The Big Picture

This article is from Times Magazine by ALIX BROWNE.
It was publish on 26th september, 2008.

CERN is the world's largest particle physics laboratory, located near Geneva at the border between Switzerland and France. Its newest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, above, is scheduled to begin test operations in fall 2007.

The Large Hadron Collider at the Cern particle physics laboratory near Geneva will accelerate two beams of protons traveling in opposite directions in a circular ring about 17 miles around.

As we all know about this big project going on at Nasa.
The artist Josiah McElheny was conducting a test of his own ideas on the Big Bang theory at Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York City. He was inspired by Lobmeyr chandeliers at Metropolitan Opera house and was informed by relater equations derived by David H. Weinberg, McElheny’s chrome, glass and electric-light sculpture “The End of the Dark Ages” is part of a four-year investigation into the origins of the universe. Than began the “The End to Modernity,” a sculpture commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University. This added next month in big installation titled " Island Universe" at while cube in London.

McElheny say, “I had this exceedingly idea to do modernized versions of the Lobmeyr chandeliers as sculpture with secret information behind it. According to McElheny physic student continues to wonder wether “is the world this way because it must be, or is it just random?” In 1965, the Lobmeyr chandeliers were designed, it was discovered that our world is not the centre of the universe. The idea was that there could be infinite number of possible write ups becoming popular not only in science but also in art and literature,
hence article says so why not in interior design too??
Wallace K. Harrison, the architect for the Met, having rejected the original design for the chandeliers, gave Hans Harald Rath of Lobmeyr, the Vienna-based glassmaker, a book about galaxies and sent him back to the drawing board.

“The End of the Dark Ages” is a scientifically accurate model
This explains 100 million years, the longest about 1.3 billion, the clusters of glass stand for galaxy formations. Yet McElheny is less concerned with exact science than the limits of reason and knowledge.

“Politically, I’m against finding the single answer,” McElheny insists. “I’m more interested in what these questions mean to our sense of who we are.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/magazine/28Style-t.html?ref=design

Flying Avatars Admire the Artwork

At Miami in December at the Art Positions fair, the Chinese artist Cao Fei sold a work to a private collector for $100,000.
This art was wasn't a painting nor a sculptor. It was not even a short video that Ms. Cao is known for. Rather all that money bought a piece of virtual real estate in the online world Second life.

Second Life (abbreviated as SL) is an Internet-based 3D virtual world launched June 23, 2003 and developed by Linden Research, Inc.

Second life has been other reality for Internet user since 2003, which allows them to travel and live as a avatars, owning land, building homes and buying and selling goods. This has been so popular that creator, Linden says that more than 20-million users accounts are registered for employment interviews, training sessions and sales meetings.

Now museums and galleries are also into this. More than 1,000 art galleries operate in Second life. The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, Calif.,the Newseum, an interactive museum of news in Washington, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York has also co-presented a Second Life show.In Second life visitors have fun with exhibition; it not just only about looking at art work and reading labels. This is kind of very interactive; avatars talking, walking or flying in space.

Ms. Cao is part of wave of artists working in this new medium. She went on the site and was excited about imaginative ideas and she says in the interview from Beijing, "I was curious at first about this world, but I learned to navigate the space and then started to have fun, before being attracted by a variety of residents, new types of community, entertainment facilities and business models. I then tried to live a life completely different from my real one.”

The final outcome was "i.Mirror," her second life avatar. “It is a sort of documentary,” Ms. Cao said. “I captured video of the experience as it happened online, then edited it down to create a feature story. Nothing was scripted.”

Ms. Cao started her career making short films and videos that combined aspects of fantasy and real life documentary. One of her example was "Rabid Dogs" a video in 2002, which showed Burberry-clad office workers crawling on the floor and growling like dogs. After this she became a fixture on international art scene, where she showed her videos and photographs in more than 100 group exhibitions.

“She’s been an art star in China for nearly 10 years,” said Christopher Phillips, a curator at the International Center of Photography in New York. “As she’s gained international experience, she’s grown in confidence and ambition, zooming from project to project without missing a beat.”

Her debut in Miami continued to exist a resident in Second Life, where she is building a virtual city as an ironic look at the pace of construction and change in China. It is called RMB City, the title an abbreviation of renminbi, China’s currency, also known as the yuan. It will denote the characteristics of Chinese cities, with new fantasy with virtual version of famous Chinese buildings and landmarks, like the Forbidden City, the Great Wall and Tiananmen Square.

To cover Web-design costs for the online building project, which is expected to take two years, the artist is selling off virtual real estate, with prices as high as $120,000 for a structure. For RMB City’s New York gallery debut, Ms. Cao has transformed Lombard-Freid Projects in Chelsea into a real estate office. Photographs of bits of prime virtual real estate surround the gallery walls. The artist also plans to open a real-life office in Beijing to help sell her virtual real estate.

This artwork is taking us to the different world all together!!

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/12/arts/artsspecial/12second.html

A Building That Blooms and Grows, Balancing Nature and Civilization

San Francisco one of the city with great architect.
The new California Academy of Science at Golden Gate Park which opens on this Saturday that is September 27, 2008 is designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano. The site of the academy's demolished home, the building has a steel frame that rests on the verdant flora like a delicate piece f fine embroidery. It is capped by floating green roof of moving wave like a round plants, which denotes that humanity is the only one part of an endlessly complex universal system.

The academy building is the in the series of the project to be completed. There is Music Concourse around the park since 1989 when devastating earthquake broke out. Herzog & de Meuron’s mesmerizing de Young Museum opened three years ago. Just the glance of academy give an impression of weightlessness. A row of steel columns 36 feet high along the face of the building lends the building to the classical air, it sense the lightness which is gained by the water-thin clothing above that creates the illusion of that the roof is just the millimeters thick. it is as if a section of the park is carpeted with native flowers and beach strawberries which are lifted off the ground and suspended in midair.
Their main idea was to create balance between public and private, inside and outside, the order of the mind and the unruly world of nature.

There's a glass lobby which allow you to see across the park and also to the building. Other view is towards the exhibition.
Mr. Piano’s building also Enlightens values of truth and reason. It has classical symmetry. Which has axial geometry, the columns framing a central entry.Mr. Piano’s design invokes Mies’s model, though with a sensitivity that makes the muscularity of the 1968 museum look old-fashioned.

The roof of the academy’s lobby swells upward as if the entire room were breathing. Views open up to the landscape on all four sides, denotes you both with the building and the bigger world outside. A narrow row of windows line top of the lobby allows the warm air to escape and creates a gentle breeze that creates the connection to the natural setting.

From here one can proceed to the exhibition hall where one can know deeper secretes of universe. There are tow 90 foot tall spheres out of which one is housing a planetarium and other is about a rain forest. These are the most solid form in the building. The base of the planetarium sphere floats in a pool; a broad ramp snakes around the rain-forest sphere. From this point the the green roof's design becomes apparent.

Addition to this the exhibition spreads just beyond the spheres were designed with movable partitions that give them a temporary feel. Large windows open onto more park views. This museum has also preserved its African Hall. which has lions and antelopes. Built in the 1930s, this neo-Classical hall is a specimen of sorts.

At last Mr.Piano discuss about the academy's structure that suggests a form a great harm that human has done to the natural world.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/24/arts/design/24acad.html?ref=design

Shared Memories

Many of the images reproduced in “Scrapbooks: An American History,” by Jessica Helfand, date back 50, 80, even 100 years. Reproduced colors and spead across wide pages are treated as good example of creativity. It often happens the anonymous scrapbook creators could imagine fate for their work. In today's world scrapbooking is very known.

Helfand said that roots of scrapbooking can be traced to the “commonplace book” of the Renaissance; in 19th- and early-20th-century America they evolved from group parlor activity to something more personal. In addition to writte notations, newpaper clips, photographs, actual scrap like sopa cover, chocolate wrappers, tickets, stones, envelopes.

Helfand pored over saying that she also encountered a pasted-down cigarette butt. In an interview, Helfand explained that these collagelike collections of images and exsisted things and the narratives they suggested frequently impressed her with their aesthetic impact and originality.

In 19th century there was a commercial aspect to scrapbooking. One of Mark Twain’s many side projects was a line of “self-pasting” albums. Passing through 20th century books with graphic themes built in. Than stickers, buttons, patterned papers came in. That was the trend which grew later by 21st century as the web. Like posting the individual page designs and layouts online.

Ali Edwards in 2002 she decided to organize her pictures and some of her momentous with the birth of her son and she came up with twopeasinabucket.com. Later her scrapbook designs won a contest which was run by the popular scrapper magazine Creating Keepsakes and later she was writing for the magazine and her own ad-support blog, she also gave her own ad-support blog. To be creative is sure but also to be recognized as creative is very essential.

Her fan really like her layouts because of her personal touches especially the way her handwriting across the photographs and pages showed. She encourages workshop attendees to think of process as its own reward and also to focus on telling them their personal stories.

She has also introduced her made unique handwriting which are for free available in form of digital font. Her style attracted her audience but later she gave up as she said, “if that’s going to help them tell their stories.”
Article talks about how scrap book came into development gradually.


Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/magazine/14wwln-consumed-t.html?ref=design

Nocturnal van Gogh, Illuminating the Darkness

Van Gogh. One of the artist who made history.
Illuminating the Darkness. Starry Night. One of my favorite painting.

The article says that this exhibition was devoting to Van Gogh who was worlds beloved artist, which may not seem like much of a reach for the Museum of Modern Art. It is obvious that such exhibition are going to hit big box office and increase membership but this exhibition is largly against uch charges. It is an anti-blockbuster. It quitely displayed 23paintings, 9 drawings and several letters by Van Gogh in six intimate galleries. The final gallery displayed collection of books which were read by him, out of which maily were poems about the night.

Organized with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, this show has been overseen by Joachim Pissarro, adjunct curator in the Modern’s department of painting and sculpture and a professor of art history at Hunter College; Sjraar van Heugten, head of collections at the Van Gogh Museum; and Jennifer Field, curatorial assistant in painting and sculpture at the Modern.

Van Gogh discovered new colors everywhere, especially at night. This show explores his special relationship with darkness. It provides a view of the tenderness, urgency and brilliance at the core of his art, as well as the openness to nature that set it burning. It is obvious that one cannot see at night or in dark yet he painted what he saw, ultimately painting his colors one against the other. later he discovered on their clashes with exaggerated layers of paint, bringing backgrounds forward and giving each inch of canvas its own sense of life.

What we see in an artist here is; who gained crucial inspiration and information from the dust, the twilight hours and the night with their constantly changing moons and relatively stable stars followed by the dawn’s first glimmers. This is what challenged his visual perception, his imagination and expanded his palette and this is what kept him close to the nature. Night also brought him the peace from the daily labors of peasants whom he admired all day.

Through his journey the night could have been traced with many other paintings, collabrating museums have an advantage. But in terms of masterpieces, with the dark interior of the Van Gogh Museum’s “Potato Eaters,” which is being shown in New York for the first time in 50 years. Early work of Van Gogh which began when he was 27 and committed to be an painter after working in uncle's art gallery in London. It ends with the Modern’s even more famous “Starry Night” (1889), under the spinning skies of Southern France, where van Gogh’s love of painting. The southern sun ignited his sense of color, but he found just as much chromatic life after it set, outdoors or in.

He studied the smooth surfaces, tentitive shapes, scarce light. Van Gogh grasp the power ofpigments in the dark. With the raw-faced peasant family in the many shades of gray and grime of “The Potato Eaters,” van Gogh makes his sympathy with the harshness of rural life and his awareness.

Van Gogh painted “Night Cafe” over three sleepless nights. He was conscious both that it had the “ambience of a hellish furnace,” as he wrote to his brother, Theo, and that it used “six or seven reds from blood-red to delicate pink, contrasting with the same number of pale or dark greens,” as he wrote to his sister Wil, both on Sept. 9, 1888.

His famour painting "The Starry Night" had to say that the bunch of stars up in the sky like in chorus line in rehearsal while th e light of the town below extend their glow into watery reflections. This painting was made at stretch 12 nights. This painting is one of his beloved painting. Loved by all.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/19/arts/design/19gogh.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=design

All About Mr. Elephant, in His Becoming Green Suit

This article talks about the creative story which was written by Brunhoff and his son who made great illustrations.
After the firt book, "The story of Barbar, the little elephant" he published 6 more Barbar tales. His son who heard the story after world war II he took over the franchise. His son has illustrated 37 books about this elephant who was orphan; he turned king. And here more than eight million books have been sold so far.

After this, elegant exhibition has been put named as "Drawing Barber: Early Drafts and Watercolors" at the Morgan Librrary & Museum. His laconic illustrations demostrates very precise narration in which diverging lines of dots becomes tears, angled eyebrows signal anger and the varied curves of an elephant's trunk evoke an inner life.

Brunhoff's illustration style is charming and very new. Like multiple images of Barbar runnig and riding the elevator suggest the movement, comic strip balloons emerge from animals' mouths as they call out, perspective is skewed or suggested by an object's size. The pencil sketches are exuberant, experimenting with gestures and attitude.

Now comes the background of the story. At firt Barbar's suit was not a shad of green but was more of a dull gray. thy later innovated the Babar marries his femal cousin, Celeste. The artist who sketched, named, Laurent has very different method of preparing his sketches. This weirdness made his first book so successful. And the other section of Brunhoff–so poweful.Think of old lady who was always fond of lilttle elephant and gives Babar whatever he wants. Babar escapes from countyside and he arrives in a great town. There he desired for a fine clothes. And he buys clothes for his young cousin when they come down to the town. Later Babar was was taught the ways of humanity and then returned home as a king. He was patient.

The story leads to the uncivilized, unclothed native to the civilization. thy are taught the ways of civilization and returns home enlightened, unquestionably embracing the world that will ultimately bring them grief. The child reader will not have sense of Babar's self-importance, but over the time such ambiguities will affect their perceptions. One can say there is a story element in Babar. Clothes represents culture. (In one book pictures appear of the workers of Babar’s town, Celesteville, dressed according to their occupations.) Babar begins as a child in human city, naked. Later when he was dressed in green suit, he leaves his childish thing behind.

One of the exhibition’s labels points out that there was another beloved childhood character who came out of the same Parisian milieu: Curious George. Margret and H. A. Rey carried the manuscript for that book with them as they bicycled out of Paris in 1940, fleeing the Nazis. They might have been influenced by Babar, but their colonial hunter, the man in the yellow hat, didn’t murder his prey. He took the monkey away. And he brought him to the New World, where George’s anarchic, unclothed spirit roamed so freely it might have tried even Babar’s patience.

This has been put up at: “Drawing Babar: Early Drafts and Watercolors” remains through Jan. 4 at the Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street; (212) 685-0008.

Web: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/22/arts/design/22baba.html?pagewanted=2

Master of Many Styles, and Many Mentors

This article has been taken from New York Times which is published by Roberta Smith.

He talks about the Chinese artist called Wang Hui from 17th century. 

He was masters at landscape. He was so talented that one could say not even his one stoke was out of place or mislead the viewer. Basically, he was a perfectionist.

The writer of the article says that hot-button is the word derived from Chinese painting which is adopted by westerners. There are more than two dozen of Wang's hangings and hand-scrolls, and many other albums that shows that his learning disciplines in copying the paintings of his predecessors. 

There are also other 30 works back from 10th century which were done by other 16 artists who were mentor's mentor of Wang which demonstrated the same thing. 

Wang's middle name was at demand. He refused to sell one of his painting by Wang Shimin who found him. He rendered irresistible with a fabulous detail and  constantly shifting spatial perspectives. He made a history. Emperor named him the painter of "landscapes clear and radiant," which was accepted by Wang as his designation.

What I would say is one learn from history. He learned to copy and learned something out of it.

This is what is also an inspiration.

http://www.nytimes,com/2008/09/12/arts/design/12wang.html?pagewanted=1&ref=design

Tomorrow Now

Petlike

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Machines just aren’t that good.
They can’t see, they can’t walk, they can’t feel.
They are apprentices in organic behavior; they can’t jump right for the top of the food chain.
They are taking on primitive organic qualities: buglike and petlike qualities.

—Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the next fifty years by Bruce Sterling. Pg.89

Machines can help you in most of the way but can't be human 100%.
Machines makes your work fast and saves time but can't be totally compared with human.

Short theme derived from this quote: Machines cannot replace humans.
PETLIKE SHOP

Abstract City by Christoph Niemann

Conceptual thinking!!
Works well and designed well.
Very inspirational and creative.
Pixel drawing can help you come up with many incredible designs which could also be used in many different places in our house.
Link:  http://niemann.blogs.nytimes.com/

Art the Garbage Man Can Appreciate

Trash as ART.
Passion for pink.
The combination of the pragmatic and the artistic.
This is something really fascinating. Designing garbage bags!! It’s also a way of encouraging people. More over this is a very unique subject. I really appreciate the creative thinking of Adrian Kondratowicz.

Not the Usual Suspects

Where art meets life!!
Today world is getting closer and closer in terms of communication in many ways. Certain signage being a common language for most of the community helps understand each others culture in a better way. Followed by signage comes visual art. People are being literate visual. This article talks about various creative art happening around us in various places which appeals a lot.