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I'm just back from the Piemonte Share Festival, one of the few events showcasing media art here in Italy. Pity I won't be able to attend the conferences that will be running every day until Sunday as i'll be visiting Artissima tomorrow (yeah!) and then i'm off to Graz for a jury.
The exhibition takes place at the Natural Science Museum, a seventeenth-century building which used to be the main hospital of the center of Turin. Although i like the museum a lot i must say that the atmosphere of the show was pretty gloomy. The exhibition rooms are below the ground and the lighting is spectacularly bad. Still, there's some very good pieces that need to be seen. I found Ralf Baecker's Rechnender Raum (Calculating Space) particularly intriguing.
Seen from afar, Calculating Space looks like a sculpture made of toothpicks. It's made of sticks, strings and little plumbs. This fragility and transparency give a physical presence as much as they hide the logic and functioning of the machine. Its units operate like a very basic artifical neural network. Through its strict geometric and otherwise very filigree construction, the observer is able to track the whole processing logic from every viewpoint around the machine. This disclosure of the machines core is enforced by an uncommon distribution of its constructing elements: a nine angled architectural body forms a torus. In contrast to an ordinary alignment of a hidden logic and an outer user facing display its geometric basis is turned inside-out. The core of the machine, with all its computing elements, is shifted outwards on the surface, while the "display" which indicates the results of the tasks is displaced into the center of the system. Even though the tasks and their logic runs directly in front of the viewers eyes and even if one is long sinking into the interaction of the elements which is accompanied by a polyphonic but steady and reassuring buzz, it is not possible to follow the succession of the single conditions of the machine. (...) The results of the computations are sent inwards -into its own center- they are not intended for the viewer.
Rechnender Raum (Calculating Space) was nominated for the Share Prize. You can visit the exhibition until November 8 at the Museo Regionale di Scienze Naturali in Turin. And of course i took a few pictures of the exhibtion. |
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I'm having a fairly busy week but i promised myself i wouldn't abandon my blog as i tend to do when i'm on the road. So... quick post about an installation i was hoping to see earlier this month at Vooruit's festival Almost Cinema in Gent. Sadly, i couldn't make it to Belgium that week. But, youpiiie! Feedforward. The Angel of History, the exhibition that LABoral which opened last Thursday, gave me a second chance to finally get to see Smoke and Hot Air. Designed by Iranian artist Ali Momeni and Robin Mandel, with participation of artist Matthew Brackett, Smoke and Hot Air reflects Momeni's concern about the relentless threats that Iran has been receiving from many other countries in recent years.
The system searches for sentences including the words "attack Iran" on Google News. The sentences go through a text-to-speech synthesizer. The voice is in turn picked up by a microphone, analyzed, and translated into rhythmically corresponding smoke rings from a quartet of wooden smoke ring makers. Reflecting on the perception of countries as they are shaped by the news and media landscape, Smoke and Hot Air reverses the general view of Iran, which is frequently depicted as aggressor. The recent global support for the uprising after the 2009 Iranian election showed how quickly the general attitude towards a country can shift. Translating the news into old-fashioned smoke signals, Momeni's and Mandel's project illustrates how the complexities of national and political identity can get reduced to false impressions, deceit, and posturing.
I found the artwork particularly moving. Is simplicity can only be equaled by its efficiency and its peacefulness by the distressing political situation in the Middle East. The quiet and smoky atmosphere incites you to make a pause and reflect on the issue at stake. Also in the exhibition: Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad 1798-2006. |
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Publisher Princeton Architectural Press says: Over the last few decades, a rich and increasingly diverse practice has emerged in the art world that invites the public to touch, enter, and experience the work, whether it is in a gallery, on city streets, or in the landscape. Like architecture, many of these temporary artworks aspire to alter viewers' experience of the environment. An installation is usually the end product for an artist, but for architects it can also be a preliminary step in an ongoing design process. Like paper projects designed in the absence of "real" architecture, installations offer architects another way to engage in issues critical to their practice. Direct experimentation with architecture's material and social dimensions engages the public around issues in the built environment that concern them and expands the ways that architecture can participate in and impact people's everyday lives. The first survey of its kind,Installations by Architects features fifty of the most significant projects from the last twenty-five years by today's most exciting architects (...) Projects are grouped in critical areas of discussion under the themes of tectonics, body, nature, memory, and public space. Each project is supplemented by interviews with the project architects and the discussions of critics and theorists situated within a larger intellectual context.
You probably saw many examples of architects installations if you attended the latest Biennale of Architecture in Venice. They provide new platforms for innovative perspectives, ideas and experiments in the field of architecture. Some of these installations will remain at the experimental stage, others might later be implemented into built work. Installations, especially when temporary, enable architects to work outside the constraints dictated by clients and city regulations. The main purpose of installations is not necessarily to be useful but to generate conversations, to invite viewers to reflect on the role and essence of architecture. Installations are also vehicles for teaching and research as the Bauhaus was one of the first schools to demonstrate. Finally, young studios can find in installations a fantastic opportunity to advertise their talent.
I expected Installations by Architects: Experiments in Building and Design to be one of those fancy volumes you open to find big, glossy photos and little text to comment on them. I was expecting a beautiful book that lingers on the coffee table for your guests to admire. There are loads of images in the book indeed but there are even more essays by critics, by theorists and by the authors (Bonnemaison is an associate professor of architecture at Dalhousie University and Ronit Eisenbach is an associate professor of architecture at the University of Maryland). Architects get to give their own view as well. The book is divided into five chapters that explore a different area of discussion. Each of them is illustrated by 8 to 10 architectural installations (this post picks up one of them for each chapter): 1. Tectonics: by exploring new modes of assembly and materials, this section reminds us that architecture doesn't stop at the facade.
Mette Ramsgard Thomse's Vivisection is a spatial experiment that explores how a techtonic surface can embed a capacity for sensing and actuation. The silk and steel fabric is conductive thereby allowing the architects to pass electronic signals through it. By using antenna based sensor chips the fabric "feels" the presence of the audience. The sensors inform a network of distributed micro-computers, that in turn control the fans, inflating and deflating internal bladders in the structure. 2. Body examines the relationship between human body, spatial experience and design.
Thom Faulders covered with pink Memory Foam (as used in the earplugs that expand to fill the cavity of the ear) the floor of his Mute Room, a temporary listening environment for experimental electronic music. The foam's surface operates as a sound baffle to enhance acoustical clarity. Similar to the way that musical notes 'decay' in the air before dissipating, this surface has a transitory quality - impressions linger until fully erased by the slowly acting foam. 3. Nature might help shape a more responsible attitude towards nature.
The Prairie Ladder was commissioned by the Connemara Conservancy (Texas) to preserve, protect, and honor the prairie landscape. The ladder introduces a veritcal axis, making a departure from the natural horizontal axis of the prairie. The ladder also proclaims human defiance of the horizontal limitations of the earth. 4. Memory engages with the collective memory and its relationship with space.
Since 1960, Detroit has lost half of its population and demolished over 200,000 housing units. Kyong Park's 24620: The Fugitive House (2001-), is an abandoned house from Detroit that has been dismantled and reconstructed in several European cities. 24620 is looking for a new home in a 'kinder and gentler" city than Detroit. Europe, however, is becoming just as neo-liberal and neo-con as in the USA With its pieces misplaced and their incisions permanent, the house, when re-assembled, replicates the condition of a dysfunctional city in the violence of dismembered spaces. Wherever it may go, the house takes the ideals and failures of modernism with it, creating discourses on the cultural state and destiny of each community. 5. Public Space offers citizens new ways to inhabit or relate to the city.
Sky Ear, by Haque Design + Research, contains miniature sensor circuits that respond to electromagnetic fields, particularly those of mobile phones. When activated, the sensor circuits in the clouds co-ordinate to cause ultra-bright coloured LEDs to illuminate thousand glowing helium balloons. Related book reviews: Bright: Architectural Illumination and Light Installations, Spacecraft Fleeting Architecture and Hideouts and Ground-up City. Play as a Design Tool. Image on the homepage: land(e)scape (Savonlinna, Finlandia - 1999) by Marco Casagrande and Sami Rintala. |
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I found most of the exhibitions i saw at the Arsenale, Venice's sumptuous ex-dockyard, to be quite disappointing. Especially the Italian Pavilion. God! What happened there? What have we done to deserve such an embarrassingly pompous exhibition?
There, i've said it. The biggest sow at the Arsenale, however, is international and takes place at the spectacular building called the Corderie, a 319 metres long space once used to make ropes and cables for the Italian navy. The theme this year is a bit of a catch-all (as it is often the case in Venice). "Fare Mondi // Making Worlds is an exhibition driven by the aspiration to explore worlds around us as well as worlds ahead. It is about possible new beginnings--this is what I would like to share with the visitors of the Biennale," explained artistic director Daniel Birnbaum in his statement.
One of the most striking artworks for me was Pascale Marthine Tayou's installation Human Being which fills in a gigantic room with a bric-a-brac of objects, furniture made of recycled material, colourful figures, videos and urban noises that re-creates the activity of that small village that we call our world.
At first, the wooden huts on stilts evoke a shantytown or maybe an African village. As you come nearer, however, you realize that the windows of the dwellings act as screens that show activities taking place around the world, there are workshops, small manufactures, people walking down the street or sitting around a meal. It's both joyful and mysterious.
The space is inhabited by strange little figures. Their hair are masterfully entangled with lovely hairpins or feathers, their round bodies are wearing strips of old cloth or Flemish lace. Sometimes they also have bright jewellery on. They gather in little clusters. Each group following a different fashion. Some of them seem to be conversing in tight, knit clan as if they were plotting. Others seem to welcome you inside their circle.
Pascale Marthine Tayou was born in Cameroon, he now lives in Belgium but travels around the world with his artworks. He trained as a lawyer, not an artist. He's a nomad, his identity is split between locations and the paths he could have or did take. That's a condition that the installation tries to reflect.
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There's a lot of photography these days on the blog. Maybe it's time to give some space to another artwork i saw at the exhibition Awake Are Only the Spirits in Dortmund (DE), i've been keeping it in my cupboard for way too long.
'Awake Are Only the Spirits' - On Ghosts and Their Media investigates the presence of the supernatural, the manifestations of spirits, and (trans)communication with the beyond facilitated by technical media. Sam Ashley's career embodies perfectly the theme of the exhibition. Ashley's work often engages with hallucination, coincidence and luck. The artist is particularly keen on exploring "spirit possession".
His Ghost Detector is a musical instrument built by 'hacking' any electronic device that generates sound. Random lengths of wire are connected to randomly chosen places on its circuit board. The wires receive radiation of all kinds, and the results are translated into sound. The device becomes a "synthesizer". It is unstable, responsive to slight influences and what it synthesizes can therefore not be controlled. A larger Ghost Detector randomly interconnects several such individual devices. Positioned all over a wall at HMKV, the network of "ghost detectors" read the "auras" of the audience. Rumour has it that the bodies or even the moods of visitors walking around the installation might affect the sonic output. 'Awake Are Only the Spirits' - On Ghosts and Their Media runs until 18 October 2009 at Hartware Medienkunstverein Phoenix Halle, Dortmund, Germany. |
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The Palais de Tokyo's ongoing exhibition, Spy Numbers, takes as its starting point the mysterious and vaguely distressing Numbers Stations. These shortwave radio stations have been broadcasting for several decades, yet their precise function and origin are an enigma. Artificially generated voices are reading streams of numbers, words, letters, tunes or Morse code. Are they sending messages to secret agents? To governments? To weapon or drug traffickers?
Spy Numbers echoes GAKONA, the previous exhibit inspired by the work of Nikola Tesla, in its exploration of the electromagnetic spectrum and its margins. Extending beyond the phenomenon of number stations, the exhibition explores the themes of intrigue and conspiracy. It's a small exhibition. Just a dozen pieces. Some if them very good.
Pascal Broccolichi used a program to capture the electromagnetic activity taking place inside and around the Palais de Tokyo. Sonotubes, an apparatus one would expect to see on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey, broadcasts the reverberations of these flows of buried waves. Installed at the entrance of the exhibition, Sonotubes sets the tone of the exhibition. We are in for an unsettling and mystifying ride.
I saw the exhibition almost a month ago and the image that haunts my memory is the one of an invisible man. For the series Erased Lynching, Ken Gonzales-Day erased all traces of lynching from postcards and old photos. The lifeless bodies, the ropes have disappeared, leaving only the setting, the onlookers, the executioners. The images deliberately ignore the victims to highlight the true mechanisms of lynching: the crowd gathered to watch the show, the photographer who immortalizes these executions. Invisible, the victims are more omnipresent than ever. As the artists writes: The Erased Lynching series sought to reveal that racially motivated lynching and vigilantism was a more widespread practice in the American West than was believed, and that in California, the majority of Lynchings were perpetrated against Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans; and that more Latinos were lynched in California than were persons of any other race or ethnicity.
La Terrella by Dove Allouche & Evariste Richer follows the steps of Kristian Birkeland. Around 1895, the Norwegian scientist tried to simulate and understand the phenomenon of aurora borealis with a Terrella, a sphere in a vacuum tank to which he directed beams of cathode rays. Birkeland found they were transformed into rings of light at the magnetic poles of a sphere, Birkeland deduced that this was the origin of the aurora borealis.
Allouche and Richer produced a replica of the Terrella, which had since been abandoned, with the help of laboratories and scientists, the two artists embarked on producing a replica. For the Paris exhibition the artists made it operate in accordance with the calendar of the aurora borealis in the year when Birkeland presented his invention to the public.
The piece that alludes most directly to the numbers station is a 5 meter high Numbers Station Beacon / Community Broadcast Tower that broadcasts in the exhibition space recordings of enigmatic voices reading out numbers. The mystery surrounding the meaning of the information relayed engenders anxiety. Besides, the form of the sculpture evokes other towers: powerful lighting devices, big sound broadcasting systems, transmitting antennas, or indeed watch towers. Spy Numbers opens until August 30th, 2009 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Previously: Transmediale exhibition: Conspire!, A suspicious radio/printer for Mike Corley, GAKONA at the Palais de Tokyo. |
