Presented in the form of a Soviet F1 Hand Grenade, the Transparency Grenade is an iconic cure for these frustrations, making the process of leaking information from closed meetings as easy as pulling a pin continue
Notes from the Re-Imagining Asia exhibition at The House of World Cultures in Berlin. The exhibition and other events, curated by Wu Hung and Shaheen Merali, examine how contemporary artists around the world re-invent the image we might have of Asia and the way in which the post-colonial production of knowledge is challenging Euro-centric concepts of art.
Chiho Aoshima, Japanese Apricot 3 – A pink dream, 2007. (bigger version Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin)
Asian art has reached a point where it is almost too hot to handle. New museums and art biennials are popping up all over the continent, the price paid to get a piece of Chinese art are going through the roof and Indian paintings and installations are exhibited all over Europe. Asian art is now so hype that one might think that another exhibition will just kill the enthusiasm. Well, this one won’t. The works on show have not been selected for the artists’ origins but for their focus on Asia as a space for the imagination. There are Chinese, Indian, Thai and Japanese artists but they are joined by Mexican, Germans and American artists.
As you enter the foyer of the House of World Cultures, you meet with Song Dong’s installation Waste Not. It is nothing else but his parents’ wooden house, which fell victim to urban planning in China. He reconstructed the house together with its entire inventory, a collection of utensils of all kinds accumulated by the artist’s mother over a period of 50 years and offering a picture of 50 years of material culture in China. It is hard to imagine how several tv sets, so many kitchen utensils, books, old shoes, toys, buckets, plastic bags, ballpoint pens, cupboards, etc could fit into the tiny dwelling.
Image HKW
Song Dong grew up in Beijing. His mother taught him how to make the most of few resources, recycling, re-allocating and saving utensils for future use. The socialist motto was: ‘Waste not’. The shabby borough he lived in has been cleared away for the Olympics a few years ago, but the government neglected to replace the old houses, so there is now an empty area.
On it Song Dong would like to build another wooden house in the traditional style as a call for the preservation of old Beijing.
Besides offering visitors a picture of Beijing life, the installation has relieved his mother of the dead weight of half a century and has done so without making her feel that her hoarding was futile. In fact she fulfilled the role of an artist herself by preparing the show. And each of her mundane and utilitarian objects has been elevated to the status of artwork.
View of the installation at HKW
Chairman Mao at Xiyuan Airport, Beijing, March 1949*, 45″ x 25″, Ed. 19, digital c-print, 2006
Zhang Dali‘s “A Second History” was probably the work i found most fascinating. It’s a collection of copies of Mao-era doctored “official” photographs paired with the unaltered originals.
The First Sports Meeting of the National Army, 1952*, 45″ x 25″, Ed. 19,
digital c-print, 2006
The work presents an “archive of the Chinese Revolution” in 3 parts: Mao and the Revolution, Heroes and the Masses, People’s Pictorial Archive. By presenting side by side unaltered photographies from original negatives and the images as they appeared in the media at the time, the installation shows how deliberate distortion of images became an essential mechanism of photo production, a way to satisfy a yearning for an idealized image and a propaganda tool. Long before the arrival of computer and photoshop. The methods used in the editing of these images involve mainly painting: a wrinkle between Mao’s eyebrows vanishes, superfluous figures in the background are erased. (more images of Zhang Dali.)
And in no particular order:
Michael Joo, Bodhi Obfuscatus (Space-Baby), 2005. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging
The Bohdi Obfuscatus (Space Baby) by Michael Joo embodies perfectly the tensions and harmonies between novelty and tradition. In an homage to Nam June Paik, Joo borrowed a Korean Buddha from a local shrine and encased it in a halo of surveillance cameras, Fiber-optic lights cast projections onto flat TV screens while mirrors, mounted on poles that surround the sculpture, reflect images from the video displays, the Buddha sculpture and visitors as they walk around the installation.
Ozone – So Provided by Mizuma Art Gallery. Courtesy of Munteru
Ujino Muneteru was in the house two. I only got to see the Ozone – So installation, a wooden temple turned into a tank and adorned with waste material, such as electric appliances, plush toys, bits of carpet, building materials and books collected around Tokyo by volunteers.
There was also the video of a musical performance Muneteru gave in Berlin. He played with blenders, hair dryers, parts of bicycles, used vinyl discs, turntables, not only was it fascinating to see him handle all this junk but it also sounded surprisingly good.
Shi Jinsong, Na Zha Cradle, 2005
Shi Jinsong‘s razor-sharp line of baby products include a militarized Carriage, a sadistic Cradle and a predatory Walker. Na Zha Baby Boutique (Na Zha is a child warrior deity in Chinese mythology) tries to lure “shoppers” using stainless steel “products” which evoke both luxury and danger.
Bharti Kher, The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own, 2006. Photo credit:Pablo Bartholomew/Netphotograph.com
Bharti Kher’s bindi-on-fiberglass elephant. The bindi in India is traditionally a mark of pigment applied to the forehead of men and women and is associated with the Hindu symbol of the ‘third eye’. When worn by women in red, the bindi symbolises marriage. In recent times it has become a decorative item, worn by unmarried girls and women of other religions.
Bharti Kher covered her sculpture of a dying elephant in white bindi. The elephant is often regarded in Asia as a symbol of dignity, intelligence and strength. Kher marries the elephant and the bindi to contemplate the effects of popular culture, mass media and consumerism on the culture of India.
Andreas Gursk, Kuwait Stock Exchange. © Andreas Gursky / VG Bild-Kunst, 2007
Miao Xiaochun, Orbit, digital c-print, ed. of 3, 2005, 85.5″ x 189″ (bigger version of the image)
I took a few pictures. Universe in Universe has more images of the show.
Related: Chiho Aoshima, Mr. and Aya Takano in Lyon.
During the Middle Age and Renaissance tapestries had a role similar to the one wallpapers have today. You would not use them as carpet and just throw them on the floor, no no no, you would hang them on the walls to decorate the room, insulate the walls of your castle during winter, and delight your guests. Kings and noblemen would roll up and transport tapestries from one residence to another.
Margret Eicher, Eins, Zwei, Drei (not part of the DAM exhibition)
Margret Eicher has revamped the old tradition of the gobelins tapestry (which dates back to the 15th century but keeps receiving some attention from contemporary artists) except that instead of hand-embroidered tapestries, sewed by skilled craftsmen/craftswomen, the tapestries are refined industrial products, woven by a computer.
Scenes depicted in the Gobelins were usually inspired from famous paintings or religious art. Eicher remained truthful to this inspiration and uses the pillars of modern days religion and visual culture -TV series, video game and luxury- to set the scene of her tapestries.
Margret Eicher, Die 5 Tugenden (The 5 Virtues), Tapestry, 2008
The three large-format tapestries exhibited until May 17 at the [DAM] gallery in Berlin, show different aspects of femininity. Desperate Housewives Bree, Gabrielle, Suzan, Linette and Edie hold freshly-baked cookies and show their best profile, on another tapestry high-heeled ladies wrapped and coiffed in fur defiantly look at you and on the third one young couples frolic under the bored gaze of Lara Croft.
Eicher’s digitally woven collages compile pictures with a political background with sexy D&G style advertisement found in the pages of glossy fashion magazines to realize astute portraits of our times.
Margret Eicher, Erste Nacht, 2008
Some more images of the tapestries. I couldn’t help taking others.
The exhibition runs at [DAM]Berlin until May 17, 2008.
Previously at [DAM]Berlin : A conversation about exhibiting and selling digital fine art and Generator x – Beyond the Screen.
Another post long long overdue. This one regards Generator.X – Beyond the Screen, a workshop and exhibition, which highlight the creative potential of digital fabrication and generative systems.
Digital technologies like rapid prototyping, laser cutting and CNC milling enable digital artists, designers and architects to step out of the screen and produce atoms from bits, eliminating many of the limitations of industrial production processes. The technologies are becoming increasingly accessible, pointing to a future where mass customization and manufacturing-on-demand may finally offer alternatives to mass production.
The Generator.X workshop, led by Marius Watz, in the framework of Club Transmediale, took place in January but the project developed are on view until March 8 at the DAM Gallery in Berlin.
When i went to the opening of the show i was lucky enough to be able to ask the designers and artists a few questions in order to understand what was before my eyes. However, the pieces are beautiful enough to make the trip to Tucholskystrasse worth your time. Besides, people in the gallery will be happy to answer your questions.
Imho this is probably the best show in town right now. Demonstration in 3 steps:
A Week in the life is a 3D visualisation of telecommunications data made of cardboard. The data sculpture represents Andreas Nicolas Fischer‘s movement around his home city, Berlin, and the communications he made with his mobile phone in one week.
The aim of the project is to draw attention to the German telecommunications data retention act (Vorratsdatenspeicherung) and the breach of privacy it constitutes. The law requires the telecommunications providers to store the connection data of all customers for 6 months and to make it available to law enforcement agencies upon request.
What can be read from the sculpture is Andreas’ position in the city through the cell sites he used. The density of the cell sites reflects the speed and frequency of his movement within the city. The more often he visited a place, the more cell sites were added to the map.
To get the information for the data set, the designer wrote a software for his mobile phone which recorded all the coordinates of the antennae, which he then converted to latitude and longitude. The data collected was parsed with a processing sketch and transformed into a 3d model.
“I then took the model in rhino and contoured it into horizontal and vertical 2d layers, explains Andreas. ‘Then i set the intersections and cleaned the vectors in illustrator. After that i cut the individual parts with the lasercutter. The assembly took me about a day (even though having labeled each part individually beforehand). After that i added two coats of white model paint. “
Aperiodic Series
Based on the Aperiodic series, one of their earlier experimentations, Aperiodic_vertebrae
, by Skylar Tibbits and Marc Fornes (theverymany), is a spectacular assembly of nearly 500 flat panels (11 types) all milled within 6 sheets of plastic and linked together using nearly 500 assembly details (more or less all unique!) all laser cut onto 7 sheets of transparent acrylic…
They were assembled by hand over what must have been a very long afternoon…
Foldable fractal, a work by David Dessens. I discovered more of his work during the talk he gave last month at a symposium organized by Marius Watz.
Dessens’ experiments in generating shapes using complex mathematical functions (the SuperFormula!) are beyond impressive.
Foldable Fractal (detail)
Other favourites:
Daniel Widrig‘s Laser cut model
The delicate Cubes and Spheroids of Jared Tarbell
TODO‘s ethereal curtain
The show is running at the DAM Gallery Berlin until March 8.
UPDATE: Generator.x 2.0 will open in Turin March 11 as part of the Share festival (via).
I uploaded some images but there are many many more on the Generator.x 2.0 Flickr group.
Blog of the Generator.X – Beyond the Screen workshop.
Related stories: A conversation about exhibiting and selling digital fine art, Designmai – Digitalability exhibition, Rapid Products, Rapid Products II.
Images 1, 2, 3, 6, 9 and 12 courtesy of Andreas Nicolas Fischer. Image on the homepage: Leander Herzog: Physical Vertexbuffer (Radical Slices based on Perlinnoise).
GeneratorX 2.0 Beyond the Screen at [DAM] Berlin from lambretta on Vimeo
The Generator X – Beyond the Screen event i mentioned earlier involved a series of talks by artists, architects and designers. I went to the second evening of public presentations, liked everything i saw and heard but i’ll just focus on a few projects mentioned by Aram Bartholl (here’s his website but it’s his blog that gets my vote) because 1. i had missed all his other talks so far and 2. haha! i’ve lost the notes i took during the other talks.
Sascha posted a write-up of a talk Aram gave almost a year ago about the way his work looks for connections between the virtual world and the physical one so i’ll just take the story from here and focus on the artist’s latest projects.
Chat, presented at ars electronica, the 24th Chaos Communication Congress and more recently at Club Transmediale is a mobile performance that allows 2 participants to send each other text messages, like in World of Warcraft or Second Life. As soon as they’ve been entered, the texts appear in comic-strip-like balloons above the speaker’s head.
In 3D worlds, chatting contrasts with chat “rooms” as the online form of conversation has been re-endowed with a spatial dimension: the typed-in message appears in a dialogue bubble above the avatar’s head and follows their proxy on its way through the virtual world. Other players within a certain range can read these messages and, in turn, can type an answer on their own bubble. Chat translates this form of conversation into the physical, public sphere.
Aram reminded how much is about money in Second Life and how this might explain its success. In the vitual island, you can make money out of data thanks to the digital right managements embedded into the game.
For the Second City project that ars electronica commissioned him last Summer, Aram invited other artists and turned a part of a deserted shopping street into an exhibition space that was focusing on physical representations of the virtual world.
One of the projects developed in Marienstrassen allowed passersby to walk in a “shopping panel” and buy a Trabi or any other good for their avatar and get a laser cut plastic token in the shape of the object purchased as a receipt
Another project part of Second City was Export to World. Created by Linda Kostowski and Sascha Pohflepp, the workshop commented ironically on the design and production of merchandise in virtual worlds. Their shop offered custom-made or purchased virtual objects. Shoppers would enter and buy the object of their choice at a price determined daily by the current Linden dollar/euro exchange rate. Instead of seeing the good suddenly appearing in their inventory, purchasers would receive a 2D paper representation of it which they could manually cut and shape into a 3D model of that object. The final results are paper representations of digital representations of real objects, including all the flaws that copying entails.
The Bubbagum machine was particularly impressive as this real photography seemed to have been photoshop’d. It wasn’t, that’s the real effect of a paper virtual bubble gum machine. Not sure i’m expressing myself very clearly here…
Export to Life, Bubbagum machine
Anyway, Aram ended his presentation with this slide of a project he is working on: WoW weapons which he plans to carry around the city. Just the thought of such a performance taking place somewhere in Curry Wurst Paradise makes me say once again that this city is the best place on earth.
The Żak Gallery in Berlin is currently running a delightful exhibition
Åukasz SkÄ…pski, “Machines”, 2005-2007, Courtesy Å»ak Gallery
In the ’60s Poland it was almost impossible to acquire a tractor in Poland. Agricultural machines produced by the country were available mainly for state-owned enterprises. For private farmers these tractors were too expensive and they weren’t even robust or efficient enough for the mountain region. Out of necessity they constructed their own machines using spare parts and bits and pieces from whatever machines they could find. Including decommissioned army vehicles and pre-WWI German machines.
Åukasz SkÄ…pski, “Machines”, 2005-2007, Courtesy Å»ak Gallery
Since 2005 Åukasz SkÄ…pski has been traveling all over Poland to document the story of the tractors hand-constructed by farmers. He also made a video where farmers talk fondly about their machines, how it goes faster than it is allowed, how they can drive very steep roads with it and how robust the vehicle is. Considered that somewere built decades ago most of them look like little marvels.
Åukasz SkÄ…pski, “Machines”, 2005-2007, Courtesy Å»ak Gallery
Also at the Å»ak gallery is Skapski’s latest photo series of self-made houseboats.
Åukasz SkÄ…pski, “Machines”, 2005-2007, Courtesy Å»ak Gallery
On view at the Żak Gallery in Berlin until March 3.
Fotopolis has a few more pics.
One anime film and 30 new paintings by Yoshitaka Amano, each one more gorgeous than the other, are currently on view at the Galerie Michael Janssen in Berlin.
Kiki, 2007
As a creator of video games, anime characters, illustrations and graphic designs, Yoshitaka Amano is regarded as a source of inspiration for artists such as Mariko Mori, Takasha Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara.
Unitled, 2007
Untitled, 2007
The exhibition, called Deva-Loka, takes its name from a colourful 7 meters painting inhabited by psychedelic figures. Smaller aluminium panels singles out fantastic monsters and characters, and mid-sized paintings feature close-ups of imperturbable heroes, grim warriors and delicate heroines.
Detail of Deva-Loka
Plenty of images on the gallery website, my flickr page and on artnet.
Yesterday, together with a horde of other visitors (note to self: never ever again visit the usually peaceful C/O on a Sunday) i checked out Assorted Cocktail, Martin Parr‘s retrospective which features Bored Couples, Last resort, The Phone Book, Small World, Common Sense, Think of England, Think of Germany, Knokke-le-Zoute, Glasgow and Mexico.
The photographic series, taken between 1985 and 2003, guide us from what could be regarded as the essence of “english-ness” to the garish effects of globalization.
New Brighton, Merseyside, from “The Last Resort”
Apart from Knokke which so so much reminded me of my childhood holidays in nearby Ostende, the work i found most endearing was Last Resort, one of Parr’s first successful series, the one that brought him fame and a reputation for being a sarcastic chronicler of our times. Taken between 1983 and 1986, these photographies formed a snapshot of a typical Summer day in the life of holidaymakers in the seaside resort of New Brighton. There´s more to it than a few teenagers queuing for ice cream though as the series reflects the social decline and distress of the working class during the era of Margaret Thatcher.
New Brighton, Merseyside, from “The Last Resort”
Bored Couple gets the Award for hilariousness. Yet, it is also a very bitter award as i guess very few among us have escaped those moments when love appears to give way to indifference and dullness.
FINLAND–On a ferry between Helsinki and Stockholm, 1991
Slate has a slideshow.
Small World dates back to the early ’90s but the insanity and inanity of mass tourism it portrays have only become more widespread and acute with the passing of time.
Kleine Scheidegg, Small World, 1994
From 2000 onwards, Martin Parr travelled around the world to document the high and low (but most notably the low and very low sides) of daily life in Russia (Stalin World), Germany (Think of Germany), England (Think of England), and Belgium (Knokke-le-Zoute).
Think of Germany, Berlin, 2002
Parr also went to Mexico and flew back with a photo series that made me think that he was so charmed by the country that he left his sarcastic lens in good old Europe.
Untitled from the series Mexico, 2002-04
Both BBC and The Morning News have slideshows on the Mexico series.
More images in Magnum, Der Spiegel, artnet, Stern,
At C/O Berlin, The Cultural Forum for Visual Dialogues, until February 24.
Sedlescombe, from the series Think of England, 2000-2003
Previous shows seen at C/O: The Bread Man, Weegee’s Story.
Because Berlin is hosting several institutions like bootlab, Chaos Computer Club, c-base e.V., etc. which all “are doing strange things with electricity” on a daily basis, dorkbot.bln takes place only once a year, during Transmediale, when like-minded people from all over the world are in town.
Image by Fabienne Serriere
The 5th annual Berlin dorkbot is organised by c-base e.V. and will feature the following projects:
– mikro.FM: “Your friendly neighborhood micro transmitter network and how to join in.”
– Fabienne “fbz” Serriere: “Future Fabrics: construction techniques for wearables with flexible and washable circuitry.”
– The Moving Forest team presents its electronic gadgets -introducing Ricardo from New York with his Radio Gun Revolt, Martin from Berlin with his Scrying Boards, and Pit from Backyard Radio with their micro FM node.
– 02L – Outside Standing Level: “Unità Zero”, 32 possible combinations of videos and vibrating mixed audio sequences, triggered by stepping feet.
dorkbot.bln will be hosted by discordian evangelist Tim Pritlove.
The evening is part of C-ECRETS – the c-base partner event of transmediale.08 CONSPIRE.
Monday, January 28, 2008
8 pm | 5,- EUR (Free admission for transmediale.08 festival pass owners)
c-base e.V.
culture communication carbonite
Raumstation unterhalb Berlin
Rungestr. 20, 2. HH
D-10179 Berlin-Mitte
Germany
(U + S Jannowitzbrücke)
MAP!
From Spark to Pixel (Part 1)
Second part of the visit of the exhibition From Spark to Pixel. Art + New Media, which is running at Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin until 14 January 2008.
Christian Partos had some impressive installations.
M.O.M. – Multi Oriented Mirror pixelises the artist’s mother’s portrait with 5000 micro-mirrors whose infinitesimal slant makes the intensity of the reflected light vary. If you stand close to the installation all you see is just lots of tiny bits of mirror. Take a few steps back and the the portrait of Partos’ deceased mother appears. The effect is really amazing. No picture of it in the press kit, sorry. I made this blurry image which might give you a very vague idea of what it was like.
Christian Partos: Visp, 2000. photo: Lepkowski Studios
The Swedish artist had another work on show, Visp, a continuously changing shape made of 5 light-wires, 30 feet long, spinning like skipping-ropes, two revolutions per second. A computer, which also revolves, switches the LEDs on and off to create animated patterns on the revolving surface. Bitmap pictures, text etc. can be sent to the sculpture via radio link. Made for the Swedish Pavilion Expo 2000, Hanover.
Thomas McIntosh with Emmanuel Madan and Mikko Hyninnen, Ondulation, 2002. Photo: Lepkowski Studios
Ondulation, by Thomas McIntosh in collaboration with Mikko Hynninen and Emmanuel Madan is a truly hypnotizing composition for water, sound and light. A two-ton pool of water is set in motion by powerful loudspeakers. Waves travel across the basin, rising or falling in response to the sounds. Lights, bouncing off the moving surface, send reflected ripples over the walls of the gallery. The surface of this “liquid mirror†is slowly shaped by the sound into a kind of 3D expressions of the music which in turn become reflections on the wall. The simultaneity is such between the sound and light waves that we are left with a sense of seeing the sound and hearing the image.
Shiro Takatani (whom you might remember for a work Vicente recently reviewed: LIFE: fluid, invisible,inaudible… ) had some lovely installations and that’s is too bad for you if you can’t go and see the exhibition in Berlin because, once again, the press kit snubbed him. Chrono, a fiberglass cone recreates the exactitude of each pixel of an almost infinite number of fish-eyed images of skies shot in one day in Australian desert. Camera Lucida was commissioned for the retrospective of the nuclear physicist Ukichiro Nakaya (1900-1962) by the Museum of Natural History at Riga. Nakaya was the first to perform a systematic study of snow crystals and their different shapes. Camera Lucida is an intimate piece using fibre optics to explore the micro building blocks of nature.
Dumb Type, Voyages, 2002. Photo: Jirka Jansch
Takatani is one of the founders of Dumb Type. The Kyoto-based collective is showing Voyages, a work which brings to light the feelings of uncertainty and dislocation that accompany today’s shifting realities. Images of nature and other scenes are projected upon a narrow panel on the floor, circles showing a network of flight routes are superimposed. Visitors are invited to remove their shoes, step on the panel and embark on a journey through these multilayered realities. By adjusting their upheld palm to “catch” a projected circle, they can bring a “handheld” image into focus.
Joachim Sauter, Dirk Lüsebrink, ART+COM, The Invisible Shapes of Things Past, 1995–2007. Photo: Jirka Jansch
Joachim Sauter and Dirk Lüsebrink (Art + Com) had a room filled with architectural objects and sculptures generated from existing film stills, using a method they developed in the ’90s and which they call The Invisible Shapes of Things Past. The project enables users to transform film sequences into interactive, virtual objects.
In The Invisible Shapes of Things Past stills of a film sequence are arranged in a row in accordance with the camera movement with which they were shot. Thus, a straight camera movement produces a cube-shaped object and a pan a cylindrical object.
Gregory Barsamian, The Scream, 1998. Photo: Jirka Jansch
Gregory Barsamian uses relatively simple technoloty (strobe lights and motors) to transform his dreams into 3D animations. Using the idea of the zoetrope, the 19th century automated flipbook, Barsamian utilizes strobe lights synchronized to objects mounted on rotating armatures to create series of rapidly changing images. For each flash of the stroboscope, one sculpture representing a stage of the metamorphosis follows after the other, giving the impression of a constant transformation of its shape. Through the “persistence of vision,” the human mind transforms the images into the illusion of motion. An animation without the film.
Video of one of his pieces.
The Scream is a self portrait which concerns the issue of mind clutter: bits of unwanted information, songs and sound loops, images and nonsense syllables. In this piece a head emits a scream. The mouth widens and widens not stopping until the head turns inside out revealing some of the detritus within.
Image on the right: Greg Barsamian, No Never Alone, 1997. Photo: Jirka Jansch
The name of another of Barsamian’s installation, No, Never Alone, is taken from a Christian spiritual. A central figure is shrouded and thus blinded. The figures surrounding it are constantly taunting it for its intentional blindness. Hands dangle a carrot in front of it as well as show it an eye chart that it obviously cannot see. Another pair of hands holds an open book on whose pages dances a blind dervish while hands clap in time.
Here’s a slideshow of the exhibition. Please do not forget the credits for each image if you use any.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
