Peter Greenaway creates the Last Supper to be served in Melbourne

Acclaimed as an extraordinary spectacle of sound, light and multimedia magic, Melbourne Festival invites you to the Australian premiere of one of this year’s most exciting and affordable events on offer.  From Saturday 10 October, North Melbourne Town Hall will be transformed into the Santa Maria delle Grazie of Milan, with visionary artist and filmmaker Peter Greenaway’s acclaimed masterpiece Leonardo’s Last Supper.

Screening every half hour for only $10 for adults and $5 for children, Melburnians are sure to be mesmerized as Greenaway gives new life to one of the world’s most iconic and mystifying masterpieces, merging visual arts, cinema, music and cutting-edge technologies.

A master of cinematic magic, Greenaway has created an inspiring multimedia event in front of Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper. This is a perfect, three-dimensional sculptural clone of Milan’s crumbling, 510-year-old chapel wall and painting, with live projections of images and light as well as a life-size physical reconstruction of the table in the painting accompanied by a soundscape of voice, music and atmospherics.

The Last Supper depicts the moment when Christ announces that one of the apostles will betray him and disruption ensues. Greenaway’s sensitive spectacle delves into this moment. It uncovers truths about the painting and its influence, and reveals obscure details lost to time, overpainting and restorations.

“To the strains of modern opera, he used cutting-edge technical trickery to make Leonardo’s Christ appear like a three-dimensional hologram while a radiant sun rose and fell over his head. He turned the original colourful image red, grey and black before the artist’s gentle brush strokes were replaced with a chalk outline of the 13 figures, as if Leonardo had drawn a crime scene. Dawn broke, dusk fell and by the end the disciples had been dramatically cast into the shadow of prison-like bars,” Robert Booth, The Guardian.

This exact recreation of the chapel wall - to the same size and scale, and featuring the same characteristics and texture of the original - has been achieved through a groundbreaking combination of sophisticated technology and craftsmanship.  Leonardo’s Last Supper places Peter Greenaway among the great artists who experiment unflaggingly with new means of expression for the new millennium.

Greenaway conceived Leonardo’s Last Supper in response to a deep fascination with visual literacy and explores the potential interaction between 114 years of cinema and eight thousand years of painting.

More info at the Melbourne Festival website

LAND. Ulf Langheinrich. Digital Illusion part of the Brisbane Festival

A SENSORY JOURNEY COMES TO AUSTRALIA

LAND is a triple-screen digital landscape rendered solely out of two algorithms that create pure noise. Through its sheer immensity and use of pulsing repetition it induces a changed state of consciousness, or, as the artist puts it, “an altered state of reality”.

LAND, which debuted at the 2008 Liverpool Biennial (UK), continues the German artist’s exploration into sensory immersive environments, at the core of his recent artistic research into the nature of digital illusion.

15 September – 1 October
The Block
Cnr Kelvin Grove Road and Musk Avenue, Kelvin Grove, Brisbane, Australia

For more details, see description on QUT website

Rapid Protoyping in Ice

“At McGill University (Montréal, Québec) engineers and architects are working together to explore the possibilities of rapid prototyping (RP) systems for construction with ice.

Ice structures built by the FAB@HOME desktop rapid prototyping machine.

In 2006, Professors Pieter Sijpkes (School of Architecture) and Jorge Angeles (Department of Mechanical Engineering and Centre for Intelligent Machines) received a three-year $173,000 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) research creation grant for a project entitled New Architecture of Phase Change: Computer-Assisted Ice Construction. Based in the School of Architecture, this three-year study focuses on computer-controlled techniques for constructing objects at varying scales out of ice.”

Read more about the Computer-Assisted Ice Construction Project here.

“GoodMorning!” Twitter Visualization Tool

GoodMorning! is a Twitter visualization tool showing approximately 11,000 tweets collected over a 24 hour period. The collected tweets visualize the phrase ‘good morning’ in English and various other languages.

The tweets are coded in coloured blocks:

• Green tweets are sent pre-9am
• Orange tweets are sent at 9am approximately
• Red tweets are sent between 9am and 12 noon
• Black tweets are messages sent “…at times that aren’t in the morning at that location”.

For more information, visit: blog.blprnt.com

Dancehouse presents Open Season

A season of multi-artform performances.

17 – 20 September, 2009

Curated by Dancehouse Artistic Director David Tyndall, Open Season brings together a four-day showcase of eight unique works by established and emerging Melbourne contemporary artists.

In June this year Dancehouse called for expressions of interest from artists of all disciplines – dancers, choreographers, writers, performance artists, musicians, animators or anything in between – for the opportunity to present their works as part of Open Season.

Eight distinctive and intriguing works have been selected and incorporated into two different programs running for two days each – Program A and Program B. Audiences will be treated to solo performers and groups, dance, 3D clay animation, wall paintings, physics, the sounds of birds, improvisation, paper bags, video projections, memories and of course, buckets.

Visit www.dancehouse.com.au

Chris Howlett Flashbacks

Opening Wednesday 5 August, 6-9pm, 2009
Balmoral Room, Brisbane, Australia

A multi-disciplinary exhibition combining contemporary art with immersive interactive gameplay, live action documentation and video art works.

Chris Howlett’s new interactive video and sound art exhibition called Flashbacks opens at the Balmoral Room in City Hall coinciding with the Brisbane International Film Festival. The works in this exhibition explore a number of fundamental questions around the way in which new technologies shift cultural and political understandings of our physical and psychological selves. Through combining 3D game play with interactive game mods, video projections, sound works and site-specific installations, these works activate an immersive space from which to critically and creatively consider how reality and simulated environments both construct and reconfigure our ideas about the nature of identity.

Howlett’s work asks us to reflect on how we function as a society in response to these new spaces of interaction, how we might respond to the political dimensions of these expanded sites of inhabitation, and how they might also represent a more troubling scenario for the possibility of dissent or opposition in our media saturated culture.

More from Chris Howlett dot com dot au

Rock Paper Lasers digital laser technology to create paper artworks and sculptures

Don’t F with Lasers!

Trinh Vu, Troy Innocent, Jeff Janet and Joel Zika. Exhibiting amazing paper based artworks.

Opening night Friday July 31st – exhibition runs until the 15th of August, 2009

Check:
www.rockpaperlasers.blogspot.com
www.kickgallery.com

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – + + +

The four artists in Rock, Paper, Lasers – Troy Innocent, Jeff Janet, Trinh Vu & Joel Zika – have used the latest digital laser technology to create paper artworks and sculptures; some of the works mimic industrial design objects while others are representative of mere folly and experimentation.

One of the intentions of the artists in this exhibition is to deride the mass production of iconography, such as that which is so often seen in ‘home wares’ or ‘lifestyle’ shops, to make a series of more unique works. Other works in the show are intended to exemplify the possibilities of these tools for the creation of contemporary art works. While these artists cast a light on the facelessness of the prefabricated object, at the same time, they choose to revel in the machine’s benefits for more unique creative purposes rather than running from them.

Each of the artists in Rock, Paper, Lasers lecture in Art and Design at Monash University and as a part of their own on-going practice set themselves the task to create this exhibition of two and three dimensional artworks collaboratively.

Troy Innocent is represented by Tolarno Galleries, Boutwell Draper Gallery, and Hugo Michell Gallery. Trinh Vu is represented by Christine Abrahams Gallery (Melbourne), ArtsBank and Chika Gallery (Tokyo). Joel Zika first exhibited at Kick Gallery in 2004 and has regularly exhibited at Kick Gallery in various group exhibitions. Rock, Paper, Lasers has been supported by the Monash University Art & Design Faculty.

Host: Kick Gallery
Opening Night: Friday, July 31, 2009
7:00pm – 9:00pm
Location:  Kick Gallery, 239 High St , Northcote, Melbourne, Australia

Email: info@kickgallery.com

Cinema 2 point 0 plus 3D Big Screen and Participatory Futures

How will the traditionally passive cinema experience change in the next few years. Stereoscopic 3D films are becoming commonplace alongside specialised 3D Imax outings and in the past few months we have experienced Monsters vs Aliens, Up, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Coraline, My Bloody Valentine. Dreamworks have committed to producing all CG films in 3D and there are new releases planned over the next 6 months including Avatar, The Final Destination, re-release of Toy Story 1 & 2. A Christmas Carol & Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. But what about more interactive cinema with games or social applications particularly with YouTube recently delivering a full 3D capability? Where does the future lie for cinemas and other public screen spaces?

Speakers:
- Tim Baier (Animal Logic)
- Paul Nichola (Stereo Supervisor/VFX Supervisor – Cane Toads 2)
- Matt McGinity, UNSW iCinema
- and Peter Giles Director of Digital Division @ AFTRS

Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Time:  5:30pm – 7:00pm
Location:  AFTRS THEATRE
The Entertainment Quarter, Moore Park
Sydney, Australia

Email: info@aftrs.edu.au
Website: lamp.edu.au

Edgar Mueller – 3D Street Art

Edgar Mueller – 3D Pavement Art – The Master of street painting uses the street as a canvas. If one looks from the right spot, its three-dimensional painting becomes the perfect illusion.

This dude is amazing!…Edgar Mueller’s website

3D murals

Off the wall: The astonishing 3D murals painted on the sides of buildings by a trompe l’oeil artist

At first glance, it looks as if some natural disaster has shaken away the walls of these buildings to reveal architecture hidden for thousands of years.

And at second and third glance, it looks like that too.

But these spectacular images are not the unexpected result of an earthquake.

The incredibly lifelike scenes are actually huge works of art, painted on the side of perfectly intact buildings. (Even that woman peering into the ruin above is not real – refer to Daily Mail for images) 

The paintings, which have fooled many, were created by John Pugh, who specialises in trompe l’oeil – or ‘trick of the eye’ – art.

He uses his skills to delude the viewer into seeing 3D scenes painted on flat surfaces.

The Californian-born artist said: ‘It seems almost universal that people take delight in being visually tricked.’

More tricky from The Daily Mail