A few days ago, I was very pleased to discover Gilberto Esparza, a mexican artist, which is interested in making robots that interact with the enviroment. His last project, Plantas Nomadas, is a robot that works with the help of microorganisms and contaminated river water. The key for this process is the microbial fuel cells. According to wikipedia : “A microbial fuel cell (MFC) is a bio-electrochemilcal system that drives a current by mimicking bacterial interactions found in nature.[...] A microbial fuel cell is a device that converts chemical energy to electrical energy by the catalytic reaction of microorganisms.” Summing up, Plantas Nomadas is a self-sufficient robot that can walk to the river and drink contaminated water. Through a microbial fuel cell proccess, the produced energy feeds the robot and make it able to walk, while the surplus  helps the plants to grow. A great interaction between technology and life cycle.

I encourage you to have a look at his past project, Parasitos Urbanos, where small robotic creatures interact with the urban enviroment.

Both projects are nicely illustrated as well.

Simplicity is the best . At Design Reactor, a Berlin based office, they understand this concept very well. Probably allot of you had great ideas like this one time or the other, but these guy’s actually produce them. Very innovative, humoristic and nicely designed. I love them.

At read more some other projects by Design Reactor.

Electronic Ruler is a simple wooden ruler with a display. It uses the resistance of your pencil against the wood to mesure the distance.

Temae is more than just a holder for your tea bag, it also hase an indicator to show u how strong your tea is.

Mathieu Lehanneur is a fantastic designer, inventor,.. and lots more. His work varies from interior designs to pils and robots. His designs are functional and flawless a great merge between aesthetics and concept. In this post I’ve tried to compile his most famous designs. On the first look they probably don’t say anything, on his website u can find the explanations. But maybe u can find it out by just looking at the visual images themselves.

Michael Marcovici is an amazing guy who had an extraordinary life so far. He quit school when he was 17 and started his first own company in the finance field, he sold his first business when he was 23, he started a side business on eBay that eventually became the world’s largest power-selling enterprise on eBay with a turnover of 30 million euro’s a year. U really have to read his biography on his website. His artwork is conceptual and loaded with political and sociological meanings. Also his interests in finances and technology is visible in his works. Interesting guy, worth checking.

Everybody knows photoshop, its a way to digitally modify pictures. This is something that’s very useful and almost impossible to do yourself. But nobody ever died trying. This is an image that has been circulating the web quite some time and nobody really knows who’s image it is. On this¬†flickr¬†page are some more pictures. The origin and the concept behind it are a riddle according to¬†Wired,¬†they assume it was a promotional campaign for Photoshop¬†on the Indonesian market.

Draw bots are everywhere these day’s and the generic art scene gains popularity to. I’ve always been a big fan of these things and last year I’ve spend a lot of time researching this phenomena. This research resulted in a series of robots (what else?). In 7 months time I’ve made 6 different robots and installations. Every new robot or installation was an evolution of the previous, with this one at the end of the line. This robot reads simple algorithms loops them and creates patterns by doing so. An algorithm can be, move forward for 2 seconds and rotate 78 degrees, if we loop this we generate a certain pattern. The more difficult the algorithm, the more complex the pattern. This video we made at the Antwerp Astonauts exhibition last month.

A while back I saw a lecture with Theo Jansen. As an engineer/artist he makes organic, moving creatures. He releases his sculptures on the beach where they, driven by air, can walk around freely. They are fitted with ingeniously designed sensores that warn the sculpture when he contacts the water, and let him walk the other way as soon as he does. In the same lecture he speaks about his next step, to let his sculptures live autonomously the beach and he hopes that thew will develop to creatures that can withstand storms by hiding in the dunes. Very inspiring work, more info at strandbeest.com.

The next artist we undress here at the Parfois Blog is Jean Shin. Jean was born in Seoul, South Korea. She lives and works in New York City. I think its a bit strange that I don’t see her work appear in other websites and blogs. If you look at her work, you notice there is a message in it. Her installations are mostly build with all kind of leftovers. With which she creates her own world. She does this not only with installations, but also with photography, video, prints and sculptures. Read on for Jean Shin’s full story.

Biography:

Jean Shin is nationally recognized for her monumental installations that transform castoff materials into

elegant expressions of identity and community.  Working in a variety of mediums, she collects vast accumulations of singular objects—prescription pill bottles, sports trophies, sweaters—which she alters into conceptually rich sculptures, videos and site-specific installations.  Distinguished by her meticulous, labor intensive process of amassing her materials from various communities, her arresting installations reflect the individuals’ personal lives as well as collective issues that we face as a society.

Her work has been widely exhibited in major national and international museums, including solo exhibitions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC (2009), the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia (2006), and Projects at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (2004).

Other venues have been the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Art and Design, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Asia Society and Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, Sculpture Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, and Frederieke Taylor Gallery in New York City.  Site-specific permanent installations have been commissioned by the US General Services Administration Art in Architecture Award, New York City’s Percent for the Arts and MTA Art for Transit.  She has received numerous awards, including the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Architecture/Environmental Structures (2008) and Sculpture (2003), Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Art Award.  Her works have been featured in several publications, including Frieze Art, Flash Art, Tema Celeste, Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, Artnews, and The New York Times.

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Shin attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1999 and received a BFA and MS from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.  She lives and works in New York City.

Artist Statement:

Why Jean Shin?

One of the Parfois members, Jonas Blondeel, came across Shin a wile ago, his work is mostly made out of recyceld materials. With some old pallets he made the “Parfois Chair“, with leftovers from a stone mill he made a cupboard… So Eco-design is something we are familiar with. I think Shin takes recycling to an other level. There are plenty of artists building things out of trash, but unlike them Shin gives you a story, and most of the time its not a fairytale. Take her installation “Chemical Balance” (one of my favorites) for example, it is commonly know that people take too much medicine. You go to the doctor with a little cold, he pops you full of pills. Walking by an installation that is based on hunderds of empty prescription bottles makes you think about it. It forces you too see the drug problem in our society. An other example is the installation “Change City”, a city build out of losing lottery tickets with a total value of $32,404. So for me it is not really the beauty of the complete picture, the story behind her installations is something of a much bigger value.

Work:

Jean Shin is a productive artist, it is impossible to show every installation she made here at Parfois. So i’ve picked my personal favorites. All other work can be found at her website.

All the information about the installations and other work come form Jean Shin’s website.

Chance City, 2001-09

$32,404 worth of discarded “Scratch & Win” losing lottery tickets (no adhesive)

Approximately 7 ft h x 21 ft w x 10 ft d
Installation at Smithsonian American Art

Museum, 2009 
$24,496 worth of discarded “Scratch & Win” losing lottery tickets (no adhesive)

Approximately 8 ft h x 8 ft w x 6 ft d

Installation at Brooklyn Museum, New York, 2004

$17,119 worth of discarded “Scratch & Win” losing lottery tickets (no adhesive)

Installation at Caren Golden Gallery, New York, 2002

Chance City is made up of thousands of discarded scratch-and-win lottery tickets that have been arranged into an urban complex, constructed as a house of cards. Embodying the failed hopes of ordinary people, the worthless lottery tickets become building blocks for monumental, yet temporary structures. While no glue was used to make these towering and pre

cariously-balanced edifices, they are sturdier than they look. The structures, literally held up by gravity and friction,

are symbols of the American Dream representing how labor, money and resilience defy the odds of a fragile

existence.

Chemical Balance, 2005-09

Chemical Balance III, 2009  Prescription bottles, mirror and epoxy, fluorescent lights
5 units, from 18 to 40 inches in diameter
Overall dimensions variable
Installation at Smithsonian American

Art Museum, Washington, D.C. 
Chemical Balance II, 2005

Prescription bottles, mirror and epoxy 7 units, from 18 to 38 inches in diameter Commissioned by University Art Museum, Albany, NY  To create this work, thousands of empty prescription pill bottles were collected from nursing homes, pharmacies and  individuals’ medicine cabinets. Like stalactites and stalagmites, the constructions hang down from above and grow upwards from the floor below.Chemical Balance speaks to our culture’s over-consumption of prescription drugs and our bodies’ dependency on these medications. The piece acts like a group portrait, mapping our society’s chemical intake. The illuminated structures radiate with an intense orange glow, suggesting that issues of health reach far beyond the physical.

Key Promises, 2006

In collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia

Computer command key caps: enter, clear, space, backspace, pause/break, control, shift, alt/option, return, home, esc, end 46 linear feet Installation at Frederieke Taylor Gallery, New York, 2007

By isolating and transforming ordinary computer command keys, the artist creates playful, concrete poetry. Removed from the keyboard and placed onto the wall, the command keys repeat such words as “control”, “pause”, “home”, “escape” and “end.” Viewers are invited to ponder the

various meanings and associations of these found words. The keycaps construct a path, while leading the viewer through the architecture of the gallery.

Armed, 2005-09

Cut fabric (military uniforms from US soldiers), thread and starch

14 ft h x 36 ft w x 6 ft d
Installation at Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., 2009 
13 ft h x 38 ft w x 6 ft d

Installation at PKM Gallery, Beijing, 2006

14 ft h x 24 ft w x 6 ft d

Installation at Roebling Hall, NY, 2005

This large-scale fabric mural is composed of military uniforms donated from American soldiers. The deconstructed uniforms bring together a community of soldiers and veterans that have served in various wars,

from WWII and Korea to Vietnam and Iraq. The different types of camouflage reflect the varied landscapes in which American troops historically have fought, such as the jungle and the desert. Pasted flat like wallpaper, the installation of camouflaged uniforms

questions the notion of the US military’s

visibility.

Alterations, 1999

Fabric (pants scraps) and wax

2 ft h x 12 ft w x 12 ft d

Collection of Peter Norton, Santa Monica

In Alterations, a colorful and dense cityscape is constructed of hundreds of cylindrical forms made from the leftover fabric of shortened pants and blue jeans. The standing heights of each wax-stiffened cuff represent the measurement of the body in absence. The installation comments on one’s failure to measure up to the fashion industry’s standard size. At the same time, the cast-off cuffs refer to a population—predominantly Asian immigrants—who make up a large portion of

the clothing industry’s workforce, including sweat-shop seamstresses, tailors and dry-cleaners.

Previously Undressed:

- Ron English

I found this fella on superuse.org, he had some nice concepts. Dennis graduated in June’07 as an Interactive Media designer at the Willem de Kooning Art Academy, in Rotterdam. In June’09 he completed the master-course Media Design at the Piet Zwart Institute, also in Rotterdam. His work is inspired by everyday life. Associations made between everyday objects and media result in hybrid forms and ‘new media’. Recognizable but subtle and clever.

The project above is called vacumonium, it is a harmonium (air-organ) build into an old Miele vacuum cleaner. So (…), form and function of two (household, everyday) objects are associated and literally combined. There’s a soundsample of the vacumonium on his website.

Combination between a recordplayer and sewingmachine. Update Oktober 2008: Completely working!

Biological Generative Painting using mold.

A 100% organic circuit board. It provides nutrition to laborers who otherwise would have to work for food under hazardous conditions.

Its a pity we don’t have any of these creative bus stops here in Belgium, it would encourage me to take public traffic more often. Today i’ve stumbled on¬†creativecriminals and found these, a nice way to advertise your product. Making money with street art, parfois would love to get our hands on a bus stop and do a makeover. The picture above: advertisement for Guarana Antarctica. Read on for more pictures.

Movie up: Balloons

United Way Of Greater Milwaukee: Cardboard roof

Star Wars: Lightsaber

3M: Security Glass

Quick Silver skateboard

Quick Silver: Surfboard

Osram: Only use electricity when you need it

Pru Health: Oranges

Nike: Bernard Lagat

Mc Donald’s: Free Coffee

Apple: Macbook Air (Student work)

Ikea

Ikea

Hasbro: How does it feel to be involved in a crime

Fitness First