Photography: In Colour

Looking at this blog (and thank you for doing that by BTW) you might get the idea that I’m slightly obsessed with colour. More specifically I’m obsessed with doing weird things with colour, so here are a few photographers who have recently bought my eye who seem to share the same obsession.

Clockwise from top left:
Streaking Trains by Aaron Durand
Sea life photography by Alexander Semenov
Photographs of explosions by Geoffrey Short
Aqueous Fluoreau by Mark Mawson

Modern Art is Rubbish

So Jeff Koons claims he owns the copyright on Balloon Dogs. Enough has been written about this egomania already but it’s just another example of superstar artist’s obsession with fame and money. So here’s a rant from Hennesy Youngman about why Damian Hurst is a dick. I wonder if you can copywriter a dot?

London 2012 Olympics Posters

More polarising design work for the London 2012 Olympics. Like everything else so far, from the logo to the stadia to... what ever the hell that Anish Kapoor thing is, it’s situation of love it, hate it or just plain confused by it. These 12 posters (presumably if it was the '98 Olympics they would have done 98 posters?) seem to cover all three of those emotions perfectly.

As always, the bile in the comments on Dezeen are always good for a laugh. Put simply by Dimitris – “They all really, REALLY really suck. Really.”

Well, at least it's still getting people talking. That must count for something, right? I mean, when the logo was unveiled, practically the whole country was having a heated conversation about the merits of branding and graphic design! Unheard of before or since!

P.S. I'd just like to take this opportunity to say that, after seeing the interview by Alan Yentob on Imagine, I hate Anish Kapoor. Not his work, I love (much of) his work. Him. Personally. Tosser. And Alan Yentob.

Decode the QR Code

Artists and musicians have been using gorilla sticker campaigns with QR codes for a good few years now to get their work onto your ‘generic-mobile-device’ (or ‘iPhone’ to you and me). More recently it seems that everybody with some online content to promote has caught up and these undecipherable and none to pretty blocks of black and white squares are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. Turns out that these things are pretty robust don’t have to be as ugly as you might think. With a little bit of work you can make something that still works and has some beauty all of its own. And the message in the stencilled code above? ‘U R SO PORNO BABY!’. Thanks for that Mr Fahrenheit, you made my day.

Mapping

If all the design blogs are to be believed, projection mapping seems to be everywhere at the moment. Stand still in the street for long enough and someone will point three projectors at you and start paying loud glitch music. Makes for a great public event though; some nice example here from Diez

Stik

Am I the only person who prefers to see street art actually in the street? Don’t get me started on that Banksy guy. That said, I’ve been loving Stik’s work that seems to have been popping up on just about every East London street over the last year or so, so it’s cool to see that he has an exhibition indoors for a change. In West London. I suppose those West London guys deserve to see it somewhere.

‘The Clock’ by Christian Marclay

You may well be familiar with this, so many people have fallen head-over-heals in love with it. Saw this rumour that there may be a forthcoming iPhone app for those of us who don’t quite feel like spending 24 hours watching it in the Hayward Gallery.

Alt//Language

Our recent London show...

"Come in and shelter from a virtual thunderstorm, fight samurais in the dark, make music with paint and play in a Wiimote band, all in the atmospheric seting of Shoreditch Town Hall Basement. Expect screens, projectors and speakers, immersive environments and games, audio and visual installations, sonic experiences and performance."

altlanguage.com

Synaesthesia

Synaesthesia from We're So Digital on Vimeo.

This is our second installation which has been a real hit with the public.

"Synaesthesia is an interactive performance/installation exploring alternative digital music interfaces and the relationship between colour and sound, creating a relational experience between the artists, users and the audience. The project utilises video colour tracking, sequencing, softsynths and sample modulation to generate audio loops via Processing and MaxMSP."

2000 hits on Vimeo in one week and soooo many blog postings can't be wrong!

Squirtle

Squirtle from We're So Digital on Vimeo.

So I've been spending the last year working on interactive digital art installations. Squirle was the first one to go public. It's in the form of a game uses that uses galvanic skin response to measure users' emotions. The user has to maintain steady emotions to get to the end of the animation on the screen. If their emotions change, the animation plays backwards. Sounds simple – but it can be incredibly frustrating! Uses Processing, Arduino and Flash.

Decode

If you haven't been to Decode at London's V&A yet you gotta go!! An extremely inspiring interactive digital art exhibition.

It's mostly screen based, but my favourite was Daniel Rozin's Weave Mirror (above), which is basically also basically a screen – only made of wood! Wooden pixels! Yeah! Go wooden pixels go!

On until 11 April, 2010
Decode

Hackney Wicked

Open studios and gallery exhibitions throughout the former warehouses of London's latest bohemian capital, Hackney Wick. Spread out over about 40 spaces, many of which are the artists own live/work spaces and with lots of live 'happenings', the East London art scene has never looked more intimate. Just make sure you dodge all the fixed-gear bikes, those guys don't stop...
31 July – 2 August
hackneywicked.com

Walking In My Mind

Exhibition at the Hayward Gallery exploring the inner workings of the artist's imagination through huge room-size installations.
Until 6 September 09
Walking In My Mind

The Mobile Evolution

You know that drawing 'The Evolution of Man', where a monkey evolves into a man... with an iPhone...
Via Designboom

Damien Poulain 'Totem 49'

Exhibition of the French born, London based designer's latest project at Kemistry Gallery from: 5 June - 18 July 2009

The Noise of Art: Deep Space Disco

Audio-visual/performance extravaganza at Ether 09 included Chateau Flight's new score for the 1915 film Les Vampires, Orca from the Faroe Isles playing homemade instruments and featuring recordings by Yann Tiersen, DJ T and Thomas Schumacher from Berlin minimal techno label Get Physical and Severino from Horse Meat Disco. The highlight of the show was DFA's The Juan Maclean playing live and some pretty out-there performance art from Immaculate Extremists.
Pictures by Christian Smith.
Noise of Art

Offf Festival

Say Hello are heading to Lisbon for Offf 2009, the 'international festival for the post-digital creation culture', to rub shoulders with the cream of the world's digital designers, film makers and musicians, including Universal Everything (featured), Neville Brody and many many more. We'll report back in May.
Offf

Please Remain Calm - Kim Rugg at Nettie Horne

If patience is a virtue, Kim Rugg is a saint! Meticulously slicing up and re-asembling newspapers, comic books and postage stamps to create intricate and witty takes on familiar objects. Her 2D made 3D (or is it the other way round?) cereal packets are reminiscent of Tom Freidman, which is no bad thing, but we particularly love her subverted wallpaper, especially her installation demonstrating what would happen if you took a lawnmower to a floral print!!

Please Remain Calm on until 26 April at the ever-good Nettie Horne gallery.

Maud Traon

Maud Traon's conceptual (and delightfully impractical) jewellery draws inspiration from world issues, from consumerism to natural disasters and plane crashes. Combining materials such as fimo clay, glitter and electroformed copper with found objects like My Little Pony and Spiderman toys and, er, crisp packets to make highly individual objects infused with chaos and magic. No, we don't understand it either, but it's really far out!

You can check out her work at the Also Known as Jewellery exhibition at Flow gallery or the up-comming Collect art fair, as well as on her new website maudtraon.net
Flow gallery
Collect

Kinetica Art Fair 2009

Sometimes art is really clever. Know what else is clever? Computers. Dead clever. I don't know how they work but I'm sure it's pretty darn complicated. So if you stick a computer in a work of art then you're gonna get something which is, well, really really clever... Like, say, a robotic emu made out of gloves that follows you round the room in quite a sinister fashion. For instance.
Kinetica-artfair.com