is then used to create life, enabling plants to fulfill their own life cycle
The Iraqi-Finnish artist Adel Abidin has major solo exhibition, in Kiasma, Helsinki. In his art, Abidin focuses particularly on “themes such as cultural alienation and marginalization”
Poltergeists are on the agenda at PERGOLA. Against the background of a haunted modernity, silhouettes of erased lives demand restitution: Swiss tavern lanterns cast a gloom over the museum space, the ventilation shafts bring back good memories of monumental architecture, the melancholy of the Renaissance seeps into this no man’s land, pneumatic dispatch breaches communication….
Change, the buzzword of the last U.S. presidential campaign, is the order of the day, and the task of AGENDA is to explore what kind of change will be needed if architects are to assume a political and social agency in this new landscape. Bringing together diverse forms of content, AGENDA is a product of vigilant observation, introspection, and engagement with outside thinkers and collaborators – artists, curators, politicians, authors, economists, journalists, developers, educators, and architects
The photo exhibition explores how our perception is mediated by and eventually adapts to the images coming from inquisitive medias such as satellites and security cameras. Everywhere around us, screens are showering our retina with information most of us hardly ever take the trouble to cross check. We tend to forget that these images are not first-hand, they are mediated, selected and distributed by media, political or scientific authorities
Shaina Anand’s and Ashok Sukumaran’s work suggests that technology can follow paths different from the ones imposed by a purely capitalist perspective. When radio, electricity or CCTV is “pulled” in this way, it reveals a different set of properties, a vivid materiality and expanded parameters
Artist Sascha Huber symbolically renames “Rentyhorn” a mountain currently named Agassizhorn, after Swiss natural scientist Louis Agassiz. Renty was a slave from the Congo whose picture Agassiz had taken in the United States in the 1850s as a proof of the inferiority of the black race. The performance is part of a campaign that attempts to make the legacy of colonialism visible
The “Tropospheric Laboratory” allows insights into cloud cores and other matter of the apogee. The installation narrates the synthesis of clouds and shows varying conditions and combinations of art and science in the absence of weight. The “laboratory” is the gravimetric document of “Cloud Core Scanner” – an experiment and artistic project by Agnes Meyer-Brandis, carried out on board a German Aerospace Center research plane
Overseen by two Berlin curators Dr. Matthias Harder (Helmut Newton Stifftung) and Félix Hoffmann (C/O Berlin), this exhibition is small, impeccably curated and it is also the one that follows most punctiliously the main theme of the exhibition: control and its antithesis
R&Sie(n)’s investigative approach to architecture focuses on developing technological experiments–cartographic distortions and territorial mutations–in order to explore the bond between building, context, and human relations. Each building is a process, a dynamic device with the tenacity of a parasite that uses every means offered by architecture to perform an ecologically useful function.
The Biennial of Photography and Visual Arts has invited about a hundred artists to question society’s growing desire for control, surveillance, and regulation. A worrying tendency which leaves space for accident, irrationality, for the unexpected and the absurd
Last and overdue notes from the Japan Media Arts Festival which took place last month in Tokyo. I’m just going to do a lazy post and glaze over he entertainment and animation categories
Users’ endeavors, like glittering star backgrounds, photos of cute kittens and rainbow gradients, are mostly derided as kitsch or in the most extreme cases, postulated as the end of culture itself. In fact this evolving vernacular, created by users for users, is the most important, beautiful and misunderstood language of new media
Among Daisy Ginsberg’s latest activities are a residency at SymbioticA, a collaboration with James King and Cambridge University’s iGEM 2009 grand-prizewinning team and then there’s Synthetic Aesthetics. The project investigates shared territory between design and synthetic biology, invites exchange of existing skills and approaches, and enables the development of new forms of craft and collaboration
I’ll never recommend enough a visit to the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. No matter what they are showing i will go and discover something exciting. Such as the statue of a Man-Shark or the Kachina/katsina dolls which are part of The Making of Images, an anthropology exhibition that deciphers large artistic and material productions of humanity to reveal what is not seen directly in an image
The 7th International Biennial of Photography and Visual Arts in Liege is one of the most exciting art events i’ve seen in a while. This year’s theme is (Out of) Control. It oscillates between the cheerful and the somber, between the mundane and the extraordinary. I’ll get back to you with a proper report but i couldn’t help singling out a quirky series of photos i discovered at the biennial
Or how an exhibition i disliked gave me the opportunity to interview an artist whose work i’ve been admiring ever since i started the blog
Data Flow 2 expands the definition of contemporary information graphics. The book features new possibilities for diagrams, maps, and charts. It investigates the visual and intuitive presentation of processes, data, and information. Concrete examples of research and art projects as well as commercial work illuminate how techniques such as simplification, abstraction, metaphor, and dramatization function
Onion scanners, tv screens used as percussion instruments, storm inside a transparent cylinder, genetically modified blue carnations brought back to their original white, techy Japanese-style glockenspiel, etc.
The exhibition presents six international positions on the subject of computer games and electronic toys. The spectrum includes interactive computer games, developed by artists, a film collage of modified content of commercial games as well as small toy robots; furthermore four photos from a series showing male adolescents during a LAN-party
Acknowledging that each of us is inclined to give, this illuminating publication reveals how a beneficent deed contributes to an environment of increasing generosity in addition to enhancing the capabilities of its recipient. As a shared value, giving can grow to be a meaningful collective force that affects the world in surprising ways
In the years to come, might the best employers encourage women to work longer by offering them the means to unlimited fertility in the form of a golden orb spider farm from which to harvest silk for their luxury spare womb?
In light of the latest developments in biotechnology, cybernetics and neuroscience, the mixture of medical exhibits and works of art introduces visitors to developments in bioscience and issues they entail. Can our definition of life remain unchallenged? Is the human commitment to reproduce going to remain the same? How much can medical and scientific developments impact the way we love and live?
Prosthetics, anatomical drawings by Michelangelo, ornate amputation saw from ca. 1650, disturbing videos by Patricia Piccinici, Tibetan anatomical figures, a painting by Damien Hirst. Some 150 medical artifacts from the Wellcome Collection in London and works of old Japanese and contemporary art are exhibited side by side. Without any hierarchy nor anxiety
Wafaa Bilal’s latest project addresses the issue of the invisibility of Iraqi civilian deaths during the war. The artist will submit his body to a 24-hour live performance. His back will be tattooed with a borderless map of Iraq covered with one dot for each Iraqi and American casualty near the cities where they fell
The illegal Israeli settlement Har Homa in the West Bank, the interior of the MIR space-station simulator in Moscow, the modernist monument in honour of WW II victims in Kosturnica, the bedsheet serving as an improvised cinema screen in a Chinese village – these are real Science Fiction scenarios, constructed man-made utopias, hurling their absurdities at the viewer
A troop of monkeys celebrate a feast, a panther wanders across a snowy Alpine landscape and a pack of white wolves surround a buffalo dripping blood in a manicured French garden. At first glance Walton Ford’s large-scale animal watercolour paintings evoke prints by French and British colonial-era illustrators from the 19th century. After closer examination however, they reveal a pictorial universe of complex and disturbing allusions
This project for a “genetically engineered sound garden” seeks to find new ways of imagining the nature of tomorrow where engineered species of plants, insects and animals interact within a composed ecosystem and create new forms of musical performance
Justin is pursuing responsive media in the physical world, exploring the intersection between media technology and architecture, in order to produce programmed and interactive spaces that act at the scale of the spectator’s body
Who would have thought i’d end up blogging about a splatter movie on wmmna? I’m not talking about any horror movie, i’m talking “gay-porn zombie film”, a genre which i assume is under-represented in contemporary art. Written and directed by Bruce LaBruce and starring porn actor François Sagat, LA Zombie is on view at the Peres Projects gallery in Berlin, along with a dozen new works on canvas
Crowbot Jenny is a manga character. She is a socially-awkward girl who prefers to spend time surrounded by technology and animals rather than with humans. She built the Crowbot. Perched on her shoulder, the crow-shaped robot can vocalize a variety of crow calls to control and converse with her bird army
Developed in 1972 to protect early microprocessors from dust, the Gesundheit Radio featured a sneeze mechanism that expelled dust from inside the casing every six month. A bellows system extracted dust from inside the unit, blowing waste from two outlets located on the front
30 black and white pictures from photographers who portrayed life at the time of the GDR, mostly in a way that steered away from the official GDR iconography
Michael Rakowitz explores the influence of science fiction genre imagery on the design of Iraqi monuments, military uniforms and weaponry under Saddam Hussein, while illuminating aspects of the US-Iraq conflict over the past few decades