matt pyke & friends: super-computer-romantics.

Any time Matt Pyke is about to release new work feels like Christmas Eve. My favourite digital artist and motion designer ever, Matt’s simply unbeatable at creating innovative, organic and jaw-dropping work for his own studio, Universal Everything, and some of the world’s biggest brands. (You may have heard of them: Nike, Chanel, Nokia, MTV and the London 2010 Olympics. Whatever. NBD.) He’s also the mastermind behind my favourite motion design project ever, the inimitable Advanced Beauty. If you haven’t seen it, get it. Buy it. Find it. Watch it. It’ll change your life.

One of my fave facets of Matt’s work is how it never seems forced or even “created” – somehow it feels like everything he does (“organic digital” is what I like to call it) just comes into being. It flows as easily as if it washed up on a shore or floated in on a breeze. Plus I’ve emailed with Matt a few times and he’s also a really stand-up guy and a class act all around.

In his first ever solo show, Matt’s taking over Paris’ La Gaîté Lyrique with Super-Computer-Romantics. Guest-curated by Charlotte Leuozon and with sound design by Matt’s brother and frequent collaborator, Simon, the exhibition features 8 separate environments covering more than 26,000 square feet. Pyke says “The approach is one of a romantic view of technology and of really kind of being optimistic about what you can do with technology and how you can create beauty with super-computers, how you can create pieces of video work and pieces of audio-visual work.”

Reading La Gaîté Lyrique’s extensive info on the event, I started to get light-headed and giddy: “Here, a 3 meters high walking monster, endlessly transforming itself. There, a monolithic block invites viewers to peek into a singular experience – witness the birth of materials at a molecular level. On the mezzanine, stands a crowd of generative living sculptures, grown from code. Facing them, a huge projection of a never-ending procession of bodies, struggling against a hurricane of sound. Each piece can be considered a supercomputing beauty seeking emotional sensations and feelings whose magic breaks with rational functionalism. Remixing primitivism, minimalism, pop culture and 19th century landscape painting, the exhibition Matt Pyke & Friends takes us to a romantic theatricality reaching a subtle and meaningful relationship between technologies and the viewer.”

Opening this Thursday and running until May 21, 2011, the show will also feature a full-sized theatre screen with a retrospective of all of Pyke’s commercial and artistic work to date as well as a public lecture, from Matt himself, on the subject of “creation.”

Getting me all hot and bothered for the upcoming show, today Nowness debuted a stunning teaser vid for “Supreme Believers”, one of the installations from Super-Computer-Romantics. The Universal Everything Vimeo channel has also released a teaser for the exhibition. Both are classic Pyke and I want more, more more.

Here’s a video of Matt himself talking about his vision for the exhibition (and giving some visual glimpses into what he’s got planned). 

I need to see this show. I NEED IT. If anyone would like to take me to Paris to see Super-Computer-Romantics, I’m not above begging. I’m a pretty decent conversationalist, I sleep well on planes and I know some French. I’ve also never met an escargot that I didn’t like. Just putting that out there.

If you want more Matt Pyke (and why wouldn’t you), here are past posts on Forever, a video installation for the Victoria & Albert Museum; the new brand identity they created for MTV International; their gorgeous 2010 reel; and here’s one of Universal Everything’s most recent works, a series of digital installations for Chanel:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

+ via @universalevery

fabric: perpetual sunshine.

Created by the amazing design, architecutre, and research geniuses at Swiss genius-factory Fabric, their travelling exhibition “Perpetual Sunshine” is pure feel-good. Giving seasonal affective disorder the heave-ho, “Perpetual Sunshine” is a data-based sensory installation made up of 334 high-intensity infared bulbs. The light and heat emanating from the bulbs is calibrated by a computer to match the current temperature in any other part of the world where the sun is currently shining. So even though it might be night-time where you are, you can still be bathed in the exact light and heat glowing, at that moment, on the other side of the world.

Most recently on display at Madrid’s La Noche En Blanco festival, the installation has appeared at both indoor exhibitions and public outdoor events across Europe.

All images © Fabric Ch 2005-2008

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

solar collector.

If art is in the eye of the beholder, then here is what happens when the beholders are creating the art. In the hills near Cambridge, Ontario, Gorbet Design Inc. (made up of Matt, Rob, and Susan LK Gorbet) has created Solar Collector.

Just the online description itself gets my little new-media-modern-artist’s heart a-thumping:

In a collaboration between the community and the sun, Solar Collector gathers human expression and solar energy during the day, then brings them together each night in a performance of flowing light.

How awesome does THAT sound? Integrating the cycles of it’s natural environment into an interaction-based work of outdoor art, similar to Jiyeon Song’s beautiful “One Day Poem Pavilion”, almost every aspect of Solar Collector’s design took a completely holistic and thought-out approach to it’s natural surroundings. Despite the high-tech aspect of its workings, there is a subtle, organic reasoning behind almost every element of the piece.

The 12 aluminum shafts are held at separate angles in the hillside. Each shaft has three LED lights and three solar collectors, gathering the sun’s energy to power their noctural illumination. The angles of the shaft represent the sun’s position throughout the year: the tallest shaft faces the sun’s location at winter solstice, and the lowest shaft faces does the same for summer solstice. If you’re a techie kinda person, you can check out all the detailed specs here.

During the day, while sunlight charges the batteries within each shaft, people go online and create their own patterns and send them electronically to solar collector. At sunset, Solar Collector comes to life and creates it’s display not just from the energy of light but from the creative energy of human beings. As the solar power in the batteries diminishes during the night, the light from each shaft slowly fades away and darkens until they’re energized by the sun again the next morning. It’s as natural and universal a cycle as breathing.

There’s also a kind of delightful shock to the location of Solar Collector. For those of you who don’t live in Southern Ontario, Cambridge isn’t exactly the first place you’d expect to find an interactive outdoor light sculpture. In fact, it may be one of the last. The randomness of its locale adds to it’s overall coolness.

Via Stimulant