Super Phat, Super Fine

A few weeks back, I went to a show at the School of Visual Arts Gallery in Chelsea, New York to see an exhibit called Super Phat. It was a multimedia art presentation featuring the work of over 40 of SVA’s Japanese alumni and alumni living in Japan. Among them were two large and gorgeous drawings by my friend and studio-mate, Yuko Shimizu. Her work never fails to astound me. Yuko’s pieces entitled The Wild Wild Chase and The Rodeo Drive transplants her striped swim-suited characters into a Western inspired realm where they are met by horned and furry hooved monsters. Magnificent. [read an interview with Yuko Shimizu and check out the posts she has written for Lost At E Minor]

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Originally from Lost At E Minor: Music, illustration, art, photography and more by Marcos Chin
reBlogged by michael on Oct 8, 2007, 8:08PM

Designs for urban living: In-house crops

While urban farms in Detroit are making use of reclaimed land to grow crops, Israeli architecture firm Knafo-Klimor is designing that process into new buildings. The firm’s “Agro-Housing” concept (which recently won the International Architecture Competition for Sustainable Housing) combines an apartment building with low-maintenance greenhouses: “[The resident] has to plant the seeds and that is all,” says architect David Knafo. “The irrigation is automatic, the greenhouse is sealed against insects and there is no need for pesticide, and the windows provide the light and heat necessary for growth.”

The concept will serve as a model for prototypes in rapidly urbanizing China, starting with the city of Huan. More on the concept here.

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Originally from core77.com's design blog
reBlogged by michael on Oct 9, 2007, 9:05AM

WikiCity, an MIT project

How can a city perform as an open-source real-time system. Although the approach of this project seems to be driven quite a lot by a cultural engineering mindset, there are some interesting people-focused elements in it: In the past decades, real time control systems have been developed in a variety of engineering applications. In so doing, they have dramatically increased the efficiency of systems through energy savings, regulation of the dynamics, increased robustness and disturbance tolerance. Now: can you have a city that performs as a real time control system? This is the aim of the WikiCity project at MIT. Let’s examine the four key components of a real time control system: entity to be controlled in an environment characterised by uncertainty; sensors able to acquire information about the entity’s state in real-time; intelligence capable of evaluating system performance against desired outcomes; physical actuators able to act upon the system to realise the control strategy. A city certainly fits the definition of point 1, and point 2 does not seem to pose particular problems. As an example, the Real Time Rome project used cellphones and GPS devices to collect the movement patterns of people and transportation systems, and their spatial and social usage of streets and neighborhoods. But how to actuate the city? Although the city already contains several classes of actuators such as traffic lights and remotely updated street signage, a much more flexible actuator would be the city’s own inhabitants. Consequently, we are creating a new platform for storing and exchanging data which are location and time-sensitive, making them accessible to users through mobile devices, web interfaces and physical interface objects. This platform enables people to become distributed intelligent actuators, which pursue their individual interests in cooperation and competition with others, and thus become prime actors themselves in improving the efficiency of urban systems. The project vision, which is driven by Carlo Ratti’s SENSEable City Lab, is currently being implemented in Rome, Italy. Visit project website

Originally from Putting people first by PuttingPeopleFirst
reBlogged by michael on Oct 7, 2007, 9:14AM

The Art of Sampling at MCASD, CA

SOUNDWAVES: THE ART OF SAMPLING :: MCASD LA JOLLA :: SEPTEMBER 23 – DECEMBER 30, 2007 :: Selections on view through May 4, 2008.

Sound has played a significant role in the development of modern and contemporary art, from the visual references of Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian in the early 20th-century to the aural experimentations of Nam June Paik and John Cage in the 1960s. Soundwaves: The Art of Sampling looks at a specifically late 20th-century manifestation of the conjunction of art and sound, and features artists in MCASD’s collection, such as Tim Bavington, Celeste Boursier-Mougenot, Sean Duffy, Julio Cesar Morales, Dario Robleto, and Steve Roden, who appropriate the musical process of sampling in their work, either through the incorporation of found sound or through visual and material references.

Download and listen to the Soundwaves audio tour on your MP3 player.

Image: Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, Untitled (series #3), 2001, set of 3 inflatable plastic pools, 3 pumps, water, 93 assorted bowls, water, 21 stem glasses, 3 immersion heaters, Clorox. Museum purchase, International and Contemporary Collectors Funds.

Thanks to Rhizome and William Hanley.

Originally from Networked Music Review by helen
reBlogged by michael on Oct 8, 2007, 5:10PM