Concrete Canvas and Concrete Canvas Shelters
"Concrete Canvas Ltd. manufacture a ground breaking material technology called Concrete Canvas that allows concrete to be used in a completely new way. Concrete Canvas was originally developed for the award winning Concrete Canvas Shelters, a building in a bag that requires only water and air for construction."
(Concrete Canvas Ltd.)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Russian-born artist Yelena Popova: one to watch
"Russian-born artist, Yelena Popova, has been garnering attention in the art world since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2011. As well as her inclusion in the Saatchi Gallery's upcoming exhibition of contemporary Russian art entitled, 'Gaiety is The Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union', Popova created work for the Zabludowicz Collection, in light of the London 2012 Olympics, and was named by The Independent newspaper as 'one to watch'. Popova works across various mediums including painting, where she makes use of different types of linen for her canvases as well as pastel colours and circular shapes reminiscent of the Bauhaus movement. Although her work is often influenced by Russian Constructivism, Popova, now a part of the Nottingham arts community, sees artistic movements as local developments thus questioning herself as a 'Russian artist'."
(Crane.tv)
Fig.1 "Yelena Popova for Saatchi Gallery", Published on 12 Nov 2012 by CraneTVVideoMagazine.
Fig.2 Yelena Popova (2011). "Balance of Probabilities", mixed media on linen, wooden domestic objects, brass doorknob, dimensions variable.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Marco Brambilla: Civilization
"When [Marco Brambilla] asked us to work with him on Civilization, a vision he had of taking hundreds of stock footage, movie footage and original clips and combining them to create a moving landscape depicting the ascension from hell to heaven, we knew that it was going to be huge challenge but one we were very excited about....
The project had two huge challenges. Firstly we needed to figure out how to create content that could move with the elevator where it would ultimately be viewed. The idea was this, when you go up in the elevator the content goes down and when you go down it goes up. Not unlike a ride film this project was designed to be synced to the moving environment of the hotel elevators in New York. We wanted to synchronize the footage to the movement of the elevator as best as we could.
The second challenge was creative. What are we seeing through this 'elevator window'? We only really knew at the beginning that the canvas or environment would be very tall and skinny due to the physics of elevator travel and we wanted to go from a hellish landscape to a heavenly one.
We began with exploring the idea of using a game engine to house the project. Seemed easy, map footage onto planes in space, attach a PC to the elevator and we can move up and down in the game environment all day. Unfortunately, once we started to collage the clips together in the Flame we knew the game engine idea wouldn't fly. We approximated that we would have 250 looped HD clips in the environment and our Flame could barely handle it (in the end it was closer to 500 looping clips). We compromised by locking ourselves into the idea that we would create a huge vertical canvas that we would scan up and down on once the elevator was in motion. The final piece was approximately 1920 x 7500 pixels.
Another technical wrinkle was more human. Would we create motion sickness by subjecting riders on the elevator to the video art? To test this we shot some footage of a rising and falling landscape on a glass enclosed elevator and played back the footage on a 42inch plasma in a fully enclosed elevator. Not one person in the 30 we used in the test got sick so we knew our gut check was all right.
In parallel to the technical research, Marco and his studio staff began the process of researching and collecting a vast amount of footage sampled from both mainstream and more obscure film sources. Marco then assembled still grabs from each piece of sampled footage into photomontages, which we would review weekly while Marco's editor cut together a linear chronology of what the components in journey from hell to heaven may look like.
The logistical task of collecting and cataloguing all the clips involved a great deal of coordination between our producer and Marco's studio and stretched over a period of almost three months. Once the material was imported into Flame we would invariably make adjustments and receive more photo-collages that would polish to make the 'video mural' look as seamless as possible. The clips were used in much the same way the way a painter would use a colour or texture. We felt it was like audio sampling, using the clips as beats and timing them all to work together to create something new and original. Marco and our team experimented in the Flame and played with the clips for about six weeks, arranging and rearranging them on the 2d canvas over and over to find the right compositions. Most of this work was done at night because we couldn't afford to do it during prime time hours.
Not only were we playing with where on this huge canvas the clips should go, we had to consider the looping aspect of this project. We wanted the canvas to loop once it got to the top of heaven and come right back around to hell again. Once the canvas looped, each of the 500 clips had to be looped individually as well. Along with colour correction, each clip required careful vari-speeding and stabilization to allow all the pieces fit together. We ping-ponged most of the clips as to avoid any cutting on the loop points. With all the clips treated and placed into the canvas we color corrected the entire thing as one big piece of wallpaper. We had over a hundred 'power windows' on the piece to isolate sections and make each station gel together. We ended up with six main stations on the canvas. Hell, lower purgatory, middle purgatory, upper purgatory, heaven and upper heave/lower hell which was the loop point.
After all this was done we set out to redo the entire piece in 3d space! We took each station, rendered it out as a static 2.5 minute plates and then projected those onto geometry modeled to match the stations layout. We then had to go in and render the stations with and without most of their elements so we could achieve the proper parallax. Essentially it was like recreating the entire project over again but with most of the guesswork taken away with the 2d final as our road map."
(Motionographer)
Credits: Title: Civilization (MEGAPLEX), 2008 By: Marco Brambilla; Client: The Standard Hotel, New York; Editor/Research Assistant: Beau Dickson; Assistant: Swapna Tamhane; Production Company: Crush, Toronto; Representation/Images Courtesy of: Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica; Marco Brambilla Directorial Representation: The Ebeling Group; Ebeling Group U.S.A.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Francis Bacon's Studio Mapped By Archaeologists
"The Hugh Lane Gallery removed the contents of Francis Bacon's studio at 7 Reece Mews in August 1998. This operation was conducted with the assistance of a team of archaeologists who mapped the space, and tagged and noted the positions of the objects. The reconstructed studio features the original door, walls, floors, ceiling and shelves. Over 7,000 items were found in the studio and these were catalogued on a specially designed database before their replacement in the studio. The Francis Bacon Studio Database is the first computerised archive of the entire contents of a world ranking artist's studio. Every item in the studio has a database entry. Each entry consists of an image and a factual account of an object. The database has entries on approximately 570 books and catalogues, 1,500 photographs, 100 slashed canvases, 1,300 leaves torn from books, 2,000 artist's materials and 70 drawings. Other categories include the artist's correspondence, magazines, newspapers and vinyl records."
(Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, 14 December 2004)
CONTRIBUTOR
The Constellations ProjectSHARE
Rauschenberg: Design by Improvisation
"Much critical commentary on Rauschenberg has focused on the so-called combine paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s. These were the works--most notably, the horizontally disposed painting Monogram, sporting a stuffed Angora goat, and the vertically disposed painting Bed, incorporating a real quilt and pillow--that briefly earned Rauschenberg a reputation as something of an enfant terrible and as one of the leading exponents of a new post-Duchampian avant-garde. He was singled out in this way, along with Cage and Marcel Duchamp and the unlikely Jean Tinguely, in a widely read book by Calvin Tomkins published in 1968 under the title Ahead of the Game: Four Versions of the Avant-Garde. (6) Rauschenberg's more materially encumbered combine paintings came to be seen as effecting a radical restructuring of painting, with the work no longer functioning as formalized entity set in the viewer's line of sight to evoke a fictional pictorial space but rather as something much more literal and insistently materialized, a flat support to which objects, images, and paint were attached."
(Alex Potts)
Alex Potts, Reviewed work(s): Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde by Branden Joseph, The Art Bulletin, Vol. 87, No. 1 (Mar., 2005), pp. 167-170 (review consists of 4 pages), Published by: College Art Association.
CONTRIBUTOR
The Constellations ProjectSHARE
