Installation: Ekklesia Pavilion

"Ekklesia Pavilion" by Pink Intruder

This cubic pavilion was constructed in the heart of downtown Valencia for the Valencia Fallas Festival last March. With its crisp, straight geometric lines and lustrous silver finish, it looks like it’s made of a metal such as aluminum, but it wasn't.  It was constructed from top to bottom out of cardboard.

The structure, which was named the Ekklesia pavilion after the principal assembly of Athenian democracy in ancient Greece, was built by the art collective Pink Intruder.  The lattice-like installation was designed to represent a temple "where citizens can meet and realise the power they have to change things through debate and confrontation of ideas."  It was built from eight horizontal layers of metallic cardboard tubes, supported by a seven-by-seven grid of vertical columns. It sat atop a 96,000 elaborately painted tile mosaics, which echoed the geometry of the larger structure. The mosaic was based on designs of Nolla Mosaic, using only squares and triangles and seven different colors. Nolla’s ceramic was a traditional Valencian ceramic that was lost in the middle of 20th century.  You can see a time-lapse of the construction process in the video below, along with how the final structure looks at night, when it’s illuminated with a cascade of blinking.

 

Of course, that's not the whole story.  You see,  traditional "falla" structures are built and then burned during the festival to celebrate the arrival of spring.  This installation took place only fifty days before the municipal elections in Spain.  Each of the installation’s columns were screen printed with real political messages from actual citizens to highlight the emptiness of political discourse.

Event: ArtPrize 2014

"1001 Coffee Cup Stories" by Gwyneth Leech, 2014.

Mixed media on upcycled paper coffee cups.

At the Harris Building, 111 S. Division.

ArtPrize is the world’s largest art competition, and it's held annually in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  The competition culminates in a public vote that awards a top prize of two hundred thousand dollars to a winner and another one hundred sixty thousand to the next top ten pieces.  The event is almost entirely volunteer-run, and participating venues agree extend their hours during the competition's three-week run.  It's a fantastic event that the Michigan art community looks forward to all year round.  Here are a few of the pieces favored for a win this year.

Papercraft: Papercut Scenery

Papercut Installations by Matteo Capobianco

Installation: Universe Mind

"Universe Mind" by Nikolay Polissky

Part of the New Media Night Festival at the Nikola-Lenivets Art Park in Moscow

For this year’s New Media Night Festival, media design studio Radugadesign was comissioned to set ‘Universe Mind’ in motion with this 8-minute video projection. If you’d like to get a feel for what it’s like to step inside the building under normal circumstances, check out this interactive 360° panorama.

Installation: LIGHT is TIME

"LIGHT is TIME" created by DGT Architects Website for watch manufacturer CITIZEN

Photos by Takuji Shimmura

80,000 "plates," the structural base of watches, strung up on 4,200 metal threads hung from the ceiling. The light is refracted on the metal discs and becomes the raw material for a stage set displaying, in three phases, the mechanical components that have been used in Citizen watches since the 1920s.

"Sunlight is the terrestrial measurement of passing time”, explains Tsuyoshi Tane, of French office DGT, “we took that as a starting point and developed the simple concept behind the Citizen installation."

Installation: Our Changing Seas

"Our Changing Seas III" by San Francisco-based Courtney Mattison

On exhibit at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College through June 15, 2014.
Photographed by Arthur Evans

These glazed stoneware and porcelain sculptures are intended to raise awareness about the endangered ecosystem and inspire more people to fight for conservation. The sprawling installation is entirely hand-built and is meant to show the devastating transition coral reefs endure when faced with climate change, a process called bleaching.  An interest in marine biology and environmental science has shaped her work, providing the inspiration and motivation to create handmade porcelain sculptures in a three-part series.

"At its heart, this piece celebrates my favorite aesthetic aspects of a healthy coral reef surrounded by the sterile white skeletons of bleached corals swirling like the rotating winds of a cyclone. There is still time for corals to recover even from the point of bleaching if we act quickly to decrease the threats we impose. Perhaps if my work can influence viewers to appreciate the fragile beauty of our endangered coral reef ecosystems, we will act more wholeheartedly to help them recover and even thrive."

An interest in marine biology and environmental science has greatly shaped her work, providing much of the inspiration and motivation to create handmade porcelain sculptures liker her three-part series
Read more at http://all-thats-interesting.tumblr.com/post/83922586449/courtney-mattisons-intricate-porcelain-coral-artwork#aZ8gdQGfozKHbs18.99

Installation: Cityscope

"Cityscope" by German designer Marco Hemmerling

Marco Hemmerling's Cityscope installation in Cologne is an urban kaleidoscope set in one of the city's busiest squares, between the railway station and the majestic cathedral. The beveled, many-faceted structure captures reflections of the surrounding facades. The outer skin of the piece is covered in radiant foil, so the colours will change, depending on light conditions. This crystal-like installation encourages user interaction, as it is impossible to avoid touring around it to take it in from different angles. The project was designed with Rhinoceros software and the resulting jewel is in proportion to the buildings that make up the setting.

Installation: I/P/O-cle

"I/P/O-cle" by Istanbul Candaş Şişman

A Light Installation composed of lenses, light, mirror, sound, container, fog.

Sculpture: Golden Roach Project

"The Golden Roach Project" by Budapest-based artist Miklós Kiss

Kiss has placed thousands of golden beetles made of injection molded plastic into museums across the world, placing them throughout the spaces and incorporating them throughout other exhibitions. During their stay in the exhibition space, visitors have the opportunity to take one of the golden roaches home with them. 

Sculpture: Escape Velocity

"Escape Velocity" by Tyler Hanson, of Poetic Kinetics, Inc.

Photographed by Koury Angelo

The Coachella Astronaut is a 36 foot tall, 57 foot long, 40 foot wide mobile installation held aloft by a forklift.  It circulates through the assembled crowd at The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Annual Festival like a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade float, as if it really were an astronaut floating gracefuly through space.  As it slowly moves about, images of the festival's artists are projected onto the front of the helmet in a tribute to all of the work they put into the art that make the festival such a cultural gem.

“It’s massive,” says Tyler Hanson, of Poetic Kinetics Inc,, who was responsible for both the Coachella Snail and the Astronaut. “It’s a really fucking cool thing. At night, the helmet and visor turn into a video screen--there’s going to be some interesting content, and there are also going to be Instagram competitions, where kids can get their face put into the helmet. They can be the astronaut for a moment.”

Installation: What Will You Leave Behind?

"What Will You Leave Behind?" by Nino Sarabutra

On exhibit at the ARDEL Third Place Gallery, January 24  – March 3, 2013

Nino Sarabutra covered a gallery floor with over a hundred thousand miniature porcelain skulls for visitors to trod upon freely.  The whole macabre display is intended to remind its audience that each step we take brings us one step closer to our own demise, and that none of us know which of those steps will be our last.

Installation: Early One Morning

"Early One Morning" by New York City-based Andy Yoder

On exhibit at the PULSE New York Contemporary Art Fair May 8 -11, 2014.

Andy Yoder assembled thousands of hand-painted matchsticks into a globe forty-two-inches in diameter over the course of two long years.  Each match was glued onto a foam and cardboard frame inside a plywood skeleton after it was painted.  And, in case you’re daydreaming about setting this matchstick Earth aflame, Yoder’s son, YoderAustin, has explained that the entire piece was coated in flame retardant, though that seems to rather defeat the purpose, if you ask me.

Electronic Art: Social Soul

"Social Soul" by artists Lauren McCarthy and Kyle McDonald

Social Soul is an “immersive digital experience” from the MKG marketing agency designed for Delta Air Lines to exhibit at TED2014 in Vancouver.  The installation uploads a user's Twitter streams into a structure full of monitors and mirrors that displays that acts as a veritable hall of mirrors, reflecting the noise of the social media network back at the user from all angles.  Then, the Social Soul uses an algorithm to find each user's soul mate based on that stream of data and tosses that person's feed into the mix as well.  After users leave the exhibit, they receive Tweets from the installation to lead them back to their soul mates out in the real world.

It beautiful and cacophonous and romantic, if a bit overwhelming.

Installation: Facades

"Facades" by French photographer Zacharie Gaudrillot-Roy

Zacharie Gaudrillot-Roy that imagines a world where facades have been completely isolated from buildings.  Several of these pieces will be included in “Bright Lights. Big Cities.” exhibit at the Antwerp Mansion in Manchester this May.

"The façade is the first thing we see, it’s the surface of a building. It can be impressive, superficial or safe. Just like during a wandering through a foreign city, I walk through the streets with these questions: what will happen if we stick to that first vision? If the daily life of “The Other” was only a scenery? This series thus offers a vision of an unknown world that would only be a picture, without intimate space, with looks as the only refuge."

Installation: Mirror Culture

"Mirror Culture" by Ignatov Architects

Prints available for purchase from Etsy. Society6. US$

Last summer, Ignatov Architects erected this outdoor installation in Varna, Bulgaria with the assistance of 128 volunteers who gathered six thousand used compact discs and tied them onto a fishing net at the entrance of a local seaside garden.  The resulting surface reflects the light as it ripples in the breeze, like a fish's scales catching the light beneath the waves.

The resulting piece, "Mirror Culture," was seen by over fifty thousand visitors in the course of the summer, and its popularity raised public support to nominate Varna as the European Capital of Culture for 2019. 


"It was my fascination with the play of light on fish scales and on liquid surfaces that made me think of a flexible mirror," lead architect Borislav Ignatov told Slate in a recent interview.  "I realized that the optical discs use the same principles of refraction and separation of light as fish scales and I decided to use them for the purpose."

Installation: Walking, Eating, Sleeping

"Walking, Eating, Sleeping" by Laurie Frick

Frick’s work is composed of laser-cut wood panels that serve as visual records of numerical patterns that represent how people experience their day.  Each piece is unique.  One piece, for example, depicts how a group of people spend their day walking.  It looks like a map of a city, with gridded roads and clusters of buildings.  Each panel is hung at different height and at different angels, creating an overwhelming cloud of data, referencing multiple lives and timelines. 

"Numbers are abstract concepts but we recognize pattern intuitively. I’m experimenting with wall size patterns that anticipate the condition of our daily-selves. Very soon walls and spaces we occupy will be filled with easy to decode patterns – a visual record of how we feel, stress level, mood, bio-function captured, digitally recorded and physically produced using 3D printers and lasercutters. Human data portraits transcribed as pattern from the all the sensor data collected about us.

Will it kill the mystery of being human, simply magnify our defects or will sensors and a mass of measurements acknowledge and present patterns of self-examination that lure us into a future of self-quantification that is irresistible?"

Installation: Caret 6

"Caret 6"

An architecture installation using digital software and fabrication technologies for the design of an innovative vaulting structure.

"The School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin is hosting an exhibition as part of TEX-FAB 5 SKIN: Digital Assemblies beginning January 2014. We are 17 students led by Assistant Professor Kory Bieg designing and building an installation to showcase the SKIN Design Competition. In the spirit of digital fabrication, we generated a project using parametric tessellations that simulate a three dimensional experience."

Electronic Art: The Emergent City

"The Emergent City" by British artist Stanza

Prints available for purchase from Etsy. Society6. US$

Stanza represents the inter-connected nature of our modern world with a miniature city constructed of computer components and powered by the vibrations and sounds of London.   This exhibit collects data from sensors placed all over London.  The sensors gather a wide range of data about the city, including its transit systems, weather, and sounds.  The installation then responds to the data by projecting maps of that data onto the walls of the exhibit. 

According to Stanza, The Emergent City is an "Open social sculpture that informs the world and creates new meaningful artistic experiences. The artwork is also a highly technical project that gives vast amounts of information about the environment. By embedding the sensors like this we can re-engage with the fabric of space itself and enable new artistic metaphors within the environment."

Installation: Flow

"Flow" by New York-based Erika Harrsch

Wall installation project for EATON Corp. World Headquarters Cleveland, Ohio.

Erika Harrsch creates butterflies sculpted out of specimen-prints of international bills.  The piece explores notions of commerce and value by juxtaposing one of nature's most delicate creatures with one of man's most powerful mediums.

Installation: Giant Suspended Nets

Giant Suspended Net Installations by Janet Echelman

While walking through a village in India during her stint as a Fulbright Scholar, Echelman was struck by the colorful variety of nets used by local fisherman.  Her work is inspired by epiphany to create these massive net sculptures around the world.

Echelman is currently working on her largest piece ever, a seven hundred foot long net that will be exhibited in Vancouver to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the TED Conference.  She’s currently seeking funding via Kickstarter to fund the project.