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The amen break, the world's most important 6-sec drum loop

Nicolas, 02/03/2010 | Source: Links

This fascinating, brilliant 20-minute video narrates the history of the "Amen Break," a six-second drum sample from the b-side of a chart-topping single from 1969. This sample was used extensively in early hiphop and sample-based music.

Tags : history music samples video

Poésie:numérique

Nicolas, 01/03/2010 | Source: Links

Le séminaire "poésie:numérique" se propose d'élaborer, à partir du questionnement des oeuvres, un mode d'approche analytique de la poésie créée avec l'ordinateur.

Tags : new media poetry text theory

Calculated Cinema

Nicolas, 01/03/2010 | Source: Links

For several years now, I've been using the simplest system of all - the binary system - instead of the decimal one, in other words, progression two by two because I've found that it helps perfect the science of numbers.

Tags : cinema new media theory

Time Machine - Lisa Haskel - July 1998

Nicolas, 01/03/2010 | Source: Links

Written for the catalogue to accompany the exhibition Star dot Star at Site Gallery, Sheffield, and the symposium Dialolgues with the Machine held at the ICA in 1998

Tags : art new media theory

CEMuTAN

Nicolas, 01/03/2010 | Source: Links

CEMuTAN est un espace dédié aux technologies et aux arts numériques. Il vise à rendre visibles projets, recherches et ressources ainsi qu’à regrouper les actions des différentes structures engagées dans ces domaines en Ile-de-France.

Tags : art community france new media resources

Review: Decode

Paul O'Neal, 26/02/2010 | Source: Google Reader

words William Wiles

There’s something of a carnival atmosphere at Decode, the Victoria & Albert Museum’s exhibition of digital design. All the exhibits have clusters of people around them, and it’s a chatty, laughing crowd. Far more than a regular design exhibition, the emphasis is on interactivity, so people are waiting to have a go or waiting for something to happen. Flight404’s Solar, for instance, is a popping, fizzing sound-sensitive animation, so its viewers are whistling, whooping and yelping to make it respond. Everyware’s Sand Pit, in which little electronic creatures can be influenced by pushing about black sand, is consistently mobbed. Mehmet Akten’s joyous Body Paint has people throwing shapes, which appear on a big screen as sprays and bursts of colour. There are also a trio of funhouse mirrors, by Random International, Daniel Rozin and Fabrica, which have people lining up to see their reflection rendered in different ways. Fabrica’s mirror, in particular, is very pleasing – a clear image only appears if the viewer stands still for a long time, and the slightest movement fogs the reflection. Amid a clutch of motion-sensitive devices, it encourages stillness and concentration, a clever and counter-intuitive strategy.

Decode is a lot of fun, then, but is it anything more than that? There’s plenty of sideshow candyfloss – where’s the design nutrition? The text accompanying the show is vague, saying at most that digital technologies have become a new tool for designers. True – so how are they using this tool? In answer, the text refers more to art than to design – perhaps not a surprise, given that the show was a collaboration with new media arts organisation onedotzero. But really the work is in a new field: digital crafts.

This isn’t to say that the work in Decode is just for looks. It’s easy, for instance, to think of uses for Aaron Koblin’s Flight Patterns, a time-lapse animation of commercial flights over the USA, a piece that is also captivatingly beautiful, a cat’s-cradle of light. Information visualisation is going to be an essential design discipline in a future world characterised by its dependence on ever-growing streams of data of ever-greater complexity. But we’re left to think that for ourselves – Decode doesn’t generally interest itself in the real-world applications of the technology it displays.

That shortcoming is more important than it might first appear. Digital technologies are highly disruptive – all around us, their effect is revolutionary, upsetting industries and social systems, changing the way we work, play, live and think. But Decode doesn’t feel very revolutionary or dangerous – it’s pretty and entertaining. Despite its subtitle – “digital design sensations” – there’s little that’s very sensational about Decode, nothing that hits you at gut level and makes you realise that the world’s going to be very different. Individually, these pieces are all perfectly meritorious, although it should be said that a few weren’t working when I visited. But when the work on show is taken as a whole, its focus on aesthetics and making the raw, terrifyingly abstract world of data and the network attractive and seemly, makes it feel similar to the bourgeois Victorian decorative arts that took inspiration from nature. It’s the 21st-century equivalent of William Morris wallpaper.

Indeed, the nature theme recurs throughout the exhibition, from Dan Roosegaarde’s thicket of LED-tipped wands at the entrance to Simon Heijden’s Tree projection (which responds to the wind outside the V&A) and John Maeda’s exuberant floral animation. Roosegaarde’s chirruping, flickering shrubbery, which flashes energetically when visitors brush past it, is one of the more affecting pieces in Decode. It’s charming, but there’s a hint of menace about it – a suggestion of unsympathetic animal intelligence and our primal suspicion of dark undergrowth. Decode could have looked more at the pity and terror of the new world, at its grandeur and transforming power, at the digital sublime. Instead we have digital crafts, which are … nice.

Decode: Digital Design Sensations is at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, until 11 April

top picture Audience by Random International for the Royal Opera House, London

picture Flight Patterns by Aaron Koblin

picture Dune, 2006-2009 by Daan Roosegaarde /p>

picture Weave Mirror, 2007 by Daniel Rozin. Photo by John Berens, courtesy Bitforms gallery, New York

Martin Arnold - Pièce touchée

Nicolas, 25/02/2010 | Source: Links

Arnold's breakthrough film, pièce touchée, is based on a single 18-second shot from The Human Jungle (dir. Joseph M. Newman, 1954). Woman sitting in a chair. Man enters the room. Man and woman kiss. Exit man.

Tags : cinema experimental video

Designaside » Sayaka Kajita Ganz

Designaside, 24/02/2010 | Source: Google Reader

Book Cell: Octagonal Building Made Entirely From Books!

Moe Beitiks, 24/02/2010 | Source: Google Reader

Architecture is knowledge, history, research and trend. This is literally evident in Book Cell, an octagonal building made entirely from books that was installed in the Modern Art Center in Lisboa. Slovakian artist Matej Kren built an octagonal framework, filled it with books and removed it, leaving a symmetrical, enclosed room of stacked literature.

Read the rest of Book Cell: Octagonal Building Made Entirely From Books!

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Post tags: Architecture, book cell, CAMJAP, de Matej Krén, eco-art, green architecture, green design, lisboa, matej kren, Recycled Materials, sustainable design

Jen Stark

Spencer Fry, 23/02/2010 | Source: Google Reader

Jen Stark

Sculptures by Jen Stark.

Metagraffiti - Dressed For Success

Nicolas, 21/02/2010 | Source: Links

Tags : graffiti performance video

“Ce qui coupe une ligne, c’est le point”, 2007 by Olaf Nicolai.

mail, 20/02/2010 | Source: Google Reader

“Ce qui coupe une ligne, c’est le point”, 2007 by Olaf Nicolai.

Terence Koh

angelo@abstractk.com (acidolatte), 18/02/2010 | Source: Google Reader

The Grayscale Universe of a Post-Media Artist
Written by Maxwell Williams. Photographed by Alexei Hay.

It was easier to remember the beginning of my three days with the artist Terence Koh than the end. In the beginning: there is a bedroom-sized restaurant in Chinatown called Brown, where I meet Koh for dinner. “I have no brains,” he says exhaustedly. “I lost all my brain cells.” It’s the week of the opening of Performa 9, the performing arts biennial in New York for which Koh is giving multiple performances. This part is true. I remember thinking it odd that Koh would meet me at a place called Brown, given I had just watched a conversation with him from his YouTube project, “The Terence Koh Show” (2008). In it, Koh says, simply, “I hate color.”

We eat pike and share a flourless chocolate brownie with vanilla gelato, then grab some beers (for me) and cranberry juice (for Koh) and move over to Koh’s apartment to continue the conversation. At the bottom of the stairs are a cluster of shoes and a sign that says SHOES OFF FAG. “I’m germaphobic,” explains Koh sheepishly. Or maybe he’s not. “Actually, I like to torture people. I like to watch them take off their shoes. Especially ladies. They’re usually in high heels when they come. They get pissed off because it’s part of their outfit.” From there, up the white stairs into the rabbit hole of Koh’s apartment we go. Here, as is true of a decent percentage of Koh’s artwork, it is dominantly white. Nestled in the cracks of the white linoleum floor is a human skull; the taxidermied albino peacock you see on this magazine’s cover sits in a glass vitrine by the white wall. A white couch, a white table, Terence Koh, dressed in white. We begin the interview. “I’m having tea,” says Koh. But maybe I saw him pouring a vodka and cranberry juice. “No. I’m having chamomile tea.”

“Probably, yes,” says Koh when I ask him if he will answer truthfully to the questions I ask him. Things can be interpreted in different ways in his life and art, an ambiguity that I admire more and more in Koh’s work. It’s not always threadbare like some shows at galleries and museums, where you walk in and you pick up the one-sheet artist’s statement and you easily connect the dots between process and concept, medium and intention. It’s the contrary for Koh’s art—you have to work for it. To prove this, all I need to do is look to my right, where Koh’s two mini-refrigerators [one of which may or may not be broken and which may or may not contain the cranberry juice in which Koh may or may not have mixed vodka into] and his microwave are fit like Tetris into several of Koh’s famed vitrines from his Kunsthalle Zürich show in 2006. In the vitrines—which remind me of Kinder eggs with prizes inside—are objects purchased while thrift store shopping in Berlin, all painted white. What are they exactly, other than glass boxes with trinkets inside? “I am purely a conceptual artist,” says Koh, with infinite irony. So, maybe then it’s the space in between concept and beauty, or maybe it’s the space between post-minimalism and irony, that Koh exists. It’s a start. But, where does it all come from?

What we do know about Terence Koh is he was born in either Beijing or Singapore or Malaysia or Vancouver. Somewhere on Earth, probably. Let’s say China, 1980, because that’s what it says on the website of the gallery that represents him, Peres Projects. He studied architecture, and was one of Zaha Hadid’s star assistants. His early work was made under the nom de guerre asianpunkboy, and mainly existed as a website full of poems and pornography. Wikipedia says he was raised in Mississauga, Ontario, a suburb of Toronto. asianpunkboy died when Terence’s work became a hot commodity, around 2003. See, if anything is certain, Koh is the poster boy for contemporary art. He is, for lack of a better term, what Picasso, Duchamp, Warhol, Basquiat, and Gilbert & George were before him: a fully formed “art star.” What that means is, again, open to interpretation and argument. He is not part of any categorical art movement, and his work sells for a lot of money. He is Asian and he is gay and he was married this summer to a graphic designer named Garrick—who designs all his art books—and he lives on Canal Street. He has ten fingers and ten toes and he doesn’t pronounce the “h” in “th.” He “tinks” about “tings.” He is a very good artist. Or a very bad one.

In 2007, Marc Spiegler wrote a rather baiting article, albeit well-written and entertaining, treating his New York Magazine readers to a spectacle of excess (a document of Koh and his dealer Javier Peres on a shopping spree) and of semi-open insider art dealings (it cost $400,000 to create the 1400 vitrines for the Kunsthalle Zürich show). He documented Koh’s usage of bodily fluids (a gold-plated collection, including Koh’s excrement, sold for $500,000). Given that the article was called “Is Terence Koh’s Sperm Worth $100,000?,” it is more a critique of the art market’s treatment of a young artist, or a subtle jab against decadence in the art world, than it is a profile of Koh. In fact, Koh hardly shows up in it, as if to reiterate that it’s hard to pin him down.

On the other hand, London’s Serpentine Gallery’s Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects, Hans Ulrich Obrist (the #1 most powerful man in the art world, according to ArtReview Magazine’s much derided, yet often discussed, Power 100), has followed Koh’s career for some time now. In an e-mail, he explains to me what he thinks of Koh’s work. “[I’m interested in] the utopian dimension and obvious proximity with the notion of Gesamtkunstwerk,” says Obrist, using an art historical term translated as “comprehensive artwork,” referring to Koh’s all-encompassing practice in the post-medium situation. “Terence Koh does everything: he does books, he does boxes, he does exhibitions, he does Internet, he does performances. He does specific installations, but he also does what Gilbert & George call ‘art for all.’” Obrist goes on to talk about Koh’s main influences: Warhol and Yoko Ono. Fame is a word often associated with Koh. Ono was very famous, too, but weird. Maybe that’s what ties them all together. They’re all Gesamtkunstwerk-ing weirdos.

As I sit in front of Terence Koh at his kitchen table, I quickly understand my interview with him will be much more of a conversation. It will be less of the dialectic he and Obrist recently had (also on YouTube) and definitely not investigative or unpleasant. He speaks softly when he admits he doesn’t allow very many face-to-face interviews—perhaps as a result of Spiegler’s less-than-flattering look into his world—preferring to conduct them through e-mail. Koh puts on John Cage’s “Music for Two Pianos.” Other than that it is eerily quiet. Koh even notes that we are being extremely “civilized.” But it could be even more so. “Ideally,” he muses, “that would be a perfect life: to be in an all-white room and to have nothing but a bed and all my groceries would be brought in a little pill.”

Regardless of our civility, we end up discussing everything from New York artist Ray Johnson’s suicide (“I like artists’ lives more than the artists’ work.”) to George Michael’s art collection (“One of my goals in my life is for George Michael to collect a Terence Koh piece.”) to meeting Madonna the night before in the Standard Hotel’s Boom Boom Room (“She was grinding on me!”). He sings me an aria from “Adansionias, A Tragic Opera in 8 Acts,” a recent project he did in Paris. He is extremely intelligent and knowledgeable about art history and can expound upon his work like few other artists, but his lost brain cells keep him taciturn for the most part tonight. “I forgot the question,” he says. “I’m being a difficult interview.” Suddenly, the interview devolves into yes and no answers. And then he starts to just say “yes” to everything. In a video from “The Terence Koh Show,” Chinese artist Zhang O asks Terence if his Chinese name is Ming Fing Ling. I ask him about that. “I guess that’s my name,” he says, giggling as though he’d never heard it before. “I like the way it sounds.

“I don’t intentionally make things vague and inconsistent,” he continues. “It’s as truthful as I can be. It’s what I remember. I just want to make things more honest. It’s like Indian myths and folklore. It’s just as truthful as the rain falling down.” Then, Koh tells me about why rain falls. It’s because of a white polar bear that he says died in Ontario. An Indian chief who wanted to show his prowess killed the bear. The bear’s tears are the rain.

The next evening, Koh and I, along with his assistants Alex and Val take a car to the Brooklyn Museum. It is sprinkling outside, but unseasonably warm. When we get there we are herded into a tiny storage closet in the education center of the museum, where Val applies full black body paint to Koh, who is in a black leotard and matching black sheer tights. I have offered my assistance and will be Koh’s videographer. When Koh is fully blackened, Alex and Val, also in black, put on long black wigs backwards so as to cover their faces, like a pair of heavy metal Cousin Its. I am told by the museum to get Terence at exactly 9:30 p.m. I am told by Terence to stall. Finally at about 9:45, a museum staffer comes to get Koh. I try to tell her the paint is still drying, he’ll come out soon. She makes it clear she’s not leaving the room without him. Koh, the diva, steps in. “I’ve been doing this so long,” he says. “I’ll go out when I go out. That’s how it works.”

When we emerge from the storage closet, the lights in the museum lobby have been dimmed. Koh positions himself behind a makeshift DJ booth, lights some strobes and starts pumping techno music at the art-seeking crowd. “DANCE!” he commands into a microphone. The Cousin Its try to pump the crowd into a frenzy, but little works. “DANCE!” he shouts again. But it seems the people at the museum are there to watch a performance, not be participants in one. This is Terence Koh, after all, the man who says he’s interested more in “artist’s tricks than in artists.” Maybe would-be ravers feel duped. It’s probably just the denizens of Brooklyn not wanting to look uncool. Then, just as I sense people are starting to feel the pulse of the beat, Koh breaks off from the DJ booth and enters a roped-off circle of heroic Rodin bronzes, where he does a Butoh-inspired contortion dance. With the bright lights on him, a circle forms around the statues and watches Terence warp his body. It’s truly beautiful, especially through a camera.

Later, he leans into me and says, “That part wasn’t supposed to be good.” It’s an awkward moment for me. I truly thought it was good, even if he deflects the connotation. At the end of the night, we go our separate ways, and I am somehow holding a black balloon in my hands. This is when things start to get fuzzy.

A photo shoot is happening in Asia Song Society. ASS, as it is almost only referred to, is Koh’s art gallery just below his office, which in turn is below the apartment I interviewed him in 48 hours previous. Val is painting Terence again—white this time. The albino peacock is being photographed, along with Koh, who looks like a cross between an African tribesman and a Mayan warrior. He hooks the peacock’s tail to his custom-made white Ralph Lauren bodysuit he received from Fischerspooner’s Casey Spooner.

“I have done this more times than you can imagine,” Koh retorts when I remark about his willingness to perform for the camera. He stands on a chair and contorts himself to the point where I’m ready to jump if he falls. He leans against the wall and let’s out the most ferocious silent scream. And I can’t remember the rest. Perhaps his scream sent us all into a state of hypnosis, like a siren’s call.

I fly back to Los Angeles and begin to think about my trip. I’ve known Koh for a little while now, and I’ve seen a few of his performances (and even one “non-performance” in Miami at Art Basel). I saw his infamous Whitney Museum show, where he aimed, in his words, “the brightest light possible” at the entrance of the museum. It was, according to him, an “outpouring of white love. It was my hippie piece to New York.” I felt that love back then, even if the light was so bright I couldn’t see right for several hours after. It embodied what Hans Ulrich Obrist later confirmed to me: Koh’s “utopian dimension.” The white pills, the white room, the white walls of art.

Maybe his bright beam of love mesmerized Aarons, Saatchi, Frahm… Did he cast a hypnotic light spell on these bastions of the art world? Obviously those collectors mentioned are very rich, very thoughtful white men, who are able to make

a purchase based on taste rather than value. Because it’s hard to say if Koh’s artistic bon mots can sustain their individual value on the primary market. In all honesty, I’d rather see Koh’s work exist in an institution, breaking down the white walls of the museum gallery, than languishing in a collector’s warehouse in Paris. They deserve to be experienced. They trigger something in us that whisks us away to a place where we are alleviated from our earthly contraptions. “I believe,” says Javier Peres, owner of Peres Projects, over an e-mail late one night, “a primary influence of Terence’s work is its ability to empower the viewer, including other artists, to explore the art-making process to its fullest and to create art in response both to the world around them, but also to what is inside them.”

The grayscale world in which Koh lives is not so black and white. A complex lineage of abstract, post-minimalist work clashes in the air above him, forming singing clouds, the precipitates floating down in a snow blanket of operas and sculptures, performances and bunny heads. Something Terence said while sitting in his kitchen echoes in my mind: “When I create something, it just pops up in my mind.”

Terence Koh: The Grayscale Universe of a Post-Media Artist

Written by Maxwell Williams. Photographed by Alexei Hay.

source: Flaunt Magazine

James Clar & Associates - Piece [You & Me]

jamesdouble, 15/02/2010 | Source: Google Reader

via http://www.jamesclar.com/piece/2006/youandme/index.html

Pylons of the future: Dancing with Nature / HDA

Karen Cilento, 12/02/2010 | Source: Google Reader

HDA’s construction technologies used for the arch of the Turin Olympic Footbridge (previously featured on AD), have been further refined for their most recent award winning competition proposal, entitled Pylons of the future: Dancing with Nature. The competition, held by Terna, a private national electricity provider, asked participants to design pylons of the highest technical and aesthetic quality with a minimal impact on the environment. HDA’s design response was based on transforming the current ‘industrial soldier’ image of today’s pylons into an elegant shape whose form was inspired by nature.

More images and more about the pylons after the break.

The competition seemed to pose a contradictory request: make the pylons, a clearly man-made structure, blend in with nature. By evaluating the relationship between the pylons and nature, HDA intended to create a structure that would “become a symbol of compatibility and symbiosis of man in his environment and not the inverse.”

Inspired by the form of the shoots of a young plant, HDA’s pylons work off the basis of Fuller’s tensegrity, as the “shoots” are stabilized by a system of tension cables at their tips. The tension and compression of the system gives the pylon an elastic strength to resist wind forces and retain an optimal elegance. Their triangular surfaces are inclined to reflect the light to become a singular and elegant plane with minimal shadow.

The new pylons also respond individually to their natural context and forces. The pylons lean into the direction of the forces of the cables they are required to carry, creating the allusion of the pylons “dancing” across the landscape. The “dancing” pylons find structural equilibrium by leaning into the curve of the electric cables as they follow the constraints of the landscape.

Parametric processes carried out design calculations and form determination while a complex construction phase, where the pylons were fabricated from flat steel plates cut to individual shapes using contemporary numerically controlled tools, assembled the pylons together using automatic continuous welding machines.

Check out previously featured projects by HDA as well as their complexities blog, an open research platform about architecture and complex geometry where the process of opening architectural culture and communication toward a more open culture vision of architectural contents is top priority.

CREDITS

Hugh Dutton’s design was admitted into the second phase in 2008 and was finally judged the winning design of the competition in December 2009.

CLIENT: Terna Spa

DESIGN TEAM: HDA – HUGH DUTTON ASSOCIÉS | designer, GIORGIO ROSENTAL | team leader, GOZZO IMPI ANTI, CEGELEC Solutions & Services |consultants

HDA DESIGN TEAM: HUGH DUTTON, PIERLUIGI BUCCI, PIERRE CHASSAGNE, FRANCESCO CINGOLANI, MARIA ANGELA CORSI, GAETAN KOHLER, CARLA ZACCHEDDU

Mine the Gap

Alexander Trevi, 11/02/2010 | Source: Google Reader

(Chicago's reversed skyscraper. Photo by “SolarWind - Chicago”. Source.)

Here's another competition, and it's organized by the Chicago Architectural Club. The site is the Chicago Spire hole.

The Chicago Architectural Club is pleased to announce the 2010 Chicago Prize Competition: MINE THE GAP, a single-stage international design ideas competition dedicated to examining one of the most visible scars left after the collapse of the real estate market in Chicago: the massive hole along the Lake Michigan shore that was to have been—and may yet be—the foundation for a singular 150-story condominium tower designed by an internationally-renowned Spanish architect, a tower which was to have become a new icon for the city and region. What to do with the gap? Whether or not the project is resuscitated, what else can we do with this strategic and highly-charged site? Once the motor of real-estate speculation has stalled, what can we use to propel ourselves, and the discipline, forward?

We're still pining for subterranean skydiving, but we'd be happy if it gets turned into a mushroom farm as a satellite venue for the world's largest annual food orgy, the Taste of Chicago.

Entries can be submitted online between March 22, 2010 and May 3, 2010.

(Spotted via @BlairKamin.)

Seen in the Tejares Neighborhood, Salamanca (Spain)

(author unknown), 10/02/2010 | Source: Google Reader

Arist: Pablo

Art History Poster | Design Milk

chrisid, 08/02/2010 | Source: Google Reader

via http://design-milk.com/art-history-poster/

Sculptural Sound Chamber Sings When the Wind Blows

Brit Liggett, 03/02/2010 | Source: Google Reader

Here at Inhabitat we love the wind — it’s one of our favorite natural resources. That explains our excitement when we heard about Luke Jerram’s new artistic venture, an acoustic pavilion that sings when the breeze blows by it. The project is named Aeolus after the Greek God of the wind, and it will employ hundreds of light tubes outfitted like Aeolian harps. Each pipe, or harp, has strings in it and as the wind passes over the structure in different directions the wind will strike chords in various parts of the circular structure. The art piece will travel all over the UK to windy summits and play a concerto of nature in each location.