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Liam Johnson

Liam was chosen for the scholarship by lead designer at Alexander McQueen, Sarah Burton. He spent his year in industry in Paris, working at Maison Margiela under John Galliano, working personally with the designer on both the artisanal and ready-to-wear collections. As a designer, his own collections often centre upon alternatives to normal fashion and instead offer remodelled silhouettes, bright colours, unexpected textures and sculptural, exaggerated forms.

Bernardi Roig

NO/Escape
Mallorcan artist Bernardi Roig (b. 1965) installs six sculptural works in unexpected interior and exterior spaces, challenging visitors to rethink the definition of the museum. Roig draws parallels between his and Honoré Daumier’s works, both of which offer poignant social commentary. Roig addresses the existential dualities of entrapment and liberation, blinding and illumination, absence and presence. Typical of the artist’s work are the cruel-looking white plaster figures cast from real people, often cornered or crushed against walls or twisting in pain. By including the element of light—whether a single light bulb, neon tubes, or fluorescent lights—Roig’s work blends minimalist forms with highly charged expressions of anxiety and loneliness.

Pangenerator

The shimmering pulse
The installation consists of 451 independent modules arranged in a form of hexagon – each module reacts to light it receives by spinning iridescent disc that spreads out thanks to centrifugal force, creating a unique kinetic “physical pixel”. That field of shimmering pixels is combined with light projection mapped onto the installation surface to visualize real-time data of the traffic in the Shenzhen area – the hexagon is divided into sections corresponding the 9 city districts. As a result the public can observe and interact with the object that represents the pulse of life of the city in an artful and unexpected way.

Patricia Olynyk

Oculus
Oculus is a large-scale, collaborative light sculpture that depicts a colossal abstracted drosophila eye, replete with compound faceted surfaces. It both recalls the circular opening at the apex of a cupola and alludes to a surveillance device or drone hovering in mid-air. Oculus is inspired in part by a series of scanning electron micrographs produced in a transgenic lab while researching human and non-human sensoria. The work evokes affective encounters with scale such as viewing miniature particles through the lens of a microscope or wandering through monumental physical environments. As each viewer’s reflection plays across the sculpture’s undulating surface, the apprehension of the self affects both individual and collective behavior in unexpected ways. This affective dynamic plays on the precariousness of our coexistence with other lifeforms in the world, one that is always contingent upon viewers’ bodies and the variability of the environment around them. The act of gazing at Oculus also puts into play the reciprocal condition of both seeing and being seen.

Maotik

Erratic Weather
Despite some world leaders skepticism, climate change is a reality and the world isn’t just warming, in some parts of the planet the weather is becoming more erratic. During the last years, our generation has started to observe the effects and consequences of this shift, witnessing violent and unexpected climate phenomenons. Erratic Weather is a digital art project aiming to represent changing atmospheric conditions into an immersive multimedia experience. During the performance, the system uses various source of weather information retrieved from an online database and processed on real time to generate a visual and a surround sound composition. During 30 minutes the audience will experience the life cycle of swirling phenomenons such typhoon, hurricane and tropical cyclone , demonstrating the devastating power of the nature and the emergency to preserve it.

TIM HAWKINSON

蒂姆·霍金森
ティム·ホーキンソン
تيم هاوكينسون
Möbius Ship

The ambitious and imaginative structure of Hawkinson’s sculpture offers an uncanny visual metaphor for Melville’s epic tale, which is often considered the ultimate American novel. Möbius Ship also humorously refers to the mathematical concept of the Möbius Strip. Named after a nineteenth-century astronomer and mathematician, the Möbius Strip is a surface that has only one side, and exists as a continuous curve. Its simple yet complex spatial configuration presents a visual puzzle that parallels Hawkinson’s transformation of the mundane materials into something unexpected.

RANDOM INTERNATIONAL

随机国际
rain room

Using digital technology, “Rain Room” is a carefully choreographed downpour—a monumental work that encourages people to become performers on an unexpected stage, while creating an intimate atmosphere of contemplation. Visitors can literally walk through rain, as though surrounded by an invisible magnetic field, and never get wet.

David Marinos

Skin 2
His work often uses classical imagery that is transformed and energised using decidedly non-classical colours and forms. He uses collage and glitch techniques on his own and found images to create a quickly expanding body of work which has a recognisable and consistent style but has un unexpected energy making it feel fresh and dynamic.

TOM FRIEDMAN

Фридмен, Том
톰 프리드먼
トム・フリードマン

Tom Friedman’s art has been exhibited extensively in the United States and internationally. The quirky, and flawlessly executed work tends to defy categorization. While his art is often linked to 1960s Conceptualism and Minimal art, Friedman invents his own visual language through his almost obsessive attentiveness to detail and his striking ability to transform the familiar into the unexpected. He uses common household materials such as aluminum foil, spaghetti, fishing line, hair, Styrofoam, and Play-Doh to create works that rearrange the viewer’s perceptions of the everyday environment.

Caroline Ziegler and Pierre Brichet

canapé couette
French design duo caroline ziegler + pierre brichet of brichetziegler have created ‘canapé couette’, a sofa wrapped in a single piece of fabric. The wood and resin structure is enveloped by a quilted cotton duvet. The strategically placed folds add the form of arms and a headrest. Colorful stitching creates an unexpected rhythm chart, emphasizing the direction in which the textile was folded.

sarah braman

Confort Moderne
Braman has a penchant for seeing the most common of objects—desks, cushions, file cabinets, tents—through the eye of an outsider. She extracts an unremarkable portion of the world, makes a few quick alterations, and then presents something fresh and unexpected. It’s a sleight-of-hand move that characterizes great assemblage, and Braman does it using a painter’s transformative touch.

Fabien Nissels

blocks
All of the pieces to the puzzle are there, but Switzerland-based artist Fabien Nissels organizes them into various wacky and nonsensical arrangements in his project, entitled Blocks. Nissels has taken a typically familiar object—the human body—and encourages his viewers to reinterpret this everyday thing in all of its unexpected new forms.

Heather Nicol

Soft Spin
Soft Spin is a public art project which also featured a performance intervention, in the style of “flash mobs”. Colour, texture, movement, and decidedly flirtatious forms invite visitors to look up and embrace the unexpected, highlighting the ever-present potential for encounters with unforeseen pleasure and drama in the day-to-day. From the possibility of feeling miniaturized by the enormity of the installation’s curvaceous hemlines to the play of sunlight through the bursts of spring-time colour, Soft Spin steps away from legers, straight lines, and the black and white. The clean, engineered certainty of corporate grandeur is infused with an immersive dose of the whimsical, the feminine, and the celebratory.

ALEXANDER PONOMAREV

الكسندر بونوماريف
АЛЕКСАНДР ПОНОМАРЕВ
A PARALLEL VERTICAL

Chapel Saint Louis, de la Salpetriere, Paris
Installation
Periscope installation with a cable suspension system. Metal, plastic, video optic system, acrylic spheres, sound wave generators.
The keystone artistic project of the Paris Fesitval d’Automne will be realized in September 2007, at the Salpetriere chapel in the center of Paris. A 36-meter periscope hanging from the dome forms a rigid vertical, equipped in the lower part with the head of the periscope with an ocular allows any viewer to look at the Parisian horizon, expanding vision in the spectacular spaces of the cathedral. The real-time video image is broadcast on closed-circuit television to chambers, offices and other buildings attached to the chapel of Salpetriere hospital. The patients, doctors and staff have the opportunity to take in the unexpected view point of the random viewer and peek past the horizon. This project has been organized by the French Ministry of Culture and the Energy of Art Foundation, Moscow

Joon Y. Moon

Augmented Shadow
File Festival

Augmented Shadow is a design experiment producing an artificial shadow effect through the use of tangible objects, blocks, on a displayable tabletop interface. Its goal is to offer a new type of user-experience. The project plays on the fact that shadows present distorted silhouettes depending on the light. Augmented Shadows take the distortion effect into the realm of fantasy. Shadows display below the objects according to the physics of the real world. However, the shadows themselves transform the objects into houses, occupied by shadow creatures. By moving the blocks around the table the user sets off series of reactions within this new fantasy ecosystem. In this installation, the shadows exist both in a real and a virtual environment simultaneously. It thus brings augmented reality to the tabletop by way of a tangible interface. The shadow is an interface metaphor connecting the virtual world and users. Second, the unexpected user experience results from manipulating the users’ visual perceptions, expectations, and imagination to inspire re-perception and new understanding. Therefore, users can play with the shadows lying on the boundary between the real, virtual, and fantasy. Augmented Shadow utilizes this unique interface metaphor for interactive storytelling. Maximizing the magical amusement of AR, it is embedding an ecosystem where imaginary objects and organic beings co-exist while each of them influences on each other’s life-cycle, even though it is not in use by users. Light and shadow play critical roles in this world’s functions causing chain reactions between virtual people, trees, birds, and houses. A set of tangible blocks allows users to participate in the ecosystem. Users can influence on the system by playing with the blocks or observe the changes of the shadows as if kids were playing with an ant farm.

STELARC

drawing with robot arm
“With gene mapping, gender reassignment, prosthetic limbs and neural implants, what a body is and how a body operates becomes problematic. We generate Fractal Flesh and Phantom Flesh, extended operational systems and virtual task environments. Meat and metal mesh into unexpected and alternate anatomical architectures that perform remotely beyond the boundaries of the skin and beyond the local space it inhabits. The monstrous is no longer the alien other. We inhabit an age of Circulating Flesh. Organs are extracted from one body and inserted into other bodies. Limbs that are amputated from a dead body can be reattached and reanimated on a living body. A face from a donor stitched to the skull of the recipient becomes a Third Face. A skin cell from an impotent male can be recoded into a sperm cell. And more interestingly a skin cell from a female body might be recoded into a sperm cell. Turbine hearts circulate blood without pulsing. In the near future you might rest you head on your loved one’s chest. They are warm to the touch, they are breathing, they are certainly alive. But they will have no heartbeat. A cadaver can be preserved forever through plastination whilst simultaneously a comatose body can be sustained indefinitely on a life-support system. Dead bodies need not decompose, near-dead bodies need not die. Most people will no longer die biological deaths. They will die when their life-support systems are switched off. The dead, the near-dead, the not-yet-born and the partially living exist simultaneously. And cryongenically preserved bodies await reanimation at some imagined future. We live in an age of the Cadaver, the Comatose and the Chimera. Liminal spaces proliferate. Engineering organs, stem-cell growing them or by bio-printing will result in an abundence of organs. An excess of organs. Of organs awaiting bodies. Of Organs Without Bodies.” STELARC