Room Portraits

“Through challenging camera angles Menno Aden abstracts most familiar actual living environments and public interiors into flattened two-dimensional scale models. A camera that the artist installed on the ceiling of various rooms takes pictures downwards of the interiors. The resulting images lay out space in symmetrical compositions that look like assemblages stripped off any kind of objectivity. The views into private homes and secret retreats bring up associations of the ubiquitous observation camera. The notion of surveillance is systematically played out by the artist to hint at society’s voyeuristic urge that popular culture has made mainstream.”

Menno Adens´website

Behind the 'madness'

Janie Bryant is the costume design director at AMCs´ serie Mad Men.
It has been a strong inspiration since few years ago for many style magazines. Let´s get prepared for the new old things that we are about to discover with the 5th season.

Elsewhere

 

Elsewhere (2010) is a multi-projection video art work which seeks to phenomenally transform the reinforced concrete landscape of the Malmö C underground station into a wide open space.
Through a projection device that evokes the perceptual experience from the train, the viewers will be invited to lose themselves in images during their wait. The projections acting as windows, the station itself becomes a train that loses its spatial and temporal rails, itinerant across the earth.
From the salt flats of Uyuni to the roads of Saigon, from the plains of Siberia to those of Patagonia, from the Honshu-Shikoku Bridge to the Orinoco River to central Montreal to the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro to Johannesburg’s Soweto to a Kensington street to Oaxaca market to Plaza Mayor to the Sicilian coast to Jalpur to Alexandria to Fortune Bay to Kualalampur to Ulan Bator to Den Haag to Reykjavik to Marienville to Tallinn to Corbridge to Buenaventura to Faisalabad to Muscat to Adana to Kinshasa to Xiangkhoang to Arrecife to Krakow to Pusan*… the Malmö C station will travel the world. elsewhere, like a lost river, flows continually into an underground passage. It is said that one never steps in the same river twice; comparably, the elsewhere installation is elaborated in such a way that it is unlikely that a viewer on a fixed schedule will see the same image time and again.
In terms of tempo, elsewhere is conceived as a release for the individual viewer. The recorded images are slowed down, in contrast with the speed of everyday urban life, in order to ease the experiential flow of time.
In symbolic terms, this artwork highlights the importance of the Central Station as a node; in its primary sense, as a crucial railway link, but also metaphorically as a connection between the city and the entire world.

Text from the artists´ website.

Everyday Architecture..

 ..through the eye of Victor Enrich.

" after years of working for customers who -hounded by the pressure of deadlines- ended up being pleased with something that I found minimally acceptable, I felt that my skills were being misused, and I wasn´t reaching my potential. I was just one link in a chain in which almost no one was aiming for beauty.Then I moved to art."

Personal extract of an Interview with Victor Enrich in MARK Magazine June/July 2012

Netropolis by Michael Najjar

Michael Najjar's  work in the  serie entitled "netropolis" is an exploration of the way global cities will develop in the future.

Of similar magnitude to the impact of the industrial revolution in the late 19th century, it is now computer networks and the information society based on them which are the main vehicles for change, the key elements transforming the face of our urban living spaces.

Three main components characterise this transformation: space becomes the image of space, the city itself becomes a terminal as real space fuses with telematic space. in the telematic society material embodiment is further supplemented and extended by virtual representation :
the so-called "tele-polis". Telematic space endows the urban environment with a new form of structure, intermingling with it and giving birth to a completely unprecedented form of urban space.

The panoramic view transforms the reality of urban spatial structure into landscape. The digital fusion of panoramic views taken from different angles transforms the landscape into a woven fabric of relationships which is abstract and multi-layered yet still underpinned by a geographic reference point. Viewing the city from a distance inverses the perceptual order of objects viewed in close-up. The view from afar is orientated on what is clearly visible from a distance and provides a context for objects which appear too close when viewed close up and thus retain their strangeness. In virtual space, however, distance and proximity lie on the selfsame level. The different cities and relationship strands need first to be combined and interwoven before they can give rise to a completely unprecedented and imaginary form of urbanity - the telematic netropolis.

The "netropolis" series of works portrays the megacities of berlin, beijing, dubai, hongkong, london, los angeles, mexico city, new york, paris, são paulo, shanghai and tokyo.
It comprises of twelve hybrid-photographies, one video work and one image sculpture.