Mikaela Du Pomzamparc Graduate Academy of Finland.
Area of specialty: Thawing the frozen poetry of architecture. Light, space and the materials of utopia.
Member of Imaginary Foundation since 1978
Pierre Mâché Baccalauréat Lausanne University
Area of specialty: Exploring the horizon of the human imagination, Assistant to the Director since 1993
Isadore Muggli Bauhaus Drop out
Area of specialty: Stimulating the neural mechanisms of visual perception. IF Co-ordinator of optical consistency since 1976
Kamilla Rousseau Groupe de Recherche Musicale
Area of specialty: Chaotic harmony, cultivated disorder and the atonal structure of infinite beauty. Imaginary since 1978
Neville Bennette Professor Emeritus Saint Petersburg State University
Area of specialty: Experimentally demonstrating the elaborate logic underpinning nature's awesome machinery. At the IF since 1991.
Everett Ruskin MA of Octameter Odes Stanford
Area of specialty: Surfing the undulating waves of novelty reflected downstream from the impending Singularity.
Welcomed into the Imaginary Foundation 1981
"Bonkers" Bainbridge Elongated sabbatical
Area of specialty: Profound absurdity and the ever multiplying wisdom of the cosmic joke.
Estranged from the Imaginary Foundation 1974 reunited 1998
Rufus Daintree Oxbridge expulsion committee
Area of specialty: Examining the interplay of cultural and biological evolution through the lens of the metabolic metaphor.
Enchanted by the imagination since the dawn of the Foundation.
Prof. Harold Rass Graduate Kingston Institute of Higher Education,
Area of specialty: Applied vapor research and it's coextending cosmic implications.
Associate Imaginary Foundation 1982
Andre Garnier L’Université Paris Descartes
Area of specialty: Anticipatory rearrangements of tomorrow via the wealth of yesterday's experience.
With Imaginary since 1979
The Director Graduate University of Zürich
Area of specialty: Deep Pattern Structures, Conciousness and the Articulation of the Possible.
Founder of Imaginary Foundation, 1973.
Our obsession with robots is as much about the process of self-understanding as it is about the development of technology. Living With Robots, a short film by Joe Berlinger and Honda, ponders life with robots and explores robotics research, highlighting the evolution of their robot, Asimo.
A bit of a health nut, British information designer David McCandless set out to create himself a quick reference guide to popular health supplements. Realizing that a static image would not represent the constant influx of new research, he created Snake Oil?, an image that is both generative (pulling its updated scientific evidence from this Google doc) and interactive. He employed the help of developer Andy Perkins to write the code for this "living image," which is an exciting advancement in the the realm of information design and its blossoming graphic architecture.
The 2007 documentary Great Expectationsis a journey through possible and impossible architecture projects since the beginning of the 20th century, from concrete illusions of grandeur to underground grass-covered dwellings. The viewer is introduced to utopian visionaries like Buckminster Fuller and Archigram and their ideas of how to build a better world. With the help of animation, unrealized projects come to life in this film that shows astounding visions of a world as it could have been and may one day still become.
Posted By: Mikaela Du Pomzamparc 03.05.10 Via: icarus films
A new wiki for our post-literate society provides free summaries of books ranging from the classics and current best-sellers, to non-fiction and self-help. How will these CliffsNotes by the collective intelligence affect what it means to be regarded as "well read"?
R. Buckminster Fuller once noted, "Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value." This inspiring documentary is about the "Cradle to Cradle" design concept of chemist Michael Braungart and architect William McDonough, which substantiates and applies Bucky's notions of sustainability. It won the Silver Dragon award at the Beijing International Science Film Festival in 2006.
This short preview for the BBC special The Secret Life of Chaos is a concise and succinct three-minute explanation of Mandlebrot's fractal theory of self-similarity.
French multi-media artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot staged an interactive installation at the Barbica Centre in London. The result is a delightful play between chance operations and the unlikely intersection of technology and nature.
Dubbed by Britain's Channel 4 as "the crack cocaine of the thinking world," Edge is an organization of thinkers which includes some of the most interesting minds in the world. Each year Edge poses a question, this year collecting 172 essay responses to the question: How is the Internet changing the way you think? This essay from science historian George Dyson was one of our favourites.
KAYAKS vs CANOES In the North Pacific ocean, there were two approaches to boat building. The Aleuts (and their kayak-building relatives) lived on barren, treeless islands and built their vessels by piecing together skeletal frameworks from fragments of beach-combed wood. The Tlingit (and their dugout canoe-building relatives) built their vessels by selecting entire trees out of the rainforest and removing wood until there was nothing left but a canoe.
The Aleut and the Tlingit achieved similar results–maximum boat/minimum material–by opposite means. The flood of information unleashed by the Internet has produced a similar cultural split. We used to be kayak builders, collecting all available fragments of information to assemble the framework that kept us afloat. Now, we have to learn to become dugout-canoe builders, discarding unnecessary information to reveal the shape of knowledge hidden within.
I was a hardened kayak builder, trained to collect every available stick. I resent having to learn the new skills. But those who don't will be left paddling logs, not canoes.
Moscow-based art director, designer, and interactive programmer Anatoly Zenkov creates three-dimensional impossibilities in his 2D photo series, Persistent Pyramids. Zenkov created his own application that creates these cubist dreamscapes.
Great strides are on the horizon for conserving the remainder of our earth's strained resources. A Silicon Valley company, Bloom Energy, will unveil this week a fuel cell that is "capable of producing clean energy in amounts sufficient to power homes and corporations," Information Week reports.
Company founder K.R. Sridhar explains to a 60 Minutes correspondent how his invention, the Bloom Box, produces electricity through "a chemical reaction created by combining oxygen in the air with any fuel source, including natural gas, bio-gas, and solar energy."
With its technology remaining a guarded secret and mystery within the industry, and nothing at all being announced on the company's website, the Bloom Box is garnering as much excitement and hope as it is skepticism. Watch for an announcement on Wednesday to judge for yourself.
Danish filmmaker Kaspark Astrup Schröder offers this preview for his forthcoming documentary about traceurs and freerunners. These athletes challenge the intentions of architecture and manmade environments as they use surface areas of buildings for recreation and physical exploration. In the film, Schröder gives an in-depth look into the development of the first parkour park (located in Copenhagen), designed for the sole use of this burgeoning physical artform.
Founded upon Albert Einstein's E=mc2 equation, nuclear fusion is finally producing results after more than 50 years of research. New experiments are giving researchers the confidence that a milestone will be achieved sometime this year. This process of atomic binding, which occurs naturally in stars, has been the focus of experiments at the National Ignition Facility, with the aim of producing controlled fusion power for the production of electricity. Einstein's original vision of nuclear energy was not for destructive uses like the H-bomb, but for the good of humankind. Let's hope his dream will be realized.
Artist Caleb Larsen's radically thought-provoking A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter (2009) is an extraordinarily profound multimedia work that questions the relationship of media, culture, technology and commerce. Although Minimalist in form, its content is complex and interactive. Within the black acrylic cube lives a device that allows the box to perpetually attempt to sell itself on eBay. Every 7 days, the box begins a new auction and monitors the bidding progress of each auction. Larsen's experience with scripting programs and open-source codes is vital to the success of the work, as it continues to independently sell itself online. The artist's stringent purchase agreement for bidders (listed on the eBay page) provides a structure that protects the box's ownership rights, but can also lead to great profit for both the "collector" and the artist.
Banksy's new film "Exit Through The Gift Shop" is a film-within-a-film that begins as a chronicle of guerrilla art and its most prominent creators but morphs into a sly satire of celebrity, consumerism, the art world and filmmaking itself, “Exit Through the Gift Shop” is a nearly impossible work to categorize. That doesn’t begin to describe the contradictions that surround the new movie that’s both about — and made by — the controversial and hugely popular artist.
The last five years had witnessed an unprecedented craze for contemporary art, in which works of art sold for record-breaking prices. It all climaxed in September 2008, when Damien Hirst sold 111 million pounds' worth of his art at an auction at Sotheby's – the very day Lehman Brothers collapsed, bringing down the financial markets of the western world. The art auctions in October and November 2008 were a disaster and the art world was in shock. By early 2009, the contemporary art auction market was down 75 percent. Auction houses recorded record losses and were rapidly downsizing. In this inside eye-witness journey into the art world, filmmaker Ben Lewis visits auction houses, art fairs, galleries, and the homes of billionaires across the world, searching for the reasons behind the greatest rise and fall in financial value of art in history.
London-based sculpture Kate MccGwire employed the help of hundreds of supporters to collect tens-of-housands of found pigeon feathers, which she laboriously crafted into mythical creatures that resemble both bird and serpent. There is a strong sense of pattern-seeking in the artist's work. This, in combination with her exploration of materials and her broad definition of beauty, allows the humble pigeon feather to transcend nature and become an integral part of a supernatural design that is both beautiful and grotesque. Sluice, 2009 Sluice (detail), 2009 Vex, 2008
