Virgin Media has commissioned UVA to ‘explore the themes of communication and modernity’ as part of their 10th year celebrations of broadband. As a concept, UVA explored the material of optical fibre and stripped back – it is essentially a beam of light.
The response to the brief is a series of installations set across six rooms and four floors of a raw industrial space behind the OXO tower in London.
As you enter the space, you are posed a question. You speak your answer into a microphone and your voice is amplified and distorted as it is played back to you. Slightly amused and curious, you climb the stairs into the darkness.
As your eyes adjust, flashes of red laser light race round the edges of the room to create hard edged forms. It’s an impressive visual mixed with sporadic snippets of voices, and you quickly pass to see the same effect in a smaller room outlining a TV, table and a sofa.
The next room appears to have a long reflective channel down the middle, maybe 10 metres long. Red, green and blue lasers at either end are mixed together to form white light and then this light is reflected and scattered back down the length of the installation. All the time snatches of voices (which you now realise are the responses to the earlier question) are syncopated into a heavy bass track and perfectly matched in time with the laser sequences.
It’s mesmerising, thrilling and the sense of the world of conversation passing through light is beautifully represented. My photos do not do this justice in any way.
The next room appears to have a ‘smiley’ face and the concept wasn’t apparent.
The last room is in the loft of the building is a sequence where lasers from different parts of the room converge on single points as they move. Snippets of news and other sounds are mixed together and this piece (although very beautiful) felt more of a showcase for effects than the strong narrative that was represented earlier in the show.
Overall a stunning achievement – technically and in terms of drama and narrative.
The behind the scenes videos are a lovely touch into the revealing processes involved in creating this type of work.
The V&A museum in London is running the excellent Decode exhibition but tucked away from the crowds is the rather lovely Digital Pioneers exhibition. As you can imagine, it starts to outline how computer art has progressed – from it’s inception to the mid 80′s.
The background to the exhibition is that the V&A acquired two very large collections of computer art (one from Patric Prince) as they are the only museum building an archive of work. This is a startling admission and great work to the V&A for recognising that computers can make art not just be used to make art.
The collection from Patric Prince has a brilliant backstory. Patric was the husband of Robert Holzman who worked at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in the 70′s. You wouldn’t associate NASA and computer art, but back in the 60′s and 70′s computers were enormous number crunching machines housed mainly in Universities and specialised businesses. The story goes that at the NASA jet propulsion lab, some of the research involved pioneering computer graphics and this grew into the lab having a dedicated computer artist (David Em). Many artists would use the machines to generate their art and there were times where Patric was picking up discarded pieces of work from the floor to file and keep.
People might regard many of the works as primitive in execution, but many of the artworks were created through incredibly crude, laborious and almost ‘blind’ processes. Other artists modified equipment for their own needs and Desmond Paul Henry actually used old WWII mechanical bombsight computers to create his works.
Here are some highlights.
Charles Csuri – ‘Random War’ – 1967
Paul Brown – ‘A-B Modulars’ – 1977
Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton – ‘Studies in Perception’ – 1997
I went to the Barbican last night for the Ron Arad: Restless exhibition. It was a really interesting showcase of his work mainly focusing on his chairs (but also including lighting design, shelving and architecture). This sounds really very dull but it wasn’t. The chairs were highly sculptural, organic and bordering on jewellery in many case.
Overall a very playful and fun experience. The set design of the exhibition used big LED screens to take you through the concepts and the meaning behind many of the pieces.
The last part of the exhibition focused on his architecture. Really interesting to see how his style evolves into large scale buildings.
The flickr gallery below showcases the exhibition.
Lolita – A Chandelier you can SMS.
Ron Arad: Restless
18 Feb–16 May/10
Bold, experimental and inventive, Ron Arad defies categorisation. This internationally acclaimed London based maverick is variously described as a designer, architect or artist.
To celebrate, Barbican Art Gallery stages the first major exhibition in the United Kingdom of the internationally acclaimed, London-based design maverick Ron Arad.
Ron Arad: Restless explores three decades of Arad’s designs from his early post-punk approach of assembling products from readymade parts to his exclusive and highly-polished sculptural pieces. Featuring a dramatic exhibition design by Ron Arad Associates using the latest LED display technology, Ron Arad: Restless also includes architectural designs and immediately recognisable mass-produced items. Highlighting the significance of experimentation, process and materials in Arad’s work, the exhibition offers a timely insight into the development of objects from initial idea and fabrication to finished design.
The Kinetica Art Fair was on over the weekend and I wandered down to see the sights and sounds. Having been the previous year, I was well prepared for more steampunk cyber art but the talks last year were the highlight – although this year I missed the talks.
So onto the show. It was PACKED full of people which was great for everyone. I’m really hoping it was a massive success and elevated new forms of art to the masses. Here is a bref recap of caught my eye.
This was a mechanical drawing device that took plaster casts of heads and traced their contours and drew them out onto paper – A sort of 3D to 2D process. It was really interesting to watch it happen in realtime and the mechanical direct feel really made me want to watch this artwork form. The output was just as interesting – Something a bit disgusting and indefinable.
A very simple yet beautiful piece of work – If you imagine hundreds of threads of light forming ethereal bodies floating in space. I think the artist used fibre optic cables and ‘cut’ them to let the light bleed out thus creating the forms. There was no interaction or gimmickry (something common to a lot of the work) and I really liked it.
Kinetic Masters
My favourite section of the fair was the area devoted to pioneers of computer / cyber art. You can imagine at the time just how far these guys were innovating and their pieces are still of artistic value to this day. Just shows the process of creating art is irrelevant if the end result connects with you on some level.
I had heard of this ground breaking show at the I.C.A and it was brilliant to study the poster up close. A lovely piece of polish graphic design. A shame I left my camera at home as I wanted to note down all the artists present – If anyone has the poster or the programme of artists could they drop me a line. I’m sure I recalled that Xenakis was present.
So overall a very interesting experience. Some of the ‘art’ I would classify as playful interactions but then others would class it as art or even the process of creating the art. A debate I couldn’t get drawn to far into.
For another review of the fair, check Chris O’ Sheas excellent pixelsumo site.
The london underground might be derided as a creaking, rickety antique of a public service but atleast there were some great design moments in its history – Harry Beck and his iconic map, Charles Holden and his modernist masterpiece stations and the lesser known Enid Marx who provided many moquettes (fabric designs) for the tube seats.
The TFL has decided they would like to open up the design of new moquettes to the public – There is a £5000 prize which sounds great in principle but for a professional designer this isn’t much at all – considering the usage the TFL will get from the designs.
I can understand change, progress and iterating design to make it better – I just hope they leave these designs in place somewhere as a reminder of how good design can be timeless.
The V&A had a late opening last week which was a triumph of exploration and entertainment. One of the many many events to partake was a very amusing take on ‘Cluedo’. On starting the game you were given a detective pack with the following instructions.
The task at hand was to retrieve 10 cards which would reveal the killer, location and weapon of ‘Jim’ – a faithful doggy. Also included in the pack was a map of the museum with all the clues needed to find the cards.
Along the route through the museum were lots of entertaining events – films, postcard making, surreal chairs etc and after a lot of sleuthing we grabbed nearly all of the cards (some were missing by the time we found them).
The ‘game’ was brilliant – There really wasn’t a game at all – It was just a very very entertaining way to guide people round the museum to take in the multitude of activities.
For five nights this week, visitors to Trafalgar Square will be treated to spectacular illuminations covering the front of the National Gallery.
25 February – 1 March, 6–10pm
Picasso exhibition
You can also see real masterpieces by Picasso at the Gallery. The illuminations celebrate the opening of the National Gallery’s must-see exhibition ‘Picasso: Challenging the Past‘.
Interactive installation work is really becoming really interesting of late as more brands commision work and more design studios are born out of the frustration of working in one medium – really blurring the lines between art/architecture/design/interaction. A great way to introduce yourself to this world is with the upcoming Kinetica Art Fair.
Kinetica Art Fair is developed by Kinetica Museum in partnership with P3 and supported by the Contemporary Art Society.
More than 25 galleries and organisations specialising in kinetic, electronic and new media art are taking part with over 150 exhibiting artists. The Fair will be like no other with living, moving, speaking and performing art.
The Fair provides unparalleled opportunities for the public and collectors alike to view and buy work from this thriving international movement and to participate in the programme of talks, workshops and performances.
It’s on from friday 27th -> monday 2nd in London town and the lineup of speakers and performances looks great.
When you think you’ve seen it all, along comes a visual technique that really makes you sit up and take notice. ‘Datamoshing’ with its seriously terrible moniker, hit the mainstream recently with the new Kayne West ‘Welcome to heartbreak’ video. It breaks in from black into this riot of colour that is so blocky and compressed you think that youtube is actually broken. But it isn’t. It is the intent of the director who employs this techique of glitching out the video and blending the motion together to create something quite mesmerising.
But this effect isn’t new. It is very very very old. If you’ve every played a divx video without the right codec installed, you get these compression artifacts because your computer doesn’t understand how to render the video. I’ve seen it many times when you skip through a video and the frames start to ‘blend’ together, but never investigated if some bright spark had applied it in some creative way. Well, with the Kayne video coming to light, a lot of the design blogs are point towards David OReilly as being one of the first artists/directors to intentionally glitch video.
After immersing myself in the world of compression glitching I’m really loving how this technique instantly puts you on edge and unsettles you. Taking it further and glitching the edits or blowing the compression so much you can’t actually tell what you are looking at really makes you look harder. A brilliant way to subvert the medium.
The NY Times have recently released an API allowing developers to access a huge archive of news and data. This is a perfect example of how an open attitude to intellectual property increases brand awareness because people hack/mould/mash/visualise the data in interesting ways.
The brilliant Jer Thorp has starting putting together some stunning data visualisation with processing.
This is a visualization of the frequency of the words ‘socialism’ (orange) and ‘capitalism’ (green) in New York Times articles since 1981.
This visualization reads like a clock. 12:01am is January 1st1984 and 11:59pm is January 1st 2009.
