I walked across the front of the National Gallery last night, and became one of many caught up and enchanted by Lozano-Hemmer's pavement 'magic-lantern show'. It seemed to fit the surrounding Christmas lights and the feeling of child-like enchantment I often get in the west end at this time of year (until I think about it all a bit more!).

After a while, surrounded by passing footfalls and flickering images, I realised that the installation is an even bigger box of tricks than it first appeared. The figures actually seem to respond. They beckon you or 'wake up' as you approach them, then retreat, retire, or go back to sleep as you walk away. The pre-recorded films react in various random ways, some sad or serious, some humorously, to sensors criss-crossing the concourse, creating a computerised grid. An image of this grid spectacularly zooms across the square every few minutes to drive the point home.

It's all clever stuff. It's all very spectacular. And as the high-tech equipment and security guards around the periphery remind me, it's all very expensive.

As well as playing with robotics, projections, phone links and sensors, Lozano-Hemmer also seems to enjoy playing with the idea of public surveillance. Setting up a network of surveillance, he allows us to have fun with it. Isn't this like getting into bed (and being tickled) by Orwell's Big Brother though? Surveillance, through play, becomes perhaps less threatening, but no less controlling and pervasive.

The artist wants to involve the viewer in the work and I've heard that the he quotes a couple of artists with similar concerns: The 17th century Spanish painter, Diego Velázquez, and that amazing painting Las Meninas, which positions you, the viewer, in the place of the subjects that the artist, Velasquez, depicts himself painting. As a more recent example, he quotes Tall Ships by Gary Hill. This is probably closer to Under Scan in its use of video and computer technology and involves the viewer in a similarly controlled intimacy with filmed images of other people. With three friends (two of them video artists), I made a special trip from London to Oxford to see Tall Ships, a multi-image, walk-through video installation, a few years ago. We were blown away – but quietly. Hill's minimal, finely-judged piece was moving rather than spectacular. As a result, it resonated more deeply. It avoided what we thought at the time, (as I am reminded now) was a major pitfall of some electronic and/or interactive work: that of looking rather more like an impressively-staged exhibit at a science museum and feeling rather less of an art experience – interactive or otherwise.

I first heard about Under Scan in Trafalgar Square on the radio. It has attracted the attention of the media and the artist speaks very well when interviewed about it. It's the kind of art that 'reports well'. It's popular, it is spectacular and I can't help thinking, is this media art, or art for the media (or maybe art for people so saturated by media messages that they really need an instantaneous, flickering, fast-moving "WOW!" to cut through it all and be engaged)?

– Maybe I'm just an old minimalist, but for me, perhaps less would have been not only more, but more focused.

Whatever it was, the installation at Trafalgar Square was fun. Like many others there, I was engaged. I stayed and explored the piece for quite a while. Interesting to see though, how many people got a kick out of stamping on the image of someone who was clearly not there to be offended or fight back. Perhaps in spite of our modern, sophisticated lifestyles and high-tech artworks, we are not so 'advanced' after all?

I've posted a couple of my favourites that I did kind of enjoy – in spite of my po-faced reservations!

(photo courtesy of Alastair Fyfe)


Artists are lighting up London's South Bank with 1200 wind-powered lights as part of a digital arts festival.

The Aeolian tower - which means moved by the wind - is a 15m steel structure located next to Waterloo Bridge.

The tower is covered with hundreds of tiny wind-powered LEDs. Each one made of a plastic turbine, controlling circuits and three red LEDs.

The designers aim to show how renewable energy can be used to power sustainable art and design.

The Aeolian Tower will be in place from 14 -16 November as part of the One Dot Zero - Adventure In Motion festival at the BFI Southbank in London.

Read more of Flora Graham's report on BBC News

Update: I went down to check out the Tower of Power on my way home from the England-Australia match at Twickenham today and it was mighty disappointing. Someone had pulled the plug or the wind was non-existent... whatever the problem is was on the dark side.

It was good to see the Tinsley Cooling Towers in Sheffield fighting back this week-end and refusing to lie down.



Part of the second tower refuses to lie down. It was later demolished by bulldozers.

Despite the Big Art Project's committed support the passionate TowerLovers of Sheffield were unable to save their cool towers. Energy corporation EON, who own the site, have promised £0.5M to fund a public art work on the site. That's an identical amount to the estimated cost of making the towers safe.

Meanwhile, the passions around the twin towers remain anything but cool, as illustrated, by way of example, by The Sesquipedalist:

"Even though they’re the oldest standing example of hyperboloidal cooling towers in the UK and even though they were probably the largest of their kind when built in 1939, the cooling towers at Tinsley would be of considerably less interest if they were in a Lincolnshire field, or on the Northumberland coast. But they’re not. They’re a few metres from the M1, symbolising the transition from “The South” to “The North” (and back) to millions of motorists. I remember going to visit my grandparents in Sheffield in the ‘70s. Peering out of a brown Ford Cortina’s rear window, I knew we were “nearly there” when I saw at close quarters these Brobdingnangian salt and pepper pots. A matching pair no less, oozing iconicity from their concrete pours. The kind of imbued iconicity that’s been invested in by a shared memory over decades of proud “Made in Sheffield” tradition rather than blinging stainless steel meaninglessness, designed in Apathy and built in Elsewhere."
More...

Photo courtesy of Andy Coe

Good to see the youth of Cardigan rising up. Reminds me of the good old days (words courtesy of Bob Dylan, named of course after Wales' own poet Dylan):

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

This comes from the august journal that is the Tivy-Side Advertiser:

"The Big Art project could be the best thing that's ever happened to Cardigan - that's the view of younger people in the town it was claimed this week.

After months of negative comments about the £600,000 project, younger people are now coming forward to voice their support.

This comes in the wake of warnings that the project will fail if it does not get the backing of the community.
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"Big Art is a fantastic idea and something that will bring tourists and customers into Cardigan," said 22-year-old Liz Greenhalgh, who will be taking over a town shop in the next few months.

"It's far better that the money is invested in our town rather than any other. I'm all for it - and so are a lot of young people."

Liz's views were backed up by artist Rowan O'Neill, 31, who wants to use Rafael Lozano Hemmer's floating buoys to create her own project."

Read more of the Youngsters love Big Art

"We could have changed the way people look at this city. And they didn't let us." - here's a great account by Alexandra Topping from The Guardian of Toms Keeley & James' dogged campaign to transform industry into art.

" From the window of the Sheffield Supertram, Tom James watches despondently as the city's out-of-town shopping centre, Meadowhall, comes into view. Just beyond this mecca of consumerism, with its Disney-style dome and legions of parked cars, rises an altogether different landmark. The Tinsley cooling towers - bleak, elegant, real - are often the first and last thing people see as they enter and leave the city. But soon, like Sheffield's industrial golden age, they will be consigned to history, demolished to make way for a new power station. James reflects: "Imagine, when the towers are gone, Meadowhall will be the only thing you'll be able to see from the tram and the M1. How depressing."

Over the last three years, the 1940s towers have become symbolic of the battle for the city's soul - between those determined to create a 21st-century gleaming metropolis and those intent on preserving and celebrating some of the city's industrial heritage.

At the heart of that battle are Tom James and Tom Keeley, self-proclaimed "post-industrial city lovers" in their mid-20s. For two and a half years, they have been campaigning to have the redundant 76 metre-high towers, which stand just 17 metres from the motorway, transformed into a space for public art. "The idea was to transform the cooling towers into something amazing," Keeley says. "Our Angel of the North - something that would really make people think about Sheffield differently". "

Read on...

Here's an interesting arrival in London and Newcastle (simultaneously) this week. Peripatetic (LA born) David Choe has a new show opening this Friday night at the Lazarides Galleries. Here's a sneak preview of the new work...



Picture courtesy David Choe and Lazarides Gallery
Copyright: David Choe 2008

Stars of the UK arts scene, the art collective, Greyworld, has been selected to develop new art works for Burnley. Greyworld, is best known for The Source, created for the new London Stock Exchange and is currently developing a new installation next to London's Tate Modern Gallery for November 2007.

The Big Art Burnley team reflect on the past years' Big Art experience in their own video.




Visit the Big Art Burnley team's own website: www.bigartpro.co.uk for more information.