Hasta La Ideas

All images courtesy of LACMA, Decorative Arts and Design Council Fund

Designer Greta Magnusson Grossman couldn’t have known the profound impact her brand of Swedish modernism would have when it hit stateside in 1940, the year she set up shop in Beverly Hills. Her bullet-shaped lamps, teak and tweed seating and playful “atomic” room dividers were instantly popular, attracting attention from celebs like Greta Garbo and Joan Fontaine as well as from the budding California design community. Just a decade later, Grossman, firmly entrenched in the midcentury movement, observed that California design “is not a superimposed style, but an answer to present conditions…It has developed out of our preferences for living in a modern way.”

Greta Magnusson Grossman Above: Desk (with storage unit), 1952. Walnut, iron, formica. Below: Lamp, model 831, 1949. Iron, aluminum.

Just what were the conditions that inspired one of the most influential eras of 20th-century design? That’s what LACMA’s California Design, 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way investigates. It’s part of the Pacific Standard Time series, an exploration of Southern California art on exhibition at over sixty different museums and galleries.

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The world’s leading trade fair for floor coverings is an absolute “must” for your diary
DOMOTEX HANNOVER will once again be the most important event ..

The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University continues its pace toward becoming a real, full-fledged institution with two new announcements this week. First, following the hiring of their first director, Michael Rush, last summer, they’ve now landed Alison Gass as their new curator of contemporary art. Gass, who was picked last year by the NY Times‘ as one of nine up and coming curators, has worked in New York for the Jewish Museum, the MoMA, and the Brooklyn Museum, and most recently on the other coast as an assistant curator at the SFMOMA. Second in the new news, the Broad recently announced its first two debut exhibitions:

The Broad/MSU’s inaugural exhibitions, curated by founding director Michael Rush, include “Global Groove 1973/2012,” which will use Nam June Paik’s seminal 1973 video “Global Groove” as a jumping off point to explore current trends in international video art, and “In Search of Time,” which will investigate artists’ expressions of time and memory by creating dialogues among works by artists including Josef Albers, Romare Bearden, Damien Hirst, Toba Khadoori, Andy Warhol, Eadweard Muybridge and Sam Jury, among others.

The Broad Museum, in its nifty new Zaha Hadid-designed building, is set to open on April 21st of next year.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

A photographer picks five standouts in his own medium from the fairs in Miami

Amidst the staggering amount of work we see at the fairs in Miami, one of the major highlights for me, as a CH contributor and a photographer myself, is to see something that catches my eye in a new way. Whether it’s discovering unknown talents, seeing fresh concepts from old favorites or catching sneak previews for upcoming shows, Art Basel never disappoints. Here’s a list of five stand-out photographs from the main event itself.

Currently showing as one of the six artists selected for this year’s New Photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Viviane Sassen was on display at South Africa’sStevenson Gallery at Art Basel. Called “Parasomnia,” the photos will be shown in full at the gallery’s Cape Town location January 2012.

Ryan McGinley takes his band of naked youth out of nature and into the studio, and pits them against every manner of animal from turkey to scorpion. Team Gallery offered a lovely preview to a forthcoming show that will be on view 29 March to 28 April 2012.

Shown at 303 Gallery, Florian Maier-Aichen’s images reinterpret landscape photography for the 21st century. Often shot at obscure angles or from aerial views, his estranged vantage points and subtle digital manipulation create places that feel both alien and familiar.

I was wowed by the simplicity, beauty and restraint of Leslie Hewitt‘s still-life photos of everyday objects, a few of which were shown at D’Amelio Terras Gallery.

Gladstone Gallery showed some of photographer Sharon Lockhart’s recent “Lunch Break” series as well as this intriguing one-off, “Visalia Livestock Market, Visalia, California.” While traveling around California’s Tulare County, Lockhart shot more than a hundred 4″ x 5″ negatives of ranches and cattle auctions before choosing to print just this one.

Dezeen in Israel: devices that spy, measure, dance and eavesdrop have been added to an exhibition of digital and interactive design that has travelled to the Design Museum Holon.

Top and above: the CUBES project by The Interaction Lab at HIT

Co-curated with digital arts organisation onedotzero, Decode: Digital Design Sensations debuted at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London but has been updated to include new exhibits by Israeli designers.

Above: the CUBES project by The Interaction Lab at HIT

Research group The Interaction Lab at HIT has produced twenty different mechanical cubes, including one that measures distances, another that moves erratically after being shaken and a pair that tap at each other.

Above: the CUBES project by The Interaction Lab at HIT

Next up, artists Amnon Dekel and David Opp present a device that listens to nearby conversations and presents similar topics as images and words on a flashing LED screen.

Above: DEVICEINTERFERENCE [0.3] by Amnon Dekel and David Opp

The third new project, by designer Mushon Zer Aviv, is a virtual confession booth that spys on websites to expose how they are sharing information about their visitors –  you can download this plugin for your web browser here.

Above: DEVICEINTERFERENCE [0.3] by Amnon Dekel and David Opp

The exhibition opened in November and continues until 10 March 2012.

Above: DEVICEINTERFERENCE [0.3] by Amnon Dekel and David Opp

You can read more about the original exhibition at the V&A in our earlier story here.

Above: Good Listeners by Mushon Zer Aviv

To see more images of the Design Museum Holon, which was designed by Ron Arad, click here.

Above: Good Listeners by Mushon Zer Aviv

Here’s some more text from Design Museum Holon:

Decode: Digital Design Sensations
Design Museum Holon, Israel
In partnership with V&A and onedotzero

Design Museum Holon and the V&A are pleased to announce details of specially commissioned works by Israeli artists and designers for the new exhibition Decode: Digital Design Sensations which have been generously supported by the Porter Foundation. The exhibition has been expanded to include Good Listeners by Mushon Zer Aviv, CUBES by The Interaction Lab and DEVICE INTERFERENCE [0.3] by Amnon Dekel and David Opp.

Curated by Louise Shannon, Deputy Head of Contemporary Programmes, V&A and Shane Walter, Director of digital arts organisation onedotzero, the exhibition shows the latest developments in digital and interactive design, from small screen based graphics to large- scale installations.

Good Listeners by Mushon Zer Aviv is a browser plug-in that exposes the secret way in which our browsing habits are shared with and mined by third-party web services such as Google Analytics and Facebook ‘Like’ without users’ consent or knowledge. Every time a site exposes visitor data to a third party service, a confessional booth window opens in the Good Listeners sidebar. The priest in the window encourages the visitor to share more information by saying “Tell me more…”, “Let it all out…”, “I am always there…”, “You can trust me…”. Each third party service opens its own confessional window sized by the scope and depth of the data it accumulates, presenting a satirical visualisation of the vast data passively generated by us and aggressively collected and mined by mysterious but omnipresent forces of the web.

The CUBES project by The Interaction Lab at HIT deals with the basic idea inherent to interaction: that of action and reaction. The 20 cubes respond to stimuli from the viewer such as presence, light, motion and distance. In response the cubes expand, show movement patterns, emit soap bubbles, become illuminated and more, revealing their inner mechanisms and celebrating the beauty and complexity of the world of electronic components.

DEVICEINTERFERENCE [0.3] by Amnon Dekel and David Opp explores the way in which mobile phones broadcast information at all times. This information can be captured, deciphered and changed, making the fabric through which we communicate with others sensitive to attacks and manipulations. The exhibit ‘listens’ to people and their phones as they walk by, eavesdropping by the use of embedded surveillance microphones. At the same time electromagnetic radio waves emanating from nearby phones are also captured, measuring the frequency of the radio waves, the number of phones and their activity. The results are used to pull relevant information from the web via Google and meshed to create an audiovisual experience through the large LED display and speakers in the Museum space.

The exhibition explores three themes in digital and interactive design: Code, Interactivity and Network. Code presents pieces that use computer code to create new designs in the same way a sculptor works with materials such as clay or wood. This section looks at how code can be programmed to create constantly fluid and ever-changing objects.

Interactivity looks at designs that are directly influenced by the viewer; visitors will be invited to interact with and contribute to the development of the works, many of which show designers playing with the boundaries of design and performance.

The final theme, Network, focuses on works that comment on and utilise the digital traces left behind by everyday communications, from blogs in social media communities to mobile communications or satellite tracked GPS systems. This section explores how advanced technologies and the internet have enabled new types of social interaction and media for self expression. Designers reinterpret this information to create works that translate data into striking forms.

During the exhibition, 3rd year students of HIT, in their first semester, will also have the opportunity to practice their interaction design course in the Museum’s Design Lab.