Yayoi Kusama

I was in Sydney last week and went to the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I entered a surreal world filled with organic shapes and lots of polka dots. Yayoi makes large paintings, soft sculptures and environmental sculptures. As a child, she suffered from hallucinations and began seeing dots – lots of dots. They have become a lifelong obsession.

Art makes me think in different ways; it gives me the ability to view the world through someone else’s gaze. I assume this is the case for most people. What I got from Yayoi’s vision was a sense of boundlessness – freedom from space, time, gender, location & ‘normality’.

Entering her Infinity Room initially takes your breath away. You walk through a door into a room. You know you are in a tiny room, but you feel suspended in a space that has no walls, floor or ceiling. Through lights and mirrors, I could instantly suspend believe and simply float in infinity. You become a small part of this silent, colourful, magical, timeless cosmos.

It’s an exhibition I wanted to immediately revisit and explore in greater depth. I returned to Melbourne without doing so. Hopefully I’ll get back to Sydney before the exhibition closes in June.

Yayoi Kusama Dots Obsession

Where everyone’s seen a Godard film

Yesterday I attended a one day forum “New Directions in Film Research“, run by Cinema Studies at La Trobe University, Melbourne. I thought it time to re-engage with ‘all things cinema’ and start to flesh out ideas for my Honours project for 2009. New Directions sounded ideal!

Although I felt rather intimidated by the presence of a battalion of erudite cinema academics, of which I am patently not, I’m pleased I attended. There were three speakers, but my main reason to attend was to hear Deb Verhoeven speaking about how research technologies, new to Screen Studies, can contribute to and expand the type of discovery and articulation within the discipline. Her particular focus, in this instance, was on the use of databases and maps in key screen research projects. And I thought I was the only one interested in mapping cinema…go figure!

Deb spoke about her project ‘Greek and Italian Cinemas in Melbourne’ and the cultural mapping it involved. Her project examined audience experiences and business practices of the independent Greek and Italian cinema chains that operated in Melbourne, Australia from the late 1950s until the late 1970s. This project raises questions about National cinemas in relation to diasporic communities, itinerant cinema and indeed, cinema’s place within the wider social milieu.

What was fascinating was the way Deb has been working with geo-spacial scientists to create maps and databases to track Greek and Italian cinema in Melbourne. This included population location (and movement over time), cinemas opened and closed and exactly where Italian and Greek films were distributed throughout Australia. These visualisations provided a lot of information in a short period of time. Now I just need to focus on narrowing my field of exploration.

River of words

We live in a society of cut-up words; I’m interested in the aesthetics of data visualization and what we can make of fragments…made even more interesting when combined with social networking and powerful databases. Check out:

WeFeelFine. Pretty? Useless? Pretty useless? Read more about it at Museum 2.0.

Moveable Type. An installation located in the lobby of The New York Times building. A cool way to regurgitate words.

San Francisco Emotion Map

This is what I like about the world today. A lot of information presented in one layer…but on closer inspection is densely multi-layered. Simple complexity. This biomap was created by Christian Nold. Somehow I want to incorporate these ideas into my Honours project. I like the idea of ‘tracking’ home movies to see what type of pattern takes shape and meaning is revealed.

Christian Nold is the creator of this biomap.

The San Francisco Emotion Map is the culmination of Christian Nold’s five-week residency and participatory art project that involved a total of 98 participants exploring San Francisco’s Mission District neighborhood using the Bio Mapping device he invented. During his residency at Southern Exposure, Christian Nold worked in the organization’s Mission Street storefront gallery encouraging visitors to stop by and use the devices during the weekdays and on Saturdays when he conducted intensive workshops. The project invited the public to go for a walk using the device, which records the wearer’s physiological response to their surroundings. The results of these walks are represented on this map using colored dots and participant’s personal annotations. The San Francisco Emotion Map is a collective attempt at creating an emotional portrait of a neighborhood and envisions new tools that allow people to share and interpret their own bio data.

VEER INC.

Veer are a very cool company that provides visual elements for use in professional creative work, such as graphic design, motion design, advertising and filmmaking. Their products include stock photography, illustration, typefaces, and unique merchandise. This New York outfit is very sassy and won the 2008 Webby Awards Winners for Best Use of Typography.Who needs substance, when you have so much style?

Visual Complexity project

visualcomplexity is a beautiful website showing the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is ‘to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web’. Some are not genuine complex networks, but ‘they either provide advancement in terms of visual depiction techniques/methods or show conceptual uniqueness and originality in the choice of a subject’.

I love it, because it makes me look at how information and data is (and could be) ‘mapped’ in different ways. I’m also a sucker for the pretty colours and patterns!

Bookshops

Anyone who buys from Amazon may be interested in Zoomii. It’s a virtual bookshop, where you can browse the shelves, before placing your order with Amazon. Looks great!