Sheep 16850 by drunkenbutterfly

Scott Draves (aka SPOT) produces software art that makes my brain melt. I’m almost positive it’s doing something neurological similar to the pink beam of light fired at Horselover Fat’s brain in Philip K. Dick’s novel, VALIS. These self-generative, evolving, extremely beautiful and complex images are encoded with information words do not adequately capture. Moreover, they warp conventional understandings of computer-generated imagery. Read more…

It is hard to think of a competition more symbolic of our times than the CoolClimate Art contest – which uses the internet to put art in the service of climate change awareness. In July, the organizers of the contest spoke to Metropolis’s editor-in-chief Susan Szenasy about their mission to galvanize public opinion through iconic images that communicate the tragedy and challenges of climate change in an arresting and provocative way.

Over 1,000 artists from all over the world responded to the call, submitting photographs, digital art and sculptures through the artist mega site deviantART.com. Twenty of those entries were chosen by a panel of artists and environmentalists, and then published last week on the Huffington Post web site for a popular vote. Here are the top three entries:

No Pollution Please, (above) by Greek photographer Christos Lamprianidis, was declared the winner yesterday, at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C. Read more…

Tadao Ando, Farnsworth House, 2009.

When I went for a tour of the Glass House, someone in the tour group shared with us yet another colorful, but completely unverifiable anecdote about Mies van der Rohe. Legend has it that on his first visit to the newly completed house, the master, having closely examined the structure, turned to Philip Johnson and said, “You never could do corners.”

Whether the story is true or not, it is one of many conversations, real and imagined, between Philip Johnson’s Glass House, and Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, which was designed earlier, but completed two years later, in 1951. Linked closely in time, and by the relationship between the architects, the two buildings together form a landmark in modern architecture. Not only do they speak to each other over 800 miles, agreeing in spirit, disagreeing on the details, they also continue to speak to artists, architects and designers today. Read more…

Oil Field #13, Taft, California, Edward Burtynsky

In last week’s Q&A with Susan Szenasy, the organizers of the CoolClimate Art Contest spoke of the role of art in raising awareness about ecological issues. In a similar vein, Ecoaesthetic: The Tragedy of Beauty is an art exhibit that hopes to do for sustainability what war photography does for the cause of world peace: shock us into caring. On view at the Exit Art gallery, in New York, until August 25th, the exhibit brings together the work of nine photographers whose viewfinders have discovered the disturbing beauty of ecological disasters. The images are haunting in a way that is surprisingly reminiscent of pictures of children in war zones. There is the same sense of innocence lost, bringing on an urge to do something.

Ecoaesthetic is the first show organized as part of an art initiative called Social Environmental Aesthetics (SEA).  Conceived by artist Papo Colo, the SEA hopes to build a permanent archive of art that addresses social and environmental issues, and will organize related exhibitions, lectures, and public events at Exit Art gallery.

Here is a little taste of the images on view at Ecoaesthetic: Read more…

With all the talk about climate change, many of us still find it hard to connect with the crisis. Yes, we intuit that we’re facing something huge and life-altering, yet we continue to wallow in a state of denial. As frequent and devastating storms swoop down in our neighborhoods, we know something is very wrong.  Nevertheless, we’re too distracted or paralyzed to spring into political action. A new online competition, the CoolClimate Art Contest, is meant to help us recover from our political paralysis. Its organizers believe that artists and designers, with their well-known abilities to reach into our emotions, can help mobilize us to push for policy initiatives in energy, alternative fuels, and green jobs, among other subsets of climate change. To learn more about how artists can turn us into political activists, we asked the organizers of the CoolClimate Art Contest to share their hopes for their timely initiative. Our respondents are David Ross, the former head of the Whitney Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and a judge of the contest; Josh Wattles, advisor in chief at DeviantART, the largest online social network for artists and art enthusiasts with over 13.5 million registered members; Karl Burkhart, an expert in social media and the environment; and Sarah Ingersoll, the director of the CoolClimate Art Contest.

Why put art in the service of climate change?

Karl Burkhart: Just last week an unprecedented event occurred in Greenland. An iceberg twice the size of Manhattan broke off one of the largest and oldest ice sheets in the world in less than twenty-four hours. Scientists are still scratching their heads to figure out why global warming in certain regions is happening faster than predicted. The famous ‘Al Gore graph’ turns out to have underestimated the scope and speed of climate change.

Despite these facts, much of the public is clueless. At least half of Americans do not believe climate change is real and thus are completely inactive when it comes to advocacy and engaging their elected leaders. There has been a critical failing in communications around climate change and a big part of the problem has been a lack of ‘imagery’ that evokes and symbolizes the global changes that are, as we speak, changing the shape of the planet we live on. That is why we are turning to the artists. Read more…

In her monthly “Letter from Baltimore,” Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about architecture, culture, and urbanism in a city more often associated with violent crime than with good design. Click here to read her previous posts. For more by Dickinson, visit her blog, Urban Palimpsest.

Yolande Daniels’s Tea Cozy. All photos: Will Kirk

New York has P.S. 1’s courtyard installation; Baltimore has Sculpture at Evergreen. Every two years, the 26 acres surrounding the historic Evergreen Museum & Library transforms into a lab for artists. This year, equal presence was given to installations by architects, including New York’s Matter Practice and Yolande Daniels, the founding design principal of studio SUMO.

Sculpture at Evergreen’s curators—the University of Maryland architecture professor Ronit Eisenbach and the artist and curator Jennie Fleming—directed the ten individuals and teams to develop work responding to the site, a Gilded Age house with Italianate gardens owned by Johns Hopkins University. For architects, this kind of impermanent installation can become an extension of the studio, offering an opportunity to play with materials and processes in a fast and temporary setting. “It allows them to experiment,” Eisenbach says, “and take what they learned back to their practice.” Read more…

Today was the first day of Figment NYC, a weekend-long festival on Governors Island with a focus on interactive, participatory art. Along with dozens of ephemeral artworks, the event is hosting a few semi-permanent installations, including a mini-golf course, a sculpture garden, and the winner of this year’s City of Dreams Pavilion Competition. The latter is a low-tech structure made of plastic milk cartons sandwiched between a CNC-milled plywood skeleton, with a lush interior lining of of Liriope plants. Called the Living Pavilion, it’s the work of the New York architects Behrang Behin and Ann Ha (although they’re quick to point out that the project was realized thanks to the help of about 70 volunteers, most of them students or underemployed architects.) As for the idea to put the greenery inside the structure, rather than on the roof, Behin says it was “an old architect’s trick—take what you have and turn it upside down.” Or inside out, as the case may be. The Living Pavilion will be on display on New York’s Governor’s Island until October 3; click here for the ferry schedule.

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In her monthly “Letter from Baltimore,” Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about architecture, culture, and urbanism in a city more often associated with violent crime than with good design. Click here to read her previous posts. For more by Dickinson, visit her blog, Urban Palimpsest.

Baltimore, like most urban environments, is lousy with graffiti. The culture of tagging is well established here. Street art, though, is just starting to take off. In the last few years, wheat-pasted posters and hand-painted imagery have been popping up on abandoned buildings, sidewalks, and light poles. These works of art—and these are art—evoke the likes of Banksy and Swoon, with subject matter that arrests us in our daily travels and reminds us to again see and question the city we occupy.

Perhaps the most accomplished street art in Baltimore right now is coming from a young artist named Gaia. Read more…

You may remember the NYC Department of Transportation’s call for designs for an “economic, temporary surface treatment” for the new pedestrian plazas on Times Square. The design was meant to be a placeholder that will keep the plazas looking fresh till the real overhaul slated for 2012.

The DOT announced yesterday that, from the 150 designs submitted, it has selected a proposal by the Brooklyn-based artist Molly Dilworth. Titled “Cool Water, Hot Island,” Dilworth’s swirling blue pattern is based on NASA’s infrared satellite data of Manhattan. The infrared readings determined that the New York urban area is much hotter than the surrounding rural areas, a phenomenon known as the “urban heat-island effect.” The new design proposes to symbolically cool New York down.

Dilworth’s vibrant colors certainly fit in with the Times Square look, although it is debatable if Times Square needs any more vibrancy. What Times Square as an urban space has needed is some public art, some form of creative expression apart from the flashing signs and billboards. This new work–which is scheduled to be installed in mid-July—is definitely a step in the right direction. But the really nice touch is that Dilworth will be inserting a little marker of water into the urban landscape. In this glass-and-steel metropolis it is easy to forget that you are on an island whose history has been shaped by the water around it. Dilworth’s little swash of blue will do very well as a reminder, at least until Times Square is ready for the next big change.

Image, courtesy the NYC Department of Transportation

In 2006, we wrote about Object Orange, a Detroit artists’ collective that was painting some of the city’s abandoned houses Tiggerific orange in an effort to call attention to its rapidly decaying neighborhoods. Last winter, a pair of Detroit artists hit on an even more dramatic method of highlighting the city’s deterioration—Ice House Detroit, “an architectural installation and social change project” by Gregory Holm and Matthew Radune that froze one of the city’s 20,000 abandoned houses in solid ice (which required spraying the house with a fire hose for more than a week.)

Here’s a (rather ominous) video of the final result: Read more…