Biennial of Lyon – Part 3
How can we refuse to dance with the ghost girl from the Shilpa Gupta’s (invited by Pooja Sood) interactive installation?
A big screen, a camera, 5 visitors and a computer. Your shadow projected to the screen (thanks to the camera) and images are generated around you, interacting with your shadow.
A ghost girl asks you to dance, windows appear waiting for you to open theme, birds fly across the screen, and blocks fall from the sky on you.
This piece reminds me another work done by Camille Utterback, called Text Rain. Where you have your shadow projected to a screen where lines of a poem fall down and stop when they find a shadow. I’ve seen this work in Emoção Art.ficial 3.0 at Centro Cultural Itaù, in Avenida Paulista, São Paulo.
Biennial of Lyon – Part 2
Invited by Sean O’Toole (editor in Art South Africa), James Webb’s work, The black passage, 2006, was one of the most touching pieces of the biennial for me.
The piece is long(?) black dark corridor, with a wall of speakers diffusing a continuous psychedelic sound. Around the speaker wall we can see a white glimmer. When you walk in , you loose spacial perception, and you don’t really know how long the corridor is. Seeing this piece, I had the impression that the corridor got longer as I walk in, since this piece speaks “suggests a lift descending into Johannesburg’s deepest goldmine“, the phenomenon makes me think on an endless and uncomfortable travel to the center of the earth…
When I first saw Webb’s work, I immediately thought on James Thurrell’s work with light. For instance “The Light Inside“:
Another artist that came into my mind seeing The black passage, is Dan Flavin and his work with neon lights :
Low tech : a bending spirit…
After a long absence, here I am to write again… In fact I have a lot of stuff to speak about but I haven’t enough time to write everything down… Maybe I should see my time schedule again in order to fit some time for the blog…
This time, I’ve seen a post in Digital Tools blog speaking about low tech sensors and actuators with a circuit bending spirit. This post made me obviously think on Nicolas Collins‘ work and workshop at the academy. The interesting part of his post are the links: one to a wiki that teaches how to build some low tech devices; and the other one to the lowtech.propositions website.
Thanks to this pot I got to know this architecture company website, with some interesting features (in their old website) like interactive design and artistic research.
