The Centre Pompidou in Paris is being, um, protected by 80,000 condoms. Irish artist Bryan McCormack‘s Preservation is Life lines the iconic staircase on the facade. Brilliant.

Via Feel Desain.

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.

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.

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.

Via My Modern Met, Design You Trust, LA Times.

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.

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!

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.)

A new book from the same source as New Exhibition Design 01 & 02, but now looking back, is now available for pre-order. Just pre-ordered mine. Due in January. (If you don’t have the first two, get them while you’re at it. Quite indispensable recent surveys.)

UPDATE, 30 Dec 2011: Just heard that the release date has been pushed back to March. Sigh.

I don’t really need any more proof that the Dutch can out-design us all. But if I did, I could refer to Engaging Spaces: Exhibition Design Explored, a new monograph by Amsterdam “exhibition architects” Kossman.dejong. The book is big, and so are the ideas in it. Highly recommended.

Published by the rather indispensable Frame.