Saturday, October 23, 2010

New England In Autumn

I spent last weekend at the Mystic Seaport in Connecticut. It's that gorgeous time of year when trees go through their fleeting autumnal fireworks before succumbing to the inevitable. There's something very special about the light in this corner of New England. Big skies over little white houses buried inside luscious masses of leaves, and the rippled mirror of the Mystic river that reflects it all.



 



Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Pulling a "Charner"


What happens when  you combine an ink-on-paper drawing with an iPhone drawing? My interesting and dear artist/friend Alex Charner did just that during our Paris trip in July-he photographed his drawing with an iPhone and continued inside the Brushes app. So I decided to pull a "Charner", too. What could be more fun than experimenting with art?! (thanks, Alex!)

Here's a group of volunteers at the Mystic Seaport's restoration shipyard chopping wood on a windy Saturday afternoon. 

Drawn on my iPhone

Sunday, October 10, 2010

My iPhone Drawings in MoMA Augmented Reality Exhibition

This Saturday was a gorgeous summer-like day in New York. I was at the MoMA, anticipating the launch of the DIY Augmented Reality Art Invasion at 4pm. All that was needed was to figure out how to use Layar app. It took about 10 minutes of utter confusion, until the first signs of "it works!" appeared on my iPhone, in the room with Monet's Water Lilies.



The next hour and a half were spent roaming the museum and the atrium outside, discovering layers of virtual art galleries. My drawings were "attached" to the 5th floor, but technically could be viewed from any place inside and near MoMA by selecting the floor level within the Layar app. 


I was among 35 other artists who participated. I only met 2 while there, and one of them was Sander Veenhof, the mastermind / pioneer / curator of this exhibition. 


It's a very exciting experiment (well-executed, too) that has amazing potential. This exhibition opened my eyes to the idea of phychogeography.
"Developments in the field of phychogeography advance rapidly and radically. In former times the discipline required mental capabilities such as concentration and imagination, nowadays mobile phones provide us with easy-to-use viewing tools to percieve a multitude of fictive realities, anywhere we are, instantly. The technique causing this 'progression' is called augmented reality. It has led to an armada of virtual creativity of various kinds into our public physical space. Actually, AR has rewritten the scope of 'public space'. Physically walled private spaces, such as musea, are now open areas for anyone's objects and actions. To reflect on this and to investigate the implications for art intitutes, Mark Skwarek and I propose to infiltrate the MoMA with an augmented reality exhibition, curated and transmitted from a distance using GPS-driven Layer AR technology. A helpdesk will assist Conflux participants to collaborate and contribute a work to this "virtual DIY museum". ~Sander Veenhof (quote taken from conflux festival.org)

The 7 virtual MoMA floors will remain available/viewable permanently!

Instructions on how to see this virtual gallery: 

iPhone/Android: 
-Download (free) Layar Augmented Reality Browser app. 
-In your phone's general settings, make sure "location services" for Layar are "on". 
-Open the app, search for "art moma" and select "MoMA AR exhibition" 
 (Sander Veenhof / Mark Skwarek). 
-Open it, go to "settings": select "alternative positioning ON" / move "viewing range" to max / select floor
-My iPhone drawings are on the "5th-2D" level. 
-You can explore all the floors from any location within the museum. 

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

my iPhone Drawings @ the MoMA in NYC on 10.09.2010

I am thrilled to announce that my iPhone drawings will be featured as part of the Augmented Reality Exhibition at the MoMA in NYC this Saturday, October 9th, starting 4pm, on the 5th floor. You will need to have an iPhone or smart phone with Layar AR app installed.
Details here: Augmented Reality Art Invasion

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Paris :: Part 5 : Wine Tasting Notes

...to continue with drawings from my Parisian trip in July, here are some happy memories from the wine tasting night. We met our sommelier Oliver inside the 17th century cellar that's adjacent to the Louvre and that once belonged to Louis XV.
 

Oliver began his lesson with Champagne, and we slowly drifted through the Whites and Roses to the Reds. By the way, I learned that Rose is made from red grapes without the skins (and not a mix of reds and whites); Champagne is made with the mix of 2 red grape varieties and 1 white grape variety; I also learned that the most telling and important item on the French wine's label is Appellation. And, of course, I learned in practice the three techniques to make me look like the legitimate wine snob (that I'm not): 1-how to LOOK,  2-how to SMELL, 3-how to TASTE the wine.




Frankly, I still stumble when I have to order a bottle at a restaurant. I think I might need a few more lessons: the know-how on the wine je ne sais quoi.


Saturday, October 2, 2010

Drawing Music :: Mount Kimbie

*drawn on my iPhone

I went to check out a great dubstep duo Mount Kimbie at the Public Assembly in Williamsburg last night. It was a pleasant surprise to hear them live-with real-life samples of guitar and drum loops. These UK musicians filled the room with abstract and mellow ambient sound on top of slow dub beats. Felt like it should have been more of a sit-down kind of show, which is a strange thing to say about dubstep music.