Tatenbanko is the the Japanese art of creating three dimensional perspectives from paper, dating back to the Edo Period of feudal Japan. It seems, though long forgotten, that it has been revived and Tatebanko.com out of Japan is starting to offer small kits, with it’s first offerings based on the famous woodblock printers, Hokusai and Hiroshige.
While something like this might seem just a bit ‘drull’ for some, there is a lot to be said about this sort of activity, namely the tactile interactivity and sense of peace it often brings the person doing it. Then of course there is the simple pleasure in just looking at it; a bit like those amazing 2D/3D ‘landscapes’ made from cork one used to see at Chinese restaurants that would transfix you. It’s that whole old school thing that seems to be lacking from our modern society these days.
We are not too sure about the ‘box’ it seems to be presented in but we are sure the industrious out there can do something a little more….. ‘designery’ but this is pretty cool.
Coming up with the latest and greatest bit of Experiential Design to entrance the participant is always an interesting challenge, especially when thinking about longer term prospects. TiWalkMe, could be described as taking Experiential Design to a whole new level.TiWalkMe is a 1000 year clock using trees as the guage of time. Designed to track time for a millennia and engaging multiple generations, tree plantings grow, mature and die off as they progress along a tact of land, giving an indication of time marching on.The project is guided by three main principles:
Principle 1: The slow march of trees across the Escapement must always be visible and unobstructed.
Principle 2: The Escapement must adapt to future knowledge and needs, yet remain balanced with the past.
Principle 3: TiWalkMe’s mission is to bring perspective and insight to its visitors.
Art, one might think is all a bit high brow. After visiting the ‘Sydney Art’ expo, it’s nice to see that seeing some great ‘art’ is probably more accessible than it has been in the past, even if the price tags are not.
Amongst the range of interesting work present, we discovered Joel Rea, who unveiled a new work at the show. What was most striking about Joel’s work was the combination of painting skill, strong concept, almost a bit Dali if we dare to say, and the odd mix of hooded street people and corporate suite types. His work is the sort that sits in your mind, nagging away at you to try and decipher the message.
From Joel’s site:
” Born in 1983, Joel has been painting in oils since graduating with a degree in fine art from the Queensland College of Art in 2003. Living on the Gold Coast and painting along side Brett Lethbridge at the Lethbridge Gallery in Brisbane, Joel is fully committed to his creative practice to which he generously engages anyone interested with insight into his fine art paintings.
Joel successfully exhibits his paintings in Brisbane, Gold Coast, Sydney & Melbourne with Lethbridge Gallery.
Be Joel’s friend, find him at - www.myspace.com/joelreafineartist”
“I think that our distance from nature is already a cliché. City dwellers often have no relationship with animals or greenery. As a public artist I feel a sense of duty to draw attention to deficiencies in our everyday life. As a cultivator of eco-urban sensitivity, I usually go back to the sites to visit my “plants” or “moss”, sometimes to repair them a bit, but nothing more generally as they tend to get enough water from the air, condensation, and rain - especially in certain seasons. I also like to let them live by themselves. From the moment I put them on the street they start to have their own life. For me, the reaction of life on the street is also very important. I am curious about how people receive them, if they just leave them alone, or if they want to, take care of them or dismantle them. This is what makes my work similar to graffiti, although I am searching for a deeper social meaning and a dialogue with memories of the animals and gardens of my past in a small town in Central Europe. I believe that if everyone had a garden of their own to cultivate, we would have a much more balanced relation to our territories. Of course, a garden can be many things.”
I grew up in an artistic household. Design and art were pretty much a part of everyday life and I can remember spending hours drawing or looking through art books of all sorts. I though also remember the difficulty of making any sort of living out of art and that is what probably led me to pursue a more rational career in product design; how much more money there is to be made doing that though can at times be debatable. Read the rest of this entry »
For over seven years we worked creating digital montages for architecture offices in order for them to convey what they are doing to clients, councils and courts. For better or worse we were pretty damn good at it and could create montages that looked like photographs. We knew all the tricks and developed some of our own that would fool the observer into believing that what they were looking at was actually a real photograph. Read the rest of this entry »
