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Untitled Fragile Machine, seen last week at Arthur Ganson's very charming Long Now seminar titled Machines and the Breath of Time. As Stewart Brand says about Ganson's work: "As long as the idea is nonphysical, it is permanent; it becomes temporary as a physical device; and then it becomes permanent again in the mind of the viewer."
The seminar is available for download as audio and there's a video to watch too. |
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In case you forgot that something like 5 months ago i posted the first part of this story, here's a link to it: A visit to UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts, part 1. The department is located inside the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center on the UCLA campus, right next to T.E.U.C.L.A., Richard Serra's 42.5-ton ellipse sculpture. And that's where you should go next week. On May 14, D|MA graduate students are showing some of their work at the MFA Exhibition. I wrote about the projects of David Elliott, Michael Kontopoulos, Nova Jiang, and Justin Lui last time. Here's a few words about two of the other students i met while i was in Los Angeles:
Gil Kuno is doing mostly, but not only, sound-based projects. He recently collaborated with GX Jupitter-Larsen (The Haters) to develop an application and performance that amplify and treat the sound of an aerosol can to create a live soundscape. The image of the can discharging is projected behind the performers to deliver the audiovisual articulations of erosion and entropy. The performance ends when the can is empty. A year ago, the artist exhibited the most frightening musical instrument i've ever seen: Christo Allegra's work intersects information design, dynamic media and performance. Among the works he showed me, the one i like the best is Phi Two, a series that uses an algorithm to construct a form based on phyllotaxis, the arrangement of the leaves on the stem of a plant. Phyllotaxis was described mathematically as morphogenesis by Alan Turing as part of his final work. Morphogenesis attempts to account for biological pattern formation as documented by phyllotaxis.
In the Phi Two series, the application was rewritten for tracing the nodes of the phyllotaxis as they were generated. For each drawing, 200+ nodes/lines were traced in silver ink on black paper, and 100 drawings were generated. All of the resulting drawings were given away at their showing in return for an explanation from attendees as to why they had chosen the particular drawing. Marks generated in the drawing process were then fed back into the system for redraw. |
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While i was in Los Angeles ealier this month, i had the opportunity to visit the UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts and chat with some of the students. The department educates responsible designers and artists for the information age by teaching the fundamentals of Design, Media, and the Arts, and encouraging experimentation and innovation. Providing an extensive education in Design and Media Arts practice, history and criticism, the department fosters a critical and creative exploration of emerging forms of visual communication, typographies, interaction and interface design, ubiquitous computing, virtual environments, information spaces, networked agents and all other pertinent areas of research.
I was impressed beyond words by the mix of lightness, playfulness, critical minds, audacious ideas, social relevance and a great attention to details and aesthetics. Because I met only 5 students from the course, i will focus on their work while inviting you to check out the project gallery on the DMA website.
I'll start with Nova Jiang whom i left a few days ago in cold Milan where she was participating with the project Alternate Endings to the Milan Public Design Festival. Standing in a little pink open house in the street, she invited passersby to leave one piece of garment with her. Using a different coloured fabric each day, she and her team of costume designers and makers replicated exactly the cut and style of the garment and later gave it as a present to the person. Another of her pieces, the Figurative Drawing Device invites two people to get in close and sometimes disturbingly intimate contact with each other. One of them uses the device to 'scan' and draw the outlines of the other person. The imperfect lines preserve not only the presence of the model but also the idiosyncratic movement of the tracer.
Each drawing can be read as a graph which records the subtle interactions between the two. The drawings can also be multiplied and become a flip book. The process of creating a flip book this way is a performance in endurance for both the subject and the tracer where new psychological patterns emerge.
Hull Loss --which she just exhibited in The Netherlands-- invites participants to make paper airplanes and launch them through a series of mechanically animated scissors.
The Objects for Enhancing the Experience of Being Lost, in collaboration with Michael Kontopoulos, address ideas of disorientation in a foreign city, in their case, Singapore. A traveler may tote the objects around in a briefcase, using them to enhance the experience of being lost. One of these objects is a pair of blinders that simulate the experience of tunnel vision at any given location.
Which brings me to the work of Michael Kontopoulos. Watching his Machines that Almost Fall Over is akin to being in the same room as someone whose favourite hobby is to scratch their fingernails on a blackboard. His wooden sculptures are constantly on the brink of collapse. They swing dangerously, slowly and endlessly but never crash.
Justin Lui (together with Andrea Boeck and Jihyun Kim) created an amazing installation on the facade of the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) gallery in Hollywood. OPENINGS is made of system of modular vacuum-formed panels, LCD displays, and LED lights built into both the interior and exterior sides of the storefront wall. White LEDs glow in intensity according to the motion and proximity of pedestrians on Hollywood Blvd's 'Walk Of Fame'. LCDs on the exterior side of the wall show animated text describing art exhibits culled from the archives of LACE, while LCDs on the interior show text derived from artist Douglas McCulloh's project '60,000 Photographs in Hollywood' describing and quoting various characters encountered on Hollywood Blvd.
OPENINGS functions as the active membrane between two seemingly at odds zones on either side of the storefront wall, pulling Hollywood Blvd. into LACE gallery and LACE gallery onto the street.
Water Clouds of Light. Discarded water jugs are re-contextualized into a light installation. Objects that used to be cheap and very mundane has been ennobled and seem to float and 'breathe' with light. What i like best about the installation is that it is NOT interactive. Why should everything techy be interactive? Video.
Human Powered Chatbot was a workshop headed by David Elliott and FutureFarmers in Baltimore. 17 people who were given simple rules for processing text and working together. This system created a writing machine that was connected to the internet. Source material was programatically mined from the Twitter and New York Times APIs based on feedback from the participant's input. The result was a chatbot running on twitter that could interact and respond to conversations online under the guise of a "computer simulating intelligence".
Reduced to mere automata in the system, the participants could nevertheless chose to be either Computational Processors (whose job is to extract keywords) or Subjective Processors (who make a text using the keywords). After a message has been passed through the Computational and Subjective Processors, it gets uploaded to the internet where keywords are used as search terms on the New York Times and Twitter websites. The results of the search are returned along with any replies from people trying to talk to the Human Powered Chatbot and everything is copied down onto pieces of paper... and then redistributed to the Computational Processor to complete the loop. Inspired by A Mathematical Theory of Communication, an article written in 1948 by mathematician Claude E. Shannon.
To be continued... |
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After Postopolis, a talk at ENSAD in Paris, a few days at the STRP festival in Eindhoven, a couple of days washing dirty clothes, queuing all over the city and catching up with work at home, i'm back on the road again and will probably disappear for half a week unless i manage to extract myself from the 'evening entertainment' that -rumour has it- will be forced upon me these coming days.
The plan was to write a long and well-documented post about a remarkable exhibition i saw at LACMA in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago: Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures, i promised myself i'd do it before i get on the plane to Linz but guess what? The plan failed miserably. So here, dear reader, for your eyes only comes a sloppy version of what this post should have been. It is not exhaustive, it is not very informative but it might give you an idea of a couple of works i found particularly striking. Sometimes i might even explain why:
Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures: For East and West Germany during the Cold War, the creation of art and its reception and theorization were closely linked to their respective political systems: the Western liberal democracy of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the Eastern communist dictatorship of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Reacting against the legacy of Nazism, both Germanys revived pre-World War II national artistic traditions. Yet they developed distinctive versions of modern and postmodern art--at times in accord with their political cultures, at other times in opposition to them. By tracing the political, cultural, and theoretical discourses during the Cold War in the East and West German art worlds, Art of Two Germanys reveals the complex and richly varied roles that conventional art, new media, new art forms, popular culture, and contemporary art exhibitions played in the establishment of their art in the postwar era.
I knew i would get a powerful lesson of history but i was not expecting the show to be so overwhelmingly good.
Artworks are choreographed in chronological order. First comes WWII's immediate aftermath, 1945-1949, a dark period that would not be brightened by the division of the country into two separate states--East Germany and West Germany--along the lines of Allied occupation. Richard Peter Sr.'s B&W photographs that document the bombing of Dresden translate the mood better than any word could:
The second section, covering the 1950s, reveals the influence of Soviet and communist imagery on East Germany.
I particularly liked Konrad Klapheck's strict and flat paintings of various instruments and devices that have often been interpreted as a reflection of the stern and strong Nazi regime.
The Zero Group explored the relationship between science, technology and art. Strangely (to me) the movement was illustrated by an installation of it founder, Heinz Mack, that covered a wall with slowly spinning silver panels and disks. Section three, dedicated to the 1960s and '70s brings familiar faces: Joseph Beuys (right from my arrival at the exhibition, i was pacing the rooms wondering "so which Beuys will be here? Which one?), Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter.
Uncle Rudi is a 1965 painting of a family snapshot of a SS officer, he was Richter's uncle, "the Nazi in the family". A smiling and proud young man who, years after the picture had been taken, evokes war and violence.
The final section brings us to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The most arresting piece in the section refers to the country's darkest hours again. For the installation "Hand and Foot" (1980), Raffael Rheinsberg carefully ordered on the floor 400 shoes and gloves painted dark brown. The shoes belonged to forced laborers during World War II, they were found in an abandoned train station in Berlin.
Sibylle Bergemann's photos of sculptures of Marx and Lenin have become symbols of the dismantling of the Soviet power in Eastern Germany, when in fact the images documented the monument's birth, not its destruction.
Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures is on view until April 19, 2009 at LACMA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art. All images courtesy LACMA. |
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The first day of Postopolis is over. It went way better than i expected (and expectations were high.) We are on the rooftop of The Standard hotel which means looking at each other with a smug smile on our face that says "we're so lucky to be here". Problem is that the smile literally freezes as soon as the sun goes down: it gets cold beyond my worst nightmare of a night sleeping rough in Tobolsk (only slightly kidding here.) Bring your blanket and moon boots tonight or follow us on the webcast! Don't expect full reports as days are pretty busy but here are a few highlights of Day One on Postopolis planet:
I had the immense pleasure of kicking off the series of talks by introducing Fritz Haeg (how can anyone be both laid-back and so stylish?) whom i had invited precisely for his dedication to engage with everything but architecture. You might remember that i had interviewed him briefly two years ago about Edible Estates, a project that challenges the lawn, this "carpet of conformity", by inviting families to replace their front lawn with food-producing vegetable gardens. Fritz discussed Edible Estates (look out for his next garden in New York in June), gave an overview of the performances and various education activities he organizes but he also explained us briefly another of his projects: Animal Estates.
Launched at the 2008 Whitney Biennial, the project that attempts to integrate animals in our landscape, in particular indigenous species that have disappeared because of human habitats and settlements. The customized dwellings are designed to encourage the resettlement of wildlife in urban neighbourhoods.
Next came a presentation of the work of experimental architecture group fabric by Patrick Keller who proved once again that Swiss architecture rocks (check out this other talk by his colleague Christophe Guignard) and a live interview of Yo-Ichiro Hakomori of wHY Architecture by the two David from ArchDaily & Plataforma Arquitectura. Been very impressed by the thought-provoking and quiet answers of the Americano-Japanese architect and blown away by the picture of one of the most striking building he designed: Royal/T, LA's first Japanese-style cosplay café.
Bryan from Subtopia had had the great idea to invite Michael Dear Professor of Geography, USC and author of the book Postborder City (must get my hands on that one asap). A few noteworthy observation Dear made: the future of the city is already at work in L.A., there is no urban center, just a big sprawl and several urban centers here and there, the population is in majority latino; even if the U.S. managed to close their borders, the latininization of the country would still be unstoppable because of natural birth; diversity is the strongest feature of this society and we should embrace it instead of looking for questionable ways to avoid it; the border is everywhere we go, that's the frontera portatil, the border to go, etc.
Geoff Manaugh invited Jeffrey Inaba who commented the shift architects must face because of the current crisis: going from private commissions to public ones, accepting a part of blame for the ambitions of their previous clients and reassessing the actions and strategies to undertake in this new climate. Sounds heavy? The talk was actually very witty, not particularly on the optimistic side but still energizing and sprinkled with ironic observations that went from gums on the pavement to extreme temperatures in Kazakhstan.
Image on homepage: Postopolis flickr set by Storefront for art and architecture. |
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The Scion Space teamed up with Choque Cultural Gallery to set up São Paulo, an exhibition that celebrates the emerging art culture in the Brazilian city.
The show closed a couple of days ago. So why am i telling you about it? First because that's exactly what i tend to do these days, it takes me ages to get exhibitions online. But more importantly, the gallery was screening a lovely documentary: Temporal : The Art of Stephan Doitschinoff (aka Calma). Having this dream of painting a whole town, Calma traveled to Lençóis and started asking villagers if he could paint murals onto their houses. He soon ended up painting the inside of a chapel and even tombstones in the cemetery. Images of the opening on the Scion website and i uploaded mine over here. |
