Installation artist Shih Chieh Huang transforms spaces with everyday objects. His most recent project “EX-I-09″ currently on show at the Beall Center for Art + Technology focuses on exploring the unusual evolutionary adaptations undertaken by creatures that reside in inhospitable conditions.
Huang creates analogous ecosystems made from common, everyday objects. “I source my wholly synthetic materials from the mundane objects that comprise our modern existence: household appliances, zip ties, water tubes, lights, computer parts, motorized toys and the like. The objects are dissected and disassembled as needed and reconstructed into experimental primitive organisms that reside on the fringes of evolutionary transformation: computer cooling fans are repurposed for locomotion; Tupperware serves as a skeletal framework; guitar tuner rewired to detect sound; and automatic night lights become a sensory input. ”
The exhibition is on till June 6th 2009
April 13th, 2009
Here are a number videos of installations and sculptures on the theme of artificial life which won awards at VIDA last year. Via wmmna
Mission eternity sarcophagus
Etoy.corporation launched the Mission Eternity Project in 2005, foregrounding on the one hand respect for the human longing to survive in some way after death, and on the other a sense of irony about dated sci-fi fantasies we contrive to satisfy that desire. The Sarcophagus is one materialization of this project. It is a mobile sepulchre that holds and displays portraits of those who wish to have their informational remains cross over into a digital afterlife. The size of a standard cargo container that can travel to any location in the world, the Sarcophagus has an immersive LED screen covering its walls, ceiling and floor. There, interactive digital portraits can be summoned via mobile phone or web browser from virtual capsules that are stored in the shared memory of thousands of networked electronic devices of Mission Eternity Angels (people who contribute a small part of their personal storage capacity to the mission, currently 765 of them; to date, 2 volunteers have been accepted for encapsulation).
The data spectres that populate this tenuous memorial space are composed of details of lives lived, in visual, audio and text fragments. But when they are summoned in lo-res pixellated form in the Sarcophagus, they resemble one merged personality. The massing of details that we find in archives and records that keep the dead with us has a similar compositing effect, yet the Sarcophagus is also very unlike those. It gives us access to a novel social world generated among networked computer users who have a common goal of keeping something alive, which can invoke intense feelings such as care and wonder.
ALAVS 2.0
Jed Berks’ Autonomous Light Air Vehicles combine many of the themes of artificial life and multi-agent robotics research in an accessible and elegant public presentation. These include capable powered navigation and obstacle avoidance, organized multi-agent behaviour (such as flocking), discernable (quasi) intelligent individual behaviour, and interaction with other (quasi) intelligent agents, i.e., people. Connecting these agendas with more contemporary interest in mobile and locative technologies, Berk has implemented human-ALAV communication via mobile phone technology. The rigors of such a project must not be elided.
While robots in research-lab contexts often exhibit remarkable capabilities, they are just as often delicate, unreliable and require the constant attention of one or several highly trained staff. A project like ALAVs must exhibit its qualities in the general public, must inform and entertain, and at the same time be robust and resilient to the unpredictabilities of unusual architectures and architectural materials, weather, children and crowds (and sometimes, animals) – influences which are almost always filtered out in the controlled environment of the lab.
The ALAVs achieve all this, while remaining lighter than air, an achievement in itself given the weight of batteries and other components. The ALAVs are beguilingly delicate translucent agents which drift and float in a most un-robotic way. Videos
April 23rd, 2008
In search of flexible buildings – Kengo Kuma uses the term “weak architecture”. His teahouse does not rise up from the ground as a fixed wooden construction, but unfolds as an airborne ephemeral structure. When a ventilation system is activated, the teahouse swells into shape like a white textile blossom. In its interior, comprising a surface of approximately twenty square metres, are nine tatami mats, an electric stove for the water kettle, and a preparation room.
Integrated LED technology allows the use of the teahouse at night; the interior can be heated by way of the membrane. The Teehouse of Kengo Kuma is situated in the garden of Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt.
via luminapolis
October 9th, 2007
Congratulations to Usman Haque and his team on the second successful flight of his ‘Burble‘ project. Here are a few photos of the event which was held in london over the weekend.
Thanks to Joe for the Photos
September 19th, 2007