RIP Rolf julius

    Photograph by Jens Schumann

The artist Rolf Julius has died. The Western Vinyl label, which is due to release a number of Julius’s sound works in the coming months, stated: “A beautiful human being and an extraordinary talent, Rolf Julius left the world on 21 January, 2011.”

Julius was born in Germany in 1939 and studied fine art in Bremen. In the mid 1970s he began using sound alongside his visual practice. Later he moved to Berlin and became an important figure in that city’s budding sound art scene – participating in Für Augen Und Ohren (1980), one of Europe’s first major sound art exhibitions. Over the course of a 30 year career Julius’s performances and low-volume, minimal sonic sculptures and installations developed an approach highly influential on a younger generation of sound artists.

Project 003: Rhythm with light

   Osanyow - Test02 by ggiunta

This is a test improv using solar panel, strobe lights and delay pedal.

Theo Kaccoufa

Kinetic sculpture employing electronics, mechanics, found objects, domestic appliances, furniture, water, living tree, wire, wood, steel, brass, aluminium, stainless steel, electric motors.

Consider Theo Kaccoufa’s objects constructed from old bits of furniture. The chair lying on its back, impotently wagging its legs in the air like an upturned tortoise, is animated in the true sense of the word: it has the presence of a Being. The viewer can empathise with its helpless predicament. At the same time, the spectacle is morbidly funny, and this collision of two normally distinct emotions creates a lingering sense of anxiety.

In the same room is a small bed, and, like the chair, this object gives the impression of human presence. This is not simply due to the ghost, the absent user, that any ergonomically designed object suggests, but rather because of the sense of theatre that the sculpture creates. The edges of a slit in the blanket are peeled back, as if held by a speculum during surgery. This wound or eye-like aperture frames a body of water, exactly in the middle of which is a vortex. The shape of the opening, the damp patch that surrounds the whirlpool, and the slit’s position on the sheet create an unsettling impression of unruly, animal physicality, triumphant, abject, or both.

I remember seeing these kinetic sculptures a few years ago. The small bed sculpture was
really  a powerful piece...

Tetsuya Umeda & Kanta Horio

 

"Tetsuya Umeda: Science of Superstition"

A bucket and a mop and a ramshackle assortment of fans and lights — all sprawled across the floor and ceiling of Ota Fine Arts in east Tokyo's Kachidoki area (www.ota.finearts.com) — lie dormant. 

Flick several switches, though, and a chaotic performance ensues, pulleys plunging objects into water-filled trash cans, spinning rotors connecting dangling wires to complete electrical circuits that set off lights and explosions of sound.

Tetsuya Umeda's installations are as much about those sounds as they are about the arrangement of the everyday items he uses. Umeda's main work is the objects' performance, which he helps orchestrate but is never in control of. At Ota, he has assembled four electrical circuits that are connected and trigger one another with unpredictable results: Watch for a while and there is no regular pattern, rather a random escalation of noise, flashes and motion followed by silences.

The artist often performs in rundown buildings with installations that reflect the disorder around them. Ota Fine Arts is one of the smaller spaces that Umeda has used, as was Ota's room at the Art@Agnes art fair in Tokyo this past January. In one of the best presentations in the hotel fair, a pile of feathers in a bedroom, looking as if it had been pulled out of a comforter, would burst into the air when a fan was turned on by an electrical circuit being completed when wires dipped into the tub in the bathroom.

You could attempt a meaningful statement about the unpredictability of these constructions representing the random nature of our existence in the world, but that would be as futile as assigning a particular meaning to life. Probably it's best to just sit back and enjoy the show.

These two Japanese artist occasionally combine Installations with performance/intervention in some of their collaborations together.  It's quite interesting and gives me a lot of ideas of how I can develop my sound sculpture/installations.

L'Ikea è un labirinto, per far spendere più soldi

 

«Arma psicologica per confondere i favorire gli acquisti». L'azienda: «Li mettiamo solo a loro agio» 

MILANO - Non è stato costruito da re Minosse per rinchiudere il Minotauro, ma l'interno dell'Ikea è un vero e proprio labirinto. Lo afferma una ricerca scientifica condotta dal professor Allan Penn, direttore del Virtual Reality Centre for the Built Environment dell'UCL (University College London). In pratica, dice il professore, la struttura dell'Ikea è un'arma psicologica tesa a confondere e disorientare i clienti in modo da farli spendere sempre di più. «Il successo dell'Ikea si basa – dice Allan Penn- su una specie di imbarazzo dei clienti che perdono l'orientamento. Per raggiungere l'uscita bisogna girovagare in una serie infinita di svolte e giravolte. In questo infinito viaggio si mettono perciò nel carrello molte più cose di quelle preventivate».

SEDE DI LONDRA - Il professore, per la sua ricerca, si è basato sulla struttura dell'Ikea di Londra. «Ma i magazzini della società svedese sono più o meno uguali in tutto il mondo. Ovunque c'è un sentiero, segnato da strisce sul pavimento, lungo il quale il catalogo dei prodotti dell'azienda assume una forma fisica perché tutti gli oggetti sono esposti. Il concetto, insomma, è che restando nel labirinto si resta a contatto con mobili, seggiolini, lampade, padelle. Tutti prodotti a poco prezzo. Che vengono comprati». 

SMENTITA - Ovviamente, un portavoce dell'Ikea ha smentito le tesi del professore londinese affermando che la struttura dell'Ikea è stata studiata solo per mettere a proprio agio i clienti, mostrando loro tutti i prodotti in vendita. 

ORIGINI - L'Ikea ha 283 negozi in 26 differenti nazioni che hanno generato, nel 2010, 2,7 miliardi di euro di profitti. E' stata fondata nel 1943 dallo svedese Ingvar Kamprad, il quale già da piccolo aveva il la fissa degli affari: vendeva fiammiferi ai suoi vicini di casa. Poi si accorse che poteva pagarli meno acquistandoli da un grossista di Stoccolma. Dopo i fiammiferi si diede alla vendita di pesce, decorazioni per alberi di Natale, matite, sementi, penne a sfera e altri prodotti. A 17 anni, grazie ai soldi ricevuti da suo padre per i suoi eccellenti risultati scolastici, fondò il "labirinto", come lo chiama il professor Penn. Kamprad, che ha 84 anni, fino a poco tempo fa guidava un'auto vecchia di 15 anni, volava in classe economica e raccomandava ai suoi dipendenti di scrivere sempre su tutti e due i lati di un foglio per risparmiare la carta.

 Similar article in English below 

Why shoppers find it so hard to escape from Ikea: Flatpack furniture stores are 'designed just like a maze

If you've ever found yourself hopelessly lost in an Ikea store, you were probably not alone.

The home furnishing chain’s mazy layouts are a psychological weapon to part shoppers from their cash, an expert in store design claims.

The theory is that while following a zig-zag trail between displays of minimalist Swedish furniture, a disorientated Ikea customer feels ­compelled to pick up a few extra impulse purchases.

A-mazing: A route a customer took through a store. Professor Alan Penn said they are designed to stop customers leaving...

My hard drive is experiencing some strange noises

The sound of a defective hard disk is picked up by a contact microphone. The acoustic wave is instantly processed by a software that repeats and amplifies sounds creating a resounding echo. 

Gregory Chatonsky is an artist born in Paris. He currently resides in Montreal and Paris.

He holds a philosophy master’s from the Sorbonne and a multimedia advanced degree from the Ecole nationale superieure des beaux-arts in Paris. He has worked on numerous solo and group projects in France, Canada, the United States, Italy, Australia, Germany, Finland and Spain. His works have been acquired by public collectors such as the Maison Europeenne de la Photographie.

I was told that my sound sculpture presented at the Containment project sounds like a defective hard disk. 

Henrik Menné

Whether they are dynamic or static; sculptures by Henrik Menné are basically about process, balance and about organizing matter through both rigid systems and chance.

The major part of Mennés production consists of large-scale machines or arrangements temporarily put at work when exhibited - all sculptures are ‘in the making’ so to say. Their process is always silent, controlled and structured by repetitive movements as the machines transform a single material - plastic, wax, metal or stone - into peculiar objects. These soft-formed elements are seldom regarded as autonomous art works and destroyed or recycled when no longer on show.
Although closed and often self-referring, the system in which the process takes place both changes the environment and is sensible to changes in the environment. The instability of the physical context is therefore what causes important marginal variations in the shapes of the particular outcome.

The static sculptures by Menné contain the same immense effort and obsessive trait when it comes to putting forces such as gravity and well-known qualities ascribed to conventional materials into play. Another more conceptual approach is to be found in the few replicas of everyday objects, which are disturbed to the point where they loose the original function.

The intriguing low tech and analogue character of all works by Henrik Menné make visible the principle on which the individual system of the particular sculpture is organised. Despite this rational transparency works by Menné almost always appear as logically impossible and tremendously beautiful.

I'm really impressed by these sculpture. I like the simplicity and fragility of some of these structures. I'm particularly interested in the piece called 'Container' (2005 polystyrene balls, fan diameter 210 cm).