Hasta La Ideas

Poietic Studio’s latest project, the Tropism Well, is a drinking fountain with a difference. As you approach it, it gently bows down to pour water into your glass…

Richard Harvey and Keivor Stainer formed Poietic a few months ago and the Tropism Well is their second project. Apparently making use of the “natural laws of physics to function”, say the designers, “once it has seen you, the gently bowing motion is created simply by moving water up and down the stem.”

Not only is it an enchanting installation (check out the reactions to it in the video below) but a political one, too. In distributing water this way in a public space, it rarefies the experience, turning the way we access drinking water into something special, rather than an act we should simply regard as a right.

“We plan to use Tropism Wells at festivals and events,” say Poietic, “and also open up conversations for permanent installations to replace the current ageing drinking fountains in public space.”

Harvey featured in last year’s graduate editon of CR and, along with spatial designer Stainer, the aim of Poietic is to bring their combined knowledge of art, design and engineering into practice, with an emphasis on creating tangible experiences. More on the Tropism Well at poietic.co.uk.

The word “tropism” relates to the growth response of a plant to external stimulus, while Poietic comes from the Greek word for “creative maker”.

CR in Print

Thanks for reading the CR website, but if you are not also getting the printed magazine, we think you’re missing out. This month’s issue has a superb feature on the Sainsbury’s Own Label packaging of the 60s and 70s, a profile of new Japanese creative supergroup Party and our pick of this year’s top graduates. Read all about it here.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

When you stand inside one of these riverside pavilions in Turku, Finland, you can hear what’s going on beneath the water’s surface.

Speakers embedded inside the walls of the two structures transmit the real-time recordings of underwater microphones, called hydrophones, positioned in the river.

The grey clay-covered walls of the structures are constructed from bales of lake reed and are perforated by small holes through which the sounds escape.

Media artist Hanna Haaslahti was responsible for the design of the pavilions, while sound artist Marianne Decoster-Taivalkoski designed and realised the sound recording concepts alongside Alejandro Montes de Oca.

Other interesting pavilions featured on Dezeen include a bright green spectator stand and a shelter made from cardboard hoops – see all our stories about pavilions here.

Photography is by Hanna Haaslahti and Thomas Söderström.

Here is a more detailed description from the artists:

Sonic Seascape Terrace by Marianne Decoster-Taivalkoski, Hanna Haaslahti & Alejandro Montes de Oca

Sonic Seascape Terrace is a site-specific project, which explores connections between the seascape and sounds emanating beneath it´s surface. Two terraces, belvederes, constructed on the shorelines of Turku city in Finland are accompanied with a realtime soundscape composition, distributed on the terrace from the hydrophones hidden in the nearby body of water. The speaker system was designed as an integral part of the architecture, making the terrace itself a resonating structure.

Conceptual description

What is the correlation between underwater soundscape and the way the sea looks on the surface? Sound can travel many kilometres under water, so it´s noisy down there, though on a surface the sea appears as a calm and peaceful entity. When we talk about the sea, we tend to refer only to what´s happening on the surface level. But underneath is a secret world, which we know very little of.

The aim of the project is to build view-point terraces, belvederes, in a city with marine shorelines. From each terrace one can hear the real-time underwater soundscape of the seascape visible from that specific view-point. The view over the seascape is framed from the terrace to the place where a number of hydrophones (underwater microphones) are located, so that a viewer/listener standing at the terrace can link the seascape and the soundscape to each other.

The terraces form an exploration into the interaction between the sea and the land, how the sea is reflecting human activities and how city sounds merge into the underwater soundscape. In the same time, it should sharpen our senses to make observations about our surrounding environment not only with our eyes, but also with our ears.

Soundscape studies and acoustic ecology form the scientific background of the project. Acoustic ecology is a rather new field of research dedicated to the study of the sound-based social interactions of living organisms. The composer and researcher R. Murray Schafer created the term soundscape in the 60`s in parallel to the term landscape. Soundscape refers to an acoustic environment in which listeners are immersed, it includes natural acoustic elements as well as those caused by human activities in a specific place of the landscape.

In our project the contradiction between the soundscape and the seascape should raise thoughts about the invisible changes happening under a naturally serene surface. Even if the seascape still looks harmonious and beautiful, its industrial soundscape prefigures something really different.

General description

Lake reed is a traditional building material in Baltic countries. The eutrophication of Baltic Sea has spread it along the coasts of Finland and many are rethinking it´s cabablities as a sustainable building material for contemporary architecture. The LUMO centre (Centre for the natural building materials) of the Turku University of Applied Sciences, involved in the EU project called Promoting Natural Material Know-How assisted in building the terrace from lake reed.

Lake reed has excellent acoustic qualities, thus making it a suitable material for sonic structures. Both walls of the terrace has 20 minispeakers immersed inside the lake reed bales to diffuse the soundscape composition. The walls are plastered over with clay and little holes punctured in the inner walls for sound to reach listeners. All the technology is hidden from the listener. The clay wall is a comfortable surface to lean on  and listen to the sounds moving and vibrating inside the terrace.

The terrace is facing towards the origin of the soundscape. The surrounding sounds blend with the realtime composition distributed in the terrace because of it´s open structure.

Technical description

Underwater sounds picked up by submerged hydrophones are digitized and sent with Internet audio streaming to computer running an Max/MSP application which analyzes, processes and organizes the signals into an ambi-sonic four-channel soundscape composition. Speaker systems built inside the walls of the terrace located on the shoreline, diffuse the real-time soundscape around the listeners.

Project Team

Sound concept: Marianne Decoster-Taivalkoski
Visual concept: Hanna Haaslahti
Realtime composition and application design: Alejandro Montes de Oca

Location: Turku, Finland
Duration: 31.05.-1.9.2011

Produced by: Capsula (Curated Expeditions on the Baltic Sea) for the Turku European cultural capital 2011

In collaboration with:
The Centre for music & technology at Sibelius Academy
Turku University of Applied Sciences, Lumo center
BalticSeaNow.info
AVEK Audiovisual promotion Center of Finland
Arts Council of Finland

See also:

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Packed by Chen, Zausinger and Leidi	Trufa by Anton García-Abril	The Cross-Gate by Ivo Pavlik

Over the years, we’ve seen a number of instances where people have cried foul over the removal of a piece of Banksy street art, particularly when it involves the remover’s getting rewarded with a large batch of cash. After all, as we wrote back in 2008, “Banksy Makes Walls Worth Millions.” We last saw an instance of what the site VIT.B has quoted some as calling “cultural looting” back in August of last year, when a couple of Banksies were removed from walls in an abandoned building in Detroit and showed up on eBay, starting at $75,000/per. Now the Keszler Gallery in Southampton, New York is getting the same treatment with their exhibition “Banksy: Original Street Works.” Reportedly unauthorized by the artist, actual chunks of the walls holding the paintings were removed and have been put on display and made available for sale. Given Banksy’s very public canvases, which if not removed and sold to galleries are semi-regularly accidentally painted over by graffiti-removal crews or unknowing new building owners, it seems par for the course and not something that should be of any particular surprise. So depending on how you view this latest matter, viewing the gallery-produced video below will either make you terribly mad, or you’ll be interested to see how a Banksy removal is handled:

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Now something to do with China that has nothing to do with Ai Weiwei for a change (unless he happens to be moonlighting as a cat burglar). Back in May, you might recall, thieves stole a number of items from Beijing’s Forbidden City, which turned out to be just the start of a summer of embarrassing incidents for the country as additional heists were pulled off. Reuters is reporting that now the government has issued a mandate requiring all museums to beef up their security or they will be forced to close temporarily until the issues are fixed. If they don’t do enough, then those closures will be permanent. We think it’s safe to assume that there’s some hiring going on right now across China. Here’s a bit:

“People who have been lured by the high profits attained through the theft and smuggling of ancient relics tend to set their targets on various museums,” state news agency Xinhua cited a notice from Ministry of Public Security and State Administration of Cultural Heritage as saying.

“Police and cultural authorities should examine museum security systems and improve training for museum guards. Museums should make emergency response plans and conduct emergency drills every six months to improve their ability to handle thefts.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

If you’d been wondering, as we have been, what misfortunes would befall artist Ai Weiwei again after he began ignoring a total media ban imposed upon him by the Chinese government after releasing him from a three month detainment, we may soon find out. Following his forays back onto the internet and granting interviews to the media, the last of which, with the LA Times, he admitted that he’d been getting into trouble for talking too much, he’s perhaps reached something of a breaking point with his latest move. Appearing just before the holiday weekend here in the US, Weiwei penned an essay about Beijing for Newsweek, which also appeared online on the affiliated Daily Beast website, wherein the only two positive things he says about the city, before calling it “a constant nightmare,” are a) “people still give birth to babies” and b) “there are a few nice parks.” The rest is positively damning, calling out the government for establishing a culture of fear among its inhabitants, crafting an unfair and harsh judicial and policing system, and he even addresses his own arrest (which was apparently point number one in the gag order he was placed under). In response, the Independent reports that Chinese authorities have ordered that the page Weiwei’s essay appears on in this week’s Newsweek be torn out and destroy from each and every copy. Thus far, the artist apparently has not been reached for comment, and we wouldn’t be surprised if that keeps up for a while.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.