Today, I went to the first day of South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW). Today's keynote was by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator at the MoMA.
First she equated Design with quality in all things, which is a perfectly valid definition of Design. Her historical root was a MoMA show from the 1920s that put ball bearings and airplane props on pestles as a way to made the ordinary new again, a way to showcase how well-designed common-place things can be. She then showed about twenty artists whose work had been showcased in the last five years. Nothing was earlier than 2010. Repeatedly she differentiated herself from Scientists, saying that she did not know "anything" about quantum mechanics yet took inspiration from it. And that inspiration lead her to explore "entanglements" and "super-position" as concepts in art. The works she showed started with architecture. She seemed very impressed (as The Contemporary here in Austin also does) with "styrofoam" grown from mushrooms - other building materials created by artists. She did a short bit about art that uses cultural context, showed some pottery repaired with chewing gum. Talked a bit about the use and construction of buildings for performance art, and segued into the second half of her presentation. The second-half was all about bio-art. She kept making reference back to her quantum mechanics inspiration, but everything she showed was artworks that integrated other organisms - photographs, living food, terrariums, sustainability projects, semi-life or things not quite alive. She ended by telling a story of having to kill a leather-making, semi-living machine because it had grown too large. She had talked about growth a few times. Life could not be made top-down, she said, it had to be grown. Bz -- -˜+*oˆ‰÷——‹˙Ê*+-˜+*oˆ‰÷——‹˙Ê*+-˜+*oˆ‰÷——‹˙Ê*+- http://bishopZ.com -˜+*oˆ‰÷——‹˙Ê*+-˜+*oˆ‰÷——‹˙Ê*+-˜+*oˆ‰÷——‹˙Ê*+- ==\\___//== ===\\_//=== ====\_/==== =====_=====[ \_____________end.transmission______________ _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
