(Originally posted on Ymag)

When can you say a new era has begun? According to Michiel Schwarz and Joost Elffers – both Dutch, working in the United States – it’s when you can give it a name. And here it is, then: Sustainism, the single word representing the global trend that will eventually save the world.

In the words of its authors, Sustainism is the new Modernism is "A Cultural Manifesto for the Sustainist Era". Full of inspiring aphorisms and rich in colorful logos, the book definitely has the enthusiasm of a manifesto. Its contemporary mantras and hopeful predictions about the times to come make it a very optimistic one, too, albeit often redundant. But again, we’re talking about a manifesto.

As many of you might have guessed, the word “sustainist” echoes the need for sustainability we have so much heard about in the last years, mostly in association with architecture and design. Joost and Schwarz, though, take a step further and extend the meaning to other global phenomena, not necessarily inherent to familiar concepts like “green” and “recycling”. If the Sustainist world will be obviously reliant on recycled materials and clean energy, it will also be a media-savvy, iper-connected world.

Networking and new media are an important part of the Sustainist credo, with social media weaving a real-time global network coordinating the movement. To Elffers and Schwarz, recycling and the Internet are all part of the same open and participatory philosophy, a sort of “good wave” departing from many of the principles of Modernism – but not in total opposition with it.

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(Originally posted on Ymag)

It’s not a surprise. After information, street maps, and books, Google is at it again. This time the Mountain View giant has chosen art, and recently launched Google Art Project, an innovative platform that offers both a – still not perfect – pseudo-3D navigation of the world’s biggest art institutions and an impressively detailed view of some of the main pieces in their collection. So far the list features the MoMA, the Tate Britain, the Uffizi, the Van Gogh, and several others, but we can expect it to grow in the future.
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(Originally posted on Ymag)

Marjetica Potrč’s work stems from contemporary art in two directions. First of all, in context: the Slovenian artist is also an architect, and her art often takes place in form of building.
Her museum installations are case studies in world architecture, concerned with issues of community and sustainability. If these pieces bring diverse aesthetic styles from the urban fabric where the were born to the sanitized gallery space, her site-specific interventions transcend contemporary art’s fascination with the place, carving deeper into ground and participation.

New Orleans: Shotgun House with Rainwater-Harvesting Tank, 2008

Potrč doesn’t engage public space with big scale installations for people to behold (and maybe to socialize around), she tries to create infrastructures tapping into local natural resources, like water. Rooftop rice fields, community gardens, wind turbines. The artist wants to leave a mark deeper than a memory, actual tools activating virtuous circles in their contexts.

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(Originally posted on Ymag)

MVRDV, Silodam, Amsterdam

In his book Recombinant Urbanism, urban design scholar David Grahame Shane describes the contemporary metropolis as “a layered structure of heterotopic nodes and networks.” Shane utilizes the foucauldian concept of heterotopia in relation to the enclave and the armature. Heterotopias mix “the stasis of the enclave with the flow of an armature” and within them “the balance between these two systems is constantly changing”. Quoting Foucault, Shane describes the emergence of heterotopias as a shift towards a system of “sites” – that is “relations of proximity between points or elements” – that replaced “extension”, creating a world in which space “takes for us the form of relations between sites.” Shane’s insistence on network and sites can’t but suggest a growing isomorphism between the global city and the Internet, between its flow of people and goods and that of information. The shipping container is probably the best example to demonstrate such intersections.

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(Originally posted on Ymag)

It was not the first time I visited the town of Utrecht for the Impakt festival, and I found this edition much better than last year’s. Maybe I just got to explore it a little better, but generally I had the feeling of a more consistent experience, also involving the city on a deeper level.

Impakt’s Matrix City is a layered urban environment, where new media art augments the average living experience and video-games school us on the mechanisms of globalization and finance. As playful and didactic activities intertwine through the artworks and projects on show (also discussed in the festival’s conferences), an underlying concern with the future of cities leads us to reflect on emerging and controversial utopias.

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(Originally posted on Ymag)

(Originally posted on ymag.it, images from nathaliemiebach.com)

The emergence of infographics and information aesthetics, along with more or less augmented mapping, has been a major trend on the internet and mobile devices for a while now (by the way, check back our interview with Barcelona-based infoviz masters Bestiario.org, in case you missed it). Collapsing huge amounts of data into intricate visual interfaces, dynamic or not, is now an established design practice where the interest for actual phenomena and pure taste for the abstract image converge. But while a dynamic interface or an infographic snapshot of complex collected data live in the flat realm of printed or screen-read information – much like any other real-time-obsessed web2.0 phenomenon – some artists have been inspired to use these aesthetics in the slower-paced environment of actual physical space.

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(Originally posted on Ymag)

Photo by Erik Krikortz

Emotional Cities, by Swedish artist Erik Krikortz, is a pretty interesting project. In the past I’ve written here how the new augmented reality mobile apps can be seen as the future of psychogeography, but in this case the sheer scale of the aesthetic outcome required much bigger fundings and much higher connections to take place. Nevertheless, I think the idea is so simple and beautiful that it’s worth it.

First of all, the project is rooted on the web. By visiting and signing up on the Emotional Cities website, you can place your daily mood on a rainbow-scale, from a desperate purple to a joyful red. You also fill in the city and the country you live in, and you can see a visual statistically-calculated color average of your location over time. Is that it? No.

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(Interview originally published on Ymag. Images courtesy of Tom Tlalim unless specified otherwise. You can also read the beginning and the end of the interview.)

Two skyscrapers in De Zuidas. Photo by Nicola Bozzi

Nicola: I liked your video because it is visually simple and engaging, but at the same time dense with actuality. Both the Israeli military practices, which you also mention in your video, and the World Trade Center in Manhattan, from which the Zuidas are inspired, remind of a complex global scenario (as described by urban theorists like Saskia Sassen) where the urban sites of business and war’s battlegrounds are increasingly overlapping.As an Israeli artist, how do you feel this global dimension is affecting your work and what do you think is the best way to critically investigate it?

Tom: I often feel humbled by the flow of information in the 21st century. I used to look for an absolute truth while I was growing up in Israel, but now I don’t anymore. I accept the fact that media reality is increasingly overlapping and networked in all fields, including conflict. It becomes much more difficult to trace a clear reality in the flurry cauldron of opinions and stories. So I prefer to treat both quantitative and qualitative information as rumors or stories. But arguably politics finance and the military have always been cross-linked. In the book Lords of Finance as one example, Liaquat Ahmed describes how in 1694 a group of protestant city merchants got permission to form the Bank of England – with exclusive rights to service the government, in return for lending the government £1.2 million which saved the country from bankruptcy over a war with France. This happens throughout history. It’s just that with the volume of media flow today, the public experiences all of these complex networks as they are formed, in real time. So the data attack becomes as overwhelming as any powerful weapon. (more…)

(The interview was originally published on Ymag, where you can still read it. Images courtesy of Tom Tlalim, unless specified otherwise.)

In occasion of The Smooth and The Striated, a Gilles Deleuze-inspired art exhibition which took place at the Nieuwe Dakota and Huize Frankendael venues in Amsterdam, I had the chance to meet Israeli artist Tom Tlalim. Tlalim has been living in the Netherlands for a decade now, and recently he has been in the new business district of De Zuidas in South Amsterdam for a five months residency at the Virtueel Museum Zuidas. The works he exhibited dealt with contemporary themes of conflict, politics, war, finance, and urbanization, while maintaining simple yet technologically-layered aesthetics. The long interview that follows (and which will be published in three parts) covers a variety of issues, ranging from the intersections of art and science to public ground privatization, from the contemporary role of the artist to the Palestine/Israel conflict. All with the urban landscape of the developing business district of De Zuidas as a background.

De Zuidas. Photo by Nicola Bozzi

Nicola: First of all, before being an installation artist or a video-maker, you are a musician. While visiting the Zuidas myself, I noticed the landscape is quite desolated and dispersed and, apart from a few bars – for example near the metro stop, next to the Accenture building – the area is very quiet. How did the sound of the Zuidas inspire you?

Tom: It’s interesting that you indicate the location of the bars by their proximity to a multinational company building. This happens a lot at the Zuidas. For me it was essential to keep a critical view of the place in my work, and not to use readymades such as brand names or PR materials. I wanted to experience this environment for what it is and let my opinion on it form gradually. In such a politically charged environment, the info, news and views, however impartial they may seem, often do tend to reaffirm the brand by placing it on the map. (more…)

I just posted an article on ymag.it (former yskira.com) about District 9. You should go read it.