Environment, Behaviour, Interaction

Bjork - Mutual Core from DanielleNoir on Vimeo.

Another dramatic piece by Andrew Thomas Huang, using some similar methods and themes to Solipsist that is also on this blog. This time for Bjork's song Mutual Core. The song was part of an album about reconnection of music with nature, drawing inspiration on her homeland Iceland, hence the volcanic eruptions, tectonic plates shifting, passing across eachother and crashing together, and rich violent colours and surfaces. But this was also used as a metaphor for a human relationship and interaction (obviously a passionate one!). The album it was part of, Biophilia (the worlds first "app album"), was partly recorded on Ipad and Bjork described it as multimedia collection "encompassing music, apps, Internet, installations, and live shows". Watch tutorials and intros about each app here

Movement and Communication

Bottle from Kirsten Lepore on Vimeo.

A very effective piece of stop motion, showing communication between two distant beings. Brilliant use of sound design, emotion, humour, simple (ish) movement, repetition, framing/composition and pacing of ideas.

Final Biopic projects on Vimeo

Well done to you all. Some very accomplished work in terms of ideas, narrative and depiction, and for many of you a first foray into film making/animation to any large degree, so the technical aspects are also showing great promise.

Here is the link of those uploaded to Vimeo...

http://vimeo.com/groups/45714/videos

Pictoplasma - Pen to Paper @ Concrete Hermit

Another useful exhibition for you and your Biopic project. Here's the blurb from the Concrete Hermit website...

26th March – 24th April 2010

Berlin based project Pictoplasma is regarded as the world’s leading authority on contemporary character design. Starting with the first Conference in 2004, a diverse, international audience has been attending Pictoplasma Festivals in Berlin, New York and Argentina establishing a vast creative network and lively exchange of ideas. It’s numerous publications and events focusing on the impact and role of character design within the world of contemporary art and design have found international acclaim.

Their latest publication, Pen to Paper, launches in the UK with an exhibition at Concrete Hermit on the 25th March. The book presents the most adventurous images of a select group of international artists whose work finds its genesis in traditional analogue techniques. The recent revival of analogue skills has injected immeasurable visual wealth into the world of illustration, fine art and especially character design. Artists reject the computer and channel their creativity through spontaneous freehand drawing. The spontaneity of this kind of creativity allows for a more free-flowing form of expression, leading to edgy and untamed beings, erupting with energy – the perfect antidote to the plethora of digital imagery abundant today.

The exhibition will feature a fine selection of figurative drawings, watercolours and collages.

Author project pictures on Flickr

See photos of your costume debuts and final presentation of all Author work before Easter on the right side in "Us"

Manifesto club in a constructivist style

The manifesto club website's manifesto. Using type and symbol in a style reminiscent of russian constructivist posters which you can see examples of earlier in this thread/Author_society pt1 threads both of which cover aspects of different ways of being, social groups, ideals, doctrines, dogmas, rituals, behaviours.

Haeckel's Embryonic forms

An awareness of origins of form as depicted by Haeckel.

He demonstrates his belief that the embryos echo the history of evolution from fish to reptile to human, and a trail of those forms being tailored to origins and environment and resultant needs.

Folkloric costume from the Museum of British Folklore

Images of costumes of British ritual and celebration via The Museum of British Folklore...it doesn't exist yet as a museum but you could help it happen









The purpose of these costumes are to invoke spirits, relate to and reflect natural powers, and to communicate with an audience. They often serve specific ritualistic needs... love, anarchy, peace, fertility, harvest, beer, temperance, celebration, protest..

David Noonan/Spartacus Chetwynd/Lindsay Seers/Kibbo Kift

Ceremonies, rituals, performance, folk culture, costumes, masks, all feature heavily in David Noonan's large scale images which seem to evoke notions of transcendance, fantasy, role play and memory. His massive pieces in the altermodern exhibition are rightly described as ambiguous "suggesting a playful act, a protest or perhaps something more unsettling". See more of his work here or go see them for yourselves at AlterModern.







Spartacus Chetwynd creates carnivalesque live spectacles, reminiscent of medieval raggle taggle performing troupes, modern day mummers. Flamboyance, grotesques, bawdiness, anarchy, but all in the quest for what she refers to as 'an untainted existence', a moment at which 'Eden becomes a state of mind'. Above are some of her costumes from performances – a lizard and a mole, and a film of dancing buildings! She once created 'An evening with Jabba the Hut'! Lounge in the Jabba-esque opulent giant cushions at Altermodern and watch the multi-screen mayhem.



Lindsay Seers, whose work involved her being a human camera. An amazing story, the background of which is retold in a haunting film at Altermodern. Here she is in the next stages of her work, now as a projector.



Also learn about the Kibbo Kift in Olivia Plender's informational 'museum' piece for Altermodern, full of almost pastoral longing for a 'pre-industrial golden age', a longing that she shares with the Kibbo Kift movement. The film above is not hers but gives you some idea of Kibbo Kift ideals, which they represented and reinforced in their rituals and artefacts. Olivia Plender also creates comic books. See one called The Masterpiece here. Funnily enough I went on Laura Oldfield Ford's (Savage Messiah) walk today and before turning up into the Stratford Olympic Village monstrosity being built, I saw Kibbo Kift written in marker pen on a bollard on the gateway of the Greenway walkers path.

Marcus Coates' Shamanic exploits...

See his work at the Tate as part of the AlterModern exhibition. I am going tomorrow...

Inuit fun

an image of the act of shamanistic transformation courtesy of here [thankyou]. See how much fun and enlightenment there is to be had by producing and wearing a costume!
Below are examples are of Inuit Indian masks.

One of my favourite images in the whole world

Being part of something bigger. Being a part. Belonging to something else. Being incomplete. Becoming whole. Having a place where you fit.

Art, theatre, performance people; Studio Scarabee. I still know nothing about you, except what is in the pages of the book I found years ago in a second-hand bookshop in Amsterdam. All I know is that you are brilliant.

RBG6

Workshop in experimental typography at Konstfack, University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. Watch the video here

Shuttlecocks

a costume/suit/illustration produced by Chloe Timms [currently a third year Illustration student. It was produced for a notional performance of Leda and the Swan. Note the cunning use of multiples of a single objects i.e. the shuttlcock and pom poms. This may be worth thinking about when making your collection of materials for monday's session. Check out Chloe's blog, lots of nice material on there particularly in relation to this project.

Surface Decoration

Thinking about ways to construct and making surfaces and looking at the mixed-media work of Jessica Stockholder, I came across an 'Electric Dress' by Atsuko Tanaka...



...which looked like a techno version of a Songye costume...

In Hiding

Junya Watanabe + The Elephant Man + Gareth Pugh + The Invisible Man + Geoffrey Cottenceau (again)

STUDIO ORTA

British artist Lucy Orta creates what she calls "architectures with soul". Her garments, objects, structures often have a transformational nature and act as a way to bring people together or allow people to survive autonomously. Her work deals with dwelling, social exclusion, identity and mobility through intervention.

Animaux

Just thinking about the stuff that surrounds us when looking for material to work with, as well as the beauty and simplicity of re-appropraition...Geoffrey Cottenceau produced this series during his time at the Swiss design school ECAL in Lausanne. You can see more of his and Romain Rousset's work here

Riitta Ikonen's work for Noone Belongs Here More Than You

See her very pertinent work here which explores expressive costume to amusing and poignant effect.

The Carnival

After Hurricane Katrina the Mardi Gras was nearly cancelled, but the need for the human spirit to survive through celebration and creativity was considered even more prescient that year. Mardi Gras is always a chance to be playful with identity through costumes and performance. Historically this and other Carnivalesque events were opportunities to subvert and reverse power structures through satire, and after the Hurricane there was felt to be much to satirise in the inadequacies and neglect of the Bush Administration. Above the images are of both survival and death. The blue roof tarpaulin for the survivors, and the maggots who invaded the dead. Black humour as healing and protest. See here for other costumes.

This tradition of carnival/festival/fiesta/parade often involves the form of grotesque body or grotesques to lampoon, and celebrate fundamental corporeal functions/pleasures to shock in an effort to overturn repressive social hierarchy, if only for a day.

François Rabelais's 'The life of Gargantua and Pantagruel', illustrated by François Desprez, displays the grotesque body to fascinating and surreal effect, and was a trailblazing satirical examination of the political, social and philosophical issues of the times (mid 1500's). See some examples below and further lurid examples here





See an exhibition of contemporary grotesques at Concrete Hermit this month