Month: July 2009

Eno’s Luminous Opera House panorama

eno_sydney

I’m a bit late with this one but better late than never. Brian Eno’s illuminated transformation of the Sydney Opera House, part of the city’s Luminous Festival, was widely publicised last month but I never got round to checking it out properly. This week Thom drew my attention (thanks Thom!) to this panorama by photographer Peter Murphy whose marvellous view inside one of Yayoi Kusama’s mirror rooms I linked to in March. Looking on Murphy’s site I see he has another Kusama panorama showing a view inside Phalli’s Field (or Floor Show). And while we’re on the subject of Ms Kusama, she currently has a room at London’s Hayward Gallery as part of their Walking in My Mind series by different artists. You can see a reaction to that here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The panoramas archive

Miasmah in Manchester

miasmah.jpg

Out again to Trinity Church in Salford for an evening of musical performance from the Miasmah label. “Miasma” was a fitting word for this event since all three artists proved very adept at filling the humid air with great clouds of treated guitar chords, loops and electronic noise.

The aural miasms created by The Sight Below, aka Rafael Anton Irisarri and Simon Scott, reminded me of favourites Main whose Hz album I’d been playing earlier in the day. Main were among the first musicians in the 1990s to extend the sound of the electric guitar through samples and other processing, and everyone at the Trinity tonight was following a similar path, albeit with very distinctive, individual styles. The Sight Below add a pulse of heavy rhythm to their sheets of distortion. Svarte Greiner (Erik Skodvin of Deaf Center) meanwhile, played some great bowed Stratocaster then some even better squalls of Strat feedback. Very impressive all round and the combination of volume plus environment (old church carefully lit and perfumed by clouds of incense) showed again why these kind of intimate performances often trump their recorded equivalents; sometimes you just have to be there.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Deaf Center in Manchester
• Machinefabriek in Manchester
• Trinity rendezvous
• Main

Sipho Mabona’s origami insects

mantis.jpg

Praying Mantis (2008).

Folded from a single sheet. Amazing. Lots more insects and other constructions on her Flickr page.And while we’re on the subject, Between the Folds is a documentary about origami artists currently doing the rounds of film festivals. Via Design Observer.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Kitchen insects
• Elizabeth Goluch’s precious metal insects
• Laura Zindel’s ceramics
• The art of Philippe Wolfers, 1858–1929
• Robert Lang’s origami insects
• Lalique’s dragonflies
• Lucien Gaillard