The future is now: Sam Songailo's short-circuits
More from this Issue
A Meme is born
Adelaide writer and artist Peter Drew looks at various examples of recent street art and the many ways it is circulated and reproduced as a meme in a wired and globally connected world. "As it turns out," he says, "memetics can be very useful in understanding the patterns of street art."
The inchworm revisited
Artist, writer and honorary visiting Professor at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at the University of Sussex in England Paul Brown sketches out the long intertwining history of the relationship between C.P. Snow's two cultures - art and science, design and mathematics, beauty and computation, and extrapolates upon Lady Ada Lovelace's famous words: "We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves."
Threads: Contemporary Textiles and the Social Fabric
Curator: Ruth McDougall with Maud Page and Russell Storer Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane 1 October 2011 – 5 February 2012
Fractal food
John Walker is the founder of Autodesk, Inc. and co-author of AutoCAD. In Fractal Food he discusses the marvel of fractal forms (complex shapes which look more or less the same at a wide variety of scale factors) as they are seen in a rather wonderful vegetable - the chou Romanesco.
Choreography of the elements: Janet Echelman
American artist Janet Echelman reshapes urban airspace with monumental, fluidly moving sculpture that responds to environmental forces including wind, water, and sunlight. The artist’s ongoing series of aerial net sculptures started in 1997 when she was in India as a Fulbright Scholar and became fascinated with the beauty and movement of traditional fishing nets. In 2011 her installation 'Tsunami 1.26' hung over the Town Hall traffic intersection in Sydney as a joint initiative of the Powerhouse Museum and Art and About Sydney.
Pipilotti Rist I Packed the Postcard in my Suitcase
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 21 December 2011 – 4 March 2012
Medi(t)ation - 2011 Asian Art Biennial
1 October 2011 – 1 January 2012 Curator: Iris Shu-Ping Huang National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts?(NTMoFA) www.asianartbiennial.org
Mesne: Pattern In(formation)
Tim Schork and Paul Nicholas founded MESNE Design Studio, an innovative architecture and urban design studio working globally as one office from London and Melbourne, to explore the relationship between architecture and divergent domains of knowledge through the use of computation in order to create innovative design strategies for novel spatial structures. They write about the back story of the project "Pricking', an interdisciplinary collaborative project between MESNE Design Studio, Ian Maxwell (supermanoeuvre) and Indae Hwang, which involves an interactive lace-making table with an infra-red based multi-touch interface.
Openwork patterns: Love Lace
Powerhouse Museum Curator of Textiles Lindie Ward discusses the groundbreaking 'Love Lace' exhibition on show at the Powerhouse until April 2013. A globally sourced series of works it showcases 130 designs for openwork structures from 20 countries.
