Why we love tech: Watch life explode into moving paintings in Jeff Scher’s experimental films

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  • March 25, 2012 at 9:19 am

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A frame from Jeff Scher's animated short Tulips

Jeff Scher wasn’t content just with painting a beautiful picture; he wanted to breathe life into his work. By drawing a series of paintings and then shooting them in sequence, with each painting making up a frame to a film, the same way old-school hand-drawn animation was made, he’s been doing exactly this. The New York-based artist has been experimenting with video most of his life and his collection of short animated films are a combination of a lot of patience, hard work and a touch of technology.

Each second of video is around fifteen paintings or collages. Every painting is captured with a digital camera and joined in software to create the end product. Most films end up being around two minutes with a minute and a half of video being shy of 1,500 drawings.
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Why we love tech: Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room is the closest you’ll get to floating in space

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  • March 1, 2012 at 2:12 pm

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Yayoi Kusama retrospective at the Tate Modern in London

Obsessiveness, repetition and of course dots sum up the incredibly original work of Yayoi Kusama. Aged 82, Kusama came into adolescence while Japan was entering its postwar period and later moved to New York in the 1960s, exhibiting alongside Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns, before returning back to her home country in 1973. Kusama didn’t just follow the trends of her time, she created them.

The Japanese artist has been on a creative roll ever since she was a young child incorporating her trademark dots for the first time in a drawing at the age of 10, which as she admitted were part of her first hallucinations.

Even after she self-admitted herself to a mental institution in 1977, Yayoi Kusama continued to work fanatically from a studio near the hospital in Shinjuku, Tokyo even to this day. It’s no wonder she is one of Japan’s most celebrated artists
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Why we love tech: Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” comes alive on our screens

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  • February 11, 2012 at 5:58 pm

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Petros Vrellis - Van Gogh's "The Starry Night" interactive painting

When we think of the era of Paul Gauguin, Henri Rousseau and Vincent van Gogh we imagine a time long-gone and far away from our modern reality. However, important artists of all times are the vanguard of their era, experimenting with new techniques, materials and ideas and creating something new, a silent revolution.

I’m sure that if Vincent van Gogh were to live in our times, he would have experimented with technology the way many contemporary artists do. It’s pretty natural then that “The Starry Night”, van Gogh’s magnum opus now exhibited at the MoMA in New York, has received the interactive treatment.
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Why we love tech: David Hockney’s ‘A Bigger Picture’ is contemporary art done on an iPad

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  • January 16, 2012 at 5:29 pm

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The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire, in 2011. iPad drawing printed on paper by David Hockney

David Hockney is one of the most influential contemporary British artists. Born in 1937, with a career spanning more than 50 years, he has relentlessly acquired mastery in a number of media. David Hockney has made paintings, drawings, lithographic and etching prints, designed stage sets and worked with photography and photocollage. In his long, and successful, career he has also always embraced new technologies. David Hockney’s latest exhibition, titled ‘A Bigger Picture’ and running between January 21st and April 9th 2012 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London is a testament to this.

The exhibition is devoted to landscapes and includes more than 150 works by the artist, most of which were created in the last decade while many are massive in size. The vivid works were inspired by Hockney’s native Yorkshire. After Hockney’s 30 year long stay in California and Los Angeles, where he created his famous paintings portraying alluring poolside scenes he returned to his home country and has been based in Bridlington, a small seaside town in east Yorkshire, around 65 miles from Bradford where the artist was born. The exhibition includes oil paintings, watercolors and more than 50 drawings created on an iPad and then printed onto paper. There are also a number of videos created for the exhibition.
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Why we love tech: Björk’s Biophilia is an album wrapped in an app; or is it the other way round?

Reviews

  • August 18, 2011 at 11:47 am

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Björk Biophilia iPad app

Biophilia is a project/album by Icelandic singer-actress-composer Björk. What makes it so special is that it’s the first interactive ‘app album’ putting as much importance on the experience and visuals as the music. Björk has composed part of the album on an iPad and so completing the circle the application has been released, in collaboration with Apple, on iTunes for iOS devices (iPad, iPhone, iPod touch).

The ‘host’ application is free to download and includes the theme song, Cosmogony. The host app is an interactive 3D map of the ‘cosmos’ made up by the different songs. Each additional song takes the form of an in-app purchase for an eventual total of ten songs for the album. Every song operates as a mini-app with different visuals and animations, a game, moving score for the song with karaoke playback and an essay. There are currently two songs that have been released, Crystalline and Virus, each available for $1.99.

Putting any discussion on excessive commercialization to the side, this is one of the most exciting and ground breaking music related productions we’ve seen. What’s important is that you are not checking your friends’ status on Facebook or sending an email while listening to the music, but actually interacting with the song. Art direction by interactive artist Scott Snibbe is excellent, though quite abstract, and certainly the experience is engaging. Although this is something that could have ended in just being a gimmick it certainly is not. We only lament the fact that this is an iOS app only.

You can find more about the app in the intro video narrated by the man himself, David Attenborough, together with the song Crystalline, after the break.
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