Hasta La Ideas

Lights and music collide for a fantastic display of digital technology at California’s Coachella festival

The concept behind The Creators Project is not new—mix the social, the artistic and the scientific. The resulting experiences the initiative produces though, is astounding. Founded by Vice Magazine and Intel, the altruistic enterprise seeks to support the creative community through a series of collaborations that push the boundaries of digital technology. At this year’s Coachella music festival, the team worked with the British multi-disciplinary collective United Visual Artists and Goldenvoice concerts on a 3D Rubik’s Cube-like installation of light and music, unfolding over three days on Coachella’s main stage.

Using bespoke software and LED light projection, UVA have created an immersive experience that will serve as both a platform for performance and as a standalone light and sound sculpture. To top it off, Vice has chosen key bands—Interpol, Animal Collective and Arcade Fire—to program distinct visual identities to coincide with their live performances. For the Arcade Fire show, 2,000 lightweight balls equipped with LED lights and infrared receivers will be released into the crowd. As the balls drop, they’ll be controlled by a series of IR transmitters, altering the LED effects in each ball, and painting various lighting designs across the crowd for an effect that feels like a New Years Eve Balloon drop meets War of The Worlds.

Through The Studio, a sector of The Creators Project that aims to encourage collaboration between artists, a number of smaller installations will illuminate the festival. Director Jonathan Glazer is working with the band Spiritualized to create a physical manifestation of their best-known song, “Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space,” which will be an arched cathedral of light and sound. Interpol is working with David Lynch, playing with the notion of surveillance, and Black Dice and Animal Collective have collaborated on a video.

The Creators Project is not only making visuals we actually want to watch, but it’s also adding a whole new dimension to watching live music. We wish Pink Floyd was still around to see this.

Artist Tofer Chin’s black stalagmite sculptures invade a Rio de Janeiro park

The 30 mosquito bites that eventually landed him in the hospital from a Dengue scare didn’t stop artist Tofer Chin from installing his latest show in Rio de Janeiro’s Parque Lage. “Fourteen Black,” as the Los Angeles native calls it, runs until 30 April 2011 as part of Rojo’s Nova project.

To address the project’s theme about the absence of light, Chin placed 14 tall, black triangles—a shape that regularly appears in his work—around the Patos Lagoon in the park, located in the Jardim Botanico neighborhood. The wooden, acrylic-coated “black stalagmites,” as he calls them, are meant to be “living and breathing souls, ghosts, spirits, voids, shadows.”

In contrast to the abundant, bright, green surroundings, they work to emphasize the existence of dark, shady areas in the park and play on the idea of light versus absorption of light. Also, because of the way that light bounces off the sides of the angular sculptures, they give the scene a surreal digital touch.

You can get a behind-the-scenes look of the artist installing his work as well as other artists participating in the Nova project here .

This pavilion by Italian firm stARTT has won the first international edition of the MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program and will be installed outside the Zaha Hadid-designed MAXXI museum in Rome this June. See this year’s New York installation in yesterday’s story.

As inaugural winners of the YAP_MAXXI award stARTT’s installation, entitled Whatami, will feature a series of mini hills around the concrete plaza with pools of water in between.

The artificial landscape will be littered with clusters of funnel-shaped canopies representing flowers.

WHATAMI will open in June this year at the same time as Interboro Partner’s winning design for their installation in the courtyard of the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Centre in New York. (See our earlier story)

See all our stories on past winners of the Young Architect Program »

Here’s some more information from The Museum of Modern Art:

stARTT SELECTED AS WINNER OF THE INAUGURAL YOUNG ARCHITECTS PROGRAM AT THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF XXI CENTURY ARTS (MAXXI) IN ROME

stARTT’s WHATAMI to open in the Courtyard of MAXXI in June

NEW YORK, February 16, 2011—The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, and the National Museum of XXI Century Arts of Rome announce Interboro Partners of Brooklyn, NY, as the winner of the 12th annual Young Architects Program in New York, and start, of Rome, as the winner of the first annual YAP_MAXXI Young Architects Program in Rome.

Now in its 12th edition, the Young Architects Program at MoMA and MoMA PS1 has been committed to offering emerging architectural talent the opportunity to design and present innovative projects, challenging each year’s winners to develop highly innovative designs for a temporary, outdoor installation at MoMA PS1 that provides shade, seating, and water. The architects must also work within guidelines that address environmental issues, including sustainability and recycling.

For the first time, MoMA and MoMA PS1 are partnering with another institution, MAXXI in Rome, to create the first international edition of the Young Architects Program. stARTT has been chosen from among five European finalists to create an innovative event space in the MAXXI piazza opening in June.

WHATAMI by stARTT is based on the manufacturing of an artificial archipelago-hill, generating smaller green areas in the garden and potentially outside the museum. The hill works as a garden, injecting “green” into the concrete plateau of the museum’s outdoor space, allowing it to serve as a stage and/or parterre for concerts and other events, or as a space to rest and look at the museum itself.

The artificial landscape will be punctuated by large “flowers” providing light, shadow, water, and sound. The materials proposed for the installation involve a two-fold recycling process, the supplying of the materials for the construction (straw, geo-textile, plastic) and the dismantling of the “hill” (turf, lighting).

Opened in May 2010, MAXXI was designed by Zaha Hadid and awarded Royal Institute of British Architect’s (RIBA) Stirling Prize for architecture, and has already gained a place among the elite international contemporary art and architecture museums.

The other YAP_MAXXI finalists were Raffaella De Simone/Valentina Mandalari (Palermo); Ghigos Ideas (Lissone/Mi, Davide Crippa, Barbara Di Prete and Francesco Tosi); Asif Khan (London, United Kingdom); and Langarita Navarro Arquitectos (Madrid, Spain, María Langarita and Víctor Navarro).

Pippo Ciorra, Senior Curator of Architecture at MAXXI, explains, “We’re very happy with the results of this program for three main reasons. First, the collaboration with MoMA proved as effective and productive as we hoped, finally allowing us a surprising insight into the most recent research in terms of architecture, public space, and landscape.

Second, we were able to discover an unexpected positive quality of answers by the Italian and European young (under 35) architects involved in the project, all proposing fascinating, innovative and well developed proposals. Third, we’re delighted that we were able to choose a winning proposal which incorporates a MAXXI_specific approach to the issues of ecology, recycle, and public space.”

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Holding Pattern by Interboro Partners	Afterparty by MOS at P.S.1	Mexican Pavilion for Shanghai Expo 2010 by Slot.

Brooklyn studio Interboro Partners have won this year’s MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program competition to design a temporary installation in the courtyard of the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Centre in New York.

The installation, entitled Holding Pattern, will feature a twisted rope canopy stretched over the courtyard.

The space below will feature benches, mirrors, ping-pong tables and floodlights, creating a temporary urban landscape where the MoMA/P.S.1 Warm Up summer music series will be hosted. Holding Pattern will open in June this year.

MoMA and P.S.1 are also partnering with the Zaha Hadid-designed MAXXI museum in Rome to create the first international edition of the Young Architects Program, with Italian studio stARTT chosen to create an event space in the museum’s piazza. More information to follow.

See last year’s installation by SO-IL in our earlier story.

See all our stories on past winners of the Young Architect Program »

The following information is from The Museum of Modern Art:

INTERBORO PARTNERS SELECTED AS WINNER OF THE 2011 YOUNG ARCHITECTS PROGRAM AT MoMA PS1 IN NEW YORK

Interboro Partners’ Holding Pattern to open in the Courtyard of MoMA PS1 in June

NEW YORK, February 16, 2011—The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1 announce Interboro Partners of Brooklyn, NY, as the winner of the 12th annual Young Architects Program in New York. Now in its 12th edition, the Young Architects Program at MoMA and MoMA PS1 has been committed to offering emerging architectural talent the opportunity to design and present innovative projects, challenging each year’s winners to develop highly innovative designs for a temporary, outdoor installation at MoMA PS1 that provides shade, seating, and water. The architects must also work within guidelines that address environmental issues, including sustainability and recycling. For the first time, MoMA and MoMA PS1 are partnering with another institution, MAXXI in Rome, to create the first international edition of the Young Architects Program.

Interboro Partners, drawn from among five finalists, will design a temporary urban landscape for the 2011 Warm Up summer music series in MoMA PS1’s outdoor courtyard.

Interboro Partners’ Holding Pattern brings an eclectic collection of objects including benches, mirrors, ping-pong tables, and floodlights, all disposed under a very elegant and taut canopy of rope strung from MoMA PS1’s wall to the parapet across the courtyard. Creating an unobstructed space, the design incorporates for the first time the entire space of MoMA PS1’s courtyard under a single grand structure, while creating an environment focusing on the audience as much as the Warm Up performance. A key component of the theme is recycling; objects in the space will be donated to the community at the conclusion of the summer. The designers met with local businesses and organizations including a taxi cab company, senior and day care centers, high schools, settlement houses, the local YMCA, library, and a greenmarket to determine what components of their installation could be used by those organizations following the Warm Up summer music series.

Incorporating objects that can subsequently be used by these organizations is a means of strengthening MoMA PS1’s ties to the local Long Island City community.
The other finalists for this year’s MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program were FormlessFinder (New Haven, CT/Brooklyn, NY, Julian Rose and Garrett Ricciardi), MASS Design Group (Boston, MA, Michael Murphy), Matter Architecture Practice (Brooklyn, NY, Sandra Wheeler and Alfred Zollinger), and IJP (London/Cambridge, MA, George L. Legendre). An exhibition of the five finalists’ proposed projects as well as YAP_MAXXI’s five finalists’ proposed projects will be on view at MoMA over the summer. It will be organized by Barry Bergdoll, MoMA Philip Johnson Chief Curator, with Whitney May, Department Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art.

Mr. Bergdoll explains, “Simple materials that transform a space to create a kind of public living room and rec room are trademarks of this young Brooklyn firm. Interboro is interested in creating elegant and unpretentious spaces with common materials. Their work has both a modesty and a commitment quite at odds with the luxury and complex computer-generated form that has prevailed in the city in recent years. With a few gestures they transform parts of the city to achieve new temporary atmospheres and attract new participants.”

Klaus Biesenbach, MoMA PS1 Director and MoMA Chief Curator at Large, adds, “MoMA PS1 is very excited about the innovative architecture of Interboro, which describes the famous MoMA PS1 courtyard as one architectural volume, especially since the YAP 2011 opening will coincide with the much anticipated opening of the new MoMA PS1 entrance kiosk by Andrew Berman Architects.”

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Pole Dance by SO-IL at P.S.1	Afterparty by MOS at P.S.1	Public Farm One by Work Architecture Company

London designers Yael Mer and Shay Alkalay of Raw Edges created an animated pond at the Bloomberg offices in London using equipment the company had thrown away.

Called The Pond, the installation featured an animation by Oscar Narud spanning 60 discarded computer monitors, showing fish, dragon flies and ducks darting between the screens.

40 wooden pallets were used to make seating around the pond, where workers can gather during breaks.

The installation was initiated by Arts Co as part of their Waste Not Want Not project commissioned by Bloomberg Philanthropy.

More about Raw Edges on Dezeen »

Here are some more details from the designers:

The Pond
Yael Mer & Shay Alkalay

“The Pond’ is a seating environment constructed from 40 discarded wooden pallets encircling a recessed pond made from 60 redundant Bloomberg computer monitors. These are arranged to look as though they have been thrown into it landing untidily on top of each other. Across the linked screens runs an animation created especially by designer Norwegian designer Oscar Narud. Within the animation are several repeating cycles of activity – a duck paddles after a dragonfly, a small fish darts in and out among stones, a butterfly flits across the water and a frog leaps over lily pads and into the water.

The work is purposefully raw in construction, mimicking a natural outdoor landscape and drawing attention to the materiality of the waste used. The irony of this bucolic pond scene is that over 99 tonnes of domestic and industrial waste goes into landfill in the UK annually fundamentally impacting on the composition of this natural world.

About The Designers

Israeli-born Yael Mer and Shay Alkalay set up their London-based design studio Raw Edges after graduating from London’s Royal College of Art.

Their work is playful and imaginative yet functional and desirable and tries to continually challenge the basic premises of why a designed object has to be the way it is and how it functions.

Since their graduation show at the Royal College of Art in 2006, Raw Edges have received several highly respected awards including The British Council Talented Award, iF Gold Award, Dutch Design Award, Wallpaper* Design Award 2009 and the Elle Decoration International Design Award for best furniture of 2008_09 and just recently the Designer of the Future Award for 2009 from Design Miami/ Basel.

About Arts Co

Arts Co has been variously described as a ‘platform for talent’ and a ‘unique provider of solutions across the arts.’ Founded by Isabella Macpherson and Sigrid Wilkinson in 2007 Arts Co has its own curating programme, and connects individuals and companies with artists, designers and architects.

‘Waste Not Want Not’ is the latest in a series of specially commissioned art and design projects that bring the best of emerging international talent into the heart of Bloomberg’s London office.

Commissioned by Bloomberg Philanthropy ‘Waste Not Want It’ provides a platform for some of the UK’s most dynamic artists and designers through the commission of unique furniture and art installations made almost entirely out of Bloomberg’s own waste. From cable flex to cardboard boxes, keyboards to computer mice, the waste materials traditionally stored in Bloomberg’s off site warehouses have been startlingly reinvented into technically innovative and environmentally responsible chairs, tables and interactive art works to excite and stimulate the employees and visitors who interact with them from the moment they enter the building.

DezeenTV: The Pond by Raw Edges

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The Coiling Collection by Raw Edges	Bench by Raw Edges for Bench 10	Tailored Wood by Raw Edges for Cappellini