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.
Daniel Czapiewski, Polish businessman and philanthropist, built this house as an artistic statement about the Communist era and current state of the world. Many tourists who visit Upside Down House complain of mild seasickness and dizziness after just a few minutes of being in the structure.
Joshua Allen Harris creates inflatable animals and mythical creatures that are in a constant pattern of living and dying. The air that fills then depletes them rises from the underground subways of New York City, where the re-structured garbage bag designs reside atop sidewalk grates. Harris' use of soft sculpture, popularized by Swedish-American pop artist Claes Oldenburg's 1974 Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, lends the works a fragile tactility, similar to a person's skin, which can be easily torn or damaged by the elements.
Polish photographers Szymon Roginski and Kasia Korzeniecka worked together to create these images for the O Mia O Spring/Summer 2009 collection from fashion designer Ania Kuczynska. First, the duo took photographs of models wearing the collection. Then, they transformed the flat surfaces into 3D objects. These sculptures were then brought back into the 2D format when they were rephotographed. The final result yields a merging of the two dimensions, and hints at a cubist perspective.
This concept film by Bonnier aims to capture the essence of magazine reading on a handheld digital device, which illustrates just one possibility for digital magazines in the near future. With models like this, it appears that, although print magazines may become extinct, people's enjoyment of them may not be in jeopardy afterall.
Japanese multi-disciplinary artist Nagi Noda took time out from her busy schedule directing music videos and commercials and running her fashion line Broken Label to sculpt head adornments inspired by wildlife and domestic animals. Noda's menagerie includes a boar, lion, rhino, bull, squirrel, ox, elephant, goat, rabbit, walrus, and various dogs. These Hair Hats are abstract contributions to the genre of hair art that lie somewhere between an elegant ancient headdress and an outlandish contemporary weave.
Polish artist Jan Vormann incorporates modern materials into old architecture with his site-specific installations of textural resurfacing. For the exhibition Moje Twoje Miasto ("My, your city") at the Museum of Art in Lodz, Poland, he created Destructif Modernization, wherein he affixed a mirror following the shapes of brick outside the museum walls. In this work, Vormann traces history with a reflection of the present.
The The Headington Shark sculpture was erected in 1986 when Oxford, England resident and local radio DJ Bill Heine commissioned sculptor John Buckley to install a life-size shark in the roof of his house. The Shark caused a controversy when it was created but now has become a local landmark even with it's own facebook page
London-based Héctor Serrano Studio approaches product design with the belief that a successful process yields a successful product. The focus of the client project Dress for Dinner Napkins was on the intersection between an everyday event (dinner) and its most commonly related object (napkin). The process resulted in an unexpected and humorous, but useful, reworking of the plain white dinner napkin.
One of our all-time favorite IF shirts is Parallel Universe, pictured here. Although mathematically provable, the notion of parallel universes is almost unfathomable to most of us. In this short TED Q&A session, British physicist David Deutsch, leading proponent of the multiverse (or "many worlds") interpretation of quantum theory, does a fantastic job of making this complex idea comprehensible in the context of our everyday lives.
Self-taught Northern California artist Jim Denevan lives a life based upon the whims of the earth. His large-scale sand, earth, and ice drawings, which are created with tools ranging from his bare hands to a common garden hoe to 4-wheeled vehicles and are eventually erased by waves and weather, call to mind the fleeting beauty of nature and our earth's resources. His use of geometrical patterns in the drawings is a reflection of the patterns that repeat themselves in nature and science, those that explain the existence of something as superficial as a blooming flower and as profound as human life. The work may may only last a few weeks or even days, but the impact of the art is anything but temporary. Denevan, who is also an avid surfer and accomplished chef, is the founder of Santa Cruz, California's experimental food and dining project, Outstanding In the Field. IF you happen to be enjoying a meal at San Francisco's historic Cliff House during the warmer months, you could be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the artist in action on the sandy beaches below.
This story about the repair mission to save the world's most beloved telescope was filmed as a documentary but unfolds as dynamically as any Hollywood drama. The Hubble telescope was launched in 1990 and in its near-20-year history has undergone the replacement of parts, but never repairs. A crew of astronauts trained for several years to prepare for the May 2009 repair of Hubble's camera and spectrograph. Their painstaking work during the twelve-day mission involved five pressure-filled spacewalks that were exhausting, uncomfortable, and often-times painful, both mentally and physically. Watch the full-lenth PBS-produced documentary of filmmaker Rushmore DeNooyer's aptly titled Hubble's Amazing Rescuehere.
Amsterdam-based experimental fashion designer Berber Soepboer collaborated with fellow-Dutch graphic designer Michiel Schuurman to explore the concept of interactive fashion. Colour-In Dress allows the wearer to colour their own dress, thereby contributing to the textile design and making their statement of individuality through their personal vision of colour and craft.
A recent study by the University of California at San Diego concludes that Americans consume 34 gigabytes of information every day. While this, and the additional report that we process up to 100,000 words a day, is fascinating in itself, it is of consiberable note that the units of measure used in the study are culled from computer terminology. Has a "byte" become synonymous with the a neuron? Does this speak to the cachet of artificial intelligence?
Artist Blue Sky created this mural in 1978. In reflection about Overflow Parking, he has stated, "I wanted to convey the beauty of the parking lot: the geometry, the lines, the cars glistening like jewels. If you were from another planet and you were flying over the city, the cars would look like jewels–different colors, sparkling in the sun."
Minimalism, industry, and wit are ever-present in the home furnishings of the Kyouei Design group, based in Shizuoka, Japan. Here, the bulb lantern is arranged in multiples to create a small installation.
This six-string guitar, made of crystalline silicon, is no bigger than a single cell. Each string is 50 nanometers wide: the width of 100 atoms. Researchers at Cornell University created it to showcase emerging technology for manufacturing a new generation of electronics. Though it can technically be played (if you happen to have access to an atomic force microscope), the 10 micrometer-long instrument would only resonate at inaudible frequencies.
The worlds of art and science continue to remain inseparable, especially in the mind of the scientist. Mehmet Ozgur, who holds a doctorate in electrical engineering and specializes in RF and microwave applications in nanotechnology, has a passion for the elements of nature that extends beyond his career. A fanatic of seeing light in various forms, appreciating beauty, and fueling the imagination through the sciences, Dr. Ozgur (an avid photographer) has been spending the past two decades perfecting his smoke art. For these works, he combines thousands of photos of smoke and montages them in the darkroom to create his own imagined worlds.
Challanging the arcane western view of man's dominion over nature, Michael Pollan’s best-selling book, Botany of Desire, redefines our relationship with the plant world and demonstrates how plants benefit from encouraging human attention. PBS produced a video that presents a variety of perspectives based upon the concept of the book.
Posted By: Neville Bennette 12.14.09 Via: open learning
Texas artists Dan Havel and Dean Ruck were given full access to two adjacent condemned buildings to create Houston's Inversion house. The temporary installation brought together the interior and exterior spaces with its massive indoor/outdoor tunnel and a roof/ceiling that was converted into a large-scale pinhole camera, which projected outdoor light onto the floors inside. The "time-warp" quality of the tunnel celebrated the years that the buildings provided space for students at the Art League Houston and welcomed the new buildings that would inevitably take the place of the old.
London marketing and technology agency Lost Boys International boasts progressive brand-building for a digital culture. But they also lay claim to producing innovative interactive works of art, including installations by star LBi employee James Theophane. To celebrate this Christmas season, the entire agency got together to create an enormous interactive mobile made entirely of antiquated mobile phones (although "antiquated" to LBi may simply mean last year's model). The phones in the Mobile Mobile are called individually from on-site computers that are programmed to repeatedly dial their distinct numbers. The ringtones are a variety of Christmas jingles that fill the Lost Boys reception area with a cacophony of Christmas cheer, which can also be enjoyed remotely at xmas.lbi.co.uk.
London-based designer and multi-disciplinary artist James Theophane appropriated an old replica oil painting and gave it a modern spin with the added sculptural component of a motorized spinning wheel of death, which is a universal symbol of dread and doom in today's computer culture. According to Theophane, Painting Render Crash, a clever and quite apropos contribution to a group interactive art exhibit, places "a relatively new problem in an old setting."
Joseph Pelling's film Outside The Box is a hilarious caricature of the creative mind–pompous, pretentious, and always enthused by its own inspiration. Outside The Box was winner of the 2009 Digital Artist Awards animation category.
Posted By: "Bonkers" Bainbridge 12.11.09 Via: it's nice that
Decode: Digital Design Sensations showcases the latest developments in digital and interactive design, from small screen-based graphics to large-scale interactive installations. The program, which is the first of its kind for the Victoria and Albert Museum, includes works by established international artists and designers such as Daniel Brown, Golan Levin, Daniel Rozin, Troika, and Karsten Schmidt. It features both existing works and new commissions created especially for the exhibition. Decode is a collaboration between the V&A and onedotzero.
Dutch artist Benjamin Verdonck nestles 13 stories above the street in his hand-crafted habitat, Nest Rotterdam, that he constructed on the side of the Weena skyscraper in Rotterdam.
Vancouver 3D artist Eric Testroete set out to make a Halloween mask that was inspired by "big head" mode in videogames. The complexity of his project led to a papercraft self-portrait that only an experienced 3D artist could accomplish. The simple absurdity of the work, however, recalls the Dadaist masks that appeared in Cabaret Voltaire performances in 1920s Zürich.
Darwin's Darkest Hour, a two-hour drama produced by National Geographic Television (2009), highlights the crisis that finally compelled Darwin to publish his theory of evolution. Watch the full feature here.
Posted By: Neville Bennette 12.09.09 Via: PBS video
Lauded London-based photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten pushes the creative use of lighting techniques and color to cultivate her unique camera-eye. These images are from a personal project entitled Teenage Stories and appear in her 2007 book of the same title.
The latest in efforts to perfect touchscreen controls and further the human-computer interface is an iPhone app called Walky, which allows users to control a small bipedal robot by letting their fingers do the walking.
British artist Slinkachu's Little People – A Tiny Street Art Project uses reworked and painted miniature model train set characters, which are placed on the street as mini installations. The work reflects the alienation and loneliness of urban living but is tempered with a healthy dose of sardonic humor.
Parisian mixed-media artist Katya Bonnenfant creates complex worlds to feature simple animation, allowing her charming creatures to come to life within their customized surroundings. For Motif Fleuri, Bonnenfant installs an ornate floral pattern wallpaper that she designed and projects an animation of a creature that interacts with the flora. In a more recent work, Vintage Packaging for Animation, the artist refurbishes vintage clocks and calculators to house animated creatures whose design is based upon the original digital displays of the machines.
Li Wei is a contemporary artist from Beijing, whose work depicts him in apparently gravity-defying situations. Wei states that his images "are not computer montages, but that he works with mirrors, wires, scaffolding, and acrobatics."
And so it happens that a book that was bought for less than £1 was sold last week for over £100,000. The story is almost comical: the son-in-law of the book's owner went to the Charles Darwin Exhibition at London's Natural History Museum, where he recognized the green spine with gold letters of the old book that for years was kept in the guest bathroom of their house in Oxford. Only 1,250 copies were made of this first edition of Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, printed in 1859. A very proud collector now owns the book that revolutionized the perspective of humankind on a universal level.
Wired magazine editor-at-large Kevin Kelly explores the nature of technology through technology’s eyes. Kelly thinks we’ll soon be dwarfed by the collective intelligence of all the technology we’re creating.
German artist Frank Kunert's "Small Worlds" are whimsical, grotesque, and pensive musings. By ingeniously playing with our sense of perception they leave us asking whether they are morbid, or simply funny?
The Rotating Kitchen by Zeger Reyers was put into motion during the opening of the exhibition "Eating the Universe. Food in Art" at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany. It will continue to rotate slowly until February. Incredible.
It's not H.G Well's science fiction novella...it's Shandong-born artist Liu Bolin, who has mastered the art of camouflaging himself against virtually any background. Liu says his art is "a protest against the actions of the Chinese government," who shut down his art studio in 2005 and regularly persecutes artists. He adds that his art is also about "not fitting into modern society."
Posted By: Mikaela Du Pomzamparc 12.02.09 Via: hi•fructose
Cartoonist Robert Mankoff has dedicated his career to understanding humor. He talks here about the science behind laughter and its importance to both humans and other animals.
Posted By: "Bonkers" Bainbridge 12.02.09 Via: big think
Lena Gieseke's fantastic 3D exploration of Picasso’s famous painting, Guernica, features music by Manuel de Falla, Christopher Johns and Matthew Anderson. Courtesy of changethethought.
Generative art refers to art that has been generated, composed, or constructed through the use of computer software or similar mathematical, mechanical, or randomized processes. Generative art was pioneered in the 1960s by Dr. Desmond Paul Henry, who modified analog bombsight computers employed in World War II bomber aircraft to become "drawing machines." Today, the emergence of a new generation of generative artists has elevated the computer’s artistic capabilities to increasingly elaborate levels of complexity. One of our favorite artists currently working in this field is Leonardo Solaas. Explore his interactive piece Voidhere.
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