On Shows, and Going Ons

May be a bit strange picture to restart postings here, but I feel that it’s quite appropriate, and ‘to the point’. These are the hands of Richard Parry, leader of Bell Orchestre band; they performed here in Eindhoven recently, during the Flux-S festival, in an old and abandoned industrial complex called Strijp. It was one of the most uplifting and energizing performances I’ve seen lately – very interesting music, and a very creative use of instruments.

This is just one of their compositions, deceptively simple and yet very strong; one of the leading parts is played by the… drum sticks, hitting the concrete floor of the hall.

Net Works

WorkForce HaHa at De Fabriek

Almost by accident managed to get to an interesting event, a sneak preview of the show Workforce HaHa at the De Fabriek [looks like they have a redesign of their web site atm]; met a few very interesting folks, both the artists and the people from the hosting organization itself. Need to follow these contacts when back from the trip.

Hell to Heaven, elevator pitch

Civilization, by Marco Brambilla, is a stunning video installation designed for the elevators of the Standard Hotel in New York.

“The video mural depicts a journey from Hell to Heaven interpreted through modern film language using computer-enhanced found footage,” writes Eric Melin who also compares this art+technology work with the epic visual narratives of the Garden of Earthly Delight by Hieronymus Bosch. “This epic video mural contains over 300 individual channels of looped video blended into a multi-layered seamless tableau of interconnecting images that illustrate a contemporary, satirical take on the concepts of Heaven and Hell.”

I like the idea of re-place-ing and re-playing this old, archetypical story in a hyper-modern context, and also enacting a dramatic Dante-like journey using a banal elevator. The most obvious reading of the journey is from Bottom to the Top (from the Past to the Future?), but in fact the spatial organization is more complex. Both Hell and Heave are the futures, and both are possible.

Wonder if they they heat the cabin when passing the Hell.

Freedom, Ghanified

Somehow I got to this gathering in Second Life, with, and about the Ghana speech of Obama. Usually it’s not my piece of cake, but via-via I got an invite (and then tp) from a friend from the crowd. The meeting was well-attended, I should say, although a higher than average proportion of Linden avatars pointed that one shouldn’t expect too much of political incorrectness or ‘playfulness’.

And yet I managed to find – if not full game, than at least some element of playful re-writing of the reality (which is what Second Life for, if you ask me). At some distance from the gathering venue there was a model of the US Capitol (no Capitol Hill though) – at least, the building was resembling the US Capitol enough for me to consider it as such.

But then my eye spotted on the top of the building a very interesting artifact, and not quite the Statue of Freedom

I really liked the way they appropriately modified (Ghanified) the statue, to fit the topic of the talk, kudos!

Obama ‘Gotham’ is the Desingers’ President

Last issue of form publishes an article by Erik Spiekermann that looks at the US presidential campaigns with an eye of graphic designer (and ES, renown German designers, founder and for many years a director of legendary MetaDesign studio, does have such an eye).

Few excerpts:

“Type doesn’t provide the melody” [I guess, he meant 'meaning' here], but the sound of a text. A song strummed on a banjo will sound different from the same song performed by a full philharmonic orchestra. Listeners will know. And designers have, of course, always been aware of that fact.

“Barack Obama himself also has to abide by some of these unwritten laws. His logo shows a blue semi circle, rising like the sun over three curvy red stripes that flow towards the upper right – into the future?

“OBAMA’08 is set in roman capitals. But his motto ‘Change’ makes a much more definite typographic statement.

“Above varying sublines it is set in Gotham, the typeface that want to be generic. Its designers were inspired by vernacular type found on the New York’s public buildings. Batman lives in Gotham City, the mystical New York. Gotham looks simple and geometric, but not as cold or constructed as DIN [similar font, used, for example, on the road signs along the German highways]. It has authority but tolerate dissent.

“The candidate on the other side, John McCain, makes a Freudian choice, typographically speaking. Optima, of all the things, the typeface that doesn’t know whether it is a serif or sans.

“This wimpish alphabet is supposed to represent the war hero and hardliner in matters of security. His logo also features a golden star that looks like it belongs to a uniform, but he cannot kid us, experts: if this election campaign is about brands, there can only be one real candidate: Barack “Gotham” Obama will be the designer’s president.”

Domnitch & Gelfand :: 10k Peacock Feathers

Ok, this performance I did catch, albeit only a half; but the picture is not mine again (taken from electroblog); I only manage to make a few sec long video of at the tail of the show. Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand presented their (already famous) Ten Thousand Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid.

More details can be found on the artists’ website, and also there is a video on YouTube explaining how the technology behind the show works:

sonArc::ema – Jan-Peter Sonntag

Again, this is not my picture, but rather a visual stab, to learn more about Jan-Peter Sonntag later on. He and another group, N-Solab (both from Denmark Germany) presented sonArc::ema performance at the AE gala. Apparently, both teams share the same site, www.sonarc-ion.de, where a few interesting examples of the past projects can be found.

PS: While searching for more information about the artists, I bumped into an interesting site, www.mediaarchitecture.org, where they also announce the coming Media Facade Festival in Berlin, later in October; might be interesting for another project I am to run soon.

(missed) SoUNdSET : Domenico Sciajno

Because of my long night walk to Postlingsberg, I missed the beginning of the All Inclusive gala opening; so, the picture is not mine, but made by Pablo Sanz (who also has an interesting blog Mediateletipos).

An opening performance named SoUNdSET was by Domenico Sciajno and TeZ (aka Maurizio Martinucci), multi-media artists from Italy. Domenico himself describes the idea of SoUNdSET in the following way:

“As the sun begins to go down (at 7:38 PM on September 4, 2008), visitors can take a seat on the viewing terrace, focus their attention on the diminishing natural sunlight and simultaneously influence via directional loudspeakers the live soundscape being generated in relation to it. As the natural light increasingly gives way to the darkness of night, the more these acoustic experiences are transformed.”

More about Domenico Sciajno can be found at this site, and also another site about his recent projects, including Cosmofonie.

new ae building

I didn’t know the program of the event well enough (and I remember well, the site was also misleading – it says that the old building of AE will be functioning till the end of October or something). The reality was very different as you see – the old building of AE is NOT functioning, or rather it is in a full-steam transition to the new building. From this side the transformation does not look particularly impressive, but in reality the extension if very big.

The poster of the contraction company I saw nearby gives some (vague) idea of the future AE:

But to get the real scale of the project, one needs to go the other side of Danube

I later found (in the brochure about Linz as Cultural Capital of Europe 2010) the following image:

I marked with the red dot the place where I took the very first image fro, so you can try to reconstruct the total picture.