Excellent documentary on early 80s Manchester (and the UK in general), post punk and the rise of Joy Division. Writer Jon Savage and director Grant Gee fully submerse you in the world of Ian Curtis, other band members and notable artists of that period.

Currently available on Hulu (not sure for how long).

Great van paintings by Kevin Cyr. Also currently has work at Mixed Greens in NY and 941 Geary in SF.

http://www.kevincyr.net/

BIG BANG BIG BOOM – the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Available from Skreened.

“Quintetto” is a nice little installation based on the study of the movement of goldfish used as input for the production of sounds. The fish’s movement is motion captured and translated into sound – each fish representing a different musical instrument.

http://www.quietensemble.com/

Another great minimalist video from Maxim Zhestkov

I came across this yesterday – Capsule 02 – a project Gareth and I did ages ago which tells you about Cape Town Transport and other such stuff.

The content was distributed on a 1.44mb disk (mainly because they were cheap and deemed completely “unsuitable” for a magazine) and won numerous awards. I shudder at the navigation, but the content is still quite fun.

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The Big Cup is coming to South Africa. Dress for success. Dress to impress.

Now available from the very fine MySoti Store

(* Headline translates roughly as: Hurry guys! The Big Cup is coming)

Playing homage to James Turrell, ITP student Matthew Richard has built this pretty sweet kinetic light sculpture, an area of work that I am really interested in. 80 RGB LEDs create a animated color field painting by letting the light itself mix together on a canvas. The 2 LEDs are placed at the tips of 40 arms that are arranged in a circle and controlled by 40 servos. One LED faces towards the center of the circle and the other faces away from the center. Subtle differences in servo timing and LED values create color patterns resemble wasting sunsets and sunrises melding and disappearing.

Said Richard: “I wanted to create a living color field painting using a mechanical interface instead of a projector.”

Here’s a documentation video:

Via Rhizome.

Tired of meaningless BNE stickers plastered all over your hood? Time to localize…
Give them some local relevance by just adding a letter, whether you’re in NY, London, Paris or Cape Town.

Helvetica Neue Bold Condensed at 85% horizontal scaling.

Relief sculptures using found photographs of the same place taken at different times.
http://www.abigailreynolds.com/ 

I’ve always been fascinated by the flickering light a TV gives off. I am also concerned with my art being experiential – to create a place for visitors to interact with, hang out and make their own. Thus the idea of The Living Room was born.

A TV remote control could be used to control the “channels” on the TV and hence the lighting of the room. The channels were actually various sound reactive applications running off a laptop. The computer was connected to an Arduino with an infra-red sensor to communicated with the remote control.

Featured was also a knitting channel which showed visitors how to knit, with wool and knitting needles provided.

The installation was part of the Mind The Box launch event held at the amazing Mind Pirates building in Kreuzberg Berlin.