prosthetic knowledge

Manfred Mohr: one and zero 

Exhibition currently at the Carroll Fletcher Gallery, London, on Computer Art pioneer Manfred Mohr, which runs until the 20th of December:

All my relations to aesthetical decisions always go back to musical thinking, either active in that I played a musical instrument or theoretical in that I see my art as visual music… I was very impressed by Anton Webern’s music from the 1920s where for the first time I realized that space, the pause, became as important to the musical construct as the sound itself. So there are these two poles, one and zero.

Manfred Mohr

one and zero, Manfred Mohr’s first solo exhibition in London, presents a concise survey of his fifty-year practice. Harnessing the automatic processes of the computer, Mohr’s work brings together his deep interest in music and mathematics to create works that are rigorously minimal but with an elegant lyricism that belie their formal underpinnings. Through drawing, painting, wall-reliefs and screen-based works, the show examines the artist’s practice through the prism of music and the idea that what is left out is as important as what remains.

Beginning in 1969, Mohr was one of the first visual artists to explore the use of algorithms and computer programs to make independent abstract artworks.  His early computer plotter drawings - when he had access to one of the earliest computer driven plotter drawing machines at the Meteorology Institute in Paris - are delicate, spare monochrome works on paper derived from algorithms devised by the artist and executed by the computer.  P198aa (1977-79) is an elegant rhythmic composition of nine randomly rotated and cut cubes that hints at multi-dimensional space.

More about the show can be found at the gallery’s website here

Images above were taken from a Flickr set put together by Paul Prudence, which can be found here

One of the artist’s featured in my Algorists piece for Rhizome, which can be found here

Day in London 

Took a day off to see the great city (so no research today).

Met Joanne McNeil (the editor for Rhizome, who is giving a couple of talks in the UK) for lunch - very pleasant person to meet (and the first person I have met in offline world from being in contact through the online world …)

Then off to the Tate Modern to see the Damien Hirst show before it closes. It was OK - I was very familiar with the works. The only truly standout moment, though, was seeing for yourself how his famous shark has really aged and wrinkled - certainly not the shark I saw well over a decade ago, yet somehow fitting.

Then later, I visited the Saatchi Gallery to see the Korean Eye. I have an interest in contemporary Korean art but wasn’t expecting too much - in fact, there was a lot more to enjoy. Would certainly recommend - above are a few photos taken with my mobile phone.

From that exhibition, the GIFs above are paintings by Joonsung Bae, whose works are generally set in the gallery space, and have lenticular prints which alter elements within the composition.

Fearful Symmetry by Ruairi Glynn 

‘Alien Art’ installation currently at Tate Modern - a glowing tetrahedron curious of the visitors. It is actually a computer-controlled puppet on a robotic arm, using Kinect sensors to detect people. BBC News has a short video (embedded below) about the piece, and is also a great ‘behind-the-scenes’ look at how a modern computer art installation is put together:

Artist Ruairi Glynn has premiered a unique piece of installation art at Tate Modern in London, using a technique he calls “mechanical puppetry”.

His “delta robot”, normally found on factory production lines, has been redesigned to work as a piece of interactive, performance art.

Fitted on a 21-metre rail, it travels the length of the Tate Modern’s new basement Tanks space, which opened at the end of July.

Part automated, it measures people’s movements with Microsoft Kinect cameras, as found on the Xbox games console. When visitors come into its vicinity, the robot responds with a set of pre-programmed reactions, from playful movements, to dramatic withdrawal.

More at BBC News here

UK Prime Minister David Cameron, and London Mayor Boris Johnson, caught dancing during the Spice Girl’s performance at the London 2012 closing ceremony.

[Better source here]

Usain Bolt’s fistbump makes Olympic volunteer’s day 

Love this GIF - the volunteer’s smile is priceless, and Bolt’s coolness - brilliant …

A better version can be found at imgur

Hackney Olympic Looting Team by Pure Evil 

[via @Visuelleuk]

London Olympics Brand-Ban Workaround

Using the Jumbled Words technique - via @NaomiMc + @otolythe

Metropolis Film Programme For London Premiere, 1927 

Fascinating and insightful hi-res scan of an incredibly rare piece of film history - via The Cataloguer’s Desk:

The world’s most valuable movie poster, for Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis, is to be auctioned again after making a record $690,000 in 2005. Ephemera related to the film is notoriously scarce, with only four copies of the poster known to survive. Almost as uncommon is this amazing film programme, one of only three surviving copies of which we’re aware, produced for the London premiere at the Marble Arch Pavilion on March 21, 1927. Not only a list of cast and crew, it includes eleven short pieces on the making of the movie, commentary from the director and cast, and numerous production photographs and film stills, many attractively arranged as modernist collages. One of the most interesting sections shows in parallel columns how a passage of film scenes was adapted from the novel of the same name by Lang’s wife, Thea von Harbou. 

You can read and examine the whole booklet here

Zebra-Drawn Carriages Of Brixton

More at The Retronaut here

Woven Portico 

Artist Nicolas Feldmayer uses the classical columns of University College London to create a large-scale weaved pattern with plain white fabric.

More Here

Maya Nakanishi Calendar 

Japanese paralympic athlete put together calendar featuring tastefully nude photography to help fund her entry to the London Paralympics:

Japanese sprinter Maya Nakanishi published a calendar featuring her posing semi-nude with her prosthetic leg to help fund her training and trip to the London Paralympic Games. Nakanishi lost her right leg below the knee in a workplace accident when she was 21, then became a sprinter with her prosthetic limb. She is the Asian record holder in the T44 (one leg amputated below the knee) 200 meter and long jump and she was the first Japanese woman to be at the starting line in a 100 meter final race in the 2008 Beijing Paralympic. 

More at J-Box here

The Wall: BORN IN 1987: The Animated Gif - Call For More Entries

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The Wall: BORN IN 1987: The Animated Gif 

The Photographers Gallery, London, is hosting an exhibit celebrating and examining the animated GIF format:

Part of our extended programme includes a new digital display named The Wall,an exhibition space for screen media. The Wall consists of a 2.7 x 3m Sharp video wall, situated on the ground floor and visible to everyone visiting the building and those passing by on the street.

The Wall forms part of a research programme which aims to explore issues concerning the digital image, its dissemination and display on-screen. The Wall’s programme will include experimental commissions, collaborations and participation.

For the opening show, The Wall will address a unique form of image which is best experienced via a screen: the animated gif. The GIF is an image file format created in 1987 by CompuServe as a portable, low bandwidth image file easily rendered by a web browser. Restricted to only 256 colours, and able to store multiple frames in a single image, the GIF brought animated movement to the static webpages of the 1990s in an era before YouTube and Flash.

The show runs from 19 May to 1 July 2012.

You can find out more about the show here, as well as visiting the show’s official Tumblr blog here