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While in London i went to see a few photography exhibitions. And yes! i realize i wrote a couple of days ago that i'd focus on the RCA show this week but i can't keep that promise, i'm starting to bore myself. Now one of those photo shows is called freshfacedandwildeyed and it marks the launch of an annual exhibition presenting the most striking work by visual arts graduates from BA and MA courses across the UK. There were 25 photographers selected. Some of them had all my attention:
Murray Ballard's Cryonics series explores the practice of preserving dead people or animals by freezing them at extremely low temperatures, in the hope that science will be able to revive them in the future. The photographer traveled to a cryonics lab in Phoenix, Arizona, documenting the facility, the technology used, the scientists working there, met with some prospective patients in the UK, etc. All along, questioning whether he was dedicating his time to a world of 'farcical fantasies' or of 'genuine and innovative scientific experimentation.'
Boris Austin's Solidified Memories series aims to balance the glossy surface of China promoted by the Olympics and made of swanky stadium and gorgeous swimming pool with what he saw in the north eastern city of Dalian, China's 'most habitable city'. He discovered a neighbourhood which remains a world away from the much publicized urban regeneration accompanying the Games. Not that we're surprised of that fact....
Jan Stradtmann commented on the urbanistic consequences of the Olympics of 2012. In The Manor Garden Allotments series, he documents the small garden plots which had to be eliminated in order "regenerate" the site for the 2012 Olympics in London. He took pictures of the 'victims' of the planning of the Olympics as if he'd just arrived on a crime scene. Photographing the huts shortly before their elimination transformed them into symbols of an injustice to come.
Steve Schofield's portraits of science-fiction costumers in their homes in Britain, investigate how, through a sub-cultural world of fandom, like-minded people establish a fictional existence to escape the everyday.
Michal Honkys went back to his hometown, Ostrava (Czech Republic) to see what was left of a city which had been pride of the Communist era. freshfacedandwildeyed 08 runs at The Photographers' Gallery in London through July 6. |
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The largest part of the pharmaceuticals and chemicals we take go through our bodies and eventually end up in waste water. As water and waste treatment plants haven't been designed to filter them, the content of our medicine cabinets are eventually passed into the water supply. In London, tap water comes from surface water which implies that traces of our medicine can end up in our drinking water. This results in local differences in tap water, based on the food and drugs we ingest. Tuur van Balen, one of the graduates of Design Interactions at the RCA, decided to explore this issue in a project which imho had the perfect balance between speculation and solid anchorage into reality.
The way people live and behave in each zone of London can be reflected in the quality of the tap water. Tap water in London Notting Hill very probably benefits from the high density of organic shops found in the area. Tap water in the city of London is presumably enhanced with all kinds of stimulants, from caffeine-rich drinks to cocaine. Golders Green which houses an important Jewish community can be expected to 'produce' a very fertile water due to the low concentration of people taking anti-conception pills.
Back in January, at the opening of the department work in progress show, Tuur presented My City = My Body, the first chapter of this research into future biological interactions with the city and more precisely into how the increasing understanding of our DNA and the rise of bio-technologies will change the way we interact with each other and our urban environment. He offered tap water to the visitors of the show and asked them to donate a urine sample along with their postcode. The samples, their biological information and postcodes were then added to a map of London which reveals potential local city-body ecologies or biotopes. The mapping of tap water creates separate territories within the city. Could these areas be the biological counterpart of gated communities?
The next step is a website which helps London inhabitants describe, speculate on, map and share what they think are the unique characteristics of their tap water. The map thus created reveals potential local city-body ecologies, or biotopes. The system will also generate a custom-made label which you can download if you want to sell your own tap water.
That's what the designer did. He went to the hip and organic-addicts frequented Broadway market in Hackney to set up a stall, offer people to "buy" bottles of tap waters, branded with the London area they came from and engage in a discussion about the possibility of new urban biotopes.
You can find various websites which details the quality of various tap waters. But most of the systems employed to analyze water do not check for say, anti-depressant substances or cocaine. What if biotechnology could provide us with cheap detectors?
With the help of bioengineer James Chappell, Imperial College, Tuur developed the concept for a Urban Biogeography tool. The instrument would enable anyone to study the distribution of urban biodiversity over space and time by monitoring sewage. With the tool, a tiny amount of sewage can be pumped up and scaned for different pharmaceutical and chemical traces, without having to lift a manhole cover.
Using synthetic biology and in particular the biobricks tools, bacteria are programmed to become cheap biosensors. The bacteria-sensors, housed in the small transparent compartments, change colour when oestrogen, antibiotics, Viagra or Prozac are detected in the water. Since synthetic biology is both open source and modular, this instrument can be redesigned to detect other chemicals by any Urban Biogeographer, even amateurs as the technology is becoming increasingly accessible. The set of data thus obtained can be used to influence healthcare or property prices in the area, that of course would be the ideal scenario... All images courtesy of Tuur van Balen. Related: 24c3: Programming DNA - A 2-bit language for engineering biology, Designer Microbes. |
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Haunch of Venison London is running until July 5 Home Lands, Land Marks, an exhibition presenting works from seven contemporary artists from South Africa. Although i have less opportunity to see (and thus report on) shows of contemporary art from South Africa, what i've discovered of their practice over the past couple of years makes me think that we need to see more of their works. Here's a few reasons to explain why: Anton Kannemeyer - The Alphabet of Democracy, Control of Arrivals, In South African prisons.
The Haunch of Venison show didn't disappoint at all. Differing from the usual approach to post-apartheid South Africa, the exhibition addresses the complexity of the South African landscape, reflecting upon notions of memory, place and identity, referring to the political context and historical background of South Africa only through the imprint and trace of human experience on the physical landscape. I couldn't resist focusing on the photographies of David Goldblatt who has spent the past five decades documenting everyday life in South Africa, from scenes of Apartheid to the advances of AIDS in the country (around one in seven of its citizens is infected with HIV), from scandalous housing development projects to memorial isolated by the side of the road.
The gallery website has plenty of pictures and that never prevents me from making my usual lame pics. |
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Artist and taxidermist Reid Peppard's narrative environment Not With a Bang but a Whimper asks what would happen if we just ended today. Set in the office of someone mysterious who had a taste for stuffed rats (or did they conduct experiments on them?), plants are taking over and faux sunlight is falling through the blinds.
Seen at Central Saint Martins' fine art degree show. |
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I encountered Stockholm-based artist Albin Karlsson's work at the recent Icon Experiment, an island of interesting projects of an otherwise often ghastly design expo at the ExCeL center in London's uber-gentrified Docklands.
Among works by Jurgen Bey, Studio Glithero and Julia Lohmann, his piece was sitting somewhat on the fringe, but was quite literally becoming increasingly present because it was spinning a web of fine glue-fibers across the stand. Asking what it was, I was told that the work, titled 1g/min, is actually a clock, dripping 1 gram of hot glue per minute from a rotating nozzle. Over time, a stalagmite-like structure arisis which physically visualizes the time that has passed. The material quality of the object is somewhat of a honeycomb, yet there's often that whitish web attached which also gives it a delicate cobweb-like appearance. Time lapse-videos of the clock in progress are wonderful to watch and say a lot about the possibilities procedural and generative sculpture.
Later I had the chance to talk to lovely Albin and he told me that the main body of his work so far had been revolving around timepieces. He has explored measuring and displaying the passing of time in many different ways. He says "Time fascinates me both as physical phenomena and as a philosophical and personal matter. The sense of time have changes during the years. The changes go hand in hand with the technical inventions to measure it."
Another good example for such a time-based work is the public-space installation Minuterna, a robotic arm at Stockholm's Odenplan subway station, which in 129600 minutes (3 months) had several panes of glass covered with the same number of dots, eventually obscuring the whole surface. This process must have given commuters such an interesting sense of how time passes. Especially since it was located in a highly controlled urban environment which we, as opposed to a forest for instance, usually do not associate with change.
A third work on this subject sits probably kind of in between the previous two and is called Thermopaper 2 in which a big sheet of thermochromic paper is slowly wound from one spool to another. A rotating heat source draws a circle on the paper, one cycle per minute. However, since the sheet is constantly in motion, the circle can never be completed and instead becomes a spiral which grows longer and more intricate as time goes by, in a sense letting time become a medium as such on the paper. More images from the event to be found here. |
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Tate is archiving dozens of videos of artist talks, performances and cultural debate which took place in the museum from 2001 until today. They haven't finished re-encoding all of the existing material but so far there are over 600 hours of audio and video available. Here's my pick from the full listing:
In the media art department there's Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (i can't recommend that one enough), tech and culture philosopher Bernard Steigler, a symposium titled Softspace: Contemporary Interactive Environments with Lucy Bullivant, Lev Manovich, Despina Papadopoulos, Usman Haque, Jason Bruges and Daan Roosegaarde. |
