Infra

Gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous. I see images like this and I want to create digital landscapes just like it.

I want to wander through the pink lusciousness.

Infra:

[Image: Men of Good Fortune, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, by Richard Mosse (2011)].

Photographer Richard Mosse, whom long-time readers might recognize from his two interviews here on BLDGBLOG, will be celebrating a new show tonight, Thursday, November 17th, at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City.

[Image: Lava Floe, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, by Richard Mosse (2011)].

Richard will be showing new work from his Infra series, taken on a series of trips to the Congo, visiting tribal reconciliation gatherings, deserted battlefields, UN-administered aid camps, active war zones, and remote mountain villages in the extraordinary rolling landscape.

[Images: (top to bottom) Flower of the Mountain, House Of Cards V, and Come Out (1966) II, all by Richard Mosse, North Kivu, Eastern Congo (2011)].

From the gallery description:

For centuries, the Congo has compelled and defied the Western imagination. Richard Mosse brings to this subject the use of a discontinued military surveillance technology, a type of color infrared film called Kodak Aerochrome. Originally developed for camouflage detection, this aerial reconnaissance film registers an invisible spectrum of infrared light, rendering the green landscape in vivid hues of lavender, crimson, and hot pink.

However, infrared film “also found civilian uses among cartographers, agronomists, hydrologists, and archaeologists,” the gallery adds, “to reveal subtle changes in the landscape”—and it was in this capacity that Richard first picked up on the conceptual power of the technique.

He began visiting the Congo, using infrared film to document the line between the living and the dead in the war-torn landscape, as living vegetation when exposed on this film appears in blood-like shades of burgundy, pink, and violet, and artificial materials—from army uniforms to discarded weapons—fall flat, appearing nearly black & white like blurs and specters in the terrain.

[Images: (top) Nowhere To Run, South Kivu, Eastern Congo (2010); (bottom) Taking Tiger Mountain, North Kivu, Eastern Congo (2011), by Richard Mosse].

However, does the surreal transformation of the landscape here make the reality they depict seem that much more dreamlike and politically unreachable—as if we’ve stumbled upon some strange and very alien race of warriors living amidst military hardware and forests the color of chewing gum, like strandees in a spectacular videogame, where pure white clouds hover above an earth the color of merlot?

Or is that part of a deliberate strategy, a comment on the seemingly impossible task of representing African conflict? Put another way, what specific interpretive role does the filmstock itself play in this scenario?

[Image: Blue Mask, Lake Kivu, Eastern Congo (2010) by Richard Mosse].

In any case, stop by the Jack Shainman Gallery tonight to talk to the artist and see the work at full scale.

(Via BLDGBLOG)

HAPTIC INTELLIGENTSIA by Studio Homunculus

Brilliant

HAPTIC INTELLIGENTSIA by Studio Homunculus:

HAPTIC INTELLIGENTSIA is a new project developed by Studio Homunculus. Consisting in a human 3D printing machine that allows the user to tactually perceive the virtual object and to directly transform it into the physical. The user can freely move the extruding gun, which is attached to a haptic interface. When the tip of the gun is moved into a surface region of the virtual object, the interface generates forces under computer control, allowing the user to feel and touch the surface of the object. See more;

Without looking at the computer screen, the only way to visualize the virtual object is to pull the trigger and extrude the material along the feedback surface. The results are always unique and different, depending on how each user responds to the machine’s guidance. The sense of touch is no longer present in our current screen-based interface. HAPTIC INTELLIGENTSIA humanizes the 3D printing process, bringing the user a tactile relationship to the virtual object.

(Via TRIANGULATION BLOG)

Brick Swarm

Interesting implications if utilized to make art

Brick Swarm:

[Image: From “Flight Assembled Architecture” by Gramazio & Kohler].

Semi-autonomous flying robots programmed by Swiss architects Gramazio & Kohler “will lift, transport and assemble 1500 polystyrene foam bricks” next month—starting 2 December 2011—at the FRAC Center in France. The result, they hope, will be a “3.5 meter wide structure.”

[Image: From “Flight Assembled Architecture” by Gramazio & Kohler].

According to the architects, this will serve as an experimental test-run for the construction of a hypothetical future megastructure—presumably requiring full-scale, autonomous, GPS-stabilized helicopters. However, I’d think that even a small insectile swarm of robot bricklayers piecing together a new low-rise condominium somewhere—its walls slowly materializing out of a cloud of rotors and drones—would be just as compelling.

(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Flying Robotic Construction Cloud and Robotism, or: The Golden Arm of Architecture).

(Via BLDGBLOG)