“Each level takes place in a different flower’s dream as it sits on the windowsill of a dull city apartment. As the player progresses through the game, the apartment and city gradually becomes more vibrant and colourful, until it climaxes at the 100% completion mark and the cityscape is replaced by a vibrant field with mountains in the background. The player guides a petal through brightly coloured, abstract fields by tilting the motion-sensitive controller; pressing any button on the controller gives a speed boost. The aim is to guide the petal into other flowers in the field, triggering an explosion of colour that spreads through the game world.” Wikipedia: Flower
Earlier this morning I came across another Bruegel collaboration, a painting of the 9 muses meeting with Minerva, the Roman Goddess of War. This painting, which I didn’t get then name of, was housed in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen.
This project by Elemental Architects (Chile) reminds me of Rural Studio/Samuel Mockbee (US) in that they involve the public in the design process. This project however goes a step further by adding the potential for expansion and further customization to be realized by the dweller after the design is complete.
The above is an article in the New York Times about the shopping mall crisis in the USA mentions the photography of Julia Christensen (above) which documents the conversions of big-box stores in the Big Box Reuse book and BigBoxReuse website and a new book with research on the phenomenon called “Retrofitting Suburbia,” by Ellen Dunham-Jones…
A similar book worth mentioning is Rem Koolhaas and his students’ work at Harvard called “The Harvard Guide to Shopping” …if you can get your hands on a copy. $112 and up on Amazon. [We happened to read the intro to Koolhass' "S, M, L, XL" in Vito Acconci's "Aesthetics of Information class" (Spring 08) and we also read a criticism of his books by Hal Foster in Siebren Versteeg's "Workshop in Design History" (Spring 08)]
In regards to re-purposing and mix-use space, here is a film by an artist friend of mine Hatuey Ramos-Fermin, which documents a special mix-use space in Holland.
Coexistence: “Since the year 2000 this Latin American migrants pentecostal church shares their worship space with a ping pong club in Amsterdam. Each weekend they transform the space.”
Finally, this is a great little guide book from architects Atelier Bow-Wow in Japan called “Made in Tokyo“… It’s an index of all the uniqueness of Tokyo’s architectural condition: very little space…
PROPOSITIONS: ‘AFTER IMAGE’
Written + Realized: Documents, Objects, Flyers, Sculpture, Video, Painting, and Drawings.
(i) Is there any rest from images? In abstraction and representation? The attempt to deny the image is but just the most instinctual of all responses we can have to the image: shut it off. I am a bit confused to what you mean by shutting off the image? A way to think about it is like turing off the lights. Reading into it or not? Overlooking its formal qualities? Or it’s purpose of depicting something?. Both form and message, the next line answers states this…
As of this post, After Image is requesting propositions from:
[X] HSIAO CHEN • [ ] ZOE GHERTNER • [X] AMA SARU [X] ANTONIO SERNA • [X] SUZANNE SONG • [X] PEGGY TAN
[ ] ARTHUR OU • [X] MATTHEW WILSON • [X] JOHN MONTEITH [ ] KELSEY HARRINGTON • [ ] KEITH RILEY • [ ]HONG-KAI WANG
Couple in Gallery photo by Mark Kobayashi-Hillary (click for the flkr page)
This article in Wired’s website “Beauty Affects Men’s and Women’s Brains Differently” caught my eye because of a recent discussion about how women and men process visual art differently. (Apparently there are studies that show a difference in the way men and women process music too.) But more interesting than the difference in how we process art –as everything is perhaps processed differently from person to person– was this line about how Camilo Cela-Conde, the researcher in the article, believes aesthetics could actually be a byproduct of other cognitive tasks.
