Stelarc Remote Suspension

Not relevant to anything. But strange enough to put up

Harland Miller

The Next Life's On Me

9 November – 22 December 2012

Hoxton Square

White Cube is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by artist and writer Harland Miller. For this exhibition, the last at White Cube Hoxton Square, Miller will show two new series of works: a selection of paintings based on the marbled covers of vintage Penguin poetry books as well as a group of new figurative paintings that are nostalgic and elegiac in feel.

Miller's practice has developed in tandem with his love for books – both as sculptural objects in their own right and as the carriers of humour, irony and emotion. For over a decade, Miller has been painting fictional covers for imaginary Penguin paperbacks, based on the original colour block covers that were used to denote genre. His new series of paintings adopt the marbled paper covers used on the old-fashioned Penguin poetry editions and are made using luxurious metallic paints on heavy, smooth walnut panels. These paintings appear like facsimiles of an original object, since the wear and tear of each book is clearly discernible, but their titles have been replaced with philosophical aphorisms or snappy turns of phrase. Tonally reduced, in black and gold with the odd accent of brilliant red, their process of making combines an element of pure chance (Miller mixes the paint with a flow medium to make it more slippery) and deliberate intent. The paintings are made on the floor, in the manner of a Pollock drip painting and indexical traces of the artists' movement as well as drips, smudges and accidental colour bleeding all contribute to the final image. Although purely abstract, trompe l'oeil figuration begins to emerge from the 'marbling' where clusters of colours appear like clouds, as in the work In Dreams begin Monsters where celestial sunsets morph into different galaxies or other natural phenomena.

In his new series of figurative paintings, Miller adopts a tangential approach to his subject matter in works that deal with the cult of personality. Filmic in feel, these paintings have developed out of the artist's interest in heterogeneous printed ephemera – in particular, adverts and obituaries – from the 1970s. In Painting for John DeLorean (2012), a character that Miller has written a short story and film treatment on; the American engineer, car maker and infamous conman is celebrated in an image of a white gull, cinematically flying into the distance. In other works, Miller has used details from the lives of historical or semi-celebrity characters: the bipolar American chemist and inventor of nylon Wallace Hume Carothers, for example, or the darkly acerbic cartoonist Charles Addams. Described by the artist as ‘escapism through reinvention’; these works suggest a fantasy world of glamour and theatre, nostalgically conveyed through incidental surface details.

Harland Miller was born in Yorkshire in 1964 and lives and works in London. Miller will have a solo exhibition at Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh until 26 January 2013. Recent solo exhibitions include, LAB, Beirut (2011) and Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2009). Miller published his first novel, Slow Down Arthur, Stick to Thirty, to critical acclaim, in 2000 and was writer in residence at the ICA in 2002.

Tycho Brahe:

Danish scientest of the renaissance,, empirical researcher, founder of the Castle Uranborg, the underground observatory Stjemeborh and garden. Also a spectacular display of early prosthetic nose . . . . . .

Please follow link the Tycho Brahe main website

Please follow this link for further reading

Tycho Brahe's 'murder' investigated

Scientists have cast new light on the 17th-century death of the Danish astronomer by exhuming his body from a Prague church

Follow this link to the guardian webb article.

NEIL DENARI WORKS:

For further drawings of Neil Denari please follow this link.

Bio:
Former Director of SCI-Arc from 1997 -2001 and recipient of the Los Angeles AIA Gold Medal in 2011, Neil Denari is principal of NMDA, Neil M. Denari Architects Inc. He received his B Arch from the University of Houston in 1980 and an MArch from Harvard in 1982. In 2010 Denari was inducted into the Interior Design Hall of Fame honoring him for his contribution to the growth and prominence of the interior design field. In 2009, he was given the California Community Foundation Fellowship from the United States Artists and in 2008 he received an Architecture Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. In addition to these personal awards, NMDA has been awarded the 2005 and 2007 National American Institute of Architecture Awards, 2005 Progressive Architecture citation, 2004 and 2006 American Institute of Architecture/Los Angeles Honor Awards, among others.  His work has been included in many exhibitions, including the solo shows “Fast Forward” in 2008 at the Museum of the City of New York, “Architects’ Work: HL23” in 2009 @ Syracuse University, and “The Artless Drawing” in 2010 @ Ace Gallery Los Angeles, curated by Sylvia Lavin and Hi-C.  Current projects include a 34,000sf office building in Beverly Hills, an art gallery in New York, and HL23. He lectures worldwide and is the author of Interrupted Projections (TOTO), Gyroscopic Horizons (Princeton), and Speculations On (AADCU) forthcoming in 2012. [http://www.aud.ucla.edu/faculty/neil_denari_5.html]

Where the internet lives

...some interesting images from the Google data centres.

Sky City

Next time a contractor tells you he needs an extension of time show them this Article

• 838 metres
• 163 floors
• 220,000 tonnes of steel
• 31,400 people
• 104 high speed elevators
•  £950 per square metre

•  90-day construction time

The world's oldest working digital computer has been restored, and is now on display at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, Milton Keynes

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20155028

Its nice when everyone brings something to the party!

Appendix C
Commonwealth Gifts
The following gifts were made by the countries of the Commonwealth in 1950 to mark the rebuilding of the House of Commons Chamber:

AIDEN (Yemen)- Members' Writing Room table
AUSTRALIA - Speaker's Chair in Australian black bean
BAHAMAS - Minister's writing desk and chair
BARBADOS - Minister's writing desk and chair
BERMUDA - Two triple silver gilt inkstands
BOTSWANA - One silver gilt ashtray
BRITISH HONDURAS (Belize)- Minister's writing desk and chair and Royal Coat of Arms
CANADA - Table of the House in Canadian oak
CEYLON (Sri Lanka) - Serjeant at Arm's chair
CYPRUS - Members' Writing Room table
DOMINICA - One silver gilt inkstand
FALKLAND ISLANDS - One silver gilt ashtray
FIJI - One silver gilt inkstand
THE GAMBIA - Two silver gilt ashtrays
GHANA - Minister's writing desk and chair
GIBRALTAR - Two oak table lamps with bronze shades
GRENADA - One silver gilt inkstand
GUERNSEY - Minister's writing desk and three chairs
GUYANA - Four triple silver gilt inkstands
HONG KONG - One triple silver gilt inkstand
INDIA - Entrance doors to Chamber
ISLE OF MAN - One silver gilt inkstand and two silver gilt ashtrays for Prime Minister's Conference Room
JAMAICA - Bar of the House in bronze
JERSEY - Minister's writing desk and chair and silver gilt inkstand
KENYA - Minister's writing desk and chair
LEEWARD ISLANDS - Six oak table lamps with bronze shades
LESOTHO - Two silver gilt ashtrays
MALAWI - One triple silver gilt inkstand and one silver gilt ashtray
MALAYA - Minister's writing desk and chair
MALTA - Three silver gilt ashtrays
MAURITIUS - Minister's writing desk and chair
NEWFOUNDLAND - Six chairs for Prime Minister's Conference Room
NEW ZEALAND - Two dispatch boxes in pururi
NIGERIA - Furniture for Aye Division Lobby in iroko
NORTHERN IREALND - Two clocks and division clock for the Chamber
PAKISTAN - Entrance doors to Chamber
RHODESIA - Two silver gilt inkstands with paper racks
SABAH - One table and five chairs for interview room
SEYCHELLES - Minister's writing desk and chair
SIERRA LEONE - Minister's writing desk and chair
SINGAPORE - One table and five chairs for interview room
SOUTH AFRICA - Three chairs for Clerks at the Table
ST HELENA - One Chairman's chair for Prime Minister's Conference Room
ST LUCIA - One silver gilt inkstand
ST VINCENT - One silver gilt ashtray
SWAZILAND - One silver gilt ashtray
TANGANYIKA - One table and five chairs for interview room
TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO - Minister's writing desk and chair
UGANDA - Furniture for No Division Lobby in mvule
ZAMBIA - Two pairs of bronze brackets for the Mace
ZANZIBAR - One silver gilt ashtray

unitsixteen.H4.2012

UNITSIXTEEN HERRON+ISA+HAGOS                                                 2012-13

The Robinson Institute . . .

CONTEXT:

The site for your proposal is the National Gallery Extension [Sainsbury Wing], located on the corner of your broader study site of Trafalgar Square. Turning the clock back we ask you to imagine an alternative future.

Consider the abandonment of the original Common Wealth Institute, designed by Robert Matthew, Johnson-Marshall and Partners, completed in 1962, which used Modernism to mark the transition from Empire to Commonwealth. Sited off Kensington High Street, on the periphery of the Museum district, a curiosity from a lost age, set within a garden landscape on the edge of Holland Park the original building stands abandoned, slowly decaying into ruin.  A proposed redevelopment by Stuart Lipton and OMA has recently received planning consent for a combination of private apartments and retail units all clustered around a relocated design museum, which is to inhabit the cannibalized remains of the former exhibition hall.

Consider the original institute as an idealistic but faded utopian dream, flawed from inception, a curiosity from a period when modernism was still an ideology rather than modernism as simply image. What is your view regarding buildings and or institutions, which fall out of use? Is shopping the new social model?  What is the difference between say the Design Museum and the Conran shop?

PROPOSAL:

Within this context you are to propose a New Institute, a collective experiment in life and art. Your proposal should represent and house a collective vision for the re reading of the Common Wealth as a contemporary institution. At the center of this you will need to consider how your architectural proposal physically embodies and formalizes both the tangible and intangible properties of this collective social ideal. Consider these two alternative prototypical models, the Salk Institute by Louis Khan, and a club like the RIBA. Consider their respective ambitions and functions; A centre for research, knowledge, and debate, meeting ground and or social club.

Your initial work will provide you with a strategic lens for interpreting this new terrain. You will need to consider how your architectural proposal physically embodies and formalizes both the tangible and intangible properties of this collective new social model.

PROGRAMME:

The principle accommodation is to be questioned; the following is for guidance only. You need to decide on the specific nature of your Institute. Is it a club, a place of study, a place of science, a place of retreat, an archive, a window onto an unrealized utopian dream? Consider your project as a bridge between two worlds, a hybrid structure which tries to arbitrate between opposing pressures of use and ideology.

SCHEDULE OF ACCOMODATION:

 01:    The Secretariat: The administrative core of the institute

02:    The Common Room: A central meeting point and social hub to the community. 

03:    The Laboratory: To be defined by individual agendas.

04:    The Library & Tapestry Room: A quiet place of study and wonder

05:    The Drawing Room: A presentation, exhibitions, and public dissemination space.

06     Central Galleries or Exhibition Halls: The scale a specificity to be determined.

07:    Living Units: Two self-contained apartments one for the director the second for a visiting scholar.

You should consider the planning issues involved, contacting the local planning authority, consulting the local UDP, and the various current rulings regarding the proposed redevelopment. Remember the attached timetable is tight. We recommend that you collaborate in groups to research, prepare and share site information. Design and technical development is to be recorded in a project file; recording all research, information gathered and the like, structured to form the basis for the technical reports [see year 4 guide]

Task 01: Outline Design Presentation No1

The following should be seen as an indicative guide as to the range of information, needed at Outline Design Stage Presentation No1.

-       Clearly describe the key architectural characteristics of your proposal.

-       What are the driving spatial and organizational strategies

-       Suggest the principle qualities imagined for at least two key spaces.

-       Prepare a typical sketch plan and sketch section drawn to an appropriate scale.

-       3D Drawings and Diagrams to explain proposals relationship to site.

-       3D Drawings and Diagrams to examine, spatial relationships,

circulation systems, volumetric massing, and distribution of key programmatic elements.

-       Site model [To an appropriate scale]

Some Key Dates . . .

WK 9             19 Nov           Introduction

WK 10           21 Nov           Outline Design Presentation No1 – 10am

WK 11           28 Nov           Tutorials Design Development – 10am

WK 12           23 Nov           Design Development Presentation No.2 – 10am **

WK 13           30 Nov           Tutorial Design Development – 10.00am

WK 14           19 Dec           Scheme Design Presentation No.3. –  10am**

                                               [VACATION]

WK 1 T2        14 Jan            Interim Portfolio Assessment 9am – 10am

Note:

** These occasions will have external guest critic.

REMEMBER:

The attached timetable is tight. We recommend that you collaborate in groups to research, prepare and share site information. Design and technical development is to be recorded in a project file; recording all research, information gathered and the like, structured to form the basis for the technical reports [see guidance notes]

A further timetable for the development of this project and the associated report will follow.

Reference Tate: [http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/patrick-keiller-robinson-institute