Alias Arts

Interactive Architecture is evolving after 4 years of me writing some 388 articles on my own. I’ve invited Lighting Designer Ben Kreukniet from United Visual Artists & Interaction Designer Paul Skinner from Digit to contribute to the blog as guest writers.

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Coop Himmelblau was founded in 1968 by architects Wolf D. Prix, Helmut Swiczinsky and Rainer Michael Holzer. In its early days, the firm was based in Vienna, but moved to Los Angeles in the 1980’s. Their early experimental works included a series of installations in which people played key roles. These experiments included inflatable [...]

When the groundbreaking Prada store by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas opened in New York’s SoHo neighborhood in 2001, the concept of retail design was forever changed. Now, less than a decade later, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect and the Italian fashion house have done it again with the Transformer, a shape-shifting event structure in Seoul, South [...]

Another great project by LAb[au], “fLUX binary waves” is an urban and cybernetic installation based on the measuring of infrastructural ( passengers, cars…) and communicational ( electromagnetic fields produced by mobile phones, radio…) flows and their transposition into luminous, sonic and kinetic rules.

This relation between the installation and the urban activity happens in [...]

Materials & Applications is a research center that I’ve written about a couple of times because of the wonderful large scale installations that are built there every year. It is a residential space “dedicated to pushing new and underused ideas for art, landscape and architecture into view.”

Above and below is a recent installation Density [...]

Installation artist Shih Chieh Huang transforms spaces with everyday objects. His most recent project “EX-I-09″ currently on show at the Beall Center for Art + Technology focuses on exploring the unusual evolutionary adaptations undertaken by creatures that reside in inhospitable conditions.

Huang creates analogous ecosystems made from common, everyday objects. “I source my wholly synthetic [...]

Korean artist, Choe U Ram, creates massive, precision engineered sculptures with an eerie organic feel. He uses cut and polished metals, machinery and electronics to create kinetic sculptures inspired by sea creatures and plant life.

Exploring the boundaries of archeological discovery and developmental morphology, Choe’s explanations and Latin titles for these creations follow the linguistic [...]

Above is an image of 1301 fluorescent tubes powered only by the electric fields generated by overhead powerlines. It was created by Richard Box while artist-in-residence at Bristol University’s physics department.

He got the idea for the installation after a chance conversation with a friend. ‘He was telling me he used to play with a fluorescent [...]

About once every couple of months one of my students sends me a video of ART+COM’s mechatronic installation, made up of 714 metal balls for the BMW museum. ART+COM describe it as “a spatial translation of a design process. Seemingly weightless and guided solely by the power of the mind, the sculpture moves through a [...]