Hasta La Ideas

Arik Levy‘s contribution to the Digital Crystal exhibition at London’s Design Museum in an interactive installation that uses visitors’ body movements to mutate computer-generated crystals (+ movie).

In Osmosis Interactive Arena, visitors enter a darkened room with a screen at one end. By stretching an arm or hopping to one side, for example, they can mutate the crystals on screen in unpredictable ways.

Israeli-born and Paris-based designer Levy was inspired by the idea that a master jewel cutter can predict the shape of a cut stone but not how it will interact with the light.

The installation “generates unexpected results that one cannot create with conventional tools or intellectualised creativity,” adds Levy.

Digital Crystal continues until 13 January 2013. We previously featured two other installations from the exhibition – a mechanical projector by London design studio Troika and a series of ‘light paintings’ made with spinning crystal beads by Philippe Malouin.

Other projects by Arik Levy we’ve featured on Dezeen include another crystal-inspired piece for Swarovski and a pebble-shaped device for opening bottles.

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Here’s a statement about the installation from Arik Levy:

Osmosis Interactive Arena

This installation creates a new bridge between the body movement, the eye, the sense of space and the impact that of all of these have over the geometric and structural mineral body.

This emotional interface transforms the object into a symphony of movement and colors, texture and density. We live on our planet not without impact, we engineer and progress not without transition… all of this generates unexpected results that one cannot create with conventional tools or intellectualised creativity.

This relates to Swarovski being a master cutter. Crystals get cut and formed by advanced tools and mechanical actions: the one and only parameter that we have a hard time to simulate or predict beforehand is the light and the way it will interact with the cut stone. This small place of incertitude is where my action takes its place and expression.

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by Arik Levy appeared first on Dezeen.

This wearable cocoon of quilts and blankets by Slovakian architecture graduate Danica Pistekova is just right for people who wish they could take their bed with them in the morning.

Pistekova sewed fabric and duvets into a complex, adjustable structure to create a portable environment for two people that’s meant to be halfway between clothing and housing.

“The project is something in between,” Pistekova told Dezeen. “Between fashion and architecture, small and big, private and public, intuitive and logical.”

“For me, dress is only another state of architecture,” she added.

Pistekova graduated from architecture at the University of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava this year.

We recently featured a collection of folded paper dresses made by another architecture graduate.

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Here’s some more text from the designer:

The result of the practical part of my diploma thesis is a set of dresses/houses. These objects blur the classic definitions of architecture (‘firmitas, utilitas, venustas’) to reveal the hidden ones.

If, as Zevi says, architecture is an object where I am able to come in, my clothing-house does that. If, as Rossi says, architecture is theatre for life, my soft house offers conditions for different situations by constantly changing the clothes and location in one system.

And if architecture is only the system of transits and boundaries, this process also provides them. For Tschumi, architecture is an event, a turning point, a place of shock.

The clothing-house is also trying to surprise by paradoxical behaviour, discovering in-between spaces or moments where the boundary between interior and exterior is changing with every movement.

The result is architecture as an intellectual and sensual experience. It was created by an architect with the hands of a tailor and wants to remind us that architecture is the way of thinking standing before any built reality.

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by Danica Pistekova appeared first on Dezeen.

The Velveteen Rabbit meets Blade Runner in “Dark Peculiar Toys,” an exhibition of photographs by Viktor Koen that opens Thursday, October 4 at the United Photo Industries Gallery in Brooklyn. Koen’s dystopian playthings evoke the scarred and spooky future stars of a Steampunk sequel to Toy Story. “Their appeal lies solely in the tendency children (of any age) have to cannibalize existing objects in order to fuse their own,” says the artist of his “tragic action figures” in a statement about the project, which has been previously exhibited in Berlin, Boston, and Athens. “These creations come at odds with their carefully planed origins and brake gender and age molds by defying children experts, focus groups, and sales projections. The newly assembled toys, though somewhat dramatic and traumatic due to their darkness, evoke our emotions and form a connection with us, by taking a place in our personal memories. Not in a ‘lost childhood blah, blah, blah’ way—but as images that communicate nostalgia and joy, or the nostalgia of joy.”

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