Head in the clouds

After months of hard work, STUDIOKCA's “Head in the Clouds” pavilion made of 53,780 reclaimed plastic water bottles finally popped up on Governors Island for the participatory art fair, and invited festival-goers to enter the pillowy structure to experience it from within.
They wanted to create a space where dreamers could dream and putting your head (and body) inside of a huge cloud felt right. You can lose yourself in the light as it shifts through the blue and white re-purposed bottles that were used to construct the exterior and interior of the cloud-shaped pavilion
300 volunteers from the Emerging NY Architects Committee, the Structural Engineers Association of NY, and the FIGMENT arts organization joined hands with STUDIOKCA’s Jason Klimoski and Lesley Chang to construct the recycled pavilion, which was the winner of this year’s “City of Dreams” design competition. STUDIOKCA sourced the thousands of bottles that make up the installation from all over the city from both individuals and businesses. While Head in the Clouds was designed to be a light-hearted, fun experience for visitors to the island, it also calls attention to the nearly 48 million plastic bottles thrown away every day in the US. In fact, STUDIOKCA took great care to size the pavilion to represent the number of plastic bottles thrown away in New York City in just one hour – about 53,000 bottles.

Head in the Clouds was built upon a 40 ft long x 18 ft wide x 15 ft high frame of curved aluminum tubes fitted together with clamps that was then covered with “pillows” made of 1 gallon water jugs woven with netting. The inner ceiling of the pavilion was lined with smaller plastic water bottles filled with blue water dyed with organic food coloring to glint and glitter in the sun. 

Lepsis Terrarium

As global populations continue to grow, our appetite for meat is likely to cause severe resource shortages in the not-so-distant future. To address the problem, a recent UN report suggested that people should be eating more insects, because they're much less harmful to the environment that traditional meat. But for that to become a reality, we'll need a way to grow and harvest insects - and that's where designer Mansour Ourasanah comes in. Ourasanah has created the Lepsis, an attractive insect breeder that could be used to grow grasshoppers in an urban home. This clever design was recently nominated for the world's largest design prize - the 2013 Index: Award.

Ourasanah collaborated with KitchenAid to develop the Lepsis, a small, decorative unit that can rest on a kitchen counter. The unit addresses the question of how to produce large amounts of protein without devoting more land space to the cultivation of insects, and it was just announced as a finalist in the INDEX awards. According to Ourasanah, 80 percent of the world population already eats insects, and introducing edible bugs to rapidly-expanding urban populations could significantly reduce the impact of meat production on the environment.

The Lepsis is a vessel that can be used to grow insects for food. The product consists of four individual units that are each designed to breed, grow, harvest and kill grasshoppers, and they combine to form a decorative kitchen product. “In order to move toward a sustainable future, we must do away with our culinary hangups and redefine the paradigm of food,” explains Ourasanah. Even though growing and eating insects is pretty repulsive to many people in the developed world, an attractive product like the Lepsis could help people to warm to the idea.

These portraits of electronic musicians and DJs by Spanish illustrator and designer Alex Trochut show one image during the day and another at night
Alex Trochut screenprinted two different images onto the same surface using black and phosphorescent ink in a checkerboard grid of tiny squares. When seen in the light the portrait printed in black is visible, but if viewed in the dark a different image suddenly appears.

Trochut told Dezeen that he developed the technique first and then decided on a suitable subject matter: "I thought that if I could show two different images it made sense to work on the idea of there being two sides to someone's personality."

The portraits reflect the notion that the musicians and DJs depicted, including Four Tet, Acid Pauli and Damian Lazarus, transform and come alive at night.

Binary Prints was first shown earlier this month at Sónar+D, the innovation and technology area at the Sónar arts and music festival in Barcelona, where many of the musicians have previously played.

Trochut initially used the idea of a camouflaged image for the cover of his monograph More is More, which featured a hidden pattern printed in glow-in-the-dark ink.

Recently launched at Sonar Music Festival, Binary Prints by illustrator and designer Alex Trochut, is an ingenious technique that he's invented to allow him to illustrate two completely different images on the same surface, one visible by day the other only visible by night.

For his first series Trochut has teamed up with some of the biggest names in electronic music such as James Murphy, Four Tet, Damian Lazarus, John Talabot and many more to create a series of portraits that explore the people behind the music.

These nocturnal images wake up when the lights go out, just as DJs come alive at night, they glow in the dark to reveal a nocturnal persona, an icon of music and sound.

The inaugural exhibition of Binary Prints will present this first series of DJ portraits, which will continuously grow as more artists are added and the show continues to tour music festivals and galleries around the world.

Cortex 3D-printed cast

3D-printed casts for fractured bones could replace the usual bulky, itchy and smelly plaster or fibreglass ones in this conceptual project by Victoria University of Wellington graduate Jake Evill.

The prototype Cortex cast is lightweight, ventilated, washable and thin enough to fit under a shirt sleeve.

A patient would have the bones x-rayed and the outside of the limb 3D-scanned. Computer software would then determine the optimum bespoke shape, with denser support focussed around the fracture itself.

The polyamide pieces would be printed on-site and clip into place with fastenings that can't be undone until the healing process is complete, when they would be taken off with tools at the hospital as normal. Unlike current casts, the materials could then be recycled.

At the moment, 3D printing of the cast takes around three hours whereas a plaster cast is three to nine minutes, but requires 24-72 hours to be fully set," says the designer. "With the improvement of 3D printing, we could see a big reduction in the time it takes to print in the future.

After many centuries of splints and cumbersome plaster casts that have been the itchy and smelly bane of millions of children, adults and the aged alike, the world over, at last fracture support has been brought into the twenty-first century.

The Cortex exoskeletal cast provides a highly technical and trauma-zone-localised support system that is fully ventilated, super light, shower friendly, hygienic, recyclable and stylish.

The Cortex cast utilises the x-ray and 3D scan of a patient with a fracture and generates a 3D model in relation to the point of fracture.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a 2 year old learning to climb your first step, or a veteran architect conceptualizing a monolithic spiral, we’re all fascinated with stairs. It seems so obvious, most of us tread on them everyday, but when creative minds shed a new perspective on the common architectural necessity, that regular staircase can become visual gold. Architects Sergey Mishin and Katya Larina of Studio Mishin teamed up with Daniel Llofriu Pou and Alberto Arguimbau of Arup to build a beautifully illuminated, perforated copper staircase for Michin’s new Villa Mallorca.
In the early months of 2010, Studio Mishin contacted the technical architects and engineers at Arup. At this point the villa was largely complete but still needed a central staircase. Spanning three floors, the architect’s vision consisted of an imposing staircase that lies at the central heart of the building and creates a visual link by the use of perforated copper panels throughout the interior and exterior of the building.
Specialist advice was necessary to finish the detail design, engineering and construction of this unique proposal. Arup´s Materials Consulting and Lighting Design´s teams in Berlin began to work on the practicality of realizing and building the copper cladding. The detailed design of the complex structure is based on a limited set of panel types and interface geometries to allow for a consistent appearance and an efficient procurement. The installation is sequenced in such a way that the structural panels interlock with each other and a delicate substructure to minimize visible connections.
The lighting design accentuates the geometry of the perforations of the copper panels through backlighting, with dramatic lighting from above to reveal the texture and material properties of the copper and laminated wood. An innovative approach to both maintenance and construction for the lighting elements was also a critical element of the success of the project. The result of such a detailed process is a clad with almost 200m² of composite panel, including treated copper, bonded and structural timber with approximately 12,000 perforations made by a CNC water jet cutter.

Enzo Mari

"I am convinced," writes Enzo Mari at the opening of his autobiography, 25 ways to drive a nail , "that design corresponds to a deep human instinct like survival, hunger, sex. We are a species that wants to change its environment." More than the sequence of events in Mari's life, which is perhaps the book's pretext rather than its end, the driving force of 25 ways ... is the desire to express this principle through theoretical discussions and concrete examples; the desire, so to speak, to manifest the bridge linking design to human life.
The book, edited by Barbara Casavecchia, follows the life of Enzo Mari almost chronologically and is grouped around a few core themes that also provide reference points for his work as a designer: from his apprenticeship when, as a young and inexperienced 'gofer,' he alternates his first design work with odd jobs and even a little fraud as a street vendor, to his relationship with art; from his commitment to centering his work on labor conditions—one of Mari's cornerstones—to the disappointment of seeing his principles ignored or perverted by successive generations. From a purely narrative point of view, the story is captivating. It is, after all, the story of an incredibly talented visionary, whose passion and curiosity lead him through the birth and explosion of one of the core disciplines of the 20th century (in terms of its intellectual charge, in terms of its innovation, in terms of its economic power)—design.

Computer-Generated Portraits Created From Images Of The Universe

The Barcelona-based artist's latest project sees him creating a series of portraits based around the concept of nucleosynthesis or "the process of creation of new atomic nuclei from pre-existing matter that takes place at cosmic scale". To do this he'll be sourcing images from the Hubble Space Telescope and using them to generate images using custom software from user-submitted pictures, resulting in some abstract portraits dotted with stars, galaxies, cosmic dust, and other space matter.

The artist sees the project as an experiment, one in which he hopes to create as many portraits as possible over a certain time period (it started on 18th of June 2013 and seems to be still going) using an automated process to aid him. Anyone can submit a portrait online and Albiac will create three portraits, what he calls "generative collages", from the submission mixed with images from Hubble.

The project, as well as creating unusual and totally cosmic portraits of people, aims to look at how technology can help an artist to realise and create more artworks than they could do on their own. He explains on the project's web page:

Life is finite. Creativity isn't. An artist has the potential to create infinite artworks but only some of them will see the light due to the constraint of time. What if we use technology to outsource the creation of art so more of these potential artworks are finally created? Modelling artistic decisions into software would provide a generative assistant that could even survive an artist in the creation of meaningful works of visual art. This project is a first experiment around this concept.

Albiac has been exploring the idea of generative portraits for some time, creating still images of his subjects fromrandomized newspaper clippings, before moving on to moving image portraits where he used online videos to generate a video painting of the Queen of England. And now he's decided to give technology even more control. It's not unusual for artists to outsource their work, artists like Damien Hirst and Mark Wallinger outsource the creation of their art to project managers and teams of young artists. Albiac is outsourcing it to software.