Suzan Szenasy, Editor in Chief of Metropolis magazine interviews Suzan Globus, Interior Designer and Past President of the American Society for Interior Designers.

An award-winning, widely published designer, Globus is principal of Globus Design Associates, a Red Bank, N.J.-based interior design consultancy specializing in public, educational and museum libraries.

She has served the Society as chair of the ASID Education, Training and Advisory Council and the ASID Legislative Advisory Council; member of the ASID Professional Development Task Force; director at large of the ASID Board of Directors; ASID representative to the NCIDQ Model Legislation Task Force; and a Society spokesperson on privacy issues. A past president of the New Jersey chapter, she is active in several community associations and advisory boards, and was appointed by the New Jersey governor to serve on the state’s first Interior Design Examination and Evaluation Committee.

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Yves Behar, Founder of fuseproject, demonstrates the OX Computer designed for the One Laptop Per Child program which delivers ingeniously designed technology to schools in developing countries, and the new NYC condom wrapper and dispenser—a sexy design solution that promotes safe sex.

To see our exclusive interview with Yves Behar about the laptop click here
To see the presentation by the former chief technology officer of XO laptop Mary Lou Jepsen click here

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Ok. They still have it. Radiohead comes out with their House of Cards video and maybe it will do for the digital generation what the gloved one did with Thriller back in the day: redefine the music video.

As we learn over at Google Code:

No cameras or lights were used. Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.

And we’d be remiss not to include the making of:

And if you’re particularly inspired, grab the code, mix and mash your own and show the world what you got.

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Stephen Savage is an award winning writer-director. His film, ‘Cosmic Radio’ was named an official selection to the Palm Springs International film festival, 2008, and was an official invited feature to the Sundance Film Festival, 2008. His next feature film, “Country Club Cowboy”, is greenlit to begin filming in 2009, and his AFI/Sundance Channel Invited Submission short film, “The Hunter’s Moon”, is shooting this coming August.

Stephen’s first feature length movie, ‘Turquoise’, won both ‘Best Screenplay’ of 2002 from the California Film Commission and the ‘Excellence In Screenwriting’ trophy at the NorthWest Film Institute at Washington State University. The film itself (along with the soundtrack, which Stephen scored) has gone on to win numerous awards at film festivals throughout the United States, including Best Screenplay, Best Director and Best Feature/Audience Choice awards at the Minneapolis Cinema Festival (SMMASH FEST) and Best Feature, Best Screenplay and Best Director at the ICF International Film Expo.

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This video was filmed during the Metropolis Magazine conference @ ICFF - Design Entrepreneurs: Make Good and Prosper.Sponsored by ASID and Lonseal.

Fritz Haeg, architect, educator, and author of Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, the newest title published by Metropolis Books, talks about his current activities, and designs that transcend materiality and reconnect 21st-century humans to a primitive place of plants, animals, weather, dance, and dirt.

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This video was filmed during the Metropolis Magazine conference @ ICFF - Design Entrepreneurs: Make Good and Prosper.Sponsored by ASID and Lonseal.

Douglas DeNicola, the Design Director of the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, Queens discusses the Japanese artist’s legacy, the crafting of his famous Akari Light Sculptures, as well as the licensing agreements that fund the museum’s education programs.

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Louise Bourgeois’ career spans a century and is beyond the confines of modern or even contemporary art. It is beyond any art styles or art movements. Her work simultaneously absorbs and repels all labels art critics so eagerly apply to artists.

Bourgeois at the Guggenheim

This summer, New York’s Guggenheim Museum is honoring 96 year old sculptor with a retrospective lasting until September 28, 2008.

More information about it can be found at the Guggenheim Web site.

I saw the previous version of this show at the Pompidou in Paris this past March. Somehow that show seemed more intimate and appropriate to Bourgeois’ work and its private nature.

While shooting, I remembered that my friend — and art critic — Olesya Turkina wrote a book about Bourgeois in the occasion of her exhibition at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. Olesya has kindly let us reprint part of it here:

Louise Bourgeois: Pandora’s Box

Louise Bourgeois, who was born in Paris in 1911 worked more than half a century in New York. In fact her creative work reflects the century, with its revolutions and world wars, Utopian hopes and crippling disillusionments. Never one to blindly follow fashion in art, she has been compared with such masters of the 20th century as Constantin Brancusi and Vladimir Tatlin, Hans Arp and Alberto Giacometti, and even Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman. Her work is abstract and figurative, realistic and phantasmagorical, and is made from all manner of material such as wood, marble, bronze, plaster, latex and fabric. Probing themes of universal import, it is also highly autobiographical. In fact the personal and traumatic is Bourgeois’ most vital material.

Throughout the 20th century one might say Louise Bourgeois has created an idiosyncratic symbolic dictionary in which certain personal experiences and fantasies are concretized into expressive images. In the words of the artist, “Symbols are only empty bottles. They function only through what you put in them — personal symbols mean personal alphabet, our uniqueness is all we have.”

For example, her use of the spider is not a sign of arachnophobia (terror of spiders), but a sign of the enveloping and diligent mother. In much the same manner, sewing needles are not represented as aggressive instruments but symbols of magic to signify the restoration of losses. And home is depicted not as a refuge, but as an enclosure where one is in danger of losing oneself.

These objects thus recover magical properties connected to personal experiences well known since childhood. Childhood, in the artist’s words, “has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama”.

In fact, Louise Bourgeois describes herself as a woman without secrets. For her, sculpture is an instrument of exorcism, a place to work through traumatic childhood experiences.

In 1982 the artist formulated this principle in her artist’s project for Artforum called “Child Abuse” where she says, “Everyday you have to abandon your past or accept it and then if you cannot accept it you become a sculptor.”

In this project, she disclosed the secret of her life — a tale that reads like a melodramatic novel. Louise Bourgeois grew up triangulated between an adoring but ill mother and an authoritarian father whose mistress of ten years was also Louise’s governess. The complex relationship with her father, in which the duality of love and hate were manifested, resulted in a lifelong ambivalence to authority.

Within this context it is no coincidence that her creative work is metaphorically compared to the space of memory. It can be said that Bourgeois’ drawings, prints, and sculptures constitute a unique theatre of memory. Each work is related to one or another important event in her life on the principle of free association. Memories therefore play a leading, not auxiliary, role.

The full article can be downloaded here.

Olesya Turkina is a critic and curator (her projects include Russian Pavilion at the 48th Venice Biennial (1999) and Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Contemporary Art in the Russian museum, St. Petersburg. She is contributor to Flash Art International, Kabinet journal (St.Petersburg) and Moscow Art Magazine. She is Editor of on-line journal on Contemporary Russian Art and Member of the Russian Space Federation. During several years she is working on the series of films “The Chain of Flowers” with The Museum of Jurassic Technology (Los Angeles).

MORE SMAC:
on OS GEMEOS
on SWOON
on CAI GUO-QIANG
on ART BASEL MIAMI 2008

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Is art more important then real life? Artist Martin Creed doesn’t agree. He says: I think it’s good to see museums at high speed. It leaves time for other things.

In the video Martin Creed talks about his latest project Work No. 850, at Tate Britain which involves a person running through the galleries as fast as they can every 30 seconds.

It seems that Creed shared this idea about museum going with Jean-Luc Godard, who included a scene of running through the Louvre in “The Band of Outsiders.”

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Brazil is famed for carrying a sense of the carnivalesque in everyday life. You can smell and taste it even if the festivities are a long way away.

The work of Os Gemeos (”The Twins”) reflects this celebration as they offer audiences a vibrant taste of everyday life portrayed through a fantastic caste of characters, real and imagined.

Largely self-taught, the brothers started out by tagging the streets with the name “Os Gemeos” in their distinctive style. Later, they started to weave surreal narratives of Brazilian subconsciousness into their graffiti.

About this Video

We filmed this interview using the Panasonic AG-HSC1 high definition camera.

Over the years their street painting reached such high levels that officials invited them to paint Brazilian trains.

Now, they’re equally at home on the street and in museum and galleries. While still tagging Os Gemeos, their work has been recognized by the Tate Modern in London, MAM in Sao Paulo, Museum Het Domein in The Netherlands and Deitch Projects in New York.

This summer Deitch Projects is showing the largest gallery exhibition of Os Gemeos to date. Called Too Far Too Close, the show fills the gallery with the dreams and fantasies of Brazil: street kids, family portraits with mermaids, bathing girls, street musicians, favelas, flying animals, clowns and the reoccurring theme of twinship.

The show invites viewers to visit the childhood of the Pandolfo brothers as well as revisit their own.

Too Far Too Close runs at Deitch Projects
from June 28 to August 09, 2008
18 Wooster Street, New York
Open to the public Tuesday through Saturday from 12PM to 6PM

MORE SMAC:
on LOUISE BOURGEOIS
on SWOON
on CAI GUO-QIANG
on ART BASEL MIAMI 2008

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“Synthetic Times” is the largest New Media exhibition ever mounted in China and will run during the 2008 Beijing Olympics at the National Museum of Art China. I had the opportunity to film the curator of the exhibition, Mr. Zhang Ga when he recently spoke at the MOMA in New York City, and presented the curatorial background of the exhibition as well as the development of New Media in China and the World.

The “Synthetic Times” exhibition is a truly international event with the participation of American New Media thought leaders MOMA, the New School and Eyebeam as well as several European new media organizations. The magnitude of this exhibition and its impact on the development of Chinese New Media is certain to be great.

I’m happy and privileged to have been able to catch a bit of it for you. Soon to be posted videos regarding “Synthetic Times” include an interview with Barbara London, MOMA’s new media curator and her role curating an overview of the history of video art on behalf of MOMA for the Synthetic Times exhibition and Fan Dian, director of the National Museum of Art China’s presentation of the state of comtemporary new media in China.

How the Piece was Shot

I spent a fair amount of time playing with pixels on this piece. With what started out as damage control (no light and a subject located a few football fields away from the camera). Knowing that I would have colourful “B Roll” footage composed of stills of various media pieces in the show, I wanted to tweak out the head shot of Zhang Ga to visually hold its own. The background of the shot was a fuzzy, pixelated, grey-green soup and there wasn’t enough contrast to mask it out.

My Idea Creative!

With no way to hide the background muck and overall low-light, no-contrast look of the shot, I wanted to try to embrace the Yuck, and amplify and shape it into something interesting.

I zoomed in to the shot to tightly frame the speaker. This blew up the pixelated distortion. I increased the contrast and sharpened the image to bring out and define the pixels. I applied various luminescence-based colour correction to colourize the rogue bright little blips. With the background now a buzzing little kinetic garden of electro noise, I wanted to frame and contain the image against a background of clean clear video “normalicy”.

Humanity has expressed a long standing spiritual need which transcends wide tracks of geography, culture and faith to put circles around head shots. I’ve confirmed this by staring at Buddhas in South East Asia, Medieval manuscripts in Europe and Icons in Central Europe over the course of several years.

So pop on a fat circle mask I did! I added several thin spinning circle motion graphics on top of the circle mask to have at least one clean, slick element to contain the image (stock stuff from Final Cut “Motion”).

Now for the fun part. I set up various combinations of fisheye, selective focus and vignette filters to add direction and motion to the tweaked video noise. This served to keep Zhang Ga’s relatively stable and the background noise move outward away from him. Within each area of colour, contrast, and warp distortion I created around ten variations of the filter set so that the shot would look basically similar and yet would be consistently morphing over time via keyframe transitions and fades.

Originally, I had the “Head in Bubble” shot drifting all over the screen. Kindly and keen-eyed colleagues let me know it looks liked hell and recommended that I lose some bubble motion and let the B roll go full screen more often. Wise advice, this exhibition is massive and there is a wealth of images from the hundreds of individual art objects and installations.

The Toolkit

I used a combination of:

Final Cut - sharpen, RGB balance, min max and 3 way colour corrector,

Magic Bullet Looks - vignette and color

Eureka - contrast, people tweaker, silk stocking new,

Joe’s Filters - soft spot focus, chroma glow

I composed the score in Reason and Logic Audio. Dialogue clean up in Sound Soap and Protools with “waves” plug in set and final mix in Protools

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