THIRTY THREE by Nils Völker

Thirty Three, 2013 by Nils Völker_

"The intensity and direction of the waves are determined by the actual tides at the harbor of Le Havre which is the subject of Claude Monet's painting "Impression, soleil levant" from 1872 and which gave rise to the name of the Impressionist movement.

Approximately every six hours, when the water level reaches its highest or lowest point, the wavelike movement of the installation slows down until it restarts towards the opposite direction. Also the intensity of the waves changes from day to day, according to the height of the tides at that time." - Nils Völker. See more;

Thirty Three is a site specific installation for a solo exhibition inside the Eglise du Vieux St-Sauveur in Caen curated by David Dronet, Station Mir within the frame of "Festival Normandie Impressionniste". The exhibition runs until 1st September 2013 and is open from Wednesday until Sunday, 15:00 till 19:00.

Making of

mylar, cooling fans, pvc, wood, custom made electronics and programming - approx. 17 x 1.5 x 2 m 

Floe

Floe is a kinetic glass sculpture created by four artists and designers from different backgrounds and professions from the Royal College of Art, London; Lida Marinkova (mixed media and textiles), Ozgun Kilic (animation), Oluwaseyi Sosanya (innovation design engineering), Pierre Paslier (innovation design engineering).

"The piece is inspired by formations and movement found in nature, it embodies the shape and movement of ice drifting on the surface of the North Atlantic. The glass structure is combined with a simple wave movement and light bringing life to the piece. An interactive element was essential to the project; the audience influences the movement and light intensity with their presence." See more;

"This is the first prototype of an on going project, using a continuous rotation servo motor(+arduino), a distance sensor to track the presence of the audience in the environment changing the speed of rotation accordingly. A single beamer as a light source adds another layer to the whole - that being random shapes created on the walls as a result of light rays reflecting from/breaking through extremely thin glass layers."

The process started off with Pierre Paslier’s experimentation with kinetic structures using mdf and manual movement, check it out in the two videos [1] [2]

Jeremy Couillard

Programming Pyramids

Jeremy Couillard has been working in his new project "My Time in the Cult of Melting Ancestors" for around a year. Jeremy has created diverse number of pieces, including a great 19 min. video you can watch into the post, several acrylic paintings, and kinetic sculptures which are connected together with the video and are all controlled by a plinth in the center of the exhibition at Louis B James in NY,  a solo show that will be running til next May 31, 2013. See more;

Press release, (an essay on Super Mario):

"A Japanese playing card company, loosely translated as Leave Luck to Heaven, develops a video game based around a new mythology where its participants become two Italian plumber brothers, who, by undergoing a Joseph Campbell-style hero’s journey through giant green pipes, are transported to a realm of evil turtle beings and anthropomorphic mushrooms. They discover in themselves god-like powers through plants, fungi and astral guidance, as they travel through realms, or worlds, under, on, and above ground. Dark worlds, day worlds, ice worlds, worlds on treetops, worlds underwater. The brothers can break brick walls with their heads, jump on bullets, walk through walls and go down hidden tubes; they accumulate coins to purchase their reincarnation and climb secret plants hidden in boxes to walk on clouds. In lava-soaked, labyrinthine brick castles they battle giant turtle soldiers in order to rescue a human princess, who is always in another castle and replaced with a mushroom man. They finally find her in the 8th world, after completing something perhaps similar to the Buddhist 8-fold path. 

Mario is the first hero created in the computational realm. At his core he is binary numbers, code, and logic gates. He is electrons travelling through a Ricoh 2A03 8-bit processor. Through all of us he was brought to life by manipulating an early Christian symbol of the cross and two red Japanese suns on a controller hooked up to a minimalist grey box reminiscent of Robert Morris plugged into a glass tube of deflection coils and electron guns. Children sat in dark rooms engaged in the first of many computational cultist rituals under the glow of the cathode containing images of the plumber hero who could be almost telepathically controlled. Soon Mario embarked on a myriad of adventures to new worlds: riding egg-eating baby dragons; battling robed ghosts, naked ghosts, and other increasingly complex enemies. Then Game Boy came out: the first portable computational mythology. Soon after, 

Mario discovered the mathematical third dimension, began jumping through paintings to enter his worlds. He climbed mountains, went to new planets and galaxies, discovered computational gravity, and began to collect crystals along with coins. Mario is an analog for lo-fi spirituality and digital age mysticism. His cosmology is every bit as cryptic as the Popol Vuh, as Vedic rituals or symbolic flesh eating, though from the beginning his story is one we don’t believe but in which we are every bit as invested."

MY TIME IN THE CULT OF MELTING ANCESTORS

Acrylic paintings on panel - 48"x48"

Installation at Louis B James

http://www.louisbjames.com

Floor 1: An installation of paintings, kinetic sculpture and dioramas built around a 20ish minute video that takes place in the space you observe it in. Kinetics react to the video and are all controlled by a plinth in the center.

Floor 2: A beeping meditation room that is activated by pushing a red button. A mandala begins to spin, 6 screens light up and start beeping. The viewer is invited to use the beeps and images for meditation.

LAb [au]

m0za1que and Particle synthesis, two projects by LAb [au]

"m0za1que is a permanent artwork for ‘La Maison Mécatronique’ in Annecy-Le-Vieux, France. The main wall of the entrance hall 3.4m x 6m is divided in 26x15 squares. Each of the 390 tiles is motorised by a linear actuator with a range of 10cm. The individual control of the motion creates different three-dimensional reliefs of geometric patterns evolving following the logics of cellular automata.

During day these programmed motifs draw black shadows whereas in the evening they draw coloured shadows: The illumination by three light-projectors in primary colours of red, green, and blue leads to a global white illumination of the wall but the tiles’ shadows appear in the secondary colours of light. These coloured surfaces appear and disappear according to the tiles’ movement.The artwork relates motion with colour through the phenomena of light; while it’s mechanic and electronic system is exemplary for the very function of the building." See more;

m0za1que, 2012

Video here.

"The resulting mosaic can be compared to the electro-magnetic functioning of a memory slot in computation logics. The-so called 'place holder', having here the size of the matrix of tiles, can be filled with binary data and where this magnetic action leads in the installation also to physical motion. Information emerges not only out of the binary state but out of the relative position of the tile in the matrix. What in terms of computer logics is referred to as sequential data becomes here spatial data.


When no data activates a tile, the rigorous absolutely white surface is nothing but emptiness: zero is flat and white or pure light. When tiles are activated shadows outline their sharp-edged square shape, one is dark or no light. This transposition of the operating modes of the installation to the binary logic of computer memory is the origin of the project name 'm0za1que'. In this manner the installation gives the inherent computation logics a proper esthetic both on the level of its physical realisation and on its kinetic behavior." - LAb [au]

Particle synthesis, 2011

Video here.

"The project ‘particle synthesis’ started from the idea of combining 3D particle engines with granular sound synthesis, a research mainly motivated by the possible convergence of visual, sonic and spatial parameters processed in real time within electronic space. Both technologies are considering a shape, a form or a sound as the result of many combined elementary particles which would be individually neither visible nor audible. In computer graphics the tiny graphic elements are named ‘particles’ whereas in granular synthesis many names exist for the sonic ones such as ‘sonel’, ‘sonic quanta’... The very broad notion of particle as it can be applied to sonic and visual elements has been retained for the project name as ‘synthesis’ in reference to the way sound is processed. 

The hexagonal shape of the installation translates these sonic and spatial specificities: six networked computers, each rendering 60 degrees of the 3d scene, are boxed in a transparent Plexiglas case also including a speaker. These boxes have the shape of a stage monitor and are placed next to each other on the ground to constitute the hexagonal ring. The speakers and screens are oriented towards the center of the installation offering the visitor inside the ring an immersive and ‘spatialised’ experience whereas the ‘external’ view rather gives a complete vision, an overview, of the setting. This principle is also present in the design of the hardware, from outside the spectator see through the transparent box the ‘stripped’ electronics whereas from the inside only the screen image remains visible. In this manner the specific shape and design of the installation initializes the viewer to the project specific spatial, sonic and technological setting and invites him to enter the installation. Once the spectator has taken the engagement to enter the installation he takes part of the visual and sonic space and as such the spectators’ ‘act’ shifts the statue of the installation from an object (external perception) to a space (internal perception)." - LAb [au]    

 

Krister Olsson

Krister Olsson is a sculptor based in Yokohama and Los Angeles who has created beautiful sculptural based works and interesting kinetic machines such as Pink Cosmos (after High and Low), Mouth Machine 1, Easy Target and Little Prick among others, Krister tells us more about these works into the post;

Pink Cosmos (after High and Low), 2012

"In the Kurosawa film "High and Low" (天国と地獄) the protagonist pays a ransom using a suitcase lined with a compound that burns pink. The movie reaches its climax when the suitcase is burned and pink smoke spews from an incinerator, making the madness of the kidnapper tangible.

In creating Pink Cosmos I decided to transform this pink smoke into a solid, making climax and catharsis (achieved in the film through the dissipation of the smoke) impossible. The obsessive scarring of a spiral into the surface of the pink solid directs the piece further inward."

Mouth Machine 1, 2010

"Mouth Machine 1 endlessly paints the outline of a mouth in lipstick on a piece of glass. The piece was conceived as a meditation on repetition and was made to be shown at a former brothel in Koganecho, Yokohama."

Easy Target, 2011

"Easy Target is a sculpture about time and domestic space comprised of three discrete elements.

The wooden container at the top of the sculpture is filled with one year's worth of collected house dust. A plexiglas partition with holes divides the container into two spaces, with the dust deposited in the back blown to the front by a small fan. The movement of the dust is imperceptible, but over time is revealed in stains around the partition and apertures in the plexiglas.

Underneath the sculpture are two blue corroded metal boxes traditionally used to store Japanese kimono. These boxes are long out of fashion."

Little Prick, 2010

"Little Prick explores two opposing actions working in concert. As the sculpture rotates, its outer discs deposit charcoal in concentric circles on a plastered panel. Simultaneously, a needle driven by these outer discs continuously extends and retracts, lightly chipping at the plaster in the center of the panel."

Point Cloud by James Leng

Point Cloud, 2012 by James Leng_
"Point Cloud is an attempt to reimagine our daily interaction with weather data. Weather has always had a unique place in our lives, because it has a multiplicity that encompasses both the concrete and the indeterminate. It is the intangible context within which we build our lives and our cities, but it is also the physical element against which we create protective shelter. Most of the time it is an invisible network that we can see but are not aware of; yet it can manifest in a spectacle or disaster, come forward and activate our senses, make us forget our rationality in delight or fear. With modern scientific and technological developments, we can now deploy sophisticated monitoring devices to document and observe weather. Yet despite these advances, our analysis and understanding of meteorology is still largely approximate, and in many cases, inaccurate. Weather continues surprise us and elude our best attempts to predict, control, and harness the various elements." - James Leng. See more;

"In contrast, however, the nuances of weather’s continuously shifting states are largely oversimplified as the information is transmitted into our daily experience. Our various home and mobile devices most likely distill a forecast into static representations, such as numeric values or simple infographics of sun, clouds, or rain. There is a deep discrepancy between the flatness of the visualizations we are accustomed to, and the rich mixture of tactility and perceptibility of our immediate physical experience. As a critical response to these issues, Point Cloud emerges as a sculptural form defined by a thin wire mesh, driven asynchronously by 8 individual servos controlled via Arduino. As whiteness of the hanging structure begins to disappear into the background, the viewer is treated to a constantly morphing swarm of black points dancing through midair.

The project’s ambitions are two-fold - first and foremost it seeks to meditate on the transmutation of digital data back into analog movement. In the current prototype, the speed, smoothness, and direction of rotation are modulated to interpret a live feed of weather data. Instead of displaying static values of temperature, humidity, or precipitation, Point Cloud performs the data, dynamically shifting between stability and turbulence, expansion and contraction. It re-introduces weather conditions as a permanently variable state, and creates a visceral experience in our interactions with weather.

The second aspiration of the project is an attempt to conceptually mime the structural complexity of meteorological systems - wherein predictable elements converge into unpredictable or unexpected outcomes. The various components of Point Cloud are functionally autonomous and clearly defined: 4 cables descend into a central control core, from which a lightweight steel space frame cantilevers and supports the 8 servos. Each servo powers a cam mechanism that activates 3 to 4 pistons that push and pull on various parts of the wire mesh - composed of over 300 feet of wire thread, and 966 intersection joints. Despite the fact that the only type of mechanical actuation is linear, the resulting motion is like that of a third degree digital surface; the effects each push and pull ripple out along the elastic tension of the wire threads, and in combination with the syncopated rhythm of the servos, create movement that is complex, unexpected, and hopefully wondrous." - James Leng