Damien Hirst Eco Home

Post by iSiZ

Damien Hirst (1965) is an English artist, entrepreneur and art collector. He is the most prominent member of the group known as the Young British Artists (or YBAs), who dominated the art scene in Britain during the 1990s.

For the Love of God is a sculpture he produced in 2007. It consists of a platinum cast of a human skull encrusted with 8,601 flawless diamonds, including a pear-shaped pink diamond located in the forehead. Costing £14 million to produce, the work went on display at the White Cube gallery in London in an exhibition Beyond belief with an asking price of £50 million. View a short presentationfilm of ‘For the Love of God’ here.

Watch a short inteview with Damien Hirst by Belinda Luscombe from Time Magazine:

 

Hirst is developing 500 eco-homes in Ilfracombe, Devon, where he already has a restaurant, an art studio and several properties. The properties feature hidden wind turbines in the roofs, photovoltaic solar panels and state-of-the-art insulation. Hirst hopes this will create a national blueprint for environmental housing and help regenerate the area. Building work will probably start 2013.

Watch this episode from the television series Grand Designs. Damian Hirst and his wife Maia Norman wanted to turn their new houseboat into a perfect London hang-out with the help of designer Mike Rundell.

The mystery is dissolved, now everybody is a creative.

Post by iSiZ

Innovations in technology makes us creative. In the documentary PressPausePlay Moby states: ‘Everybody is a photographer, everybody is a filmmaker, everybody is a writer, everybody is a musician..’ We are living in an era of immense creatieve potential and this is exciting. Our imagination is the limit.

PressPausePlay is a documentary film by creative agency House of Radon based in Stockholm, Sweden. The digital revolution of the last decade has unleashed creativity and talent in an unprecedented way, with unlimited opportunities. But does democratized culture mean better art or is true talent instead drowned out? The documentary film contains interviews with some of the world’s most influential creators of the digital era. Watch it here:

 

Renee Viterstedt, part of the team behind PressPausePlay visited the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. She wrote a blogpost about the documentary Side by Side. This film is produced by Keanu Reeves and directed by Chris Kenneally. It contains interviews with some Hollywood heavyweights such as Steven Soderbergh, Martin Scorsese, David Fincher and George Lucas. Viterstedt: ‘While our documentary focused on how digital tools have helped unleash creativity in an unprecedented way to create a democratised culture, this film looks specifically at how digital technology is increasingly pushing out traditional use of photochemical stock to make movies.’

Watch the trailer of the film here:

Technology allows you to create

Post by iSiZ

Charlie Caper and Erik Rosales from D1gits performed a striking techno-magic multimedia act as a marketingstunt for the Stockholm booth at MIPIM trade show in Cannes. Last march this presentation went viral on Youtube, day five it hit 900.000 views.

Earlier this year on this blog we had a post on magician Marco Tempest, who already uses this techno-magic in his shows. If you’re interested, there’s a ‘how does he do it’ video-tutorial at the end of that post. Nevertheless this new act from these guys is as exciting and proofs again: technology allows you to create!

Crowd+light+desire = 9 billion crowd accelerated innovative potential

Post by iSiZ

TED’s Chris Anderson says the rise of web video is driving a worldwide phenomenon he calls Crowd Accelerated Innovation, a self-fueling cycle of learning that could be as significant as the invention of print. But to tap into its power, organizations will need to embrace radical openness. And for TED, it means the dawn of a whole new chapter.

William Kentridge: Pain & Sympathy Art 21 “Exclusive”

Post by Paulien Bekker

 

With his video “History of the Main Complaint” (1996) serving as a backdrop, William Kentridge discusses how artists draw upon tragedy as subject matter for their work and how drawing itself can be a compassionate act.

Page by page he draws the images with charcoal and takes pictures of them. His films are produced without any storyboard or script.

About William Kentridge

William Kentridge born in Johannesburg, South Africa, witnessed first-hand one of the twentieth century’s most contentious struggles—the dissolution of apartheid—Kentridge brings the ambiguity and subtlety of personal experience to public subjects that are most often framed in narrowly defined terms. Using film, drawing, sculpture, animation, and performance, he transmutes sobering political events into powerful poetic allegories. Without a script or storyboard, Kentridge records his scenes as they evolve by photgraphing his charcoal drawings and paper collages over time, recording scenes as they evolve into an animated film.

The Resurrection of Forest City Cleveland

Post by iSiZ

Cleveland, Ohio was once the 7th biggest city in the United States, it’s population peaked with 914,808. In 1949 Cleveland was named an All-America City for the first time. The city’s prime geographic location as transportation hub on the Great Lakes has played an important role in its development as a commercial center. Picture below: Holiday Traffic on Euclid Avenue & Huron Road. Cleveland, Ohio. December 1949, PlayhouseSquare Archives.

By the 1960s, the economy slowed, and residents sought new housing in the suburbs. Today the city is dealing with a fast declining population and land is left empty. Comedian Mike Polk, made this funny video about the city of Cleveland today.

 

The nickname for Cleveland, The Forest City, unveils the river valley was once a heavily forested environment. A group of architects developed a plan to transform the city into a progressive city once again.

The idea is to develop the land so that agriculture and developmental activities go side by side. The land will be used for a variety of things right from agriculture purpose to clean industries to recreation for the inhabitants. Special emphasis has been being given on conservation and recycling of water, so that the water table may never go down in future. Watch this inspiring and clear overview on the planned changes for the resurrection of Cleveland:

Gardens of a Nonexistent Dreamlike Reality

Post by iSiZ

The High Line, an abandoned elevated rail line on the West Side of Manhattan New York, has not been in use since the 1980s. It was built in the 1930s, as part of a massive public-private infrastructure project called the West Side Improvement. In 1999 a community-based-non-profit group called Friends of the High Line, initiated a project to redesign the High Line into a public parc.

 
Piet Oudolf, a Dutch garden designer, worked on the planting design. His garden designs are like a dreamlike wilderness. The High Line’s planting design is inspired by the self-seeded landscape that grew on the out-of-use elevated rail tracks during the 25 years after trains stopped running. The species of perennials, grasses, shrubs and trees were chosen for their hardiness, sustainability, textural and color variation, with a focus on native species.

 
It developed quite a following among urban naturalists and seekers after the unusual and novel. It was just this wildness, the sense of wilderness within one of the largest cities on earth, that captured the imaginations of so many.

You can see an inspiring slideshow presentation of the design of the parc by clicking here.

A three minute short about the High Line design:

 
 
And watch a video on the history of the High Line narrated by Ethan Hawk.

Below a picture on how the High Line used to look like, before the reconstruction.

Animation is the illusion of movement

Computers have evolved in the last century, the mobility and power of transferring data has fortunately developed along. Watch this very funny commercial by John Cleese comparing a computer with a dead fish, aiming to explain the computer’s compatibility.

 

Animation can be defined as an illusion of movement. Within filmmaking animation is probably the most creative. As computes evolve the ability to make more complex forms of animations is possible. Watch this two part video, which is an interesting overview on how computer animation has changed over the years:

 

You can watch Part 2 through this link

The Wonders of Technology

Post by iSiZ

Jacque Fresco is a self-educated structural designer, concept artist and futurist. He is considered by many to be a modern-day Da Vinci. From a young age he has been interested in visualizing the future. Today his sketches have been put in 3D computer visualizations by 3D artists. Watch this short film of how a new city of the future can look like:

 

The Venus Project  is a project initiated by Fresco and reflects the culmination of his life work: the integration of the best of science and technology into a comprehensive plan for a new society based on human and environmental concern.

Future By Design is a documentary, produced in 2006, on the life, designs, and philosophy of Jacque Fresco. Watch in 1,5 hours, the work of this inspirational designer of the future as he visualizes the wonders of technology to elevate human potential.

The fear of the unknown is what thrills us the most

Post by iSiZ

Is it not interesting that what we’re most afraid of is what thrills us the most. We live in a so called 3 dimensional space. As the unknown always attracks, we want to know how the 4th dimension in space looks like. In geometry mathematicians calculated a four-dimensional analog of the cube, the tesseract:

The following 5 minute extract is from the film: “What The Bleep Do We Know!?: Down The Rabbit Hole”. Here Dr Quantum visits Flatland and examines 2 dimensional space versus 3 dimensional space. The animation of Flatland is inspired by ‘Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions’ an 1884 satirical novella by the English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott. This short clip very effectively explains how the fear for the unknown works.