highlike

Gwyllim Jahn & Cameron Newnham +Soomeen Hahm Design +Igor Pantic

Steampunk Pavilion
Steampunk is a pavilion constructed from steam-bent hardwood, designed by Gwyllim Jahn, Cameron Newnham (Fologram), Soomeen Hahm Design and Igor Pantic for the 5th edition of Tallinn Architecture Biennale.
“Steampunk explores a path to rethink applications and traditions of craft in pursuit of their evolution.” Soomeen Hahm Design
“The structure challenges the idea of the primitive hut –showing how, by using algorithmic logic, simple raw materials can be turned into a highly complex and inhabitable structure”.Gilles Retsin

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.

BAUMGARTNER+URIU

Animated Apertures

instead of windows, mouths with green “hair” that sway in the wind. This is the Animated Apertures Housing Tower, a project of the American architecture firm B + U. The fun building appears to have been attacked by carnivorous plants. The residential building will be built in Lima, Peru. Architects Herwig Baumgartner and Scott Uriu, known for the use of new materials, explain that they wanted to “show that architecture can exist between nature and technology”. Therefore, the designs and colors that imitate plants, in a building that looks more like a living organism. The “hairs” of the windows will be made of a special silicone and will move with the wind, giving the impression of being tentacles. The project is also innovative in its structure, because instead of several small windows, it proposes few and large openings. Thus, professionals avoided a regular facade. The building will have 20 floors and 90 car spaces in an underground car park. The coverage will also have a garden and swimming pool for residents.

Ying Gao

2526
Polymorphic Robotic Garments
2526 refers to the number of hours invested in the creation of the two polymorphic robotic garments, from ideation to the finish, from the first line of drawing to the last stitch. The two polymorphic outfits of the 2 5 2 6 project are very real: woven, hand-screened, and consolidated materials have been specially designed to create these clothes. They are not virtual at all. However, they simulate the effects of virtual clothing: a surreal undulation generates a play of volume and transparency; their polymorphic movement, as well as their reflectivity, are results of an entirely new flexible material that combines glass, precious metals and silicone.

Heavy Duty Love

Lucy Mcrae
HEAVY DUTY LOVE
A cautionary narrative in an uncomfortable, complex debate on the scientific acceleration directing our evolutionary path —from gene-edited babies to CRISPR to AI — Heavy Duty Love is a mental health prop existent as a tactile mechanical structure, asking, “As we head toward a life designed from scratch, will we seek new types of intimacy?”. Realised as a speculative domestic device compensating for a lack of human touch in early life, Heavy Duty Love sandwiches the body between layers of soft, dampening materials normally used in contemporary camping or construction.

STUDIO FUKSAS

Matilda Home
The idea to bring design also in common life attracted us. This is a new concept of habitat of house. It’s a mobile home it can be everywhere around the world; everybody can be a client. It’s a modular unit so many of them can be added together like a cloud. It can even be a city .This is not an object, it is a concept, it can be a city, a landscape or simply an home. Easy to build, it can be done in different materials more or less expensive. Matilda is a completely different space since nowadays we don’t need so much storage space, you just need to have a screen. The only thing is important is to have a nice place to eat, to seat and to sleep but also this can be done with something you close when you don’t need

CLIVE VAN HEERDEN AND JACK MAMA

Skin Sucka

A project conceived with Clive van Heerden, Jack Mama (Philips Design Probes) and Bart Hess, Skinsucka explores a vision of our nano technology future whereby bio technology and robotics come together to question our attitudes of a synthetic future. Skinsucka reveals a future where microbal robots live in our shared spaces and autonomously they will undertake menial tasks such as cleaning our homes by eating the dirt. ‘Skinsuckas’ clean the skin, removing the vestiges of make up and providing the remedies to combat the excesses of the night before They swarm over the body extruding metabolized household dirt, dressing the body in a daily ritual of real time, customized manufacture – yesterday’s discarded clothing ready for recycling.” Clive and Jack’s work has consistently brought very diverse skills together in new innovation processes. In the late 1990’s they took designers and other creative skills into Philips Research labs in the Redhill, London and New York and created a specialist studio in London to develop the skills, materials and technologies for a host of Wearable Electronic business propositions in the areas of electronic apparel, conductive textiles, physical gaming, medical monitoring and entertainment.

Klaus Obermaier

克劳斯奥伯迈尔
the concept of … (here and now)

In front of a giant screen, two dancers interact with a cohort of cameras… Their movements are captured by infra-red sensors and projected onto the screen, whereby their bodies become the canvas on which new images take shape. The result is a shifting kaleidoscope of strange, living, quasi-mathematical visual worlds which sometimes seem to be emanating or even escaping from the dancers’ bodies. “Who decides which movement to make: the man or the machine?” Blurring the line between the real and the virtual, Klaus Obermaier loves to subsume his performers’ bodies and physicality in a disconcerting digital universe. With his latest creation, the choreographer/artist has taken a bold new step. He has constructed a system of projectors and infra-red sensor-cameras, trained upon the movements of two dancers. The performers thus find themselves thrown headlong into a living, moving graphical universe: their movements are projected onto the screen, but at the same time their bodies are illuminated by more projected images. This is a true artistic performance, pushing well beyond the frontiers of a standard dance recital, or even a contemporary dance show. A corporeal, temporal performance. A choreography which makes subtle use of its raw materials, deftly combining lights, video, perspectives and the real-time power of bodily movement.

Circus Family

Triph
“When left alone with no audience, the object glows dimly as if it were asleep. Yet when visitors approach, the installation slowly comes back to life. Colour gradients pour into each shape, whilst mirrored surfaces start reflecting light – all to the orchestra of an encompassing soundscape. This project invites visitors to become part of something. An immersive light experience in which the audience directs the intensity, audio and colour palettes simply by approaching, moving around in and between the large geometric shapes of the installation. Truly, a merging of art, interaction design, sound, tech and vision. As visual architects, our aim with ‘TRIPH” is to demonstrate that a number of different techniques can be combined into a mix of unexpected shapes and materials, that in turn help to create a new truly unique way of experiencing a story. Both in daylight condition and at night. With our self-initiated work, we aim to find undiscovered methods of narrative, questioning the ways people discover and open themselves up to new conceptual work.” Circus Family

Ying Yu

airmorphologies

Humans, as social beings, use language to communicate. The human voice, as a biometric authentication mechanism, is constantly used throughout daily life applications, such as speech recognition, speaker verification, and so on. Currently, language-based communications mainly fall into two categories: voice over air, and voice over internet protocol. Can we add a new dimension for voice communication such as a wearable material? If so, how could we shape matter in order to physicalize vocal information?

airMorphologiesis an interactive installation that uses soft materials, such as silicon, fabric, and air, to realize these physicalizations. The human voice controls the actuation of a soft wearable structure, changing the appearance of the human body.

Alyson Shotz

アリソン・ショッツ
Алисон Шоц
Fluid State

Alyson Shotz is an American artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated with a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1987 and an MFA from the University of Washington in 1991. Alyson Shotz investigates issues of perception and space with sculptures made from a range of synthetic materials such as mirror, glass beads, plastic lenses, thread and steel wire.Karen Rosenberg wrote: “Ms. Shotz evokes natural phenomena with accumulations of beads, pins and other common materials…Often they respond to the challenge of visualizing concepts from theoretical physics (string theory, dark matter).”

LUCIO FONTANA

Spatial Environments with neon
Ambiente spaziale con neon
Fontana’s “Spatial Environments” are considered the most innovative outcome of the theories about space that Lucio Fontana first expressed in his Manifiesto Blanco of 1946. Here and in later manifestos, he described a new form of visual representation linked to space and time, which would move past the classic materials of sculpture and painting and employ modern technology to create “artificial forms, rainbows of wonder, words written in light” […] Ambiente spaziale con neon had a single red bent neon hanging from the ceiling in a room covered with pink fabric.

ANGELIKA LODERER

Angelika Loderers work is refering to the basic research of form and space. She uses fragile, everyday materials that are derived from the vocabulary of domesticity and combine them with sort of traditional sculptural techniques. In the process the play between chance and control defines the aesthetics of her work. The experimenting with attidudes – via a very specific amalgam of materials, shapes and objects- brings forth a new, metaphysical result. “In transience, fragility and decline, I see the formal expressions to which I refer in my designs, and which to some extent provide the framework conditions for my processoriented work. From the abundance on offer, however fragile and vulnerable in composition, the elements fall into place, becoming worthless once again when dismantled.”

Eric Klarenbeek, Designer of the unusual

Eye Jewellery
Eric Klarenbeek does special projects, or let’s say the unusual, for unusual people, projects or purposes. His studio connects creatives, designers, local crafts and clients by inventing new projects and products and believing our world can be so much better, more beautiful and honest. “My work is characterized by interaction and innovation. My products can be in motion, react on our presence or respond on developments in our society. I search for new meaning and principles in objects, for unexplored connections between materials, production methods, makers and users. Scale and appliance are irrelevant. I’ve designed jewellery, but also developed concepts to connect tourists to local craftsmen”, says Eric.

IRIS VAN HERPEN

Айрис Ван Эрпен
イリス ヴァン ヘルペン

Iris van Herpen is a Dutch fashion designer who is widely recognized as one of fashion’s most talented and forward-thinking creators who continuously pushes the boundaries of fashion design. Since her first show in 2007 van Herpen has been preoccupied with inventing new forms and methods of sartorial expression by combining the most traditional and the most radical materials and garment construction methods into her unique aesthetic vision.

BART HESS

바트 헤스
巴特·赫斯
בארט הס
Барта Хесса

Bart Hess (1984) explores several fields combining material studies, animation and photography. Bart has a very personal and recognizable signature. With his designs he is able to use new and existing materials in a very innovative way and he seems to tap into new worlds. His work is of international stature, he finds and creates its own stage and international collaborations with prestigious names.

PETER HAMMAR

Time Space Cube
Peter Hammar is a visual artist who creates mixed media collage paintings and installations. His work is in Flux and the status of the work is in question, fragmented, dislocated and failing, exploring the Meta qualities of art, mixing unusual materials with traditional practices. Multiple shaped collage canvases morph into hybrids in an attempt to re-address an ongoing query upon the visually apparent versus the embodied. Found objects altered and juxtaposed and by so, give a new order and meaning to installations that engage in a dialogue within the architectural space.

Pauline Van Dongen

Pauline van Dongen researches the body in a technologically textured space. After graduating from ArtEZ, Academy of the Arts in Arnhem, the Netherlands, she started her own womenswear label in 2010. Pauline operates a meticulous research of the behaviour of experimental and high-tech materials, combining new technologies with traditional techniques to constantly renovate craftsmanship. Working closely with companies from the field of science and innovation, Pauline aims to merge fashion and technology giving life to scientific creations.

Daniel Lefcourt

Double Imposition
Daniel Lefcourt’s monochromatic works criticize and dismantle the processes of painting itself: its inspirations, its materials, and the spaces in which it occurs. Using source material such as photographs of the trash in his studio, Lefcourt creates indecipherable surfaces in low relief that hover between abstract and representational, as well as flat versus textured; The New Yorker has called the artist’s conceptual practice “a surrender to mystery.”

isabel nolan

Turning Point
Isabel Nolan’s artwork utilizes textiles, steel rods, and primary colored paint to approach questions of anxiety, current events, and the human condition. Her work has a particularly erudite quality, with materials teased and propped to mimic symbolism and images in literature, historical texts, science, and art. Nolan’s work has been exhibited throughout her native Ireland and wider Europe, including at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Musée d’art modern de Saint Etienne. With her first solo exhibition in the United States fast approaching, artnet News caught up with the scholarly artist to hear about her early diagrams of brains and ideas she is currently entertaining for her next body of work.

JAIME PITARCH

Chernobyl
Jaime Pitarch uses cheap equipment and materials to produce videos and “sculptures.” His goal is to produce evocative works that escape the new forms of mannerism that impregnate global art practices within a technophile society.

Rebecca Louise Law

The Hated Flower
Rebecca Louise Law is a London-based installation artist known for her transformation of spaces using hundreds or thousands of suspended flowers. Trained in fine art at Newcastle University in England, Law has been working with natural materials for 17 years, a practice that involves a constant exploration of relationships between nature and humans. Over the past few years she has worked in numerous public spaces, museums, and galleries, and has been commissioned by brands like Hermes, Cartier and Gucci.

JAMIE WEI HUANG

The label is based on the principle of bringing out the character in contemporary women. The ideas of fashion is the language of exploration the inner self by materials and silhouette, developing the concept of garments but refine it in cutting and details. The essential components of the label is simplistic with clean refined outline, masculine in a way into details. The label Jamie Wei Huang is to create the idea of the present women herself by developing new ideas of materials and cutting to represent the way of exploring modern women’s character using their own language.

Przemek Pyszczek

Playground Structure (Steps)
In his recent channels of work, Przemek Pyszczek has painted with concrete and ripped apart playgrounds. As hardcore as this sounds, his bright studio in Schöneweide features friendly knots of primary-colored pipes resting in one corner, and opposite, a canvas with waves of sherbet hues leans against the wall. Pyszczek’s use of a variety of aesthetics and materials is the outcome of his recent focus on the contemporary urban landscape of Poland, where he was born.

THOMAS LANFRANCHI

Flying sculptures
Thomas Lanfranchi uses lightweight materials to create environmentally responsive sculptures. Many of his projects have been wind blown, taking the form of kites or wind socks. He has installed these pieces at sites across France and on buoys at sea. On a recent visit to Australia he made a journey around the outback, creating and documenting a new airborne sculpture each day to suit the site. Working with a type of plastic commonly used for shopping bags, Lanfranchi is able to make very large structures that are capable of being supported by the lightest breeze.

Rina Banerjee

She’s my country

The Indian born, New York City based artist Rina Banerjee has a love of materials, heritage textiles, ethnicity and fashion, colonial objects and furnishings, historical architecture, and their ability to disguise, animate, locate their inherent meanings in her art work. While sculptures and drawings, paintings use a fusion of cultures and unravel our connected experiences an explosion of differences alternate the way we receive our identity. Banerjee says her work explores “specific colonial moments that reinvent place and identity as complex diasporic experiences intertwined and sometimes surreal.”

Thom Puckey

The Wife of the Alchemist
British sculptor Thom Puckey creates work that interestingly treads between old aesthetic sensibilities and materials and new content. Not unlike Renaissance sculptors, Puckey’s pieces are large, constructed out of marble, and often involve female nudes. Yet at the same time the objects presented in the sculptures are fiercely contemporary[…]

SAMANTHA DONNELLY

Саманта Доннелли
Samantha Donnelly’s practice is concerned with breaking down subjects and reconfiguring them in new constellations. Bringing together appropriated ephemera and quotidian materials such as magazines or cut-out photographs to produce assemblages, Donnelly reworks material remnants from various areas of contemporary culture, allowing them to dialogue and resonate within the same piece. By drawing our attention to surface and formal elements such as composition and colour, Donnelly’s work often references art history, particularly Modernism and the Baroque.

Emily Motto

Эмили Мотто
My Cell

I make playful sculptures that perform and evolve throughout, and beyond, my creation – especially in terms of their shape, and the physicality of the unstable materials that I build them from. When creating parasites I was inspired by how the materials I made and used fed off each other’s properties; the net, dough and string of my recent sculpture series structurally supporting each other, and these responses creating new, and often quite fragile, forms

Samantha Donnelly

Саманта Доннелли
Samantha Donnelly’s practice is concerned with breaking down subjects and reconfiguring them in new constellations. Bringing together appropriated ephemera and quotidian materials such as magazines or cut-out photographs to produce assemblages, Donnelly reworks material remnants from various areas of contemporary culture, allowing them to dialogue and resonate within the same piece.

Zilvinas Kempinas

The works of the Lithuanian artist Zilvinas Kempinas are not only kinetic but also minimalistic. Now a resident of New York, Kempinas uses the simplest of means to create complex and atmospheric room situations of great beauty. His installations play with air and lightness – the reliefs are based on time and chance[…] Gravity seems abolished, light’s palette penetrates and activates the materials in his installations.

HENRY BAUMANN

Генри Бауманн
One Cut

Giving new life to materials that others have discarded, designer henry baumann has transformed wooden cable drums, commonly found on building sites into the ‘one cut’ spiral. the sculptural installation is formed using only slice through the original material, ensuring that there are no unwanted leftovers. the project is based on the concept of creating something new without acquiring any additional waste, or needing many alterations or additions done to it.

Laura Splan

Gloves
Laura Splan’s work examines the material manifestations of our cultural ambivalence towards the human body. Her conceptually based projects employ a range of traditional and new media techniques. She often uses found objects and appropriated sources to explore socially constructed perceptions of order and disorder. Much of her work is inspired by experimentation with materials and processes including blood, cosmetic facial peel and digital fabrication.

PETER MOVRIN

Wearable Sculpture
He designs with meticulous attention to detail and longing for newness. Leather and wool are still his favourite materials. To get the effect of surprise he juxtaposes these two traditional materials with others, perhaps not typically associated with the textile industry. An important part of his design process is treating natural and synthetic fabrics with various methods, using heat, chemicals or other techniques, thus combining innovation and tradition.

PAULINE VAN DONGEN

wearable solar

There is nothing natural in nature; technology makes our humanness giving form to our surroundings. The human habitat reveals a techno-morphed structure that can no longer be hidden behind the vestiges of a natural world: technology has to be naturalized. Pauline van Dongen researches the body in a technologically textured space. After graduating from ArtEZ, Academy of the Arts in Arnhem, the Netherlands, she started her own womenswear label in 2010. Pauline operates a meticulous research of the behaviour of experimental and high-tech materials, combining new technologies with traditional techniques to constantly renovate craftsmanship. Working closely with companies from the field of science and innovation, Pauline aims to merge fashion and technology giving life to scientific creations.

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon

It Only Happens All of the Time

Constructed by Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon within San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) new exhibition series Control: Technology in Culture, It Only Happens All of the Time is an installation that shapes sound, movement, and perception. Architectural in ambition, the installation tasks visitors with exploring a room lined with a droning 11.1.4 surround sound system and custom sound-dampening acoustic panels in order to foreground what the artist describes as the “the exchange between moving within the sound, moving within the sculpture, moving with someone else” and yielding an “intimacy” in the process. Borrowing the materials and geometries of the acoustic panels used in anechoic chambers and acoustic testing labs, Gordon’s immersive sonic environment deploys clinical sound design to engender exploration and interaction.Positioned in the centre of Gordon’s space is “Love Seat”, a pair of adjoined enclosures where visitors can sit and listen. While sharing a common sightline—but physically separated—listeners can enjoy a moment together, each within (relative) acoustic isolation. In the essay accompanying the exhibition, Control: Technology in Culture curator Ceci Moss succinctly describes Gordon’s approach as “sound modulating mood” to “both commune and command” those entering the space.As would be expected, Gordon went to great lengths to sculpt the acoustics within It Only Happens All of the Time and the exhibition saw her working closely with specialists at Meyer Sound Laboratories. She touches on her process briefly in the video below and the Creator’s Project post on the project is worth delving into, as it provides some worthwhile ‘making of’ details as well as comments from collaborators Jon Leidecker (aka Wobbly) and Zackery Belanger.

Kevin Beasley

Strange Fruit
Using both sculpture and musical performance in his practice, Kevin Beasley explores the physical materiality and cultural connotations of both objects and sound. His sculptures typically incorporate everyday items like clothing, housewares, or sporting goods, bound together using tar, foam, resin, or other materials. Often they also contain embedded audio equipment that warps and amplifies the ambient tones of their surroundings. For Storylines, Beasley has created two new works specifically for the Guggenheim’s Frank Lloyd Wright–designed building. Within this vast and open sonic environment, Strange Fruit (Pair 1) and Strange Fruit (Pair 2) (both 2015) offer an experience of intimacy, absorbing and reflecting the sound of the crowd at the scale of a personal conversation. Each work embodies this spirit of dialogue in its two-part structure—at its core are two athletic shoes, one merged with microphones, the other with speakers. Suspending these objects in space, Beasley compounds their technological interchange with additional layers of meaning, bringing to mind the urban phenomenon of shoes hanging from overhead wires or poles (itself an open-ended form of communication). At the same time the works’ titles refer to history of lynchings in the American South memorialized by Bronx schoolteacher Abel Meerepol in the 1937 protest song “Strange Fruit.” In these contexts, the hanging forms of Beasley’s sculptures resonate not only with his body, which molded them by hand, or with the bodies moving through the museum, but also with those inscribed in the problematic history of race and class in the United States.

1024 architecture

VORTEX

Architectural fragment made from scaffolding, VORTEX has a raw wood skin highlighted by 12 lines of LED light as many generative and constructive project’s lines. Merging organic materials with new technologies, this hybrid architectural artwork wraps around and embraces the footbridge between the complex’s two buildings, revealing and enhancing the venue’s dynamic energy while working as a live visualizer of energy consumption. VORTEX evolves like a living organism; it breathes, trembles and emits pulses of light created using 1024’s MadMapper software. Manually controlled via a joystick, the structure can be synchronized to music and also displays its location’s energy consumption through a series of illuminated tubes. It ultimately answers to the ambient environment around it, capturing the Darwin Ecosystem Project’s unique energy consumption footprint, and converting it into data that is processed to spawn realtime visuals.
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Mette Ingvartsen

The Artificial Nature Project
In The Artificial Nature Project a new encounter between human and non- human performers emerges from the following questions:What does it mean to make a choreography for materials where human movement is no longer in the center of attention?How can one address the force of things, materials, objects and matters as something that acts upon humans?What is the relationship between the animate and the inanimate world?
The outcome is a performance that literally throws things around. Materials fly through the air giving rise to a landscape that constantly transforms itself. Throughout the performance the view is persistently changing: a calm contemplative site may turn into an energetic chaos of stuff being projected into space. Or, a flood wave becomes a storm of confetti whirling through the air, rushing over the stage. The theater stage gets covered with and traversed by various objects and raw materials, creating a disastrous mess of small, thick, light, big, heavy, thin, breakable and resistant things.

P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S

The Textile Room

Los Angeles-based P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S is among the most intriguing and progressive firms working in architecture today. They seem relentless in pushing boundaries in areas like ultra-light-weight high-tech materials and immersive media. They are also very thoughtful and patient in the way they approach design.This is good because what they are engaged in and the way they work takes time. By collaborating with engineers and innovators in different industries they are slowly changing the way architecture is carried out and conceived on material and ontological levels. They don’t do spec homes, they do what’s new, and sometimes try to do what hasn’t been done yet.

THOMAS LANFRANCHI

Structure volante

Thomas Lanfranchi uses lightweight materials to create environmentally responsive sculptures. Many of his projects have been wind blown, taking the form of kites or wind socks. He has installed these pieces at sites across France and on buoys at sea. On a recent visit to Australia he made a journey around the outback, creating and documenting a new airborne sculpture each day to suit the site. Working with a type of plastic commonly used for shopping bags, Lanfranchi is able to make very large structures that are capable of being supported by the lightest breeze. When they are destroyed after the exhibition an object the size of a blue whale collapses into a carrier bag.

EUNHEE JO

New Tangible Interfaces TTI

Interactive surfaces makes everyday objects multi-functional and fun. Reactive technologies have now enabled normal interfaces with new functions and new possibilities. The role of the surface is changing radically, according to how it’s designed and incorporated with objects. My proposal was to re-define the role of the surface in future lifestyle, exploring how surfaces can be an integrated as part of a product or environment.

TTI, (standing for Tangible Textural Interface) is a new sound system that embeds a tactile surface. TTI has flexibility that enables people to physically touch and feel the response through the controls and physical morph of the surface. TTI delivers new aesthetics through integrated flexible surfaces as interface material unlike adapting conventional materials for interfaces such as plastic or glass. Unlike existing 2D interfaces, TTI has a curved 3D surface opening up new possibilities in making flexible forms and shapes within the interface.

TTI consists of 3 main functions, backwards and forwards, volume control and equaliser, having a physical feedback and control interface within one surface. As you control the functions, the left surface physically responds to the controls. Tactile surface also responds to the beat of the music.