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.

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.

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

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.