Hasta La Ideas

A few weeks back, we told you that there were light-painting giant robots on the horizon for the late-summer’s London Design Festival. Now they’ve added a starchitect to the mix. David Chipperfield has been commissioned to create a project for the annual fest and he’s come up with an impressive one. In the same Size + Matter space Marc Newson was in last year, Chipperfield will be installing something called “The Space Between,” a temporary series of large glass boxes that will look a bit like a mini city. The festival’s organizers have also hired Paul Cocksedge to create an installation called “Drop,”which looks a bit like Chicago’s Millennium Park Bean. Here’s a bit on how Chipperfield’s project will be assembled:

Chipperfiedl is working with Sefar, leading manufacturer of architectural textiles and glass manufacturer Bischoff Glastechink (BGT). With a light source hidden in the base of each block, as day turns to night each will begin to glow and the towers’ solidity apparent in the day will fall away, encouraging a new relationship between the cityscape and the audience. The installation, on Southbank Centre Square, is overlooked by the various elevated walkways at Southbank Centre as well as the street and surrounding plazas. The total composition oscillates between a large still life and a small cityscape where the space in between becomes the protagonist in the balancing of mass and space.

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Architect Rem D Koolhaas has just opened this store in Shanghai for his United Nude range of shoes. (more…)

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pa href=”http://www.andrewfriend.co.uk/disappearing(ats.html”The Device for Disappearing at Sea/a is a floating hiding place, meant to produce a total isolation that can seldom be experienced on land. A sunken, one-person chasm is surrounded by a floating fiberglass ring. Once inside, it’s just you, the sky and the sun. Don’t worry, there is a rope that leads out of the sinkholemdash;this is intended for a safe and temporary disappearance only. When you’re done being alone, just climb out and swim it right on back to shore./p

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pThe project is part of Fantastic, a larger series of devices by a href=”http://www.andrewfriend.co.uk”Andrew Friend/a that debuted last night at the opening of the Royal College of Art Design Thesis Show in the Design Interactions section. The project is about creating products to help people experience something fantastic, like disappearance, lightning strike (pictured below), and invisible electromagnetic forces. /p

pWe like this series because it proposes new, very direct ways that humans can experience the world. There’s no denying that these products are dangerous, but so are motorcycling and sky-diving. These, though, aren’t about sport. They could have been dreamed up by Werner Herzog: deliberate, in search of the sublime, and totally at the mercy of the terrifying forces of the environment, almost to the point of mysticism. /p

div style=”align: right;”img src=”http://s3files.core77.com/blog/images/2010/06/friend-lightning.jpg” width=”468″ height=”468″ alt=”friend-lightning.jpg”//diva href=”http://www.core77.com/blog/object_culture/andrew_friends_device_for_disappearing_at_sea__16810.asp”(more…)/a
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Work by Daniel Carmacho from Emerge 2009

In September, Emerge returns to showcase some of the best work by this year’s graphic design graduates as part of the London Design Festival. And there’s still time to upload your work to their website to be considered for the show…

Working in collaboration with Art Below, the Emerge 2010 programme will feature a series of poster installations in various east London Underground stations, forming the basis of the second Emerge graduate award. One winning poster design will be selected by a panel of industry figures headed up by Domenic Lippa of Pentagram.

“There will also be a week long exhibition of the posters at The Cube London, which is the LDF’s east London hub,” says Emerge co-founder, Holly McConnell. “Being part of the LDF will allow graduates to get in direct contact with industry leaders, potential employers and fellow graduates. As if that wasn’t enough, graduates will also have the opportunity to make commission on limited edition print sales of their poster.”

There will also be a selection of workshops this year, including a networking session by the Enterprise Centre for Creative Arts and a session on intellectual property advice from the Bridgeman Art Library. A talk by some of last year’s award winning graduates is also scheduled.

Emerge was set up in 2009 by London College of Communication MA students, Holly McConnell and Jane Trustram. It will run from 18 to 26 September at The Cube London and in Underground stations in east London.

To upload samples of your work to be considered for Emerge 2010 and to find out more about this year’s events, see thisisemerge.com.

The deadline for submissions is 2 July.

Emerge 2009 poster wall

A return to the questions and confusions of “Is it art because it’s artistic? Or is the output itself irrelevant, but the ‘art’ is born from it being made by a celebrity?” Our brains are frazzled with these sorts of thoughts as the actor-turned-artist James Franco pops back up in the art scene with the opening of his first solo show, “The Dangerous Book Four Boys.” It opened on Wednesday at the Clocktower Gallery, the P.S.1-affiliated space, with none other than P.S.1 alum (and founder/former director) Alanna Heiss curating the show. We’ve seen a handful of images of it so far, but it’s difficult to make heads or tails of it from just photographs. Fortunately, the Wall Street Journal, who Franco had cozied up to earlier this year by writing an op-ed for them about his forays into the art world, sent out Erica Orden, who files this report about the show. However, even after reading it, you’ll probably still feel like the water’s a bit murky (though you might also have that same trouble seeing the whole thing in person, too). But who said art ever needed to have instant gratification? Here’s Orden’s quick synopsis of the show:

“The Dangerous Book Four Boys” addresses boyhood and the “sexual confusion” of adolescence, as Ms. Heiss put it. Short films focus on demolition, showing burning or bullet-riddled structures like a plastic toy home or a large wooden rocket (the exhibition contains originals or replicas of these). Another work explores a romantic encounter between “Star Trek” characters Spock and James T. Kirk.

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