Dutch artist/engineer Theo Jansen makes unbelievable kinetic sculptures; it’s as if da Vinci had access to PVC. This video (a BMW ad, as it happens) shows off some of his walking machines in motion on the beach. Wired covers the genesis and evolution of Jansen’s work, and you can see his two-ton Animaris Rhinoceros Transport on the move in this video. Many more photos are on his site. [Via] [For more on kinetic scuplture, see previous entry.]
Category: Art
On Lake Michigan, A Global Village
As Racine has changed, so have its politics. Once, a ritual antagonism for business was a sure vote-getter among Democrats. But Mr. Becker was elected three years ago with a pro-development message, pledging to trim jobs from the public payroll to free resources to attract new residents and businesses.
Racine’s future, Mr. Becker believes, lies in forging stronger links with the regional economy and global markets. Reinvention can be unnerving, he acknowledges, but he says it is his hometown’s best shot at prosperity and progress. “In the past, Racine was a self-contained economy,” he said. “But that is not an option anymore.”
No local economy truly mirrors the nation. But for Racine and its surrounding suburbs, the last few years have been marked by gradually rising prosperity, in step with the national trend. And the recent history of Racine, like that of the nation as a whole, is also the story of how a community comes to grips with the larger forces of globalization and technological change.
Gorgeous Evening Paris VR Scene
Check it out. Via Virginia Postrel.
The Price Opens at the Madison Rep
But Corley says the play is both personal and political, and that the current political climate makes The Price as relevant as ever.
In The Price, one of the brothers, Victor (played by Roderick Peeples), is a retired policeman who gave up a budding scientific career to care for his ailing father. The other brother, Walter (Richard Henzel), is a wealthy surgeon who has given their father only token support.
The play’s political themes emerge, Corley says, as the brothers try to make sense of their past and of their choices — and of the prices they have paid. “When Miller wrote the play, he wanted to write about the ideology that created the Vietnam War,” Corley says, “and the belief that the end of war could make things better. Both fallacies are based on a misunderstanding of the past.”
Chihuly Victimized by His Own Success
But at age 64, he’s where he never wanted to be, in court. He’s suing two glass blowers for copyright infringement, contending they’re imitating his work. They’re threatening to sue him back, questioning whether Chihuly is the creative intelligence behind the art bearing his signature. And a former dealer is attacking him with a gusto rare in the art world. If that’s not enough, his feet hurt.
Emotionally, he has been through the wringer.
Since 2001, a significant number of the people closest to him have died, some without warning. Partially because both his brother and father died in quick succession in his teens, he tends to experience each death as a blow to the body.
Last year he sank into a depression from which he is now recovering. Friends who haven’t seen him in many months are being invited over for dinner.
Chihuly’s work lights up the Kohl Center’s entrance – adding color to an emotionless sea of grey.
An Interview with Errol Morris
Megan Cunningham interviews UW Grad and noted film and advertising impresario Errol Morris [pdf]:
Within the entertainment industry, Errol Morris holds a chameleon position. To the commercial production world, he’s established as a highly successful director, both innovative and intelligent. (He’s one of the only, if not the only, director of TV commercials who has written an opinion-page article published in The New York Times.) Within talent and advertising agencies, he is known for his exceptional off-kilter vision, and honored in ways usually reserved for noncommercial artists. (In November 1999, his work received a full retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. In 2002, the organizers of the Academy Awards asked him to direct the short film that introduced the annual Oscars ceremony; it featured a series of real-life characters—some well-known, some everyday citizens—describing their passion for
movies.) In a 2004 Adweek article honoring Morris’s contributions as someone who “rises above the fray to create work that resonates and inspires,”
Winter Milwaukee Art Museum Visit: Rembrandt and His Time
Through January 8, 2006. We’ll worth a trip.
A Window into Nature
Fascinating: Rivers and Tides:
This amazing documentary from Thomas Riedelsheimer won the Golden Gate Award Grand Prize for Best Documentary at the 2003 San Francisco International Film Festival. The film follows renowned sculptor Andy Goldsworthy as he creates with ice, driftwood, bracken, leaves, stone, dirt and snow in open fields, beaches, rivers, creeks and forests. With each new creation, he carefully studies the energetic flow and transitory nature of his work.
John Lasseter at MoMa
MoMA just opened their show about Pixar last week and on Friday, we went to a presentation by John Lasseter, head creative guy at the company. Interesting talk, although I’d heard some of it in various places before, most notably in this interview with him on WNYC. Two quick highlights:
New Mexico’s Rock Art
Some anthropologists now believe that more human beings lived in Southwest New Mexico 1,000 years ago than live there today.
How do they know? Because the region is covered with thousands of archaeological sites. Some areas are positively littered with rock art and artifacts from long-gone ancient cultures.