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.
JooYoun Paek is a Seoul-born, New-York based artist and interaction designer. Her fantastically tactile interactive video installation, The Zipper Orchestra, uses a zipper canvas as a physical controller to a zipper collage video. Users can play music by zipping and unzipping the physical zippers.
Neill Blomkamp, director of the science-fiction thriller District 9, talks about extraterrestrial life, the progression of civilizations, and the coming singularity. Not to be missed.
Avant-Gardener Marcel Duchamp propagated the readymade. Duchamp’s found objects (a signed urinal in 1917’s Fountain, a defaced Mona Lisa in 1919’s L.H.O.O.Q.) challenged distinctions between art and everyday life, and shifted the focus from the work of art to the vision of the artist—a fundamental realignment without which most 20th century art would be inconceivable.
Andrew Stafford's interactive journey, Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp, is a brilliant guide to understanding Duchamp's ouerve.
Light Ripples, an interactive audio/visual installation, made its debut at the 2010 Maitreya Festival in Melbourne, AU. With the use of custom-designed software, a pool of mesmerizing liquid illuminations is created by eight floating balls that act as inputs. Music and visuals are created from the interplay between the user, the balls and virtual objects.
Avant-Gardener Sun Ra propagated Afrofuturism. Ra's concerts with his massive Myth Science Arkestra linked large-scale, relentlessly experimental improvisation with an intergalactic mythos that was equal parts black history, science fiction, and civil-rights struggle.
In an astoundingly conceptual moment in art history, MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design has acquired the @ symbol into its collection.
Ray Tomlinson. @. 1971. Here displayed in ITC American Typewriter Medium, the closest approximation to the character used by a Model 33 Teletype in the early 1970s
Avant-Gardener John Cage propagated the idea that music is all around us. With 4'33" (1952), a three-movement piece consisting entirely of rests, Cage foregrounded the performance environment and obliterated the distinction between sounds—the shuffling of the audience’s feet, the noise of traffic outside—and music. Cage used compositional methods involving chance and randomness to remove creative bias and level the playing field for all sound, any sound, to become music.
Here, the BBC Symphony Orchestra plays Cage's 4'33"composition under the direction of conductor Lawrence Foster at the Barbican Hall in London.
Avant-garde was originally a French military term meaning “forward guard”—troop specialists who surveyed battlefields in advance of armies. Now it refers to artists and artworks that break with convention, are ahead of their time, experimental, shocking even. Here, the Imaginary Foundation showcases Avant-Gardeners of the past hundred years—cultivators of the imagination who transformed the world of artistic endeavor, sowing seeds of radical innovation that would bloom for decades to come.
Each Avant-Gardeners t-shirt comes with the first eight in a series of new Avant-Gardeners Trading Cards. A limited-edition box set of 23 cards will be released soon. Look out for forthcoming IF blog posts featuring the Gardeners.
A short movie inspired by numbers, geometry and nature. For more information (including theory, stills, screenshots, tutorials and workshops), visit Etérea Studios.
Californian artist James Turell has been sculpting and painting with light since the 1960s. In his solo exhibition at the Kunst Museum in Wolfsburg, Germany (running until May 24, 2010), Turell furthers his exploration of the infinite possibities of light's interaction with object and space. Bridget's Bardo, 2009
German artist Sinta Werner plays with spatial perception in the same way that a cubist painter attempts to capture three dimensions on a two-dimensional plane. The pieces in Werner's architectonic installation, Drillcores, however, function in the opposite order. His sculptural collages are designed to evoke illusions of flatness when viewed from certain angles.
Geoffrey West, President and Distinguished Professor of the Santa Fe Institute, led a team of scientists from various institutions that found that measures of wealth, creation and innovation increase with size, in such a way that doubling the size of a city increases its economic productivity per person by about 15%. This "universal" behavior is seen worldwide from China, to Europe, to the USA. Their results show that all cities share common underlying dynamics and that, on the average, they are scaled versions of one another. Despite obvious superficial characteristics, New York, Boston and Santa Fe are, to a large extent, scaled versions of one another!
Almost since computing began, scientists and technologists have been fascinated with the idea of a computer that works similarly to the human brain. In 2008, the first "memristor" was built, a device that is designed to behave in a manner that mimics the junctions betweens the neurons in the brain. However, until recently, the memristor was just a device. Now a group at the University of Michigan, led by Wei Lu, has demonstrated that the memristor can actually be used in computing. Their findings were published in Nano Letters: "Nanoscale Memristor Device as Synapse in Neuromorphic Systems."
In Search of Memory is a passionate exploration of the life and work of 2000 Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel, the brilliant and irrepressible neurobiologist whose pioneering work has illuminated the neural functioning of memory. The film opens at Kendall Square in Boston on April 23, 2010. Find more dates here.
The film offers an inspiring and unique look into the Hubble space telescope's legacy and highlights its profound impact on the way we view the universe and ourselves.Hubble 3D will be shown exclusively in IMAX and IMAX 3D theatres on Friday, March 19, 2010.
Mind reading may have taken a step away from the realm of science fiction, thanks to a new study in which researchers taught a computer to spot specific memories as a person was having them. The study showed that past events leave unique "memory traces" in a portion of the brain called the hippocampus, traces that can be distinguished from one another in brain scans. More here
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"?
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