Month: April 2010

[Image: The Cloud Project van by Zoe Papadopoulou and Cathrine Kramer].

Like a whimsical hybrid of molecular gastronomy and Glacier/Island/Storm, the Cloud Project by Zoe Papadopoulou and Cathrine Kramer, design-interaction students at London’s Royal College of Art, would use “artillery dispersed ice cream ingredients,” fired from roof-mounted cannons, “to make clouds snow ice cream.”

[Images: From the Cloud Project by Zoe Papadopoulou and Cathrine Kramer].

The van’s projectile clouds of aerosolized nanotechnology would kick-start snowflake formation high above—seemingly inspired by the cloud-producing exhalations of open-ocean algae—but they would also then scent the resulting snowfall with the aroma of fresh strawberries.

The result? Ice cream, delivered soft, cold, and delicious, falling straight from the afternoon sky. Perhaps we’ll soon all need ice cream gloves.

[Image: A how-to guide for precipitating strawberry ice cream by Zoe Papadopoulou and Cathrine Kramer].

Oddly, BLDGBLOG proposed a variant on this—scented snow—a few years back, so it should come as no surprise that I think it’s at least worth a shot. After all, what could possibly go wrong?

But it’s worth asking what other foodstuffs might also be made to precipitate directly from the summer sky—when agriculture gives up the ghost, say, or once our planetary soils have been entirely depleted, could we someday farm the sky? Aerocultural precipitation: nutrition fresh and direct from the planet’s atmosphere.

And what a strange planet it would be if this somehow sparked runaway ice cream climate change: unstoppable drifts of Chunky Monkey filling the streets of Montreal, vast glaciers of the stuff carving valleys through Antarctic plains.

(Thanks to Liam Young for the tip! Speaking of food, meanwhile, don’t miss the previous post about this coming weekend’s quarantine banquet).

[Image: O.T. (2006) by Esther Stocker, photographed by Rainer Iglar].

Here are two projects by artist Esther Stocker. They both use the black, abstract outlines of fragmented spaces to suggest much larger architectural shapes. There is the implication in each that, if only you could stand in the right place, at the right angle, all of these detached typographies of edges and corners might merge, Felice Varini-like, overlapping backward through the stages of a slow explosion, to form a building.

[Image: Abstract thought is a warm puppy (2008) by Esther Stocker; photo by Sacha Georg].

But each of these also has the optical side-effect of generating what looks like an immersive matrix of information hovering somewhere in the room in front of you, the stark contrast between black and white, and the geometric clarity of the pieces, taking on a disconcertingly digital air.

Tangentially, I’m reminded of the System Wien/”Architecture of Energy” project by Lebbeus Woods and Christoph Kumpusch, which translates a series of seemingly directionless sketches of white lines in black space—

[Image: From System Wien/”Architecture of Energy” by Lebbeus Woods and Christoph Kumpusch].

—into reflective implications of perimeters, the outermost envelopes of buildings that don’t exist, when “drawn” onto city streets with metal pipes.

[Images: System Wien by Lebbeus Woods and Christoph Kumpusch installed on the streets of its urban namesake].

This up-scaled materialization of the 2D sketch—from flat line on paper to angular filling of space, built with what Woods calls “vector rods”—for me also has the optical effect of gesturing toward something that doesn’t really seem to be there. In other words, these pipes, so reflective as to appear white, seem more like retinal tears (or even scratches in the negative), not objects that you can actually see or touch somewhere out there in the city. They are pieces of an invisible building—like fingernail clippings of space.

(Esther Stocker spotted via but does it float).

[Image: From Trophy Hunter by Bryan Christiansen, on display at the Nevada Museum of Art till May 9].

While out in Reno last month, in addition to our virtual spatial adventure relayed in the previous post, we stopped in for a few great shows at the Nevada Museum of Art.

The photos here are from Bryan Christiansen’s Trophy Hunter, which is up through May 9, in case you can stop by. The basic idea here is great: Christiansen treats “discarded household furniture that he finds in neglected urban areas” as rare animals found on a hunt.

[Image: From Trophy Hunter by Bryan Christiansen at the Nevada Museum of Art].

He skins them, mounts their resulting pelts on the wall, and then digs through the cracks, stuffing, folds, and hollows to store whatever lost objects remain.

[Image: Trophy Hunter by Bryan Christiansen at the Nevada Museum of Art].

These gutted insides thus “stand in for the trophies, antler mounts, and pelts so often prized by hunters,” the museum explains, Remote controls, stained upholstery, scattered coins, buttons, and much more are all displayed like preserved organs and prized cuts of meat, the trappings of a wild hunt as played out in the world of home furnishings.

[Images: From Trophy Hunter by Bryan Christiansen at the Nevada Museum of Art].

The furniture that is thus skinned and gutted is then reassembled into totemic animal forms, like some strange new shamanism of couches. These creatures now stand alert throughout the gallery space, their bodies ingenious reconfigurations of wooden legs, springs, and seat frames.

[Images: Trophy Hunter by Bryan Christiansen, on display at the Nevada Museum of Art].

There is something genuinely amazing, for me, in this almost animistic approach to the world of sofas, kitchen chairs, and love-seats; there is also an eye-opening candor in Christiansen’s recognition that many of these furnishings were wearing animal skin in the first place: leather couches and den chairs and more all already surfaced in the flesh of living creatures. The hunt analogy is both artistically inspired and materially appropriate. Even the case of an artificial covering—such as polyester or vinyl—being hung up like the skin of a prized animal takes on a post-natural ring that leaves me stunned.

It’s like a scene from John Carpenter’s 1984 film Starman, where Jeff Bridges brings back to life a deer that was recently shot and killed by hunters: only, in this case, artist Bryan Christiansen walks into a room and the furniture around him comes creaking back to life, broken apart and shelved in pieces, but welcomed back to the realm of animal nature.