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Archive for the ‘Artifacts’ Category

Box” is a short promo video by a company called Bot & Dolly, a design and engineering studio from San Francisco that specializes in automation, robotics, and filmmaking.

The video explores the synthesis of real and digital space through projection-mapping on moving surfaces.

The short film documents a live performance, captured entirely in camera. Bot & Dolly produced this work to serve as both an artistic statement and technical demonstration. It is the culmination of multiple technologies, including large-scale robotics, projection mapping, and software engineering:

More information:

I have been an admirer of the work of Swiss artist Jean Tinguely almost all of my life. It started while at university, when I bought this poster of a Tinguely exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London.

Since then I have been collection exhibition posters and graphic works of Tinguely and other artists and started to develop an interest in technology and media art.

Today, I stumbled upon another Swiss artist focusing on sculptures and installations that move, have rhythm and make noises – somewhat similar to Tinguely’s works – who works under the name of “Zimoun”:

According to the CV on his website

Zimoun builds architecturally-minded platforms of sound. Exploring mechanical rhythm and flow in prepared systems, his installations incorporate commonplace industrial objects. In an obsessive display of simple and functional materials, these works articulate a tension between the orderly patterns of Modernism and the chaotic forces of life. Carrying an emotional depth, the acoustic hum of natural phenomena in Zimoun’s minimalist constructions effortlessly reverberates.

Zimoun currently has an exhibition in The Netherlands in Groningen at np3TMP:

An interesting artist to check out in Groningen and follow IMO.

Found on eatART.org, a website of a Vancouver based technology art collective: Prosthesis, another exo-skeleton based artwork comparable to the works of Stelarc.

According to eatART Prosthesis is

an independent art project by Jonathan Tippett. It is a 5m tall, 3000kg, four-legged wearable walking machine, powered by a cutting edge, modular, expandable hybrid-electric power plant. Prosthesis uses this power to amplify the pilots movements through a full body, on-board exo-skeletal interface. The machine has no computerized control system or giros and is entirely dependent on the skill of the pilot to operate properly. The pilot’s skill and the configuration of the power system all contribute to the machines overall efficiency.This relationship reminds us, in very immediate way, how our use of technology can convert small acts in to movements of great consequence.

The Prosthesis project has it’s own website were you can track it’s progress: http://www.anti-robot.com .

“Anti-Robot” because according to the Prosthesis website:

Prosthesis is not being built to fulfill any practical need. It is not a tool, nor a weapon, nor a rehabilitation device. The purpose of Prosthesis is to explore what it means to be human by creating a challenging, completely unprecedented, interactive human-machine experience. Prosthesis is being built to push the age old pursuit of mastering a physical skill in to new territory. Prosthesis is a new sport, a new dance, a new martial art.
Prosthesis reminds us to question whether or not we really want to automate everything we do. It asks us to remember our bodies—remember how it felt when we first rode a bike—when we fist did a cartwheel—when we first landed a jump. It puts the human back in the driver’s seat, and then makes them learn to walk again.

Now in Mu Gallery in Eindhoven, Netherlands: the exhibition Sounds Like Art.

This is an excerpt of the description of the exhibition on the Mu Gallery website:

In the vanguard of music, sound artists are always exploring new ways of creating music. Often the search will not only lead them to the new sounds they set out to find, but also to some unique instruments. Instruments which, besides being functional, can also be seen as works of visual art in their own right. Especially when they combine the aesthetics of craftsmanship with the possibilities offered by the latest in technology.  Usually these works of art perform their humble services exclusively on the stage, where they can hardly be observed from up close. But in the exhibition SOUNDS LIKE ART the spotlight is not on the artists, but on the instruments they create. It has resulted in an exhibition in which we can hear and, most importantly, also see the unique interplay between form, material qualities, and technology of these new instruments.”

The artists participating are the Andy Cavatorta, who created a series of harps especially for Björk, which are played using gravity.

Other artists in the exhibition include Dutch hardware hacker Gijs Gieskes who compiles new synthesisers from existing electronics, and  musician/artist Tom Verbruggen, better known as TokTek, who creates some ingenious sound-producing sculptures.

 

Fellow art blogger Gwen Kuo commented on my post on noise wizard Tim Kaiser with a link to a post on the work of female sound artist Qin Yufen. Born in the Chinese town of Qindao in 1954, artist Qin Yufen has spent the last 15 years living and working in Berlin. This cross-cultural biography is  reflected in her site-sensitive installation work. Combining western artistic techniques with such symbolically eastern materials as bamboo, rice paper, and silk, Qin engages an ongoing dialogue between form and content, regionalism and internationalism, and East and West. At times serious, humorous, sublime, and simple, the aesthetics of her painterly sculptures and sound installations have been compared with traditional Chinese poetry, especially in her use of metaphor.

Qin’s site-specific sound installations present sublime aesthetics which have been compared with classical Asian painting“, according to Gwen Kuo. A video and pictures of several of her sound  installations can be found on Gwen’s Gwenart blog in the post “Qin Yufen : Sound, Art, Chinoisuire“. Check this post and other art related posts out on this interesting blog.


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