willhead: March 2010

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Haroon Mirza

DEPTFORD MARKET BY VERONICA KAVASS

The role of “fillers” is to, amongst other things, avoid disorientation and dominating disruption. Fillers go unnoticed when they are in place and create havoc when they are missing. The filler is in the same family as the glitch—but they exist on opposite ends of the same field. Haroon Mirza’s work plays on this field, creating a marriage between elements that are typically regarded as incompatible and/or dangerous when combined: water and electricity, proper vintage furniture and fairy lights, Pachabel’s Canon and glitchy hypnotic beats. The fusion results in self-governing sound sculptures pumped to life by watery circulatory systems and elevated by Baroque ghosts.

Veronica Kavass is a writer & curator based in New York

Haroon Mirza link

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Dave Muller

What was the last CD/LP you bought? What bands have you been listening to recently?

Bill Dixon – Tapestries for Small Orchestra

http://dustedmagazine.com/reviews/5430

I’m a big fan of Bill Dixon, especially the solo trumpet pieces, and will buy anything he puts out.

Sergio Rodriguez – Dias y Flores

http://pandcz.blogspot.com/2010/01/silvio-rodriguez-dias-y-flores-1975.html

God’s Gift – Pathology: Manchester 1979-84

http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/5378

Sprigs of Time: 78’s from the EMI Archive

http://www.honestjons.com/label.php?pid=33279

Selda – Vurulduk Ey Halkim Unutma Bizi

http://www.dustygroove.com/item.php?id=9wnkg5srdd

Nancy Lesh/Kulkarni – Various Cd’s of Ragas on cello

http://tinyurl.com/yar9xnj

Favorite album from ‘09?

No one favorite. I never listen to any one thing for long.

Herwig Weizer "Zgodlocator"

A computer's hard disk is a static storage medium, whereas the computer itself is a dynamic medium capable of handling rapid information streams. For this particular project hundreds of hard disks ...

Herwig Weizer link

Art Clokey "Mandala"

Shot in 1964 in his 1,100 square foot basement in Topanga, CA, Mandala was Gumby creator, Art Clokey’s most ambitious stop motion film. The short film’s abstract nature and spiritually-aware subtext were quite a departure from his work on Davey and Goliath. And I’m not sure the evolution of consciousness ever looked so good.

Rube Goldberg does OK Go video

Pop band OK Go made one of the cleverest recent Rube Goldberg machines for a music video that debuted March 2. The star of the video is a massive machine whose parts move, clank, drop and roll in perfect synchronization with the song, “This Too Shall Pass.” Amazingly, the nearly four-minute video rolls in a single, unbroken take.

The creators were Syyn Labs, a Los Angeles arts and technology collective. Building the machine took months of preparation and construction and involved the work of nearly 60 volunteers, all culminating in a two-day filming session in a Los Angeles area warehouse.

Read more on how the Syyn Labs team built OK Go’s Rube Goldberg machine.

CommonsExplorer

commonsExplorer is an experimental interactive browser for the Flickr Commons. It provides a "big picture" view of these collections - a rich, single screen interface that reveals structures and patterns and encourages exploration.

Download software here

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Nathan Fake 'Sky Was Pink'

Pantha Du Prince 'Saturn Strobe'

There is Love in You

Bernard Voït

These 2 photos were made by Bernard Voïta and you should have a very good look at them. It’s all about the perspective, they actually remind me of Felice Varini. It’s basically the same principle but with physical objects. If Bernard Voïta would have made them one step to the left or right, they would look totally different.

You can see more of his work in his book White Garden.

(It’s almost impossible to find any info on him.)

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Four Tet in 3D...

There Is Love In You: Four Tet [Part 1 of 3] from Ray Concepcion on Vimeo.

There Is Love In You: Four Tet [Part 2 of 3] from Ray Concepcion on Vimeo.

There Is Love In You: Four Tet [Part 3 of 3] from Ray Concepcion on Vimeo.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Anada tapas bar on Gertrude

Out on the street, opposite Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, a man and a woman of overtly artistic leanings are thumbing manuscripts, drinking Spanish beer, smoking fat rollies and talking on telephones. All at the same time.

At another table, under the still-glorious evening sun, two mid-20s girls are drinking beer and sharing modest plates of food.

Go inside, and three guys at the copper-clad bar are finishing what appears to have been a long, mid-afternoon Sunday tapas session; a table of chefs down from Sydney with their girlfriends is working its way through the menu with gusto; and at the very back, around what serves as the high, communal table, a group of fiftysomething males is enjoying an early dinner.

It's a scene that is pure Fitzroy, 2008. In a brief time, Anada has arrived and conquered, adding new vigour to Gertrude Street with unpretentious style, a low-fi vibe and an intangible memory of a lost Spanish moment that is perfectly pitched for the times and the area. It's a happy little place.

Absinthe bar Péché in Austin, Texas

AUSTIN, Texas — Every liquor tells a story at Péché, an absinthe bar whose enthusiastic owner is more than willing to serve up some history with your delicious cocktails. Read More

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/03/sxsauced-peche/#ixzz0iUWXDLq3

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Olaf Breuning

www.olafbreuning.com

Gelitin

gelitin is comprised of four artists.
they met first in 1978, when they all attended a summercamp.
they have been playing and working together.
from 1993 they began exhibiting internationally.

www.gelitin.net/mambo/index.php

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Nina Canell

Swedish artist Nina Canell engages in a kind of stoner science, her easygoing experiment-based practice yielding whimsy, poetry and humour. Canell’s interest in cause and effect, and her fondness for abject materials and casual apparatus—plastic buckets, plastic bags and plastic funnels; cassette players, cables, and electric fans—lead to artfully informal assemblages of objects that often beget real results, slight as they may be. For ‘Walking on No-Top Hill’, the New York-based artist has turned Barbara Wien Galerie into a kind of spare, high-school science fair. A fair, it should be noted, in which the top prize does not reward scientific breakthroughs but rather giddy, lo-fi demonstrations of the way the physical world—and the sweet awesomeness of its daily electrical phenomena—works.

In Sleep Machine (all works 2008), a small plastic bag, slightly ripped and of a vivid verdant hue, is affixed to the wall somewhere near your knees. What keeps it there is a handily wrought device: about two feet away is a small electric fan tied to the top of a broom handle, itself stuck into a plastic funnel sitting sturdily on the floor. The thread of green—in the bag, the funnel, and a plastic tip on the broom handle—ties the whole assemblage together, and the fluttering of the bag, pressing its bright face against the smooth white wall, is a nice touch too. While the work’s methodology is quickly understood, its inexplicable poetry—the work works in both senses—is not; Canell shows us her bag of tricks but we remain mystified.

If, in Sleep Machine, Canell readily reveals her hand, inTriangular Interlude she is a little more poker-faced. The sound piece comprises two bulky black cassette players, hung back-to-back from the ceiling. The arrangement has an attractive symmetry, but its odd charge comes from its fuzzy recording of Canell’s attempts to tape the sound of a triangle. Instructively, this was done in the most straightforward manner possible: she recorded herself riding a bike in the aforementioned shape. If this experiment feels cloyingly sincere, it is offset by its more mysterious neighbour, Mutual Leap (After Nollét), another hanging work but crafted from a round of femur bones and string.Mutual Leap pays tribute to Jean-Antoine Nollét, a French clergyman and physicist who, in the 18th century, made one of the first electrometers (his fellow monks acted as very patient, and often shocked, guinea pigs).

Nothing blurs the boundary of object and casual scientific performance, a border that Canell seems to favor, more than the exhibition’s pièce de résistance, Anatomy of Dirt in Quiet Water. An experiment less contained than sprawled over the gallery floor, its snakelike cables connect lights, amplifiers, hydrophones and pipes, all of which work together to exchange and transform energy. A motor causes vibrations picked up by a mic, while also triggering a light and a basin of seemingly still black water, the movement of which is also amplified. While Canell’s interest often lies in making visible what is invisible, her intention extends to sound and making heard what normally passes unheard. This is not a unique aim in art, which often portends to make the inexplicable, well, explicable, but in Canell’s light, dexterous hands and able ear, her exploratory sculptures come across as vivifying, instructive, and—for empirical knowledge that’s been around forever—something new.

Quinn Latimer

Eric Tabuchi

French Countryside Skateparks« by Eric Tabuchi.

Michael Johansson

Strövtåg i tid och rum, 2009
(Strolls through time and space)
Armchair, books, bags, boxes, radio, clock, etc.
Dimensions: 0.55 x 0.85 x 0,6 m.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Olafur Eliasson

"Taking one's time means to engage actively in a spatial and temporal

situation, either within the museum or in the outside world. It requires

attention to the changeability of our surroundings. You could say that

it heightens awareness of the fact that our actions have a specific speed,

depending on the situation. The question is whether such temporal

engagement is supported by society as well as by museums. Often the

answer is no. So I think it is our responsibility as artists to challenge

the shape of the museum, since museums claim to communicate the

values of society." Olafur Eliasson

www.olafureliasson.net

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

The Adelaide Fringe

Henry Trumble Photomedia

Adelaide Night Light.

Adelaide is not perceived as a young city. We are relegated the role of the conservative, older relative who shakes a bony fist at the vibey and more culturally conscious eastern cities.
Seemingly content, the youth of Adelaide bide their time as acts pass us over for the bigger, brighter lights of other cities. Then, a shift of perception, the image of the old relative blurs and wavers. And the Adelaide Fringe Festival turns on its switch.
Energy pours into this multi faceted beast which rears its head like Frankenstein’s monster and tears the shackles off the conservative city for a month. Made by a combination of the Adelaide youth culture, mixed with a melting pot of international talent. They strive to shine the spotlight, which is seen so briefly on our small city, burning away the dusty cupboard cobwebs and helping put on a sparkling petticoat to flash around town.
This spotlight shines brightest on the Fringe opening night. It feels as if the City of Churches holds its breath for a year, and then exhales. Out pours the second biggest Fringe in the world; a multitude of people, events, shows, sounds, food and drink from around the world. This mass swarms across Adelaide where people can revel in the lights, culture and sound of a city that is both king and queen for just one night of the year.

text by Phil Manning.

Location: Adelaide Fringe Opening Night

Species: Birgus latro

Habitat: Coastal forests of islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans

It's paradise with a twist. As the sun sets over the beautiful Palmyra atoll, south of Hawaii, Earth's largest land arthropod emerges from its lair.

Coconut crabs can reach a length of 40 centimetres, with a leg span of 90 centimetres, and weigh 4 kilograms. Most such monster arthropods – the group that includes insects, spiders and crustaceans – live in the sea, where the water helps support their heavy bodies. To survive on the land, coconut crabs have had to evolve a suite of strange adaptations. But their exceptional lifestyle has also put them at great risk, and conservationists are only now working out how to protect them.

Coconut crabs – also known as robber crabs for their habit of stealing food from inattentive campers – are not true crabs. They are members of the group that includes hermit crabs, known for living in discarded mollusc shells. Coconut crabs do this when they are young, but as they grow they give up the habit.

They begin their lives in the sea. Female crabs carry their fertilised eggs around on their bodies, and release them into the sea when they hatch – generally when the moon is new. The juveniles develop in the sea for about a month, after which they head out onto land.

There they face a problem: how to breathe. Aquatic crabs have gills, but these are inefficient out of the water. To get round this, coconut crabs have developed organs called branchiostegal lungs, which are essentially sets of gills turned inside out. They have only been able to develop these strange organs because, unlike other hermit crabs, they perform the slightly obscene-sounding trick of exposing their abdomens to the surrounding air.

Danse Dance

Play the game now

Each day, we are surrounded by seemingly insignificant objects, taking them from one place to the other, or leaving them on a table for weeks, without paying any attention to them. We ignore or forget them, using things only when we need to, making sure they don’t interfere or inhabit our space. But what if they were not so stable and subservient? What if they could swivel, bounce or even fly. And what if they did so all at the same time? We want to imagine a place where objects could live and move, harmoniously, and of their own accord. Without interfering with each other these objects would bounce, roll, turn and cross each other’s paths.

This experiment is about re-discovering our daily surroundings. Each object is assigned to aletter on the keyboard, and can be activated or deactivated at any time.

Mirrors Polished for Next-Gen Space Telescope

The first mirror segment of the James Webb Space Telescope, the all-purpose instrument that will take the mantle of “most awesome” telescope from Hubble in 2014, is polished.

There are 18 mirror segments to go, but it still marked a milestone on the telescope’s march towards flight-readiness.

The huge mirrors require incredible precision for collecting the tiny amounts of photons arriving at Earth from distant objects. Even the tiniest mistakes can kill the performance of a telescope.

Recall that an erroneously polished mirror fouled up Hubble’s launch. The telescope got into orbit before researchers realized that things weren’t working quite right.

It took a separate Shuttle mission — STS-61 — to get the telescope working properly.

Clearly, NASA doesn’t want a repeat of that experience, so the agency and its contractors are taking special care polishing up its latest space observatory. This time around, everyone is taking their own measurements.

“For validation purposes, we’re planning four sets of completely different cross checks and verification tests to authenticate the outcome of the mirror cryotests,” said Scott Texter, Northrop Grumman Webb Optical Telescope Element Manager. “If any discrepancies surface, we can then investigate and re-verify.”

Carsten Nicolai 'Spray'

spray :: alva noto from bacteriasleep on Vimeo.

spray is a room installation consisting of a folded, stealth-shape seating area and a video that can be seen from both sides of the projection screen. the 8-minute loop of the video shows the process of pixels accumulating, setting up orders, building up patterns, modelling moirés, decaying into fragments and dissolving again.

the idea behind the work is to show that although our communication system tends to atomize information, the original sense remains. the stealth forms seen in the video of spray dissolve into particles, which still contain enough information to regain the original forms again and build up a cycle of persistent repetition.

the main metaphor of spray is the mechanism of masking and concealing – of stealth. it shows the contradictory essence to produce and secure information as well as hide and absorb it.