Category Archives: NYC

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Flash:Light

Flash:Light NYCIf you’re in NYC and you haven’t made your Saturday night plans yet, this definitely seems like the thing to do tonight. As part of the Festival of Ideas for the New City, Audemars Piguet presents Flash:Light, a series of projection mapping events around the New Museum, including on the New Museum itself. There are an impressive amount of artists participating in the project including Daniel Arsham (of recent Dig and Pixel Clouds fame), Acconci Studio, Jon Kessler, and about fifty more! There’s more information here but it looks like the three main events are taking place at the New Museum, St. Patrick’s Basilica on Mott St. and on the street itself on Mulberry Street between Prince and Houston. It all apparently starts at 8pm and continues past midnight.

Check it out here.

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Pop-Up Magazine

Pop-Up Magazine at Skirball Center, NYCIf you’re in NYC next week, this event looks interesting. Apparently it’s a big hit in San Francisco. From their website:

Pop-Up Magazine is the world’s first live magazine, created for a stage, a screen, and a live audience. Nothing will arrive in your mailbox; no content will go online. An issue exists for one night, in one place. Pop-Up showcases the country’s most interesting writers, documentary filmmakers, photographers, and radio producers, together, on stage, sharing short moments of unseen, unheard work. Books, films, journalism, photography, and radio documentaries in progress. Obsessions and digressions. Outtakes, arguments, and live interviews.

This live issue includes filmmaker Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side), author Nicholas Dawidoff, This American Life contributor Starlee Kine, and a host of other people including New Yorker, ESPN, and New York Times writers to name a few. Looks like tickets are going fast. Info and tickets here.

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NYC Art Installation Lobbies

NYC Lobbies with Art InstallationsOne of the nice aspects of NYC is that there are always new, or not-so-new, things to discover. Among them, are the various art installations in many an office building lobby. Some are permanent, some rotate. Some are by famous artists and others, less famous. All, when in the neighborhood, are worth popping in to see. Here is a sampling:

From top to bottom, row by row:
James Turrell; 3-dimensional Light sculpture; CIT Group Building, 42nd and 5th Avenue; KPF Architects.

Video Walls at IAC Building. World’s largest hi-resolution video wall, 120 ft by 11ft high. Alternating usage; West Chelsea; Gehry Partners Architect

Jenny Holzer; A continuous stream of prose and poetry about the history of New York City scrolls across glowing, 65-ft-wide, 14-ft-high wall; 7 World Trade Center; 250 Greenwich St; SOM Architects

Interactive Wall at Sloan-Kettering; the large lobby wall has a perforated appearance that transitions from regular on the front plane to apparently random on the back plane. The openings are determined by an array of eye-level viewpoints that cluster in programmatic hot spots throughout the lobby; 1275 York Ave.: LTL Architects

Rotating Art Installations in the Lever House lobby. A few examples shown (l to r): most recently Rachel Feinstein. Also Barbara Kruger, Tara Donovan. You can see other past exhibits here. SOM Architects.

Moveable Type by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen, is a digital installation that reflects the movement of news in the New York Times building lobby. It pulls sentences and phrases from the newspaper’s databases, projects them onto a grid of small screens, and orchestrates the material into a series of changing sequences. Renzo Piano Architect.

Photo credits: MSK Wall – Halkin Photography; Moveable Type – Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
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Alexandre Arrechea

Alexandre Arrechea_Orange Tree
“Orange Tree is a 20 foot steel sculpture created by Cuban born artist Alexandre Arrechea, with multi-limbed basketball hoop “branches” surrounded by scattered basketballs to mimic fallen fruit. Orange Tree shifts familiar structures to engage viewers’ perceptions of form and function, while raising questions about the role of street sports in urban culture.”

Orange Tree is on exhibit at the Bronx Museum through June 6, one of several reasons I’m thinking of checking out the museum soon.

You can see more of Arrechea’s very interesting and varied work at his site.

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Festival of Ideas for the New City

The Festival of Ideas for the New CityWe previously posted about the upcoming Festival of Ideas for the New City, here in NYC, from May 4-8, 2011, but now there seems to be much more information. The Festival is a “major new collaborative intitiative in New York involving scores of Downtown organizations, from universities to arts institutions and community groups, working together to effect change… It will harness the power of the creative community to imagine the future city and explore the ideas destined to shape it. It will take place in multiple venues Downtown and is organized around three central programs: a conference of symposia; an innovative StreetFest along the Bowery; and over one hundred independent projects and public events.” A small sampling of events and projects are pictured above (click image to see larger.)

Visit the Festival site for complete information on the conference, projects and street festival as well as for tickets.

via TheScout

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Ryoji Ikeda: The Transfinite

Ryoji Ikeda_The Transfinite_Park Ave ArmoryRyoji Ikeda, a Japanese sound and visual artist who lives and works in Paris, will soon unveil The Transfinite; “an immersive sonic and visual environment that subsumes visitors within abstract expressions of digital information and binary code. Breathtakingly provocative black and white projections keyed to a tightly synchronized musical composition explore how data defines the world we live in. Known for large-scale installations and public artworks around the world that push the limits of digital technology, Ikeda creates his most ambitious installation to date with The Transfinite.”

“In choreographing vast amounts of digital information, Ikeda conjures up a transformative environment in which visitors confront data on a scale that defies comprehension, experiencing the infinite. This installation includes strobe effects and high volume.”

The Transfinite opens May 20th and runs through June 11th 2011,  here in NYC at the Park Avenue Armory.  Tickets here.

Looking forward to checking it out!

UPDATE: See our follow-up post here.

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Q Kyu Seop Lee: Pizza Box Side Table

Q Kyu Seop Lee_Pizza Box Table_Pratt“Pratt Industrial Design senior Q Kyu Seop Lee combines the work of Isamu Noguchi with a familiar object most students appreciate and love, a pizza box. The result embodies the iconic simplicity of Noguchi’s coffee tables and maintains the accessibility and youthful quality associated with the pizza box. Q’s side table is perfectly crafted to provide easy assemblage without any tools, and comes apart to fit inside the box of the top.” Part of the Pratt Show 2011.

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Daniel Arsham: Pixel Clouds

Daniel Arsham Cloud SculpturesInspired by photos of clouds that he took with his iPhone and blew up until pixelated, Brooklyn based artist Daniel Arsham used a total of 21,000 ping pong balls (hand-dipped in paint) to recreate the different shades of pixelated color and constructed these 10 to 15 ft cloud sculptures. Daniel Arsham is co-founder of Snarkitecture and is presently finishing up his Dig installation in New York City.

via fubiz

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Yotel

Yotel Pods and HotelI’ve been intrigued by Yotel since my first sighting two years ago in the Amsterdam airport. Fast forward to last weekend when I noticed a new Yotel façade with its 70s-style signage near Times Square, here in NYC. Turns out Yotel has three cabin-style airport hotels with cabins ranging in size from 75 sq.ft to 108 sq.ft and each comes equipped with wireless internet, flatscreen tv, fold-out desk, en-suite bathroom with shower and 24-hour room service. Oh, and a bed! All for about $50 for the first 4 hours and $12/hr for each additional hour for a standard cabin. In addition to the one in Amsterdam, there is one at Gatwick and Heathrow airports, in London.

The NYC Yotel is the first non-airport site, with larger “cabins” at 170 sq.ft and $149 per night. There will be an airport-style self check-in and a robot (Yobot) to store left luggage. Here’s a video tour:

You can learn more at Yotel’s site.

via Spot Cool Stuff

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Haroshi: Future Primitive

Haroshi_Jonathan Levine Gallery“Haroshi makes his [three-dimensional] art pieces recycling old used skateboards. His creations are born through styles such as wooden mosaic, dots, and pixels; where each element, either cut out in different shapes or kept in their original form, are connected in different styles, and shaven into the form of the final art piece.”

His upcoming solo exhibition at Jonathan LeVine Gallery in NYC opens April 16th and runs through May 14, 2011.

via MyModernMet

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City of Dreams Pavilion: Burble Bup

Burble Bup_Bitterang Governor's IslandThe winner of this year’s two-round City of Dreams Pavilion competition, hosted by Figment, ENYA, and SEAoNY, is Bitterang and their Burble Bup entry. Entrants were asked to imagine a socially and ecologically-sustainable public meeting space.

Burble Bup will be constructed on Governor’s Island for an early-June opening date. Bitterang “strives to bring happiness and pleasure into the built world by referencing that pleasurable world which surrounds us. Our work explores multiple themes including pleasure, frothiness, biological matter, animal posturing, babies, sculpture and coloration all unified through bel composto.” Burble Bup certainly fits the bill with its biological quality.

According to Figment: “…The recyclability of the project occurs at various levels, some materials are recycled into other projects or reused, while others are toys to be enjoyed by children. None the less, all materials chosen will enhance our surroundings after their deployment in our pavilion.”

The other four finalists can be seen on Figment’s site, as well.

via architizer

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Festival of Ideas

“The Festival of Ideas for the New City, May 4-8, 2011, is a major new collaborative initiative in New York involving scores of Downtown organizations, from universities to arts institutions and community groups, working together to affect change. A first for New York, the Festival will harness the power of the creative community to imagine the future city and explore the ideas destined to shape it. It will take place in multiple venues Downtown and is organized around three central programs: a three-day slate of symposia; an innovative StreetFest along the Bowery; and over eighty independent projects and public events. The Festival will serve as a platform for artists, writers, architects, engineers, designers, urban farmers, planners, and thought leaders to exchange ideas, propose solutions, and invite the public to participate.”

Worth checking out, I think. More information here.

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Aakash Nihalani

Aakash NihalaniAakash Nihalani is an artist whose work consists mostly of isometric rectangles and squares made from fluorescent tape. He places these graphics around New York to “highlight the unexpected contours and elegant geometry of the city itself…For however briefly, I am trying to offer people a chance to step into a different New York than they are used to seeing…”   via happymundane

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Open House: Droog

Open House_Droog Event LogoSounds interesting. I’m in.

“Open house is a project by Droog led by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Open house will be presented in a one-day event on Saturday, April 23rd, 2011. The event will be kicked-off with a symposium at Studio-X New York introduced and moderated by Mark Wasiuta of Columbia University, followed by a bus trip to Levittown, where visitors can view and participate in several house installations in the neighborhood, designed and executed by architects, designers and artists in collaboration with the homeowners. One of the installations will showcase concepts for future open houses, with proposals for new housing configurations and regulatory modifications.”

The event is free but there is an optional transportation fee from Studio-X to Levittown.

UPDATE: POST-VISIT FOLLOW UP HERE.

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Geeky by Nature

Hellicar & Lewis_Geeky by NatureWe attended the first part of Geeky by Nature yesterday here in NYC, a conference “exploring the best in art, code & design.” The day was filled with great presentations, the highlights for us being Joshua Hirsch from Big Spaceship, Hillman Curtis and his upcoming Stefan Sagmeister film, and Joshua Davis including his interactive graphics for IBM’s Watson. But, our absolute favorite talk was given by Hellicar & Lewis. Apart from being incredibly smart and talented, this team of UK interaction designers (Pete Hellicar and Joel Gethin Lewis) is witty, appealing, and immensely inspiring. The images above are stills from work on their site. I highly recommend that you look at some of their videos to get a taste of what they do. Brilliant!

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Dig: Installation and Performance

Dig_Snarkitecture at Storefront for Art and Architecture“Dig is an installation and performance by Daniel Arsham/Snarkitecture
at Storefront for Art and Architecture and made possible by OHWOW that explores the architecture of excavation.

Installation. The gallery will be filled almost in its totality with EPS architectural foam, then excavated with simple tools to transform the material into an unexpected cavern. (March 29 – April 4)

Performance. In the final stage, Arsham/Snarkitecture will both create and inhabit Dig for the duration of the installation (April 23). There will be excursions by invitation only, but people will be able to view the performance from the street. More details here.  via Creative Everyone