Arthur Ganson – Sculpture that’s truly moving

Arthur Ganson is a renowned kinetic sculptor. Ganson makes mechanical art demonstrations and Rube Goldberg machines with existential themes. Ganson was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1955. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of New Hampshire in 1978.

Arthur’s work has a lot to do with happiness. He started out as a young boy making things for people as a way of showing love. When he was a child he started to explore motion as he loved the way things moved. He started out by making little flip books. In college he found himself making fairly complicated and fragile machines and this really came about from having many different kinds of interests. In high school he was interested in programming computers and later on was interested in becoming a sorgeon as it ment working with his hands in a very focused and intense way. So he started taking courses which helped him create art and making them very precise with his hands and coming up with different kinds of logical flows of energy through a system and also working with wire made everything that he did both visual and a mechanical engineering decision at the same time.

My favourite design of his was the wish bone that was made to walk across the table. He engineered basically constructed a mechanical solution to just make a wish bone walk across a table. He says this reminds him of a cowboy who was sitting on his horse for too long. I found that quite humorous. He describes this sort of work as pupetry where his the puppeteer and he control and designs the objects.

Im my opinion his work doesn’t really mean anything, but all his work is just simply inspired by movement. In a nutshell, Arthur Ganson loves solving mechanical problems.

Theo Jansen: The art of creating creatures

Theo Jansen (born March 14, 1948, in The Hague, Netherlands) is a Dutch artist and kinetic sculptor. He builds large works which resemble skeletons of animals and are able to walk using the wind on the beaches of the Netherlands. His animated works are a fusion of art and engineering; in a car company television commercial Jansen says: "The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds."

Theo talks about a project he started 16 years ago and its about making new forms of life. These forms of life are made using plastic tubes. These creatures are mainly powered by the wind. He explains the propotion of the tubes in each animal is very important for walking. There are 11 numbers which are called the eleven holding numbers. These are the distances of the tubes which make it walk the way it does. Infact it’s a new invention of a wheel. The axis of a wheel stays on the same level just like the hip of the creature does. He says it’s a better method than a wheel and explains if you try to ride a bicycle on the beach, its not very easy to do. But this new method makes movement easier as the feet of the animal just steps over the stand and need not touch every bit of the ground in between like a wheel does. So basically, 5000 years after the invention of the wheel, he says, we have a new form of the wheel.

Each animal is made to detect all the dangers on the beach. And one of the biggest is the sea. Thus, each animal is equipped with a water feeler. This is basically a tube that normally sucks in air. But when it detects and swallows water it feels the resistance of it, therefore, causing the animal to move away from the water. The animal is also equipped with a brain. This is a binary step counter. The purpose of this is to let the animal know where exactly it is on the beach at all times. There is also a nose attached to the creature. This helps to stabilize the animal during a storm or harsh winds. A hammer sort of device hits the nose which is a sort of pin that is driven into the ground helping the animal fixate itself to the ground.

Stefan Sagmeister: Yes, design can make you happy

Stefan Sagmeister (born 1962 in Bregenz, Austria) is a New York-based graphic designer and typographer currently living in Bali, Indonesia[1]. He has his own design firm, Sagmeister Inc in New York City. He has designed album covers for Lou Reed, OK Go, The Rolling Stones, David Byrne, Aerosmith and Pat Metheny. Sagmeister studied graphic design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. He later received a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Pratt Institute in New York. He began his design career at the age of 15 at "Alphorn", an Austrian Youth magazine, which is named after the traditional Alpine musical instrument

In the video Stefan talks about moments of happiness he has had in his life and goes on to say how many of these moments had to do with design. He first talks about how he went to visit a friend in Hong Kong around 15 years ago, and at the time been a very supersticious person, upon landing at the airport he thought if he seems something good he would have a great time during his stay and if he saw something negative he would be miserable. And as he landed the first thing he noticed was a billboard with the word ‘winner’ on it. After leaving Honk Kong with a great job offer and returning to Austria, he packed his bags and another week later, still supersticious, he flew back to Honk Kong. On his way there he was thinking if the ‘winner’ billboard is still up he would have a good time and if its gone he would have a miserable time. It turned out that not only was the billboard still up, there was another one placed next to it saying ‘double-happiness. However, he had a terrible time there.

He also talks about how he went to Tokyo to visit a new museum. The innaugral exhibit was called happiness and under that theme the exhibition was sectioned into 4 sections. Arcadia, Nirvana, Desire and Harmony. Each section was different and unique. What he took away from the exhibition was that most of the pieces in their was about the visulization of happiness and not about happiness. He says that he felt a little bit cheated as the visualization is a easy thing to do and his studio does that sort of thing all the time.

All in all the Stefan goes on to mention and show many other visuals of design that was trully creative and no doubt depicts happiness through them.

Kareem Rizk

Kareem Rizk had a glamorous view of what design was supposed to look like and had always wanted to work in a big studio. Qualified as a graphic designer from university he applied for many jobs and had several interviews. He did not however sell himself very well but finally did manage to secure a job at the Herald Sun. After working there for awhile he decided to start doing his own work as an artist and started venturing into doing collage work which he says he enjoys doing more than anything else. He first produced a large body of work in 2006 and slowly started shifting into doing this sort of work more. He is know recognized in been one of the best collage artist going around today.

He describes that collage work is always structural and he always works to a grid in his mind. He hardly ever relies on accidents. To produce these artistic pieces he uses torn paper, oil pastels, carbon paper and random images just to mention a few. The images he uses are generally over sixty years old, thus eliminating any copy right issues that may arise. But he takes further precautions by manipulating the images in various ways such as covering the faces with type and other images. He sources his images from old publications and never uses images of celebrities and of any publication after the 1980s. He never uses newspapers either as he explains that it doesn’t help him to establish his own unique style.

He started his work on paper as a background and decided moving onto using canvases so it helps his display them in galleries around the world. His work consists of mainly paper, cardboard and canvas. He also stains the paper for a more creative olden looking background. He will be featured at the Art Basel 2009 which is to be held in Miami Beach.

He also produces digital pieces using old paper, textures, typography, old images and transparencies. By the use of Photoshop he is able to create various textures and colours as well. He released his website in 2006 which helped his become known and established as a collage artist around the world. The website took him over three months to create since he wanted it to be a very visual site. He did a lot of self promotion and pushed his work anywhere he could to gain as much publicity as possible. This helped him in getting where he is today.

He names his work after something in the collage itself. Keeps it very simple. But at times some pieces can have quite complicated names. He says he loves using black and white images and puts in coloured backgrounds. He goes on to say that this helps the composition sit better. He sometimes designs his work digitally before proceeding to create on canvas.

He is since lately looking into having his work printed on t-shirts, mugs and shoes. He says that some of his greatest influences are artist such as Richard Hamilton, Charles Walkin, Mario Wagner and Edurado Recife. Recife was his main influence to get into collage work he added.

Australian Colour

Based in Melbourne since 2001, Louis Porter is a creative and talented photographer who was born in England in 1977. His work has been exhibited in Australia, England , Canada and Austria. Since his arrival in Australia, he has traveled suburbs of greater Melbourne for new, the interesting and the strange photos he can capture. He carries his camera with him almost everywhere he goes and if the opportunity for capturing a good picture presented itself, he would be ready to capture it without any hesitation.

His photography is categorized as street photography. He has traveled from Altona to Hoppers Crossing and Deer Park to Thornbury. His Exhibition ‘Australian Colour’ presents a series of ink jet prints individually titled after the places they were shot at. Rather than staging a scene like many photographers do, Louis Porter finds his subject matter while exploring the streets. His shots are all done with film rather than using a digital camera. He explains that the film helps his capture a better colour quality that he loves in his photography. The film he uses is extremely sensitive to strong colour which helps him in the process as well. None of his images are digitally manipulated and the colour captured is in the photograph itself.

Louis Porter’s main aim in taking photographs is to capture the colour, thus most of his images are captures before afternoon and never at night. However, when asked if he would be interested in night photography, he responded that he would be looking into that aspect as well in the near future. His attitude to street photography is truly unique since most street photography out there is focused mainly on people and buildings rather than on colour itself.

Porter has described these works as “portraying familiar scenes that just
aren’t right”.