Powerful: Iranian artist Farhad Moshiri’s ‘Life is Beautiful’ at the Venice Biennale last year featured hundreds of knives stabbing the walls at the Pinault Foundation’s Palazzo Grassi to spell out the title in script.
Via Swiss Miss and Wallpaper.
Speaking of designing exhibits about design, here is a great short video by Walker Art Center about their current exhibition, Graphic Design: Now In Production. It features curator Ellen Lupton from the Cooper-Hewitt, design director Andrew Blauvelt from the Walker … and lots of installation imagery of the exhibit itself. Just in time, too: the show closes on January 22.
Hello World!, a video installation by Christopher Baker. Via Designboom, who wrote:
chicago-based visual artist christopher baker’s video installation ‘hello world! or: how i learned to stop listening and love the noise’ is now on display at the duke of york square screening room at london’s saatchi gallery. the artist’s massive video-graphical work consisting of 5,000 video diaries projected upon a wall within the gallery space. the personal video collection of ‘hello world’ was compiled through the use of online self-produced video archive resources such as youtube. … in the gallery space the observer may interact with the soundscape in two distinct ways: he/she may focus in upon an individual voice or get lost in the rumble of the thousands of video diaries on display. in this way, the at-once singular and overwhelming quality to baker’s work is consistent with human sentiment towards the internet and democratic, modern media.
Reading Forms, a tumblr by Yotam Hadar, collects images of well-designed exhibits about graphic design. A must-see. (Above, an installation shot from the Yale 2006 Graphic Design MFA Thesis Exhibition.) Cheers, Yotam!
Via a tweet by the well-informed Ellen Lupton.
Artist Chris Burden’s “Metropolis II,” a gigantic kinetic racetrack sculpture and homage to bad traffic, opens to the public on January 14th at LACMA in LA.
Roof Top LIghts, a new horizontally-hung lightbox idea by Lightboys, puts lightbox images of things you would see above you, above you. Very, very smart.
Via Collabcubed, for one.
Dezeen reports on a memorial in Norway, dedicated to 91 suspected witches burned at the stake there during the seventeenth century, designed by noted architect Peter Zumthor with artist Louise Bourgeois. In the main seaside structure, a catwalk leads to a suspended interior volume, where 91 naked light bulbs hover behind 91 tiny windows along an interpretive corridor. Shocking, perilous and brilliant. The Salem Witch Trials Memorial of course springs to mind.
Mogees, an experimental interface design by Bruno Zamborlin and Norbert Schnell, creates a gestural interface out of any hard surface using a simple microphone (attached to something we never quite see in the demo video, but it’s great anyway). Um, yeah, but … huh? In Zamborlin’s words:
Through gesture recognition techniques we detect different kind of fingers-touch and associate them with different sounds. In the video we used two different audio synthesis techniques:
- physic modelling, which consists in generating the sound by simulating physical laws;
- concatenative synthesis (audio mosaicing), in which the sound of the contact microphone is associated with its closest frame present in a sound database.
Riiight. Anyway, it seems like a powerful idea and if it works, expect to see (or hear) more on Mogees.
Via FastCoDesign, TrendHunter, and various other good people.
I hear this project, Lumarca, is better in person than in video, and it’s already pretty good as a video. But how the #@%& does it work with just one projector? Get the soon-to-be-released DIY kit and see for yourself, apparently. From the artists:
Lumarca is a truly volumetric display which allows viewers to see three dimensional images and motion. The system requires only a computer, a projector, and common materials found at most hardware stores. This provides an affordable platform for artists to design compelling content that conveys information, narrative, and aesthetic information in a new way. Lumarca is a collaboration between Albert Hwang, Matt Parker, and Elliot Woods.
Is teetering the new thing? Following this and this (and this for that matter), here is another visitor experience that is not for the faint of heart. Do the visitors to this cantilevered bird-watching perch realize that they have become the birds, in a giant precarious nest?
A witty, beautiful project by Manuel Fonseca Gallego in Spain. (Fonseca Gallego runs the gamut: here is a similarly unique take on a circulation element, but in a cave rather than on a cliff.)
Via Archdaily.
This gigantic, temporary (for obvious reasons) ice typography by Vancouver artist Nicole Dextras goes well with the onset of chilly weather here in New York.
Via Collabcubed, Notcot, and others.
Through March 12, the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia is hosting a miraculous installation by artist Yayoi Kusama. Called “The Obliteration Room,” it is part of an exhibition called “Look Now, See Forever.” It’s simply a white room of white things to start, but the whiteness is, well, obliterated by thousands of colorful stickers handed out to young visitors over time. Another testament to the strange magnetic attraction between museum visitors and stickers. See more images over at Colossal.
This reminds me of that panzer-made-from-removable-balloons installation from a few years back, except in reverse. Brilliant!
Another one I wish I’d done: Italian architect Werner Tscholl has created yet another lookout / observation deck / museum high in the mountains (here is the last one). This one, called Granat and overlooking the town of Moos, Italy, has two parts linked by a wooden bridge: one is a precipitous cage that glows at night, the other a gravity-defying, windowless exhibit gallery. Spectacular.
From Designboom.
Resolution: IndieGoGo Campaign Video from Stephanie Andreou on Vimeo.
What would you pay to help create a new interactive sound installation about something meaningful? Indie Go-Go, the project-funding site (a competitor of Kickstarter), has a project you might be interested in: “Resolution” by Stephanie Andreou. Her campaign is worthwhile and her video is informative. Worth watching, worth donating. (Link to the campaign after the jump.)
Speaking of virtual museums, “Road Inc.” is a new iPad app from Pyrolia in France. One reviewer has apparently said “Road Inc. is the closest thing you’ll find to a dynamic museum exhibition [in an iPad, I assume] and some of the best proof that there is life beyond coffee table books.” I’ve heard similar claims before, so I wasn’t optimistic. But this time, there may be cause for optimism.
I paid $4.99, downloaded it, and went through a few cars. (As their blurb says: “The first digital object dedicated to the automobile, Road Inc. comes with 50 iconic models to unveil.”) It comes with a Ferrari “exhibit” preloaded. The rest require individual waits for downloads, but they don’t take long, and otherwise that first download would take most of the day.
This frankly gorgeous app is utterly packed with interesting content of all kinds, from original studio photography to historic schematics to essays. And it’s full of little touches. Three of my favorites: you can choose what order you use to walk through this “museum”: sorted by type (racer, supercar, etc.), price (from 7,000 to yikes, 55,000,000), or (ha!) speed (from 15.6 to 254 mph). When you download a new car, you get to whisk off a little virtual tarpaulin to unveil it. And, at least for the ones I’ve done so far, you can listen to what the car sounds like when it accelerates. That all might not be the same as the real thing, but $4.99 is a little more in my price range than, let’s say, $2,100,000 (for a Pagani Zonda). More on “Road Inc.” after I have visited the whole “museum” but my initial visit made me smile.
Via Notcot.
My Shelfari bookshelf: the latest on exhibit design, museum planning, and interactive space.
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