Ghost doors @ the Barbican

everybody is familiar with the strange atmospheric feeling that goes by the name of 'Barbican'. i have a couple of routines there (going to the cinema on level 4, going to the curve gallery on level 0). without the Barbican branded mini moments of oddness, i doubt i'd be enjoying the movies and art as much as i do.

my favorite one is the ghost door on level 4 (right), a lonely door in an absurd desolate corridor leading to cinema 2 that just can't get it's motion sensor right - the way the door automatically opens and closes for any visitor approaching is calibrated slightly wrong, it makes you want to stop in your tracks, it makes you feel like a ghost just walked through and you don't know whether it's coming right at you or whether you'll be safe. just a tiny tick, but it makes me nervous every time. (i don't think i'm the only one - building management put up a sticker pointing out that this is an 'automatic door' - see bottom sticker on door).

another can-i-trust-my-eyes moment usually grabs me when i enter the ladies room on the ground floor (left). the passage way through to more toilets is so oddly designed that i usually mistake it for a mirror from which my own image is miraculously absent. just a little shock, but it works every time. (i don't think i'm the only one - building management put up a 'more toilets this way' notice, pointing out that this is a way through, not an ending - see sign next to frame).

Nice details

left: love the fact that the taps in the barbican's women's bathroom do feature women's shoes - will have to find out what the gentlemen's shoe detail looks like...

right: bankside trees wrapped in red dots - at first i mistook this for a nice advertising detail but then i discovered that the polka dot trees are a piece by artist Yayoi Kusama who is currently exhibiting at the Hayward. just one more example of how the best parts of a blockbuster exhibition are almost always free...

A few things I liked at the RCA summer show

The Toaster Project "For nine months I've been trying to make an electric toaster, myself, starting from scratch. Travelling to disused mines around Britain, digging up raw materials, processing and forming them into a hand crafted pastiche of a product sold in Argos for the throwaway price of £3.94."

The Cloud Project" [...] a dream to make clouds snow ice cream [...]"

Open_Sailing "This is not a utopian architecture model, we are actually building it."

Radical Nature at the Barbican

radical nature? sorry, i don't get it... neither 'radical' nor 'nature' are being discussed much in this exhibition, and a lot of the exhibits feel rather gimmicky, naef, in fact. cut up a tree and reassemble it, let a couple of pseudo rain forest trees grow at an angel of 90 degrees within the gallery space, stuff a wolf and put it on a trailer (to comment on the, quote-unquote, 'traveling circus/carnevalesque-like commodity that nature has become' - bless the good person who wrote that review) -

i want my money back!! - but what was i hoping for?

hoping to look at un-green-clicheed takes on nature, for a start. the whole exhibition feels rather like being inside the womb of a no-questions-asked south ken wholefoods than being in the hands of a curator willing to deal with less kitschy and more relevant contemporary artists - i'm thinking loud here of steve kurtz (bio art), natalie jeremijenko (environmental art), maybe even edward burtinsky (photography), and most definitely the NASA engineers (thanks to bldgblog for the great image find)... all of whom radicalise nature, it's meaning, fabrication and utopia in different ways.

it is striking how the old grandmasters joseph beuys and robert smithson manage to shine the most in the show, roughly 40 years after their peak. my one shining exception is agnes denes and her wheatfield project, and i am looking forward to visit it offsite in action @dalston from mid july.

some public pictures of Radical Nature can be found here on the barbican site and here on the guardian site.

Chopstick Frogs: We ate this!

yes, we ate this: photo taken when we where in beijing, me and the fjord's chrises feasting away... luckily we are not the only ones who think that frogs and chopsticks make for a delicious match, there's more evidence here and here :)

Escapist Findings

after reading "the amazing adventures...", i wanted to stretch my own escapist experience a bit so went over to the British Library's image search to see what they'd have on the history of comics. i didn't find much about superman, but this is fascinating...

maybe old news to any english boy and girl, but i don't have much of an understanding of victorian newspapers, their circulation, production and consumption... so being suddenly exposed to a well-crafted tabloid such as the "illustrated police news" from saturday sept 22, 1888 makes my brain jump and want to know more.

Yoga Arms

since daniel craig started doing bikram yoga, more and more muscly men have started to appear in our sunday classes... and are having serious difficulties getting into the postures alright because their big muscles keep getting in the way! quiet giggles of revenge over here :)


a pose that seems to be particularly challenging is the eagle pose, performed above by this spaghetti-like man who can teach all the muscles a lesson - wonderful set up on flickr here.


credits: "See?!" originally uploaded by Levi Hastings; "devourer" originally uploaded by Talkingsun

The Escapist

"The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" by Michael Chabon is a book about escapism, in every imaginable form. escaping to survive, escaping as a cultural mindset and psychological opportunity, escaping as an illusion of safety and a form of imprisoning oneself.

escaping to survive: one of the central figures, joe kavalier, born a czech jew, manages to escape from nazi-ridden europe to america with the help of his magic teacher. houdini is present at all times.

escaping as a cultural mindset and psychological opportunity: in america, to earn their bread & butter, joe and his cousin sam invent 'the escapist', hero of countless comics and lead of their initial financial success. at this point, survival and escapist motives become one.

escaping as an illusion of safety and a form of to imprisoning oneself: needless to say, after their initial years of (financial) success, personal matters and motives take over, and it all goes haywire - i won't go into the ending but highlights before the ending include squatting in the empire state building, erotic freckles, dog love, crazy plane stunts in the arctic, and stinking seal skins. in fact, this is quite a 'nose' book - it makes you smell anything from the mud that the golem of prague was made of to the burnt meals in joe's aunt's house to the unwashed crazy soldiers lost in the ice... please, just go and smell it. it's phantastic.

Magic Button

this could have been good, but... (image shows wordpress ui promising click-of-a-magic-button blogger import)...


having been distracted by the FeeBies and tweeties of this world for, um, a few long years of noisy social networking, i've recently come to miss the 'talking to myself' quiet quality of my old little blog. strange to see how little things have changed at this end of the spectrum - blogger has become even more closed off (host it here! use our templates only! upgrade!), and wordpress.org now has a commercial little sister (host it here! use our templates only! upgrade!), but in essence both products still work & feel the same. which is rather less fluid and more time-consuming than i expected.

i was pondering playing around with something more advanced like apture for richer data but that'll have to wait til rather more basic problems such as displaying tags in blogger have been tried and tested...