Tonight I went to the opening of ‘Impetus and Movement‘, the 3rd Ars Electronica exhibition at the Volkswagen Automobil Forum Unter den Linden in Berlin.
I was very eager to go because I knew that the installation ‘Particles‘ by Daito Manabe & Motoi Ishibashi would be there. ‘Particles’ is an illumination installation of seemingly floating lights. It’s actually a quite complex installation. Just watch the video and you’ll understand why I wanted to see it.
Unfortunately, it didn’t really work at the exhibition. I can imagine that this isn’t the easiest installation to build up.
Anyhow, there’re 11 other installations and 6 video artworks at the exhibition which make it definitely worth it. You can go and see it till September 16th and it’s free!

Mirror Wall by Jeppe Hein.

A huge mirror is mounted onto a wall. When visitors enter the space the mirror starts moving subtly and wavelike. Visitors facing the mirror will be irritated by the vibrating reflection of themselves and their surrounding. This sensation causes not only a vague feeling of dizziness but also a latent distrust of one’s own eyes and spatial perception.

found at kiameku

There are 3 new artworks on my wishlist: Corner I, Corner III and Corner IV by Tauba Auerbach. They’re ‘just’ white, woven canvases.

found at BOOOOOOOM!

‘Mouth Factory‘ by Cheng Guo is one of the cooler projects I’ve seen lately. Cheng has build a series of functional machines specifically designed to be operated by the mouth of the user, which includes chewing drill, teeth lathe, tongue extruder, mouth breath rotational molding and vacuum form machine.

The project explores the capabilities and versatility of this wondrous organ and correlating facial expressions, re-contextualised within the realm of production. As a comment on human enhancement, the project aims to explore the aesthetic of production through a series of performative devices. By focusing on the mouth, the production devices acquire a fantastic quality that amplifies and render visible the reciprocal relationship and effects between our body and our tools.

chewing drill

inhaling vacuum form machine

teeth lathe

tongue extruder

blowing rotational molding machine

found at adafruit

Somehow I really like art made with stuff you can buy at the hardware store. Untitled Endless Cut by Jacob Dahlgren.

found at dvdp

“Pulse Machine” is an electromechanical sculpture made by Alicia Eggert and Alexander Reben.

This electromechanical sculpture was ‘born’ in Nashville, Tennessee on 2 June 2012, at 6:18 PM. It has been programmed to have the average human lifespan of babies born in Tennessee on that same day: approximately 78 years. The kick drum beats its heartbeat (at 60 beats per minute), and the mechanical counter displays the number of heartbeats remaining in its lifetime. An internal, battery-operated clock keeps track of the passing time when the sculpture is unplugged. The sculpture will die once the counter reaches zero.

“Blind Self Portrait Machine” is collaboration between Kyle McDonald and Matt Mets. They’ve build a machine which can help you draw your own self portrait.

While the visitor keeps their eyes shut, a moving platform guides a pen in their hand to draw a self-portrait, using computer vision to track their face and generate a line drawing. The result is a machine-aided drawing, a self-portrait you could never draw.

found at Make blog

Here are some very impressive sculptures made of straws by SangSik Hong.

Normally I’m not into decorative porcelain plates, but I’m willing to make an exception for these ones by Maxime Ansiau.

found at booooooom

Inner Doubts .com, Rafaël Rozendaal‘s latest piece. Not that it really matters, but is this Rafaël’s first HTML/Paper.js work?