Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen Wire: design critic Justin McGuirk writes about the focus on alternative means of production, open-source design and crowd-funding that permeated this year’s Milan furniture fair in his column for the Guardian newspaper.

McGuirk talked to Dezeen about these issues when he popped into Dezeen Studio powered by Jambox at MOST last week – watch the interview in our daily show from Milan here.

We also spoke to editor-in-chief of Domus magazine Joseph Grima about The Future in the Making show he curated that’s all about collaboration, open design, crowd-sourcing and hacking, and interviewed curator Beatrice Galilee at Hacked Lab where workshops, demonstrations and happenings took over the city’s most famous department store all week.

See all our coverage from Milan here.

A massive collaborative exhibition showcases audio-visual delights

by Naheed Simjee

A resurrected rapper by way of a hologram wasn’t the only technological breakthrough that had people talking last week. Returnees from Coachella Part I flocked downtown on Thursday night for the opening of Transmission LA: AV Club sponsored by Mercedes-Benz and The Avant/Garde Diaries at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. The visionary and creative mastermind of the festival, Beastie Boy Mike D, invited 17 multi-disciplinary artists—including Family Bookstore and Roy Choi’s Kogi Korean BBQ food truck—to create extraordinary site-specific installations that demonstrate the influence and inspiration that audio and visual art forms have on one another. The exhibition runs through 6 May 2012 with a full schedule of live performances.

“It’s the new art, a new audience, new music and new technologies all together, and it’s a wonderful fit with the fabulous new Mercedes that is being unveiled tonight,” explains Jeffrey Deitch, director of the MOCA, who has been actively involved with the project since LA was selected for this edition of the festival’s destination. The first Transmission festival was held in Berlin and curated by Dior’s new head designer, Raf Simons.

The exhibition is an immersive experience in sensory stimulation. Upon entering the massive space, seductive lights and vibrant colors tempt patrons to freely explore in every direction. Immediately, Takeshi Murata‘s zany audio loop of a game show host’s voice enthusiastically announces a series of prizes: “It’s a new car! It’s a new boat! It’s a piano!” Exhibition-goers are lured to a projection of sequentially stacked images of The Price Is Right Showcase models revealing game prizes, and a totally unexpected surprise.

Another showstopper is Ben Jones‘ stellar creation of a triangular tunnel—paneled with Tron-like neon grids and sound bites of racecars zooming by—leading to an enormous room in which computer-animated projections take over the floors and walls, as if you’re suddenly transported into a life-size version of Pole Position.

Ara Peterson and Jim Drain have created a series of hypnotic spinning fan-activated pinwheels mounted at different heights and depths. This segment of the exhibition pleasantly seems to slow things down and makes you feel as if you’ve stumbled into the control room at the Wonka Factory.

Tucked away unassumingly in a room further down is another work central to Mercedes’ vision for the project. Visitors are invited to take one of the pairs of headphones hanging from the ceiling to listen to drum and bass tracks created by Adam Horowitz (Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys), that perfectly sync up to a light performance surrounding the new Mercedes Concept Style Coupe. “The car itself is a sculpture and the original model was made out of hand clay,” says Mark Fetherston, exterior designer for Mercedes. “There’s a lot of shape and it’s an expressive design statement. We’ve taken a more artistic approach and here, we’re mixing with different people, so it’s not just a typical motor show approach. We’re trying to really attract new customers.”

The robust aroma of Miscela d’Oro Espresso beans emanates from Robert McKinley‘s coffee bar installation, based on a concept that Mike D introduced to Deitch when discussing ideas for the exhibition. Mike D and McKinley—who also served as the co-designer of the entire exhibition—are self-proclaimed coffee obsessives and consume a lot of it. “There’s been so many times where I’ve been at an exhibit and I feel like I’ve burned out at a certain point and if I could just get a cup of coffee, I could stay in the game a bit longer,” says Mike D. “I wanted to give all the people here that opportunity. We didn’t want to do it with just a cart, we wanted it to be an impressive cup of coffee, so we took it one step further and actually made it one of the installations in the space. Rob kind of went crazy, in a good way. The beans are from Naples. The coffee has a very classic Italian profile.”

The exhibition also includes works by filmmaker Mike Mills, paintings by Sage Vaughn and Will Fowler, Justin Lowe and Jonah Freeman‘s environmental installation combining fictional narrative with artifacts, Tom Sachs‘ Jamaican sound system-inspired sculpture comprised of several speakers, an axe, a chained iPod and tape deck, video art by Cory Arcangel and Sanford Biggers and a complete build out of a social space in which Public Fiction addresses the topic of the nightclub, that will also host several nights of live performances.

So what are the challenges of putting on a show of this magnitude? Mike D explains, “What ultimately prepared me for being able to do an exhibition like this was that, on multiple occasions, the Beastie Boys had to mount fairly decent size concert tours. Really it’s this quandary of figuring out what’s the visual presentation we’re going to give our music while making it fun and exciting and new. Hopefully, it’s something that people haven’t seen or experienced before, so that’s somewhat analogous to this project. What I’ve taken away from this and have been most inspired by is really just getting to work with the individual artists here.”

“I feel like they really work in the realm of translating the idea and making it into a reality and experience that everybody shares,” says Mike D. “It’s inspiring for me, coming from a world where we have all these parameters, where you want to build something, but someone says, ‘Oh, that will never work!’ or you want to do a record cover, but the artwork isn’t going to be the right size. These artists are really in the job of just being translators of creation. We’ve managed to do this by living here for the past two weeks and working 14 hours a day.”

Mercedes is using the creative platform to redefine itself by associating with the art of tomorrow; as Deitch confirms, “This is exactly what we want to be doing at the MOCA.” Transmission LA: AV Club will run through 6 May 2012 at the Geffen Contemporary.

Geffen Contemporary at MOCA

152 North Central Avenue

Los Angeles, CA 90012

I giorni scorsi cercavo un buon cardiofrequenzimetro per tenere sotto controllo i miei poveri battiti durante le pedalate. Volevo farmi per forza un Suunto, così mi sono configurato un M5. Messo a dura prova domenica, vi rassicuro dicendovi che funziona molto bene. Integra inoltre tutta una serie di consigli e programmi su quando e come allenarvi, in base alla vostra altezza, età e peso. All’orologio puoi associare un POD per monitorare velocità e frequenza di pedalata, questo però devo ancora configurarmelo.

Patrycja Domanska e Felix Gieselmann hanno disegnato questa lampada da tavola ispirata alle vecchie lampade ad olio.
{Via}

In an encouraging sign that will hopefully serve as an inspiration to their exhibitors, the Consumer Electronics Association has announced that they recycled an astonishing 75% of this year’s CES show materials.

If you’ve ever been to CES–or any large tradeshow, for that matter–you don’t have to look far to notice the enormous amount of potential waste that can be created: There are enormous foamcore signs and vinyl banners everywhere, every attendee is wearing a badge in a plastic holder, and the tradeshow floor is covered in miles of carpet.

For this year’s event the CEA rolled out recycleable carpeting for all of the exhibit halls, switched the signage from foamcore to a 100%-recycleable cardboard-like material, and used banners from last year’s event to make the attendee badges for this year’s. In addition to that they’ve donated $25,000 to an organization that transformed other large show banners into sunshades for local community centers, and donated $50,000 to another organization that used the bread to make solar panels for the local Salvation Army.

After the show, come cleanup time the CEA gathered more materials to be recycled: Upwards of 35,700 square feet of magnetic banners, 28,600 square feet of vinyl banners, 16,000 square feet of other signage and 50,000 pounds of show publications.

“Every year, we work tirelessly to make the International CES even more environmentally sustainable than the year before,” said Karen Chupka, CEA’s Senior Vice President of Events and Conferences. “This year, we exceeded years past, increasing the overall reuse and recycle rate to 75 percent of all CES materials.” In the following video, CEA execs and partner organizations explain the initiative and the results:

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