Staying on the topic of the Wall, today I found a neat project that was founded and is run by Tamiko Thiel and Teresa Reuter. These two have launched the "Virtual Wall", a digital reconstruction of a segment of the Berlin Wall. The project area lies between Kreuzberg and Mitte. The aim is a 3D interactive digital installation that will show the development of the Wall and it's surroundings in this area through time. Views will be from he East and the West side, so the user can freely chose from which angle he or she wishes to take a look at this dividing structure. The installation will premiere in the Museum for Communication in Berlin on August 13, 2008 and will be exhibited from August 14 to September 7, 2008.

I'm intrigued... check out their page here 

The name says it all: Hairwash-Project is a project by the Russian KunstGroup. They took pictures of people before and after having their hair washed... The links are kyrillic to me ;) but the collective image forms a very human pattern, especially if seen in it's entirety.

check it out here...

In terms of street art, here's a very original idea: Dan Bergeron shoots portraits of the residents of Regent Park, Toronto, and superimposes them on the buildings in the area.
As many of these are torn down and rebuilt, the idea is "to make the residents literally become part of the physical landscape".
The aim is to make aware and challenge the decision of the displacement of Regent Park's inhabitants as they are kicked out of their homes in order to make way for new projects...

read more here...

I've always been a big fan of installation artists (as long as they're good, as the bandwidth is huge) and I'm happy I recently stumbled over Olafur Eliasson.
The Danish-Icelandic artist lives and works in Berlin and just hosted a retrospective at the MoMA and the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York. His work focuses on the "cognitive aspects of what it means to see". He explores the actual feat of visual perception, the act of looking on a very engaging, subjective level. By means of illusions and visual experiences out of the ordinary he challenges our visual behaviour and probes a critical approach.

Look at his work at MoMA here...

I stumbled over these funny robot hunting trophies yesterday and it reminded me so much of "A Few Good Men" by Joe Gonzalez (our special selection from mech tech competition). These robots do actually function: when someone stands in front of them, the head moves and their eyes open and they start to growl. When people leave the room they become inactive again. There are 11 different ones to collect. Some of them or all together on the wall make a cool, unexpected and a little weird wall ensemble, I'm sure...

check them out here..

Here is an interesting project to visualize language in terms of related images in referral to the semantic meaning of nouns. The compilation of the related images comes through Google and other search engines and the nouns through Wordnet. The result is a huge mosaic of image clusters that make up the big 'language picture' and explores the similarities and proximity of visual and semantic content.

Read more here...

The Cloud Gate in Chicago's Millenium Park, dubbed the 'bean' by the city's inhabitants, is Anish Kapoor's first outdoor sculpture in the United States. It's a very remarkable monolithic piece that mirrors the surrounding skyline beautifully.

The 110-ton elliptical sculpture is forged of a seamless series of highly polished stainless steel plates, which reflect the city's famous skyline and the clouds above. A 12-foot-high arch provides a "gate" to the concave chamber beneath the sculpture, inviting visitors to touch its mirror-like surface and see their image reflected back from a variety of perspectives.

Inspired by liquid mercury, the sculpture is among the largest of its kind in the world, measuring 66-feet long by 33-feet high. Cloud Gate sits upon the At&T Plaza, which was made possible by a gift from AT&T.

check out more here...

In the theme of our current competition, here is an interesting post over at our friends darkoastedblend. Some ideas on what you can do with your good old computer equipment.

Given the Moore's law that the power of computers doubles every 24 months, we end up with a lot of useless devices and obsolete hardware, that you sure can recycle in a normal way, but it's much more fun to recycle it in a wild and unusual ways! Let's see how to give a new life to the computing zombies of yesteryear.

Check it out here

At the end of the month, the 10-yearly “sculpture projects“ in Münster close. I went there recently to have a look at what's on display. It's an interesting event because the whole city becomes the stage for established and not so established artists who install their sculptural pieces all over town. The whole thing is called projects because the result is somewhat an experiment in order to find out which pieces actually acquire the necessary sculptural quality- at least that's my impression. The successful ones are sometimes bought by the city and remain there for the public. Past artists include Claes Oldenburg, Keith Haring, Bruce Naumann and Richard Serra, so some of the “big” names have left their mark here.
The 30th September marks the end of this event with a big closing party, so if you're there, go and check it out.

more info here...

Here is a very cool installation at London's Gloucester Road Underground station:
Artist Brian Griffiths "who has filled the disused platform with Life Is A Laugh, an epic installation which is part assault course, part giant panda head. The artwork is the latest exhibition in the Gloucester Road Platform for Art programme, which presents four shows a year in the Underground space. Griffiths is known for his magical, absurdist work that in the past has included a super computer made from cardboard and other household materials and a galleon constructed in wooden furniture."

The installation is comissioned by Platform for Art, an art programme by London Underground. I think this is a very good idea: three million passengers use the network every day and apart from raising awareness towards the arts it gives people waiting for their train something to look at and think about...

(via Creative Review)