Monday, May 10. 2010
Via Rob Aid
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We already wrote about several 3D printers which are mostly used for rapid prototyping or creating delicious meals out, however 3D printing technology has leapt into a new realm because the Organovo NovoGen 3D bio-printer can build body parts from cells and it recently created the first “printed” human vein. The printer is meant to be used in regenerative medicine.
Instead using donor body parts or performing a surgery to transplant some of your own, the printer could just make a new part for you. The printer, developed by Invetech, is loaded with cartridges of “bio-ink” a substance that acts as a kind of scaffolding for the cells to retain their shape. A sophisticated computer is linked to the printer that is pre-programmed with the 3D blueprint of whatever is being made.
The printer fits inside a standard biosafety cabinet for sterile use. The 3D bio-printers include an intuitive software interface that allows engineers to build a model of the tissue construct before the printer commences the physical constructions of the organs cell-by-cell using automated, laser-calibrated print heads.
It includes two print heads, one for placing human cells, and the other for placing a hydrogel, scaffold, or support matrix. One of the most complex challenges in the development of the printer was being able to repeatedly position the capillary tip, attached to the print head, to within microns. This was essential to ensure that the cells are placed in exactly the right position. Invetech developed a computer controlled, laser-based calibration system to achieve the required repeatability.
Dr. Fred Davis, president of Invetech, which has offices in San Diego and Melbourne, said, “Building human organs cell-by-cell was considered science fiction not that long ago. Through this clever combination of technology and science we have helped Organovo develop an instrument that will improve people’s lives, making the regenerative medicine that Organovo provides accessible to people around the world.”
This technology could replace other toxic and carbon-heavy medicinal practices like using artificial parts in the human body if the method proves the body accepts printed parts. Invetech plan to ship a number of 3D bio-printers to Organovo during 2010 and 2011 as a part of the instrument development program. Organovo will be placing the printers globally with researchers in centers of excellence for medical research.
Via e-storming
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Allan de Souza, The Goncourt Brothers stand between Caesar and the Thief of Bagdad, 2003
©Courtesy Allan de Souza and Talwar Gallery, New York / New Delhi
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DREAMLANDS
5 mai – 9 août 2010
Galerie 1, niveau 6
CENTRE POMPIDOU, PARIS
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De la toute fin du XIXème siècle jusqu’à nos jours, à travers plus de 300 œuvres, l’exposition « Dreamlands » interroge l’influence grandissante du modèle du parc d’attractions dans la conception de la ville et de son imaginaire. Photographies, installations, projections, peintures, dessins, plans et maquettes d’architecture, extraits de films : au sein d’un parcours spectaculaire et inédit, l’exposition explore une quinzaine de thèmes et de lieux, de Paris à Coney Island, de Las Végas à Shanghaï et souligne la « colonisation » toujours plus forte du réel par la fiction et le spectacle.
Autant de mondes utopiques où la réalité devient rêve !
Expositions universelles, parcs d’attractions contemporains, le Las Vegas des années 1950 et 1960, le Dubaï d’aujourd’hui: tous ont contribué à modifier profondément notre rapport au monde et à la géographie, au temps et à l’histoire, aux notions d’original et de copie, d’art et de non-art. Les «dreamlands» de la société des loisirs ont façonné l’imaginaire, nourri les utopies comme les créations des artistes, mais ils sont aussi devenus réalité: le pastiche, la copie, l’artificiel et le factice ont été retournés pour engendrer à leur tour l’environnement dans lequel s’inscrit la vie réelle et s’imposer comme de nouvelles normes urbaines et sociales, brouillant les frontières de l’imaginaire et celles de la réalité. Du «Pavillon de Vénus» conçu par Salvador Dalí pour la Foire internationale de New York de 1939, au «Learning from Las Vegas» (L’enseignement de Vegas) des architectes Robert Venturi et Denise Scott Brown, et au «Delirious New York » de Rem Koolhaas (qui associe Manhattan et le parc d’attractions de Dreamland), les seize sections de l’exposition retracent les étapes d’une relation complexe et problématique.
Via e-flux
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Eduardo Abaroa
Proposal: We Just Need a Larger World, 2009 (detail)
Courtesy the Artist & kurimanzutto gallery, Mexico City
Uneven Geographies:
Art and Globalization
8 May – 4 July 2010
Nottingham Contemporary
Weekday Cross
Nottingham NG1 2GB
UK
info@nottinghamcontemporary.org
http://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org
Éduardo Abaroa (Mexico City), Yto Barrada (Tangiers), Ursula Biemann (Zurich), Bureau d'Études (Paris), Öyvind Fahlström, (Rio de Janeiro, Stockholm & New York), Goldin + Senneby (Stockholm), Mark Lombardi (New York), Steve McQueen (Amsterdam & London), Cildo Meireles (Rio de Janeiro), George Osodi (Lagos & London), Bruno Serralongue (Paris), Mladen Stilinović (Zagreb), Yang Zhenzhong (Shanghai)
Curated by TJ Demos and Alex Farquharson (Director, Nottingham Contemporary)
Uneven Geographies focuses on projects by artists concerned variously with visualising the transnational mobility of capital, goods and people in today's global networks. Its point of departure is the assumption that the opaque and labyrinthine workings of worldwide economies tend to frustrate attempts to represent the historic conditions and expanding geographies that define current forms of globalization. Artists have consequently turned to the invention of innovative ways of imaging and narrating, analysing and reconceptualizing the processes and relations of globalization - whereby geopoetics mediates geopolitics.
Without returning to an imaginary lost language of objectivity, these artists' practices mobilize experimental forms of transnationalism—whether in regards to labour, migration, or resource allocation—via active and creative re-stagings by which the underlying relations of profit and exploitation become legible and are imaginatively reconfigured. These strategies creatively re-animate the novelistic and poetic, the cartographic and the documentary, the performative and the ludic, which connect to global processes situated in relation to varied geographies, including Mexico, the Congo, Morocco, Central Asia, the Bahamas and Mumbai. In the case of Fahlstrom—here the exhibition's historical forebear—and Lombardi, networks are tracked, rhizomatically, around the globe in diverse flows of capital and relations of power. With the photographic and video-based projects of Barrada and Biemann, passages of migration are imaged with ambivalence, evoking both the disenfranchisement of statelessness and its empowering potential. Whereas McQueen invests the imagery of Sub-Saharan manual labour with perceptual affect and literary allusion, contesting documentary legibility yet connecting current operations to the history of colonialism, Goldin + Senneby reveal how the conditions of post-representation serve as well to cloak unregulated economic power today.
These far-reaching engagements with the creative imaging of the cultural geographies of globalisation will be extended further through its public programme, in partnership with University of Nottingham and Nottingham Trent University. The programme include Lars Bang Larsen on Öyvind Fahlström, a short residency by Ursula Biemann, Renzo Martens and Alfredo Cramerotti on Episode III – "Enjoy Poverty", John Tomlinson on the acceleration of capitalism, and a keynote lecture by Saskia Sassen. The exhibition opens with a one-day conference, The Geopolitical Turn: Art and the Contest of Globalization featuring Cramerotti (author, Aesthetic Journalism), Angus Cameron (co-author, The Imagined Economies of Globalization and emissary of Goldin + Senneby), Mark Fisher (author, Capitalist Realism), geographer Alex Vasudevan, Sara Motta (Co-Director of The Centre for the Study of Global and Social Justice at The University of Nottingham), participating artists Biemann, Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler, Bureau d'Études and George Osodi and the exhibition's curators. All events are free but booking is essential. See our website for full dates: http://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org
Crossposted with Do projects.
The response to the Systems/Layers walkshop we held in Wellington a few months back was tremendously gratifying, and given how much people seem to have gotten out of it we’ve been determined to set up similar events, in cities around the planet, ever since. (Previously on Do, and see participant CJ Wells’s writeup here.)
We’re fairly far along with plans to bring Systems/Layers to Barcelona in June (thanks Chris and Enric!), have just started getting into how we might do it in Taipei (thanks Sophie and TH!), and understand from e-mail inquiries that there’s interest in walkshops in Vancouver and Toronto as well. This is, of course, wonderfully exciting to us, and we’re hoping to learn as much from each of these as we did from Wellington.
What we’ve discovered is that the initial planning stages are significantly smoother if potential sponsors and other partners understand a little bit more about what Systems/Layers is, what it’s for and what people get out of it. The following is a brief summary design to answer just these questions, and you are more than welcome to use it to raise interest in your part of the world. We’d love to hold walkshops in as many cities as are interested in having them.
What
Systems/Layers is a half-day “walkshop,” held in two parts. The first portion of the activity is dedicated to a slow and considered walk through a reasonably dense and built-up section of the city at hand. What we’re looking for are appearances of the networked digital in the physical, and vice versa: apertures through which the things that happen in the real world drive the “network weather,” and contexts in which that weather affects what people see, confront and are able to do.
Participants are asked to pay particular attention to:
- Places where information is being collected by the network.
- Places where networked information is being displayed.
- Places where networked information is being acted upon, either by people directly, or by physical systems that affect the choices people have available to them.
You’ll want to bring seasonally-appropriate clothing, good comfortable shoes, and a camera. We’ll provide maps of “the box,” the area through which we’ll be walking.
This portion of the day will take around 90 minutes, after which we gather in a convenient “command post” to map, review and discuss the things we’ve encountered. We allot an hour for this, but since we’re inclined to choose a command post offering reasonably-priced food and drink, discussion can go on as long as participants feel like hanging out.
Who.
Do projects’ Nurri Kim and Adam Greenfield plan and run the workshop, with the assistance of a qualified local expert/maven/mayor. (In Wellington, Tom Beard did a splendid job of this, for which we remain grateful.)
We feel the walkshop works best if it’s limited to roughly 30 participants in total, split into two teams for the walking segment and reunited for the discussion.
How.
In order for us to bring Systems/Layers to your town, we need the sponsorship of a local arts, architecture or urbanist organization — generally, but not necessarily, a non-profit. They’ll cover the cost of our travel and accommodation, and defray these expenses by charging for participation in the walkshop. In turn, we’ll ensure both that the registration fee remains reasonable, and that one or two scholarship places are available for those who absolutely cannot afford to participate otherwise.
If you’re a representative of such an organization, and you’re interested in us putting on a Systems/Layers walkshop in your area, please get in touch. If you’re not, but you still want us to come, you could try to put together enough participants who are willing to register and pay ahead of time, so we could book flights and hotels. But really, we’ve found that the best way to do things is to approach a local gallery, community group or NGO and ask them to sponsor the event.
At least as we have it set up now, you should know that we’re not financially compensated in any way for our organization of these walkshops, beyond having our travel, accommodation and transfer expenses covered.
When.
Our schedule tends to fill up 4-6 months ahead of time, so we’re already talking about events in the (Northern Hemisphere) spring of 2011. And of course, it’s generally cheapest to book flights and hotels well in advance. If you think Systems/Layers would be a good fit for your city, please do get in touch as soon as you possibly can. As we’ve mentioned, we’d be thrilled to work with you, and look forward to hearing from you with genuine anticipation and excitement. Wellington was amazing, Barcelona is shaping up to be pretty special, and Taipei, if we can pull it off, will be awesome. It’d mean a lot to us to add your city to this list. Thanks!
Personal comment:
An interesting initiative by Adam Greefield. Reminds me a little bit about the walks in the city or urban landscapes the italian architecture group Stalker is/was doing. With different goals in mind though. And I quite like the idea of a "walkshop" too!
Via r-echos
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The Portrait Machine Project by Carlo Van de Roer are photos made with a Polaroid aura camera developed in the 1970s by an American scientist in an attempt to record what a psychic might see.
This project explores the idea that a portrait photograph can reveal an otherwise unseen and accurate insight into the subject’s character.
The subject is connected directly to the camera by hand-plates that measure biofeedback, which the camera depicts as an aura of color in the Polaroid and translates into a printed diagram and description explaining the camera’s interpretation of the subject. It also explains separately, what the the subject is expressing and how they are seen by others, such as the photographer, suggesting the camera bypasses the control of the photographer and subject in making the portrait. This printout, which includes information about the subjects emotions, potential, aspirations, future, etc. is presented to the viewer along with each photograph in a similar manner to a caption.
found at I heart photograph
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