E. Chromi

I’ve known about E. Chromi for about a year now and actually have been in contact with Alexandra Ginsberg, but what reminds me to post this here is visiting the London Design Museum, where Ecrhomi was displayed. Here is a video explaining the iGEM project. Really interesting and forward thinking about synbio and biotech. After which made a short visit to Royal Collage of Art where I met Anthony Dunne and some second year students in Design Interactions, where Ginsberg herself had studied. I really enjoyed the work that they do, but so far I am most interested in looking at technology as a medium and the applications and ethics of new technologies. 

E. chromi from Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg on Vimeo.

Sidi Larbi Chekaoui & Antony Gormley

Sutra, Beautiful.

Cocky Eek

Various works by Cocky Eek

3D Compositions – Concepts for Iron Man 2

By Prologue

Title: Steven Pinker

Lucy Orta’s “home”

Lucy Orta’s work considers the home as something that is dynamic and humans as nomadic. These objects become Architecture , fashion, and products all in one, merging the boundaries between them. You can simply pick up your home and while wearing it as a jacket, settle somewhere else.

Here is an interesting paper called “Dress for Stress Wearable technology and the social body” by Susan Elizabeth Ryan

This paper considers the work of artists, designers, and activists who, since the 1990s, have worked with body covering as survival mechanism and social tool. Individually or within collectives, they call their work art, design, or activism; or all three. The result is a “body of records” of technological, biological, and performable wearables that have not received the attention they deserve, both as art and design, and as vehicles for ideas about threats to species survival and collective experience.

For example, in the early 1990s artists created wearable artworks in the form of survival attire embedded in localized performative events concerned with social connection under adverse circumstances. Lucy Orta is prominent among such practitioners, who formulate clothing the body as critical, social, and ethical practice within an ambient “culture of fear.” (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1) Lucy Orta, Nexus Architecture x 50: Intervention Köln 2001.

I call such work “critical garment discourse” (abbreviated as CGD), a term I propose to mean work in the form of fashion or clothing that concerns not just the body, but notions of dress–and dress, not just as historically viewed or normatively considered, but as experienced, situated and located, and empowered as a medium capable of significant commentary.

Kumi Yamashita

Beautiful little paper sculptures with a few simple folds by Kumi Yamashita

found at Potz!Blitz!Szpilman!

Darkstar: Gold

IKEA “Hembakat är Bäst” baking book

IKEA “Hembakat är Bäst” baking book is actually a 140 pages coffee-table book, containing 30 classic swedish baking recipes. They were inspired by high fashion and japanese minimalism and decided to put the ingredients in focus. The recipes are presented as graphic still-life portraits on a warm and colourful stage. And you can find out more about all the details and all the different recipes and pictures of each page HERE.

Niet Normaal

NIET NORMAAL 
Everyone’s heard of Average Joe, but has anyone ever met him?
What does he look like and how does he act?
Is he even a he?
And could you be Average Joe?
This website is dedicated to finding out.
It’s part of Niet Normaal, a new exhibition which explores what is and isn’t normal through the
work of cutting edge contemporary artists.

To find out whether you look normal, click here.

To find out whether you act normal, click here.

Photographs: Alberto Seveso

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Alberto Seveso.

Enrico Dini’s 3-D Printers Sculpture

Enrico Dini’s prototype machine can print in solid rock! His giant printer is the first of its kind that can print whole buildings. It uses sand but someday it’ll use moon dust? The machine is called D-shape, it sprays a thin layer of sand with a magnesium based glue from hundreds of nozzles, the glue binds the sand in to solid rock- building up layer after layer in to a sculpture or furniture or really anything you want. He claims that the d-shape process is four times faster than conventional building, costs 1/3 as using portland cememnt and createles little waste. On top of all that it makes creating curvy structures simple!

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Japan Media Arts Festival

David Bowen’s Growth Modeling Device scooped up the grand prize in the Art Divistion category. The system attempts to replicate the daily growth of an onion plant.While lasers scan the onion from one of three angles, a fuse deposition modeler creates a plastic model based on the information collected. The device repeats this process every twenty-four hours scanning from a different angle. After a new model is produced the system advances a conveyor approx. 17 inches so the cycle can repeat. The result is a series of white plastic models illustrating a simple organic phenomenon from different angles.

Lawrence Malstaf‘s Nemo Observatorium

Common Flowers, by Shiho Fukuhara and Georg Tremmel (of the Biopresencefame), reverts the blue “Moondust” carnation -the first commercially available and purely aesthetic GM product- back to its natural white state using open-source DIY bio-bending methods and procedures.

Photo on the homepage: Flood Helmet Gallery from the series

Objects for Our Sick Planet, by ONG Kian-Peng.

Text by Regine of WE MAKE MONEY NOT ART

All pictures from the Japan Media Arts Festival.

Synthetic Aesthetics: Art, Design and Synthetic Biology

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is a designer, artist and researcher. Her work  exhibited at the final show, The Synthetic Kingdom, explored how design could contribute to a field that most of us find a bit intimidating and distant from our daily preoccupations: synthetic biology.

Among Daisy’s latest activities are a residency she recently completed at SymbioticA, a collaboration with James King and Cambridge University’s iGEM 2009 grand-prizewinning team and then there’s Synthetic Aesthetics. This project investigates shared territory between design and synthetic biology, invites exchange of existing skills and approaches, and makes possible the development of new forms of craft and collaboration.

Synthetic biology is a bit of a daunting area of research. It seems to be highly technical and almost too abstract. How much background in Synthetic Biology would the designers and artists who apply for the residency need?

Synthetic biology is the application of engineering principles to biology – living matter has become a new material for engineering, a new technology for design and construction. The promise is that we can simplify the way we engineer life, making it predictable and useful (though biology’s complexity still challenges us, for now). The discussions today are creating a framework that could influence biology and nature for generations to come.

The deeper I get, the more fascinating and complex it becomes and the faster the field is evolving. For the last two years I have been engaging with the construction of this potential future and the ethical implications it presents. My RCA projects, The Synthetic Kingdom – a proposal for a new branch of the Tree of Life – and Growth Assembly, with Sascha Pohflepp, investigate this (both currently on show in the Wellcome Trust’s windows).

Dunne and Raby, WHAT IF…, window display, 2010.

The principles behind synthetic biology are straightforward: standardization, abstraction and modularity. Synthetic Aesthetics is not looking for designers or artists necessarily expert in genetics, rather, how might design and art work in dialogue with the evolving science?We’re interested in the overlaps between synthetic biology and design, the ways that we can explore and interrogate science, opening up new thought areas and processes. We’re asking: how would you design nature?

Synthetic biology is multi-disciplinary, from computer scientists to mechanical engineers. As design advisor with James King to the 2009 Cambridge UniversityiGEM competition team (International Genetically Engineered Machines), we joined undergraduates in Maths, Physics, Engineering and other subjects in a two-week synbio crash course last July.

Patricia Piccinini: The Story of Science

Part I: Laboratory Procedures, 2002
Science Story
Type C colour photograph
100 × 200cm
(small format) 70 x 140 cm
Edition of 15

Part II: Ethical Issues, 2002
Science Story
Type C colour photograph
100 × 200cm
(small format) 70 x 140 cm
Edition of 15

Part III: Research Methods, 2002
Science Story
Type C colour photograph
100 × 200cm
(small format) 70 x 140 cm
Edition of 15

Part IV: Thesis and Conclusions, 2002
Science Story
Type C colour photograph
100 × 200cm
(small format) 70 x 140 cm
Edition of 15

+ Patricia Piccinini

Patrick Evans: Montreal Pecha Kucha

Last night at the Montreal Pecha Kucha , Patrick Evans presented his wonderful story
on "Where the snow goes". It was overall a nice night at the CCA. 6 presentors,
speaking about "City Cleanliness".

Where The Snow Goes

by Patrick Evans
Published by Smith, Bonappétit & Son
ISBN 1-897118-02-3

Patrick Evans is co-founder of the architectural collective

Inflatable Creatures: NYC Subway

fantastical hats: Philip Treasy

Jenny Tieaho

Simon Schubert: Folded paper

Folded paper drawings created by German Artist Simon Schubert. Fantastic!

 

+ SIMON SCHUBERT

illumination : sakura story

 

 

 

VISIT : Gwenael Nicolas – Curious