Archive for October, 2007
Recent fallen, floating and flying architecture
Today’s brief round up of temporary or transient architecture:
Filed under ‘accidental’, ‘deconstructivism’, ‘inadvertent installations’ and ‘looking like a Coop-Himmelb(l)au building’, some wonderfully collapsed scaffolding in Melbourne (cnr. of Collins and Elizabeth). Apparently news of the splintered short-term structure flew around Melbourne’s architectural community last week. [As heard about on Triple R's excellent show 'The Architects', and images via the show's Rory. Last week's show also featuring a cracking chat with Louis Sauer, by the way.]
And filed under ‘unbuilt’, ‘branded buildings’, ‘you’ve probably already seen it’ and ‘unlikely bedfellows’, Zaha Hadid’s transient gallery for installation art, for Chanel’s art director Karl Lagerfeld. "The container will travel from Hong Kong to Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, London, Moscow and Paris over the course of two years." [Seen on Archinect, Wallpaper*, and NYT + video]
Filed under ‘megastructures’, ‘floating buildings’, ‘luxury space’ and ‘wet’, Renzo Piano’s floating building - OK, a P&O superliner - called the ‘Pacific Dawn‘. (With 165 more staterooms than the biggest hotel in Australia etc etc. The exterior is far more appearling than the interior, though.) To be launched in Sydney Harbour on November 8th and setting sail next year.
Finally, filed under ‘airborne buildings’, ‘megastructures’ and ‘late’, the A380 flew into Sydney this week on its first commercial flight, after a brief pit-stop in Melbourne earlier this month. These first planes are operated by Singapore Airlines, out of Chang Airport.
Originally from cityofsound by
reBlogged by michael on Oct 30, 2007, 8:34PM
levelHead
levelHead is an interactive game that uses a cube, a webcam, and pattern recognition. When the cube is rotated or tilted in front of the camera the user will be able to see ‘inside’ the cube and guide a small avatar through six different rooms.
Pattern recognition has already been used in several other projects, but this is a new way of using it, and a new way of thinking of the technology. The idea behind the game itself is rather simple. When the cube is tilted the avatar moves in the corresponding direction. The goal of the game is to guide him through a maze of rooms connected by doors, and lead him to the outside world.
According to the creater, Julian Oliver, the game is currently in development, but will be released as open-source soon.
Check out the explanatory video.
Related projects: Handheld Augmented Reality, Magic Book, Magic Cubes, Pet Shop Boys Include QR codes in new video, Semapedia, and Tagtracker.
Via Gizmodo. [blogged on Digital Experience]
Originally from Networked_Performance by
reBlogged by michael on Oct 25, 2007, 5:14PM
Zhang Huan
Before expatriating to New York City, performance artist Zhang Huan was one of the earliest and most influential icons of contemporary Chinese art. One of his most famous pieces consisted of him covering himself with honey and sitting naked in front of a fetid public restroom outside of Beijing; eventually flies envelope his body. He’s also made a muscle suit out of meat, created sculptures, drawings, public art, and installations, and has travelled the world shocking and mesmerizing people with his naked body and masochistic performances. [watch a short film about Zhang Huan and his art]
Originally from Lost At E Minor: Music, illustration, art, photography and more by
reBlogged by michael on Oct 15, 2007, 10:29PM
Tenori-on musical instrument demo
The newly released Tenori-on, developed by Toshio Iwai for Yamaha, has been mentioned on several blogs. But I particularly liked this short demo from engineer Yu Nishibori. Tenori-on is a 16-channel, 16-layer music sequencer, with a modernized 8-bit-ish sound. I particularly liked the visual feedback that the interface provides — deleting, moving and setting [...]
Fantoche
If animated wall drawings of severed heads and insect men ejecting their brains from their craniums is what people produce when they have too much time on their hands, then we should do their laundry for them and cook them dinner so they’ll have even more time on their hands.
Originally from Lost At E Minor: Music, illustration, art, photography and more by
reBlogged by michael on Oct 14, 2007, 6:21AM
Universal Avatars Bestride Worlds
“A virtual character, or avatar, for all the virtual worlds in which people play is the goal of a joint project between IBM and Linden Lab. - The computer giant and the creator of Second Life are working on universal avatars that can travel between worlds.
The project aims to open up virtual worlds by introducing open tools that work with any online environment. The companies hope to boost interest in virtual worlds as well as make them easier to navigate. At the moment every virtual world requires a player or user to go through the process of creating an avatar that will act as their proxy in that online environment. Typically, an avatar created for one world, be it a game or a system like Second Life, cannot move between these different virtual spaces. The project started by IBM and Linden Lab aims to create a universal character creation system so people only have to create a digital double once.” Continue reading Universal Avatars Bestride Worlds, BBC News.
Originally from Networked_Performance by
reBlogged by michael on Oct 12, 2007, 3:53PM
Interview with Milk and Tales
The British collective Milk and Tales is made of three young women who design interactive environments for cultural venues. I don’t know how they do it but each of their new projects manages to enchant everyone: kids and their grand parents, Londoners and tourists, people for whom interactive environments is a new expression and old grumpy blasés like me who keep on complaining that interaction is getting tired and tiring.
Who is Milk and Tales? How did you get to work on interactive environments?
We are Arlete Castelo, Melissa Mongiat and Kelsey Snook.
We met on the MA Creative Practice for Narrative Environments (CPNE) course at Central Saint Martins, in London, and started working on projects together, in parallel to the course activities.
– We also have a set of rotating collaborators for different projects. We have been working with Dan Harris, Charles Ward, Matthew Olden and Rakhi Rajani on some projects, we are currently working with Chris O’Shea on a new project.
We started to work on interactive installations together as an offshoot from the course where we were fine-tuning our skills in creating narrative environments. A narrative environment is an experience or a place designed to communicate a story, is hopefully engaging and a place for dialogue. Interactive environments are inevitably linked to narrative environments. We’ve got a mix of skills and are very happy designing both.
Hidden Love Song
Your installations seem to manage to get the broad public immediately engaged and entertained. At the same time, your works are very elegantly designed. Is one of you responsible for the “look” of an installation and someone else works more intensely on the sound technicalities or on the experience side of it? How do you work?
Arlete and Melissa have a background in communication / graphic design and Kelsey has one in in product and installation design. In concept phases, our skills blend to work on the experience of the user/visitor/passer-by – that is our focus and what attracted us to the MA CPNE. For design detailing and production though, we may be working separately on different parts depending on our expertise and we usually seek extra help for technological development, but this is always done in a collaborative spirit, so that in the end, we all have a say and all make sure we are working towards a cohesive whole.
How much do you manage to control the way people interact with your work? Which kind of unexpected behaviour have you witnessed with your installations? Any bad or good surprise? What have you learnt from the way people interact with your works?
We like unexpected behaviours, we see our role as providing a medium for people to be creative. However, for the interaction to work, we feel there needs to be a careful study of the context. We carefully plan the first spark, and then let it go from there.
Hidden Love Song
When we study the context, we’re looking at factors such as the environment, the user, and the existing types of behavior in the environment. This enables us to set the foundation for a successful interactive piece, however, we enjoy when people find new ways to use our work and take ownership over what we do. For example, in Gamelan Playtime, we took time to study how people moved in the space and understood that everyone was in a hurry with no time to stop. We made it a priority for people to only have to stroke the wall while passing by for the interaction to work. However, when the installation was up, we realised people were stopping to pull and twist the buffers and were spending a lot of time discovering the different instruments and creating their own piece. They were seeking much more engagement than what we had anticipated. For the following installation of the same ‘Keeping in Touch’ series, Hidden Love Song, we provided a much more flexible and empowering medium, the scratch-off layer. People could scratch the wall to reveal hidden words or sounds, but they could also scratch in their own messages or simply draw. The piece was particularly nice because it wasn’t precious, the whole wall was fair game for manipulation.
Gamelan Playtime
Gamelan Playtime was created for the Royal Festival Hall in London. What was the brief for that project? How easy or difficult is it to get such a prestigious and probably a bit conservative institution to accept your unusual ideas.
First we have to mention that we have been working with the Learning and Participation team at the Royal Festival Hall, who is one of our very innovative and most forward thinking clients. Their way of doing and thinking has been an inspiration for our work, and was really a true collaboration. We met Shân Maclennan, head of L&P through the MA CPNE network and she asked us to come up with an interesting experience using the RFH hoardings while the building was closed for refurbishment. The initial thought was that we could start with communicating Gamelan workshops held with primary school children in Lambeth. They wanted to bring back the life that usually inhabited the area when the building was open. Typical marketing posters campaign didn’t seem to do that.
Gamelan Playtime
We came up with a broader program that we called ‘Keeping In Touch’ which would aim to communicate ongoing activities to the general public via an interactive system on the RFH hoardings for the entire duration of the refurbishment period. This system was made up of a tactile surface, sensors and a sound system which would enable a series of hoarding to go up every 2-3 months. This would keep a momentum with the audience until the re-opening of the hall, and maximise the use of the interactive system. Even though Shân could not commit to the program at the start, we ended up having 3 cycles on the hoardings, up until they took the hoardings down. Then followed PLAY.orchestra on the Riverside Terrace. Now the RFH is open, and we are still working with them on various interactive systems.
Where does the idea of PLAY.orchestra come from?
The brief came from the Royal Festival Hall (RFH) in collaboration with the Philharmonia Orchestra (PO). The PO wanted to communicate their Sound Exchange website, which enables the general public to download sounds from the orchestra and upload their own.
This installation was to take place on the Riverside Terrace which was not very busy, though a lot of people would pass by. Some people were using the seating in the area to take breaks. We needed to make it a destination point, for all audiences.
The Philharmonia initially thought of having their website on the hoardings for people to take part in the sound exchange. We thought it was all a bit too abstract for people to come by and want to ‘exchange sounds’ through a website interface on a hoarding. So we thought through what a sound exchange meant to begin with: it was about taking part in the Orchestra, learning about the sounds and sending your own for a composition to take place. We noticed on the website there was a page of the orchestra scheme with all the instruments laid out in their particular spot and the sound they each make. So there, we decided to recreate the orchestra scheme on a stage with only seats. Each seat was labeled with its instrument. When people would sit, they would activate the sound of the instrument. All together, they would hear an entire piece, either classical or specially commissioned pieces. Once comfortably sitting and engaged, people could further take part in the orchestra by sending their own sounds via their mobile phones. A composition was made with all the sounds received and took place on the PLAY.orchestra installation in the last two weeks of its showing.
It turned out to be a huge success that the Royal Festival Hall directors could witness from their office windows not very far away. We also have had quite a lot of demand for it from around the world. We are now in discussion with the RFH and the Philharmonia to make a touring version.
In general, how much do you have to battle to get your vision of a work accepted? Do you get carte blanche?
It is very rare to get carte blanche, we feel the biggest trick is to be resourceful! Our process is pretty rational and directly responds to a client’s need, so it’s does not feel like a battle to have our ideas accepted. The biggest challenge is always to fully understand the context, the client’s desires and apprehensions, and then of course to make the idea work within budget…
Which kind of advice would you give to young designers who would like to work on similar projects? What are the pitfalls? What worked well for you?
We feel we’ve been pretty lucky with our opportunities, but our advice to new designers in the field— to see the opportunity to do something great in every brief, to think ahead and make the opportunity exciting even when the brief might not be. Gamelan Playtime’s initial brief was just a hoarding design that could have seemed somewhat boring, and made with a very small budget. But where there’s a will… Our first design had a great response and so the idea was allowed to grow. We also were careful to plan a basic interactive system that could be changed in a series of different installations, and luckily we were able to produce a series!
Is there any spot in London where you´d love to install a work?
Many spots… of course the Tate would be nice. An installation for the Olympics as part of a celebration, that would be great. The New York City Subway has a great art installation and tile art programme, which has really changed the experience of using their transport system. We would love a chance to do something similar for Transport for London. Tube journeys are just torturous, the NYC subway isn’t a whole lot better, but when you are navigating the subway maze or arrive at stations where there is some kind of installation, you feel at least that your journey hasn’t been all that bad. It’s an opportune ‘dead’ time and space where people have the time to engage, if you can pique their interest.
Thanks Arlete, Melissa,and Kelsey!
All images courtesy of Milk and Tales.
Originally from we make money not art by
reBlogged by michael on Oct 13, 2007, 3:53AM
Kacy Maddux: New Drawings
Kansas City artist Kacy Maddux, whose headless sketches in the University of Chicago Renaissance Society’s “All My Pretty Corpses” exhibition caught a lot of attention in 2005, is to be featured again in the Windy City.
This time her fine illustrations are to be featured in a solo exhibition at the Gescheidle gallery in downtown Chicago. These free-hand drawings appear to riff on the theme of anatomy and symmetry while remaining fairly abstract. It’s an interesting installment in this 27 year-old artist’s career, presenting “empirical information metaphorically, and intuitive misunderstandings literally.” The result is equal parts new age and science class, to stunning effect.
New Drawings
Opening Reception: 12 October 2007, 6-9pm
Conversation with the artist: 13 October 2007, 1-2pm
12 October -10 November 2007
Gescheidle
1039 W. Lake Street, 2nd floor
Chicago, IL. 60607 map
tel. +1 312.226.3500
Originally from Cool Hunting by
reBlogged by michael on Oct 11, 2007, 5:18PM
memory landscape drawings
an impressive collection of large-scale wall drawings & works on paper that represent mental maps, an investigation of the mind’s peculiar ways of organizing memories. artist Janice Caswell attempts to trace the edges of recalled experience, plotting the movement of bodies & consciousness through time and space.
this work arises out of a desire to capture experience, an impulse to locate, arrange & secure the past. she uses a pared-down, coded language through which points, lines & fields of color define spaces & retell narratives, making memories concrete.
[link: janicecaswell.com (wall drawings) & janicecaswell.com (works on paper)|via visualcomplexity.com|thnkx Jack]
Originally from information aesthetics
reBlogged by michael on Oct 11, 2007, 11:21PM
Evolving in Brussels
On October 4th, a vernissage held concurrently in Second Life and in Brussels inaugurated that city’s first art space devoted entirely to art made in electronic media. Located in central Brussels, iMAL (Interactive Media Art Lab) Center for Digital Cultures and Technology boasts a group of workshops at the disposal of resident artists as well as more than 400 square meters of public space for events and exhibitions. The facility opened both its real and virtual doors with a three-evening series of events, including the dual celebrations, as well as audio and visual performances by French artists Pascal Baltazar and Mathieu Chamagne, who are known for their digital sound works created with custom gestual interfaces, and a demonstration of Danish artist Sven Konig’s instant video sampling software. Through October 14th, noted electronic music composer Kim Cascone is hosting a workshop titled ‘Genetic Laptop Music’ at iMAL. Each of the 15 participants in the project, equipped with a networked laptop running common audio software, perform a function within a composition process based on genetic selection. Audio is chosen from a ‘gene’ pool of open-source sound files, which are then recombined or ‘killed’ by participants. As the group of possible combinations narrows, a participatory audio work emerges. The workshop culminates with a public performance at the new iMAL space on October 14th. - William Hanley
http://www.imal.org/cascone_workshop/
Originally from Rhizome News
reBlogged by michael on Oct 11, 2007, 10:00PM
