IDEAS: SOCIAL | THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY

In an age where we are spoilt for choice and saturated in information it’s difficult to keep your thoughts and your attention on one thing. New information continously engulfs the former leading to a fleeting and fragile relationship with the experiences around us. Designers and artisans are venturing on projects which attempt to claw back and preserve precious memories.

Artist Diana Block attempted to rescue the memories of her parents by pulling together photographs, negatives and handmade garments – objects capturing a moment in time. The garments in particular hold special significance, needle crafted pieces for different life moments from baptism to communion and marriage. She has poetically photographed the images to create abstracted stills. These will eventually for part of a multi-disciplinary project combining audio and film. http://www.dianablok.com/

In a culture where millions of photographs are uploaded to social media sites every day, One Memento is a concept project that invites users to be more selective and specific in their photographic upload. Users have a 2 hour window to take one photograph to submit to the project after downloading a special ‘one free shot’ digital camera app from the App Store. The shot is then shared on a gallery viewable to others and open to comments with space for up to 250,000 individual memento’s  In a way we are encouraged to be less careful and crafted with digital photography, afforded the luxury to delete and re-touch, One Memento asks us to be more committed. http://www.onememen.to/

This year’s Serpentine Galley pavilion adopted the elephant’s motto, ‘never forget’ as architects Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei opted to pay homage to pavillions past, choosing to explore the hidden history of the previous structures. A floating platform stood 1.5m over the excavated ground sharing a hint of the building foundations, held up by 11 columns each representing an old pavilion. http://www.serpentinegallery.org/

At The Design Museum The Future of Memory in the Digital Age asked designers to re-establish the relationship between objects and our memories of them now digital design seems foreign and synthetic. http://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/future-exhibitions

IDEAS: TECH | BEHIND THE MEGA-MANUFACTORY

Whilst 3D printing steals the limelight at one end and handmade crafts score brownie points at the other, the juggernauts of the manufacturing industry are showcasing the technical processes and secret recipies behind their iconic products.

Rolls-Royce recently held a dinner party on the assembly line floor to emphasise the customization process and unique personal experience behind purchasing one of the most luxury, hand-made automobiles on the market. ‘Dine on the Line’ offered insight to 100 lucky invitees who has a red carpet tour of the plant and met the makersn behind the models.

Google recently released images of their massive data centres housing the mass of servers, drives, fibre optic lines, routers and switches that maketh the internet. In true Google style, the epic technical plex is colour co-ordinated in Google colours. 

IDEAS: SCIENCE | POST-HUMANISM: THE DAWN OF THE HYBRID AGE

Parag Khanna, author of Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilisation recently published an article in Wired on the close of the Information Age and the emergence of the Hybrid Age. In a nutshell, the very notion of what it is to be ‘human’ will shift dramatically into an evolution of our own encouragement. To illuminate:

“We are entering an era of technology with a big ‘T’ in which various fields from physics and biology to mathematics and neuroscience are combining with one another – and being accelerated by IT to produce powerful new offspring.”

Where the ‘Information Age’ championed technology at the heart of our daily routines and endeavours, the Hybrid Age envisages a future where disciplines are cross-bred and enhanced with technology, integrated with humans. “Technology with shape us as much as we shape it”. We’ll experience a man-machine civilisation thanks to experiments in genomics, stem-cell research, genetic enhancement, germ-line engineering, neuro-pharmacology, AI and pattern recognition technologies.

• Robots, avatars and other forms of artificial intelligence will soon become familiar bit players in our everyday lives. And it won’t be about the familiar service models either – they’ll be able to make decisions and even influence ours with their own cognitive behaviour.

• We’ve already begun to witness the beginning of techni-ceuticals with swallowable pills that track our insides and body enhancing prosthetics.

• Governments world wide are plunging budgets into sectors such as nanotech,biotech, alternative energy and robotics to help innovate and progress rapidly in the sector

• We’ll see new jobs emerge from ‘avatar coaches’ to ‘virtual-services broker’

• Industry bodies will work with govenments and NGO’s to develop an ethics codes for testing on human subjects. Law schools from Oxford to Stanford are already hosting “Human Enhancement and Technology! conferences to debate and discuss the future and legalities of a transhuman culture.

More to come on ‘Human Architects’ shortly…..

(Image: Lucy McRae’s Swallowable Parfum)

Colour Burst Ballet….

” Through a Glass Brightly” by William Grieg

IDEAS: URBAN FUTURES | POST-LONDON

The spotlight has well and truly shone on the little lush isle of Great Britain this year what with a celebration of 60 years of Queen Elizabeth II and the jaw-dropping 2012 Olympics. Now the party’s nearly over, artists, poets and thespians are looking relatively far forward into the future of the historical city of London imagining both utopian and dystopian scenarios.

Future Victorians was a series of salons held at London’s Theatre Delicatessen imagining the world in 2062 through three different lenses. Historian Leo hollis explored ‘the creative possibilities of the urban sprawl’, philosopher Julian Baggini explored the effects of the technologyon the ego and Tasha Marks presented a feature on future food and confectionary.

Jessica Voorsanger and Bob & Roberta Smith present two contrasting visions of London in London’s Callingbetween7th September and 26th October. Bob & Roberta Smith look to the future of transport in the city with works like ‘Imagine the Mile End Road of the Future’ replete with cycle lines and electric cars. Vordanger takes a slightly different approach looking more immediately into the world of celebrity culture and personalities, juxtaposing them with found images of London Landscapes.

http://www.elevenspitalfields.com/shows/londons-calling/

Virulent Experience is an immersive theatre event and art exhibition set in a fictional future version of London on the eve of the 2040 Olympics. Very much in the realms of dystopia, technology has impacted our minds, our imagination and even our free will in whats fascinatingly termed ‘The Age of Emotional Prohibition’. Humans are engineered to be monitored by The Ministry of Information’s Emotional Experience Act;

in an effort to stop the nation tearing itself apart, the government has instituted ENGLAND REBORN – for your Safety, Security & Sanity. Thanks to the Sure Heart implant technology gifted to newborn citizens, all disruptive, antisocial and negative emotions and rogue experiences are now prohibited, isolated and catalogued within the Virulent Museum of Human Experience via real time analysis of your lives. No longer do the self destructive impulses of the nation manifest in the phenomenon known as Virulent Novelty.

http://conwayhall.org.uk/52/+/74

The End of the Future at The Transition Gallery examines the optimistic regeneration programmes initiated by the government as lost visions of a future that never really materialised. From 1951’s Festival of Britain to post-war construction drives. Four artists looked at a future that simply, wasn’t.

http://www.transitiongallery.co.uk/

Tomas Saraceno: Cloud Cities in New York

IDEAS: TECH | DIGITAL ARCHEOLOGY

Ok, so we’ve heard alot about the ‘Netstalgia’ movement. The turning point in the early-to-mid 1990’s that saw computer technology evolve from the blocky Pacman graphics of the eighties to the dial-up beeps of the internet. From 8 to 32 bit. Gameboy RGB and the bus-stop boredom filler, Snake on your Nokia 3110.

Computer AV has rapidly sophisticated in astonishing time, multiplying little ‘bits’ into giggatiggapixels but 20-something’s neither born in the eighties or born hard-wired like Generation-D are taking a moment to celebrate the awkward and the ugly of decade-old Digital Dinosaurs.

The Museum of Endangered Sounds is one such genius project that archives the distinctive, cumbersome sounds of early tech from gameboy beeps to VHS tapes ejecting and the whirring strain of a Discman loading. http://savethesounds.info/ Chiptune as a ‘music’ genre is making a comeback with EDM producers and soundscapists experimenting with Gameboy-esque components using shared programmes like http://littlesounddj.com/lsd/

Early Web 1.0 aesthetics are dominating graphics trends at the moment fromthe flicker of glitchy gifs to grainy CMYK halftone prints. Alain Vonick’s Ruins project attempts to harness the immature ruins before the Adobe Suite, Dreamweaver, Flash, HTML5 and teams of front-end designers. Clunky icons, chunky pixels and basic typefaces characterise the collection. http://www.alainvonck.com/index.html Couture is similarly getting in on the act with Alexander McQueen producing a glitchy promo film for their A/W 2012 collection.

As video games become more like Hollywood movies with cutting edge CGI and immersive marketing campaigns a new shop in Streatham celebrates back to basics RGB (or Retro Game Base) is a shoppable museum of games, consoles and arcade cabinets from the 70s to the 00s. http://www.retrogamebase.co.uk/ Earlier users of the first Nokia phones will remember the ‘Angry Birds’ of its day, Snake. Now, game developer Matt James has given it at 2012 makeover incorporating user-generated rules allowing you to incorporate your own elements. Fun initiatives like the iCade attempt to turn your hyper-modern iPad into an arcade console. 

IDEAS: SOCIAL | DREAMGINEERING

Forget snooze-inducing rainforest or whale music sound machines, a series of innovative new apps claim to help engineer the very narratives of your dreams as you enter the realm of the subconcious.

At present, these apps are largely experimental. Taking inspiration from the classic audio tape hypnosis there are several useful, and questionable applications for these new pieces of software. On the positive, they can be used to treat sleep and psychological disorders at a subliminal level, on the flipside imagine an app in the hands of an advertiser or agenda-pushing engineer using them for their own influence….

Dream:On

Dream:On allows you to pre-select a dream scenario from a series of options in the ‘dream store’. Select from ‘On the Run’ (who would pick that?!), a Wild West adventure in the middle of a shoot out, a trip across Tokyo’s skyscraper landscape or perhaps an exotic adventure in the rainforest or a serene stroll through a peace garden among others. You are instructed to place your iPhone face down, near your pillow. When the app senses you are sleeping, it plays a ‘soundscape’ that has been designed to influence your dream. It monitors your movement and adjusts the volume to ensure you are not woken up!

Yumemiru

Translated in Japanese as ‘the dream’, Yumemiru allows you to select one of eight scenarios from a trip to the beach to a romantic encounter. Like Dream:On, the app detects the time passed before you go into REM sleep when you are most susceptible to influence. As well as a sounds there are pre-recorded phrases repeated to you. 

ARCHIFON I, INTERACTIVE INSTALLATION

Archifon is an incredibly original audio visual project merging projection mapping with interactivity. The whole of the Olomouc Baroque chapel becomes a virtual musical instrument. ‘Architectonical Objects’ (great phrase!) or areas of the church are overlaid with visual projections and sound. Up to ten visitors at any one time can interact with the installation’s 100 active points using laser pointers to activate. 

Trends | Urbex: Urban Exploring

IDEAS: MUSIC | LISTENING DIFFERENTLY: SILENTAINMENT & URBAN CLASSICS

Silentainment…shhh!

So the likes of Silent Disco started it all off with one-on-one audio experiences, now perhaps bolstered by the glaring popularity of dialogue-free The Artist, a series of venues and artists are experimenting with concepts nights and approaches exploring the art of keeping the noise down.

The Local in Bethnal Green hosts the annual Shhh Festival whereartists are invited to soundtrack silent movies while selected ‘quiet’ musicians are invited to play ambiently and artworks on display allude to the idea of ‘quietness’. The Old Vic Tunnels welcomes back Silent Opera as part of the Vault festival, inviting visitors to experience intense storytelling in a ‘personal sound world’ channeling a full symphony orchestra, chorus and cast of opera singers through your earphones.

John Hooper’s Landsounds project simply reflects on the everyday environments around you. He captures an honest moment of a place with a photograph accompanied by an audio recording which you can intimately experience later. http://landsounds.tumblr.com/

Urban Classics

As the title implies, classical music is getting an urban twist in a series of highly credible mash-ups.

As part of The Barbican Weekender, the BBC Symphony Orchestra shares a stage with N-Dubz producer Fazer and urban artists Devlin, Skepta and Ms Dynamite performing familiar hits and brand new collaborations.

Seven years ago, Yellow Lounge in Berlin radically re-imagined how classical music could be experienced and enjoyed by new audiences. International performers are teamed with cutting edge DJ’s and accompanied by eye-popping VJ visuals in a nightclub environment. Now, Yellow Lounge has permeated London and sets to educate and enthrall a new audience.

IDEAS: MUSIC | Beat Theatre

The concept of merging killer visuals with a musical performance is nothing particularly new – Kraftwerk were one of the AV pioneers, whilst the Gorillaz broke ground with their line drawn band and acts like Hexatic and New Opera Hero are constantly impressing with beats overlaid with digital graphics.

That said, as technology advances with augmented reality techniques, projection mapping and sophisticated bespoke softwares the results are becoming increasingly spectacular, more immersive, something close to AV theatre.

Brazilian artist Amon Tobin’s on-going tour of his latest album ISAM has pulled in audiences of art and music lovers alike with a jaw-dropping 25’ x 14’ x 8’ multi-dimensional/ shape shifting 3-dimensional art installation that surrounds him and the audience in a veneer of kinetic light, flashing projections and glowing cubes. The audience is temporarily transported to a fantastical environment that skips between a computer game vortex, a spacescape and everything in between.

On February 3^rd, the Chemical Brothers release their film Don’t Think created with their long time collaborator Adam Smith. 20 cameras have attempted to capture the electricity and psychedelic trip of a Chemical Brothers live gig from a fans perspective capturing the ambitious graphics and of course, the music in ultra clear Dolby Digital Surround Sound 7:1. The promise is trippy, “above you, lights swoop and strafe across armies of marching toy robots and galloping deconstructed horses; paint balls explode in front of borderline psychotic clowns”.

Even musical genres that traditionally shun frippery are exploring AV to enhance euphoric big beats and basslines. Drum’n’Bass Godfather Andy C recently unleashed Alive taking the gritty grimey d’n’b experience to a new, cultured level. A new A&H DB4 mixer allows Andy to control the visuals as he mixes where different tracks and genres are synced to different visual clips.

AS ABOVE, SO BELOW BY LIGHT HARVEST

One day, we will all be living in the ‘Grid’. stunning light projections…

IDEAS: ART | Discrete Graffiti

Anarchic art takes an ambient turn, blending surreptitiously even seamlessly into the environment through discrete techniques. In a world where anarchy is currently, very visible indeed (cue, Occupy movement), guerrilla artists are finding quieter ways to express themselves. Eschewing obvious graphics, spray-can daubs and stencils artists experiment with invisible installations and mediums guaranteeing an ASBO-free execution.

Italian street artist Moneyless creates beautiful geometric interventions from rope. The rope ‘drawings’ appear suspended in mid-air, augmenting its environment with a graphic sketch.

Glow Graffiti enables spray painting for the law-abiding citizen. You use the can to ‘spray’ light onto a UV activated canvas. The LED tip in the can means you can also create art by taking photos of images you have ‘drawn’ with the light.

A major development in anti-establishment street art is “audiofiti”. Here, sound emitting devices are planted within a given environment interupting the soundscape. One such example was a recent joint commission between Capsule and art gallery VIVID. Sound artist Mr Underwood was commissioned to insert his sound objects into urban spaces around Birmingham city. Passers-by are invited to interact with little noise box synthesizers and mini recorders that encourage finders to record a message for the next person.

Recyclism (aka Benjamin Gaulon) creates Sonic Graffiti which converts light from New York’s video screens into a sound output which assaults passers-by with a high pitched sound. The intrusive sound is impossible to ignore forcing people to pay attention to their surroundings- in particularly the cacophony of advertisements rendered in blinding LED’s.