Category Archives: Visual Art

Ombre

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Una rimarchevole iniziativa dell’artista giapponese Tatsuo Miyajima.

Memore delle persone vaporizzate dall’atomica su Hiroshima, che di loro ha lasciato solo un’ombra su un muro, ha creato il Peace Shadow Project, un sito a cui tutti possono inviare la propria foto che viene poi trasformata in un’ombra e firmata (in seguito si può visionare l’immagine e anche cambiarla).

Il sito è un impressionante slide show delle immagini di tutte queste persone che si trasformano gradualmente in un’ombra blu, accompagnato da una gradevole musica d’ambiente. Un’idea semplice, realizzata in modo raffinato (c’è un team non banale, dietro) che, senza tante complicazioni, trasmette un’emozione immediata.

Un’ottima dimostrazione di come si possa utilizzare il web per fini creativi, artistici e sociali.

Peace Shadow Project

Here is a remarkable initiative by the Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima.

Mindful of the people of Hiroshima vaporized by the atomic bomb leaving only a shadow on a wall, she created the Peace Shadow Project, a website where everyone can send his photo that is converted into a shadow and signed.

The site is a very impressive slide show made by the pictures of all these people gradually transforming into a blue shadow, with a pleasant ambient music. A simple idea, very well realized and arousing a deep feeling.

David Byrne at the Roundhouse

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In occasione del suo passaggio alla Roundhouse di Londra (7-31 Agosto), abbiamo una immagine un po’ più accurata dell’installazione Playing the Building di David Byrne di cui abbiamo parlato in febbraio.

It’s all mechanical. There’s no speakers, there’s no electronics, or any of that modern rubbish.

È un po’ buffo che Byrne chiami “rubbish” quello con cui ha giocato fino all’altro ieri. Ma forse questo approccio si adatta alla struttura vittoriana della Roundhouse, che, in origine, era un capannone adibito alla riparazione di motori a vapore.

In realtà Byrne sfrutta, con grande spiegamento di mezzi, idee che girano come minimo dagli anni ’70 (se non prima) e hanno raggiunto una certa notorietà all’epoca delle performance Fluxus (far suonare gli oggetti). Cioè, in questo caso quello che fa non è farina del suo sacco. Però almeno, grazie alla sua notorietà, ha il merito di proporre le suddette idee a un pubblico che altrimenti non le avrebbe mai conosciute…

Ed ecco anche un nuovo video

10 Beautiful Modern Ruins

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The Coolist ha una bella rassegna fotografica delle 10 più belle e sorprendenti rovine moderne (alcune le abbiamo già segnalate), fra cui colpisce, non per la sua bellezza, ma per quanto è recente (le altre hanno almeno 50 anni), questo incredibile fabbricato: il Ryugyung Hotel a Pyong Yang (Corea del nord) che potrebbe essere uno dei più grandi fallimenti architettonici del XX° secolo.

Iniziato nel 1987 e bloccato nel 1992 per mancanza di fondi da parte del governo coreano, la costruzione è ripresa nel 2008, ma, data la segretezza governativa, è difficile, per ora, capire se i lavori siano solo di facciata o se l’edificio sarà portato a termine anche all’interno.

Qui su wikipedia.

If you find beauty in urban decay, in the crumbling and abandoned places of yesteryear, you’ll want to read on.  The Coolist publish a gallery of 10 of the most amazing, beautiful and creepy abandoned places in the modern world.

Here on wikipedia.

ryugyong-hotel

Guardate anche questo video di Ross Ching Labs su una Los Angeles vuota…

Rendezvous with Rama

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In the 1970s, NASA’s Ames Research Center gathered artists and asked them to imagine how feasible space colonies, able to accommodate about 10,000 people, might look.

The results are here (here in high resolution) and this an example.

Please note that Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur Clarke was first published in 1972. 😎

Here there is a Java applet to interactively explore some aspects of living in a rotating environment, particularly jumping off high platforms and throwing balls.Wait the applet load and click jump (must have java enabled, of course)

Via Boing Boing

BLADE RUNNER revisited

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Video artist François Vautier made an experimental film in tribute to Ridley Scott’s legendary film “Blade Runner” (1982).
This film was made as a unique picture with a resolution of 60.000 x 60.000 pixels (about 3.6 gigapixels)
It was made with 167,819 frames from ‘Blade Runner’.

The artist explain

  1. first step : the “picture” of the film
    I extracted the 167,819 frames from ‘Blade Runner’ (final cut version,1h51mn52s19i)
    then I assembled all these images to obtain one gigantic image of colossal dimensions : a square of approximately 60,000 pixels on one side alone, 3.5 gigapixels (3500 million pixels)
  2. second step : an illusion
    I placed a virtual camera above this big picture. So what you see is like an illusion, because contrary to appearances there is only one image. It is in fact the relative movement of the virtual camera flying over this massive image which creates the animated film, like a film in front of a projector.

source : Blade Runner de Ridley Scott (the final cut)
duration : 1h51mn52s19i > 167819 frames >>
one picture / format psb : 60 000  X 60 000 : 3 540 250 000 pixels >> 3,5 gigapixels
compositing> logiciel : Combustion. Mac pro 2X 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon. nombre de layers : 1!

Note by me: 3.600.000.000 are 3.515.625 mega-pixels, so the title should be “> 3.5” not 3.6. But it’s only an academic question.

In my opinion, the interesting fact is that this is a whole film in a single image. All the 167819 frames from the film are in this mammoth image.

Edgar Mueller 3d painting

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Now Moscow has a waterfall. It’s first Project (called Duality) of Edgar Mueller‘s new series “Unconditional Love” that took place under extreme environmental conditions in Moscow. Location: Tepli-Stan Mega Mall main entrance.

See also the video below.

Augmented Shadow

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Augmented Shadow is a design experiment created by Joon Moon producing an artificial shadow effect through the use of tangible objects, blocks, on a displayable tabletop interface. Its goal is to offer a new type of user-experience. The project plays on the fact that shadows present distorted silhouettes depending on the light. Augmented Shadows take the distortion effect into the realm of fantasy. Shadows display below the objects according to the physics of the real world. However, the shadows themselves transform the objects into houses, occupied by shadow creatures. By moving the blocks around the table the user sets off series of reactions within this new fantasy ecosystem.

In this installation, the shadows exist both in a real and a virtual environment simultaneously. It thus brings augmented reality to the tabletop by way of a tangible interface. The shadow is an interface metaphor connecting the virtual world and users. Second, the unexpected user experience results from manipulating the users’ visual perceptions, expectations, and imagination to inspire re-perception and new understanding. Therefore, users can play with the shadows lying on the boundary between the real, virtual, and fantasy.

Augmented Shadow utilizes this unique interface metaphor for interactive storytelling. Maximizing the magical amusement of AR, it is embedding an ecosystem where imaginary objects and organic beings co-exist while each of them influences on each other’s life-cycle, even though it is not in use by users. Light and shadow play critical roles in this world’s functions causing chain reactions between virtual people, trees, birds, and houses.

More on Joon Moon site

Mammoth Earth image

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Earth

If you desire high-resolution images of the Earth, the good folks at Unearthed Outdoors have made available the 250m True Marble image set for a free download with a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. It’s a map of the Earth made up of 32 tiles, where each tile is a 21,000 pixel square, available in png and tif formats. There’s also a series of smaller files that may be more useful — in case you don’t need a map of the Earth that ends up being 84,000 pixels tall and 168,000 pixels across. Printed at 600 dpi, that’s about 12 feet by 24 feet (m 3.66 x 7.31)!

Click here to reach the download page.

From Boing Boing

More Tarkowsky

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Thanks to the Film Annex, you can now watch the complete collection of Tarkovsky films online for free in original language with english subtitles.

The soundtrack of three films, Solaris, The Mirror and Stalker, has been written and recorded by the russian electronic composer Eduard Artemiev.

From Open Culture

AnthroPosts

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anthropostAnthroPosts organizes a growing collection of found Post-it notes in a variety of views, which colorful and symmetrical, evoke the simple beauty of a mandala. The project also features sound recordings of anonymous online workers (solicited through Amazon’s Mechanical turk) reading the notes. The inferred significance of these notes contrasts our current age of shortened communication “bursts”, and causes the viewer to find a new appreciation in the individuality of the notes themselves. Additionally, he is provided with a renewed perspective on contemporary society: it’s pace and consumption, and the double-edged sword of technology, at once enabling communication and isolating (some of) us from one another.

Noah Pedrini is a digital artist interested in exploring the changing face of community in contemporary society through interactive works.

Click the image to go.