Old School, John Maeda

Last Saturday I went to town again to see some more art. Hauser & Wirth Gallery on Old Bond St. is currently showing an exhibition called "Old School". The idea is to show classical as well as contemporary paintings in one show and to examine the correlations between them. I have to say that although I was a bit hesitant in the beginning as to whether this might work or not, I can now say that I really enjoyed the show as I was pleased to find that some works of my all-time favourites Gerhard Richter and Jeff Wall as well as other contemporaries of the likes of Luc Tuymans are doing rather well in the company of old masters like Lucas Cranach the Elder and Carlo Dolci. Find some pictures below:





After that, I got myself immersed into a completely different aesthetic context by visiting John Maeda's exhibition "My Space" at Riflemaker Gallery. Maeda being one of MIT's finest in terms of new media art for years and it came both as a shock and a shame to me that I discovered him so late. I particularly liked the pieces he did with the iPods, be it to reprogram them as a display for a Mac II or as a form of collage. But the one piece that left me rather stunned was the sugarcube-print.

In the case of the Cibachrome photograph representing sugar granules, Maeda wanted to find some way to use every little crystal of sugar in one image. Influenced by the idea of nanotechnology — essentially the ability to paint with atoms — and by his conviction that computer graphics has become overused and overdeveloped, John Maeda thought it would be interesting to individually place together each crystal of sugar to obtain an image. The reality of all of the sugar in a sugar packet and the synthetic nature of three-dimensional computer graphics have come together in a series of highly saturated, visually captivating photographs.

The content of a single sugar packet was placed onto a scanner bed, and scanned in several passes. Maeda then created a computer program that was able to extract single images of the sugar crystals from the scan. To his surprise, Maeda found that in a single crystal packet there are more than 70,000 individual crystals. A computer graphic scene was then specially rendered by another piece of software he wrote. Finally another computer program he wrote processed the data such that each ‘pixel’ could be replaced with a corresponding sugar crystal cluster. This general process of using a conventional image scanner as a kind of camera, and the computer programs written by Maeda as a kind of chemistry for developing the film,repurposes digital photography to illuminate the relationships between image, artificial image, and reality. (link)

Highly recommended:





Pictures in this post are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 UK: Scotland License.

Kinetica once more

Kinetica put on a new show since I last was there. This time, it's about "Visionaries & Luminaries", so all the works exhibited have something to do with light or its absence.

One of the works that struck me both with its simplicity and effect was Jim Campbell's picture of moving shadows.


As you can see, the method is achieved via an LED panel superimposed on a photograph, but the effect is stunning since the matrix of the panel can be addressed dynamically. The shadows look very convincing and vary in size, shape and movement.

There were also some pieces experimenting with fluorescent surfaces like this "lamp-shade" here:



The picture below is of a camera-obscura-style piece which works with strobe light. It's hard to document it with a single frame, so in case you like it, make sure to check it out for yourself.



Some more images below...










Pictures in this post are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 UK: Scotland License.

RCA Interaction Design Interim Show

Last weekend I went to the RCA Interactive Design show which displayed several works in progress. Having attended the last two consecutive graduate shows which were held annually, I was curious to get a glimpse on future gadgets and conceptual ideas.

Among the works which really interested me was "Flat Future" by Miquel Mora which showed practical applications for super-thin microprocessors applied on tape to suit various everyday purposes. Whether it's labeling fruit, attaching speakers to a book you read at the moment or taking exact measurement via "smart tape", the possibilities are endless.



I was aware that Siemens are currently doing active research in the field of super-thin displays. The above project seems like the logical progression. While I would suspect that a lot of marketing experts would only deem these displays to have advertising on them all the time, Flat Future shows luckily enough that it doesn't at all end there.

The guys over at we make money not art also have a post about the whole show, for those among you who would like to check it out....

Next up was an Origami remote control. Nice one. Although I loved to play with the folded object which served as a model for the remote control, I wasn't able to fold one myself back in the day when I was a kid, as I focused more towards the perfection of the paper plane per se.



However, it is yet another example that new and exciting innovation with electronic media does not need to stem from more powerful hardware, as more hardware usually means that more things can break, lag or freeze, it is also more complicated. In the wake of Nintendo being the rejoicing third party while Sony and M$ are engaging in a console (and DRM) arms-race, this remote control not only shows that simple and effective is the right way to begin with, it might even have commercial success one day...

I also liked the emotoscope which gives you a vintage super-8 feeling while looking through it, along with the flickering and the sound.



Some more images of other projects below.












Pictures in this post are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 UK: Scotland License.