Hasta La Ideas

1. Basquiat’s Unseen Work After a year of record breaking sales at Gagosian Gallery, the public’s voracious appetite for the late artist Jean-Michel Basquiat is undeniable. In the wake of this recent rush, his former girlfriend Alexis Alder has come forward with a…

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L’infografica completa sul corretto uso della carta igienica la trovate all’interno di questo post. Trovata su Taxi Design.

Il comune biglietto da visita in realtà ha origini ben più lontane, scopriamole in questa infografica.

A data-driven display from Ryoji Ikeda explores the interior of an automobile

Derived from the data set of the latest Honda Civic model, the new sonic and visual installation by the Paris-based Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda, “data.anatomy [civic]” was unveiled last week at the stunning post-industrial venue Kraftwerk Berlin.

Ikeda considers mathematicians to be artists, and specializes in work based on science and numbers—in this case he manipulates DNA data and astronomy to compose electronic sounds and a series of black-and-white dots and flurried lines.

Contacted last year by Honda to create something based on the CAD information of the re-designed five-door Civic, Ikeda started from the solid object to convert the material into intangible sounds and images of seemingly transparent waves in the air. With his art Ryoji aims to capture an unperceived dimension and succeeds once again in this particular project.

Honda chose an interesting approach in funding a concept they had actually conceived instead of simply supporting an existing project through a third-party foundation. Created in collaboration with Mitsuru Kariya, the Development Lead on the all-new Civic, the installation took four months for a team of five architects and computer programmers to build and process the data. The choice of venue was an important one, since Ryoji works to forge an intimate and intricate relationship between his pieces and the surrounding space. Data.anatomy[civic] is located in a huge, industrial concrete structure that formerly housed a power plant in the 1960s.

The beautifully poetic video projection creates three disruptive moments on three screens in a large 20m x 4m triptych. The moving images on the black horizontal screen, along with the minimal sound track composd of clear bells, a rapid timer and medical devices give the viewer a feeling of floating without gravity. Bursting from the center and spreading in waves to the borders of the frame, the images call to mind X-rays or distorted Rorshach tests. They bloom on the rhythm of submarine, sonar-like pulses, slipping and splitting on a screen fringed by a bar code frieze. Medical references and quotations call to mind the title’s reference to the anatomy of a car while experimenting with both sound and image on a large-scale display provides an immersion that Ryoji uses to play with visitors’ perception.

What follows is a jarring set of rapidly pulsed horizontal lines of graphics, codes and figures crossing the screen in opposite directions, resembling something like an animated contact sheet or a flat-lined EEG. While the sound mellows out, this moment seems to feature the silent computer calculation or some lonesome medical device’s overnight work. The bar code is once again referenced with a series of white bars extending from the top of the screen.

The third section presents a totally different atmosphere with the negative images of motors and tubes made of thin white threads. Bursting red spots move more slowly, like spaceships through the blackness of outer space. Each screen works separately as occasional images cross them on various trajectories of different speeds, their collisions echoed by bell tones while a timer persists in the background.

This minimal yet highly precise piece of work takes the viewer on a captivating 12-minute journey into the guts of a car to illustrate Ryoji’s search for the intersection between reality and unexplored dimensions. See “data.anatomy [civic]” in action by checking out the video.

Kraftwerk Berlin

19 April through 1 May 2012

Köpenicker Straße 59 -73

10179 Berlin-Mitte

The language of structures explained in a visual dictionary

The comprehensive language of architecture has been mastered by only a select few. While many of us may have a basic grasp from that freshman survey course, most would be hard-pressed to identify the difference between Roman and Greek doric columns, let alone identify the “squinch” on modern high-rise buildings. Reading Architecture, a new book by Owen Hopkins, aims to demystify the lexicon in a wide-ranging breakdown of architecture’s most important terminology.

Utilizing floor plans, diagrams and photographs of famous constructions, Hopkins takes the reader through building types from the classical to the modern era before delving into structures and architectural elements. The final section comprises a quick-reference glossary of architectural terms. Reminiscent of a child’s visual dictionary, the book may seem light to architectural historians, but it more than informs the curious neophyte.

Hopkins has a knack for selecting architectural structures with an array of complexity, breaking down the elements in laymen’s terms. “Reading Architecture” marks the first title from the young architectural historian and curator, his straightforward approach the perfect primer for a European tour.