Link About It: This Week’s Picks
AR performances, AI photography, museums updates and more art news from around the web
Marco Brambilla’s Free “The Four Temperaments” AR App Experience Starring Cate Blanchett
On view at Berlin’s Michael Fuchs Galerie, video installation artist Marco Brambilla’s The Four Temperaments exhibition and sound installation explores four sets of distinct character types as outlined by the Greek philosopher Galen: sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic. Acclaimed actress Cate Blanchett embodies each opposing personality, drenched in correlating colors. Brambilla’s has also released the three-and-a-half-minute work for free on the Acute Art augmented reality app (which we first wrote about regarding the debut AR work of Nina Chanel Abney). Read more about the work at The Art Newspaper or download the Acute Art app for iOS now.
Image courtesy of Michael Fuchs Galerie
Scaled’s Flexible Body Cast Helps Prevent Athletic Injuries
A graduate of Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art, Natalie Kerres developed her Scaled prototype to protect and support athletes’ body parts most susceptible to injury. The “pangolin scale-like” system interlocks to form a sleeve or a strip that bends with the wearer, preventing pinches or compromised range of motion. Particularly suited for wrists and backs, Scaled creates a protective layer in case of hyperextension, collision or typical wear and tear. Whether the concept could be used in contact sports remains up for discussion, but Kerres has received financial support from MedTech SuperConnector and plans to push production to a commercial scale. Read more at Dezeen.
Image courtesy of Scaled
Art21’s Milestone 10th Season of Documentary Series “Art in the Twenty-First Century”
For the landmark three-episode 10th season of Art21’s “Art in the Twenty-First Century,” 12 artists and one collective (including Anish Kapoor, Guan Xiao and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer) share their stories amidst a world in turmoil. Each episode focuses on one creative epicenter—London, Beijing and the border of Mexico and the United States—and addresses the political and creative environments therein. “When we listen to artists, we gain insight into the state of our world,” Tina Kukielski (Art21 executive director and chief curator) says in a statement. “Artists are documentarians, activists, problem-solvers, innovators and foremost respondents to the issues of our times.” New episodes premiere on PBS at 10PM on 18 September, 25 September and 2 October. You can watch also full episodes on Art21.org and PBS streaming apps. Preview the episodes at Art21.
Image courtesy of Art21
Fotografiska Opening in Berlin
Berlin’s Kunsthaus Tacheles (aka Art House Tacheles), which has been vacant for many years, is set to become Fotografiska’s newest outpost. The Swedish hub for contemporary photography opened two locations outside Stockholm in Tallinn, Estonia and NYC last year and is now poised for a 2022 opening of an even bigger, 59,000-square-feet space in the German capital. The building (a cultural heritage site) was “a 1908 department store that was later converted into a Nazi prison during World War II, then partially demolished, then renovated as a sprawling gallery and sculpture park from 1990 to 2012.” Yoram Roth, a photographer and majority shareholder in Fotografiska, says, “Fotografiska does not want to be a repository of art in silent, holy halls, but instead a place of vibrant, creative interaction and promote constructive dialogue with the community outside its doors. Simply entertaining our audience with photography is not enough to my mind: Fotografiska wants to foster and initiate changes. Innovation, inclusion, inspiration, and sustainability are core elements of our work in this regard.” Read more at Arch Paper.
Image courtesy of Fotografiska
Trevor Paglen + Kate Crawford’s AI Photography Exhibition, “Training Humans”
On view now at Fondazione Prada, Training Humans (a collaboration by artists Trevor Paglen and Kate Crawford) is the first-ever show dedicated to the training images used to teach artificial intelligence how to view people. They’re the lessons for learning how to “see” like us. Training Humans comprises photographs from the 1960s to the present, and aims to uncover how machines are trained to identify and understand emotion, gender and race—and how biases find their way into AI programs. “Teaching machines to ‘see’ like people means replicating not only the internal logic of human visual protocol, but also inheriting the external power systems that inform our judgements—and to understand the status of today’s artificial intelligence systems, we must look closely at what has been used to train them,” Document Journal writer Camille Sojit explains. Read more there.
Image courtesy of FERET Dataset
Link About It is our filtered look at the web, shared daily in Link and on social media, and rounded up every Saturday morning. Hero image courtesy of Scaled
