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I got back yesterday from another edition of the Gamerz festival in Aix-en-Provence. I don't think there's a festival anywhere in the world i visit with more enthusiasm. First of all, it takes place in Aix-en-Provence which is always a bonus. But more importantly, the festival has a strong, unique personality. Gamerz, the organizers would tell you, is only a pretext to invite artists, designers, researchers whose work they admire. And they even have to do game art. The opening performance, for example, wasn't the compulsory electronic music performance, it was an astonishing concert given by Choeur Itineris, professional choir singers interpreting a repertoire of mobile phone ringtones. The rest of the festival programme involves robots, dipterous experiences, video art, food artists, a 'half ship, half woman' DJ and other surprising works. And game art too.
What makes the festival worth the trip for me is that Gamerz always manages to scout young, talented artists i had never heard about. Before i get back to you with a proper report, here's a brief entry about Geraud Soulhiol's extraordinary drawings. His Arena series portrays existing football stadium that are not only decaying and crumbling but have also been colonized by more traditional icons of architectures such as cathedrals, local monuments, skyscrapers designed by starchitects, fortresses, factories, etc. The feeling of desolation is increased by the fact that the hybrid structures are presented in the middle of an empty white page, like carcasses abandoned in the desert.
The images on this blog post are quite miserable but the large scale ones are spectacular and it takes a few minutes to uncover all the details. What brings us back to the world of game art is that Geraud Soulhiol was inspired by the spirit and aesthetics of strategy video games, in particular the isometric perspective many of them adopt.
This one is for Zoe:
Video interview of the artist (in french.) Gamerz festival is free and is open throughout the city of Aix-en-Provence until Sunday, November 27 2011. |
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Felice Varini named the work he made for the Cardiff Bay "Three Ellispes for Three Locks" but everyone there calls it "The Barrage Circles."
Like most of Varini's works, this one is an anamorphosis, a distorted projection or perspective requiring you to occupy a precise vantage point to reconstitute the image. Think of the skull in Hans Holbein painting, The Ambassadors, the most famous example of anamorphic perspective in art.
You need to stand at a precise point to be able to the three bright yellow ellipses that have been painted onto the working locks, on the ground, the gates, the outer sea wall, etc. The interesting thing is that i had to ask my way to passersby and most of them had passed by the artwork without ever realizing that the splashes of yellow paint they had seen while walking the dogs or cycling to the other end of the bay could form three perfect ellipses. Most of them told me "There's some yellow stuff over there but it looks nothing like that image you have on your guide, love!" But it does. You just have to be patient and find the ideal spot to see the ellipses form. My photo camera didn't agree much though:
But other flickr users got it right on their photos. From really up-close it looks nothing like circles:
I wouldn't recommend walking to the Barrage Circles. I did it, it's ridiculously long when you're not geared for a long walk by the sea. Take the water taxi, it's charming. Or even better, hire a bike.
The rest of Cardiff's dockland district is all family fun with exhibition spaces, cafes, a Norwegian church but i only had eyes for the carousel with the horses and the red dragons.
And then there is this Pink Hut on the eastern breakwater, originally designed for use by local yacht clubs.
More images on BBC. |
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Yesterday i was going through the press images of the 11th Biennale de Lyon which will open on September 15 and stumbled upon a work by Marina De Caro. I know nothing about it, except what Frieze magazine writes: Marina de Caro's work 4 Ojos (4 Eyes, 2007) is a video that portrays the artist wandering through Buenos Aires as a comical yet oddly poignant two-headed being. This four-eyed creature purports to have two consciousnesses, owing to the fact that its second head, which exhibits the will of a helium balloon, floats any which way it pleases while tethered to its twin only by a lengthy, limber neck. That's it, now i just want to see the video.
More images in the project flickr set. |
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One of the partner events of the STRP festival in Eindhoven (reports coming this way soon-ish) is the Funware show, open until mid January at one of my favourite art centers in Europe, MU. Exhibition after exhibition, the art space gives a generous overview of what contemporary creativity means by showcasing indiscriminately design, fashion, music, architecture, and new media.
Some people might believe that software is a thing of austerity, tedium, abstruseness and long nights sustained with cup noodles. Funware demonstrates with an array of interactive installations, games, hacks and rebellious applications that developing, twitching and using software can be fun. In fact, while visiting the show, you could almost forget that software is at the core of the works. However improbable it might sound for today's all encompassing dullness of forms, databases, schedules and processors, "fun" has informed and guided the development of software from its very inception. The rise of net art and the changes the Internet and desktop computers brought to culture gave rise to software art at the turn of the millennia.
Discretionary selection of the goods on show:
In 1952, one of the first programmers, Christopher Strachey, who was working with Alan Turing at Manchester University, created the first text-generating algorithms: a Mark I program that delivered combinatory love letters. LoveLetters Redux, by David Link, is a functional replica of the Ferranti Mark I. If the visitor employs the right switches of the reconstructed user interface console, it executes the original code of Strachey's software. A loveletter is then created and projected on the other side of the wall.
Link worked from just two archival photographs to reconstruct the machinery LoveLetters_1.0 is modeled on. He also managed to source some of the original working components, like the 1931 teleprinter shown in the exhibition space. Once a day, at a randomly selected moment, the machine automatically prints a love letter on the Creed 7 teleprinter.
OSK - Offener Schaltkreis (open circuit), by Christoph Haag, Martin Rumori, Franziska Windisch and Ludwig Zeller, is a silent labyrinth made of open copper tracks that turns into a giant noisy machine as visitors place speaker cylinders on its tracks. The open copper trails -similar to the ones you'd find should you open the insides of a computer- that snake on the floor and walls carry the electrical signals of a multichannel sound repository. Displacing the speaker-cylinders increases the speed, pitch and velocity of the repository of sounds recorded by the artists in Eindhoven. SimCopter Hack, by RTMark, is a legendary prank played on SimCopter, a computer game that put the player in the role of a helicopter pilot flying through 3D cities.
While he was working as a programmer for Maxis Inc., a RTMark member slipped into the game a few 'unauthorised images' of semi-dressed men walking around in trunks and kissing each other (bringing thus some variety from the usual 'buxom babes'), a couple of Elvis impersonators, the Loch Ness monster and a flying superhero. The feature would be activated and become visible on Friday the 13th, as well as on a few other days of the year - a classic Easter Egg snuck into over 70,000 copies of the game shipped to customers. The designer was fired and the release of the game was delayed. A few months later, a group named RTMark claimed responsibility for the himbos (male bimbos) being inserted into the game along with 16 other acts of "creative subversion."
Satromizer aka "the world's first multi-touch glitch tool", by Jon Satrom and Ben Syverson, is an application for iPhone, iPod and iPad that reconciles the glitch culture of the 1980s and 1990s with the spic-and-span aesthetics and closed interface of Apple products: glitches grow and the interface falls apart as you touch the screen. Satromizer also reflects on the role that software art can play in destabilising the 'boredom' of software.
I/O/D/ 4: The Web Stalker, by I/O/D.((Matthew Fuller, Colin Green and Simon Pope)), is a software application that re-visualises data-space. It allows web users to navigate WWW, except that all the information displayed is exactly what a normal browser conceals: a stream of html code, the progress of connection, maps of the links from the website, relations between the URLs within it and automatic records of the site. The aesthetics is extremely appealing with hyperlinks that appears as graphics. I/O/D challenges our usual notion of interactivity' and questions the material and structure of the network. Funware was curated by Olga Goriunova, Senior Lecturer in Media Practices at London Metropolitan University. Rhizome recently interviewed her. A few images. Funware is open until January 16, 2011 at MU in Eindhoven. The exhibition will travel to Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund, DE, in 2011. |
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Form + Code. In Design, Art and Architecture by Casey Reas, Chandler McWilliams and LUST (available on amazon UK
Publisher Princeton Architectural Press writes: The last decade has witnessed a proliferation of artists whose primary medium is software. Algorithmic processes, harnessed through the medium of computer code, allow artists to generate increasingly complex visual forms that they otherwise might not have been able to imagine, let alone delineate. The newest volume in our Design Brief series Form+Code in Design, Art, and Architecture is a non-technical introduction to the history, theory, and practice of software in the arts. Organized into themes linked to aspects of code--repetition, transformation, parameters, visualization, and simulation--each of the book's sections contains an essay, code samples, and numerous illustrations. An accompanying website (www.formandcode.com) features code samples in various programming languages for the examples in the book. An ideal introductory text for digital design and media arts courses, this unique primer will also appeal to students and professionals looking for a survey of this exciting new area of artistic production.
Just like Processing: a Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists, this paperback was co-authored by Casey Reas. But Form+Code doesn't have the same ambitions as its tech-heavy and rigorous predecessor. Conceived as a prelude to the use of software for creative purposes, the book is the perfect opening for designers, visual artists, and architects eager to explore the possibilities that coding offers. Form+Code is no "Coding for Dummies" as you will not learn how to program. Instead, the authors take you through a series of concepts, background facts and works that are meant to inspire, stimulate and encourage you to explore the topic further. Form+Code is also the ideal introduction to coding for people as creative as a vacuum cleaner but curious about the world of visual arts like i am. Reading this book, there is no doubt left that code is hidden in every single discipline that shape contemporary visual culture: sculptures, information aesthetics, story-telling, live performances, graphic design, large-scale installations, industrial design, photography, gaming, artiļ¬cial life, etc. I posted a few examples below that i discovered in the book. Roxy Paine's SCUMAK (Auto Sculpture Maker) is an industrial-style machine that melts plastic with pigments and extrudes them onto a conveyor belt, creating blob shapes. A software programme controls the process so that instead of churning out mass produced objects, the machine creates one of a kind sculptures.
Flocking Diplomats is a series of posters that visualize parking violations by foreign ambassadors in the US over two decades. Catalogtree's images show a spike in parking tickets around lunchtime on weekdays. On a larger scale, they reveals more macro trends, such as a dramatic drop in violations shortly after September 11, 2001.
In his online narrative and navigable experiment, The Whale Hunt , Jonathan Harris has used an automated data collection process to document the 9 days he spent with a family of Inupiat Eskimos as they were getting ready to hunt whales.
"An algorithm written by [Keith Tyson] determines what will be on view in this new exhibition. The subsequent rolls of a die determined the parameters of the sculpture, including the color, depth and position of each element."
To be honest, Form+Code was the book i was waiting for. It is remarkably down-to-earth, clear, resourceful and has found that rare balance between illustration and text. |
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Last week, i was invited by innovation lab to participate to their annual Nordic Exceptional Trendshop in lovely Aarhus, Denmark. I'll probably come back to the conference later this week. In the meantime, allow me to fire a lazy and nevertheless enthusiastic little post about Julie Nord - Xenoglossy, one of the exhibitions i saw at the ARos museum.
The artist's ink drawings and watercolours send delicate little girls with inscrutable eyes and blond locks into a dark fairytale inhabited by mutants, helicopters, angry flowers, skulls, monsters and paper cut outs.
The title of the show, XENOGLOSSY, is unlikely to provide visitors with the clues to the meaning of this deranged children's-storybook. The term is applied to denotes a putative paranormal phenomenon in which people suddenly become fluent in a language of which they otherwise are completely ignorant.
Julie Nord - Xenoglossy is on view until November 21st, 2010 at ARos Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark. |
