December 22, 2014

Amsterdam Light Festival brightens up the winter

Filed under: Art,Event by Orangemaster @ 12:57 pm

AMSLightFest2

In its third year, the Amsterdam Light Festival runs until 18 January 2015 and makes any winter night on the town that much more fun. Whether you’re a tourist or a local, a boat ride will give you a great view of some of the installations. I went on a running and walking tour where installations could be found in gardens (bike wheel dome shown here) and streets.

At 0:37 in the video, you’ll see coloured tulips coming out of a canal, the Herengracht, which have to be pumped up by passers-by using bicycle pumps. Other installations had their colours controlled by sound, motion and even Wi-Fi, making it interactive.

Amsterdam light festival 2014/15 from Jack Fisher on Vimeo.

(Link: roomed.nl)

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July 15, 2014

Groningen features fun art on a roundabout

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 11:34 am

Berlin artist Niklas Roy, who calls himself ‘an inventor of useless things’, was asked by the city of Groningen to design something for the Tschumi pavilion (designed by Swiss Bernard Tschumi in 1990) that sits on a roundabout.

The ‘Pneumatic Sponge Ball Accelerator’ is the name of the installation, which combines a gumball machine with foam-like balls, a lottery machine and a particle accelerator powered by a vacuum cleaner.

Niklas says his work was inspired by CERN laboratory’s work with particle accelerators, which he says you can’t see at all. “This is a particle accelerator for ordinary people,” he explains. Considering Tschumi is from the French speaking part of Switzerland, I wonder if Niklas made that connection on purpose.

(Links: thecreatorsproject.vice.com, www.tschumipaviljoen.org)

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May 19, 2014

Dominique Teufen’s disorienting black and white party

Filed under: Art,Photography by Branko Collin @ 11:37 am

party-dominique-steufen-jeroen-bosch

Words may not do justice to Dominique Teufen’s installation Afgelopen (‘Over’) which was exhibited at Nest in The Hague last April, but reviewers sure have tried.

Davos-born and Amsterdam-based Teufen created a room in which a party seems to have taken place, but with a twist—she removed all colours from the room. The result is disorienting as Trendbeheer noticed:

Your senses are being shut down completely. You’re walking in a subtle scenery of deafening silence. […] It is dull, powerful, a feast.

Volkskrant added (PDF):

I saw the remains of a birthday party. Splashes of wine left in glasses, cigarette butts, stale peanuts, empty beer bottles, suffering potted plants, wilted wreaths; it is the morning after—you know how it goes.

That is what I saw. This is what happened. The blood disappeared from my cheeks. A dark blanket covered my mood. I realised I couldn’t remember a single happy moment from my life. The space was dead, as dead as a doornail. […] This had been a Dementors’ birthday party.

And Metropolism said:

You don’t know what you’re seeing. For a moment you feel like something is wrong with your eyes, maybe somebody has been working with black lights. I thought I was seeing light blue and pale red as my eyes were searching desperately for colour. That’s when a circuit in my brain shorted. It could not deal with the fact that I had stepped into a black and white photo. My nose suddenly detected a filthy chemical smell that wasn’t there.

Teufen likes to work with mixed media, photography and a black & white copier, as you might have guessed. There are no plans for another exhibition of Afgelopen in the immediate future. Teufen will be exhibiting other work at the Uno Art Space in Stuttgart, Germany starting 14 June.

(Photo: Trendbeheer/Jeroen Bosch, some rights reserved)

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