universal everything: forever.

Matt Pyke and the folks at Universal Everything are running one of the best design shops in the entire world. In case you missed it, the mind-blowing Advanced Beauty was my favourite thing in 2008. Now they’re kicking off 2009 with equal awesomeness.

“Forever” is a large videowall floating above the pond in the John Madegaki Garden at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. It plays an endless number of unique, morphing images that constantly “rise” from the surface of the water. The result is classic Universal Everything: a heightened commingling of organic and digital as they continue to explore the ways that technology can reinterpret natural forms into stunning new visuals. With the animation designed around a central “spine”, the forms, though abstract, to me seemed beautifully reminiscent of everything from  a swirl of smoke, to a budding branch, to a genetic double helix, to a flash of lighting, to an incandescent wind-blown feather, and more.

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If you’re not able to make it in person to see the installation in London, then there’s also an online installation creating an equally-endless series of podcasts, making the experience available to anyone with a computer. It’s pretty much brilliant. “Forever” is also being used to create 20,000 completely unique postcards, which (hopefully) we can get our hands on somehow. Maybe not all 20,000… but one or five would be cool.

Check out the making of:

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rafael lozano-hemmer.

I love these amazing light installations by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Combining sculpture, design, and installation art into a type of “relational architecture”, he creates experiential art that takes one of the most fundamental entities in the universe – light – and connects it with something even more fundamental: our own bodies. Altered by our movement, our presence, and even our very own heartbeats, Lozano-Hemmer creates visually arresting installations.

With “Homographies”, “144 robotic fluorescent light fixtures controlled by 7 computerized surveillance systems” move in response to the presence of human bodies. As people travel throughout the space, the lights re-orient to graphically connect people to others in the room.

Lozano-Hemmer also explores creating a visual connection to the biology of our bodies in three different works: “Pulse Room”, “Pulse Spiral”, and “Pulse Front” (which was part of Toronto’s 2007 Luminato Festival). In all three, hand-held sensors take the actual rhythm of particpants’ pulses and convert them into patterns of light. It’s like the travelling of the light is a parallel for the movement of blood through our bodies, creating life and heat as it moves the same way that light itself creates heat. Just like light travels in wavelengths, those frequencies can be re-interpreted by the rhythm of a human heart beat.

I particularly love how all three works take something so subconscious and inherently familiar to each of us, the feeling of the beating of our own heart, and transform it from a physical, tactile sensation into a visual, illuminated one. A transferal of our own bodies’ functions from one sense to another.

“Pulse Room”

“Pulse Spiral”

“Pulse Front”

Thanks to Kirstin for the tip!

banksy: village pet store and charcoal grill.

Banksy is an alt-art Midas. Everything he touches turns to popular. He never does anything they way the contemporary art establishment expects and he’s a genius at subtly mixing social commentary with visual surprise. His works are multi-layered, but they stand alone on every individual level. That’s not easy and that’s one of the big reasons why he gets as much attention as he does.

His first New York show, “The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill” at 89 West 7th Avenue, is less than 300 square feet and can’t hold more than 20 people at a time. Passers-by can check out the storefront window 24/7, and inside there’s no graffiti or any mention of Banksy at all. Inside, he debuts his new work with animatronics with an absolutely genius line-up of creatures. Nothing in here is really what it seems: Fishsticks swim inside a fish bowl, hotdogs laze about inside their plastic tanks, and baby chicken nuggets peck away at a small tub of barbeque sauce…

The man himself said “I wanted to make art that questioned our relationship with animals and the ethics and sustainability of factory farming.”

The New York Times said “The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill, as the green awning reads, is Banksy’s first official exhibition in New York, his representatives say, and it will be open to the public daily through Oct. 31. ‘Open for Pet Supplies/Rare Breeds/Mechanically retrieved meat’ says a sign in front of the shop. Bales of hay dot the sidewalk, along with a kiddie dolphin ride, wrapped in a fishing net like the day’s catch. But it is the leopard in one of the storefront windows that stops passers-by first. ‘Is that — real?’ a woman asked on Wednesday, peering at a large furry object perched on a tree branch, its tail swinging. It’s not: it is an ingeniously arranged fake fur coat. The robot monkey is more lifelike: it sits, breathing, in a cage inside the store, wearing headphones, holding a remote and watching a television clip of some fellow monkeys in an amorous moment.”

NOTCOT commissioned Seth Brau to make (finally… thank god) a HD version for us all to check out. It’s niiiice:

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Via Wooster Collective

sandy smith.

Scottish artist Sandy Smith has gotten loads of well-deserved press and internet buzz around his brilliant Computer Installations project, but his site showcases a ton of interesting tech and socially-tinged installation work, as well as some awesome insight into each piece from the artist himself.

For Computer Installations, including the obsolescent beauty of “Mauritian Sunset”, pictured below, he took old computer monitors, donated by his alma mater, the Glasgow School of Art, and turned them into gorgeous large-scale installation pieces.

Eye-grabbing from the front and equally intriguing from the back. I love the “technology behind the curtain” vibe; the allusion toward so many beautiful things whose veneer faces us while the nuts and bolts of how their allure is maintained is hidden. The door also intrigues me. You don’t have to travel around the outside of the entire piece to see both the gilded and the mechanical side; there’s a passageway right there in the middle, a portal, and Smith invites us to openly transverse between the two. This way we see the honest connection between the colourful light and all those dull, grey wires that are working so hard to create it. They might not be as pretty or as celebrated, but they’re responsible for all the shiny glory shimmering on the other side.

For “Green/Blue Horizontal”, inspired by the ubiquitous Windows wallpaper “Bliss”, he created a walk-in corner installation from more than 60 computers. Programmed to glow blue and green, people could walk inside the amazing luminescence created by the piece and find some bliss of their own.

But that’s just the beginning. In his own description of his installation work “Sapere Aude”, Smith’s flair for the written explanation really kicks in. This guy isn’t just an artistic bright light, he’s also self-deprecating and funny as hell:

“…we set forth our intention to work collaboratively in an exploration of Immanuel Kant’s essay ‘What is enlightenment’. It was a lofty project, and a beautiful proposal, where we would explore ‘why we make crap things with highbrow ideas.’ Not us personally, but everybody and us… It would be too impertinent to suggest that by merely attempting this process we have resolved anything so lofty as our intentions and ambition desired, but I put it to you that maybe, just maybe, that’s okay. This is not to excuse ourselves – you read me too literally. We like this shit. And thus maybe we should not seek to explain ourselves just too much, and instead ‘have courage to use your [our] own reason’. Or, as Kant paraphrased in the first paragraph of ‘What is enlightenment?’, Sapere aude.

Kant. What a cunt.”

Seriously. How can you not love this dude?

For “Please Don’t Break My Heart”, he sculpturally constructed the phrase “All The Time I Was Making This I Was Thinking Of You” from 100 sheets of mounting board he super-glue together. Standing 2 metres tall but only 12 centimetres deep, the precarious fragility of the whole piece was intentional.

With that in mind, the picture below is the only one he has of the completed piece as it appeared at the exhibition opening. That night someone bumped into it and the whole thing collapsed. Oddly enough, I think, knowing what it spelled out in the first place, the broken down version is even more beautiful. A wonderful physical adaption to the tenuous nature of the sentiment it once spelled out. I also wonder if maybe, having built it to a dimension that made it so easy to topple, this was Smith’s secret intention the whole time.

For “All The Time I Was Making This I Was Thinking Of You”, part of the Studio Project 9 residency at Glasgow’s Market Gallery, Smith spent 18 hours a day placing 600 hand-made paper flowers and 1200 leaves onto four large trees. Sitting in the “meadow” between the four trees is an angular block, lit from within, whose perforations spell out “Every day in every way I am getting better and better”.

On his site Smith says “What’s it all about? The optimism, beauty and misplaced trust of striving to make Art contrasted with the puritan work ethic involved. Making a nice place to sit. Endeavour, arrogance, naivety, spontaneity, Dead Poets Society and art.”

Finally, in another project that sources from the deep well of the net’s collective emotional concious, the appropriately titled “Google Image Search” is a video installation consisting of two monitors. One displayed a single word, and the other displayed the top 20 image results for that word from Google.

From the vast list of words used in the total 74-minute looped video, you can watch two of them right here: “Free” and “Freedom”.

whitevoid: polygon playground.

There was a time when monkeybars and a tube swing would be enough to keep you entertained. That time is long gone. Instead, how about a large interactive 3D laser-mountain? Yeah. This is some Tron-shit right here. If I have kids, I’m hooking them up with a “Polygon Playground“.

Created by WHITEvoid, this playground is a huge video installation and interactive art object. Up to 40 people can roam the different angles and slopes of the space while a 3D projection system projects 360-degree mapping over the entire surface. A sensory system tracks the motion of the playgrounders and responds to their movement by warping and and rippling the projected geometric graphing, creating waves and flows of light upon the ground as you walk along. The projection system can switch its visual from a hard, geometric web pattern, to glowing balls of light, to the illusion of filling the whole piece with running water, to a thick, opaque block that makes the whole thing look like a large, luminescent ice berg.

Commissioned as a lounge area for SMUKfest, one of Denmark’s biggest music festivals, this is one more bit of proof that Scandinavians are vastly cooler than we are. Imagine lamping on this baby with some post-digital Baltic electro playing in the back and a vodka… or two… or ten. Good times had by all.

Via Today and Tomorrow

esther stocker: what i don’t know about space.

I’m starting to become obsessed with installation art. The challenges and possibilities of taking the idea of art – how we look at it and interact with it – from something contained within a space to the entire space itself is fascinating to me. Immersive and expansive, there are chances here for total sensory overload.

Using pure black and white to create an illusion-filled, almost hallucinatory, geometric world is Italy-based painter, photographer, and installation artist Esther Stocker. Her “Geometrifying” installations wrap each room with pattern, sequence, and then interrupt their supposed order. Not through error or vandalism, but it seems more like the long passing of time has worn away at each piece. Almost like geometric decay, as if the perfection of each shape couldn’t possible hold on to its shape forever.  Visually stunning.

Stocker’s work has been featured around Europe for a few years, particularly in Brussels and Vienna, but she recently garnered big buzz for her exhibit “What I Don’t Know About Space” at London’s Museum 52 this summer. Check out a nice interview with Stocker at Don’t Panic.

Via Complex

roger hiorns: seizure.

In his latest installation, “Seizure”, British artist Roger Hiorns has turned the idea of sculpture inside out. Rather than present a sculpture inside an architectural space, he’s turned every surface of the architectural space into sculpture. Mixing installation art and chemistry, he’s taken an entire abandoned apartment near London’s Elephant & Castle and transformed it into a gemstone. Covering the inside with blue copper sulphate crystals, he’s created an other-worldly, mineralized, glinting mirror of an everyday apartment. Jewels literally glowing from the ceiling and lining the floors…

The scale and production of “Seizure” is ambitious. After reinforcing the walls and ceiling and covering them in plastic sheeting, 80,000 litres of a copper sulphate solution was poured in from a hole in the ceiling. After a few weeks the temperature of the solution fell and the crystals began to grow. The remaining liquid was pumped back out and sent for special chemical recycling.

 

Describing his experience, Guardian art critic Adrian Searle said:

“Silvery shards of cold light spangle and wink and beckon. Every surface is furred and infested; big blue crystals dangle like cubist bats from the light fittings. Little wonder the flat has been abandoned: you’d move out, too, if the crystals moved in.”

If you’re in London, “Seizure” is open to the public until November 3, at Artangel at Harper Road. Check out some pictures from people lucky enough to be able to see “Seizure” up close, plus some very cool pics of the creation process, at Iconeye.

Via It’s Nice That

benjamin jurgensen.

American sculptor, installation artist, and boundary pusher Benjamin Jurgensen is not easily described. It’s almost like he’s created real-life cartoons. Or multi-coloured non-functional Rube Goldberg cast offs. Or randomly stacking shit in piles. I haven’t figured it out yet, and hopefully that’s the goal – to push, prod, and force us to think. Absurd and imaginative, they’re like whacked out three dimensional puzzles just begging to be figured out. In a world where things are so simple and laid out and don’t ask much of us for fear that we’ll grow tired and give up, these pieces challenge us. They’re complex and non-sensical and don’t promise that there will even bean  answer to find, not matter how hard we try. They stick up for themselves. They don’t care what we think.

In his 2008 exhibition “Don’t Ready To Die Anymore”, he added to the awesomeness of his works with completely kick ass titles. Reminding me of the long, word-winding titles to the songs of one of my favourite bands, The Most Serene Republic, (you can’t tell me you don’t want to just dive head-first into a track called “Where Cedar Nouns And Adverbs Walk”…), each title catapults the craziness of its piece to a sublime new level. It’s like beat poetry with a dash of Warhol. Love love love. Behold:

• “spit your game, talk your shit, grab your gat, call your click”

• “shadows only cast if comic book courage amounts to anything more than tattered sheets and exploded ankles”

• “life after death, ninety-six, woulda stayed fine had puff daddy been a better father figure”

Here’s the magnum opus:

• “put we to your ear and hear yesteryear’s ocean, mute affairs, mortarboards, merman graduate shit, this is just future love like water dripping down her inner thigh, teardrops as diluted thoughts filtered through the mainstream, twenty thing-a-ma-bobs, treasure troves, spear-fishing, love’s fragile future only safe speaking through cartoon thought bubbles and coral thieves, lured into the deepest oceans of fantasy, flipping fins, marquees wash up on shore, legs required in the seas of change, reprimanded daughters, breathing the same air, just done differently”

But it doesn’t end there. You HAVE to check out the exhibit’s simply killer accompanying online video and text project. It’ll blow ya mind a l’il. Watch  “Don’t Ready To Die Anymore”. Amazing.

Via my latest must read Today and Tomorrow

nathan coley.

I love these huge text installations by UK artist Nathan Coley. To me the messages are not necessarily positive or negative, but the clever juxtaposition is both visual and textual; we’re used to seeing these blazing marquee lights advertising spectacles that will make us happy. But which, in a way, are also escapist form out daily lives. So this is how it would feel when these same shining lights don’t bring us necessarily bring us entertainment and excitement, but point us back into the greatest questions of our lives. And perhaps once we’re there and the answers aren’t so easy, we’re left listless and questioning…

Via Today and Tomorrow