a hint of halfslant

We’ve been thinking about the phone booth lately....

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 13:19:18 +0100

We’ve been thinking about the phone booth lately. It’s one of the strangest yet most accepted private spaces in a city. It’s for public use, but owned or operated by a private company. It’s not particularly regulated but there are social protocols for its use.

Phone booths come in many shapes and sizes, offering various levels of privacy and space, and are a magnet for street art, installations and advertisements.

The phone booth as an art space allows an artist to directly interact with an intimate audience (1 or 2 people), yet engage them in an everyday location. There is the added functionality of the phone system itself, the walls or structure and of the surrounding street space.

Have any good examples of phone booth art? Tweet @halfslant or email us at begin [at] halfslant.com

Touch Screens in Museums

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:12:00 +0100

Touch screens are the future of museums. They are accessible, intuitive and interactive- all things that most Museum’s are not. They can act as a tool for museums to communicate clearly with the viewer, whether it’s to explain an exhibition, show something in depth, or as a guide. I can think of a few examples interacting with touch screens that have been transformative in the way I experienced a museum.

At the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg there are touch screen maps and guides to the immense collection that you can print out and bring along. Brilliant.

At MOMA’s Seurat show last year there were a series of table height touch screens which enabled visitors to browse though the pages of all of his sketchbooks. What a thrill, flipping through the hidden yellowed pages , now given a new life behind a bright screen.

Halsey Burgund’s touchscreen audio piece at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum allowed you to listen to not only what curators and artists had to say about the exhibitions, but also to museum visitors. You could even add your own thoughts for future participants to enjoy.

The reason this tactile experience is so thoroughly enjoyable at a museum, is because it is usually the land of DO NOT TOUCH, DO NOT TALK. A touch screen enables us to be the lucky archivist and curator, allowing us to engage with primary source materials, to choose what we do and don’t want to listen to , and see clearly where we want to go and how to get there.

In all of these instances, the touch screen is a supplement to information, to enhance the all powerful “visitor experience”, and it does so very well. I hope to see more modules springing up, with more interesting way to use them in museum’s everywhere.

Helvetica Holds Up

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 12:03:00 +0100

Helvetica is ubiquitous. And the first half of Gary Hustwits’ documentary about the font tries to find as many people to say so in as many ways as possible. It’s worth sitting through just to hear typographer Mike Parker explain how Helvetica came out of a Swiss design aesthetic in the 1950’s and 60’s which really focused on the figure-ground relationship and the negative space between the letters. These blocks of space hold the words together into the strong beautiful shapes.

It is incredible to take an up close look at the original Helvetica like a typographer might. Notice the curves and swells and edges of the letters; the plump and strong spaces in between them and how it helps them stand alone and even better together. There is much discourse about the power of fonts and their ability to send a brand message. Helvetica is clearly the most versatile to that end. But on a much more simplistic and visual level, it is a font that holds space in a way that adds weight not only the word it is holding up, but to the space all around it- be it the street, a page, or a building.

top: Arc de la Défense, Paris, France (1990 CE), bottom:...

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 16:03:00 +0100

top: Arc de la Défense, Paris, France (1990 CE), bottom: Regtisan, Samarkand, Uzbekistan (circa 1400 CE)

Nearly five hundred years and several cultures apart, it’s amazing how similair the ideas behind these structures are. There’s a very obvious need for the negative space, the long and wide flat area is probably the most important thing for the designs to succeed. But not only does the large empty square allow the arc and the Registan to feel monumental, it also provides a breezeway through both structures.

What makes the impression is not the enormous stature of the buildings, but their apparent depth and the sense of solidity that is created from that depth.

Public sculpture, installations, interactive community art...

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 17:53:31 +0100

Public sculpture, installations, interactive community art projects etc. are great. Street art, found art and graffiti are great.

Finesse coupled with boredom is the best.

Vandalized Cliff Warning Signs on the Algarve coast in Portugal.

Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut...

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 16:03:00 +0100

Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut was built in 1949 and stands as one of the most famous icons of Modernism in architecture. The Glass House itself is just one of many buildings on a sprawling plot of land- in a sense it is the living room of an outdoor house. Since the Glass House itself had an overwhelming amount of visual distraction for Johnson he would often escape to the cleverly named and constructed Brick House, a dark, private and plush play pen. His study has no windows: just a skylight and books. The bunker of his painting collection is a temple to Frank Stella and Andy Warhol. The Sculpture collection is housed in brick, glass and white walls inspired by Greek sea side villages.

If you could pick a building for each type of activity you do at home or in life, rather than just a room, what would each one look like?

Red sets the scene, a static vantage point frames the...

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 11:36:00 +0100

Red sets the scene, a static vantage point frames the narrative.

Sometimes the aesthetic stars align and all the advertising companies and product placements work together to create a stage one could only dream of.

Here’s a Paris metro station in a very complete nutshell.

Xuan-Thu Nguyen défilé in Paris

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 23:14:00 +0100

When I think of an Haute Couture fashion show, I imagine an intricately handcrafted presentation of a concept that just happens to be worn.

At Xuan-Thu Nguyen’s Spring Summer 2009 Haute Couture show, I got all of this and even an embroidered snap bracelet.(Which just came in very handy when trying to spell her name.) In Haute Couture, obsession gets dressed up as decoration and flourishes of colour as materialisations of a risk taken on the part of the designer. The models float by like vessels for these art works. They come and go too fast for me to really care about the clothes. Instead I fixate on the details. An eyebrow drawn in a stunning way, an errant piece of hair or a spirally way of walking in a straight line.

After a few pieces a selection of models returns to the runway in what I originally thought were awkwardly clunky dresses and jackets. Standing completely still and looking out into the audience their motionlessness is interrupted by a young man who proceeds to un-do (via zippers, buttons and latches) each of the young woman’s clothes, revealing wonderful bursts of colorful flowers.

The staging was touchingly poignant. The young man seemed nervous as he slowly worked and the models ignored him like elegant trees. The color that sprung from the beneath the grays and the trembling fingers that released them transformed the clothes into malleable works of art,the models into performers and the runway into a stage. There is no reason to even wonder whether art and fashion have merged. At this show, they were indistinguishable.

Color blocking rules the two dimensions

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 13:00:00 +0100

More than anything else, color is the visual science in art. A line can vary in weight, shape and flow, but color is always color. Winsor McCay, one of America’s finest cartoonists used the old broadsheet newspapers to their fullest and though his composition is top notch, it’s the color that grabs your attention. Here are two examples:

Lookout tower views from 1935

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:27:13 +0100

These old photographs are taken from a top a lookout tower in Eastern Oregon, USA, most likely by the lookout himself. Every day, the lookout wakes at sunrise and scans the area 360 degrees around him looking for fires. Over months of seeing the same terrain, these massive landscapes become intimate scenes and land markers act as beacons to help locate fires.

The tiny lookout, perched atop a 6000 foot butte, is composed of one room with windows on all sides, and acts as an anchor point to hundreds of miles of landscape.

It’s been a week now since we saw the Mantegna show at the...

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 11:37:00 +0100

It’s been a week now since we saw the Mantegna show at the Louvre in Paris. One thing of note that was particularly interesting for Halfslant was the thematic emphasis on Mantegna’s love of detail.

With the large and varied crowd that the Louvre draws, it’s difficult to curate a show without either leaving some people behind, or boring the regulars. The Mantegna show used small written introductions to a select series of works that asked the audience to look for key images in each painting.

This “Where’s Waldo” approach was very fun and extremely effective - serving as a prompt to one of the most important dialogues a person can have with a painting, what is this and why was it painted?

Blu’s “Muto” piece. It’s hard to imagine...

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 11:04:00 +0100

Blu’s “Muto” piece. It’s hard to imagine the amount of time and planning this took, but of all the great street artists working today, only someone with Blu’s track record of monumental pieces could pull this off. Simply stunning.

Photo

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:38:00 +0100