brunobergher::blog

I am a huge fan of Jonathan Harris, ever since I found out about We Feel Fine. It just blew me away. Recently, the creator of this and other outstanding works of art and visualization launched I Want You to Want Me, an installation at the MoMA in New York. Harris describes the project as simply as

I Want You To Want Me explores the search for love and self in the world of online dating.

There’s no online version for the unfortunate of us who cannot be in NYC to attend the exhibition to enjoy, but the project’s website is most certainly worth checking out.

If by any chance you’re not familiar with Harris’ work, I highly recommend visiting his sit and viewing each project with the attention they deserve. It can be quite rewarding.

* I had this post kept as a draft for a while, and in the meantime, Harris released The Polaroid Project, which I’m still to visit in depth.

While on the subject of autopsies in art and under-the-skin artwork, Brian Dettmer’s “Altered States (explorations in media modification)” just must be mentioned:

More stuff here (not official) and here (semi-official).

It’s been around the web for a while, but this is just too good to not be posted.

This Sunday I attended to the “Os Trópicos” (The Tropics) exhibition in CCBB (link is in Portuguese), here in Rio. It was a wonderful experience.

Swiss Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger’s installation in the atrium—”Dream of an Office Plant“— is astonishing.

Other pieces that really caught my attention were Walmor Corrêa’s Unheimlich, a set of four paintings of mythological Brazilian characters, painted as if in an anatomy atlas.

Below is Ondina, a kind of tropical mermaid, a nature spirit that lives in rivers, lakes and seas. (Please visit the artist’s website for more pictures—also in Portuguese).

I find this an interesting approach in visualizing data. I mean, it is fictional, but is data nonetheless; the kind of creativity required to imagine and them represent the inner anatomy of a mythological character is quite admirable. It’s what Tolkien does with words, only done with pictures (though in a smaller scale, I’d say).

I think this opens my mind to an infinite number of possibilities in visualization with and art purpose in mind: what’s being visualized does not need to be real, only it’s purpose. And sometimes the aesthetic experiment itself is worth it.

In a less formal and funnier approach, American illustrator Michael Paulus goes bone deep inside cartoon characters:

This may be old news, as it came up in Engadget a few months ago, but as it was surprising to me to see something like this, I thought it would be worth posting.

Above is a video of Morpho Towers, a project by Japanese artist Sachiko Kodama in which two metal towers are magnetically charged according to the playing music. The liquid is called FerroFluid:

“is a liquid which becomes strongly polarised in the presence of a magnetic field. It is a colloidal mixture comprising extremely small magnetic particles suspended in a synthetic oil. The particles are coated with a soap or detergent to prevent them from clumping together.”

In practice, it looks like T-1000, from Terminator 2. Unbelievably cool. The metal in the fluid reacts to the different proportions of magnetism in the towers, creating fluid forms of a rigid geometry that seemed only possible with computer graphics.

I just couldn’t help realizing this is like one of many generative art projects coming through to the physical world. It seems so abstract, while it’s actually happening. Really worth checking out.

Since the beginning on November, Paula Scher has been exhibiting her latest painting work in Maya Stendhal Gallery, in New York. Great work.

It may be old news to some, but it’s quite a discovery for me.

I’m amazed with the density of information Scher conveys in her paintings, exploring very diverse aspects of the regions she is depicting in the maps, from income differences in New York City to the population composition of cities in the Middle East.

It resembles very much a lot of generative art projects, only made by hand. This brings a subjective and case-by-case kind of approach to the details that allows her to choose what to bring forth in a way a algorithm most probably couldn’t. Not to mention the infinitely more interesting texture that her brushstrokes produce, compared to the frequently dr—though frequently beautiful—results achieved with the computer.

On the other hand, the work has a very solid conceptual basis. From the exhibition essay:

“These are absolutely, one hundred percent inaccurate,” Paula Scher declares of her colossal map paintings. Then, after a pause: “But not on purpose.” Another pause: they’re actually “sort of right.” And therein lies their bracing paradox. Scher’s sites—Manhattan, Israel, and India among them—are instantly recognizable. Scanning the allover expanse of the canvases, you might easily pick out the swath of Central Park, the void of the Dead Sea, the dot of Mumbai. But they are also highly interpretive. The colors and graphic styles allude to loose, mostly media-fed impressions. Consider Middle East, where black paint predominates, reflecting both the dire conflict in the region and the oil underlying it.

If you know where to get more information about her art, and about other people that carry on projects similar to this in any level, please comment below.

I also dug up a link to a previous exhibition she did, with similar work, back in 2005, at the same gallery.

Via Visual Complexity.

Update: Erik Natzke does something that might be the other way around: Flash Paintings. Those are pieces of Actionscript generative art which end result get’s very close to the texture of acrylic or oil paint. Definitely worth the visit.