highlike

ScanLAB

Replica
We begin with a tour of a virtual 3D model of the London house-cum-museum built by 19th-century architect Sir John Soane. The journey traverses the five floors of the museum’s meticulously restored rooms, each filled with original and duplicate fragments of antiquity. Sir John Soane (1753-1837) was one of the foremost British architects of the Regency era, a Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy, and a dedicated collector of paintings, sculpture, architectural fragments and models, books, drawings and furniture. Soane was awarded the Royal Academy’s prestigious Gold Medal for Architecture, as a result receiving a bursary (funded by King George III) to undertake a Grand Tour of Europe. His travels to the ruins of Ancient Rome, Paestum and Pompeii would inspire his lifelong interest in Classical art and architecture. As an enthusiastic collector, later in life he began to repurpose his home at Lincoln’s Inn Fields as a Museum for students of architecture. With a collection containing thousands of objects ranging from Ancient Egyptian antiquities and Roman sculpture to models of contemporary buildings, Soane’s house had become a Museum by the time of his death.

BILL VIOLA

The Raft
The Raft depicts at life-sized scale a group of ordinary people casually standing together. Suddenly, they are struck by strong blasts of water that rush in, overtake them, and then, just as unexpectedly, recede. In the aftermath of the deluge, the victims huddle together, seek protection, and help those who have fallen. The viewer experiences this event in an immersive setting, standing in a darkened room and surrounded by the roaring sounds of the water. Meticulously captured in slow-motion, The Raft arouses a visceral experience of human calamity and shared humanity, provoking a consideration of the range of responses to crisis.

Mat Collishaw

The mask of youth
The eyes of the latest portrait of Queen Elizabeth I follow you around the room. No, they really do. Mat Collishaw’s hyperrealistic mask of the Tudor queen comes to life, whirring and grimacing, to shock visitors in the shadowy former royal chambers of the Queen’s House. As the days darken, the effect will get spookier. The Virgin Queen’s dark eyes dart around nervously. Her mouth opens as if to speak but she cannot find the words. She is dazed by a future she can’t comprehend, a robot ghost staring in horror and doubt at her own painted image – Collishaw’s undead death mask has her eyes fixed on the Armada Portrait, painted in 1588 and a treasure of the Queen’s House after being meticulously restored.

Abel Gance

Napoleon

Kevin Brownlow’ restoration

Gance embarked on his greatest project, a six-part life of Napoléon. Only the first part was completed, tracing Bonaparte’s early life, through the Revolution, and up to the invasion of Italy, but even this occupied a vast canvas with meticulously recreated historical scenes and scores of characters. The film was full of experimental techniques, combining rapid cutting, hand-held cameras, superimposition of images, and, in wide-screen sequences, shot using a system he called Polyvision needing triple cameras (and projectors), achieved a spectacular panoramic effect, including a finale in which the outer two film panels were tinted blue and red, creating a widescreen image of a French flag. The original version of the film ran for around 6 hours. A shortened version received a triumphant première at the Paris Opéra in April 1927 before a distinguished audience that included the future General de Gaulle. The length was reduced still further for French and European distribution, and it became even shorter when it was shown in America. Napoleon is a silent film directed by Abel Gance, dramatising the youth and early career of Napoleon Bonaparte. Its most complete screening, said to be nine hours long, took place in Paris in 1927 – but this version was subsequently lost. British film-maker Kevin Brownlow saw a version as a schoolboy and subsequently restored the film to close to its original length from various prints. His restoration was first shown in London in 1980 with a score by Carl Davis.

Jeremy Shaw

towards universal recognition

“Shaw  presents Towards Universal Pattern Recognition, a series of archival photographs framed under custom-machined prismatic acrylic. The works, which he calls optical sculptures, depict people in transcendent states accessed through prayer, dance, yoga and the like. They act as a preview to the videos, which are projected in meticulously constructed spaces, each with eight office chairs facing a single screen.” Diana Hiebert

robert gober

Untitled Door and Door Frame
Robert Gober’s work focuses around the themes of sexuality, relationships, religion, politics and nature. Working mostly in sculpture, surprisingly Gober doesn’t use found objects as a part of his work, but recreates these found objects himself and handcrafts them in his studios. Objects such as sinks, doors, cribs, chairs and body parts feature heavily in his work but yet all meticulously handmade. All the objects and installations in which Gober creates have a certain humorous element to them be it the half body that sticks out from the wall or the sink that has legs coming out of it.

OLI SORENSON

video pistoletto
FILE SAO PAULO 2015

Inspired from the live works of Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto (1933-) of meticulously ransacking large mirrors, Sorenson revisited the classical traditions of vanitas under new materials together with one of the more celebrated exploits of Arte Povera.

MIKE NELSON

迈克·尼尔森
Mike Nelson (b. 1967) is one of the most appreciated artists of his generation. His work predominantly features sculpture and meticulously constructed, large-scale architectural installations. In this new work created for Malmö Konsthall, Nelson uses the institutional architecture as a backdrop for a massive concrete workshop. The exhibition space is divided by a glass wall into two spaces; a smaller production workshop and an exhibition space stripped back to its original configuration.

MOTOI YAMAMOTO

labyrinth
Japanese Artist Motoi Yamamoto’s incredible, labyrinthine installations are the result of 45 hours of meticulously piled grains of salt, strewn inside a medieval castle in the South of France.

video

Refik Anadol, Kilroy Realty Corporation and SOM Architects

Virtual Depictions
Parametric data sculptures
The main idea of ‘Virtual Depictions:San Francisco’ is to bring 21st century approach to public art to define new poetics of space through media arts and architecture and to create a unique parametric data sculptures that has an intelligence, memory and culture. Through architectural transformations of media wall located in 350 Mission’ lobby, home of Salesforce, main motivation with this seminal media architecture approach is to frame this experience with a meticulously abstract and cinematic site-specific data-driven narration. As a result, this media wall turns into a spectacular public event making direct and phantasmagorical connections to its surroundings through simultaneous juxtapositions. The project also intends to contribute to contemporary discourse of public art by proposing a hybrid blend of media arts and architecture in 21st century.