That said, The Plant in Chicago is probably the closest working model I’ve seen to what all these idealistic sustainable buildings are hoping to achieve. Located in a huge 93,500 square foot former slaughter house, like-minded tenants rent spaces for things like hydrophonic gardens, tilapia hatcheries, Kombucha breweries, mushroom gardens, bakeries, and more.  The Plant aims to have net-zero waste. For example, waste from the fish might go to help fertilize the mushrooms, and the mushrooms would go into the Kombucha. They’re actually hoping to convert waste ‘biogas’ into energy through the help of a few machines, and eventually be off the power grid entirely.

If I lived anywhere near Chicago, I’d be tempted to take one of their internship positions! I’m really excited to see how this project develops, and pay it a visit over the next few years!

Very well written piece on the banned American Apparel ads, how they are visually read as amateurish and in comparison to ‘professional’ ad photography, and the implications of this on the portrayal of women in the media.

Things like this just remind me of looking through books of playground equipment and planning my dream playground, much like lots of girls plan their dream weddings or dream houses…

I will have a slide in my house, someday. Also a rope bridge or a ball pit, if I can get away with it. And a grove of weeping European beech trees so I can have a literal jungle gym…

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Danish firm MONSTRUM creates playgrounds with giant spiders, fruit, ships, snakes, whales, wobbly house–you name it. I particularly like the organic shape of the snakes, the colors, the craftsmanship of the wood, and how they keep the theme going on the inside of the structures as well (as in the ceiling of the castle, or belly of the whale.)

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(Reblogged from thisiscolossal)

Aerial is a new site-specific installation by Baptiste Debombourg at an old Benedictine monastery called Brauweiler Abbey near Cologne, Germany. Debombourg used numerous sheets of shattered laminate glass to mimic a frothy flood of water rushing into a room. Remarkably beautiful work.

Guess I’ll need to start writing them somewhere bigger!

First–A holdover from Easter. An egg used as a pinhole camera!

More can be read about the Pinegg here, but basically all you need to do is dremel a hole into an egg, use some liquid emulsion, and fit an aperture over it (I LOVE how historical the brass fitting looks on that egg), and then just expose and use regular darkroom chemicals to process it. Apparently the egg is rather fragile and translucent, so extra care and some heavy black fabric might be a good idea. The resulting image is in negative on the back of the egg, and slightly distorted. I love the precious quality of the resulting image, and how it immediately becomes an object. Can you imagine a whole show of these? Just eggs sitting on a picture rail all the way around a room, with delicate little images inside? Perfect.

This was another case of haunting sound leading me into a room. Well, haunting sound and a darkened enclosed space–I have to admit I’m drawn a bit more towards the video installations than I used to be since I’m working in it more closely. I wasn’t really prepared for what I saw when I rounded the corner though. The image below probably shows the set-up the best, but in reality it was dark, with creepy music and the clickwhirr of the film projector, and a small square of light that was sometimes readable as a filmed couple darted about the room. Mauricio Ancalmo’s A Lover’s Discourse was so beautiful and haunting to behold, and seemed to technologically clever yet lo-fi. I may or may not have drawn back into one corner of the room and recorded a clip with my iPad despite the warnings not to, but luckily someone else has posted a clip with about as good quality on youtube.

It worked liked this: a large, cumbersome, apparently old projector was suspended from the ceiling like a pendulum. It was connected by some sort of spring or coil to a turntable underneath it, which also held a record to play the music. Speakers and various electrical/audio paraphernalia were spread about in a ring. The projector wound up, and spun quickly, playing the music at near the correct RPM and making following the picture very difficult and dizzy-making. As it slowed down the twist, the film became more understandable as a clip of a vintage woman or couple, and the audio drew out to fairly terrifying slowed sounds. Then, as it reached the apex of the reverse twist, it unwound and started over. Definitely a steampunk, mad-scientist feel. I think the audio (record and projector click) really made it for me.

The girls were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up. It was so interesting to hear their hopes and dreams while looking at these large-scale images where they appear so proud. I found myself being proud of them as a woman, as they were just young Indian girls so sure they were going to be doctors or lawyers or artists; exactly what they wanted. After they said what they were going to be, the prompter’s voice asks them what if they can’t be that? Some give alternate careers, but one little girl (who I remember as being the smallest) just answers with, “Nothing.” If she can’t be what she wants, she’ll just be nothing. But it’s not defiant–her voice is just… it just is. And then the audio ends. Such a powerful and haunting piece.

Another highlight of the SFMOMA was Rineke Dijkstra’s retrospective. Honestly, it was amazing, and completely changed how I viewed her work. I had at been at least somewhat familiar with her work for a while, mostly the forlorn and awkward swimmers, but that was about it. I hadn’t ever given her much thought as forlorn and awkward swimmers don’t intrigue me so much, but seeing those in conjunction with all her other work, the flow of the show, the size and quality of the prints, the installation choices and way the videos were set up…it was great. I’m assuming that’s the goal of a retrospective; to be all encompassing, to show progression and evolution and relationships, but this was done exceptionally well. Now I know about the girl she photographed each year from the time she was a small child to the time she had her own child, the bullfighters in their bloody and torn elaborate jackets, the mothers clutching their newborns, and oh, all the late night dancing club scenes.

At first, it was bizarre to be examining the beauty of exhausted bullfighters and hear thumping bass from the vicinity. It’s an art museum, sure, but in the context of what I’d seen so far I was very confused. Spaced through the show were a few darkened rooms, with techno dance music at a slightly-sub-club level, and a projection of a sole teenager against a white background, dancing. The removal of the person from the club surroundings and placed on a white background, and then shown again in a gallery (in a dark room with multiple people in dance music watching) reversed the roles in such an interesting way. I found myself standing for longer than expected, watching the projected person dancing, and watching my peers in the gallery. There was also another multi-channel video near the end of the exhibit with middle school aged children trying to (critique?) figure out a painting, which from what I can tell was Picasso’s Weeping Woman. The video pans around, focusing on different students and zooming in and out, but not really at any particular times. Hearing their ideas, the way they project onto the painting, and the way their ideas evolved was intriguing. It was possible to learn about their personalities just from that–one little boy’s answers all seemed to revolve around money, while another girl’s all had to do with feeling like an outsider. At one point, a boy in the group posits that maybe Picasso just wanted to paint a picture of a woman crying and there wasn’t anything more to it than that. At that point, everyone in the room watching the video laughed–it was clear we were all there from SPE.

Exploded Views, by Jim Campbell, uses a 3D structure of glowing orbs as pixels. They flash on or off, effectively making a crude black and white image. SFMOMA’s write-up says the purpose of Exploded Views is to “investigate the nuances of perception,” which I think (if my interaction is any indication) it’s doing quite successfully and beautifully. I took my own cell phone video of it (a painful 175px by something equally dismal) and thus have decided to borrow this one from Vimeo. Though this video shows people, the one I saw included cars–it was amazing, however, to see how much better I could tell the video was of cars when viewing it on my tiny screen. The nuances of perception indeed!