Art In A Petri Dish Project

To look at the images of Isreali artist J.D. Doria is to see a world of spiked abstractions and rich, otherworldly beautiful colors and intricate movements.

You might look at the above image and wonder just what it is you’re seeing—an alien landscape? The world of microorganisms? A CG-creation? All of the above? The patterns and forms are actually liquids shot in closeup swirling around in a glass container. They’re the work of Isreali artist J.D. Doria who describes his work as “painting as multitude” and his recent series The Petri Dish Project is, you might be able to guess, inspired by the Petri dish.

The Petri dish is usually associated with science, but which is now increasingly becoming a tool used in art. ”It comes to replace the canvas and the paper” Doria says. ”It is placed upon a light-table and above it, on a crane, a digital camera is positioned for high resolution close ups. Within the Petri dish I am “growing” images using different mélanges of liquid colors and materials.” These materials have different reactive properties and this, combined with the different colors, creates the interactions which Doria photographs the dynamics of to create his abstract images, which take inspiration from Jackson Pollock and his contemporaries.

After enhancing the images, Doria selects a set he likes choosing a circular photo to capture the initial stages, which is followed by a number of images which have been extracted from the process. In his other work, which similarly incorporates the process into the final piece, he utilizes a 3D scanner to augment his photography. Mixing acrylic, ink, glass colours, and water on paper he captures the process and movements of the materials with a suspended camera. Doria explains how he then feeds the captured images into the scanner and extroplates parts of them to turn into a single image creating a kind of mash up of the creative process. This way the process of the creation becomes part of the final piece, both becoming merged so you can’t distinguish which is which.

“At the end of the process, the work comes out as a multitude, a series of images that are both a plural form of the base state of the painting and also independent images of their own accord.” said Doria.

If small is beautiful. Then no where is that phrase more relevant than in the work of artist Linden Gledhill. Trained as a biochemist Gledhill is now a photographer who likes to take photos of the world in close-up. Like, real close-up. In a collaboration with art director Craig Ward he’s made a set of gorgeous microscopic visuals (above) set to music from Jon Hopkins’ forthcoming album Immunity, which is due for release June 3/4th on Domino Records. There will also be a record release show on June 4th at Grasslands Gallery, New York.

Gledhill’s microscope work includes experimenting with liquids and crystals to create abstract images, exposing the delicate beauty of butterflies’ wings using a macro lens, and exploring the individualism of snowflakes and their complex and intricate structures. Away from the microscope his high speed photography has seen him bounce paint off speakers and snap the frozen action of insects in flight.

For the Hopkins collaboration Gledhill created a series of 10,000 images of food dye which is in the process of crystallizing—enhanced by Hopkins’ tracks the crystals grow in sequence with the sounds, highlighting the synesthetic relationship between color and music. Working in his basement with a Canon 5D Mark II fitted onto an Olympus BH-2 research microscope, Gledhill captured the microcosmic images at a range of 200 to 1000x magnification.

For his latest album Immunity, electronic musician Jon Hopkins collaborated with biochemist turned artist Linden Gledhill and art director Craig Ward. Together Ward and Gledhill created a series of images for the album artwork which then grew to become a video, which was created in partnership with The Creators Project. The images and video were created using microscopic chemical reactions. Splashes and shards of crystalized color and foaming forms wash across the screen or appear frozen in an image. It’s a perfect fit to the sounds of Hopkins’ music and a chance for these types of biochemical reactions to aid the immersive experience of listening to an album.

For Craig Ward, working at a small scale has informed many of his previous projects and typographic work. “Fluid dynamics, inertia, combustion and particle simulations have all inspired and helped to create my often chaotic typographic explorations.” Ward says, adding: “For this project however, those tiny interactions make up the bulk of the imagery and the typography takes a back seat.”

“Jon’s music is organic and flowing, yet with a hard and rhythmic electronic edge.” Ward notes. “The idea of delving down to explore chemical interactions under a microscope felt like the perfect solve to create the album imagery and our video for The Creators Project features much of the same—various immiscible liquids, dyes and chemicals interacting underneath the watchful eye of my collaborator on the project, biochemist Linden Gledhill.”

http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/show/color-and-music-linden-gledhill-sets-microscopic-images-to-jon-hopkins-iimmunityi-remix

http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/show/the-microscopic-art-of-jon-hopkins-iimmunityi

The Emotional Computer

 

In this performance work artist Tom Estes explores the use of hand gestures and hand-over-face cues while wearing the mask of a Cyberman. Both nostalgic and futuristic, the performance provides a visual reflection on the technological advancements that are fast becoming an essential part of our civilization. 

At the McTaggart lectures in 2011, Erik Schmidt, Chief Executive of Google proposed that the next great innovations in the digital field would only come if the ‘luvvy’ and the ‘boffin’ begin to work together. Artists have long been experimenting with and working alongside different scientific fields, trying to explore the potentiality of such exchanges; indeed new and applied technologies have often been implicitly embedded in these collaborative ventures. But as well as aiding scientific discoveries, productive interactions between performance and engineering, mathematics, neuroscience, biology and computer science bring to our attention the question of how science impacts our daily lives.

In this performance work artist Tom Estes explores the use of hand gestures and hand-over-face cues while wearing the mask of a Cyberman from the British television series Dr. Who. In the television programme, Cybermen were a wholly organic species of humanoids originating on Earth’s twin planet Mondas that began to implant more and more artificial parts into their bodies as a means of self-preservation. This led to the race becoming coldly logical and calculating, with every emotion deleted from their minds.

As cybernetic technology catches up with the wild imagination of science fiction, the kind of dreams and fears anticipated in science ficition stories may also become reality. For example, today, computers can already communicate with humans. But can computers understand emotions? Can computers express emotions? Can they feel emotions? New research reports that computer will soon be able to recognize hand gestures during unvoiced speech using surface Electromyogram (sEMG). Electromyography (EMG) is a technique for evaluating and recording the signals of human or animal movement. This line of research proposes different methods for identifying facial movements and hand gestures, which can be useful for providing simple commands and control to computer. The results indicate that there are possible applications of this research include giving simple commands to computer for disabled, developing prosthetic hands and the use of classifying sEMG for Human–Computer Interaction (HCI).

Engineers building artificial intelligence, such as image-recognition apps for smartphones, are now giving their software the ability to ask humans for help. Crowdsourcing internet sites like Mechanical Turk make this possible, along with everything from translation to navigation. Likewise, how we communicate with each other has changed. The stuff we type today looks the same regardless of who we are or what mood we’re in. Helvetica, one of the most popular fonts in the world, was designed to be neutral so it could suit all kinds of contexts. So apart from the occasional transgression into the dubious world of Comic Sans, our business memos look just like our love letters, which look just like our complaints to the editor. To balance out all this sameness, people often resort to exclamation marks, ALL CAPS, smiley faces, and sometimes even Hello Kitty emoticons, which can have the effect of making us seem like a squealing teenager.

Fictional cyborgs frequently pose the question of difference between human and machine as one concerned with morality, free will, and empathy.  Fictional cyborgs are often portrayed as a synthesis of organic and synthetic parts. And in a strange twist of logic the title of the peformance work “Emoticon” is, much like a cyborg, the combination of two or more elements to create a single new element.  The word ‘emoticon’ is what is known as a ‘portmanteau‘ because it is a combination of ‘emotion’ and ‘icon’. For his performance artist Tom Estes takes this meaning forward, combining the hand to face gestures that provide visual clues to ‘emotions’ and combine them with the highly stylized or ‘iconic’ hand gestures found in Vogue or Voguing.

Relatively speaking, in terms of communication, textual ubiquity is brand new. Thanks to millions of years of evolution, we are genetically wired to respond differently to visuals than text. As far back as the days of cavemen, humans have used visuals as mechanism to suppliment storytelling. In their wall paintings, early man sought to discuss successes and failures, foibles and virtues. And long before online bulletin boards, people used to pass on their histories by word of mouth. How they communicated went beyond just the words they spoke; body language, eye contact, tone of voice and even smell added signals that gave their words a much wider and more nuanced spectrum of meaning.

Psychologist Albert Mehrabian has demonstrated that 93% of communication is non-verbal, and studies have found that our minds react differently to visual stimuli and verbal stimuli. John Berger, media theorist, writes in his book Ways of Seeing (Penguin Books, 1972),

“Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.”

Dr. Lynell Burmark, Ph.D. Associate at the Thornburg Center for Professional Development and writer of several books and papers on visual literacy, said:

“…unless our words, concepts, ideas are hooked onto an image, they will go in one ear, sail through the brain, and go out the other ear. Words are processed by our short-term memory where we can only retain about 7 bits of information (plus or minus 2). This is why, by the way, that we have 7-digit phone numbers. Images, on the other hand, go directly into long-term memory where they are indelibly etched.” Therefore, it is not surprising that it is much easier to show- for example, a circle than describe it.

Artist Tom Estes is interested in the relationship between machines and humans and in the performance work EMOTICON, Estes considers the future of biological intelligence in a world of distributed machine intelligence. In his performance Estes enacts a number of gestures that can generally be sorted into two categories. Co-speech gestures which are the idiosyncratic, often unconscious ways we move our hands as we talk (Researchers believe these gestures help us think and speak and even learn) and emblematic gestures which are the culturally codified motions that we use to supplement or substitute speech (ex. the peace sign, the thumbs-up, the raised middle finger- these gestures are symbolic, and in many cases imitative).  As with slang or new words, we tend to pick up our hand movements from the groups with whom we communicate most frequently—especially our peers. If your friends are thumb-texting at you, you will thumb-text back at them. Soon enough, the movement of your thumbs can be done without speech, and people know what it is. That’s the definition of an emblem.

In Estes’ performance, the ‘hive mind’ is referenced via the Cyberman mask from the the British science fiction television show Dr. Who. But throughout his practice Estes has created socially engaged performance work that is both participatory and immersive, while at the same time playfully messes with habitual ways of thinking. During his performance, audience members were asked to interact by taking pictures on what the artist calls a “communal camera”. The pictures were then posted on social networking sites for another, wider on-line audience. This is what Estes refers to as ‘Harnessing The Hive‘ – as the view of the central performance is mediated and digitally recorded through machines. By merging everyday technology and the absurd, Estes strives, not to break down these introverted, often self-imposed boundaries, but to look at how data flow impacts on the significance and symbolism of real-world human senses. The term ‘Harnessing The Hive’ comes from the Theory of Collective Intelligence which describes a type of shard or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making in humans and computer networks.

The term cyborg is often applied to an organism that has enhanced abilities due to technology.  The idea of the cyborg dates back as least as far as Edgar Allen Poe.  In an 1839 short story, he told the tale of a wounded war veteran whose body was rebuilt using synthetic parts, including the “handsomest pair of whiskers under the sun”. Other writers have imagined a similar future, albeit with less emphasis on facial hair. In the last few decades the image and the idea of the cyberman has evolved remarkably from an awkward, mechanical creature to a sophisticated cyborg with artificial intelligence and the potential for human-like consciousness. Indeed, even the fantasy of intelligent brain-implants may become real as researchers are currently devising electronics to revive lost memories.

By donning the mask of a Cyberman, Estes questions the relationship between humans and a new cultural mechanisms capable of eclipsing the analytical capabilities of our own species. Estes’ principle concern, then, is how our view of life is increasingly mediated by machines and the digital as a shaping condition and structuring paradox. So while machines may enable us to do things, they also do things to us and do things at us. We are being completely enveloped by abstract systems and inundated with information that we are struggling to come to terms with. So perhaps the question is not how much computers are becoming like us, but how much are we becoming like computers?

Technology has changed the way we think from the rise of modern economics― based on algorithms of marketing and fictional currencies to advanced capitalism’s smooth, self-sustaining art world as infinitely reproductive and fictional as the currencies pinging across digital networks. Value is no longer indexed to the material production of goods, or to any inherent meaning, but extracted from the digital circulation of signs.

The work on the study of the human mind begun by Sigmund Freud as a means to help humanity have been adapted to manipulate and manage the world through advertising, public relations, and politics―in turn bringing us the modern world of hyper-consumerism. Freuds legacy is an idea that would dominate politics in the age of the masses―that the dangerous desires and irrational impulses of individuals could be managed on a large scale by objects that reflected and fulfilled those desires: consumer goods.  And if technology is a drug – and it does feel like a drug – then what, precisely, are the effects as well as the side-effects?

Contemporary social critics often assert that technology has allowed for a “disciplinary” society and the pervasive inclination to observe and normalise. Cyberspace, once believed to be the dawn of a new era of communication and freedom is becoming an increasingly efficient tool of surveillance with which people have a voluntary relationship. Social networking sites like Facebook deal in self-aggrandizement and self-invention. It’s all become a fantasy expedition helmed by the ultimate avatar: a digital version of your idealized self.In “The Age of Steel”, Dr. Who is able to defeat the Cybermen by shutting down their emotional inhibitors, enabling them to “see” what had become of them. Their realisation of what they had become led them to either simply shut down out of sheer horror, or partially explode. So despite the performance’s seemingly light-hearted appearance, the artist demonstrates the serious implications posed by new technology and our physically disconnected contemporary lifestyle.

 

A Portrait of Modern Movement by Art Pendeo at The Visual Collective Space, 10 Vyner Street, 10 Vyner Street, London E2 9DG

 Curated by Sarah Gavin and Heather Firminger

Photographic images by  by Louise Lynn

China now has the world’s most powerful supercomputer

The Tianhe-2 has more than 3 million processor cores and it’s the world’s most powerful supercomputer. It can perform more than 30 quadrillion calculations per second, easily dwarfing the runner-up, an Oak Ridge National Laboratories machine known as Titan. The Oak Ridge system can do 17.59 quadrillion calculations per second, according to its most recent published benchmarks. Image: The Invisible Boy (1957)

On Monday, the people who keep track of the world’s biggest supercomputers will release the latest rankings, called the Top500 List, and the smart money is betting Tianhe-2 will be on top.

The United States, long the dominant power in supercomputing, won’t have a comparable system until around 2016, when the U.S. Department of Energy is expected to build a Tihane-2-range supercomputer called Trinity. Tihane-2 probably will beat out all U.S. systems for a few years, which is more than a loss of bragging rights for the U.S. It raises questions about whether the U.S. is investing enough in research and development to keep its supercomputing lead.

“The most important thing about this system is that it not only has a top performance, it also has a substantial investment in technology,” says Dongarra, a computer science professor with the University of Tennessee.

In fact, the Tianhe-2 is remarkably Chinese. It runs a special version of Linux called Kylin, developed by the National University of Defense Technology. It also has its own homegrown networking gear. It’s even using Chinese processors to power the supercomputer’s management tools. In fact, the only American components are the Intel microprocessors used to do the system’s mathematical calculations.

To be sure, those Intel chips are critical components, but Dongarra believes that on future supercomputers, they eventually will be replaced by Chinese chips — though he’s not sure when that will happen. “They’re developing components here that will go into a system that will ultimately be all Chinese,” he says.

It’s a remarkable success story for a country that didn’t have a single system on the 500 top-ranked supercomputers in 2001. It’s also a warning sign that the United States is losing its lead, as Europe, Japan, and China ramp up their supercomputing efforts.

“A decade ago, if it were a race, we had laps on the field,” says Daniel Reed, vice president of research and economic development at the University of Iowa. “Now the delta is a few lengths and closing.”

That matters a lot. Supercomputers are the test bed for many of the computing advances that we now see in everything, from the multicore processors in Apple’s iPhone to the futuristic networking technologies in Google’s data centers.

“Cloud data centers and [high performance computing] system are twins separated at birth,” Reed says. He should know. Four years ago, Microsoft hired him to help figure out how to build next generation systems for its data centers.

It wasn’t supposed to get this close. Five years ago, the U.S. was on track to build a supercomputer on par with the Tihane-2. The plan is still to someday build these “exascale systems” — machines that are 30 times as powerful as Tihane-2 — but by 2010 the recession intervened and funding never materialized, says Horst Simon, Deputy Laboratory Director at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “At the same time that the Chinese have made this big step forward, the American investment is stagnating,” he says.

To build these so-called exascale systems will take a coordinated effort. Many of the components are under development. Chipmakers such as Nvidia, Intel and AMD are working on new microprocessors that will be power-efficient enough to make these systems work. But the country also needs basic research to develop the networking and software tools that will power these systems.

That isn’t happening fast enough, says Dongarra. “The country’s paralyzed in terms of spending money,” he says. “Right now, we can’t get our act together in terms of the exascale plan.”

China’s Tihane-2, the world’s top supercomputer. Photo: Jack Dongarra

yee-concept-flying-car-7.jpg

Flying cars have long been a staple of futuristic fantasies, but the mainstream auto industry has made a lot more progress toward vehicles that drive themselves than those that can take to the skies.

Inventors around the world have been trying to combine the ease and utility of driving with the three-dimensional freedom of flying since the beginning of the 20th century.  The “flying car” has become a pop icon of the dream that never quite comes true.  Until now.  Terrafugia intends to be the company that catalyzes the creation of a flying car industry.

Their first product, the Transition® is a two-place, fixed wing, street legal airplane which has been internationally heralded as the “first practical flying car”.  It is designed to fit in a single car garage, be safely driven on the highway, and be flown in and out of general aviation airports.  It brings a new level of freedom, flexibility and fun to personal aviation and is available for pilots to reserve today.

The Transition® is a Proof of Process for Terrafugia’s longer-term vision for the future of personal transportation.  This vision is embodied in the TF-X™: a four-place fixed wing aircraft with electrical assist for vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL).  TF-X™ is a hybrid electric flying car designed to revolutionize personal travel with advanced technology and intelligent vehicle systems that greatly simplify safe personal flight.

Image: YEE – Concept Flying Car

Terrafugia, based in Boston, MA has already started taking orders for its FAA-approved Transition “flying car,” which takes off and lands like a plane, with wings that fold up for trips on land.

Now Terrafugia has introduced a new vehicle with significant improvements. The TF-X model takes off and lands vertically (like a helicopter) so it doesn’t need a runway.

The plug-in hybrid vehicle exists only in renderings for now, but given how far Terrafugia has taken its first model, it’s not crazy to expect to see this on our roads someday.

Some of you might be thinking of the Jetsons but this is for real! It’s the Terrafugia’s TF-X concept flying car that is also a Hybrid and a street legal plug-in. Can you imagine lifting-up from a highway during rush hour traffic and flying away?!

The next TF-X will have four-seats, collapsible wings, retractable propellers and an emergency parachute system. The best part is, it will be capable of driving and flying on its own!

TF-X™ is the practical realization of the dream of countless visions of the future; it is designed to be the flying car for all of us. In order to achieve this long-sought-after vision, Terrafugia will focus the TF-X™ program with clear goals that enhance the safety, simplicity, and convenience of personal transportation. We believe these goals are achievable today.

Terrafugia’s CEO Car Dietrich said, “This is the right time for us to begin thinking about the future”. We think he’s right and wonder what type of license we will need to drive/fly one of these. We especially can’t wait to try that “Vertical Takeoff and Landing”!

Quadcopters: Robots That Behave Like Athletes

In a robot lab at TEDGlobal, Raffaello D’Andrea demos his flying quadcopters: robots that think like athletes, solving physical problems with algorithms that help them learn. In a series of nifty demos, D’Andrea show drones that play catch, balance and make decisions together — and watch out for an I-want-this-now demo of Kinect-controlled quads.

Raffaello D’Andrea is professor of Dynamic Systems and Control, where his research focus is pushing the boundary of autonomous systems capabilities, with an emphasis on adaptation and learning. He also is technical co-founder and chief technical advisor for Kiva Systems, a Boston area high-tech company that has developed a revolutionary material handling system utilizing hundreds of autonomous mobile robots; Kiva has deployed installations worldwide, including a 1,000+ mobile robot system in the United States. He has exhibited his work at various international venues, including the Venice Biennale, Ars Electronica, the National Gallery of Canada, the Smithsonian, and the Spoleto Festival.

D’Andrea combines academics, business and the arts to explore the capabilities of autonomous systems. As part of his research as professor of dynamic systems and control at the Swiss federal institute of technology, he and his collaborators created works such as the self-destructing, self-assembling Robotic Chair, and designed a system that allowed quadrirotor drones to construct a 6-meter tower, brick by brick.

Roboticist D’Andrea explores the possibilities of autonomous technology by collaborating with artists, architects and engineers. The Flying Machine Arena he and his team created features airborne robots performing acrobatics, juggling balls and more, while the Distributed Flight Array is a flying platform consisting of multiple autonomous vehicles that are able to dock with their peers and fly in a coordinated fashion. His explorations also have practical business applications. He co-founded Kiva Systems, a robotics company that develops intelligent automated warehouse systems, and which was recently acquired by Amazon.

“Among the things D’Andrea tries to instill in students is working well in groups, which will no doubt help them become better engineers” -Cornell Chronicles.

D’Andrea is a recipient of the Invention and Entrepreneurship in Robotics and Automation Award, the United States Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering, and best paper awards from the American Automatic Control Council, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the International Federation of Automatic Control. He was the faculty advisor and system architect of the Cornell Robot Soccer Team, four-time world champions at the international RoboCup competition in Sweden, Australia, Italy, and Japan. D’Andrea has received the National Science Foundation Career Award, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Golden Owl, and several teaching awards in the area of project-based learning.

Spanning academics, business and the arts, Raffaello D’Andrea’s career is built on his ability to bridge theory and practice: He is Professor of Dynamic Systems and Control at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, where his research redefines what autonomous systems are capable of. He is also co-founder of Kiva Systems (recently acquired by Amazon), a robotics and logistics company that develops and deploys intelligent automated warehouse systems. In addition, he is an internationally-exhibited new media artist, best known for the Robotic Chair (Ars Electronica, ARCO, London Art Fair, National Gallery of Canada) and Flight Assembled Architecture (FRAC Centre, France).

If there is a difference between having ideas and knowing which ones are possible, there is an even greater difference between knowing which ideas are possible and knowing how to turn those into physical, working realities. Raff believes that this kind of knowledge comes best through hands-on experience and a deep understanding of the fundamental principles at work.

In retrospect, Raff considers himself lucky to have made it to adulthood. As a child he was fascinated by science and the physical world, and had a penchant for putting himself into his own scientific experiments. born near Venice, Italy, in 1967. He moved to Canada in 1976, where he graduated valedictorian from Anderson Collegiate in Whitby, Ontario, in 1986, and earned the Wilson Medal as the top graduating student in Engineering Science at the University of Toronto in 1991. He completed his formal studies at the California Institute of Technology where he was granted his Master of Science in 1992, and his PhD in 1997. Before moving to Switzerland, he was a professor at Cornell University from 1997 to 2007. While on leave from Cornell, from 2003 to 2007, he co-founded Kiva Systems, where he led the systems architecture, robot design, robot navigation and coordination, and control algorithms efforts. In 2007 D’Andrea was appointed professor at the ETH Zurich.

D’Andrea learned about water pressure by jumping into a swimming pool with bricks attached to his legs and a garden hose attached to his mouth; knowledge of aerodynamic stability – or lack thereof – was gained by jumping from a rooftop with a lawn umbrella; he created hydrogen gas by electrolysis, and in the process flooded his basement with chlorine gas; the laws of inductance and Faraday’s law were painfully learned through the use of batteries, transformers, and his mouth as a poor-man’s voltmeter; innumerable experiments with fireworks, flammable liquids, gunpowder, and live ammunition resulted in several unplanned haircuts, and an appreciation for the incredible amount of energy stored in chemical bonds.

Raff combined his love for science with his need to create by studying Engineering Science at the University of Toronto, where he received the Wilson Medal as the top graduating student in 1991. Then, after cycling from Vancouver to Toronto on a mountain bike, he moved west to begin graduate studies in the area of Systems and Control at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he worked on two separate projects: very theoretical research on the optimal design of systems, and very applied research on the use of pulsed air injection to eliminate instabilities in jet engines. After receiving his PhD in 1997, he joined the Cornell faculty as an assistant professor, where he was a founding member of the Systems Engineering program, and where he established robot soccer – a competition featuring fully autonomous robots – as the flagship, multidisciplinary team project. In addition to pioneering the use of semi definite programming for the design of distributed control systems, he went on to lead the Cornell Robot Soccer Team to four world championships at international RoboCup competitions in Sweden, Australia, Italy, and Japan.

While on leave from Cornell, from 2003 to 2007, he co-founded Kiva Systems, where he led the systems architecture, robot design, robot navigation and coordination, and control algorithms efforts. Kiva has deployed installations worldwide, including a 1,000+ mobile robot system in the United States. By the time Amazon acquired Kiva in May 2012 for 775M dollars, it was a 300-person company with a long customer list that included Walgreens, Staples, and Saks, with more than 30 warehouses deployed across Europe and North America.

Throughout his academic and business career, Raff has collaborated with artists, architects, and engineers to create dynamic sculptures. He has exhibited his work at various international venues, including the Venice Biennale, Ars Electronica, the Smithsonian, and the Spoleto Festival. In addition, his work is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada (Robotic Chair, Table), the FRAC Centre in France (Flight Assembled Architecture), and the Heinz Nixdorf Museum in Germany (Blind Juggler).

After being appointed professor at ETH Zurich in 2007, Raff established a research program that combined his broad interests and cemented his hands-on teaching style. His team engages in cutting edge research by designing and building creative experimental platforms that allow them to explore the fundamental principles of robotics, control, and automation.

His creations include the Flying Machine Arena, where flying robots perform aerial acrobatics, juggle balls, balance poles, and cooperate to build structures; the Distributed Flight Array, a flying platform consisting of multiple autonomous single propeller vehicles that are able to drive, dock with their peers, and fly in a coordinated fashion; The Balancing Cube, a dynamic sculpture that can balance on any of its edges or corners; Blind Juggling Machines that can juggle balls without seeing them, and without catching them. In addition, he is collaborating with scientists, engineers, and wingsuit pilots to create an actively controlled suit that will allow humans to take off and land at will, to gain altitude, even to perch, while preserving the intimacy of wingsuit flight. Playful and creative, each of these projects support his team’s natural instincts to be curious, explore and discover. And yet they also serve as real experimental platforms for developing new practical technologies.

Meiro Koizumi: Live performance at TATE Modern

Meiro Koizumi is best known for video work that combines collage and drawing, often depicting a harmonious everyday-situation that builds gradually in tension to end up out of control.

Meiro Koizumi investigates the boundaries between the private and the public, a domain of specific importance to his native Japanese culture. His videos are often based on performances and constructed scenarios where he places characters in awkward situations to focus and enlarge the moment when a situation gets out of control, becomes embarrassing or breaks social rules.

For BMW Tate Live, Meiro Koizumi will adapt his video It’s a Comedy 2012, which straddles a line between comedy and cruelty, for a live online audience. In this work a performer read from the trial judgement of Justice Radhabinod Pal, the only member of the international military tribunal for Japanese war crimes to find all defendants not guilty. During the reading of this chilling text, other performers attempted to distract the reader’s delivery using hand gestures, flowers, food and paper.

Born in 1976 in Gunma, Japan, Koizumi is an artist based in Yokohama working in video and performance. He studied at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London (1999–2002) and was awarded the Beck’s Futures 2, Student Film and Video Award (2001). Recent and other solo exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013), Art Space, Sydney (2011) and the Mori Museum, Tokyo (2009). He has participated in numerous group shows such as Future Generation Art Prize, Pinchuk Art Center, Kiev (2012), Hara Museum, Tokyo (2011), Liverpool Biennial (2010), Media City Seoul (2010), and Aichi Triennale, Japan (2010).

Koizumi won the Grand Prize at the 15th Asian Art Biennale in 2012 for his two screen video installation, Theatre Dreams of a Beautiful Afternoon. The video installation begins with passengers in a relaxed mood on a train in Tokyo, someone starts crying, and their sobs get louder and louder until the fellow passengers finally react.

 Meiro Koizumi at Tate Modern Tanks

13 June 2013, 20.00

Enter the online Live Performance Room via

www.youtube.com/user/tate/tatelive

 

DIABOLICA: The Vatican and The Venice Biennale 2013

‘Annunciation’ by Tom Estes, one of the winners of Art Venice 2013, selected by The Biennale Project for The Venice Biennale. The title of the work ‘Annunciation’ is a Biblical term which means the announcing of ‘the incarnation’ or a materialization of the unrealized in a concrete form. The work therefore relates to multiple worlds; possible, fictional or desired worlds which though different from the one we live in, directly influences our own.

The Venice Biennale (Italian: Biennale di Venezia) is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years and one of the most important dates in the contemporary art calendar. Many are exalting that this years Biennale is not about the conspicuous consumption, materialism and trophy art of recent years. However, a surprise inclusion and debut at this years Venice Biennale  may have ruffled a few feathers.

The Vatican has chosen to enter the first ever Pavilion of the Holy See, becoming one of the 88 nations to show work at this cacophonous, often irreligious festival of art from across the world. Reactions to the the pavilion have been mixed – from admiration at the Vatican’s willingness to engage with the art world to disappointment that the Holy See, historically the most important patron of art in the western world, has fielded what in some quarters is regarded as a kind of all-purpose spiritual mishmash.

Indeed in the past the Catholic Church has fiercely criticized some works of contemporary art, especially those using religious symbols — most notably Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” a photograph in which a crucifix is suspended in a vial of urine. Although Serrano’s work was created in  1987 it was recently attacked by Christian protesters in Avignon, France, after weeks of protests. And the papacy has not always had a good time at the Venice Biennale. In 1999, most strikingly, visitors were treated to the sight of a lifesize wax image of Pope John Paul II being struck down by a meteorite, by artist Maurizio Cattelan. Cattelan told Artnet News:  ”I like the idea that someone is trying to save the Pope, like an upside-down miracle, coming not from the heavens but from earth. In the end it is only a piece of wax.”

A visitor walks past pictures representing the “uncreation” theme, by Czech photographer Josef Koudelka, at the Holy See pavilion.

For some The Vatican should stick to what Catholic Italy does best – quiet churches, free to enter, where glories of Renaissance and baroque art surprise the unsuspecting visitor with feelings of awe and intimations of something beyond this frenetic life. The author of Fides et Forma, an Italian blog on art, architecture and the Catholic church, has written that the money for the pavilion (albeit privately raised) was being “spent on an absurd event” and “an insignificant mental rumination by a few individuals”. Staging the exhibition was “an act of egotism, not of love for the church and Jesus”. Under the headline “A ‘diabolical’ Biennale”, the blogger also expressed concerns that the huge main biennale exhibition – one of whose major themes is mysticism, magic and alternative belief systems – is showing tarot cards designed by the English occultist Aleister Crowley.

Interestingly, one of the most famous heretical trials actually took place in Venice when the Inquisition tried to force Veronese to change his Last Supper (Veronse just changed the title).  And I’m sure the Vatican won’t be commissioning any heretical art. Australian artist Lawrence Carroll was one of three artists invited to create work for the Vatican’s debut pavilion. While being tapped was an honor, he said, it’s all a far cry from the Vatican commissions given to masters such as Raphael and Michelangelo. ”Commission is a funny word. Commission implies they are buying the paintings, and that is not the case. I am not sure what will happen to them after,” Carroll said. “This wasn’t commissioned for the Sistine Chapel. This is temporary.” 

According to the curator of the pavilion, Micol Forti, who is also the curator of 19th-century and contemporary art in the the Vatican museums, involvement in the biennale is an opportunity for the Roman Catholic church. “It’s very important for the Holy See to be here: it’s a different situation where you can create a space for a dialogue with different ideas, different ideological thinking, different religions,” she said. “Here at the biennale, it is not important where you are from: the only important thing is that there is a place where you can speak.”

The Vatican’s presence at the Biennale is the brainchild of Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, an exuberant polymath who as president of the Pontifical Council for Culture since 2009 has tried to build bridges between the Church and contemporary culture, two worlds that have often clashed. The Catholic Church’s first pavilion at the Venice Biennale features three rooms of works that take on the themes in turn: interactive videos by the Milanese collective Studio Azzurro focus on creation; then come stark images of man’s destructiveness by Czech photographer Josef Koudelka. Paintings hinting at hope and renewal by American Lawrence Carroll complete the all-male lineup.

Installation themed “re-creation” by Australian-born American painter Lawrence Carroll at the Holy See pavilion during the 55th Venice Biennale.

Carroll, who until recently lived in Venice, said he could connect with the theme, as much of his work has dealt with giving new life to objects — a passion that goes back to his childhood when his thrifty immigrant parents would find ways to extend the use of everyday things.

Four paintings hang in one room — all large monochromatic canvases in white. One he calls “generically a sleeping painting”; it has a square space cut in the canvas where a folded canvas has been stashed, like a blanket, to be brought out at some point when needed. Another painting is embedded in a block of ice, which melts and refreezes cyclically, a process that continually modifies it.

As he made the final touches to his room of paintings, Lawrence Carroll, who is based near Rome, said: “I have an Irish mother, and I was raised a Catholic, but whether we were members of the church or not was never a question asked of any of the artists. It was not important whether we were atheists, Jewish or Catholic… I applaud Cardinal Ravasi for this – it was very difficult and controversial within the church because many people don’t want this kind of dialogue. But how beautiful to invite atheists, anyone, into a dialogue.” He said there had been no guidance or censorship from the Holy See: “I made my work in the way that I always do.”

He had no hesitation in accepting the invitation to represent the Holy See. “You can look at any national pavilion and ask whether an artist would want to show with them,” he said. “If you look at America, you can think about the wars they have been involved in, the drones … What’s more important is the bridge they are trying to create – the idea of a bridge and the extension of a hand.”

The organisers of the Holy See pavillion at TheVenice Biennale  deliberately steered clear of work that engaged directly with Catholic themes or imagery. For Cardinal Ravasi, it is very important to distinguish between religious and liturgical artwork and that which engages with spiritual ideas. The Sistine chapel is a church: it contains completely revolutionary artworks but it is still a church.

Interactive video by the Milanese collective Studio Azzurro focuses on creation

By a thoughtful use of new media, the famous Milanese group Studio Azzurro, have risen to the challenge with an interactive installation. The work shows a person at the centre and stimulates the observer into mental and physical-sensorial movement within the surrounding space and individual and collective memory.

Czech photographer Josef Koudelka presents a set of large black-and-white photographs.   The panoramic black and white photographs tell of the opposition of man to the world and to moral and natural laws, and material destruction deriving from the loss of ethical meaning.

 

Vadim Zakharov at The Russian Pavilion. Danaë, according to Greek mythology, was impregnated by the god Zeus, who appeared to her as a shower of golden rain. In the installation golden coins  rain down into a space were only female visitors are allowed in.

Micol Forti,  curator states: ”[The Holy See pavilion] is not a church; this is a completely different context. We respect this context: it is a place for international art from different contexts, philosophies, culture and religions.” The Holy See pavilion takes the first 11 chapters of Genesis as its starting point. Its title – Creation, Uncreation, Re-creation – hints at ideas “fundamental for culture and for church tradition”, according to Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the president of the pontifical council for culture and the figure behind the Holy See’s appearance at the biennale. Forti said that she and the selection committee for the pavilion “never asked the artists whether they believed or not. We started from the topic of the exhibition: for me it was important that there was intellectual honesty, a clear path in the artists’ thinking.”

The Vatican’s pavilion could well have been a political hot potato since it is  devoted to art that is inspired by the book of Genesis – and nothing splits believers from non-believers more than creationism and evolutionism. However Forti said.”It’s very important that the church was to have a relationship with the culture outside: it’s a first step towards both speaking and listening”. Indeed it’s telling that in spite of its title (‘In the Beginning’), the actual art chosen for the Vatican pavilion doesn’t seem to have any direct religious or Christian reference at all. It just seems to be loosely ‘spiritual’.  The last meaningful religious art in the west was probably in the late 17th century. Goya for example starts his career in the mid-18th century producing religious works but by the 19th century his work was entirely secular as was practically everyone else’s.

 

Andres Serrano’s 1987 work ‘Piss Christ’ was recently attacked by Christian protesters in Avignon, France, after weeks of protests.

If visitors to the Biennale want a religious moment, they do not need to see whatever contemporary take on Catholic art the Vatican has unveiled, for this city is full of Christian masterpieces that offer a contemplative sacred retreat from the hubbub of the art festival. The Encyclopedic Palace,” as the Biennale 2013 is called, has been organized by Massimiliano Gioni, the Italian director of exhibition at The New Museum in New York. Italy is a Catholic country, but it is also a modern country. So should the Biennale reflect this particular Italian belief? Isn’t it a worldwide art event where all ideas, traditions and cultures are equal? Surely there is no more reason for the Vatican to show art at the Biennale than for the Church of England to run the British Pavilion. However,  unlike other religious organisations, The Holy See is a state, recognised as such by the United Nations and in some clear ways in separate existence since the 6th century. So why would one state which has readily been conceded to have an immense artistic legacy, be excluded?

Maurizio Cattelan’s lifesize wax image of Pope John Paul II being struck down by a meteorite, was shown at The Biennale in 1999. 

We could argue all day about what art is and what it should be. While the work at the Holy See Pavilion is beautiful, it is also bland. But it is the selection of these inoffensive works and artists at the Holy See Pavilion that is pure politics. I’m personally more inclined to an 18th century definition of art as a combination of the ‘Beautiful and Sublime’. You have to have both to make good art or as the periwigged philosophers would say “Delight that is consistent with Reason” but “mingled with Horrors, and sometimes almost with Despair”. But reason like beauty just doesn’t exist beyond personal delusion. And Art is only at its best when it punctures human conceit and exposes human absurdity within an indifferent universe.

The Venice Biennale runs from 1 June to 24 November