The nuclear renaissance offers a clean, near limitless energy solution that could allow us to meet CO2 emission targets (without going short as consumers).
What if we ask for protective barrage balloons, establish concrete emergency services and resign ourselves to the perceived ‘hazards’? What if we embrace pet polar bears and pineapple ice cream along with other benefits that nuclear energy could bring? And what if not; are we prepared for blackouts instead?
Large amounts of sugar are excreted on a daily basis by type-two diabetic patients especially amongst the upper end of our aging population. Is it plausible to suggest that we start utilizing our water purification systems in order to harvest the biological resources that our elderly already process in abundance? In James Gilpin’s scenario, sugar heavy urine excreted by patients with diabetes would be used for the fermentation of high-end single malt whisky for export
As her pop musician alter ego “Sputniko!” Hiromi Ozaki showcases 3 manga-inspired characters who design objects to fulfil their own particular complex needs — Crowbot Jenny builds a crow-shaped robot to communicate with crows, Sushiborg Yukari, a sushi-serving cyborg who modifies her body to become a lethal weapon, and Menstruation Machine (Takashi’s Take), a boy desiring to become more ‘feminine’ who builds a suit in an attempt to experience the bleeding of menstruation
Sitraka Rakotoniaina’s project explores a possible ‘Hyper-normal’ space on the edge of normality, whereby a distorted experience of reality is induced because of physical or psychological stress, injuries, conditioning or training
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
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.
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
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
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?
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
Scorpio’s Garden at Berlin’s Temporäre Kunsthalle was a very beautiful show. All by Berlin-related artists and curated by Danish artist Kirstine Roepstorff, an explicitly subjective snapshot of a certain scene.
Calculating Space is a delicate sculpture made of sticks, strings and little plumbs. The fragility and transparency of its structure reveals as much as it hides the logic and functioning of the machine. Its units operate like a very basic artifical neural network
Notes i wrote down during a talk that Oron Catts gave to kick off the TIssue Culture workshop. His presentation, which put our wet lab into a historical narrative, was titled ‘An alternative timeline for regenerative medicine – A biased history’
A selection of artistic time machines expands the notion of linear time, suggesting that the Western world might have become infected by Rumsfeldian knowns and unknowns
The artworks question in some way or another the existence of ghosts, they explore the integration of new media and technologies in spiritualist contexts, make visible or perceptible the invisible and trace the political implications as well as the aesthetics of such contemporary trans-communication phenomena
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?
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
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
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
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
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
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”
Leonardo Da Vinci was credited with sketching the world’s first self-propelled vehicle back in 1478. But da Vinci was a Renaissance Man, a man at ease in front of a religious scene to paint as much as in front of a technological challenge. There’s no artist from the Renaissance in the exhibition, the majority of the works exhibited come from the last two decades but they demonstrate that contemporary artists do not need to graduate as engineers to re-invent the car… even if the result of their experimentation has no ambition to compete with what comes out of a Porsche factory
At the beginning of the 20th century, cars were hand built by small teams of highly skilled craftsmen and women. Only a small elite could afford to buy one until Henry Ford developed a system of mass-producing automobiles that lowered the unit price and enabled the average consumer to buy a car.
Tobias Rehberger takes history backwards. In 1999, the artist embarked on a project that saw him sending simple sketches, composed essentially from memory, of iconic cars such as a Porsche 911 and a McLaren F1 to a workshop in Thailand
One always has a good reason to take the L train from Manhattan to Brooklyn. I give you two of them, the first is an exhibition that explores Brooklyn’s immigrant communities, the other is a show dedicated to Ward Shelley’s time-line drawings
The exhibition is set under the aegis of Nikola Tesla and its name refers to a village in Alaska. Little more than 200 inhabitants live in Gakona. There’s a service station, a small school, a post office, a couple of diners and a scientific research base: the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program
One year after the Brussels’ exhibition Holy Fire. Art of the Digital Age, Yves Bernard from iMAL and Domenico Quaranta curate a show that, once again, puts a magnifying lens on the new media art pieces that have found their place on the art market
Together with a team of 14 people and the help of a whole range of experts, Cesar Harada is currently busy developing the Open Sailing project, a floating architecture that evolves like a living organism, a laboratory for techno-social experiments
The winner of the first prize this year is the uncanny, poetical and fascinating Hylozoic Soil, an immersive sculpture by artist and architect Philip Beesley
Dimly lit barrooms, shop windows long after the last client has gone, prostitutes tempting passersby and back alleys. These are moments and places that might sound darker than the night itself but the photographer managed to imbue sins and despair with some tenderness
Last Summer, curatorial research group Capsula embarked on the first of its Curated Expeditions, a series of research trips that engage with earthly phenomena through artistic investigation.
3 artists were invited to the scientific Zoo in Novosibirsk, the capital of Siberia, in order to collaborate with scientists and other experts and study the impact of a total solar eclipse on animals and human beings
Jordi Colomer studies the way in which the modern city influences human behaviour and explores the ubiquity and drawbacks of modernism in the urban environment
Material Beliefs takes emerging biomedical and cybernetic technology out of labs and into public spaces. Its members use design as a tool for public engagement, a mean to stimulate discussion about the value and impact of these new technologies which blur the boundaries between our bodies and materials
One of the most popular pavilions this year is probably the Japanese one, surrounded as it is by greenhouses, little wooden benches and tea tables for visitors to have a rest. Designed by the edgy and young architect Junya Ishigami, the pavilion is a hybrid between an artificial environment or an element of topography
Vicente Guallart’s contribution to the biennale is a research project that explores the potential of information technology to reorganize the habitability of the world. From a single small object to the planet itself
In big cities, groups of people decide to occupy then inhabit buildings which were left unfinished and abandoned because of economic crisis, ups and downs of the estate market, war, cataclysm, etc, giving way to an unexpected collaboration between construction industry and invention prompted by necessity
Where you’ll see a wall of robotic trophies, a robotic cat salivating in front of a virtual fish and a rocking robot having fun at the back of the gallery
Andreas Broeckmann, one of the curators of media_city Seoul reflects on crucial questions such as: Should media art be defined only by the technical media in use? Does it have any sense nowadays to organize specific media biennales and festivals?
With some 70 artists showing their work, the 5th edition of Seoul International Media Art Biennale is a very satisfying but also very overwhelming experience, especially because the event features so many pieces that require time and reflection, and so many artists whose work i had never heard of
