Thursday, May 27. 2010
Small Wonders
I just returned from San Jose working on the 2010 01SJ Biennial where, among other projects, I worked with Jaime Austin and Shona Kitchen to install “Small Wonders,” a cabinet exhibition based on the idea of the wunderkammer at the new expansion of the San Jose International Airport – which has some amazing public art, and you should definitely fly through there next time you come to the Bay Area.
“Small Wonders” includes work by Saul Becker, Jim Campbell, Center for PostNatural History, Peter Chilvers and Sandra O’Neill, Beatriz da Costa, Amy Franceschini, Ken Goldberg and Karl F. Böhringer, Tad Hirsch, Misako Inaoka, Natalie Jeremijenko, Eduardo Kac, Erik Klein, Robert J. Lang, Christopher Locke, Frank Oppenheimer, John F. Simon, Jr., SuttonBeresCuller, Stephanie Syjuco, Daina Taimina, and Gail Wight.
“Wunderkammer, also known as cabinets of curiosities, were diverse collections of objects popular during the Renaissance and considered an early form of the museum. Literally meaning “wonder room,” a wunderkammer was meant to invoke a sense of wonder and often included a wide range of objects from natural history specimens (such as taxidermy) to geological artifacts (such as precious stones) to cultural objects (such as handicrafts). Small Wonders presents a range of objects by mostly local artists. The displays are meant to evoke the wonder of the early history of Silicon Valley, and computing in general, with projects making use of the early Minitel for animations or a hack of an Altair computer. Other wonderful ‘curiosities’ that artists create employ various forms of technology from blogging pigeons, to spying coconuts, to a lifelike origami peregrine falcon.”
ZER01 also commissioned a project by SuttonBeresCullter, The Wunderkammer, which they are almost finished installing. Here is a video stream of a talk they gave about the project tonight.
Related Links:
Wednesday, May 26. 2010
Wandering through the future
@chriswoebken spied this one — an art film by Marjolijn Dijkman (NL, if you couldn’t guess) called Wandering Through the Future in which the artist takes 70 science fiction films and uses them to explore how they imagine the future. In an interview, there are some curious and relevant sentiments surrounding the production of the film — particularly this observation that the nearer in the future the film takes place, the more recent the film is. It’s as if we’re trying ever harder to imagine a possible near future, whereas in the earlier days of science fiction film, it was expected to imagine some time far, far in the future.
There’s also a timeline that goes along with it, evidently, of stand-out quotes from the films. I’m guessing this time line is also apparent in a recent book
When I collected all the scenes for this project I couldn’t find a single optimistic future scenario. It started as a timeline of the future along which I placed all the films I could find according to the fictional date when they are set. The distant future is mostly represented through films from the early days of science fiction cinema, and in general the closer you get to visions of the near-present, the more recent the film.
Scenarios change from Barbarella rocking in her space ship in 40,000 AD to almost hyper-realistic and feasible scientific models of the future in which nothing is playful at all.
I think in the 1960s and 70s culture you could still imagine far future scenarios, but nowadays people are already so afraid of the coming 30 years that they cannot think ahead. We live in a science fiction future already; the future of sci-fi has shrunk from the day after tomorrow to today. Yet we should think beyond science fiction and face the future in a different way. The films which comprise Wandering Through the Future often represent a worldwide apocalypse – the entire earth variously becomes frozen, a desert, flooded, contaminated by influenza, a single totalitarian state or taken over by robots. Cinema here does not think of local scenarios or the possibility that different phenomena might happen in different places and at different scales. It’s important to stress that we cannot only paralyse each other with fearful scenarios for entertainment but we should also think of possibilities and create new scenarios to be able to imagine a long term future again.
Related Dispatches:
- Related to Design Fiction A few assorted bits I found related to Design Fiction whilst following a link somewhere, to somewhere else. The future – a rough guide which is a blog by...
- The Week Ending 04092010 It was an insane week on the side of things happening between homes..a move. Number 3 on the list of the most traumatic things that can happen in life,...
- Design Fiction Chronicles: Duncan Jones’ “Moon” A short mention of this wonderful film “Moon”, which is presently in the theaters here and there. I quite enjoyed the production design — Tom Carden pointed me to...
Related Links:
Tuesday, May 11. 2010
Jason Tozer
I find it hard to believe that over the last three years we’ve never posted the work of Jason Tozer. The London based photographer’s work includes blowing bubbles up to the size of planets (pictured), freezing smoke, microscopic cracks in ice blocks, the infinitely detailed world of self-cast metal, all of which show us, “a world our eyes cannot see. Beautiful and strange, these are details that last a fraction of a fraction of a second – or are too slight to notice”.
Monday, May 10. 2010
Dreamlands
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.
Uneven Geographies: Art and Globalization
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
fabric | rblg
This blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research.
We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings.
Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations.
This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
