C'etait un rendez-vous by Claude Lelouch

C'etait un rendez-vous is as short movie created by Claude Lelouch in 1976. It is a single-take shot from a fixed camera on the front side of a Mercedes 450 SEL which crosses Paris at high speed (Lelouch was himself the driver). The film has been made without any trick (except for the soundtrack since it is a Ferrari being recorded) and fortunately the streets were almost empty since it was 5:30 AM.
The film has some very high hypnotic values and provokes an extraction of reality (or at least of the usual perception of scale) since the Parisian environment is moving that fast (even more for myself who used to ride a bike in Paris !).
Another interesting thing is to observe that we are now more than 30 years ahead from this movie and 99% of the buildings appearing on it did not change at all. It is symptomatic of a frozen Paris which refuses to see itself evolves...

Invisible Cities

Invisible Cities from Christian Marc Schmidt on Vimeo.

MoMA - Ron Arad, No Discipline

MoMA - Ron Arad, No Discipline from Christian Marc Schmidt on Vimeo.

SENTIENT - new sci fi movie teaser trailer video

SENTIENT - new sci fi movie teaser trailer video (HD) from Jamie Martin on Vimeo.

STO-A-WAY Car

Safety experts today would probably be aghast at the sight of the booth for "Sto-A-Way " seats, at the 1954 auto show. This product was a tiny multi-purpose device that attached under the car's dashboard and pulled out via a metal scissors-opening device, then sat on metal legs on the front seat. It could serve as a baby seat, tabletop, or writing table. When finished, it folded away again under the dash. In the booth is an actual car seat and dashboard, along with a baby doll that's buckled onto a Sto-A-Way seat.

mini

Luca Buvoli

Text below from the Mattress Factory Blog:

Based on the car crash that inspired Marinetti’s revelation of the Futurist Manifesto in 1909, Luca Buvoli has created a sculptural work that depicts the 1908 Fiat in motion, the instant before the impact. Marinetti’s famous “crash” has been the subject of various critical interpretations (some even questioning the accidental nature of the event, apparently all set up in a theatrical way). This project gave Buvoli the opportunity to explode myths of masculinity and velocity associated with Futurism. While utilizing a futuristic form for the piece, Buvoli is, at the same time, pointing out his ambivalence about the cult of heroism that has grown out of this and associated art/historical event(s).

The sculpture is depicted in futuristic form; there is dynamism created by the multiple views of the same vehicle, as if captured frozen in time and motion, moving along a trajectory. This is the moment when physical, aesthetic and ideological barriers were broken. The car is breaking the speed limit of what it can maintain to hold the road. The red steel and the automobile form refer to Pittsburgh’s industrial past and pre-eminence in this material’s fabrication (around the same years of Futurism’s foundation) while the fiberglass has a more organic quality. It is translucent almost like green algae, giving the car a more “natural” skin.

The car and its occupant, the artist (not represented here), have broken free of gravity and catapulted into the unknown. The sculpture is freed from the floor and takes flight off the floor and out the gallery window. Buvoli also sees associations between the form of the work—the multiple cars—one following another and the fascination humans have with charismatic leaders. The cars follow the lead car out the window, like a flock of sheep or the blind followers of a totalitarian regime.

Buvoli, who works in a variety of media, created a single-channel video for this exhibition. Ave Machina: Instant Before Incident uses what he calls a “meta-futuristic approach.” The video is an intricately edited collage of images. Using visual tricks taken from early experimental film syntax, Buvoli intercuts straight photography, superimposed hand-drawn animation, archival footage and interviews with the art historian Christine Poggi and cultural historian Jeffrey Schnapp as they discuss Futurism’s birth in relation to the desire for exhilaration, speed and projection both physical and psychological.

«Indian Highway» to Norway

The contemporary art exhibition «Indian Highway» opens 2nd of April at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art. This exhibition promotes India’s most innovative artists embracing a vide range of art forms, and is organised in cooperation with the Serpentine Gallery in London.


Contemporary Snapshot
The exhibition “Indian Highway” promotes a snapshot of a vibrant generation of Indian artists working across a range of media, from painting, photography and sculpture to installation, Internet-based art and video. This contemporary art project is a collaboration between Serpentine Gallery in London and Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo, and was first exhibited in London. Now it has started its grand international tour, with the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art as the first stop.

Mapping—symbolism or realism?

Landscape architect Hajime Ishikawa (related article on PingMag) maps the urban environment of Tokyo. His studies are reflections of both serendipity and symbolism. His GPS drawings within the city, while not an entirely new idea, reflect a Situationist curiousity about the mundane and familiar city environment. He says, mapping is “a kind of language — you understand where you are in this sort of diagram. Though no map can picture the real space and the real experience, you still understand where you are…” Ishikawa’s tracing of his route from his home to his office has personal significance and a kind of individual symbolism, while the animal drawing evokes questions of familiarity with and a offers a change of perspective of the the Tokyo streetscape.

Installation by Los Carpinteros at the Hayward Gallery, London

The Havana-based collective Los Carpinteros (The Carpenters) has created some of the most important work to emerge from Cuba in the past decade. Formed in 1991, the trio (consisting of Marco Castillo, Dagoberto Rodríguez, and, until his departure in June 2003, Alexandre Arrechea) adopted their name in 1994, deciding to renounce the notion of individual authorship and refer back to an older guild tradition of artisans and skilled laborers. Interested in the intersection between art and society, the group merges architecture, design, and sculpture in unexpected and often humorous ways. They create installations and drawings which negotiate the space between the functional and the nonfunctional. The group's elegant and mordantly humorous sculptures, drawings, and installations draw their inspiration from the physical world—particularly that of furniture. Their carefully crafted works use humor to exploit a visual syntax that sets up contradictions among object and function 
as well as practicality and uselessness.

Cityscape Fragments

Nina Sten-Knudsen

With her overwhelmingly large paintings, Nina Sten-Knudsen have turned her gaze toward a space of reflection tinged by an immense silence, where she enlists the aid of visual art references in her exploration of painting's present possibilities. Although Nina Sten-Knudsen consciously draws from the legacy of art history's great painters: da Vinci, Rembrandt, Degas and Vermeer, the paintings she creates are far from traditional paintings. Nina Sten-Knudsen revitalise questions about space, perspective, figuration and approaches taken as given in painting, before the 20th Century did away with the figurative.

URBAN SURFING II

Sarah Bridgland

Sarah Bridgland

Sarah Bridgland creates these incredible tiny paper collage/sculpture/constructions from found objects and random ephemera...they're like little jewelry boxes full of awesomeness.

Electic light Shoes

The electric light shoes were designed for a Japanese footwear company, Onitsuka Tiger, by Freedom of Creation.

The shoe is 3 feet long and contains a miniature city inside, the stripes resemble streets and highways and tall building point out from the shoe’s opening. The huge shoe is intended to communicate Onitsuka Tiger’s Japanese roots.

Window Facade

American artist Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) has been celebrated internationally for his boxes, collages, and films since the 1930s. His mining of far-flung ideas and traditions and elegant integration of woodworking, painting, papering, and drawing define the innovation and visual poetry associated with his work. Above all, he forever altered the concept of the box—from a time-honored functional container into a new art form, the box construction.

His lyrical, often surprising combinations of materials and ideas are usually associated with surrealism, a European art movement that emphasized dreams and poetic dislocation in the 1920s and 1930s. Surrealism, however, was just one of many resources that Cornell called upon as an artist driven by innate curiosity and creativity rather than by theories and formal art training.

He often described himself as a maker because he valued his “natural” and “spontaneous” origins as an artist. Making something new from nothing or the pre-existing is critical to the processes of many self-taught artists. It is also central to the modern concept of creativity as the collision and recombination of ideas. Traditions can be reinterpreted; connections can be forged between the seemingly random or disparate. Cornell believed that artists renew and transform materials, experiences, and ideas, and this belief fueled his ability to communicate the beauty and magic in ordinary, often forgotten things.

Excerpt from Cathedral by Marco Brambilla, 2007

Kaleidoscope interior & cityscape -2

After finished the project’s report, the main issue of my project is getting clearer than before. Moreover, the exhibition of “surreal house” provides several references to support “kaleidoscopic space.” For example, the photographs of Lee Miller, the drawing of Nicholas de Larmessin, the interior of Dali, and the works of Joseph Cornell. Surrealism gives designers, arties, architects more imaginations not only to create many masterpieces and break boundaries of stationary definitions.

According to one main axis of this project, “continually moving and zooming in through the cityscape in London from interior of a car, ” three drawings represent the continual movement through the recombined mess internal space from the huge cityscape to tiny element. However, in tiny furniture or a window, another new cityscape is created base on these elements’ shape and structure via the continual movement. The interior space in the old architecture in London will be experienced and redefined by this project’s mythology: moving and go deep into the surface of a object and probe into its true meanings.

These drawings are just only the introduction. The next step of this project is follow this mythology, choosing one interior element like a furniture, space, and window to develop and substantiate the main aim of this project (kaleidoscopic space: continually changes and repeated space and cityscape).

Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre Photography

Sapporo - Legendary Biru

Sapporo - Legendary Biru from CRUSH on Vimeo.

Kaleidoscope interior & cityscape

(combinition with the Regent Palace Hotel & Regent Street)

KALEIDOSCOPE

KALEIDOSCOPE

Kaleidoscope opens on Friday, March 31, 2006 at the Changing Room. The exhibit runs from March 31st April 8 and is open on Monday’s for the convenience of Art Professionals.

The photographic image for many years was hailed as a medium that recorded fact. Early in its inception photography was quickly embraced as a way to record moments deemed important. In reality, photography is a very subjective medium. In Kaleidoscope, Gild presents two styles of photographs: those that are "staged" and those that are not.

Sometimes, it is difficult to be able to differentiate between the two. Like a kaleidoscope, photography has a variegated way of capturing a scene or object that may itself be in a constant state of flux. Depending on the information provided a photo can have shifting values or meanings thus effecting it’s "realness". Phillip Toledano is a beast of staging photos that seem like happenstance and making outrageous photos seem like the most normal of things. Come and see the difference between the "real" and "unreal".

Phil Toledano’s photographs are a contemporary representation of what he believes to be the hopes and fears that run through America today. The warp and weft of the American dream are changing, and these changes are worn by the people in this series. While one man is covered in babies of every colour, a woman is touched by a multitude of hands. One man wears his guns with pride, while someone is strangled by a choker of firearms. Someone else is all ears, and yet another is covered in breasts. One person’s hope is another’s fear.

WORLD GAZING, SUNSET KALEIDOSCOPE (2005)

Is there a difference between a kaleidoscope and a telescope? Or are the two inversions of the same thing – viewing devices that help you see… One sets out to represent the immediate world, as seen through mirrored-glass and transparent colour-objects, while the other brings the far-away closer, using a powerful optical device.

Olafur Eliasson’s ‘Sunset kaleidoscope’ (2005) falls on the former of these two sides. When properly installed, its protruding rectangular structure penetrates the skin of the museum, creating a connection between the inside and the outside.

Olafur Eliasson Sunset kaleidoscope 2005 wood, color-effect filter glass, mirrors, and motor installation view at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2009 Collection of John and Phyllis Kleinberg © 2009 Olafur Eliasson
For its Sydney presentation a view of Jørn Utzon’s famous Opera House, the Circular Quay Esplanade and the infamous ‘Toaster’ are infinitely fractured and neatly put back together again. What you see is a perspective of the world remade anew. Traditionally, our curiosity about the universe looks to stargazing telescopes for inspiration and information. In ‘Sunset kaleidoscope’ (2005) this same curiosity is simply brought closer to home.
By Joel Mu
This entry was posted in Visuals and tagged colour, Light, mirrors, perception, Sunset kaleidoscope
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Dimensies

Steie van Vugt made a mirror installation that played with the dimensions of a space: the mirrors pull the space apart like a kaleidoscope and display conflicting images. The installation emphasizes and blurs angles and holes, creating both calmness and complexity. Dimensies gives an empty concrete space a unique finishing touch and lets people reflect on how they experience a space.

emmanuelle moureaux architecture & design: 'kaleidoscope' exhibition

emmanuelle moureaux architecture + design designed offices and showrooms of
nakagawa chemical CS design center, in tokyo which displays 1100 colors in the space.
the 'kaleidoscope' exhibition which was recently held at the center focused on
one color at a time such as yellow, red, green, blue or black. every month, the space
displayed a different color, changing hues like a kaleidoscope. the exhibition
aimed to rediscover ordinary colors.

360° kaleidoscope

360° kaleidoscope from Frank Freitag on Vimeo.

nicholas de larmessin

Surrealist architecture

(Claude Nicolas Ledoux Théatre de Besançon, vue de l'interieur)

Antoni Gaudi
Ferdinand Cheval
Simon Rodia
Bruno Taut
Hermann Finsterlin
Frank Lloyd Wright
Bruce Alonzo Goff
Frederick Kiesler

Surrealist architecture includes : designs for towns or for houses which the painters and poets of the movement set out in their works : the work of both classical and contemporary architects whom they admired; and finally various constructions from the designs of decorators and builders who were connected with the surrealist movement. It is an irrational architecture which does not fall in with any ideas of comfort; it is figurative, even metaphorical. Its aim is to make habitable monumental pieces of sculpture, preferably representing creatures or objects.

The surrealists were always interested in architecture; but, before making any practical proposals for this form of art, they used it mainly to achieve an effect of exile, of disorientation, in their painting and poetry. Many of their paintings are based on fantastic architectural landscapes, as detailed as the engravings of Piranesi. In La Peinfure аи defi (1930), Aragon remarked that 'a juxtaposition of the early paintings of Chirico would result in the creation of a town whose plan could be drawn'. Andre Masson and Max Ernst both made drawings of imaginary cities, and in the canvases of Dali, Delvaux and Kay Sage there are all manner of unexpected buildings. In his series of Dwellings (1966), Georges Malkine evokes imaginary houses conceived as particularly suitable for various famous people.

Kaleidoscopic internal Spaces

(above, Kaleidoscopic internal Spaces, drawing)
(below, the Regent Palace, Hotel under constuction 2009)

According to the chosen site, the Regent Palace Hotel, which is still under construction (2009-2012) (Figure 19), people are able to see the demolish situation inside but remain the old façade outside. This drawing (Figure 20) represents inner parts of the building reconstructed via a verity of interior constitutions such as doors, curtains, toilets, rooms, decorations, and lobby and so on in the hotel. The internal power of this building keeps combining interior elements together. Therefore, viewers are able to redefine or re-imagine the interior of this hotel from stereotypical historical images and perceptions.

After taking apart the interior elements of this historical hotel, the distorted mages blur the boundary of different spaces. The definitions of rooms, toilets, shops, kitchens, lobbies and so on are none existent anymore. Just like the under construction site, the preserved façades is the meaning of “The Regent Place Hotel.”

And when the chaos and mess factors are combined, the combination provides a chance to inspect the relationship of interior and exterior, architecture and cityscape. The internal architecture could be treated as a collector or generator, which contains cityscape, memory images beside physical objects.

Blasted Architecture

(Lee Miller,Bridge of Sighs, Kinghtsbridge, Lonson,1940)
Tristan Tzara suggested that the pantheon should be cut in half vertically, and the two halves set 50 centimeters apart, and the poet Paul Eluard predicted that “one day house will be turned inside out like gloves”. The house has a cosmic wholeness that we apprehend in childhood—four sides, four windows, a door, a pitched roof and a chimney. But it is also subject or attack, fragmentation, conflagration and collapse. The house that goes up must come down; this is especially true if we think of the house as a mirror of our won fragile being.
The first manifesto of surrealism in 1924 celebrated “psychic automatism” as central tenet of movement. Breton and fellow surrealists experimented with so-called “sleep séances” to induce automatic speech at the same time as in a trance. The ideal was to access the unconscious as far as possible unmediated by the rational mind. Although later rejected, it being impossible to deny the imposition of reason, the “sleep séances” certainly served as a playful and instructive way of loosening inhibitions and subverting convention.