London Trip March 8, 2010
Posted by admin in : Announcements, Exhibitions , comments closedThere will be a London Trip to the Decode and Digital Pioneers Exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum on Friday 12th March 2010. A coach will leave the University Bus Stop at 8.30 sharp and we will return by 8.00pm approx.
The Decode exhibition is a really excellent opportunity to see a memorable collection of interactive and digital media installations and is essential for all Digital Media Students to attend. We only have a 50 seater coach so the first 50 there get the seats.
Click on the image below for more info:
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot February 9, 2010
Posted by admin in : Exhibitions, Installation, Performance , comments closedI love this performance piece, it’s one of those pieces that is so blindingly simple that you wish you’d thought of it yourself.
French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot creates works by drawing on the rhythms of daily life to produce sound in unexpected ways.
For his installation in The Curve, Boursier-Mougenot creates a walk-though aviary for a flock of zebra finches, furnished with electric guitars and other musical instruments. As the birds go about their routine activities, perching on or feeding from the various pieces of equipment, they create a captivating, live soundscape.
27 February 2010 – 23 May 2010
The Curve, Barbican, London
http://www.barbican.org.uk/thecurve/blog/index.html
Telling Tales September 1, 2009
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Whilst in London for the Walking in My Mind exhibition I made a quick dash to the Victoria and Albert Museum to take in the Telling Tales exhibition.
“This exhibition explores the recent trend among European designers for unique or limited edition pieces that push the boundaries between art and design. It showcases furniture, lighting and ceramics, designed by a new generation of international designers, including Tord Boontje, Maarten Baas, Jurgen Bey and Studio Job, who are all inspired by the spirit of story-telling. Each tells a tale through their use of decorative devices, historical allusions or choice of materials, sharing common themes such as fantasy, parody and a concern with mortality.”
There is a particularly nice Flash site of the exhibits HERE
Walking in My Mind September 1, 2009
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An exhibition I really enjoyed was Walking in My Mind at the Hayward Gallery.
“Walking in My Mind explores the inner workings of the artist’s imagination through immersive, large-scale installation art. Ten international artists transform the Hayward Gallery’s indoor galleries and outdoor sculpture terraces into a series of gigantic sculptural environments, each of which represents an individual mindscape. Interior worlds of emotions, thoughts, memories and dreams collide with exterior reality, blurring the boundaries between inner and outer space.”
Artists include:
Charles Avery, Thomas Hirschhorn, Yayoi Kusama, Bo Christian Larsson, Mark Manders, Yoshitomo Nara, Jason Rhoades, Pipilotti Rist, Chiharu Shiota and Keith Tyson.
I thought this was a really nicely curated exhibition that made excellent use of the Hayward space. At times it was difficult to relate the exhibition to the usual inner space of the gallery. The exhibition provoked many interesting problems about how an artist can portray the inner workings of the human mind and where ideas come from.
http://www.vimeo.com/6081965On the Road April 22, 2009
Posted by admin in : Exhibitions , add a commentA few weeks ago whilst in Birmingham I visited the Barber Institute to see the exhibition of Jack Kerouac’s original scroll of On the Road. Kerouac was one of the original 1950’s Beat Generation and his novel On the Road has been a best seller for years. Written in one sitting, in a stream of consciousnesses style, on one long roll of paper. A great book well worth reading and a great record of 1950’s American culture. It became the blueprint for just about every road movie made.
Jack Kerouac: Back On the Road
“In April 1951, Kerouac sat down in front of a portable typewriter to begin writing, on sheets of tracing paper cut to size and taped together to form a scroll 120 feet long, the work that was to become the bible of the post-war Beat Generation.
The novel was completed after twenty days of continuous typing, fuelled, despite rumours to the contrary, by no other drug than caffeine. To a large extent autobiographical, and based on his own travels across America, On the Road tells the story of Sal Paradise and his friends and acquaintances — characters based on Kerouac himself as well as on Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and others. It tells of their fascination with jazz, the landscape of America, women and sexuality, and is the archetypal ‘road-trip’ tale. One of the most valuable literary manuscripts in existence, the scroll was bought in 2001 by a private collector, but has been on public tour to museums and libraries across the United States since 2004. To coincide with the 50th anniversary of the novel’s first publication in Britain in 1958, the scroll will be on show at the Barber alongside maps, photographs, album covers and memorabilia that explore the novel’s genesis and its times.”
Part of the exhibition featured this text visualisation of On the Road by Stefanie Posavec. The image visualises sentences and structure of the novel visually and produces some beautiful imagery.
Click the image above for more info.
““Writing Without Words” was a collection of text visualizations completed for my final year in the MA Communication Design course at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, England. The intention of this body of work was to explore various methods of visualizing literature without using words. I wanted to find a way of communicating the complexity of a story as well as create a system to highlight the similarities and differences in the writing styles of various authors. The structure of a novel, punctuation, parts of speech, and words per sentence were used to generate the final patterns.
Any piece of literature can be visualised using my techniques, but I chose to focus my project on the novel On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, because of its importance to me while growing up in Denver, Colorado – a key city within the novel. The designs are color-coded according to key themes and characters in the book, all of which were painstakingly marked out in a worn copy of the novel with highlighters and markers. The colors used in the final posters were chosen from automobile paint swatches of the 1940s.
“Writing Without Words” can be found online at: http://www.itsbeenreal.co.uk
Whilst researching Stafanie’s work I also came across http://www.wordle.net/ and in particular an article in the Guardian newspaper which published Barack Obama’s inauguration speech as a word cloud and compared it to similar speeches by George W Bush, John F Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln.
“Word clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.” It is interesting to compare the most used words from each of the 4 speeches and the emphasis placed on certain key words.
Barack Obama’s inauguration Speech.
George W Bush’s inauguration Speech
John F Kennedy’s inauguration speech
Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration speech
