Trends

Back in November i was at Medialab Prado in Madrid to visit the Visualizar workshop and i had the pleasure to hear the talk that Juan Freire gave there. I was really looking forward to know better about the thoughts of someone whose keen observation on open knowledge, digital culture and everyware'd city i was following with interest for some time. Juan Freire is one of the very very few people who keep track of what is written in the field of ubiquitous computing, free software and technology but who would also hang around with media art curators and mingle with the hackers and the urbanists. And his everyday job doesn't have much to do with all of the above. He has a PhD in Biology, he is Associate Professor and Coordinator research group at University of Corunna.

Apart from Joshua Davis' talk, the other main highlight of OFFF, the software and visual communication conference which took place last week in Lisbon, was the panel on Data Visualization curated and moderated by the European evangelist of the discipline: Jose-Luis de Vicente.

Lounge at the LX factory where OFFF took place this year

The following is a possibly entertaining but highly unedited rant, thank you:

Brooklyn, NY: The inner-sanctum of Hipster-dom, along with it's spiritual annexes; Austin, Minneapolis, Seattle, Hollywood etc. tends to house avenues and streets that bleed fresh creative explorations before vulturous bacterias grow within and feed off of the collective right-brain hemorrhages. Well, maybe not Hollywood, anymore.

Hollywood seems to have been reduced to having it's heart valves that used to gush blood for the sake of flowing become clogged with festering deleterious dyssocial disease long-time go.
The reasons for why Hollywood, unlike some other metropolises that house a constant, age-old war of what reduces down to Jedi versus Sith, has chosen to become a breeding pen of cultural ouroboros remains unclear.

Just back from Frankfurt where i participated to the marvelously organized and well-attended Node08 Forum for Digital Art conference. As i was in town for two days, i visited All-Inclusive. A Tourist World at the Schirn Kunsthalle.

Ho-Yeol Ryu, Airport, 2005. Courtesy Ho-Yeol Ryu

All-Inclusive. A Tourist World presents works from 30 artists depicting and commenting on various phenomena influenced by the continually growing tourist industry.

Tokyo correspondent Vicente Gutierrez paid a visit to the Yokohama Museum of Art last month to check the exhibition Goth - Reality of the Departed World . Here's what he has to say about it:

Dr. Lakra, Untitled (Muscidae and Tea), 2007. Courtesy of the Artist and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City

New Architecture in Concrete... ... from translucent blocks and photo-engraved building fronts to revolutionary materials that promise to change the rules of construction as we know them today. We all know that concrete can be concocted to look like many things, but who would have thought that the rock-solid substance could be a substitute for a window? As it turns out, a handful of academic and commercial researchers are not just dreaming of this, they’re busy making it happen. I've heard onlymatt is building his house with this stuff. Cool.