Body Technology Interfaces

“…Participatory installations that aim to bring critical awareness and consideration to the complex relationship between people and their technological artifacts.”

The Box Man

In a dark city, a man encounters a cardboard box. The box has a small rectangular slit that compels him to take a closer look inside. Stop-motion animation explores the anxiety of being seen, inspired by Kobo Abe’s 1974 novel, where a man decides to give up the self that he has been all his life to attain a state of blissful anonymity. He leaves his world behind and moves onto the streets of Tokyo. He puts a large box over his head, cuts a hole for his eyes.

Michael Clark’s ‘O’

Leigh Under a Skylight

Performance artist and transvestite Leigh Bowery (1961-1994) was one of Freud’s favourite models. In the photo below Leigh is posing for the 1994 “Leigh Under a Skylight”. Click image for more.

What can you bring to the table?

A project to create five chairs where each component was designed in isolation without any knowledge of what the other parts would be like. The picture below is the home page of the project site.

Holga 120

“The Holga is an inexpensive, medium format 120 film toy camera, made in China, appreciated for its low-fidelity aesthetic. The Holga’s cheap construction and simple meniscus lens often yields pictures that display vignetting, blur, light leaks, and other distortions. The camera’s quality problems have become a virtue among some photographers, with Holga photos winning awards and competitions in art and news photography….” From Wikipedia.

For the Love of God

The skull is covered with 8,601 flawless diamonds and a £50 million price tag. In the picture, the maker Damien Hirst an the skull.

Go here and here for more.

Hanging Heart

Jeff Koons’ stainless steel Hanging Heart brought a record $23.6 million at Sotheby’s evening sale of 14 November 2007 in New York. The previous record for a living artist was Damien Hirst’s Lullaby Spring which sold for $19.5 million at Sotheby’s in London in June. Hirst’s piece was a stainless steel cabinet containing 6,136 handcrafted and painted pills.

Go to Culturekiosque and here for more.

Benefits Supervisor Sleeping

At a Christie’s auction in Manhattan, Lucian Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, which depicts a 20 stone, Jobcentre worker stretched over a tatty sofa, fetched $33.64m, far exceeding the previous record set in November by Jeff Koons’ Hanging Heart sculpture that sold for $23.6 million.

More from Times Online.

Tunguska event

Tunguska Home Page, Department of Physics, University of Bologna, Italy: “On June 30th, 1908, something exploded 8 km above the Stony Tunguska river. About 2150 square kilometres of Siberian taiga were devastated and 80 millions trees were overthrown. Up to now, it is not clear whether the great explosion was due to a comet or an asteroid or something else. We are searching for an answer.”

For more information go to the International Conference “100 years since Tunguska phenomenon: Past, present and future” or click picture below for Wikipedia.