Susan Soares

Susan Soares projects all explore the idea of new organs of perception. During the project she discovered some research into the use of bees to detect explosives. They can be trained in minutes and can also detect hormones and other chemical traces produced by the human body when ill or at different stages of the fertility cycle.



One of the more striking proposals to come from her project was for an alternative means of diagnosis, less technical and invasive, but also less precise. Bees trained to detect a particular hormone would be placed in a specially designed glass container, the person breathes into a smaller open chamber within the larger one, if the bees detect the hormone they move into the smaller space indicating its presence.

http://www.susanasoares.com/

Eva Hesse

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Hesse

Eva Hesse, Aught, 1968

Eva Hesse, Untitled (rope piece), 1970

Ansen Seale 'slit scan photography'

http://www.ansenseale.com/

Victoria Reynolds - 'Carne- Landscapes'

Pity the meat! Meat is undoubtedly the chief object of Bacon’s pity, his only object of pity, his Anglo-Irish pity. On this point he is like Soutine, with his immense pity for the Jew. Meat is not dead flesh; it retains all the sufferings and assumes all the colors of living flesh. It manifests such convulsive pain and vulnerability, but also such delightful invention, color, and acrobatics. Bacon does not say, “Pity the beasts,” but rather that every man who suffers is a piece of meat. Meat is the common zone of man and the beast, their zone of indiscernibility; it is a “fact”, a state where the painter identifies with the objects of his horror and his compassion. The painter is certainly a butcher, but he goes to the butcher’s shop as if it were a church, with the meat as the crucified victim. Bacon is a religious painter only in butcher’s shops.

Gilles Deleuze. The logic of sensation. Continuum 2003

Peter Gabriel 3 (melt) 1980

Artwork by Storm Thorgenson

SymbioticA - The Art and Science Research Laboratory

http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/


'an artistic laboratory dedicated to the research, learning, critique and hands-on engagement with the life sciences.'

lots of interesting lines of scientific inquiry that encompass a multitude of biotechnological, transgenic and mechanised methodologies to pursue compelling design and creative avenues. have a look at the residencies, past and present, here
http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/residencies/residents2

home to Oron Catts and Ionat Zur

Implantable Silicon-Silk Electronics at technologyreveiw.com

Duane pointed me in this direction......

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23847/page1/

By building thin, flexible silicon electronics on silk substrates, researchers have made electronics that almost completely dissolve inside the body. So far the research group has demonstrated arrays of transistors made on thin films of silk. While electronics must usually be encased to protect them from the body, these electronics don't need protection, and the silk means the electronics conform to biological tissue. The silk melts away over time and the thin silicon circuits left behind don't cause irritation because they are just nanometers thick.

lots more interesting stuff to be found at http://www.technologyreview.com/
like biodegrable transistors http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/23940/
or 'rapid prototyping in biology'
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/23567/

Silicon on silk: This clear silk film, about one centimeter squared, has six silicon transistors on its surface. These flexible devices can be implanted in mice like the one in this image without causing any harm, and the silk degrades over time. The orange liquid on the hair is a disinfectant used during the surgery

Nobel Textiles.......research platform

http://textilefutures.co.uk/exchange/bin/view/TextileFutures/NobelTextiles#Metabolic_Media


Nobel Textiles is the result of a two year-long collaboration between Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design and the Medical Research Council which paired 5 Nobel Prize winning scientists with 5 designers.
Part of Textile Futures http://textilefutures.co.uk/


_self assembly
_the fat map collection
_now you see it now you don't
_metabolic media
_suicidal textiles

BioCouture, Suzanne Lee

http://www.biocouture.co.uk/

http://www.fashion-body-materialcultures.org/research.php?sh=1&m=18

BioCouture - growing clothing using bacterial cellulose

'BioCouture aims to address ecological and sustainability issues around fashion. The BioCouture research project is harnessing nature to propose a radical future fashion vision.
We are investigating the use of bacterial-cellulose, grown in a laboratory, to produce clothing.
Our ultimate goal is to literally grow a dress in a vat of liquid........'

http://www.biocouture.co.uk/beaker.html
 

Mike Webb, Suitaloon & Cushicle........(vicarious prosthesis?)

Suitaloon & Cushicle, Mike Webb, 1967

'Clothing for living in-or if it wasn't for my Suitaloon I would have to buy a house.'

Suitaloon is an inflatable, nomadic house conceived to be worn as a suit providing a living envelope whenever and wherever desired. It extends Archigram's interest in mobile architecture, expressed in earlier projects such as Walking City. Fitting the body like clothes, the Suitaloon is a reductive dwelling that reduces the components and support systems needed to sustain an entire community down to the necessities for supporting a single individual. The Suitaloon was designed to be a complementary component of the Cushicle.

Lucy and Bart

http://www.lucyandbart.com/

Levi Van Veluw

http://www.levivanveluw.nl/

Levi Van Veluw, Veneer II, 2009

Levi Van Veluw, Natural Transfer III, 2009

Paul Stamets......'earth's natural internet'

Juan Enriquez......shares mindboggling science

He concludes with the notion that we are approaching 'Homo Evolutis', as a progression from Homo Sapien
(hominids that take direct control over their evolution...and that of others').



see also
Stephen Hawking: "Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution"
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/07/stephen-hawking-the-planet-has-entered-a-new-phase-of-evolution.html

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1906-1961)........ideas

The Visible and the Invisible

For Merleau-Ponty, consciousness is not just something that goes on in our heads. Rather, our intentional consciousness is experienced in and through our bodies. With his concept of the lived body, Merleau-Ponty overcomes Descartes' mind-body dualism without resorting to physiological reductionism. Recall that for Descartes the body is a machine and the mind is what runs the machine. For Merleau-Ponty the body is not a machine, but a living organism by which we body-forth our possibilities in the world. The current of a person's intentional existence is lived through the body. We are our bodies, and consciousness is not just locked up inside the head. In his later thought, Merleau-Ponty talked of the body as "flesh," made of the same flesh of the world, and it is because the flesh of the body is of the flesh of the world that we can know and understand the world.

Thoughts on the living......

'And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, and then from hour to hour we rot and rot, and thereby hangs a tale.' William Shakespeare from As You Like It

Organ_etymology

In biology and anatomy, an organ (Latin: organum, "instrument, tool", from Greek ὄργανον - organon, "organ, instrument, tool") is a collection of tissues joined in structural unit to serve a common function.......

'Body Without Organs'

When you will have made him a body without organs,then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom
Antonin Artuad

The notion of Bodies Without Organs (or BwO) was coined by Giles Deleuze, and later developed as a central concept in his collaborative work with Felix Guattari.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_without_organs
In Deleuze's work, the term initially refers to the "virtual" dimension of the body. For Deleuze and Guattari, every "actual" body has (or expresses) a set of traits, habits, movements, affects, etc. But every "actual" body also has a "virtual" dimension, a vast reservoir of potential traits, connections, affects, movements, etc. (a phase space). This collection of potentials is what Deleuze calls the BwO. To "make oneself a body without organs," then, is to actively experiment with oneself to draw out and activate these virtual potentials. These potentials are mostly activated (or "actualized") through conjunctions with other bodies (or BwOs) that Deleuze calls "becomings."

Design and the Elastic Mind

Some interesting stuff, (and some not so) to be found at this rather infuriating flash site accompanying the 2008 MoMA exhibion 'Design and the Elastic Mind'

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/#/206/

Once while travelling across the sky.....

Joe Cocker, Space Captain from Mad Dogs & Englishmen 1970

Stephan Balleux

http://www.stephan-balleux.com/

painting/painting, 2009

thank god, 2007

Macropinna microstoma

Carl Sagan & The 4th Dimension

Vestigial organs: Remnants of evolution

from http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19826562.100-vestigial-organs-remnants-of-evolution.html?page=1

VESTIGIAL organs have long been a source of perplexity and irritation for doctors and of fascination for the rest of us. In 1893, a German anatomist named Robert Wiedersheim drew up a list of 86 human "vestiges", organs "formerly of greater physiological significance than at present". Over the years, the list grew, then shrank again. Today, no one can remember the score. It has even been suggested that the term is obsolete, useful only as a reflection of the anatomical knowledge of the day. In fact, these days many biologists are extremely wary of talking about vestigial organs at all.


This may be because the subject has become a battlefield for creationists and the intelligent design lobby, who argue that none of the items on Wiedersheim's original list are now considered vestigial, so there is no need to invoke evolution to explain how they lost their original functions. While they are right to question the status of some organs that were formerly considered vestiges, denying the concept altogether flies in the face of the biological facts. While most biologists prefer to steer clear of what they see as a political debate, Gerd Müller a theoretical biologist from the University of Vienna, Austria, is fighting a rearguard action to bring the concept back into the scientific arena. "Vestigiality is an important biological phenomenon," he says.

Vestigial Organs Seem Ripe for Transhumanist Tweaks, Wired Article

http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/commentary/alttext/2007/11/alttext_1107

into the void....

Nine Inch Nails - Into The Void

Eric The Red | MySpace Video

Nine Inch Nails Into the Void from the Fragile (1999)

notes on vestigial structures.........

Vestigial structures are anatomical structures of organisms in a species which are considered to have lost much or all of their original function through evolution. These structures are typically in a degenerate, atrophied, or rudimentary form. Vestigial structures are often referred to as vestigial organs, though not all of them are actually organs....

Although the structures most commonly referred to as 'vestigial' tend to be largely or entirely functionless, a vestigial structure need not necessarily be without use or function for the organism. Vestigial structures have lost their original main purpose, but they may retain lesser functionalities, or develop entirely new ones.

Henry Moore, Drawings

Henry Moore, Study for Row of Sleepers, 1941

Henry Moore, Grey Tube Shelter, 1940

The Field: The quest for the secret force of the universe

from
http://twm.co.nz/McTag_field.htm#About

A bit like finding there is such a thing as The Force in Star Wars. The Field tells the story of respected frontier scientists all over the globe who have produced extraordinary evidence to show that an energy field -The Zero Point Field - connects everything in the universe, and we ourselves are part of this vast dynamic cobweb of energy exchange. 
The Field also reveals a radical new biological paradigm-that on our most fundamental level, the human mind and body are not distinct and separate from their environment, but a packet of pulsating energy constantly interacting with this vast energy sea. 

The Night They Drove Ol' Dixie Down- The Band

from The Last Waltz 1978

Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting

by Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini

extracts.....full manifesto here http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/techpaint.html

Our growing need of truth is no longer satisfied with Form and Color as they have been understood hitherto.

The gesture which we would reproduce on canvas shall no longer be a fixed moment in universal dynamism. It shall simply be the dynamic sensation itself.

Indeed, all things move, all things run, all things are rapidly changing. A profile is never motionless before our eyes, but it constantly appears and disappears. On account of the persistency of an image upon the retina, moving objects constantly multiply themselves; their form changes like rapid vibrations, in their mad career. Thus a running horse has not four legs, but twenty, and their movements are triangular.

Rene Almanza

Rene Almanza, mexican artist http://www.renealmanza.net/

Will Barras

English artist and illustrator

http://willbarras.com/

Kofie One

'urban' artist Kofie One. check it

http://www.keepdrafting.com/

Alice in Chains- Would?

Umberto Boccioni

“All things move, all things run, all things are rapidly changing. A profile is never motionless before our eyes, but it constantly appears and disappears. On account of the persistency of an image upon the retina, moving objects constantly multiply themselves; their form changes like rapid vibrations, in their mad career. Thus a running horse has not four legs, but twenty, and their movements are triangular.”
– Umberto Boccioni, ‘Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto’ (1910)

Umberto Boccioni, Charge of the lancers, 1915.

Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913

We're in this together......

Nine Inch Nails - We're In This Together. (The Fragile, 1999) Directed by Mark Pellington

Issey Miyake

Claude Heath

Gundam

Shin Musha Gundam.

Musha Gundam (武者 頑駄無) are Gundam units modelled after samurai, ninja, or other forms of feudal Japanese warriors. Inheriting the base SD Gundam design, typical design element include changing beam sabre into katana, sheath that act as a gun, removable armour suits etc.

The Garden of Earthly Delights, Heironymus Bosch

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, Francis Bacon

from wikipedia:

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion is a 1944 triptych painted by the Irish-born artist Francis Bacon. The work is based on the Eumenides—or Furies—of Aeschylus' The Oresteia, and depicts three writhing anthropomorphic creatures set against a flat burnt orange background. The triptych summarises themes explored in Bacon's previous paintings, including his examination of Picasso's biomorphs and his interpretations of the Crucifixion and the Greek Furies. Bacon did not realise his original intention to paint a large crucifixion scene and place the figures at the foot of the cross.

The Three Studies triptych is generally considered Bacon's first mature piece; he regarded his works before the triptych as irrelevant, and throughout his life tried to suppress their appearance on the art market. When the painting was first exhibited in 1945, it caused a sensation, and helped to establish him as one of the foremost post-war painters. Commenting on the cultural significance of Three Studies, the critic John Russell observed in 1971 that "there was painting in England before the Three Studies, and painting after them, and no one ... can confuse the two."

Krzysztof Pruszkowski

from  http://www.gallerywm.com/prusz_index.html

The Plural Vision.


Krzysztof Pruszkowski tells us about the saturation of pictures in the modern world and the short-sightedness they create. A world where pictures are at the same time over-represented and fleeting, very talkative and restrained. Pictures always competing with each other, ending up stacked upon each other and finally dissapearing in the daily stream of information issued by the media.

By subjecting his photographic topics, wether they are taken from the media or not, to "multiple superimpositions", Krzysztof Pruszkowski demonstrates the limits of the new reality. A reality which disolves the notion of time picture by picture and, in a way, accounts for the speed which characterizes some videoclips, the instant circulation of information and pictures around the world. We are no more in the order of the snapshot.


His process: to subject the picture to up to sixty or seventy superimpositions. He names it "photosynthesis" - the gathering of information which could not be covered in one shot. The process is often limited to six or seven superimpositions. The picture doubles, triples, reaches the edge of fuzziness, and provokes a conflict between global and individual, between singular and plural.

Therefore, when Krzysztof Pruszkowski addresses one of todays most difficult artistic concepts, which is the portrait, he does not provide a cohesive picture of the model, but rather the search and formulation of an individuality composed by superimposing different faces. For example Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir (1984), or sometimes more generic, as if he was slowly building up a photofit (portrait-robot), like "Miss Europe" or as with "The President"(1984), with the merged portraits of six American presidents.

This is in fact the new representation of the individual within the present social code, commonly named the typical profile for job selection (profil-type des offres d'emploi). The notion of individual has gone from specific to generic, from unique to interchangeable, like the objects which have changed from original to reproduction. A plural vision of a world where "production" is a key word.........

60 passagers de 2e classe du metro. Ligne: Clignancourt-Orleans. Paris Krzysztof Pruszkowski

No Maps For These Territories

a film by Mark Neale about William Gibson. For some perplexing reason, self-styled saviour and self-righteous tax dodger Bono and his beanied sidekick The Edge are in it, just skip through their bits.

premise :

On an overcast morning in 1999, William Gibson, father of cyberpunk and author of the cult-classic novel Neuromancer, stepped into a limousine and set off on a road trip around North America. The limo was rigged with digital cameras, a computer, a television, a stereo, and a cell phone. Generated entirely by this four-wheeled media machine, No Maps for These Territories is both an account of Gibson’s life and work and a commentary on the world outside the car windows. Here, the man who coined the word "cyberspace" offers a unique perspective on Western culture at the edge of the new millennium, and in the throes of convulsive, tech – driven change.

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XODk5OTkzMTI=.html

Acton Chin

Forever Existence 3

Humble Pie - Black Coffee

live at the OGWT 1973

James Dawe

'One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich' Endpaper for Fallon Re-published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson Aug 2009 One in a series of 9 classic Novel re-printed in hardback with die cut cover

From http://www.jamesdawe.co.uk/profile.html

"James Dawe is an Illustrator & Image Maker who grew up and still operates out of East London.James specializes in contemporary photo collage, working both digitally and analog with a tendency to assemble imagery in the form of portraits.Pride is taken in composition and interpreting the everyday in a surreal and fantastical way. "

Leonardo Calvillo

illustrations

http://www.leo.maliarts.net/scan.html

Isis- 20 minutes/ 40 years

New video for "20 minutes/ 40 Years" from the album "Wavering Radiant" by ISIS. Video directed by Matthew Santoro.

Ben Weiner

Oracle, 2007, oil on canvas, 64 x 96 inches

Darkness, 2007, oil on canvas, 64 x 96 inches

http://www.benweiner.com/work.html

Tool

Tool - Stinkfist from Ænima (1996) directed by Adam Jones

whisper[s] : wearable, handheld, intimate, sensory, personal, expressive, responsive system

http://whisper.surrey.sfu.ca/

Whisper[s] is an acronym for "wearable, handheld, intimate, sensory, personal, expectant response system." The whisper[s] research group out of Simon Frasar University's School of Interactive Art & Technology combines wearable computing, dance, music, and fashion to explore how we exist in an environment of pervasive technology. Thecla Schiphorst, Susan Kozel, Sang Mah, and Robb Lovell led the creative team to produce work that equally balances art and technology.

The wireless technology embedded in the garments trigger responses of light and sound with other garments as well as the surrounding environment. Therefore, wearers (re)learn how to engage with each other and their surroundings through play and exploration. The use of natural fabrics is a welcome change from the tendency to overdo the futuristic feel of many wearable technology examples. These netwroks are imagined as extensions of the body - cyberpathways as extensions of neurological systems, muscle and skin.

Meatbook - 'Tangible and Visceral Interaction'

from http://meatbook.iat.sfu.ca/index.html

'The Meatbook, an interactive art installation, explores the use of a novel tangible interace to provoke a visceral response in the viewer. The Meatbook presentes the symbiosis of the mechanical and the organic as it simultaneously juxtaposes the conflicting materiality of these media. Sensors, motors and other mechanics are used to animate the meat, generating movements specifically designed to produce visceral, even cathartic responses from the user. By simultaneously generating revulsion and fascionation, the user undergoes an embodied experience in which the alien and the familiar come together in the form of a book.'

Diane Gromala

Aaron Levisohn

Jinsil Seo

Jayme Cochrane

Anton and Giulio Bragaglia- 'A glacial reproduction of reality'

Anton & Giulio Bragaglia, The Slap, (1912)

"We are not interested in the precise reconstruction of movement, which has already been broken up and analysed. We are involved only in the area of movement which produces sensation, the memory of which still palpitates in our awareness” Giulio Bragaglia (1913)

Idris Khan

“every…Bernd and Hilla Becher Prison type Gasholders” Idris Khan 2004.

A series of images he made by superimposing Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographs of industrial buildings, while digitally manipulating them to emphasise certain details or to enhance areas of light and shade. In his own words- 'it’s obviously not about re-photographing the photographs to make exact copies, but to intervene and bring a spectrum of feelings - warmth, humour, anxiety - to what might otherwise be considered cool aloof image. You can see the illusion of my hand in the layering. It looks like a drawing. It’s not systematic or uniform. The opacity of every layer is a different fallible, human decision'

After Eadweard Muybridge ‘Human and Animal Locomotion’ Idris Khan (2005).

The above image is a combination of Muybridge's motion studies into a single image.

In Khan's own words his images are 'a playful emblem of our own departure from the corpse of photography, burdened with what the Futurist Anton Guilio Bragaglia once referred to as its ‘glacial reproduction of reality'.

Tool - Vicarious

music video for the american band Tool for the song 'vicarious' from their most recent 10,000 days album.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUXBCdt5IPg

Rob Sheridan

With Teeth

Bleedthrough

The Slip

American graphic designer noted for his long running visual collaborations with Trent Reznor/Nine Inch Nails.

http://www.rob-sheridan.com/

Theo Jansen

Animaris Percipiere


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcR7U2tuNoY&feature=related

Open Country: Bryan May's 3D village, BBC Radio 4

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nhn1n

Queen guitarist Brian May uncovers the story of an Oxfordshire village captured in time by Victorian photographic pioneer T.R. Williams.

Edward T Hall- Theory of Proxemics and The Anthropology of Space

Edward T Hall's Proxemic Diagram, 1966

Arne Quinze

'Rebirth', Installation at Hotel Le Royal Monceau, Paris, 2008

http://www.arnequinze.tv

Baroness- The Blue Record

http://www.myspace.com/yourbaroness