Hasta La Ideas

This inkjet printer has been adapted by Ecole Cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL) student Christophe Guberan to print patterns that contort pieces of paper into specific 3D forms.  Watch this movie on Dezeen Screen »

The machine prints a mixture of water and ink that causes the paper to fold automatically along wet lines and humid areas.

It’s hooked up to a computer that can be used to generate patterns for different fold configurations.

There will be a live presentation of the project at the Salone Satellite at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan next week. See all our stories about Milan 2012 here.

Watch another popular series abut folding paper by hand on Dezeen Screen here.

Here are some more details from ECAL:

Hydro-Fold by ECAL/Christophe Guberan

The ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne is very pleased and honoured to be invited on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the Salone Satellite in 2012.

Under the given topic «Design-Technology» we decided to present a very innovative yet extremely straight-forward project: Hydro-Fold.

Christophe Guberan, 3rd year Product Design student at the ECAL conceived and developed the Hydro-Fold project. It is a project combining modern technology (ink-jet printer) and a very well known and accessible material (paper).

Hydro-Fold is a project that aims to explore the properties of paper or how a liquid may bend its structure.

The project consists on bringing modifications on a simple contemporary desktop ink-jet printer by replacing the regular ink contained in the cartridge by a very specific mixture of ink and water.

Different patterns, grids and shapes can be printed on paper using this specific liquid. While drying, the paper contorts, folds and retracts around the printed and humid areas, transforming it self from a 2-dimensional paper sheet to a 3-dimensional structure where lines become edges and surfaces become volumes.]

We aim to present this project through and installation bringing together 3 functional ink-jet printers, each on a separate display table as a live happening.

A video presenting the process and various possibilities of this concept will be presented on the available screen. The public will be able to see the paper sheets being printed and then take home with them as a souvenir.

Material: paper, ink + water
Process: customised water printing machine

Collaborative art revives a century-old former nursing home estate

Originally conceived as a white-glove retirement home for elderly who had lost their fortunes during the Great Depression, the once decadent Andrew Freedman Home in the Bronx itself fell from grace in the 30 years since it closed its doors. The grand manor had succumbed to natural decay until local arts initiative No Longer Empty reclaimed the property, inviting 32 artists to participate in This Side of Paradise, a site-specific public art exhibition that has transformed the space and brought the building back to the community.

Spanning an entire Bronx city block, the estate’s cavernous hallways lead to a grand ballroom, mahogany-lined library and countless boarding rooms, all of which have been bequeathed to the artists as a three-dimensional canvas to do with what they please. Paintings, installations, film, sculpture and photography fill the home, encouraging guests to wander the halls and take in all the home and art have to offer.

While some artists chose to work within the site’s own physical makeup, others like Justen Ladda channel its former inhabitants. His “Like Money Like Water” installation creates a scene where Ladda’s skeletons quite literally piss their money away—a legacy that haunted many former Freedman Home residents to the end—addressing the illusion of money’s worth and the real value of life.

Two of the more unconventional works came from graffiti artists HOW and NOSM and muralist Sofia Maldonando. The honeycomb textures and giant prisms of HOW and NOSM’s “Reflections” create an otherworldly experience that really switches gears as you roam through the show. Maldonando chose the kitchen as the home’s heart, where her street-influenced art is paired with a personally prepared dish made with ingredients sourced from local food vendors to “make something for the community and make something that will last,” she says.

This Side of Paradise will run through 5 June 2012. Numerous community-focused events will also run concurrently in the space,
including La Cocina—a cooking workshop on 21 April, held in the the estate’s kitchen, which now features a mural by artist Sofia Maldonando. For more images of This Side of Paradise see the gallery below.

Gary Panter and Joshua White tune you in and trip you out with an array of mind-bending works

Meeting Joshua White and Gary Panter is like stepping back in time. Not because White is responsible for creating the Joshua Light Show—the beautifully psychedelic backdrop that entertained thousands at Fillmore East concerts for Janis Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix, The Who and more in the 1960s—but because they continue designing experiences with the same childlike nature they likely possessed as creative young kids decades ago. This skillful, ingenuous approach is evident in their retrospective-like exhibition currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, where Panter’s playfully simple illustrations and hypnotic graphics glow under White’s tightly orchestrated theater lights.

While kindred in spirit, the two are actually from slightly different eras. Panter neatly sums it up when he says, “Free love didn’t happen to me.” White began synthesizing music and lights in the late ’60s, making a name for himself among the rock ‘n’ roll crowd in New York shortly after graduating from USC. Panter, who grew up in Texas, read about the Joshua Light Show in magazines at his local drug store. A trained painter and genuine magpie, after graduating college Panter moved to New York and began hosting small shows at record shops in Williamsburg, where he would wiggle a flashlight behind a shiny piece of film while making weird noises with abandoned beat boxes. White saw one of these shows, thought he could help Panter streamline his production, and their friendship and working relationship began.

We recently visited Panter’s studio, an airy space on the top floor of his Brooklyn home, filled with random shiny objects, stacks of records, acrylic paintings, sculptural mobiles and around 200 sketchbooks. The duo calls much of this miscellany “light show potential”—things that can be thrown in the mix to modify the already trippy liquid light show. At its foundation, the spectacle’s lava lamp quality is as simple as colored water and colored oil continuously moving around on top of an overhead projector.

As the MoCAD show demonstrates, their approach has expanded in concept and size over the years, but really only in a sense of refinement. The DIY vibe still lingers, evident in the shoebox mockup, sketches and sculptural models Panter created for the exhibition. The fun house effect Panter lends the show is likely a nod to his days working on the sets of Pee Wee’s Playhouse, which now provides the perfect environment for White’s immersive light show installation at the museum. Whether in a slightly more static setting like the Detroit exhibition or in their performative light shows that reflect the music playing at the moment, White and Panter’s work always stems from their art first.

Their candid analog style isn’t without any digital elements—they often distort computer-generated imagery in their light show performances—but you definitely won’t catch them doing a laser light show. “I have two problems with lasers,” White explains. “One is that it is a very strange repurposing of something that is so magnificently pure. And the other thing is the colors—well it’s not a rich palette. Kind of cold.” Instead they employ a “less is more” approach to their work, which keeps the shows from becoming what White calls “too soupy or too speedy” while allowing the audience’s minds to wander. “We have people coming up to us going ‘were there camels carrying giant bears?’ or something, and we always say ‘You saw that? Good for you!'” They toy with synesthesia, giving freedom to the people watching to interpret the visuals how they like.

Together they continue to put on performative light shows, working with bands whose musical style closely matches their own experimental nature. Separately they both work on personal projects, and soon Panter will begin a residency at the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, which is funding the third installment and paradise version of his Divine Comedy graphic novels. Panter painstakingly dipped a chopstick in ink to draw the first two intricately detailed books, “Jimbo in Purgatory” and “Jimbo’s Inferno”.

The most obvious realization that comes across after spending any amount of time with White and Panter is that they are both highly intelligent and their work is a distillation of their hyperactive minds. Their ability to funnel ideas into various artistic forms speaks to their innate creative talents, and the results are entertaining as well as enlightening.

“Joshua White and Gary Panter’s Light Show” is currently on view at MoCAD through 29 April 2012. Panter shows his fine art work at Fredericks & Freiser gallery in NYC and performs with his band, Devin Gary & Ross at venues around Bushwick in Brooklyn.

Photos of Panter’s studio shot by Charis Kirchheimer. See more images in the slideshow.

Light play and voyeurism in Dan Graham’s latest collection of glass sculptures

The new show by Dan Graham at the Lisson Gallery in London is at once predictable and unexpected. Those who have known and loved the interactive experience of Graham’s Pavilions for the last several decades will recognize his stamp, yet somehow—for those familiar or not with his work—Graham manages to create surprise and delight every time.

The 70-year-old artist continues to develop his series of structural meditations on the perception of space, which he began in the 1980s. The Lisson Gallery exhibition combines two new large pavilions with three pavilion scale models being built, and accompanying the show is a catalog of not-yet-realized pavilion drawings by the perpetually ambitious artist.

As studies on the concepts of inside and outside, it’s appropriate that Lisson has placed one large pavilion inside and one in their sculpture yard outside. The light-filled white space of the gallery suits the perfectly engineered minimalism of Graham’s work, which combines references to the slickness of modern architecture with the entrancing effect of a hall of mirrors.

However, Graham’s is best experienced outdoors where the concave and convex semi-reflective surfaces have so much more to play with, from sky and clouds to trees, buildings and people. The superbly detailed structures are both sculptures to admire and, at the same time, blank canvases to reflect their surroundings. Inside an empty white space, the reflections remain monochrome and calm. Outside, the glass canvas is splashed with busy, eclectic and multi-colored reflections that change rapidly and dramatically.

While many experience the Pavilions as playful spaces, it’s interesting to see the Lisson Gallery referencing more sinister themes such as voyeurism and surveillance. As they explain, it can indeed be disconcerting to be enveloped by a Dan Graham installation. According to the gallery’s description of the exhibition, “Viewers are involved in the voyeuristic act of seeing oneself reflected, while at the same time watching others. Whilst giving people a sense of themselves in space it can also result in loss of self as the viewer is momentarily unable to determine the difference between the physical reality and the reflection.”

Pavilions is on display at the Lisson Gallery through 28 April 2012.

Lisson Gallery

29 Bell Street

London, NW1

All photos by Leonora Oppenheim

Slideshow: Croatian-Austrian design collective Numen/For Use have suspended carpet-lined cocoons from the ceiling of a former church in Pula, Croatia.

Like their earlier installation during the DMY Berlin fair in 2010, the two overlapping funnels are made from several kilometres of adhesive tape wrapped like a web around a skeletal framework.

A four-metre-high ladder lets visitors climb up inside the structure, where the curved and furry red walls create a womb-like interior.

The installation will remain in place until the end of March.

Read more about the webbed installation in Berlin here.

Here’s some more text from Numen/For Use:

TUFT Pula

TUFT is an evolution of the tape concept into a more permanent,self-standing, transferable structure. Adhesive tape is used to generate the primary form of the object. The organic surface of the carpet is later achieved through precise division of the shape in two-dimensional segments, enabling traditional tufting technology. The development and production were executed in a Croatian factory Regeneracija, a former regional industrial giant.

Rough, industrial surface of the back side of the carpet is deliberately exposed to serve as a counterpoint to the invitingly soft, carnal interior. The result is a surreal simultaneous feeling of anxiety and thrill whilst entering into the installation.

The exhibition of the structure at the height of 4 meters in the middle of the former church in Pula, additionally enhances the tension and the sensational perception of the visitor. After the initial caution, the user starts perceiving the functional aspect of the installation, utilizing the softness and sound isolation of the installation and using it as an inward facing collective sofa.