(incli)NATION

Glow, All Night Art-mania on Santa Monica Pier

So you couldn't make Coachella because you got the flu. You couldn't use your comped tickets to WMC because of a business trip to Birmingham. And you completely flaked on SXSW. Well now is your chance to make up for it: Glow, this weekend on Santa Monica Pier...

Here are some highlights via Thrillist:

Primal Source: Surreal images projected on this beach-based 40-foot wall of mist'll move based on the sounds of voices around the installation, allowing you to see what "Dude, that's totally a 40-foot wall of mist!" looks like.

The Amazing Mental Scope: Get hooked up with an EEG, then climb on the ferris wheel, and your brainwaves will be displayed via flashing lights on a cylindrical LED display. Onlookers will enjoy the soft glow of your Pleasure Center as you enjoy top-of-the-wheel "special alone time".

Poetry Boat: Use the provided phone to call the three poets on this off-shore boat, and they'll compose and read back to you on-the-spot custom poetry. Why are they out on a boat? Because that's where they put people with leprosy.

All the while, there'll be a kickin' soundtrack from Djs like KCRW's Garth Trinidad and Postal Service member Jimmy Tamborello, aka Dntel -- himself so accustomed to late-night shenanigans he once took his own E.

Check out all the craziness at GLOW

Billy May's Torn Lighting Concept

Some great work here by Billy May. Taking LEDs he installs them underneath sculptural assets fixed to the wall board and designed to look as though the wall board is peeling, waving or similarly unexpected feats. I particularly like it when he uses the corners as 'seams'. It gives the effect that the walls are made of fabric, making the space feel much lighter and open even though not a single inch has been added to the space.

Nice work

Dream Holiday: Bucky Fuller, Chris Burden and David Byrne

If I were not going to be floating in my father's Arizona pool week after next, here is a list of the things I would be seeing on my [imaginary] trip to NYC. [not that I in any way take for granted my father's generosity...]

Erector Set Skyscraper at Rockefeller Center Is Adult Fantasy: ...a sweet, old-fashioned tribute to boyhood optimism...Chris Burden's "What My Dad Gave Me"... [images]- Bloomberg News

Dymaxion Man: The visions of Buckminster Fuller: By staging the retrospective, the Whitney raises—or, really, one should say, re-raises—the question of Fuller’s relevance. Was he an important cultural figure because he produced inventions of practical value or because he didn’t?- New Yorker

and of course...

[David] Byrne’s new installation produced by Creative Time, “Playing The Building,” is located downtown in the Battery Maritime Building, which was built in 1909, closed in 1938 and hasn’t been open to the public for 50 years.

Sugar Cube City: Floating New Orleans by Kim & Stayner

It's pouring rain here today which lends poignancy to this project by Kiduck Kim and Christian Stayner of Harvard's GSD. Utopian in the best sense of the word, the project serves to highlight the reasons it could not work, rather than the reasons it could; class, capitol, private property, and common sense.

What a wonderful world it would be if we could rise above these limitations and enter a new era of urban development, a world of sweet sugar cubes floating without malice in a sea of good will. Kudos to Kim and Stayner for imagining such a future.

From Inhabitat:

It’s been almost three years since New Orleans weathered Katrina’s wrath, and debate still rages over plans to reconstruct the sunken city. Myriad options have surfaced ranging from rebuilding the levees to designing storm resistant structures to not rebuilding at all. Here’s an approach that endeavors to ride the river rather than stem it’s course. Harvard Graduate School of Design students Kiduck Kim and Christian Stayner have conceived of a Floating City that will “rise safely in an Archimedean liquid landscape.”

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Reclaimed Lumber Bookshelf by Blankblank

Anything that makes me laugh out loud must be shared.

via Inhabitat

H1 by Brio54, Knock-out Sustainable Residential Design

I fell in love with the creative simplicity of the design of the new H1 residence by Brio54, a new Arch. firm made up of partners Gernot Bruckner and Philip Macari. These are still in design development with construction slated to begin later in the spring. Be sure to check out their site for detailed descriptions of all the mechanicals and such:

from the always fabulous Inhabitat: "As soon as we saw them, we instantly fell in love with Brio54’s new set of prefab residential prototypes. A young, design-driven development firm, Brio54’s mission is to provide sustainable, affordable design while delivering high quality construction. Home buyers of all types will delight in Brio54’s wide variety of offerings - whether you live in a suburban area, are looking to refurbish or rehab, or have an empty urban infill lot. Brio54’s first prefab prototype, the H1, (pictured above) is currently in the final stage of planning, and construction is slated to begin production in the spring of 2008.

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Editta Sherman, photographer, in her apt. for 58 yrs!

Jill over at New York Mag sent me this this morning. A great article 'romancing the city'...

"The high-ceilinged, light-filled studios on top of Carnegie Hall have housed artists, musicians, and writers for more than a century; now, the remaining tenants are fighting to stay."

read the rest here

Building A Yurt Kazakh Style

Found this while Stumbling around this morning...Can't wait to try one of my own.

TrailerWrap by Michael Hughes

Love this idea, though the economic model does not seem to work. Trailer parks exist to fill a gap in the market. Anyone who can afford to will buy a stick-built house. Not to mention the fact that trailers actually depreciate in value rather than appreciate. But this one does look good:

"To Hughes, trailer parks offer an architectural opportunity to address questions of affordable housing. And he believes that trailers simply make sense as high-density alternatives to suburban sprawl. But first, they need to be made into attractive living spaces. "This is refabricated housing," Hughes says. "What does it mean to have light pouring into your home, with nine-foot instead of seven-foot ceilings? We wanted to highlight what’s possible even on a small house."

Read the rest here

via

Jackson Pollack or The Mammalian Neocortical Column

When I saw this I was sure it was yet another generations attempt to re-envision the genius of J. Pollack. To my great delight, it is in fact a ridiculously complex computer model of the cerebral cortex of the human brain. Fabulous, right? Because the connection is uncanny; Pollack and his AbEx cronies were all about the dissolution of filters between the mind and the work of art. You know, painting the ego or even id. It was all about the inner workings of these guys and now, fifty years later we get a (nearly)working model of the actual organ they were metaphorically representing and they look nearly identical! Damn!

"A visual representation of a mammalian neocortical column, the basic building block of the cortex. the representation shows the complexity of this part of the brain, which has now been modeled using a supercomputer. the visualization is part of an ambitious project to create a biologically accurate, functional model of the brain using IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer.

"the visualization of the neurons' shapes is a challenging task given the fact that a column of 10,000 neurons rendered in high quality mesh accounts for essentially 1 billion triangles for which about 100GB of management data is required. simulation data with a resolution of electrical compartments for each neuron accounts for another 150GB. as the electrical impulse travels through the column, neurons light up and change color as they become electrically active."

[link: technologyreview.com & epfl.ch & epfl.ch (movie)|via visualcomplexity.com]

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