Talk about enhancing a construction project. Google has unveiled Poetrics, an interactive art installation at the future site of their new offices in the Kings Cross neighborhood of London. Poetrics is the result of a competition run in partnership with University of the Arts London’s Central Saint Martins to create an “interactive experience for the Kings Cross community”. The installation utilizes Google's voice search technology and the Google Speech platform and features 17 LED panels that display the words spoken into various microphones placed around the building site as randomly created poetry. “We saw Poetrics as an opportunity for people to have a collective and meaningful...
“From Aaaaa! to ZZZap!” – Printing Wikipedia for art’s sake
The latest exhibition at the Denny Gallery features a sampling of Michael Mandiberg's wild project called “Print Wikipedia.” Here's the skinny: Print Wikipedia is a both a utilitarian visualization of the largest accumulation of human knowledge and a poetic gesture towards the futility of the scale of big data. Mandiberg has written software that parses the entirety of the English-language Wikipedia database and programmatically lays out thousands of volumes, complete with covers, and then uploads them for print-on-demand. Built on what is likely the largest appropriation ever made, it is also a work of found poetry that draws attention...
A library built with 50,000 free books hopes to debut at the Bay Area Book Festival
It's called Lacuna and if all goes well this spectacular homage to books, libraries and public space will be open for business at the Bay Area Book Festival that will be held in June. Commissioned by the Bay Area Book Festival and created by the FLUX Foundation Lacuna is hailed as an interactive art installation, a library, and a monument to books. It is constructed with 50,000 books that can be removed from its walls and taken home for free. Why Lacuna? Lacuna is about rekindling that sense of wonder we all have experienced with books. We want people to be enthralled and captivated...
The Ark Booktower
For the 1:1 – Architects Build Small Spaces exhibition in 2010 the Victoria & Albert Museum invited nineteen architects to submit proposals for structures that examine notions of refuge and retreat. From these nineteen, seven were selected for construction at full-scale and lucky for us one of them was The Ark Booktower by Rintala Eggertsson architects. 6,000 books fill the space and there is a reading space at the core of the 3-story tower. All the spines face in so one must enter to discover the treasures within. Introduction to the installation: As we are reaching the end of the first decade of...
Isabel Barbuzza’s Bookworks
Color Reading Color Reading detail Isabel Barbuzza was born and raised in Argentina and is currently an associate professor at the School of Art and Art History in the University of Iowa. Her interest lies "in the relationships between space, place, objects and materials in contemporary society and how through perception, thought and language we facilitate engaging with the physical world." Her work runs the gamut from artists books to sculpture to installation. Enjoy! Disasters of War based on Goya's "Disaster of War" - love poem blackened out with white numbers indicated disasters of war since Goya's time. The binding...