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One of the many (very many) reasons why i wouldn't want to be a man is because the way they have to dress is so uneventful. Last Summer's most flamboyant sensation was the 'mankle'. Poor lads! On the other hand i wish i were a man so that i could dress head to toe in Walter Van Beirendonck. I do have a lovely paper dress staring a portrait of Van Beirendonck sitting naked on the back of a bear and little grey penises near the hem but nowadays he doesn't design much for women.
I love his work so much i almost made cartwheels a few days ago in an art gallery where i found a leaflet promoting his solo show at the Fashion Museum in Antwerp. I spent 4 hours in public transports to get to Antwerp, walked under the rain until somewhere between the Martin Margiela boutique and the sublime Dries Van Noten store, i found myself in front of transparent doors adorned with the naked red silhouette of WVB.
More than just a showcase of the designer's most extravagant pieces of archive,
But there are also toys everywhere. Vintage, Japanese, Mexican toys, etc.
Masks and ritual objects from Papua New Guinea, Austria, North America.
And works by artists with whom the designer shares concerns and ideas: Ai Weiwei for his political engagement, Robert Mapplethorpe for his documentation of the S&M world, but also the Chapman Brothers, Mike Kelley, Erwin Wurm and Grayson Perry.
Isn't he cute? The exhibition echoes the main interests of the designer. There's obviously his relentless search for alternative ideas of beauty and representations of the body. This preoccupation is reflected in the models he sends on the catwalk. Some are bodybuilders, others are chubby 'bears' (a characteristic type in the gay community), or they can be thin, fragile boys. He puts them on stilts, wraps them in latex, has them wear T-shirts with prints of preoperative drawings for plastic surgery, sends them on the runway with gas masks, corsets, prosthetic horns or with the face adorned with stick-on latex interpretations of Maori facial tattoos, etc.
Van Beirendonck's collections might seem whimsical and outlandish but many of them are instilled with controversial themes and political commentaries: AIDS, the burqa debate, censorship, gender issues, mass consumerism, ecology, war, capitalism, etc.
Finally, a spectacular room was entirely left to Walter van Beirendonck's collaboration with fashion photographer Nick Knight/SHOWstudio.com and stylist Simon Foxton. Their photography and video project brings into a new light the most memorable pieces from his archive:
So ladies, you know where to drag your man in need of sartorial inspiration this weekend! Walter Van Beirendonck: Dream the world awake runs at the Fashion Museum in Antwerp, Belgium, until February 19th, 2012. Niewsblad.be has a photo set on flickr. Mine will come later, when i finally get back to wifi-wonderland. |
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This weekend, lucky me!, i'm going to Ghent to see ArtBots Gent, the Robot Talent Show. This international art exhibition for robotic art and art-making robots has been created in 2002 by Douglas Repetto of dorkbot fame. I'll tell you more about it as soon as i've seen the show but in the meantime i wanted to highlight one of the participating works. It might not be tremendously robotic but i found it so intriguing that i contacted Alex Braidwood and had him talk about it. The Noisolation Headphones attempt to correct an oversight of our body: our ears can't blink. We can't block out molesting noise as easily as we can shut off light or disturbing images. In 2004 already, Dr Michael Bull was observing that iPods and other m3 players were used to control their environment, and in particular to shield their users from the sound of the city. The Noisolation Headphones are a critical investigation that transforms the relationship between a person and the noise in their environment. While worn, exposure to the noise is structured through a sequence designated by a composer which controls the behavior of the sound-prevention valves. The composer also determines what values are adjustable by the listener through the single knob built into the device. The headphones mechanically create a personal listening experience by composing noise from the listener's environment, rendering it differently familiar. Hi Alex! I'm very curious by the appearance of the Headphones. Why did you make them so attention-grabbing? What would have been lost if the headphones had looked like any other headphones? I wanted to make an object that would start a conversation. The goal was to make a sort of visual inquiry that would lead a viewer to develop questions of their own about how we listen and our relationship to our sonic environment. As a media designer, I come from a visual background so it was important that the object itself be visually engaging to inspire a dialog. Formally, I wanted the piece to give an indication of what it was going to do but still leave people curious enough to want to listen for themselves. Through the prototyping process, it became a negotiation between the visual appearance and the acoustic qualities of the materials used. The listening experience needed to take on certain transformative characteristics and, as a result, the final selection of materials and form had to be determined by balancing the visual with the acoustic. My goal was to make people curious enough about the listening experience to want to wear the piece. I don't think this would have happened if they looked like just any pair of headphones. I like that when people approach me about them, they tell me they aren't sure what the experience is going to sound like but by looking at the headphones, they know that they want to find out. It also creates a bit of a spectacle when someone is wearing them which tends to expand the immediate audience and extend the conversation in really great directions. When I, or anyone else for that matter, wear them at an event or out on the street, people will stop and ask about what they are, what do they do, what does it sound like, why did I make them, etc. This aspect of the piece has been a lot fun and it would definitely be missing if it weren't for the visual nature of the piece.
The description of your work states that "The Noisolation Headphones are a critical investigation that transforms the relationship between a person and the noise in their environment." How is their experience transformed? First technically. Is it just a matter of turning the sound on and off or is the way the wearer manipulate sound more complex? It's actually a little more complex than just on and off. Because of the resonant qualities of the copper pipes, the listener is never as isolated as they would be if they were to wear an unmodified pair of hearing protection earmuffs. The characteristics of the noise that surrounds the wearer also impact the experience a great deal because various frequencies resonate through the pipes differently. Beyond the acoustic qualities of the pipes, there is also the interaction of the valves which open and close based on a combination of pre-composed sequences and user interaction with the selection knob. As the valves open and close, they do manipulate how much noise is allowed to travel to the listener's ears but they also affect the resonant qualities of the copper pipe. In fact, one unexpected outcome form one of my early prototypes was that even in a relatively noise-free space, there is a still an audible performance for the listener as a result of the sounds from the mechanisms functioning in combination with the "seashell" effect within the headphones. What occurs then for the wearer, no matter what type or level of noise is present, is a listening experience consisting of modified noise from their surroundings, given some form or structure through the compositions assigned to the valves. Issues of noise tend to come down to issues of control of the audio environment. From this perspective, I wanted to explore a way in which control could be something that is developed and then shared with a listener in the form of a composed sequence. What did the people who tried the headphones on had to say about the way the device had changed the way they experienced the noise that surrounds them in the city? There are a few different ways that people respond once they have tried on the headphones. Some people find it calming and have described it as peaceful, tranquil, or almost meditative in nature. They find it interesting that the it is somewhat isolating but in a way that they have not completely lost connection with what is happening around them. Some have even reacted this way to the headphones in places that are incredibly noisy and chaotic. People also will talk about what they heard and discuss how, when not using the headphones, they hadn't noticed a particular noise. Because of the materials, certain frequencies resonant differently and this filtration causes their listening focus to shift. I've talked with people who really enjoy this and begin discussing what it was within the space they felt made the most interesting tones or textures when heard through the headphones. There have even been times when other people waiting to wear the piece have started making different kinds of noise for the wearer to hear. I've had a couple of events where a half dozen people standing in line waiting their turn are suddenly giving a collective, cacophonous performance of noise for a single listener. Others have gone a step further and gotten curious about what different things sound like with the headphones on and will begin to explore the space while wearing the device. Seeing the headphones inspire people to take an active roll in the way they hear the city, or any space for that matter, has been really interesting. There's a great deal of listening that we don't do when we are audibly-concealed within a headphone+mobile device space. There is space between being completely imposed upon by noise (i.e. the naked ear) and entirely cut-off from the sound around us (i.e. noise cancellation headphones). I think these types of reactions are an indicator that the headphones are operating in this in-between space to some extend but it also provides some indicators of new directions for my research and explorations. Your work explores the relationships that people have with noise. Can you tell us more about this relationship? For example, do people in cities still pay attention to the noise that surrounds them? My interest with this relationship between people and the noise surrounding them began when I was attempting to get a handle on what the word "noise" meant in different contexts and to different people. I developed a lot of investigations as well as various probes in order to begin to dig into this and what I found to be of the most interest was that a sound getting labeled as a "noise" in many cases comes down to an issue of control. This led me to look into how people attempt to maintain a level of control over their audio space and as a result, I became interested in the pervasive use of the mobile devices and headphones in public spaces. Which led me to start asking questions about this blocking out and covering up of surrounding noise. Biologists give a great deal of credit to hearing for our ability to stay alive and evolve over the last couple million years. But over the last couple centuries, we've started loosing portions of this that has served very well through time. For example, if you watch an animal like a deer, when it hears a noise that it isn't expecting, it looks in the direction of the noise and then stands perfectly still in order to assess the risk presented by the source of the noise. As humans living in populated, modern industrial environments, we aren't really doing this anymore. We have the luxury of assuming things to be relatively safe.
With the increase in "quality" and affordability of noise cancelation technology, one can see noise not only be ignored but go completely unheard no matter what the potential risk might be. We tend not to look in the direction of a noise and asses it for risk any longer. This is true when we are ears-deep in a great album while racing to the train but I also think that this is a good metaphor for what is happening in terms of sound design when introducing new noise into our environment. For example, researchers are starting to find negative effects on hearing and communication from people who, as babies and small children, were highly exposed to white noise machines in order to reduce crying and maintain a sense of calm. Have you noticed that the way people relate to urban noise in Los Angeles is different from the way they experience noise in other cities? From what I've observed, there are a lot of similarities in places of similar size and with similar resources. For my work, it is more about the fact that it is a shared, populated space more so than a differentiation of one city to another. Part of my personal interest in urban spaces as a type of location for study is that originally, many many years ago now, I am from a very small town in the Midwestern United States. It was, and still is, farm country. There was one traffic light. The crosswalk signs don't beep or talk. There is no public transportation and people aren't walking down the three blocks of main street wearing headphones. "Noise" in this environment is a very different thing when compared to a metropolitan area looking to keep its residents safe, moving and informed. While clicking around your website, i thought that it would be great if your work could be shown more widely in Europe. Do you have any plan to come back to Europe after ArtBots? Thank you for checking out the rest of my site and I appreciate the nice words. Currently, I do not have any definite plans for showing again in Europe. I am, however, in the process of pursuing a couple opportunities that would bring me back and am very open to any possibilities where my work and interests might be a good fit. Thanks Alex! This year's ArtBots is organised by timelab Gent, in cooperation with ArtBots US, Ugent and Foam. It's open only over the upcoming weekend in Ghent, Belgium. |
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I first came across the work of the collective The T-shirt Issue a few months ago at the International Design Biennial in Saint Étienne. They were showing The T-shirt Issue, a series of t-shirts that portrayed the bodies and personal memories of 3 individuals in a garment. It was by far the most moving work i had discovered at the French design biennale.
Hande Akcayli, Murat Koçyigit and Linda Kostowski back with another series of spectacular t-shirts. Their Muybridge installation is a study set out to capture temporal change in 3D. A three-step sequence of a bird spreading its wings is reconstructed and sculpted into T-Shirts. As the change in the wings' position is a function of time, each wing's plumage is reduced to polygonal form, modeled and rigged into successive arrangements to portray the spreading motion. As its name suggests, the study leans on Eadweard Muybdridge's photography work in the late 1800s, with which he pioneered in the field of capturing animal and human locomotion. In the version designed by The T-Shirt Issue, shape and fractional motion are interpreted through jersey garments. The t-shirts capture a movement that happens in the bat of an eye and perpetuate it by material augmentation. I asked Linda Kostowski to give us a few more details about the group's latest project:
The description of Muybridge states that this is an installation. Why did you chose to sculpt the project into a t-shirt? Why not a paper model? Or a ceramic object for example? The technique we use to create the pieces is particularly revolutionary in the field of textile, as it turns common construction methods upside down. The realization that pattern construction hasn't changed much since industrialization and automated production created a very exciting challenge for us. We have always felt a diffuse discomfort about the way clothing is constructed and simutaneously wondered how to change this. Our approach was to take an incredibly common and everyday object like the T-shirt and turn it into something that has a story to tell.
Can you describe the fabrication process of one of those wings? After intensive observational research, the wings were sculpted with 3D software. In doing so, each wing was inserted with a skeleton, a framework that allows the wings to be animated. The movement resulting from this defined the key frames of the motion. These 3D objects were unfolded with software that turns them into the two dimensional patterns we use as draft for building the paper and fabric pieces. Every object has reams of paper model twins, which are used as prototypes to see what happens to the object when it moves from the screen to the "real world".
Have you ever envisioned that one of your creations (existing or upcoming) could be worn by a person? Or is this an option that doesn't interest you at all? I'm insisting on this 't-shirt issue' because that's the name of your collective and it suggests some kind of 'wearability'. Next to continuing with experimenting and creating conceptual art pieces in the future, we have a very strong vision of making the end product wearable as well, and are working on it right now. Making something tangible, yet soft and close to the body like a garment is a meaningful use of the technology we work with. This summer we will release the first wearable T-shirts made with our in-house pattern construction software. We plan to share the software with the public at a later stage, so everyone can play with the patterns of our future collections. For now, elements of all our previous pieces will be made available for download on our website from May 20th on. Thanks Linda! |
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Prédiction was the biggest exhibition of the International Design Biennial in Saint Étienne. Its ambition was to reposition the boundaries of contemporary design, exploring in over 150 artefacts and 2000 m2 the new types, methods, and practices of the discipline.
SMS Printer, brainwave sofa, amorph objects for lonely people or unpredicted needs. It was so fast, so bright, so 'finger on the pulse', i sometimes had the feeling of walking physically inside one of the design blogs dedicated to the chase of the 'ultimate coolness.' Not that it prevents the objects exhibited (or the design blogs just mentioned) to have depth and intelligence of course.
The exhibition space was shaped at the image of a Gallic Village (i kid you not!) half guarded behind high fences.
Curator Benjamin Loyauté had selected both established names and young, still unknown talents from the hundreds of submissions his call for design had gathered. Here is a walk through some of the discoveries i made at the show: One of the most interesting design projects for me is The T-shirt Issue, by Linda Kostowski, Hande Akcayli and Murat Kocyigit from Marshallah Design. 3 people got their portrait in t-shirt -not 'on' a t-shirt. Their bodies were scanned, then turned into a 3D file. Linked with their biographical memories a digital twin of the body was thus created, which expanded and personified the garment. The 3D data then became sewing patterns by the use of the same unfolding function that is used in industrial design to make paper models. The single fabric pieces and the inner interface which defines the edges were cut out by the help of a lasercutter.
By hacking a very mundane SNILLE office chair, Sander van Bussel, converted a hyper-impersonal IKEA piece of furniture into the place where the most intimate and personal activities take place.
I never thought that one of the most memorable designs of the exhibition for me would be a chair. So you get a second image of it.
Part of Richard Hutten's Playing with Tradition series of oriental rugs, this wool carpet design evokes the time of the good old dial-up modem when images failed to load properly.
China is both the country where many European companies have their products manufactured and one of the largest producers of copied and pirated goods.
Designer Laura Strasser decided to take the copying of her work in her own hands. She found a "business to business platform" and emailed 40 Chinese manufacturers, asking them to copy her physionomy. 31 producers replied immediately. When I described my project in greater detail and gave the quantity and the time-frame, eleven turned down my request because the quantity was too small, four because they only produced tableware, but six agreed emphatically.
In the exhibition space, the little porcelain reproductions evoke the soldiers of the Terracotta Army.
Union Political Table Radio by Nanar Kradjian symbolizes the political tensions in Lebanon. Up to six people can sit together at the same table, plug headphones in the cube and listen to the political message of their choice since Kradjian's radio integrates 6 radios, one for each of the main political parties in the country.
Wieki Somers's Consume or Conserve? series uses human ashes to create sculptures as different as dung beetles and toasters.
Jo Meesters' Ornamental Inheritance is a series of sand blasted used ceramics that combine the immediately recognizable delfware ornaments with contemporary symbols, such as airplanes, wind turbine and architecture.
I promised myself i would make a pass at the RCA people projects just once but sometimes temptation cannot be resisted:
Also Part of the Prédiction exhibition: The House That Herman Built. |
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The Open, by Mattia Casalegno, is a mask that wraps around your face and forces you to smell a fresh patch of grass and listen to your own breath.
The device defines also a sensory territory constructed by the rhytm of the breath, which is diffused from the headphones with a 1.5 sec. delay. The work plays with the Deleuzian notion of ritornell, and about the quality of sound to define a territory. The space defined by the sound of breathing is in a state of costant imbalance between the physical act and its sensory perception and traces an unstable relationship with the intimate environment the garment reproduces. I usually do not accept submissions -no matter how fantastic they are- on my blog. There are several reasons for that. The main one is that i prefer to see and experience the work before i write about it. Another reason is that long overdue stories are already preventing me from sleeping at night (yes, it's that bad!) But once in a while there's a submission that makes me want to go further. Hence the following conversation with Mattia Casalegno:
How long are participants advised to wear the mask to make sure that they really get the experience? Are they willing to wear the mask longer or do they report feelings of discomfort (physical or not)? They can wear it as long as they want. There have been people who wear it for few seconds or several minutes, some who were allergic and some who just refused to wear it. Others came back to experience it several times. In the room there's also a chair similar to the ones you could find in a psychanalyst office, and overall the setting is meant to be inviting. Despite the chair, after a certain amount of time, the experience can become slightly unsettling due to tightness of the mask. I liked the idea of constructing an experience that is comfortable but at the same time disturbing, enveloping but claustrophobic. Inside it's warm, and you can hear your own breath, which usually induces relaxation and security, but after a while you feel the tightness and realize that the sound of your breath is actually delayed, resulting in a distorted experience.
More generally, what were the reactions of the people who tried the mask on? Actually, they were very disparate. Some people instantly freaked out, thinking of all the other people's faces that worn the mask. Other just liked the idea to lay down and relax for a while. Some had memories of their childhood, others speculated about death.
The Open, as you write, "plays with the Deleuzian notion of ritornell, and about the quality of sound to define a territory." Can you expand on this? Why for example did you associate breathing with turf? I liked the idea of sound defining a territory and I tried to apply this notion to the project. Deleuze and Guattari in "Thousand Plateaux" talk about the capacity of structured sounds, notably rhythm, to define a space: an example the birds who negotiate their interaction spaces with their refrains - which is the english world for "ritornell", or the child who softly sings a song in the dark. The refrain is the first hint of a stable and quiet center, the primordial will to organize chaos. The idea of rhythm emerging from chaos belongs to any cosmogony, but what happens if, instead of externalizing such a process, we trace it from the inside, and thus define a kind of "inner cosmogony"? We could then define territories between our sensory system and our unconscious, libido, fears, etc. As we enter the mask, the refrain is our own breathing, but the territories thus delineated somehow don't overlap, are slightly conflicting because of the delay, there's an inconsistency between the act and the perception of it. Did you try to convey other kinds of experience(s)? Maybe a reconnection of the urban dweller with nature (if a piece of turf can be called nature of course)? Or an attempt to make them engage with senses that are less solicited by our dominantly visual culture? Yes, the sod can be a reference to nature, although a very rationalized and domesticated one. This kind of grass reminds us of the idealized landscapes and the organized fields of the English garden, a symbol of dominion of man over nature, if we want. The fact that the experience gets slightly anxious underlines somehow this kind of schizo-relationship with Nature, where we we are captivated by our natural environment but also afraid of it. Why did you name your piece The Open when people's face is so dramatically enclosed inside a mask? I wanted to play with this duality of proximity and distance, this exaggerated physical proximity and the space left between the perception of an outside and an inside, the environment and the self. The title is also borrowed from the name of a book by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, written in 2002: "The Open: Man and Animal," in which he investigates the opening of such a space and the differences between being human and animal. Maybe this goes a bit too far from the original idea for this piece, but I like this quote: "What is man, if he is always the place―and, at the same time, the result―of ceaseless divisions and caesurae? It is more urgent to work on these divisions, to ask in what way―within man―has man been separated from non-man, and the animal from the human, than it is to take positions on the great issues, on so-called human rights and values." Now for a more personal question. You have been working actively as a multidsciplinary artist for a decade. Yet, last year, you decided to move to the U.S. and attend the Design | Media Arts graduate program at University of California Los Angeles. This is imho the best school for media art and interactive design you could have chosen but what made you think you needed to go back to school? Did you feel that your practice was not enough and that you needed to acquire new skills? I don't know, maybe was less about acquiring skills and more a need to put in prospective my work, to step back and see where I was going with all that. I was also working a lot with video and live-media performances and I wanted more time to experiment with different media and follow some obsessions I had in mind, so I felt that to fly to an other continent where I knew nobody was a good opportunity to The D|MA program has a great faculty covering almost any field of media art, the approach is very much oriented to any kind of media. It's a small and very intense program, you end spending all your time there, and get to see people so often that after a while it's like having a big family, I'm already sad this is my last year here. Thanks Mattia! |
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Next week we'll be in August. I'll stay home, hunt mosquitoes, own a ghost city called Turin (all the Torinesi will be at the sea or the mountain, yeah!), count the days until Autumn finally comes and saves me from the sun and take advantage of the quiet month to review bits and pieces of the mountain of magazines that has been getting higher and higher over the past few weeks. Let's start nice, easy but somehow unconventional with a t-shirt magazine called T-post.
For each issue, the publishers of T-post select news topic that will make people want to engage in a conversation. They print the story on the inside of the shirt then they ask a young and talented designer to illustrate the news story.
What starts with a banal "Nice t-shirt! Where did you get it?" will hopefully end up in a lively exchange of views about topics as diverse as the Phoenix's rise of the cassette tape, the Swedish town where all the residents are lesbians, the expensive business of capital punishment, apocalyptic scenarios, the toilet paper crisis in Cuba, microchip-embedded butterflies, the decline of the human race due to dependence on technology, etc. Each t-shirt is illustrated by a different designer. Their bio is printed inside the t-shirt next to the news story. The subscribers even get to model the t-shirts if they feel like it.
T-post uses organic cotton, an environmentally certified printer and eco-friendly ink. Last detail, they only produce as many t-shirts as there are subscribers. T-post is a bit like everybody's favourite blogs: big, pretty images, not too much texts but enough spark and wit to make you want to react and comment. Once you sign up for a subscription the t-shirts start coming. The first t-shirt is the "Members issue" that you'll receive within about three weeks. After that you'll have a new t-shirt in your mailbox every five weeks. |
