Nastassia Barber

15 Jan 2014

Slightly Disappointing

This piece disappointed me a little bit even though it is pretty.  I love art that is this tactile, and the concept is obviously awesome.  The resting state of the fabric looks beautiful, and it looks fantastic in the photo below.  However, I don’t feel like it looks completely natural when people start moving their hands around, and it doesn’t satisfy me enough to make me feel the magic.

 

I’m not sure if the problem is due to using a Kinect, since the piece doesn’t actually react to touch but to movement, but in any case I’m sure this concept could have produced something much better.  There’s an article on Colossal here.

 

Admirable

I love this piece because it’s so original! The first mirror is brilliant and clear and well-executed.  It seems simple but I’ve never seen anything like it before.  It’s also interesting how it uses technology and an awful lot of work to create a lower-resolution version of something as simple as a mirror. The fan mirror is less clear, but then again it is made of fans, and I love it anyway because it’s so incredibly bizarre and makes such fantastic sounds.  I could watch those fans open and close all day.

I found the little article about it here.  Daniel Rozin also makes a bunch of other mirrors and they are all pretty great.  Naturally, there’s even a mirror made of mirrors.

 

Surprising

I’m including this because, even though I technically saw it before school started, it stands out in terms of being surprising.  I was walking through the EMP museum in Seattle, which is ostensibly about music but has a lot of other exhibits too.  I’m not really that into guitars, so I didn’t really care to look at the “guitar tornado” when I saw it from afar.  After my boyfriend convinced me, we went closer to the sculpture.

And I’m glad we did, because it wasn’t just a guitar sculpture; the electric guitars actually played themselves with a bunch of picks attached to little motors!  I didn’t realize until I put on the headphones nearby and heard the music.  For something I found in a pretty touristy museum, I thought this was really cool (and probably also unreasonably expensive).  The museum has a short blurb about it here.