Coming across this amazing music video from OK GO, it makes me think that this would be a great winter activity for Brooklynites who don’t want to spent time outside freezing. Rube Goldberg Contest, winter 2011, anybody? We’ll sponsor it. P.S. This video is unbelievable. How they got the timing so perfect in one take, blows my mind.
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One wall in Paris. 5 years of graffiti. Whipped into a 3D animation by Serge Gainsbourg.
40 years after his sex symbolism, and he has still not lost his cool.
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The internet seems to be the world’s hard drive. Bye-bye photographs – there’s a copy on Facebook; bye-bye documents – there’s a copy on GoogleDocs. Zach Gage sought to play with the seeming permanence of web data by creating a site that marginally changes with every unique visitor – ultimately becoming a blank page:
Unlike personal data however, data on the internet has a seemingly infinite shelf-life. Between search-engine caching, cloud-hosting, re-blogging, plagiarizing, and the way-back machine, the net collects and eternally stores vast amounts of information.
Temporary.cc eschews this paradigm. For each unique visitor it receives, Temporary.cc deletes part of itself. These deletions change the way browsers understand the website’s code and create a unique (de)generative piece after each new user. Because each unique visit produces a new composition through self-destruction, Temporary.cc can never be truly indexed, as any subsequent act of viewing could irreparably modifiy it.
Eventually, like tangible media, Temporary.cc will fall apart entirely, becoming a blank white website. Its existence will be remembered only by those who saw or heard about it.
As Heraclitus observed, “You can not step twice into the same river” – the river is constantly flowing, constantly changing, therefore the water flowing past your feet 1 minute ago is not the same water as right now. There’s also that part of all of us that likes to make our presence known to future frequenters of a location (e.g. “Tony wuz here 6/12/98″ etched into a park bench) Of course Zach Gage has a much cooler, more interactive way of demonstrating the ever-changing river/bench that we know as the internet.
Make a difference here: Temporary.cc
Endorsed by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, design and architecture studio mode:lina has created a sonic installation made of a hanging entanglement (in the shape of a cloud) of corrugated pipes, each serving as an amplifier that emits sounds accumulating around its actual position. This project was largely inspired by the concept of Audioarchitektura (Sonicarchitecture), which the studio describes as:
A utopian vision of a city that cannot be heard. An innovative system of sound emission, which isolates people from the unbearable audiosphere of crowded streets, traffic and all the noise that unnaturally has become an inseparable part of our life. Invisible Sonic-buildings, spread along the sidewalks, in parks and boulevards, emitting sound waves that drown out the city noise. Passer-by walking in their range are surrounded by the sound of hypnotic composition of Steve Reich’s concert, broadcasted live from the concert hall or a melody of raindrops falling on the tin roofs of urban buildings. Today this is a utopian technology, but Sonic Architecture is also a basis for discussion on acoustic ecology, city’s acoustic landscape and its impact on the inhabitants.
Having been born and raised in New York City, there is something deeply comforting to me about the incessant sound of honking cars, the click-clack of a businessperson against , and the hustle and bustle of a metropolis. Even at sleep-away camp in the mountains of Colorado, I would lie awake at night, unable to fall asleep because I was unsettled by the sound of nothingness (and a nearby creek), and longed for the sound of a car alarm. On rainy nights, the sound of raindrops falling down on our covered wagons (yes, wagons=bunks; 4 kids per wagon) sort of sufficed, but there’s still something so different about the sound of rain blanketing the city, when urbania is still audible but sounds miles away. What I needed in Colorado at age 12 was a couple of these mp3s of the many seemingly insignificant little sounds that make up the sound of a city:
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If you’re ever in Poland, the installation is on display at SPOT./ in Poznań.
There’s nothing wrong with opera. For singers, it’s the hardest genre to sing (even Beyoncé attempted to sing a few measures of “Habanera” from Carmen for a soda commercial a few years ago – and failed,) but if you can sing opera, you can sing anything; for composers, the sky’s the limit: Mozart threw in the highest note ever and the lowest note ever in The Magic Flute, and there’s no such thing as too extravagant – and the same goes for costume designers. Behind all the satin gloves, tuxedos, and white hair in the pompous crowd associated with it, a night at the opera can be hilarious, heartbreaking, and full of beautiful music.
That said – it’s a pleasure to see that The Knife, at the other extreme of music in the world of electronica, has composed an electro-opera as well as written the libretto for it (even Mozart didn’t write the words for his own operas.) Excerpt:
An intersection of the plain
by the bank of some great stream
the animal carcasses
and skeletons would be
entombed
Tomorrow in a year
tomorrow in a million years
Since it’s The Knife we’re talking about, it goes without saying that there must be some cool, eccentric catch to it all. Yes, well, the opera is about the world through the eyes of Darwin, in honor of the 150th birthday of the publication of On the Origin of Species. Differing from traditional operas that tend to have a 4 or so main characters on top of a chorus of 30, The Knife’s opera, Tomorrow, in a Year has 3 singers (only) and 6 dancers that perform to choreography by renowned Japanese modern dancer Hiroaki Umeda.
Tomorrow, in a Day will be residing at the Danish theatre Hotel Pro Forma, and will be touring in Switzerland, Germany, and France.
Here’s a video from the show, maybe it’ll even provoke you to take a trip to Europe:
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Weeeee! After seeing the Kakuzai “Wood” Memo Block all over the blogosphere lately, and how it was unavailable in the U.S. — we just had to get it. Please give a warm welcome to the most gorgeous memo tower, making its first American appearance:
[gallery order="DESC"]The Kakuzai Memo came all the way from Japan, from designer Kenjiro Sano a.k.a. MR_DESIGN – who has done lovely work for some big names.
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UrbanScreen is a creative collective based in Bremen, Germany that specializes in projections on building façades – but what makes them so awesome is that they design their artwork for the specific building onto which it will be projected – so they really take the architecture of the building into account, and playfully customize the projections according to the building’s layout, resulting in an extremely cool augmented reality. Their latest feat is a projection on the Hamburg Kunsthalle:
The conception of this project consistently derives from its underlying architecture – the theoretic conception and visual pattern of the Hamburg Kunsthalle. The Basic idea of narration was to dissolve and break through the strict architecture of O. M. Ungers “Galerie der Gegenwart”. Resultant permeabilty of the solid facade uncovers different interpretations of conception, geometry and aesthetics expressed through graphics and movement. A situation of reflexivity evolves – describing the constitution and spacious perception of this location by means of the building itself.
Via we find wildness
This is probably the funniest thing I’ve seen all week, and it’s making me very sad that I don’t live on the L anymore (they gotta start doing the G train)! So here we have it: A Completely Ironic Service that only stands to lose money, but make you lots of friends. Awesome. Check the details after the jump.
Click to continue reading “100% Crack Rock Delivery Service”
Twitter just the right way and you may find your tweet printed here into this artspace. Here’s an amazing project that grabs little bits of our collective consciousness from twitter and facebook and prints it on physical thermal paper in a feed quite similar to what I’d imagine all of the nonsense looking if it were to be printed in such a manner. It all collects on the floor in a haphazard manner. Brilliant. Official description and links/video below.
Murmur Study is an installation that examines the rise of micro-messaging technologies such as Twitter and Facebook’s status update. One might describe these messages as a kind of digital small talk. But unlike water-cooler conversations, these fleeting thoughts are accumulated, archived and digitally-indexed by corporations. While the future of these archives remains to be seen, the sheer volume of publicly accessible personal — often emotional — expression should give us pause. This installation consists of 30 thermal printers that continuously monitor Twitter for new messages containing variations on common emotional utterances. Messages containing hundreds of variations on words such as argh, meh, grrrr, oooo, ewww, and hmph, are printed as an endless waterfall of text accumulating in tangled piles below.
Murmur study is an ongoing collaboration with Márton András Juhász and the Kitchen Budapest. Murmur Study is a commission of Northern Lights’ Art(ists) On the Verge program with the generous support of the Jerome Foundation. Additional support provided by the McKnight Foundation, the Weisman Art Museum, and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Project Site / Videography by Andrea Steudel / Music – Tarlton – « Bol» tarltonmusic.com
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Teenage Engineering, a rather mystical company that seems to have some sort of Japanese origins, is now officially showing their OP-1 synthesizer. It was last demo’d in Frankfurt in April. Their website still shows the system as in “beta” but we can only hope this little wonder gets released soon…the possibilities look endless. If (hopefully!) they release it at a reasonable price point, I can see this thing taking stage center in the synthesizer/controller/sampler arena, because the interface looks truly amazing and intuitive, unlike anything I’ve seen before. Also, it’s tiny! Check out the video to see the “spy shots” of the interface in action, and the Frankfurt interview showing the finished product on display. As soon as this puppy is released, look for it here, we’ll definitely stock it if they’ll let us!
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