Monday, February 23. 2009
Funny how i am always reluctant to spend one hour and a half in a train to check out some exhibitions in Milan but would not think twice about taking the plane to Barcelona or Valencia and have a short(-ish) train ride on top of that just to go to Castellon. I've never really toured Castellon. I have no idea whether there is a castle, i never visited the Gothic Concatedral de Santa Maria, i was told the beach is pretty neat but never saw it, not even from afar. All i come to see is EACC. Opened ten years ago, the Espai d'art contemporani de Castelló / Castellon's Contemporary Art Space initially focused its mission on the debate and the diffusion of recent artistic practices through a program of thematic exhibitions and activities that include music, cinema and workshops. EACC doesn't take its location in a city most of us had never heard of as an excuse to explore only the hackneyed and revel in safe names. Its programme is edgy, inspired and adventurous. Recently they had a retrospective of John Cage's work. The next show will be dedicated to the one of the few artists who saved the last edition of Documenta for me: Saâdane Afif.
Photographer credit: Pascual Mercé
A few weeks ago, EACC opened Are You Experienced?, a series of three installations by Ann Veronica Janssens. Sometimes described as 'sensorial environments', 'immaterial sculptures' and 'spatial abstractions', her installations are the result of a carefully-studied transformation of the space. Each of them uses different strategies to play with visitors' perception.
The night of the opening, people were queuing in front of a big translucid box installed on the esplanade in front of the EACC. Vapour was escaping from the door each time someone would get in or out of the container. It's the Blue, Red and Yellow pavilion, a proposal consisting of a volume built with metal whose polycarbonate walls form cells covered by transparent films in blue, red and yellow. But no one tells you that. You get inside the tank and wonder what is happening around you. Bodies get lost in the mist, voices are lowered, you walk carefully through a dense coloured mist that changes hue according to your position. You can hardly distinguish your own hand, let alone the shadowy outlines of other people. They simply vanish. The only things that seem to be tangible are light and colours.
Photographer credit: Pascual Mercé
Inside EACC, Janssens designed two side-specific and apparently minimalist interventions: one based on sound and the other on light. Colours, visual light and sound effects, are combined to both re-purpose the architecture of the space and appeal to visitors' senses.
Photographer credit: Pascual Mercé
As the artist herself has said, the situations she creates are not reducible to (more or less spectacular) formal effects "but must be perceived in a context that could be considered political. They occur, for the most part, in a public space without imposing a fixed form or being directly prehensile. They are ephemeral sculptures whose action consists of being dispersed in a given space, infiltrating this space rather than imposing upon it. In effect, I investigate the permeability of contexts (architectural/social/cultural/political) even as I propose a form of deconstruction that fragments our perception of these contexts".
Using only intangible means - humidity, sound and light, fleshed out with colour or softened by mist - the artist manages to shape the spectacular, to give borders and boundaries to the awe-inspiring.
Photographer credit: Pascual Mercé
Ann Veronica Janssens interviewed by Michel François.
On view at the EACC until March 29, 2009.
two hour ride from Barcelona and a mere one hour-something ride from Valencia
Previously at EACC: REACTIVATE!! Part 1, Urban reanimations and the minimal intervention; REACTIVATE!! Part 2, Instant urbanism; Reactivate!! Urban refuges and atomized garden.
More than 82 million people in the US created content online during 2008, a number expected to grow to nearly 115 million by 2013 according to numbers released by eMarketer.
Looking inside of those numbers, it’s not surprising that the bulk of content creators are simply social networking users that do things like post photos or links, but there’s also a quickly-growing number of people participating in more involved activities like blogging or uploading their own videos.
As you can see in the above chart, 71 million people created content on social networks last year, while 21 million posted blogs, 15 million uploaded videos, and more than 11 million participated in virtual worlds. Overall, eMarketer arrives at the 82 million number – which counts everyone who generated content at least monthly - by accounting for the overlap within the respective categories measured.
Beyond the current numbers, the growth forecast makes us happy, as it means there will be a lot more to write about in the years to come Hopefully it’s encouraging for you as well, as in the big picture, even if you’re new to the party, you’re still well ahead of the curve.
------
Via Mashable
A new exhibition called Forest, curated by Cécile Martin, opens up tomorrow night in Montreal. For the show, "artists and architects have joined forces to propose a new vision of the forest."
There are three pavilions in all: "three installations that invite one to penetrate and explore the movements and dangers of the canopy, soil and hidden dangers of the forest." They include the poetically named "From Chernobyl to Montreal, the Incandescent Zen Garden," whose creators note that "the natural phenomena of radioactivity and sound waves are amplified," with part of the installation "illuminated night and day by a red light, the same one that made the forest – the Red Forest – adjacent to the Chernobyl nuclear reactor vibrate."
This slightly unclear image nonetheless leaves me wondering what the biological effects might be if you could cause a several-acre test-forest to vibrate constantly: what strange roots and branches would grow? Would constant vibration cause radically new tree structures to grow – or just make for some very happy plants?
It'd be like the sound farm, only more tactile – and far stranger.
A perpetual earthquake as a lab for cultivating the unnatural.
The other two pavilions, meanwhile, are "The Macrocosm of Fiber or the Filtering Pavilion" and "The Mobile Branch, A Forest of Hypnosis and Vertigo." The latter project, a collaboration between architect Philip Beesley – whose work was explored here a few years ago – and artist Patrick Beaulieu, is described a kind of animatronic thicket: "A raised three-dimensional flooring and a cover propelled at 300 rotations per minute form a vibrating dance of branches and twigs, constituting a human-sized space of the in-between from which humans are nevertheless excluded."
You wander into a forest – only to realize that it's not a forest at all, but a vast machine...
There are a series of workshops on Friday and Saturday, as well – so if you're anywhere near Montreal, check it out! Tell them you heard about it on BLDGBLOG.
Implant Matrix, we read, is "an interactive geotextile that could be used for reinforcing landscapes and buildings of the future." It is a responsive latticework that, installed beneath soil, would act as a kind of a terrestrial prosthesis, a local replacement for the earth's surface. An earth surface machine.
The Implant can also be used, however, as a way to treat "an architectural building skin as a responsive textile," facilitating "active exchanges with building occupants." In the process, the machine would exhibit "mechanical empathy."
Which means what, exactly?
"Mechanical empathy" is described by the project's designers – Philip Beesley Architect of Toronto – as a kind of architectural eroticism. So if you're lonely... reach out and touch your house: "The components of this system are mechanisms that react to human occupants as erotic prey. The elements respond with subtle grasping and sucking motions. Arrays of ‘whisker’ capacitance sensors and shape-memory alloy actuators are used to achieve sensitive reflexive functions. The interactive elements operate in chained, rolling swells, producing a billowing motion. This motion creates a diffuse peristaltic pumping that pulls air and organic matter through the occupied space."
The assembly, in other words, with its micro-mechanical nerve endings, seems to mimic orgasm... Perhaps giving new meaning to earthquakes. (Read more in this PDF).
Two more, decidely cinematic, views of the Implant Matrix:
Of course, there is a bewildering array of other such projects by Philip Beesley Architect featured on their website, including Cybele, a kind of rubberized terrain-machine on stilts –
– which, seen from above in this next image, offers its own miniature landscape, another earth surface machine.
Then there's the hypnotically delicate Orpheus Filter, with its shivering infrastructure of virus-like bladders arranged in hanging constellations and blurred carousels (below).
But you can also see many, many more interactive machine-sculptures – like the William Burroughsian Orgone Reef, the amazing Hiving Quilt, or even the Reflexive Membrane, which looks like some sort of artificially intelligent alien surgical device – over at Philip Beesley Architect's online gallery. Then you should hire them to design something for you.
(Abstractly related: Strandbeestmovie. With huge thanks to Eric Bury for the tip! And... I just saw that Tropolism also featured the Implant Matrix, so check out their coverage for a bit more).
Personal comment:
Back in 2006 in Montreal, a very strange, intriguing and experimental "architecture" by Philip Beesley architects.
Is there finally a news outlet that steps into the information design terrain, which is seemingly dominated by The New York Times? TimeSpace [washingtonpost.com] is an interactive map that allows users to navigate articles, photos, video and commentary from around the globe. One can discover news hot-spots where coverage is clustered, use the slider timeline to illustrate peaks in coverage, or customize news searches to a particular day or specific hour.
Other news portals with maps include:
- SiloBreaker
- Life24
- What's Up?
- News Attention Map
- Vanishing Point
- NewsQuakes
- Yahoo! NewsGlobe
- TextMap
-----
Via Information Aesthetics
Personal comment:
Un Google Map mashup et "data design" par le Washington Post: mapping et concentration des news (du quotidien j'imagine) sur la carte mondiale. Petit détail: avec une variation temporelle.
WARNING: If you are prone to motion sickness - especially air sickness - you might not want to watch the following Google Earth tour!
This wasn't the intention, but several people who have seen the tour have been a little queasy afterwards. The file is yet another demonstration of the capabilities of the new Record Tour feature in Google Earth 5. One of the engineers at Google behind the development of the KML standard and the open source libkml is Michael Ashbridge. He took one of the first GPS tracks of a hang glider (or paraglider) which was converted to a KML file (back in 2005) and wrote an application to convert the track into a GE 5 tour which lets you follow the glider as it catches thermals to gain altitude near some mountains in Idaho. Before I say more, just go check out the tour in Google Earth 5. Once it loads, double click "Linestring Tour".
Michael's program produced the tour by following the GPS track and shows you the 3D view along the "string". It's a really cool experience (if you don't get sick!). GPS data is typically a bit inaccurate in altitude and only updated periodically (maybe once per second). But, the Tour function in GE 5 does a good job of interpolating between points to smooth the transitions. Even so, the ride gets a bit bumpy in places. The tour really gets interesting if you use the "Fast Forward" buttons on the Tour slider in the lower left.
While the tour is playing, if you grab areas with land with the mouse, you can drag your view to look in a different direction. After you let go with the mouse, the view will move back to following the track. This is a great feature which makes tours even more powerful because it takes a Tour from just being like a recorded video into a live 3D Google Earth recorded experience. But, there is a "bug" which doesn't let you grab the sky to change your view (which will hopefully be fixed when GE 5 goes out of beta).
-----
Via Google Earth Blog
Personal comment:
Un petit exemple en passant pour mentionner et illustrer cette nouvelle "feature" dans GE 5: possiblité d'enregistrer et commenter des parcours (rem.: ce n'est pas le cas dans cet exemple) dans des fichiers kml (et donc transmettre cette information, visualisée dans GE)
|