Monday, March 26, 2012

Text Rain

Camille Utterback & Romy Achituv 1999

Text Rain is an interactive installation in which participants use the familiar instrument of their bodies, to do what seems magical—to lift and play with falling letters that do not really exist. In the Text Rain installation participants stand or move in front of a large projection screen. On the screen they see a mirrored video projection of themselves in black and white, combined with a color animation of falling letters. Like rain or snow, the letters appears to land on participants’ heads and arms. The letters respond to the participants’ motions and can be caught, lifted, and then let fall again. The falling text will ‘land’ on anything darker than a certain threshold, and ‘fall’ whenever that obstacle is removed. If a participant accumulates enough letters along their outstretched arms, or along the silhouette of any dark object, they can sometimes catch an entire word, or even a phrase. The falling letters are not random, but form lines of a poem about bodies and language. ‘Reading’ the phrases in the Text Rain installation becomes a physical as well as a cerebral endeavor.

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I like the artists' unconventional way of portraying a poem and having it be an interactive piece with the audience. I think it's beautiful the way it plays with movement and the delicacy of the falling of text.

Urban Projection Mapping

Urban Projection Mapping is the art of creating video displays that make buildings come alive in light, color and motion. Armed with powerful technology, a handful of enterprising video artists create vivid, visually arresting video displays that are projected on urban architecture. These videos tell stories, form abstract imagery and in some cases, sell products.

The building is manipulated by a pair of hands that sink into its structure and rearrange its facade in a stunning, grid-style fashion. The display was awarded a Silver Lion at the Cannes Advertising Festival in 2009.

Resultant permeability of the solid facade uncovers different interpretations of conception, geometry and aesthetics expressed through graphics and movement. A situation of reflexivity evolves - describing the constitution and spacious perception of this location by means of the building itself.

555 KUBIK

Production: urbanscreen.com
Art Direction: Daniel Rossa
Technical Director: Thorsten Bauer
3D-Design: David Starmann
Sound Design: Jonas Wiese
Realized with mxwendler.net mediaserver

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I love this piece because it is such a dynamic public display of pushing boundaries and a presentation of transforming an ordinary building into a grand piece of art. The concept of "How it would be if a house was dreaming" was also interesting to think about. It was just amazing how the artists really worked with the buildings' specific qualities to create a totally integrated video projection that was as convincing.

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Angki Purbandono

Angki Purbandono, Indonesia’s most prominent artist specializing in scanography – the process of producing artistic digital images by means of an ordinary flat-bed image scanner – has now taken his scan-art to the realms of noodles.

Placing noodles directly onto the scanner’s glass is like setting up a mini stage where the artist plays the stage director. Such a thought comes to mind as one looks at the works currently on show at the Garis ArtSpace. Entering the space, one is first struck by images of elegant dragons seemingly playing with noodles. In the Western tradition, dragons are often thought of as awful monsters, but in the Chinese tradition, they carry with them the meaning of luck and welfare. The dragons in his scan-art, he says, are descendants of the Chinese Golden Dragon, raised in Europe.

He lets them dance, with the noodle(s) falling into place playfully.

Liz Atkin

Liz Atkin is a visual artist based in London. With a background in theatre and dance, physicality underpins her creative practice. Skin is her primary source for corporeal art. both as metaphorical membrane and physical boundary. Her work centres on a multilayered exploration of the possibilities of marking, extending and transforming the skin so as to question the limits of the body and the potentials for communication across and within the porous textures of light and surfaces. This personal investigation explores body focused repetitive behavior resulting in a sometimes violent rendering of the body in order to condense it to matter for resculpting.

Black & White Tea

I chose to use tea bags as my first scanography project. I've used teabags in previous projects before but in a very different way using a digital camera. What attracts me about tea bags are its delicate qualities. In such a small pouch there are fine entities that have abilities to transform a body of water. It has a source of power that is catalyzed by the touch of liquid. I see them as small things with large capabilities.

I explored the use of composition with three tea bags on the flatbed. I played around with the way they lay and position themselves. I think they make beautiful images as they interplay with the intensity of light.