highlike

SPLITTERWERK

bio intelligence quotient house
Dubbed the Bio Intelligent Quotient (BIQ) House, the approximately €5 million building was designed by Splitterwerk Architects and funded by the Internationale Bauausstellung (IBA), a long-running exhibition series showcasing cutting edge techniques and architectural concepts, for this year’s International Building Exhibition – 2013.
A total of 129 algae culturing tanks are affixed to the East and West sides of the building via an automated external scaffolding structure that constantly turns the tanks towards the sun. The plant cultures are fed through an integrated tubing system, CO2 is pumped in as well. According to Arup’s Europe Research Leader, Jan Wurm, who collaborated with Splitterwerk on the project:The algae flourish and multiply in a regular cycle until they can be harvested. They are then separated from the rest of the algae and transferred as a thick pulp to the technical room of the BIQ. The little plants are then fermented in an external biogas plant, so that they can be used again to generate biogas. Algae are particularly well suited for this, as they produce up to five times as much biomass per hectare as terrestrial plants and contain many oils that can be used for energy.Not only do these tanks provide shade for every level of the building during the summer and biogas for heating during the winter, the facade itself collects excess heat not being used by the algae, like a solar thermal system. That heat can then either be used immediately or stored in 80-meter-deep, borine-filled borehole heat exchangers located under the structure. Total fossil fuels used in this process: zero.

gordon matta clark

Anarchitecture

splitting house

“Of the many shows at the fabled 112 Greene Street gallery—an artistic epicenter of New York’s downtown scene in the 1970s—the Anarchitecture group show of March 1974 has been the subject of the most enduring discussion, despite a complete lack of documentation about it. Anarchitecture has become a foundational myth, but one that remains to be properly understood. Stemming from a series of meetings organized by Gordon Matta-Clark and reflecting his long-standing interest in architecture, the Anarchitecture exhibition was conceived as an anonymous group statement in photographs about the intersection of art and building. But did it actually happen? It exists only through oblique archival traces and the memories of the participants. Cutting Matta-Clark investigates the Anarchitecture group as a kind of collective research seminar, through extensive interviews with the protagonists and a dossier of all the available evidence. The dossier includes a collection of Matta-Clark’s aphoristic “art cards,” the 96 photographs that were produced by the various participants for possible inclusion in the exhibition, and images from a recently unearthed video of Matta-Clark’s now famous bus trip to see Splitting in Englewood, New Jersey.” Mark Wigley

SASHA WALTZ

Heilig
Sacre ist Waltz’ kraftvolle Version von The Rite of Spring. Die Bühne ist verraucht und ein Kegel aus Steinen und Asche liegt im Mittelpunkt wie die Überreste eines Feuers. Paare dringen auf die Bühne ein und bilden zerlumpte Gruppen, die zerbrechen und sich neu formieren: entlang der Geschlechtergrenzen zerbrechen oder in unterschiedliche Teile zersplittern. Obwohl sie das Stück am Ende mit zu vielen Unterszenen überfrachtet – wirklich zu vielen Riten – ist Waltz großartig darin, die wilden Energien ihrer Tänzer gleichzeitig zu ordnen und zu entfesseln und die Bühne mit Bildern von Geburt, Sex und Tod, von wilder Konformität zu spießen und nackte Revolte.

Hussein Chalayan

フセイン·チャラヤン
ЧАЛАЯН
후세인 샬 라얀
Gravity Fatigue

Fashion designer Hussein Chalayan has created elasticated costumes and sequinned garments for performers in his first self-directed dance production (+ slideshow).The production is split into 18 chapters that each explore themes of identity, displacement and invisibility.

Yves Netzhammer

Vororte der Körper

Yves Netzhammer uses emblematic language for the visualisation of his between worlds. His digital worlds are peopled by a recurring stock of objects and figures both animal and human. Object and subject worlds touch and penetrate each other, merge or split away.Life appears to be in a constant flow: phases of construction alternate with those of decay.

Haegue Yang

Sol LeWitt Upside Down
Haegue Yang’s expansive installation, titled Sol LeWitt Upside Down – Structure with Three Towers, Expanded 23 Times, Split in Three, consists of over 500 independent components made of Venetian blinds that together recreate one of LeWitt’s signature works from 1986 – connecting LeWitt’s work to her own attempts to be liberated from the urge to compose, and the way modular thinking leads towards proliferation. Magnifying its size 23 times and hanging it upside down, this is the first work in her Sol LeWitt Upside Down series.

ANDY LOMAS

Morphogenetic Creations
Created by a mathematician, digital artist and Emmy award winning supervisor of computer generated effects – Andy Lomas, Morphogenetic Creations is a collection of works that explore the nature of complex forms that can be produced by digital simulation of growth systems. These pieces start with a simple initial form which is incrementally developed over time by adding iterative layers of complexity to the structure.The aim is to create structures emergently: exploring generic similarities between many different forms in nature rather than recreating any particular organism. In the process he is exploring universal archetypal forms that can come from growth processes rather than top-down externally engineered design.Programmed using C++ with CUDA, the series use a system of growth by deposition: small particles of matter are repeatedly deposited onto a growing structure to build incrementally over time. Rules are used to determine how new particles are created, and how they move before being deposited. Small changes to these rules can have dramatic effects on the final structure, in effect changing the environment in which the form is grown. To create these works, Andy uses the GPU as a compute device rather than as a display device. All the data is held in memory on the GPU and various kernel functions are called to do things like apply forces to the cells, make cells split, and to render the cells using ray-tracing. The simulations and rendering for each of the different animated structures within this piece take about 12 hours to run, Andy explains. By the end of the simulations there are over 50,000,000 cells in each structure.The Cellular Forms use a more biological model, representing a simplified system of cellular growth. Structures are created out of interconnected cells, with rules for the forces between cells, as well as rules for how cells accumulate internal nutrients. When the nutrient level in a cell exceeds a given threshold the cell splits into two, with both the parent and daughter cells reconnecting to their immediate neighbours. Many different complex organic structures are seen to arise from subtle variations on these rules, creating forms with strong reminiscences of plants, corals, internal organs and micro-organisms.

Ricardo Barreto and Paula Perissinotto

CYBERDANCE

This net art by Ricardo Barreto and Paula Perissinotto offers us a split, fragmented, impossible dance, in a divided, multiplied space. Cyberdance consists of the combination and recombination of elements that represent the different parts of the human body. A mannequin was photographed as a model in different positions. These images were later converted to the animated form, allowing users to combine them in different ways, as well as link them to different dance terms, to the names of postures and positions of classical ballet. On a page divided into frames containing fragments of the mannequin, we can see his head, legs, torso and arms rotating, while allowing us to subdivide each frame by clicking on it, each frame composing an aberrant doll whose fragments dance, silently, independent one from the other. There is no music, no rhythm, no space. It is a digital dance, a dance in which time and space have become a platform.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

Bilateral Time Slicer
A biometric tracking system finds the axis of symmetry of members of the public and splits a live camera image into two slices. With each new participant time slices are recorded and pushed aside. When no one is viewing the work, the slices close and rejoin creating a procession of past recordings.

Christoph De Boeck

Staalhemel

The intimate topography of the brain is laid out across a grid of 80 steel ceiling tiles as a spatialized form of tapping. The visitor can experience the dynamics of his cognitive self by fitting a wireless EEG interface on his head, that allows him to walk under the acoustic representation of his own brain waves.The accumulating resonances of impacted steel sheets generates penetrating overtones. The spatial distribution of impact and the overlapping of reverberations create a very physical soundspace to house an intangible stream of consciousness.‘Staalhemel’ (‘steel sky’, 2009) articulates the contradictory relationship we entertain with our own nervous system. Neurological feedback makes that the cognitive focus is repeatedly interrupted by the representation of this focus. Concentrated thinking attempts to portray itself in a space that is reshaped by thinking itself nearly every split second.

THORSTEN FLEISCH

Energie!
Thorsten Fleisch creates films that reveal the shapes and patterns of natural forces and phenomena. In this work he reveals what energy in one of its simplest forms looks like in motion. Energie! is a sequence of still images created on light-sensitive photographic paper. The artist exposed dozens of sheets of paper to enormous electrical discharges, each leaving its imprint as a trail of light. Animating these images reveals patterns in their flow of energy, akin to tracing the flow of electricity at each moment of a lightning strike. As the images are photographs created without cameras, they are records of single moments. Accordingly we see dozens of split-second documents animated to reveal the shape and power of energy.

diller scofidio + renfro

musings on a glass box
‘Musings on a glass box’ occupies the entire ground floor of the jean nouvel-designed building, generating an immersive and captivating environment split between two adjacent gallery spaces. In the first volume, a fabricated leak in the ceiling generates single droplets of water, which then fall from 12 specified points in the structure’s roof. Each drip is then caught below in a red robotic bucket that moves in synchronization with the falling water. At the same time, an enormous LED screen hung within the neighboring gallery invites visitors to view nouvel’s ceiling from the perspective of the bucket, projecting a wavy and distorted image.

LI EDELKOORT AND MOHAIR SOUTH

The fibrous texture of tissue, the fuzzy follicles of hair, the string-like strands of veins and the bouncing qualities of flesh and skin all provide a starting point for new techniques and colors. Creating a fashion to mirror our own image, celebrating humankind. Mohair is the fiber that can create our splitting image; a versatile fiber that can translate all of these ideas and more, ranging from silk-like furry yarns to entangled textured blends.

Sidsel Meineche Hansen

SECOND SEX WAR på Trondheim kunstmuseum er Sidsel Meineche Hansens første soloutstilling i Norge. Tittlen refererer både til den franske filosofen og forfatteren Simone de Beauvoirs bok Det annet kjønn (The Second Sex), og til de såkalte ‘sex wars’ – en debatt om pornografi som sjanger og industri, som splittet feministbevegelsen i henholdsvis anti-pornografi- og anti-sensur-grupper tidlig på 1980-tallet. Langs denne historiske linje vil SECOND SEX WAR utforske en ny cyber-feministisk posisjon rettet mot patriarkatet og den hvite dominansen som ligger til grunn for (re)produksjonen av det binære kjønnssystemet i virtual reality (VR).

Fellini

Satyricon
Fellini Satyricon, or simply Satyricon, is a 1969 Italian fantasy drama film written and directed by Federico Fellini and loosely based on Petronius’s work Satyricon, written during the reign of Emperor Nero and set in imperial Rome. The film is divided into nine episodes, following Encolpius and his friend Ascyltus as they try to win the heart of a young boy named Gitón within a surreal and dream-like Roman landscape.
The film opens on a graffiticovered wall with Encolpius lamenting the loss of his lover Gitón to Ascyltus. Vowing to win him back, he learns at the Thermae that Ascyltus sold Gitón to the actor Vernacchio. At the theatre, he discovers Vernacchio and Gitón performing in a lewd play based on the “emperor’s miracle”: a slave’s hand is axed off and replaced with a gold one. Encolpius storms the stage and reclaims Gitón. On their return to Encolpius’s home in the Insula Felicles, a Roman tenement building, they walk through the vast Roman brothel known as the Lupanare, observing numerous sensual scenes. They fall asleep after making love at Encolpius’s place. Ascyltus sneaks into the room, waking Encolpius with a whiplash. Since both share the tenement room, Encolpius proposes they divide up their property and separate. Ascyltus mockingly suggests they split Gitón in half. Encolpius is driven to suicidal despair, however, when Gitón decides to leave with Ascyltus. At that moment, an earthquake destroys the tenement.

EDITH BERGFORS

WE’VE GONE COMMERCIAL
Edith Bergfors shows split photographies which remind us of fashion commercials. The artists explain: ‘We were looking at stock imagery and wanted to pull in some of the recurring elements, and then deconstruct them quite literally. Stock imagery has that wonderful dullness to it, and we wanted to embrace it wholly and humorously, appropriating it into our own versions.’

Matter Design

Megaphones
Each megaphone shapes sound in a unique way—variably in line or perpendicular to the performer, with narrow or wide washed bands of sound, some split into multiple directions, while others focus on a point. These family of megaphones are revealed through a series of tableaux. more

MARIA MARTINS

“O impossivel”

They touch. They bite. They get warm. They penetrate. They are made. They get rid of. They stick their tongues in. They put the body in. They get body. They split up. They exist.
They want to be one. It is impossible (“O impossivel”). Which means that a single body, as you would like, is impossible. It can not. For a moment yes, for a moment they can. But no, they can’t. Impossible. They cannot be one. Despite the bites. Their bodies are different. They were born and will die self-absorbed, in themselves. Between them there is an abyss, a discontinuity. But they want to be continuous, they want their bodies to be one body. Since they cannot, they celebrate the sacrifice of the meat. “Essentially,” says Georges Bataille, “the field of eroticism is the field of violence, the field of rape.” Isn’t it violent, perhaps, to want to break the discontinuity of the other closed in on itself? Isn’t it violent to force the discontinuity of the other to be a continuous whole with him? O impossível by the Brazilian Maria Martins (1894/1973) shows the excesses of sex (take note: excess, sex). Or impossível is the moment in which the organs swell with blood and gush sexuality. The moment when animality makes us gloriously human.

OTA+

Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art
This building proposal challenges the traditional definition of a museum and the conventional relationship between building and site. The ground floor of the building is reduced to a nominal footprint, enclosing only enough space for basic services, structure and ticketing functions. The ground plane is primarily reserved for exterior public space, including an art park, Hall of Fame, and garden walk. The bulk of the program and building mass are split by the open ground floor. Half of the building is coupled with the earth while the other half hovers in the air. The purpose is twofold; to minimize the damaging effects of extreme local weather by harnessing environmental flows toward productive outcomes and to re-conceptualize the identity of a modern art museum. The manicured roof plane of the below ground program is pocketed with water absorbing vegetation and catchment systems, while the hovering museum above expands to form open atriums, allowing diffuse light to brighten the space and passive airflow to comfortably condition the building.The program of the museum is interconnected. The Contemporary Museum of Art, Children’s Museum of Art and Administration are located within the floating mass. The lecture hall, parking, art resource center, library and classrooms are located below ground. The programs below ground are easily accessible and directly connected through vertical circulation tubes, providing both structural support for the floating mass above and space for movement systems, such as escalators, stairs and elevators between levels. All of the below ground programs are flooded with diffuse light passing through skylights that penetrate the landscape.

Nirma Madhoo

Future Body

A stiff cyborg, fixed with a glazed and expressionless stare, dips her fingers into an alien-like amniotic fluid. Gravity shifts as droplets reverse upwards, forming a pulsing headpiece that encases her smooth, almost porcelain skull. ‘Future Body’, a new film by Nirma Madhoo, uses CGI and animated 3D modelling to explore technological embodiment, enacting it in a character that transgresses expected gender roles in a newly mechanised system of digital-infused aesthetics.
Set in the clinical, segmented interiors of a simulated hyper-real space, Madhoo’s cyborg is found dressed for battle, in pieces forming exoskeletons, a spinal scorpion’s tail and mantis-like shoes, designed by Iris van Herpen. A collision between her human and technological self is physicalised as she undergoes mitosis, splitting into two and performing a combative dance with her duplicate.
Currently showing in Melbourne in an exhibition titled ‘Fashion Performance: Materiality, Meaning, Media’, alongside work from Hussein Chalayan, BOUDICCA and POSTmatter collaborator Bart Hess, it offers a glimpse into the collapse of gender, species and machine into one another, in turn reimagining the future for fashion design and communication.

JANE BENSON

The Splits (Rehearsal)

The Splits begins with the bisecting of various string instruments into two halves, cutting them along their length, creating two separate instruments. The two halves must then be played together to complete a tune and are, thus, for duets (or quartets, octets or dectets) only—pieces which she is creating in collaboration with musicians and composers. The act of splitting at once destroys the integrity of the instrument as an object, and disrupts the conventional process of aesthetic creation that the instrument traditionally permits. Splitting is not merely an act of destruction, however. Instead, it opens graceful passages for imagined evolution: the split instrument becomes a newly creative instrument, permitting the creation not only of new music, but new communities (visual artist, the composer, the musicians, and the audience). Ms. Benson has “split” two violins, a viola, cello and double bass: all, cheap, mass-produced string instruments made in China.

GORDON MATTA-CLARK

Anarchitecture

maison de fractionnement

«Parmi les nombreuses expositions à la légendaire galerie 112 Greene Street – un épicentre artistique de la scène du centre-ville de New York dans les années 1970 – l’exposition de groupe Anarchitecture de mars 1974 a fait l’objet de la discussion la plus durable, malgré un manque complet de documentation . L’anarchitecture est devenue un mythe fondamental, mais qui reste à bien comprendre. Issue d’une série de rencontres organisées par Gordon Matta-Clark et reflétant son intérêt de longue date pour l’architecture, l’exposition Anarchitecture a été conçue comme une déclaration de groupe anonyme en photographies sur l’intersection de l’art et de la construction. Mais est-ce vraiment arrivé? Il n’existe qu’à travers les traces d’archives obliques et les souvenirs des participants. Cutting Matta-Clark étudie le groupe Anarchitecture comme une sorte de séminaire de recherche collective, à travers des entretiens approfondis avec les protagonistes et un dossier de toutes les preuves disponibles. Le dossier comprend une collection de «cartes d’art» aphoristiques de Matta-Clark, les 96 photographies qui ont été produites par les différents participants pour une éventuelle inclusion dans l’exposition, et des images d’une vidéo récemment déterrée du désormais célèbre voyage en bus de Matta-Clark pour voir Splitting à Englewood, New Jersey. » Mark Wigley