14/12/2013: WLASze: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences & zero economics

This is WLASze: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics


Amazing work of experimental architect and artist Lebbeus Woods drawing on his work from the 1980s: http://www.dezeen.com/2012/11/08/lebbeus-woods-early-drawings/. Lebbeus traces back to the Chicago 'Bauhaus' and worked under Eero Saarinen. He later co-founded and led http://www.riea.ch/ which seeming became largely inactive back around 2009-2010, but left a marked legacy of daring innovation. Woods' site is here: http://lebbeuswoods.net/. His work is going to be profiled in November-March 2014 exhibition at the Michigan State University: http://www.archdaily.com/444068/exhibition-lebbeus-woods-architect/

Another wonderful feature from dezeen, with nice home connection: Dublin-based designers Notion have set up own brand NTN. The inaugural collection is brilliant, although short: http://www.dezeen.com/2013/12/08/first-collection-from-new-dublin-design-brand-includes-a-table-with-a-hammock-underneath/
Occasionally whimsical, often challenging, and frequently truly non-derivative in originality, this is an excellent start for what is promising to be a bright, light, creative design shop. And it is a much needed boost to Dublin design community which generally lacks brands that can stand on their own internationally, but has so much real potential. Let's hope Enterprise Ireland is paying attention!
My favourite of the lot:

The brand design base is here: http://www.designbynotion.com/
And NTN brand collection is here: www.ntn.ie



Unlike design in Dublin, which moving toward real sustainable life, life on Mars has taken a turn for the worse in recent years (rather billions of years). Nonetheless, fascinating bit of news from NASA's Curiosity rover is that "a crater found on Mars is actually an ancient lake bed that could have contained the proper conditions to have supported life on the Red Planet."

NASA scientists basically claim that they "have discovered the fossil remains of a lake inside Gale Crater. The scientists say that this lake would have existed for as long as tens of thousands of years, which is long enough for life to have evolved." And, allegedly, the lack "contained chemical and mineral conditions needed to support microbial life. The lake waters held low salinity at just the right acidity and all the chemicals needed to support living organisms." Read more on this here: http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/1113023177/life-bearing-ancient-lake-discovered-mars-120913/

Let's hope Irish Water will too contain the right acidity and all the chemicals needed to support living organisms… and deliver these to us at a price that won't turn Ireland into a Martian 'Gale Crater'…

Fabian Oefner show at the whimsically inimitable MB&F M.A.D. gallery, Geneva (through May 2014) is based on pain tacking deconstruction of classic sports cars and re-assembly of their deconstructed images into a static representation of dynamic motion called 'explosion'… See the brilliant video of the work here:
http://www.designboom.com/art/fabian-oefner-explodes-views-of-classic-sports-cars-11-29-2013/
And MB&F gallery link is here:
http://www.mbandf.com/mad-gallery/explore/disintegrating-by-fabian-oefner/

His other work is here: http://www.mbandf.com/mad-gallery/explore/hatch-by-fabian-oefner/
and his personal page is here: http://fabianoefner.com/
So now you know, when that Lambo no longer fits the driveway… go 'Boom' instead of 'e-Bay'… for some serious visual impact.



Of course, the concept of destruction as artistic expression is not novel. Perhaps surgical nature of Oefner's work makes it rather more technically advanced, but the idea traces back centuries, including historical alterations and defacements of the ancients. One good example from the past is this article on "The seeds of destruction" or "Art Under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm at Tate Britain" covering the recent exhibition of the Tate:
http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/seeds-destruction
I love this work by Jake and Dinos Chapman:

And here's a feature about Capmans show in Kiev earlier this year: http://www.designboom.com/art/the-sum-of-all-evil-by-jake-and-dinos-chapman/

Not a cheerful note to end, but superb art…

Enjoy!

21/7/2013: WLASze Part 3: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics

The third part of my regular WLASze: Weekly Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics...
Parts one and two are available here and here. Enjoy!


On science, first.

The EU calls for a radical action to cut carbon emissions on Mars… well not quite, but sometime ago, they could have with some justification, some 3.6 billion years ago: here. Alas, the Martians were not to be blamed, it appears, for that environmental disaster, as much of the CO2 concentration on the Red Planet is due to rapid and massive thinning of the atmosphere, as new data from NASA's Curiosity rover shows: here.


And on arts - more specifically, architecture.

Here's an excellent retrospective of new architectural practices from around the world by the Wallpaper: http://www.wallpaper.com/directory/architects/2013

Numbers 13-16 are a delightfully whimsical translation of a barn-set modernism.
Brilliant treatment of stairs in number 29

A physical proof that modernising garden gnomes is not an improvement on the hideous original at numbers 36-38. A great attempt at doing the obvious: merging outdoors with indoors and opening up to light and view at 92-95 and 106-109… and so on… drive through this deck!

And Metropolis mag has another, much more pret-a-porter stairway treatment - http://www.metropolismag.com/July-August-2013/Ready-to-Build/


My most favourite museum in the world, NYC's MOMA is having two exhibitions not to miss: the first one is the Rain Room installation: http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1380

and Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes retrospective http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1321. The clinical painting devoid of dynamism (Le Corbusier was a lousy painter, as most architects are) contrasted by surgical ability to restructure space (Le Corbusier was a brilliant architect, intuitive and bold at the same time, dynamic and imposing, a fine balancing act of mass and space).

Both exhibitions are, ultimately, about forced interactions between external and internal , both are basically about pushing nature into our domain (yes, in that - reversed - order).


Moscow Biennale is coming up in the second half of September:
http://www.theartnewspaper.ru/posts/104/
Official site here: http://5th.moscowbiennale.ru/ru/ or in English: http://5th.moscowbiennale.ru/en/
You can see previous Moscow Biennale site here: http://4th.moscowbiennale.ru/ru/
Special Projects section is of interest while the rest of the site is still being assembled: http://5th.moscowbiennale.ru/en/program/special_projects.html


An interesting article on the issue of whether dinosaurs were cold- or warm-blooded suggesting that the latest evidence points to the latter possibility: link here.


Dinosaurs might have been warm blooded, but our news flow this week, concerning Detroit, was very much cold-blooded, with Detroit being in the news - for the wrong reasons, but possible for the right outcome as I argued here: http://trueeconomics.blogspot.ie/2013/07/1972013-detroit-officially-files-for.html. However, as they point out in Detroit's favourite graffiti message:

For all its multiple 'fails', there's always a reminder of the Detroit's good corners. DIA is one… a superb museum…
http://www.dia.org/object-info/1b623d3b-2a68-4c93-8fea-2073126e55e0.aspx?position=50
Kiki Smith, Lot's Wife, 1997
http://www.dia.org/object-info/df738a50-a117-494f-a6dd-3ceedfd6f442.aspx?position=55
Beverly Fishman, C.E.L. 1997 MediumCollage, resin, paint
http://www.dia.org/object-info/b421345c-1220-444c-827e-f5329e997fbd.aspx?position=91
Clyfford Still 1951. Oil on Canvas - my favourite of all DIA collection:

And, H/T to @FrankSunTimes we also have Detroit's music legacy: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-23377160. MrsG has encyclopedic knowledge of this stuff...


Last point on the arts via ArsTechnica:
http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/07/algorithmically-generated-artworks-comprise-average-of-faces-from-movies/#image-3

I am not sure this qualifies as art, since the whole project is a simplified form of averaging based on dimensional measurements. There is a very clear separation between a mechanical averaging exercise and a perceptive interpretation of the average by an artist or a human observer.

To see this, look no further than the most famous 'averaging' attempt by an artist (actually two artists together - Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid) here: http://awp.diaart.org/km/painting.html. Artists' official webpage is here: http://www.komarandmelamid.org/. The duo brilliantly took their Most Wanted and Least Wanted paintings series to music: http://www.wired.com/listening_post/2008/04/a-scientific-at/


And for another dose of smiles, recall Mr Grigory Yakovlevich Perelman (You say who? I say Poincare) who in 2006 was confirmed by the Science journal to have proved the famous Poincare Conjecture that eluded mathematicians from 1904… Mr Perelman has a beautiful mind. And as such, he is rather eccentric, earning him number 1 spot in Top 10 Odd News Stories of 2011: http://www.upi.com/News_Photos/Features/Top-10-Odd-News-Stories-of-2011/5963/ (H/T to @greentak for spotting the list). One obviously wonders what his Mom response was when he came back home with the news: "Ma, I told em to shove their 1 million dollars where the sun doesn't shine, cause I can control the universe, ya know!" Needless to say, Mr Perelman has not been seen in the news ever since… Note, the Dude also declined Fields Medal (2006) which is the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in mathematics.

So little does Mr Perelman engage with the media or the public, that his life is already attracting that voyeuristic attention which can only be attracted by the unattainable (oh, human nature) - there's a German book on his life out last month:  http://www.welt.de/geschichte/article117427879/Die-wahnhafte-Welt-des-russischen-Rechen-Genies.html.

Here are some good academic links on Perelman's proof of Poincare Conjecture: http://www.math.ucla.edu/~tao/285g.1.08s/ You can feel your brain twist reading this and after about an hour, you too can get to the point of controlling the universe... just don't tell your Ma, please... And should you be at risk of gaining such powers, a non-technical discussion: http://theconversation.com/millennium-prize-the-poincar-conjecture-4245.

Image from the Clay Institute and a write up: http://www.claymath.org/millennium/Poincare_Conjecture/


The end of WLASze for this week…