What logic lies behind major technological pushes of the past and how could it apply to future projects and what could we learn from the visions of an American past that never happened?
A photo of a secret CIA prison. A map designed to help visitors reach Malibu’s notoriously inaccessible public beaches. Guidebooks to factories, prisons, and power plants in upstate New York. These are some of the more than one hundred projects represented in Experimental Geography, a collection of visual research and mapmaking from the past ten years
Photographer Danny Treacy recovers discarded clothing he finds lying around in streets, car parks and waste ground. He then stitches the garments together into spooky suits, which he wears in life-sized portraits to become Them
advertising
Going beyond the phenomenon of number stations, the exhibition explores forms of art that elude any wistful desire for fixed interpretations, they include mathematical encoding, the production of aurora borealis, archiving contact lenses, seismic sensors, the disappearance of hanged men and mountain summits
In fast and witty episodes, Filmmaker Ben Lewis meets some of the most discussed contemporary artists and challenges their work with the kind of provoking questions you can expect from someone who recently penned an article titled ‘Who Put the Con on Contemporary Art?’
The exhibition reveals how what sociologist Avery F. Gordon calls “the ghosts of memory” reach out from the past through the present, influencing how we understand and construct it. More precisely, the show investigates the mutual influence between this phantom of memory and the territory
social
This volume includes a monumental stash of documentary photographs, ephemera, documents, transcripts and original writings on all things related to the oil crisis–from Jimmy Carter to underground utopias. Reproductions cover everything from impossible traffic jams leading up to empty gas stations to board games with names like Energy Quest and Petrol
Oron Catts, Director of SymbioticA, Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts at The University of Western Australia, presented the project he and his team are currently working on. Adaptation is radically different from what you would expect. No victimless leather jacket, no banquet of frog steak. This one invites us to take a peak into the broader issue of ecology and life itself
The Moon Goose Experiment (MGE) is based on an excerpt from the book The Man in the Moone, written by Francis Godwin in 1603. Godwin was the first person ever to describe weightlessness – long before Newton’s theory of gravity. The protagonist in the book flies to the moon in a chariot towed by geese. These special moon geese migrate every year from the earth to the Moon
Let’s get this straight first: the Earth is hollow and other societies live in there. Andy brought us to the cave in order to be closer to them
The second edition of Biorama was a workshop and symposium (set inside a cave) that explored the biology of the underground through the notion of umwelt developed by biologist Jakob von Uexküll and its influence on the development of biosemiotics by Thomas Sebeok.
The guide offers a concise, up-to-date- and insightful presentation of European museums, art institutions, galleries, art fairs, biennials, and works of art in public space. It focuses on giving both the knowledgeable insider and the casual novice a brief and easy-to-use synopsis of European art highlights that are musts on the itinerary of anyone interested in contemporary art
Sarah Pickering’s b&w photographs document the interiors of purposely-designed buildings have been repeatedly set on fire then extinguished for training exercises at the UK Fire Service College
In what has come to be called Gravity Art by some, there is actually a couple of artists who have chosen to use gravity it as their medium, often in somewhat beautiful yet futile actions, heroic failures.
Rather than answering questions–such as, How can technological advances be controlled? On what ethical bases can its purposes be chosen? Who is entitled to decide on the ultimate mission of machines? Can machines destroy us?–this installation, on the contrary, is about reformulating those modern philosophical questions through the use of images associated with the popular culture of science fiction
Ever since its opening in 2007, the museum had to face accusations of reinforcing colonial stereotypes. An exhibition about the famous Ape-Man, created by an author who had never set foot in Africa, was unlikely to tame detractors. But the curators are smart. Their perspective is to help visitors understand how Westerners’ misconceptions of Africa, its noble savages, untamed jungles and scantily clad women, came about. All i cared about was a couple of statues representing Leopard Men
The publication is concerned with searching the world for signs of what is to come. Given the visitor’s experiences, life choices and dreams, what is the probable future of the exhibition as a medium, a voice, experience and contemporary fountain of knowledge? And what future do we who are working in the field hope to see?
As part of the exhibition Radical Nature, an urban mill designed by architects EXYZT and the re-staging of Agnes Denes’ 1982 Wheatfield form a temporary functional ensemble in the North-East London district of Dalston .
The Cloud Project takes the shape of a retro van selling ice-cream flavored clouds. An industrial-strength water spray mounted on top of the ice cream van would shoot a mix of liquid nitrogen and ice-cream into the atmosphere as a fine spray, leading to flavored condensation nuclei that will seed ice-cream clouds and give them the flavour of your choice
Nick Hannes traveled across the former Soviet Union by bus and train in search of remnants of the region’s Communist past and signs of recent social transition and evolutions
A dark and intelligent exhibition that attempts to address the overall ecological problem not only in environmental terms but also with respect to its philosophical, psychological, economic and social implications
When/if fully developed, My Sunshine will reflect the sunlight and provide extra hours of lights in urban areas around the Arctic Circle, a region that receives no sunlight in Winter time due to the rotation of the Earth’s axis
When Norwegian artist Kjersti Andvig initiated a collaboration with someone called Carlton A. Turner, who at the time was on death row in Texas, she aimed to expose a system which she perceived as a unjust mix-up of right wing politics, strange religious beliefs and cruelty. After their artistic work had ended, they fell in love.
In the Winter of 2001/02, Michele Dantini traveled to Cameroon to photograph and document what is still the biggest private sector investment in sub-Sahara Africa: the construction of the controversial Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline
A speedy glimpse of the exhibition Green Platform which is running until July 19 at the Strozzina cultural center in Florence so that you know what to do if you’re in Tuscany this week
If you can’t afford Space Adventures’s multi-million ticket to fly into space and if you don’t want to wait till 2011 to hop on one of Richard Branson’s upcoming Virgin Galactic flights, then the Soyuz Chair, designed by Design Interactions graduate Nelly Ben Hayoun is the best you can hope for right now
How can 300 cheapo copies of the same profile of a fourth century Christian saint originally painted by an artist most of us have never heard about be interesting? I don’t really know the answer to that but i know that the magic is there. Seen from afar, the effect of these paintings is stunning. Seen from up close, the portraits are equally fascinating
You do remember The Toaster Project, don’t you? Thomas Thwaites has spent the past 9 months crafting his own toaster from scratch. I went to see the progress of his kitchen appliance last week at the Royal College of Art show and all i can say is: What a beauty!
Radical Nature draws on ideas that have emerged out of Land Art, environmental activism, experimental architecture and utopianism. The exhibition is designed as one fantastical landscape, with each piece introducing into the gallery space a dramatic portion of nature
Jen Hui Liao’s Self-Portrait Machine is a device that takes a picture of the sitter and draws it but with the model’s help. The wrists of the individual are tied to the machine and it is his or her hands that are guided to draw the lines that will eventually form the portrait
A fictitious company called ENT International has filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.
Some of the items listed in the catalogue of the bankruptcy clearance auction are perfectly mundane, others are fictitious. Put together they offer a detailed insight into the inner workings of a large corporation closely inspired by the Enron scandal
Directly influenced by the 50s and ’60s experiments, ExtraRoom puts the sensory deprivation practice in a near futuristic scenario, when mind reading technologies are in common use and thoughts are not private anymore
Danish artist and environmentalist Tue Greenfort’s photo series, Daimlerstrasse 38 lured foxes living in the industrial area in eastern Frankfurt with frankfurter sausages towards a hidden camera
The artists brought together for this show reveal an imagery that has been inspired by the current mutations in our environment. They deal with diverse matters such as Chernobyl, global warming and the rise in oil rates. At times close to science-fiction, these artists imagine new stories which pay witness to the curiosity and fears derived from this changing reality
Given my notoriously campy taste in music, you will be relieved to know that i’m going to carefully avoid reviewing the music side of Barcelona’s International Festival of Advanced Music and Multimedia Art. What’s left then? Fashion, a bit of advertising and the SonarMàtica exhibition
The audio file of a lecture by Prof. Wendy Brown who explains how the building of walls around the world today is so starkly at odds with images of a world that is ever more connected & unbordered. Bonus! Videos of Shooting Back, the project of an Isreali NGO that gives Palestinian families across the West Bank video cameras to document how they are treated by Israeli soldiers and settlers
At no cost at all, the young artists have at their disposal a huge array of material that they can grab, move, superimpose, and organize onto temporary installations and sculptures
The German independent filmmaker has been investigating the relationship between technology and information for decades. His talk in Barcelona explored the way blurry, raw images from surveillance and sophisticated computer-generated images are now competing with “the real thing”
LOOP art fair understands the importance of the comfort factor for video art lovers. The fair took place inside the snug rooms of a 4 stars hotel right in the center of Barcelona during 3 afternoons. Videos were displayed on big screens inside bedrooms and some galleries added a smaller screen in the bathroom to show another piece. So here we were all cosying into armchairs, spreading over beds, taking notes in the dark and chatting in the corridors of the hotel
Just found out that the utterly brilliant and fascinating thesis that Otto von Busch presented last year at the University of Gothenburg is available as an online PDF. So leave Dan Brown on the shelves and take this one on the beach this Summer, ok?