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Lars Müller Publishers says: In this important exploration of the sentiments of our time, World of Giving explains the motivations for why we give and offers examples of individuals, foundations, governments, multinationals and NGOs helping others. Jeffrey Inaba and C-Lab provide an understanding of the process of working toward a greater good by describing actions that build bridges between goodwill and need, intention and realization. The authors show that gifts form the foundation of all kinds of human interaction with each one establishing a unique relationship between giver and receiver. They illustrate that the gift too alters in meaning and value, detailing how it transforms as it circulates through what are at times a complex series of transactions. In place of the pursuit of personal wealth, World of Giving presents a mindset that is based on generosity and revolves around the gesture of giving. The book argues that giving is a powerful act that gains social momentum, benefiting not just the immediate recipient but typically others as well. Acknowledging that each of us is inclined to give, this illuminating publication reveals how a beneficent deed contributes to an environment of increasing generosity in addition to enhancing the capabilities of its recipient. As a shared value, giving can grow to be a meaningful collective force that affects the world in surprising ways.
Read also the introduction to the book by Jeffrey Inaba. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie donated $ 1 million to aid Haiti quake relief, Swiss supermarket Migros bestows 0.5 % of its retail and 1 % of its wholesale turnover to art and culture as part of a programme called Migros Culture Percentage. On the other end of the generosity spectrum, Italy's billionaire prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, had proposed to put up in three of his own houses some of the thousands of people made homeless by the earthquake that shake Abruzzo in April last year. The offer has often been regarded as nothing more than a PR move (rumours has it that he never even respected his promise.)
The book World of Giving navigates the world of generosity with brio and erudition. Whether they are good old christian charity, sincere kindness or corporate philanthropy, acts of generosity are everywhere you'd care to look. From the velvet monkey that puts its own life at risk by emitting calls to warn other troop members of the approaching predator to the welfare pioneers of the Calvinist Dutch Republic. From the rise of US philanthropy to Communism's re-conceptualization of the act of giving, etc. World of Giving explores generosity through times and cultures. Philosopher, and historian David Hume described men as being fundamentally altruistic. Philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smith believed that men are motivated chiefly by self-interest, even when they display some generosity. World of Giving has a more balanced approach. Far from being a mere attempt to substitute Gordon Gekko's 'Greed is good' with a call for openhandedness, the book uncovers the mechanisms and strategies of giving. And its economics, as anyone involved in thebusiness of giving away free digital goods can confirm.
* i can't recommend enough their Volume magazine. Related: Open City: Designing Coexistence - Part 3, Reciprocity. |
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One of them, Adad Hannah & Niklas Roy's International Dance Party, made me laugh out loud for its way to bring interactivity to its more extreme and absurd. This 'party in a box' looks like an ordinary and closed 'flightcase' until you get nearer and start moving. The more you jump around and dance, the more the system will deliver: powerful dance music, laser and light effects and even (but i didn't dance wild enough to experience it) fog.
The symposium focused on three of the most relevant topics of current media art practice: the relevance and involvement of new media art on the political and social sphere; new geographies in media art; the possibilities and challenges that the open source movement is proposing to the production of artworks or exhibitions. Given my total and shameful laziness i probably won't have/take the time to blog everything but the Netherlands Media Art Institute will upload the videos of the talks online in the future and i'll be sure to update this blog post when this happens. Susanne Jaschko, who curated and organized the conference, made a couple of very timely and interesting remarks in her introduction to the symposium. And that's where i'll start:
There are some traces of an acceptance of new media art from the institutional art world. Last year, two exhibitions have highlighted this tendency: Deep Screen - Art in Digital Culture at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, a show organized with a double objective: getting a sample of contemporary media artists living in The Netherlands and buying some artworks to be added in the permanent collection. The second exhibition, Holy Fire at iMAL in Brussels, had the so far very unusual purpose to explore how new media art, bypassing all the stereotypes connected with its presumed immateriality and difficulties of maintenance, was able to enter the art market. Media art has come a long way since the NIMK opened. Which does not mean that the self-conception of the whole field is not as cloudy as ever: some say that new media art has never become mature, others believe that it has reached its peak in the '90s, others would add that new media art will never integrate concepts of contemporary art, etc. Not only is the Netherlands Media Art Institute celebrating its 30th anniversary, but Transmediale has just turned 20 and Ars Electronica is going to be 30 this year, it's time to take a critical look at where we are now and which directions we want to take. There was a time when cultural funding bodies set the course but things started to take another turn when, in 2003, the Walker Art Center decided to reduce its media art programme to a minimum and last year the whole media art community was shocked by the news that the Institute of Contemporary Art in London was closing its performance and new media program. Artistic Director Ekow Eshun justified the decision as follows: As an institution dedicated to the contemporary moment it is important that we continually review the timeliness and relevance of our activities and at times make decisions on that basis.
New media based arts practice continues to have its place within the arts sector. However it's my consideration that, in the main, the art form lacks the depth and cultural urgency to justify the ICA's continued and significant investment in a Live & Media Arts department. Following discussion with the ICA Council and the Arts Council - and agreement from both bodies - I have decided to close the department. At the other end of the spectrum, LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre, which opened in 2007, has proved over and again that it is possible to fill its gigantic white space with new media art exhibitions of great quality. And, once again, the exhibition Deep Screen at the Stedelijk has shown that some contemporary art institutions see the relevance of new media art. So what does it mean today to be an artist in a networked society? Artists, curators and institutions today work on grounds that are increasingly loose, they struggle to define themselves. Technology -though it has lost much of its fascination- has the potential to enrich art, culture and society. It is one of the driving forces of today's society and culture, it has brought important discussions about public domain, commitment, open source, etc. More about the symposium soon... |
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It might come as a surprise to some of you but it's not everyday that a major contemporary art institution in Europe dedicates some space and energy to look into one of the most prominent characteristics of today's culture: the social web. The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens is doing just that with an exhibition bearing one of the most evocative and imaginative titles i've ever read: Tag ties & affective spies. The online works selected for the show comment on the aspects of the web 2.0 and evoke more particularly the controversies that have animated its short but intense life.
Exploring the functioning modes of the social networks and the ways users interact within them, a new form of artistic practice is being formed that comments, critisizes and subverts their structures by altering their semiology and formalism. Posing questions, and approaching the social media in a playful way, the works presented aim to raise awareness about the different possibilities that are now opened up to the users. The brain behind the concept and curating of Tag ties & affective spies is Daphne Dragona (who co-curated Homo Ludens Ludens at LABoral in Gijon a year ago.) Daphne is an Athens-based media arts curator and organiser. The exhibitions and events she's been involved in over the last few years have focused on the notion of play and its merging with art as a form of networking and resistance. She is a also PhD candidate in the Faculty of Mass Media & Communication of the University in Athens conducting a research on social media. I asked her to give us more details about the why and how of the exhibition.
Tag ties and affective spies is part of a series of online exhibitions featuring works conceived for the Web. Does the exhibition appear only online or is there an installation or anything else inside the actual museum that points to its existence? Would it make sense to you to mirror this exhibition in 'real' space like it is done sometimes with online exhibitions? Tag ties & affective spies is presented online in the museum's media lounge area, where computers are available for visitors to explore the works. We have not created a specially built environment or installation particularly for this exhibition. Really, there wasn't need for an additional structure. The natural environment of these works is the internet, wherever this is : at the computers in the users' homes or offices, at their mobile phones or at the computer screens provided in public spaces - such as those in the museum. But, yes I do believe that it is very important for museums to mirror online exhibitions in the real space so that net based art can be further supported. Visitors might not spend hours to view all works. In reality, they usually have a glimpse of the exhibition and then they visit it again at their own places and leisure. But museums need to support the opportunity for this first acquaintance in order to spread the information. Also, let us not forget that visitors mostly go in a contemporary art museum, to see contemporary art works. Most of them would not look at net based art on their own because they are not accustomed with this form of creativity. An institution though, can help to attract their attention towards a new direction.
In reality, net based art cannot become institutionalized. This is its charm but also its handicap because it cannot support itself easily. Net based art is about works that usually cannot be sold and consequently cannot offer money to their creators. It is about works that bring different kinds of challenges to institutions. Projects based on social media bring into mind the issues net art was facing back in the nineties. Issues to do with what can be bought, what can be preserved and what can be owned. Instead of bringing to light these discussions again I think, we should look for ways to support these forms of art, to assist in conveying their messages and making them known to a wider public. Therefore, mounting an exhibition like the "tag ties & affective spies" in an institution is meaningful to me.
The exhibition is a critical approach on the social media of our times. Could you tell us how you got the idea for this show? What motivated its existence? Well, I find that it is a field with an amazing interest as it is also controversial; both full of promises and restrictions; a genuine product of our times based on connectivity, affection, and surveillance. I think, what intrigues me most is the fact that most people share, communicate, and participate without realizing the story behind or without thinking about how this constant aggregation of information from their profiles works for the market. I believe creativity can play a role here as it speaks for the medium using the medium itself, a fact that I consider to be very interesting. While forms of creativity based on the social media platforms might be difficult to attract an art audience that is not technologically savvy, on the other hand, they can turn up to be of an interest for a wider audience that might not be art savvy but partly lives in this virtual dimension. Speaking from a more personal point of view, this exhibition also expresses my need to share the first bit of knowledge I have gained from my PhD, which I have just started on social media and art. I wanted to see how the audience would react to such an entity of works, how the press would respond, and how local artists would experience it. I looks it is going well so far... Greece is not an easy country. My experience, during the last decade, tells me that things are moving slowly in the field of media arts. Budget is usually tight and the audience is usually reserved. Some of the media art festivals happening in the country in the past have now ceased to exist. It is somewhat difficult to take big risks. But, organising events of a smaller scale, like an online exhibition, that thematically refer to contexts and issues the people are familiar with, could be a safer path and a transitional stage for a wider opening to the media arts.
Did it change anything in the way of curating the exhibition to know that the exhibition was organized by one of the major art institutions in the country? This probably implied that the exhibition would receive a different, maybe broader exposure. Did you approach the subject differently than you would have done if you had worked again for a more media art-oriented institution like, say, LABoral? No it did not. I did not modify or alter any of my ideas because the exhibition was organised by a museum. I must say that the museum was very positive and did not have any hesitations regarding the concept and the selection. So, all went very smoothly. Context and content would have been the same even if I was to do this privately somehow. I was thinking anyway of an exhibition that would be viewed, hopefully, not only by people from athens but by internet users from different parts of world. There is no locality on the web. What locally exists, is the support of institutions to net based projects as well as their presentation to new audiences. For instance, now, the exhibition will also be presented in the context of the Enter festival in Prague. This support can attract attention, bring discussions and open new roads for collaboration among art and other disciplines. A comparison with the work in LABoral is difficult because the exhibitions were very different from one another. But, as institutions they are not that different. LABoral is more media art oriented but it does have a strong interest also towards contemporary art. Additionally, every institution does have particularities that connect to the structures of the country it belongs. In general, I think it is the feeling of trust and mutual appreciation that is essential for collaborations between artists, curators and institutions. When there is such ground, fruitful collaborations do happen.
Having a look at your selection of artworks i had the feeling that it provides a good snapshot of the current issues and debates that surrounds social media. The title itself reflects quite accurately and poetically the appealing and appalling aspects of contemporary social media. Do you feel that the general trend is heading towards more "surveillance and exploitation" or is the big picture much more optimistic? Which trend(s) does the now ueber-popular Twitter embodies best for example? subjectivity - collectivity - production - consumption - exposure - surveillance - affection - exploitation - participation - resistance...all of them at the same time? I think that the moment web 2.0 embodies all these notions. Each platform might have some features stronger than others depending on the possibilities it offers. Twitter is a lot about announcing feelings and moments. Exposure, affection, and a kind of surveillance are definitely involved. I don't like to be negative for the future. I hope that we are not going towards a model that involves more surveillance and exploitation. I believe that as the "mainstream" social media evolve, so do the creative and critical stances. The great number of people using the social media will soon bring a new situation on stage. More and more social platforms should soon appear that would allow groups of people to connect and form networks for different purposes based on open source models and these do not need to be controlled or be accessible by the market. Connectivity is an incredible feature of our times - we don't need to get lost on the way. Thanks Daphne! |
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On a sunny afternoon in Florence i visited one of those exhibitions which lingers in your mind for days because of the questions and debates they set in motion inside your brain. The theme of the Art, Price and Value was selected a long time ago but given the current frenzy about the state of the art market it could not have been more timely nor thought-provoking. The exhibition, which closed a few days ago at the Strozzina cultural Center, explored how the economy has come to manipulate art production, affecting its every aspects.
Contemporary art plays an increasingly prominent role in our culture, with some of its most visible figures reaching a status that can only be compared to the one of fashion designers, Hollywood actors and pop stars. Many people have come to associate contemporary art with tactics made of shock, awe and circus. The economic power of art is reflected in the spectacular prices obtained at international auctions, the increasing number of museums accused of 'blockbusteritis', biennials becoming as necessary to the tiniest country as a local airport, festivals popping up everywhere (just how many media art festivals are there in The Netherlands exactly?), star-stud openings and mega-happenings. The exhibition at the CCCS features the work of contemporary artists which throws light on the mechanisms of the international art system. The selection explores different points of view, ranging from complete conformity to the prevailing rules of the market, to irony and sarcasm and even to an "anti-market" stance, taken by those anxious to avoid the commercial aspects of the art market entirely.
Dan Perjovschi whose work i've seen in almost every single European city i visited last year was invited to cover the walls on one of the exhibition rooms with some of his 'site-specific and time-specific' comic strip style drawings. Incisive and spot-on, the drawings sharply sum up current political, ethical or cultural issues. For the CCCS exhibition, the artist's charcoal sketches comment on the paradoxes and absurdities of the contemporary art system.
When engaging with the issue of art and money, it is impossible to ignore the two most successful money-milkers of the moment: Takashi Murakami and Damien Hirst. I'll pass briefly over these two as i doubt they need much introduction.
Just like he did notoriously and controversially a few months ago at the Brooklyn Museum, Murakami exhibited the bags he designed for Louis Vuitton in the gallery (though there was no shop to sell the accessories this time.) Further blurring the frontiers one could make between fine art and commercial goods, he had a black canvas covered with the multicoloured letters L and V and other symbols associated with the famous monogram.
No one better than Damien Hirst has managed to reduce to tiniest bits of dust the romantic myth of the 'artiste maudit'. While art experts were claiming that the party was over and that the art market would soon feel the effects of the global financial turmoil, Hirst was merrily enjoying a two-day auction at Sotheby's where his works smashed top estimates and reached a total of $198 million. Some critiques are nevertheless predicting that the Hirst hype might soon deflate. The Florence exhibition had two of his most iconic pieces: the first one is part of a long series of canvases and other objects featuring butterflies -metaphor for mortality, a theme that Hirst has explored widely- mounted on a glossy surface and manufactured by Hirst' team of assistants. This type of art production can be traced back to the workshops of Renaissance artists such as Sandro Botticelli and to the factory of Andy Warhol with whom the British artist shares an acute understanding of the market mechanisms.
The second piece on show was a door which had been part of the entrance of the restaurant The Pharmacy which Damien Hirst co-owned in the late 1990s in London. When the place closed in 2003, its interior -from a sculpture of Hirst's own DNA helix to rolls of wallpaper- was sold at auction at Sotheby's. Every single object was sold for a multiple sum of the estimated auction price. Many of these items were not unique works of art, but industrially produced goods. The fact the they had been part of a project associated with the brand name of Damien Hirst turned these objects into highly coveted artefacts. Hirst is one of The Young British Artists (YBAs). So is Michael Landy. Yet, they have adopted strikingly opposite strategies when it comes to money and art. Back in 2001, Landy stunned the mainstream press with his performance/installation Break Down. The artist, dressed in blue boiler suit, systematically cataloged and pulverized all his belongings including his birth certificate, all his books and works of art, his car and driving license. Not even the most cherished souvenirs, from a childhood teddy bear to a sheepskin coat that belonged to his father, could escape the grinder.
The video on show at CCCS documents the operation: in a vacant shop space located on the always shopping-busy Oxford Street in London every single item is placed on a conveyor belt and transported to its final destruction in a grinder.
The performance didn't even have any commercial value: Landy refused to have the bags of rubbish left from the process sold or exhibited in any form. He made no money as a direct result of Break Down, and following it had no possessions at all. A BBC documentary followed the artist as he had to rebuild his material life.
The works puts a distressing human element onto the much-criticized but eagerly embraced consumer society. Should the objects ones owns be the sole factor that determine who an individual is? What happens to one's identity when all theses objects have been annihilated? Image on the homepage: Denis DARZACQ, Hyper n° 8, 2007, serie di 4 fotografie, courtesy the artist; VU'La Galerie, Paris. To be continued... Previously at CCCS-Strozzina: Emotional Systems, at the Strozzina in Florence, China China China China !!! Chinese contemporary art beyond the global market, Exploded Views - Remapping Firenze. |
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Publisher Actar says: Once the greatest American example of a modern city served by infrastructure, Los Angeles is now in perpetual crisis. Infrastructure has ceased to support its urban plans, subordinating architecture to its own purposes. This out-of-control but networked world is increasingly organized by flows of objects and information. Static structures avoid being superfluous by joining this system as temporary containers for people, objects, and capital. This provocative collection of photography, essays, and maps looks at infrastructure as a way of mapping our place in the city and affecting change through architecture. I was waiting eagerly for The Infrastructural City - Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles. 3 reasons for that. Number one, is Blue Monday: Stories of Absurd Realities and Natural Philosophies, Varnelis' previous book which he co-authored with Robert Sumrell. Anyone who had that one in their hands will get my point.
Reason number 2 is Los Angeles, the one city on this planet i should be averse to. The first time i was there i saw creatures that freaked me out: Chupa-Chup ladies -heavy and round on top, super slim on the rest of the body- and all sort of people walking around with some rather stunning attributes that had been recently implanted. I could not accept that no one ever 'walks around the city center' to do some shopping, have a drink and sit down in a park. And where was the city center anyway? I realized i would never survive in L.A. without a driving license. The skyscrapers were tiny Lego structures thrown in a heap by the highway. And the river. Even that poor repudiated and alien river looked fake! I should never have liked LA. I tend to measure every city to a European one. I manage that tour de force almost everywhere but in LA the attempt is more preposterous than ever. That's what charmed me so much. That and many other things. Los Angeles is the only city in the USA where i would be tempted to live.
Let's get to reason number 3. The Infrastructural City will drive you way beyond Los Angeles. The idiosyncrasies, stories and lessons described are thought-provoking enough to make you look at your own city with a more inquisitive eye. In this book, Los Angeles is little more than a (fascinating) case study, a pretext to explore the effects that today's complex and distorted infrastructures, whether planned by public entities or developed by private and competing corporations, have on contemporary urbanism. As Varnelis writes: Our goal was not modest: we set out to replace Reyner Banham's Los Angeles. The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971) as the key text for understanding the city urbanistically. Instead of four ecologies, The Infrastructural City offers essays commissioned to researchers who bring the discourse on urbanism outside of its usual and sometimes way too formal boundaries. These essays cover the three scales of networks: landscape, urban fabric and the object.
In one of the essays of the book, David Fletcher invites us to 'embrace freakology rather than bucology'. The advice could apply to many aspects of the Los Angeles. Its river, for example. Instead of following blindly the assumption that it is an eye-sore and a disgrace whose dignity would only be recovered when the concrete is removed and its native vegetation and wildlife reimposed, one should be aware of the fact that coming back to the 'natural' state could only be done at the cost of anihilating a complex ecosystem made of exotic and native species that has slowly found its equilibrium over decades.
This hotchpotch of imported and original flora can be observed all over L.A. making it one of the most bio-diverse areas in the world. Most of us however, tend to reduce Los Angeles to its ubiquitous and iconic palm tree, a tree that is actually not a native species either. Most of them were planted to beautify the city for the 1932 Olympics, at a time when a city built around cars felt that it might have to re-invent its landscape. The average lifespan of the palm tree is 70 to 100. Its days under the California sun are numbered. And it doesn't seem that the city is going to waste much tears on them as no palm tree has been invited to the Million Trees party. Hopefully this will mean that the new breed of palm tree that double as cell antenna is going to loose some popularity as well:
If trees of all sorts and a river are to be expected in a section dedicated to the landscape of L.A., lowly gravel is not. Neither is oil. Well, not in the way Frank Ruchala (don't miss another of his essays, Recovering oiLA, you can access it on Lulu) pictures it: an actor which used to supply as much of the US' oil demand as Saudi Arabia, an asset whose value nowadays has to compete (most often than not unsuccessfully) with real estate. Los Angeles contains one of the most intense concentration of pipelines in the world yet, the presence of the precious resource is often camouflaged behind mundane facades. As we all know now, the Industry with a big I in Los Angeles is no longer the one that earned it the nickname of 'Oildorado.'
The rest of the book explores what is below that patch of pavement, inside the backyard garden of an unassuming house or what goes though monster warehouses. Each chapter is written by a different expert but the many photographies, graphics and a certain spirit enable the book to find its own voice.
As i mentioned above most of the infrastructures analyzed in the book provide food for thought wherever you happen to live.
One Wilshire, the unassuming container of the U.S. telephone and data connections reaching across the Pacific evokes the very tangible spin-offs of information society. The analysis of Los Angeles & Long Beach's ports, both major dispatchers of an unprecedented rise in the volume of goods from the Far East to the city and to the rest of the country, speaks to our seemingly unstoppable gluttony. I found some of the most illuminating comments in Roger Sherman's essay about change-based thinking, a position that invites architects and urbanists to envision their work under a different lens, one that would 'sett a trap' to capture potential change that inevitably occur in the lifespan of a city. Image on the homepage from Lane Barden's series Fifty-Two Miles Downstream: An Aerial Survey of the Los Angeles River and Channel. |
C.STEM 2008: Breeding Objects - Computational Design, from Digital Fabrication to Mass-Customization
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Good old Turin is currently hosting the third edition of C.STEM. The theme this year is Breeding Objects - Computational Design: from Digital Fabrication to Mass-Customization and while the spotlight is still on generative systems, it is, in many respects, very different from the first edition. This time, the main protagonists are designers, not artists.
Although, i have taken the habit of running swiftly in the opposite direction when i hear the word 'design,' i have to admit that the programme this year is remarkable. Especially because it brings that innovative focus i had hoped to see more widely explored in the schedule of the Torino World Design Capital. C.STEM showcases projects anticipating future developments in design process and technologies. What happens when domains such as design, creative coding and digital fabrication meet the new scenarios of mass-customization?
The exhibition and conference explores the way design is currently re-considered and shaped through the lens of information society and, more generally, new technologies. The work of young designers today involves a crucial paradigm shift: not only do they use the digital tools provided to them but they also invent, modify and produce new instruments themselves.
Another important characteristic of the new design production involves digital fabrication processes such as laser cutting and 3D printing (a few examples in the posts Rapid Products 1 and 2). The impact of digital fabrication is far from marginal: instead of churning out identical products, objects are created which, while they undeniably belong to the same family, are all different from each other. Beyond the creative process and fabrication, the digital tools and new design processes have also the potential to radically modify the marketing of design products and the way consumers engage with the creation of objects. Two projects presented in the exhibition, Nervous Systems and Fluid Forms (see below), have already been launched on the market and as such, exemplify new business possibilities. C.STEM conference is over but you can still see the exhibition until September 27 inside an Ex Methodist Church. If i were you i'd run there, you don't see a show like that every year in this
Located in an ex-Methodist church in the center of Turin, the exhibition illustrates what is the state of the art of computational design through a series projects that range from everyday objects you can buy online to sweatshirts weaved with newsfeeds, and a 3D printing machine able to 'prints' most of its own components (not the original one but maybe even better, a version fatta in casa by ToDo design studio.) The list of projects exhibited is online. Here's just a selection:
Ebru Kurbak and Mahir Yavuz' NewsKnitter project comments on the manipulation by the media in Turkey. Live data streams of information are used as an unpredictable base for pattern generation. Web-based information is either gathered from the Turkish daily political news or according to a theme that pervades global news. The data is analyzed, filtered and converted into a unique visual pattern for a knitted sweater. The system consists of two different types of software: one receives the content from live feeds while the other converts it into visual patterns, a fully computerized flat knitting machine produces the final output. The pieces of clothing are not for sale right now but the designers are working on that.
The jewelry designed by Jessica Rosenkrantz and Jesse Louis-Rosenberg of Nervous System, on the other hand, is up for grab. The design is both heavily tech-mediated and inspired by organic forms. Using two custom-made computer applications --one mimics branching dendrites, and the other the movement of particles--the designers generate forms for bracelets, pendants, and earrings. The Radiolaria line, for example, is named after the plant cells whose structure was a source of inspiration for Buckminster Fuller. Jewelry from the Dendrite collection takes its cue from the aggregate growth of coral. The Dendrite algorithm both controls the aggregation and allows consumers to participate in the design process
Way more beautiful in real than on pictures, 1 of 1 design studio creates one-of-a-kind, made to order apparel. For The Tissue Collection, designer Cait Reas worked together with C.E.B. Reas. The artist generated the Tissue images by defining processes and translating them into images with code and software. Cait used a digital textile printing technique to apply the patterns to fabric.
In case you'd worried that this blog is turning into a geeky version of Harper's Bazaar, i'll have to mention that the best moment of C.STEM for me was to listen to Marc Fornes from theverymany. It's the second time i attend one of his talks and i'm still not sure i understand most of what he says but his work is so awesome that it doesn't really matter.
His presentation addressed failure. For example, he detailed how the Aperiodic_vertebrae structure that theverymany developed for Generator x - Beyond the Screen (a workshop and exhibition which highlighted the creative potential of digital fabrication and generative systems) in Berlin taught him that while computers facilitate many of the design processes much of the assembly still has to be done by hands. The Berlin version of the Aperiodic Tiling counted some 530 panels and nearly as many connecting components.
The core of theverymany approach is therefore to use computer to generate, not just many parts, but a logic between these parts. They applied the concept to the woven pedestrian bridge that Francois Roche from R&Sie is building on the boundaries of Poland and the Czech Republic. My images from the event. About the 2006 edition of C.STEM: C.STEM conference, Part 1 and Part 2. Related entry: Generator x - Beyond the Screen, a workshop and exhibition which highlighted the creative potential of digital fabrication and generative systems. |
