Christoph Büchel, Häuser & Wirth Coppermill

A little more than a week ago, I attended the last chance to see Christoph Büchel's installation "Simply Botiful" at Häuser & Wirth Coppermill. Not at all clearly recognizable as an art space, the building located in Bethnal Green looks like a dingy hotel from the outside. The only hint I had that I was at the right place was the rather large cue of (mostly) fashionably dressed people in their 20s and 30s outside the venue. I can now say in retrospect that the wait was sure worth it because what I was about to witness inside surpassed my wildest imaginations. It actually took me a while to realize that the whole place served as an installation as opposed to the common spatial convention that you have a.) an artspace and b.) the piece hosted inside. But the inversion of these notions and conventions didn't really stop there. The whole place looked as if it had been occupied and abandoned shortly before the audience's arrival. Everything looked as if it was occupied literally hours ago and therefore creating a kind of haunting presence.

I overheard a conversation between a couple right behind me in the queue that they would have liked it better if there were also actors impersonating the occupants of the place we were about to witness. But I personally think that would have worked against the whole concept. A space crowded with used artifacts but void of individuals who might use them bears a better and more approachable possibility of reflection for the audience. Another comment I could overhear in the queue was that all these places looked strangely familiar and I can totally agree with that. It had this eerie attraction of the junkyard you're not allowed to trespass as a kid because it's dangerous but as one knows, kids of a certain age will go there anyway. The installation contained all these sensations of trespassing, looming danger and voyeurism.
The latter probably being the most powerful and emblematic of the whole piece because not only did the visitor seemingly trespass into a completely different set of lifestyles and locations, the references to sex, pornography and exhibitionism of the most intimate moments of private life were following you everywhere you went.
The most intense experience for me was to go down the dug hole and crawling through a tiny hand-dug tunnel on all fours. If one ever wonders what coming into a country without a valid passport or visa might feel like, I'd recommend the above experience. It was all very dark, narrow, dirty and cheap but once you come out of the whole installation and you feel the streets of London underneath your feet again, it changes the way you look and think about things.

From the press release:

A major exhibition by Swiss artist Christoph Büchel will be the second exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Coppermill in London's East End. Büchel works in a variety of media, including film, printed materials, sculpture and textiles, though he is perhaps best known for his conceptual projects and large-scale installation pieces. Büchel often appropriates mass media sources such as the Internet, printed political pamphlets and everyday household objects. His work is informed by an explicit political awareness, often telling of new forms of propaganda in an era of mediated war.

Büchel's complex installations force his audience to participate in scenarios that are physically demanding and psychologically unsettling. Cramped tunnels, claustrophobic chambers and frequent dead-ends induce feelings of panic and paranoia. He explores the unstable relationship between security and internment, placing visitors in the brutally contradictory roles of victim and voyeur. Gallery visitors to Büchel's 2005 installation 'Hole' at the Kunsthalle Basel were forced through small rooms connected by constricted passageways and steep ladders. Inside these fraught spaces, the chilling sight of a suicide caught on surveillance camera was juxtaposed with a psychotherapist's consulting room and the remnants of a bombed out Swiss bus. The frozen rooms that form the basis of such works as 'The House of Friction (Pumpwork Heimat)' (2002) offer spaces of oppressive cold, where preservation borders on the brink of obsolescence. Experiencing such charged spaces is usually a solitary task, though this private experience becomes the means by which collective tensions and traumas might be unearthed.

From kultureflash:

The gargantuan warehouse space has been transformed into a sweatshop seemingly housing and exploiting desperate asylum seekers. The operation room (filled with hundred of fridges, piles of computer innards, and mountains of junk-yard tat ripe for "revitalisation") lurks behind a scuzzy city hotel (the exhibition entrance) and a grimy cut-price shop selling row upon row of fixed-up fridges and VCRs. In the hotel, endless put-up beds are squashed into every conceivable spare inch of space -- corridors, bathrooms, the lorry out the back. There's a post-raid feel -- everywhere are half-eaten plates of food, work stations hastily abandoned, and ashtrays filled with cigarette stubs. But it's the secret room accessed by crawling through a hole in a wardrobe, the concrete bunker located beneath the freight lorry, and the subterranean tunnels with a disused deep freeze entrance portal that generate the most acute claustrophobia and bewildering paranoia. It's an unnerving meditation on the hidden hellholes lurking behind non-descript urban facades.

Pictures in this post are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 UK: Scotland License.

RCA Interaction Design Interim Show

Last weekend I went to the RCA Interactive Design show which displayed several works in progress. Having attended the last two consecutive graduate shows which were held annually, I was curious to get a glimpse on future gadgets and conceptual ideas.

Among the works which really interested me was "Flat Future" by Miquel Mora which showed practical applications for super-thin microprocessors applied on tape to suit various everyday purposes. Whether it's labeling fruit, attaching speakers to a book you read at the moment or taking exact measurement via "smart tape", the possibilities are endless.



I was aware that Siemens are currently doing active research in the field of super-thin displays. The above project seems like the logical progression. While I would suspect that a lot of marketing experts would only deem these displays to have advertising on them all the time, Flat Future shows luckily enough that it doesn't at all end there.

The guys over at we make money not art also have a post about the whole show, for those among you who would like to check it out....

Next up was an Origami remote control. Nice one. Although I loved to play with the folded object which served as a model for the remote control, I wasn't able to fold one myself back in the day when I was a kid, as I focused more towards the perfection of the paper plane per se.



However, it is yet another example that new and exciting innovation with electronic media does not need to stem from more powerful hardware, as more hardware usually means that more things can break, lag or freeze, it is also more complicated. In the wake of Nintendo being the rejoicing third party while Sony and M$ are engaging in a console (and DRM) arms-race, this remote control not only shows that simple and effective is the right way to begin with, it might even have commercial success one day...

I also liked the emotoscope which gives you a vintage super-8 feeling while looking through it, along with the flickering and the sound.



Some more images of other projects below.












Pictures in this post are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 UK: Scotland License.

Semantic Multi-Dimensional Data Graph

Every now and then, the magazine issues of renowned newspapers write about something you wouldn't expect them to report. The last incident of that sort occurred to me when I found out that the New York Times Magazine published an article about data visualisation.


image is property of James N. Sears

A project by James N. Sears, a programmer and computer artist, and Lisa Strausfeld of Pentagram Publishers is attempting to visualize semantic relations of specific words or names. The project was done with a cross-platform and open source software called processing, resulting in an interactive piece of data visualisation. Not only that it looks damn cool and is fun to play around with, the authors claim that one of its practical applications might be cross-referencing and data analysis of intelligence data, making the information at hand more accessible to analysts.

The illustrations I did for the New York Times in collaboration with Lisa Strausfeld of Pentagram were published in today's edition of the New York Times magazine. The illustrations, created in Processing, are the result of a physics-based model of keywords connected by springs. The strength of the virtual spring connecting a pair of keywords together is dependent upon their rate of cooccurrence on the Internet, a measure of their degree of relationship to each other. In addition to the three tiles shown above which are featured in the online version of the article, the cover of the magazine and the following pages of the print article all feature different views of the model.

Similar views, populated with data collected from internal networks, could be used by intelligence agencies in their efforts to determine terms that are interconnected and being discussed by diverse and disconnected agents.