The new issue of Neural magazine is out for a couple of months now but there's still some copies available. The theme of Neural 33 is Scripting Green and you can get all the details of what's inside over here.

Common Flowers by Shiho Fukuhara and Georg Tremmel

If you like tech (whether it's digital or biotech) and green hitches are sprouting all over your conscience, just run to these stores or go for the long-term prescription.

Image on the home page: Jon Cohrs, Urban Prospecting.

Volume number 20 is out! The theme of the quarterly magazine about architecture and urbanism is Storytelling: This past year numerous dramas have competed for our attention: sub-prime mortgages, banking meltdown, bailout, stimulus, pandemic, bankruptcy. The all-consuming effort to follow these events seldom leaves a moment to contemplate the explanations themselves. What is the stated dilemma, context or motive for any one of these problems? And most importantly, how does a problem's formulation determine its proposed solution? Volume 20 is dedicated to the art of storytelling. It presents the storylines of current events and architecture to show that while the truth is important, so is the ability of fiction to elevate fact. Perhaps the best way to understand our era is through narratives that distort, pervert and animate reality?

Volume's moto is To Beyond or Not to Be, its mission is to go beyond architecture's definition of 'making buildings', to reach out for global views on designing environments, advocate broader attitudes to social structures, and reclaim the cultural and political significance of architecture. The content of this issue illustrates this spirit in the most flamboyant way. It goes in many directions you wouldn't have imagined possible, i even met Jean Des Esseintes on page 38, Tokyo people fully dressed and asleep in public place on page 22 to 25 and i discovered the work of Dave McKean further on. Put together, the articles, essays and interviews draw a kaleidoscopic and absorbing picture of the crisis and the directions that could be taken to face it in the most sensible (albeit sometimes unanticipated) way. The design and graphics of the magazine are very seducing, although sometimes a bit over-complicated.

A small selection of what's inside Volume, Storytelling:

Bjarke Ingles presents a comic strip-like portrait of Welfairytales, BIG's Danish pavilion at EXPO 2010 (video), there's a small feature on La Casa del Carbonero, or the Charcoal burner's hut (1999) by Smiljan Radic, Geoff Manaugh takes as a point of departure Todd Hido's photography's series Foreclosed Homes to suggest how a world falling apart could be made of stained carpets in empty houses rather than big fires and warfare. Meanwhile, an interview of Economist Andrew Oswald explores the dichotomy between homeownership (thus investing in stability) and rentership (favouring thus flexibility).

Todd Hido, 1922a, from the Foreclosed Homes (Interiors) series

An article focusing on the Biosphere 2 shows how its own crisis echoes debates over research priorities, ecosystem construction and resource distribution.

One of the essays' embarks on an endless vacation with the so-called 'gray wave' and in particular the pioneering urban formulas offered to the new, dynamic and nimble third age. Sun City is at the forefront of experimental retirement communities. Sunny retirement paradise proved to be commercially successful and developers are pushing the model to almost hysterical extremes. Life in The Villages, Florida's Friendliest Retirement Hometown is built as a Disneyworld for active retirees, and designed to replicate the villages and small towns residents had known in their childhood. At the other side of the spectrum, the Huis Ten Bosch retirement community doubles as a theme park. It recreates the Netherlands by displaying real size copies of old Dutch buildings, right in the middle of the Nagasaki Prefecture in Japan.

Peter Granser's Paar im Pool 2 (Couple in Pool) (2000).Courtesy of Yancey Richardson Gallery

In a fascinating interview, Environmental Geographer Robert McLeman sums up the tension between today's ease of mobility and the stability of settlement. He compares the forces that came together to stimulate immigration at the time of the Dust Bowl with today's situation of 'market-induced house arrest' and tomorrow's urge to migrate due to the effects of climate change.

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A 16-page supplement analyzes how Warren, Michigan get get its American Dream back through pragmatic community-based projects.

And because the theme of this issue is Storytelling, C-Lab narrates their own tale, the one of the ostrich that saves the life of the technostrich, a robot made at her image. Volume team also meet with news reporters and experts in journalism to discuss key aspects of story telling: how news stories are told, how the ones we read in prints are different from the ones we watch on tv, how narrativity doesn't naturally go hand in hand with analysis, the use of history in current affairs, etc.

Archives of Volume.
My admiration for Volume is fairly well documented: Urban China Bootlegged by C-Lab for Volume , Volume and the JoA&P are out, Magazines: Nozone X, a minima, Neural, Cluster and Volume, A few magazines i've discovered (and in some cases liked) last month. Image on the homepage: Elderly couple dancing, woman's red skirt swirling, in retirement community, Sun City, Az.

A couple of months ago, the postgirl brought me a magazine i had contributed to. I'm absurdly reluctant to open any publication i've contributed to. Poor mag laid on the kitchen table for weeks. Last week, however, i grabbed it on my way to the airport and realized that the magazine, the very first issue of Future Exhibitions, was awesome. The publication is concerned with searching the world for signs of what is to come. Given the visitor's experiences, life choices and dreams, what is the probable future of the exhibition as a medium, a voice, experience and contemporary fountain of knowledge? And what future do we who are working in the field hope to see? I don't know if they manage to answer the questions they assigned themselves but they certainly asked the right questions, explored every possible angle they could think of, knocked on the door of some of the most fascinating and mind-boggling experts and wrapped it up in fantastic graphics and (albeit these were sometimes OTT) fonts.

Content include:
Ruth Catlow and Marc Garret propose a new way to organize and manage art events in the near future, using examples of projects they've supported and shown at Furtherfield over the past couple of years. Björn Norberg visits an exhibition of the future while, in other pages, several experts discuss the impact of and possibilities offered by technology inside cultural institutions. Katherine Watson gives an encompassing overview of the new paradigms brought about by digital culture. Jonas Runberger and Mats Brodén look at animals and plants to design intelligent buildings. Sharon Schaffer explains why museum can provide young children with a precious learning environment. Ken Arnold, head of exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, my new favourite exhibition space in London, illustrates how he turns shows into social events where visitors get to take first stage. There's also a spotlight on innovative cultural spaces such as MU in Eindhoven (one of the very few whose programme blows me away) or the Red Location Museum in Port Elizabeth (South Africa) and initiatives such as Fab Lab.

Heinrich Wolff, Red Location Museum of Struggle, Port Elizabeth 2005 (image Daimler Contemporary)

Johan Nylander shared his perspective on the role of the exhibition medium in countering greenhouse gases, an article particularly precious at a time when cultural institutions multiply exhibitions about sustainability without (most of the time) reflecting on the fact that exhibitions hardly ever come without damages to the environment.

As Therese Larsson wrote in one of the articles of the magazine "So much has happened in contemporary art over such a long period while art institutions have hardly changed at all. In order to realize really interesting ideas it is important to move outside the walls of the white room". So she interviewed the directors of Public Art Lab in Berlin, Creative Time in New York and Mobile Art Productions in Stockholm. Each of them gave their point of view about contemporary art moving away from traditional venues.

Annika Eriksson, Mannen i parken (The Man in the Park), produced by Mobile Art Productions)

Future Exhibitions is much more than what i've just enumerated. Its 142 pages will send your grey cells spinning in all sorts of directions. Icing on the cake for people like me who keep complaining that one cannot 'click' on a piece of paper, each article comes with a set of weblinks enabling readers to get further information about the issue at stake. Future Exhibitions is bilingual (English & Swedish) and will be published annually with the first number released in April 2009.

Views from inside the magazine:

To order Future Exhibitions. Copies can also be fpurchased at Konst-ig, an art book store in Stockholm + the book store at Malmö art gallery, in Malmö, Sweden, no international stores so far.

Anyone who ever asked me what to do in Paris has heard me rave endlessly about the Palais de Tokyo. That place makes other contemporary art museums and galleries look 'ringard', outdated and out of touch. The Palais is open from noon to midnight. An entrance won't entitled you to a 2 euros discount on a hefty glossy catalog. No, Sir, when you buy your ticket you are handed out a magazine with all the info you need to visit the exhibition and go further in the discovery once you're back home.

Roman Signer, Parapluie, 2007. Courtesy: Art Concept, Paris

The ongoing exhibition, GAKONA, 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.

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The researchers at the HAARP are studying the transmission of electricity in the uppermost portion of the atmosphere. But because of its military funding and the fears associated with electromagnetism, HAARP is surrounded by a cloud of controversy. Its forest of antennas has been accused of beaming electromagnetic waves that are extremely hazardous to human health, of disrupting climate, of having all sorts of influence on human behaviour and of being weapons able to disrupt communications over large portions of the planet.

Made up of 4 solo exhibition (but only 6 artworks) by Micol Assaël, Ceal Floyer, Laurent Grasso and Roman Signer, GAKONA oscillates between fact and rumors, science and imagination.

Roman Signer, Parapluies, 2009. Photographie: André Morin

The icon of the show is Parapluies (umbrellas) by Roman Signer. Two Tesla coils charge up, approx. 5 minutes later an alarm sounds and a blast of electricity spectacularly lights up between the extremities of the umbrellas. I'm not going to delve on this one, have a look at this video or this one instead.

Laurent Grasso, Haarp. Image by dalbera

Now Haarp, by Laurent Grasso, is a sculpture clearly inspired by the aforementioned program, not only does it look like its model but its potential effects are invisible as well: are there waves passing through the antennas? Are they harmful? Should we be worried? How real is this?

Chizhevsky Lessons, by Micol Assaël, is a gigantic generator of static electricity. The name of the artwork refers to Alexander Chizhevsky, a scientist who explored the correlation between solar activity and historical events such as wars and revolutions.

Right before being allowed to approach the installation, you are warned that people wearing pacemakers or hearing aid and pregnant women should not go any further, advised that you should "avoid touching other visitors' faces, especially the eyes" and promised that the work would "load the body with static electricity." Thank you very much!

What visitors experience is the unpleasantness of static electricity re-created artificially with a cascade generator, a transformer, copper plates, and wires that fill the space with negatively charged ions. The discharge only occurs when touching an object or person oppositely charged. Although the installation is not dangerous it definitely invites visitors to step out of their safety zone and explore uncontrollable physical, emotional and psychological experiences.

GAKONA is on view until May 3 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
Photos of the exhibition. Image on homepage: Micol Assaël Chizhevsky Lessons 2007 Courtesy Galleria Zero, Milan Photo André Morin (via Canadian Art.)

I'm currently spending a few surprisingly pleasant days in Linz for the jury of the Prix Ars Electronica and Alessandro Ludovico, the editor of Neural magazine is here as well. I keep marveling at what i call his generosity but he would rather define it as 'marketing ploy'. He came to Linz with this big bag full of fresh issues of Neural magazine and gives one of them to almost each and every member of the various juries. When i object that he should not distribute so lavishly magazines that we would very probably buy anyway, he keeps coming up with all sorts of answers that range from "but they shouldn't have to pay for Neural!" to "Maybe if they read the magazine they will get a subscription so that's just a selling tactic.' All i know is that i've never subscribed to Neural because of Alessandro's liberality.

Here's a few words about the 32nd issue of Neural.

The main fields covered by each issue are new media art, emusic and hacktivism and i'm going to do a jumble of them in this quick overview of the magazine.

Neural has a mix of short news (about the length of the stories you read in the online version of Neural) and more in-depth coverage of issues as diverse as polymorphic intelligence, sex & love with robots, machines that play drums and other musical instruments or media art in New Zealand. And of course there are interviews of significant artists, such as France Cadet, Ken Rinaldo Douglas Irving Repetto, Ralph Schreiber and Survival Research Laboraratories.

Instead of a pinup gracing the centerfold, you get an installation, this time it's The Inverted Machine by Ralf Baecker. Finally, neural is the place where you can read about new books, dvd and cds.

To get a copy of Neural you can either come to Linz and grab a copy from Alessandro's magic bag, subscribe and never regret it, or locate a store that sells it.

Urban China Bootlegged by C-Lab for Volume, available off and online.

What they say: As the second installment in an ongoing editorial project between Urban China and Volume, we have produced this limited edition publication on the occasion of the exhibition Informal Cities at the New Museum. Inspired by the unofficial compilations sold by fans at music concerts, we offer a bootleg issue of Urban China. The bootleg is a DIY format for assembling and disseminating work within a circle of hardcore fans, typically consisting of live work recorded, sequenced and edited by the concertgoer. Unlike a pirated copy or fake which tries to assume the identity of an authorized product and is motivated by a desire for profit, a bootleg announces itself as an improvised, illegitimate work and is largely motivated by a wish to share. Given the urgency of the topic, C-Lab has borrowed the bootleg format to quickly distribute observations, initiated in dialogue with Urban China, on the crisis and its management.

From the cover i thought i was in for some joyful read from page 1 to page 160. Bootlegged, Urban, China, these words are music to my ears. Just like Volume. I love Volume (did you get your hands on issue 18: After Zero?), if i were a tree to be cut i'd beg to be turned into a pile of Volume.

Then i caught the red letters CRISIS on top of the title, opened the magazine and realized that no one would take me by the hand and explain that the crisis is nothing but a bad dream we're going to wake up from very soon. Jeffrey Inaba crushes any doubt you might have about that by giving its introduction to the issue the title: Things Will Get Worse Before They Get Better. Very few stones are left unturned in the crisis panorama: heritage (more precisely the fate of cultural landmark in the event of war), the planning dilemmas posed by refugee camps, modernization in the deployment of borders for political ends, Obama urbanism, modernization in China, movements of (forced) mass migration, urban marathons through political geographies, the fate of Biosphere 2, etc.

Illustration from Rogue States of Mind, By C-Lab

But that shouldn't stop you to read the magazine, even if you're the kind of person who'd rather keep their head in the sand than be informed and prepared. To quote Inaba again, Understanding crisis may help us to judge the unfolding situation and maintain a realistic measure of faith. Besides, who could shun the pleasure to read smart and informative (these two do not normally go hand in hand, alas!) essays and interviews but also because the magazine is much more invigorating than depressing. SLAB even managed to see the tongue-in-cheek side of crisis by listing a series of possible "Crisis Devices" that provide a sense of security, they range from a Pepper-Spray Ring to the Bat Phone or the Trophy Wife. The articles translated from Urban China issues can even be described as heartening. Sandwiched between the ones related more closely to the U.S. situation (maybe they are supposed to embrace a global picture but i found them very U.S.-centered), they are rather short and describe local but ready to be adopted elsewhere experiences such as Shigeru Ban's paper-tube houses, Etopia's knowledge of post-disaster reconstruction.

Then there's the design of the magazine. The layout reflect the bootleg spirit of the publication with photos that seem to start on the bottom on one page and end on the top of the next one.

And if you don't trust me (why would you?), check out a few articles available online: Space In Crisis - Mark Wigley | Design for the Apocalypse -John McMorrough | International Style Heritage - Lucia Allais Unfriendly Skies - C-Lab | Rogue States of Mind - C-Lab l Systems Gone Wild: Infrastructure After Modernity - Kazys Varnelis.

Related: Book review - Verb Crisis.