Hasta La Ideas

French artist Vincent Dubourg‘s metallic furniture pieces that appear to be frozen midway through exploding are being exhibited at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in New York City.

For the artist’s first solo show in the US, Vortex, four new pieces will be presented alongside four older works across the Midtown Manhattan gallery’s two floors.

They include an addition to his Inner Vortex series, first created in 2013, which features items that look as if they are being sucked into a vortex – a mass of whirling fluid or air.

A buffet version joins two other cabinets, all with squares of aluminium arranged like they are flying off the furniture but held frozen in time.

Dubourg, who frequently works with metal to create deconstructed furniture, described the natural process that informed the designs.

“A vortex whirls in a circular motion, it forms a vacuum, and embodies subjects to its action,” he said. “In water it swirls but what happens beneath the water’s surface is hidden until it resurfaces elsewhere. If it explodes then it reconstructs, and what is absorbed into it is taken to another place.”

Also in the exhibition are items from Dubourg’s 2017 Gaïa Imprint series, named Matsendra, Uttara and Veda.

Each is formed in the artist’s workshop in Creuse, central France, where he gradually embosses melted aluminium. Once the metal is set and hammered out, it forms uneven sheets that evoke the earth’s crust, and are used to create legs and tops for low tables.

“When the metal froze in contact with the air, small reliefs appeared that the light enhanced; the surface is precious and seems unstable,” said a statement from the gallery. “This astonishing magma that simultaneously expanded and was hammered out is as indiscernible as water.”

The Matsyendra table features thick, stubby dark legs patterned by the hammering. Veda features a grid-like top, made up of square metal tiles, while the Uttara coffee table comprises two sheets of metal that peel apart from one another.

Carpenters Workshop Gallery represents a variety of contemporary artists whose work spans the fields of art and design. The gallery was founded in 2006 by childhood friends Julien Lombrail and Loïc Le Gaillard, and was first based in London and Paris, before expanding to New York City in 2015.

Dubourg showcased another series of metal furniture at the London outpost in 2008, which included bronze tables and chairs with indentations of circles and rectangles, and decorations of wispy metal branches.

His sculptural furniture pieces are influenced and the perception of time. “For more than fifteen years, Vincent Dubourg has dealt with form and metamorphosis,” said the gallery.

The Vortex exhibition will be on display from 2 November to 23 December 2017 at Carpenters Workshop Gallery New York, 693 Fifth Avenue.

The post Vincent Dubourg’s Vortex aluminium furniture goes on show in New York appeared first on Dezeen.

This is no surprise, but Unclutterer readers are a productive, clever bunch. Recently, a reader wrote in with a project that further reinforced this fact. Kate shared a great Google Chrome extension that she and some co-workers created called “G-Save,” which makes the company’s Gmail service just a little more pleasant to use.

Google Chrome Extensions are “…small software programs that can modify and enhance the functionality of the Chrome browser.” Chrome extensions often make a certain website or service easier to use, by adding additional or alternate functionality, etc. There are many extensions available across multiple categories, including productivity-enhancing gems like Papier, which lets you quickly jot down notes and random thoughts, and Taco, which lets you easily enter tasks and other information into the project managers Wunderlist, Evernote, Asana, Basecamp and Trello.

Installation

Kate’s G-Save has a sharper focus. Specifically, it lets you quickly and easily save emails and their attachments to some location outside of you email client, like Google Drive, Drop Box, Outlook…really anywhere you what.

Setup is so minimal it’s barely worth a mention. First, open the Chrome browser on your computer and navigate to G-Save’s home. Next, click the “Add to Chrome” button in the upper-right. You’ll get a confirmation window. Click “Add extension.” That’s it. You’re done. A small, red Gmail icon appears on the right-hand side of your browser’s toolbar.

G-Save is platform-agnostic, so it doesn’t care if you’re using a PC or a Mac. Here’s how to use it.

Use

With installation complete, it’s time to try this out. Open Gmail in Chrome and you’ll see a new button labeled “Save Email” beneath the familiar “Compose” button. To save a message, simply select it in the list and then click Save Email. The message and any attachments it contains are saved in a universal EML file, with any email client can read.

This appealed to me because I’m a huge opponent of using your email client as a filing cabinet/to-do list. G-Save lets you move messages out of Gmail and into relevant folders, be they for a project, reference storage and so on.

When a new email message arrives, you must ask yourself, “What is this?” It sounds silly but it’s crucial. There are three possible answers:

1. It’s garbage
2. It’s something I need to do
3. It’s something I might refer to later

That’s it. Every message you will ever receive will fall into these three categories.

The first one is simple. Spam, advertising you aren’t interested in, messages from old mailing lists you’ve lost interest in, etc. It’s all in the garbage category, so trash it — immediately.

The next category is the action category. These messages require someone — typically you — to do something. For instance, “Call Jane about the committee meeting,” “Forward the presentation to Frank,” or “Ask Faith about the camping trip next week.” Once you’ve identified what the required action is, make note of it in the appropriate place (on your to-do list or calendar) and then delete the message. Unless your company requires you to retain your email for legal reasons, then move it to an archive folder.

The final category is reference material. These messages do not require action, but they do hold information that could be useful someday. Identify what that information is, (sewing patterns, recipes, etc.) store it in the appropriate place and then delete the email. Yes, delete it. G-Save makes this simple.

Do what must be done

This step is a biggie. Just as you don’t pull a hot turkey out of the oven without first knowing where you’re going to set it down, you should’t delete that email message until you’ve identified a trusted place to put its important information. This is what David Allen calls a “trusted system.” Essentially, it’s an obvious, reliable stake in the ground that holds your information.

Congratulations to Kate and her colleagues for creating such a useful tool. Thanks for sharing and I hope you, dear reader, find a place for G-Save on your computer, too. I know it’s on mine.

Post written by David Caolo

If you’ve got an Amazon Echo Dot lying around the house you know exactly how good it is as an AI butler but how lackluster it is in the music department. Back in the day when the Echo retailed for $150, and the Dot for just a mere $50, the guys at Ninety7 decided to one-up the Dot with a supersuit of its own. In comes the Vaux, a one-of-a-kind accessory for the Amazon Dot (Gen 2). Designed to retain what it does best and add to it some serious audio chops, the Vaux was made to fit an Echo Dot (Gen 2) exactly into it. What the Vaux is, is a wireless speaker unit made specifically for the Dot. With a small cavity on the top to nestle the Dot into, the Vaux aims at giving the Dot the one very thing it lacks, and allowing it to become an Amazon Echo… think of it as the Mushroom from Super Mario!

The Vaux retains every bit of the Dot’s features and allows it to perform as a pretty good speaker too. Just connect the power supply and audio jack into it and the tiny Dot becomes a large, powerful AI Speaker system that you can not only talk to, but also play music out of. Plus, with a battery of its own, the Vaux is just as wireless as the Echo it tries to be! (Plus at the same price as the Dot itself, it saves you some cash while giving you the full Echo experience!)

If you don’t have an Echo Dot, you can buy both together right here!

Designer: Ninety7

BUY NOW

BUY NOW (Echo + Vaux)