Okay...It's not art. But...scientists recently discovered these glow in the dark Mushrooms in Japan. Thanks to an enzyme-aided chemical reaction, these 'shrooms' emit a greenish light. Pretty awesome what nature does!
.jpg)
“Content is Queen” is a video art series of generative portraits that reflects on the foundations of democracy against the resilient nature of structures of power. At the same time, is a paradoxical dialogue and strange marriage between the banal and utterly majestic: to create the series, the most popular (in a truly democratic sense) internet videos of a given moment are used as the input of a generative process that “paints” with action the image of a contemporary Queen.
Photographer Jan-Dirk van der Burg takes pictures of the everyday life, the unnoticed or things that are so common we tend to don't see them anymore. His subjects range from dogshit cleaners, office culture, miniature mechanics, day in the lives of pensionada and visits workshops to photograph whats going on there as well.
His website is made in Flash which is a pity; the photos deserve a better website.
"The Ark"- It is an object of 3 x 3metres, consisting of 100 portraits of people with eyes closed. For this project Igor Kruter searched for 100 persons not in an optimal state and/or in a stressed mind. Struggle is a daily matter, a daily struggle for all kinds of things, causing a lot of stress. They feel insecure due to this stress, which is in that sense another form of suffering. “The Ark” is a kind of photo therapy. In the process of creating this object Kruter wants to relieve the minds of his models, offer them time to come to themselves, to let them return to a certain state of rest. These people are offered a moment of coming into a balanced state, showing of in Kruter´s work. When seeing the work of the 100 portraits as a body, you are looking at a balanced object. One person is equal to the other, no one is attracting attention more than the other: the work is in balance and it is a whole. The work radiates rest. Rest and balance has to return in each and every person in this work. Every person in “The Ark” has closed eyes, everyone is focused on his inner self, has his own perception of the environment. At that moment of personal relaxation and returning rest, every person is creating an ideal world for oneself, a moment of being in paradise, a moment in eternity. That even before death of the individual. The portraits create an image of intense sleep, close to death. The rest brought by death is for a moment experienced.
A project by: Igor Kruter
The fourth edition of Arnhem Mode Biennale is named Amber and from 1 June until 3 July we are in search of her true identity.
Arnhem Mode Biennale is one of the biggest events in Arnhem and this year again we can't go around it. I went to the main exhibition this saturday. And was impressed by the exhibtion-design itself. The black walls and guiding line through the complete exhibition was very nice to see. I wasn't really suprised by the work though, but I liked that it was more than fashion. Offcourse there where some nice things there was a room full of great photographs selected by Capricous magazine http://becapricious.com/ this magazine was also shown in our own O.K. Festival Magazine expo. And offcourse a beautifull dress made by Iris van Herpen.
As a conclusion I must say I liked the exhibition in general. Some nice things, nice exhibition design in a very nice building. The entrance price is a bit to high for what you get (but you get the catalog for free) and you can skip the bookshop. But if you are in Arnhem or planning to go there please go here it's you'll have a good time.
First photograph by Anuschka Blommers, Niels Schumm and Uta Eisenreich
I was in Florence a few weeks ago and this is what I saw. A nice way to make your streetsigns look a lot better. I also posted a picture (the second one) from one of my earlier posts from a street sign in Gent.
The website of some very cool exhibition designers, website looks a little odd, but there work is great, for example these images of the Loki Schmidt Haus. Also check out their design for the State Museum of Textile and Industry, Augsburg, quite nice.
www.atelier-brueckner.com
We love magazines, that's why we have our own magazine, magazine event and will, from now on, review magazines at this blog. Hope you like it.
A5 Magazine
#11 Home Edition
The second time I'm reviewing A5, a lovely magazine, and I think I love this way of binding(none), printing and design the best. In stead of a normal bound magazine it's a box with loose cards.
A5 magazine is a platform for artist to show their work. An exhibition in a magazine form each time with another theme. By giving each artist it's own card loose in a box it get's full attention. No images on the other page of a spread or strange design quirk the designer thought of to make the page look nicer. Just the work and nothing but the work and if you want to know more about the work just turn the page and you'll see, and again in the sec and dry design that makes this magazine so stylish.
Because the cards are loose it's hard to flip through the work. Which is a good thing for the artists in the magazine especially the first ones. But not very handy if you are a flip-through-a-magazine-in-a-minute kind of guy like me. I like to go through a magazine thoroughly the first time I see it and when it landed on my bookshelf I like to flip through it in en few minutes once in a while. This is not possible which make it a magazine I like very much but won't get of my bookshelf very often. And that's a pity cause it's a very nice project.
Want to know more about A5 or want to see when the next issue is coming up? Surf to: http://www.thea5magazine.com/
A virtual tour through the new Noord-Brabants museum (regional museum) and the new Stedelijk Museum (contemporary art / city museum), completely build in sketch-up, making it possible to do a complete walk through the museum in Google! I think that's quite amazing.
http://www.noordbrabantsmuseum.nl/arachna/nl/131/het_museum/gebouwen/virtuele_tour
Beautiful documentary about architectural photographer
Julius Shulman.
Populating his photos with human models and striking landscapes, Shulman combined the organic with the synthetic, melding nature with revolutionary urban design. Amongst others, he documented the work of Richard Neutra, John Lautner and Rudolph Schindler.
Don't know why, but recently a Dutch girl got a tattoo of 152 of here facebook "friends".. Maybe it's some kind of joke, promotion or advertizing thing but this is what she says about it here self: "It shows who I am and in what time I'm living"
Photographer Vic Blue made this documentary on a man preparing himself for the outside life after having been in prison for over ten long years. The short film is exquisitely shot and prisoner Doug Starcher provides us with a raw insight on what life is like for some. Check out the written essay and photo series as well at 2011.soulofathens.com/our-dreams-are-different/almost-out-1.html
"Everybody is felons. From my grandpa and grandma, mom and dad, all my uncles, all my brothers have penitentiary numbers. (...) I guess that's what was normal. I thought that it was part of growing up. You had to go to prison too, it was what everybody else did."
via FecalFace
Epix Exquisite Corpse as a project bij Xavier Barrade and developed by Wake Up Web Solution and supported Icon Paris.
A field of 1.000.000 empty spaces is set-up to make an enormous drawing. Each space can be fild by a drawing of one person, the drawing can be made online so it's easy and fun to do. The start of 34 drawings looks promising and I'm very curious how it will grow in the coming days.
Jeroen Holthuis and myself have been in contact since we featured his work in the second O.K. Periodicals; the FAILURE issue (click ISSUES on the right for a preview). We featured his Bitquid installation in this issue which I think is very very very, VERY, awesome!
Recently he has been working to transform the beautifull glitchy images into silkscreen prints. Which, as you can see, did work out very fine.
He told me there are a limited amount of copies available for purchase. I'd say: get one!
As a reminder also the previously featured video of the Bitquid installation.
A (new?) website showing posters in the streets of Amsterdam (the Netherlands). A wonderful collection with good and bad ones. They also started doing interviews with the designers of the posters, one of the first is Michiel Schuurman. He makes awesome poster-designs.
Recently I came across the image above. I found it very fascinating, and saved it in my personal 'source of inspiration' folder. Not knowing what to do with it, but these things always turn up quite usefull. Such as now, when someone (forgot who did...) posted this on facebook. A time lapse video made by VLT, Very Large Telescopes. Magnificent and beautiful! Have a look at the video. (I don't like the music, so you can turn that off)
Robert Overweg is a photographer in the virtual world. He sees the worlds of (first and third person shooter) games as the new public space of contemporary society and as a direct extension of the physical world.
His various projects give a marvellous view of a photographer in a virtual world, unlike the real one. For example, he searches for different ends of the virtual world, shows the people he has met in an uncomfortable series of photographs (literary; screenshots of videogames) or looks for places which give a new view on the game. This makes you start thinking about which role videogame-makers have in the contemporary art world, don't you?
New experiment by Bart Hess: the slime research, exploring limits of the gaga goo. Images found via his facebook page, not yet on his website. He creates imagery that captures future human shapes and new body form’s.
Ton Zwervers Every Day Sculptures project defines the way the artist works. For him, his work is ever changing. The sculptures he makes every day from found material, only exist for a moment as they are photographed and changed again.
The first weekend of June, his work is exhibited during KunstKamers Rotterdam, worth checking out.
Blue Remix/ Yann Marrusich
In his spectacle-instalation Bleu remix,Yann Marussich let a mysterious blue liquid ooze as blood would, through the layers of his skin, as though it was a final effect or a by-product of his body's inner processes. This way, Marussich opened the paths between the inside and the outside world - secret passages from the unconscious, straight to the conscious. Each time the spectacle is performed, a different (local) musician accompanies Yann This exceptional - unique and one-time - confrontation of a musician with a performance establishes a new relation between the sound and the created image. The spontaneous meeting of two artists brings an element of risk and uniqueness to the event, as if the music explored the spectacle over and over again and depicted new ways of perception.
Life Support/ Revital Cohen
Assistance animals - from guide dogs to psychiatric service cats - unlike computerised machines, can establish a natural symbiosis with the patients who rely on them. Could animals be transformed into medical devices?
This project proposes using animals bred commercially for consumption or entertainment as companions and providers of external organ replacement. The use of transgenic farm animals, or retired working dogs, as life support ‘devices’ for renal and respiratory patients offers an alternative to inhumane medical therapies.
Could a transgenic animal function as a whole mechanism and not simply supply the parts? Could humans become parasites and live off another organism’s bodily functions?
www.revitalcohen.com
A few weeks ago I visited a lecture by mr. van den Hoed about his work and specifically his latest project, in which he set out on a quest to reproduce certain stills from the film Lost in Translation, sans characters. Yet van den Hoed never makes a traditional photo (if there is indeed such a thing as the traditional photo); one work is a composition of hundreds if not thousands of tiny photos from different times of day and different lighting situations, edited into an essentially timeless piece. The final image represents a moment that was never really there, a kind of vacuum in time and space in which the heart of the city of Tokyo resides. The story of his quest is almost as interesting as the work itself, but is too long to be told here - and he tells it better anyway. If you can, I highly recommend you check out his current exhibition.
There's another guy roaming the internets with his pinhole cameras, but this one is a lot more innocent and a lot less macabre. Artist Francisco Capponi devised this egg camera that is its photograph at the same time, a concept which I love. It's kind of like an artsy Kinder Surprise Egg!
Check out his website for more of his cameras and photographs.
The critical acclaims below are pretty much explaining why you should take a look at the amazing sound sculpture works by ZIMOUN.
With hundreds of dc-motors, wires and cardboard boxes he creates wonderful artworks.
«The sound sculptures and installations of Zimoun are graceful, mechanized works of playful poetry, their structural simplicity opens like an industrial bloom to reveal a complex and intricate series of relationships, an ongoing interplay between the «artificial» and the «organic». It‘s an artistic research of simple and elegant systems to generate and study complex behaviors in sound and motion. Zimoun creates sound pieces from basic components, often using multiples of the same prepared mechanical elements to examine the creation and degeneration of patterns.» Tim Beck
«It is a poetic and humorous absurdity we find in Zimoun’s work, which opens up a wide, refreshing and enriching space for discoveries, associations and a multitude of approaches.» Nina Terry
«Zimoun creates more than moving structures; he develops a space where the oeuvre, once it’s set in motion, can create itself.» Oscar Gomez Poviña
«Zimoun is best compared to a watchmaker of a self-reproducing time constructing his own gauging station.» Radjo Monk
Andreas Nicolas Fischer is an artist working with generative systems, physical representations of data as well as visualizations of digital processes. And the work he makes is very intrigiuing. His latest work, the PL I, II and III serie have also some videos.
Reflection II, commissioned by 5 Days Off Festival, combines sound that reacts on the sculpture when it's scanned. But there are a lot more projects worth watching on his website.
Posted by Test
12-11-2011
_thumb.jpg)
