Contemporary art news

How about more works from the Design Interactions work in progress show?

Photography by Hitomi Yoda + Fashion Design by Aephie Huimi

Crowbot Jenny is a manga character. She is a socially-awkward girl who prefers to spend time surrounded by technology and animals rather than with humans. To better communicate with the birds, she built the Crowbot. Perched on her shoulder, the crow-shaped robot can vocalize a variety of crow calls to control and converse with her bird army.

Hiromi Ozaki developed the character to explore the world of animal intelligence and interactions. Placing the issues in the context of anime and manga is far from trivial as the genres frequently discuss complex topics about the future, technology and society.

Hiromi worked with two world specialists in crow intelligence, Prof. Nathan Emery and Prof. Nicola Clayton, who provided her with samples of rook calls (the ones flocking in London parks are usually 'rooks', not crows.) Hiromi then reproduced and used the calls to attract, repel and engineer the behavior of rooks in Finsbury Park and Hyde Park.

Crowbot Jenny is also going to find her way in a film based on the character and the scientific research with the University of Cambridge. Finally Hiromi plans to write and perform outdoors a Crowbot Jenny song featuring crow calls - which will hopefully please the human crowd as much as the crow one.

Illustration by Nasos (N.C.Empire)

The exhibition is on view until February 10th at the Royal College of Art in London.
Previously: The Gesundheit Radio.

Lint’s Flickr has been bombarded with new photos displaying some work which is apparently old [...]

It's not meant to be prestigious in any way. It's a nod of acknowledgement from GraffLondon's forum members for who they think have smashed it over the first decade of the 21st Century. I was a bit late in reading about this, but here are the winners:

Writer of the year 2009

1st: 10foot
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2nd: Vamp

Crew of the year 2009

1st: DWS
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2nd: ATG
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Writer of the decade

1st: Tox
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2nd: Oker
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On Wednesday i had an alas far too short look at the Work in Progress show of the Design Interactions department Royal College of Art in London.

One of the projects i liked is by James Chambers .

Chambers postulates the existence of an experimental research group within Texas Instruments. Mostly active in the '70s and '80s, they called themselves the Attenborough Design Group (after the famous English naturalist) and examined how behaviours in nature could be applied to design.

Their first product was the 1972 Gesundheit Radio. Developed to protect early microprocessors from dust, the radio featured a sneeze mechanism that expelled dust from inside the casing every six month. A bellows system extracted dust from inside the unit, blowing waste from two outlets located on the front. Should the environment the radio lives in be particularly unclear, a convenient SNZ button enabled the user to activate the sternutation.

Gesundheit Radio from James Chambers on Vimeo.

Chambers is investigating the potential of other animal actions to be used as defense for a 'family' of between 3 and 5 products. In addition, he is re-interpreting the standing hard drive from last year (see video of the hard drive in action) as a portable floppy disk drive in the late 80's to fit in with the Attenborough Design Group timeline.

Various sneezing mechanisms developed by James Chambers (photo by d & r)

The exhibition is open all weekend and will close on Tuesday 9 February at 6pm.

5 days in Berlin is a frustratingly short time if you're planning to follow half-closely what is happening at Transmediale and want also to see some exhibitions around town. I'll bring back what i can. Such as this lovely exhibition titled East Side Stories. German Photography 1950s-1980s at the Kicken Gallery.

View of the exhibition space with what the gallery website proudly calls the 'movable element'

As its title suggests, the show features some 30 black and white pictures from photographers who portrayed life at the time of the GDR, mostly in a way that steered away from the official GDR iconography. Under the regime of East Germany, photographers had a degree of licence denied to other artists - largely because the state did not regard photography as an art form (via).

Evelyn Richter, Pförtnerin im Rathaus (Receptionist in the Town Hall), Leipzig, c. 1975

Sibylle Bergemann, East Berlin, 1972 - 1996

Sibylle Bergemann, Ohne Titel (Gummlin) (Untitled [Gummlin] (1984)

East Side Stories. German Photography 1950s-1980s runs at the Kicken Gallery in Berlin until April 17, 2010.
Related stories: Objectivities: Photography from Düsseldorf and Art of Two Germanys, Cold War Cultures.

I recently (virtually) chatted it up with visionary artist Damon Soule whose work is pretty mind-blowing. According to Damon, “words tend to get in the way of the visual experience,” so we will let his work speak for itself…well, his work and his answers to my questions.

Technological advances have truly helped bolster and propel graffiti to new levels. Take a look at this virtual blackbook, Graffiti Analysis 2.0 and tell us you don’t want to scrawl your tag in 3D.

Amanda Visell’s “eyeballs are burning up,” because she’s so excited about these new mustache vessels. Come to think of it, our eyeballs are getting a little excited as well; these ceramic containers are great.

From San Francisco to New York; London to Los Angeles, we dug through the world's finest places to view artwork. Our Top 100 Galleries and Museums are listed online now and waiting for you to vote on your favorites!

What good are great artists if they have no venue to show off their talent? We scoured the world for the best galleries and museums for the type of art we crave daily and bundled it all together in a fresh online collection: Top 100 Galleries x Museums.

There’s something about succulents –those strong, desert living plants– that possess an inherent artistic quality to their construction. Perhaps it’s their heartiness; their gently swooping curves and subtle coloring can be mesmerizing.