highlike

SHAI LANGEN

Jo Goes Hunting – Run Away

Amsterdam material designer Shai Langen made sculptural headpieces and covered models in hand-painted patterns for Jo Goes Hunting’s Run Away music video.Langen was approached by the Dutch artist’s manager with a brief for “something less conventional”, and was given complete artistic freedom in his approach.The video opens with a close up of a gleaming paint-covered black and white surface, which is gradually shown to be the form of a person.

Es Devlin

Blueskywhite
Devlin’s latest installtion is ‘BLUESKYWHITE’, a large-scale work commissioned by 180 Studios, which is currently showing at LUX: New Wave of Contemporary Art, a new exhibition co-curated by Fact and SUUM Project. The work combines light, music and language, and was conceived as a sculptural expression of our emotional response to the possible extinction of blue sky. The installation is formed of two parts: In Part I, text from Byron’s 1816 poem Darkness underscores the viewer’s passage through a 24m long red-lit tunnel. Part II draws from contemporary solar geo-engineering models documented by Elizabeth Kolbert and others which suggest that a haze of suspended particles might reduce global temperature to pre-industrial levels and might also turn the blue sky white.

KAZUHIRO YAMANAKA

sound cloud
London-based designer kazuhiro yamanaka has created the ‘sound cloud’ a light-emitting quantum glass speaker system installation for saazs ‘a glass house’ program. the structure is composed of five interactive monolithic glass panels, formed with the intention of modelling the integration of innovative glass within architecture and design. the sound and light radiating from ‘sound cloud’ shift in unison, their synchronization may be altered by the viewer as they adjust their aural and visual experience by means of a touch-screen controller.
yamanaka aspired for the visitors to ‘be able to hear the sound move from one to another, jumping back and forth and echoing from the panels.’
a sound module is attached to each panel. as it vibrates,the three layers of glass move at a frequency, which creates optimum sound quality. the sound for the installation was developed by the france-based sound designer, gling-glang. yamanaka and gling-glang devised a soundscape by which ‘sound cloud’ visitors were able to sense the sculptural construction of the music in walking through the installation’s glass-paneled pathway.
the glass is outfitted with a light-emitting system known as ‘LED in glass’, invented by quantum glass. through this technology, the panels become a source of light. the ‘sound cloud’ is illuminated as the LED bars are fitted around the edge of the panel in order to direct beams of light through the edge of the extra clear glass sheet. as a result, light refraction occurs from the front side by means of a white enamel screen print on the opposite side.
yamanaka chose to slightly obscure the brightness of the glass sound system by creating a thin layer from millions of light dots, culminating in a cloud-like shape.

Raster-Noton

White Circle
»White Circle« consists of fluorescent tubes that respond to musical impulses and illuminate the room. Five dedicated compositions by alva noto, byetone, frank bretschneider, and kangding ray playing in a continuous loop (one set takes ca. 45 minutes) model the interrelation between sound, light, and architecture in different ways. Each piece represents an independent and self-contained conceptual proposal by the respective composer. All tracks are multichannel compositions based on the idea of creating a vivid immediate experience of auditory space and visual stimuli. With acoustic material routed to twentyseven speakers placed throughout the gallery, sound itself takes on a threedimensional and indeed sculptural quality.

Heather Phillipson

100% Other Fibres
Through collisions of image, noise, objects, language and bodies, Heather Phillipson’s videos and sculptural installations behave as places, musical scores, poems and nervous systems – attending to how physical and affective ‘selves’ are constructed, manipulated and, above all, escape. Often rendered as walk-in conglomerations of readily accessible materials (digital images, paint, cardboard, words, audio loops and reproducible consumer detritus), her works stake out an ambiguous territory in which cultural references and emotional responses are mutually contingent and reactive. Collapsing distinctions between the forthright and the inarticulable, the banal and the ecstatic, and between metaphor and extreme literalisation, Phillipson’s work performs constant tonal shifts, disruptions and bleeds. In so doing, it oscillates between physical intimacies and conceptual distances – desire, sensuality, touching and being touched, shame, anxiety, (over-)exposure, resistant surfaces.

JAN VERCRUYSSE

Les Paroles

According to Jan Vercruysse, art no longer has a place in this world. As a result, he seeks, through his work, a new place for art and new conditions in which to work. His earliest photographic works recreated historical subjects, such as self-portraits, still lifes and mythological scenes. Gradually, he evolved a sculptural vocabulary of narrow rooms, empty frames and bases without objects. The sacred spaces created by Vercruysse in these works are known as Chambres or Tombeaux and represent the artist’s last-ditched attempts to create art that refers only to itself. His later works, such as plaster pianos, blue Murano glass musical instruments and bronze and ceramic turtles, achieve a perfect equilibrium between conceptual conviction and aesthetic concerns, and also reflect a real pleasure of making.

William Bondin

Morphs
MORPHs, short for Mobile Reconfigurable Polyhedra, are motive architectural structures which can crawl and self-assemble in order to encourage social interaction through play. These playful robotic creatures encourage the public to choreograph them into dance routines, assemble them into complex sculptural geometries or else play music at them, which they will play back over time. Groups of people can interact at any one time and eventually develop a dialogue amongst participants, through the use of contemporary digital technology.

DAVE COLE

Дэйв Коул
the music box

‘the music box’, a monumental sculptural piece commissioned by the cleveland institute of art and developed in partnership with ohio CAT, sees the american artist dismantling a 22, 000 lb steamroller in which he refabricates more than 80% of the machine–though still maintaining its identifiable physical qualities–transforming it into a fully functioning musical box, and at a fraction of its original weight.
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