Art visual np2

In April 2010, David Harvey gave a lecture at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (London) about his Marxist reading of Capitalism's contradiction that inevitably led to the current economical crisis. In the following video, his speech is being illustrated by a great series of drawings by RSA Animate. The result is a vivid and concise discourse that needs to be absolutely watched ! Thanks Nora. See the video of the lecture at the RSA See the videos of David Harvey's class at the City University of New York, offering around 30h of close look to Karl Marx's Capital.

Data Fossils is the last project of the series about the RIBA President's medals projects. It is a project designed by Tobias Jewson for Liam Young (from Tomorrow's Thoughts Today ) and Kate Davies ' studio at the AA . This very interesting project dramatizes a near future where digital data would be biocomputerly archived (fossilized) within organic tissues and mineral substance. In this latest case, Tobias introduces the geological constitution of monumental earth archives in Iceland, offered to far future archeologists. Here is his text: In the digital era our information no longer takes the form of the physical, but that of a electronic file stored in ‘the cloud’. Our collective history is quickly effaced from this fragile and ephemeral domain, a computer crashes, formats are quickly obsolete, a hard drive is lost and all is gone. With our attachment to physical objects and mementos becoming increasingly superseded by our relationship to information, what will we l...

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I am a bit late with these news but I learned yesterday that Ai Wei Wei has been placed under house arrest by the Chinese Authorities at the beginning of this month. In fact, one could recently read about his studio in Shanghai, first authorized then built, and eventually retroactively judged illegal and subject to destruction; following what, the Chinese artist decided to organize himself a destructive celebration of his studio. This seems to have been as an excuse for the Chinese Authorities to arrest him -they were probably planning that a long time ago, since Ai Wei Wei never failed to criticize the Chinese governmental system- as "they cannot let anything happen if they don't understand it" says the artist in a interview for the BBC visible here . I definitely do not register myself in a world vision dividing the "free democratic world" and the "evil totalitarianism axis"; however, one has to observe that the freedom of press and opinion in China...

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In my last article about Alistair William's Monastery of Irrigation , I was referring among others, to Hernan Diaz Alonso 's students' cathedral project in Angewandte (Vienna) so I thought that it would be interesting to publish one of them. St. Stephen's Cathedral is a project designed by Liu Chien Sheng and demonstrates of a very rich work. Beyond the usual architectural vocabulary used by Diaz Alonso 's studios, lies the real richness of space created by this student. My regular readers might be surprised that I value this " suckerpunchy " project since I believe that a new architecture should be achieved by more than the simple revolution of its vocabulary. However, this project demonstrating a tremendous amount of work and rigorousness, I cannot help to veritably respect it, just like I respect and appreciate Mr. Diaz Alonso's sharpness and precision of discourse that he brings whenever he is invited to talk about architecture (for instance, re...

Intoxicating song which comes at a crucial moment of Almodovar's last film, Broken Embraces , starring Penelope Cruz. The film itself is standard Almodovar: dark, self-reflexive, profound and hilarious. It is, like all Almodovar films, essentially a soap opera with a plot so effortlessly convoluted and full of secrets that it cannot be summarised. This time, though, it lacks the edge and genuine complexity of some of the Spanish director's earlier work like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Bad Education and Talk to Her . But it is still unforgettable.

It's good. Thank goodness. And the fact that it ends mid-way through the action is a huge plus, avoiding all that sentimental wrapping-up that often accompanies the denouements of the prior films. If you have not read the Harry Potter books, you may at some points have NO IDEA what is going on. But this does not stop any of the fun. I sometimes found certain lapses of logic and then I snapped out of it: after all, it's a film about a bloody boy wizard flying around the place on a broomstick. HELLO! The acting in this film is also up a notch, the characters have matured a bit, though they remain stockish. The use of landscape in this film was incredible and, for the first time in a Potter film, I found the special effects completely convincing. Not spoiling things too much I will say this: like in the last film, a major character dies. Be prepared for tears. ALL IN ALL: **** 

UK schools' projects, as we know, are as amazing for the strength and ingeniousity of their narratives than for their concern for interesting and evocative means of representations. In this regard, the Monastery of Irrigation by Alistair Williams (also selected by the President's Medals and also for the University of Westminster ) is striking for its use of an hybrid of hand drawing and computer generated images, thus creating a unique poetic vocabulary serving the program. The latter is a building that organizes its monastic life around water rhythm and power. Everything in this architecture recounts the calm and the insular aspect of the monastery which is to be contrasted with the talkative vocabulary used by urban cathedral recently designed by Hernan Diaz Alonzo's studios or Tobias Klein and Jordan Hodgson respectively at the Bartlett and the Royal College of Arts (see previous article ). In the same spirit, one would like to (re)read the article about Chen Xinyang...

Francois Bellanger very recently released a post about Chris Burden' s new installation which could easily be considered as the artistic manifesto of Transit-City . In fact, this installation, Metropolis II , is a monumental metropolitan race track on which 1200 hot wheels cars are driving at high speed. It can sound a bit too straight forward to represent Los Angeles' circulation as the artist asserts; however, watching the video above is a good way to realize that the speed frenzy occurring within this tentacular race track becomes very interesting if not hypnotic...

FROM THE ORGANISERS: Thursday November 25th TONIGHT! FREE! doors open at 7:30pm and films will start at 8:15pm After last weeks film about Henri-Georges Clouzot's aborted masterpiece INFERNO we bring you his existing one... Les Diaboliques Les Diaboliques (Henri Georges-Clouzot/France/1954/116')  Legend has it that Henri-Georges Clouzot beat out Alfred Hitchcock to secure the rights to this novel, which proved to be a veritable blueprint for an icy masterpiece of murder, mystery and suspense. Afterwards, the story goes a fellow told Alfred Hitchcock that after his daughter saw Psycho she refused to take a shower and that after she saw Diabolique she refused to get in a bathtub. Well, Hitchcock said, send her to the dry cleaners. Véra Clouzot plays the sickly wife of a callous headmaster of a provincial boarding school going to seed, and the commanding Simone Signoret is the headmaster's mistreated mistress. Together they plot and carry out his murder, a brutal drowning that...

We continue our exploratory series of UK schools' best projects for 2009-10 with a project entitled Port of London Authority (The rise and fall of the icon) and designed by James Wignall in the Royal College of Arts . In this project, he introduces a near future City of London flooded by the effects of Global Warming, and thus the appropriation of this new surface embodied by water. In this regard, this project questions the modernist paradigm of the skyscraper (see the gorgeous photomontage of the Seagram Building falling down below) by re-exploring the notion of horizontality in architecture. What used to be the tallest buildings (especially in most vision of the future) become inhabited bridges above the river (sea) Thames. Text: “When the earth was last four degrees warmer, there was no ice at either pole.” Mark Lynas, Six Degrees Both the intergovernmental panel of climate change and the Met Office Hadley Centre predict a possible temperature rise of four degre...