gravitymax in transition

Rockwell Group, in collaboration with Jones + Kroloff, designed “Hall of Fragments,” the entrance installation to “Out There: Architecture Beyond Building,” the main exhibition for the 2008 11th annual Venice Architecture Biennale. Passage through the installation disengages visitors from the bricks and mortar of Venice and connects them to the alternative world of “Architecture Beyond Building” through a immersive and interactive environment constructed from iconic films.

wiispray, a graduate project by a couple of students at bauhaus university in weimar, germany, is a digital graffiti system using a modified wiimote, flash interface and a wii server.

data visualization + fashion = wearable ambient display

Ryoko Ueoka and Hiroki Kobayashi gave Artfuture a tour through their collaborative and highly interactive Wearable Forest project in SIGGRAPH 2008′s Slow Art gallery. Not only is the wearable dress soft and comfortable, it shows the activity in the forest of Japan by the number and speed of change in the lights on the garment – the same place the sound for the project is taken from, piped in live over the Internet.

The manifestations of “experimental geography” (a term coined by geographer Trevor Paglen in 2002) run the gamut of contemporary art practice today: sewn cloth cities that spill out of suitcases, bus tours through water treatment centers, performers climbing up the sides of buildings, and sound works capturing the buzz of electric waves on the power grid. In the hands of contemporary artists, the study of humanity’s engagement with the earth’s surface becomes a riddle best solved in experimental fashion. The exhibition presents a panoptic view of this new practice, through a wide range of mediums including sound and video installations, photography, sculpture, and experimental cartography.

The approaches used by the artists featured in Experimental Geography range from the poetic to the empirical. The more pragmatic techniques include those used by the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) in projects made with students and other non-art groups that aim to strengthen peoples’ roles as agents of change in their own environments.

experimental geography is a travelling art exhibit, currently showing at the rochester art center in rochester, minnesota until april 19.

for 1 week last year, french art duo hehe (helen evans and heiki hansen) illuminated the night sky of helsinki with green laser outlines of the emission of a power plant, literally highlighting the energy consumption of local residents. residents were asked to lower their energy use and observe the visible changes. nuage vert (green cloud) has won several environmental art awards. read more on the nuage vert blog:

Nuage Vert is a communal event for the area of Ruoholahti, which anticipates esoteric cults centred on energy and transforms an active power plant into a space for art, a living factory. In tandem, as a reversal of conventional roles whereby the post-industrial factory is turned into space for culture, Kaapeli (the cultural factory) becomes the site of operation and Salmisaari (the industrious factory) becomes the site of spectacle