Playlist January 2016, World Pop Fest

Howl – Rival Consoles
Sgoraet (Burning Down) – Kedr Livanskiy
Everywhere You Go – Mari Kvien Brunvoll
Zvichapera – Chiwoniso Maraire
Muévelo Negro – Quantic, Nidia Gongora
Melt! – Flying Lotus
Shipwreck – feat. Thom Yorke – Modeselektor, Thom Yorke
Yarada Lij – Mikael Seifu
In Another Room (Original Mix) – Pional

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From the Archive

Curiosity Rover: Finds Biologically Useful Nitrogen on Mars

24 March 2015

Magazine Contemporary Culture

View from the Mars Hand Lens Imager camera on the arm of NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover and Curiosity Self-Portrait at Mojave Site on Mount Sharp, Mars, 2015

A team using the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite aboard NASA’s Curiosity rover has made the first detection of nitrogen on the surface of Mars from release during heating of Martian sediments. The nitrogen was detected in the form of nitric oxide, and could be released from the breakdown of nitrates during heating. Nitrates are a class of molecules that contain nitrogen in a form that can be used by living organisms. The discovery adds to the evidence that ancient Mars was habitable for life.

Nitrogen is essential for all known forms of life, since it is used in the building blocks of larger molecules like DNA and RNA, which encode the genetic instructions for life, and proteins, which are used to build structures like hair and nails, and to speed up or regulate chemical reactions.
However, on Earth and Mars, atmospheric nitrogen is locked up as nitrogen gas (N2) – two atoms of nitrogen bound together so strongly that they do not react easily with other molecules. The nitrogen atoms have to be separated or “fixed” so they can participate in the chemical reactions needed for life. On Earth, certain organisms are capable of fixing atmospheric nitrogen and this process is critical for metabolic activity. However, smaller amounts of nitrogen are also fixed by energetic events like lightning strikes.

Features resembling dry riverbeds and the discovery of minerals that only form in the presence of liquid water suggest that Mars was more hospitable in the remote past. The Curiosity team has found evidence that other ingredients needed for life, such as liquid water and organic matter, were present on Mars at the Curiosity site in Gale Crater billions of years ago.

“Finding a biochemically accessible form of nitrogen is more support for the ancient Martian environment at Gale Crater being habitable,” said Jennifer Stern of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Stern is lead author of a paper on this research published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science March 23.

“Scientists have long thought that nitrates would be produced on Mars from the energy released in meteorite impacts, and the amounts we found agree well with estimates from this process,” said Stern.

The team found evidence for nitrates in scooped samples of windblown sand and dust at the “Rocknest” site, and in samples drilled from mudstone at the “John Klein” and “Cumberland” drill sites in Yellowknife Bay. Since the Rocknest sample is a combination of dust blown in from distant regions on Mars and more locally sourced materials, the nitrates are likely to be widespread across Mars, according to Stern.

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R. H. Quaytman

26 August 2013

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Main No Comments

Installation view, R.H Quaytman, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, 2009 and Chapter 12: iamb (checkered blue screen with edges), 2008, Oil, silkscreen, gesso on wood, 51 x 82.2 cm

R. H. Quaytman is a contemporary artist, best known for paintings on wood panels, using abstract and photographic elements in site-specific “Chapters”, now numbering twenty-five. Each Chapter is guided by architectural, historical and social characteristics of the original site. Since 2008, her work has been collected by a number of modern art museums.She is also an educator and author, and is based in New York City.

She received a BA from Bard College in 1983 and attended the Post-Graduate program in painting at the National College of Art & Design in Dublin, Ireland in 2001 and later attended the Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques in Paris to study with Daniel Buren and Pontus Hultén.

She is a Rome Prize recipient and attended the Institute des Haute Etudes in Paris. R.H. Quaytman incorporates optical abstractions, silkscreened photographs, diamond dust layers, and hand-painted trompe l’oeil elements into her works. In 2011, her painting was on the cover of Artforum magazine, with an essay by Paul Galvez describing her international triumvirate of installations in the past three years

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Books: Oscar Tuazon

22 October 2011

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Books Main No Comments

Oscar Tuazon, I Can’t See, 2010
Do.Pe. Press, Paraguay Press, Edition of 2.000. Silkscreen cover, color ill.

This publication is the first monograph of American artist Oscar Tuazon. It accompanies the exhibition Bend It Till It Breaks, organized by Chiara Parisi and presented at Le Centre international d’art et du paysage de l’île de Vassivière (Ciap), November 15, 2009-February 14, 2010; Oscar Tuazon, organized by Philippe Pirotte and presented at Kunsthalle Bern, February 13-April 25, 2010; and the exhibition with Elias Hansen, It Was One of my Best Comes, organized by Sandra Patron and presented at Parc Saint Léger – Centre d’art contemporain, March 20 – June 6, 2010.

Edited by Oscar Tuazon, Thomas Boutoux, Pierre François Letué, and Dorothée Perret.

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Oliver Laric

14 March 2012

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Artists Main No Comments

Oliver Laric, Kopienkritik, 2011, Skulpturhalle Basel

Oliver Laric’s work seeks to parse the productive potential of the copy, the bootleg, and the remix, and examine their role in the formation of both historic and contemporary image cultures. This process is intimately tied to his intuitive, idiosyncratic brand of scholarship, which he presents through an ongoing series of fugue-like expository videos (Versions, 2009—present), and further elaborates through his appropriated object works, videos, and sculptures, all of which are densely conceptually layered and often make use of recondite, technologically sophisticated methods of fabrication. Straddling the liminal spaces between the past and the present, the authentic and the inauthentic, the original and its subsequent reflections and reconfigurations, Laric’s work collapses categories and blurs boundaries in a manner that calls into question their very existence.

Laric (born 1981 in Innsbruck, Austria) lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien. Laric’s first solo exhibition in Germany ‘Be Water my Friend’ took place at Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin in 2012. His video work ‘Versions’ (2012) premiered at Art Statements, Art|43|Basel (14-17 June 2012). Recent solo and group exhibitions include: alienate/demonstrate/edit, Artspace, Auckland (2012); Villa du Parc Centre d’art Contemporain, Annemasse, France (2012); In Other Words, NGBK, Berlin (2012), Lilliput, High Line, New York (2012); Frieze New York (2012); Kopienkritik, Skulpturhalle Basel (2011); Based in Berlin (2011); You don’t love me anymore, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster (2011); Frieze Projects, Frieze Art Fair, London (2011); Music for Insomniacs, Proyectos Monclova, Mexico D.F. (2011); Priority Moments, Herald Street, London (2011); Memery, Mass MoCA, (2011); Frame, Frieze Art Fair, London (2010); Artists’ Video, Vancouver Art Gallery (2010); The World is Flat (curated by Lauren Cornell), X-initiative, New York (2009); Unmonumental, New Museum, New York (2008). Forthcoming group shows include: Detours of the Imaginary (curated by Julien Fronsacq), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); The Imaginary Museum (curated by Bart van der Heide), Kunstverein München (2012); Museum of the Image, Breda, The Netherlands (2012).

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Resort 2014: Christian Dior

13 June 2013

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Fashion Main No Comments

Raf Simons for Christian Dior, Resort 2014, Paris

A dynamic forward movement for Dior. First and foremost, Simons was challenging himself, the way Miuccia Prada does with things she feels she has no natural instinct for. Lace, for instance, has never been part of Raf’s lingo. He didn’t want the history or the romance of the stuff, so he juxtaposed it against urgent striations of color in a dress that felt like gravity was dragging it sideways. He laid lace over a bandeau top and metallic tap shorts for a carelessly sporty effect, and he streaked lace dresses with fractured, angular graphics. But if there have been times in the past when Simons seemed like an arch iconoclast, what is increasingly coming through in his work with Dior is his ultimate respect for tradition. Why else would he try so hard to make it relevant for the new clientele that is being drawn to his clothes? So here there was a gorgeous cropped blouson with an abbreviated kimono sleeve, couture and casual in one compact package. As well as a floaty, peachy sundress in a satiny twill that wouldn’t have gone amiss on Grace Kelly, but Simons bifurcated it with a zip. “A symbol of sport and dynamism,” he said.

He’s always eulogized the movement of Christian Dior’s dresses, but here, at last, he acknowledged the restriction of those original looks, so there were zips everywhere. And aerodynamism. And asymmetry. One message came through loud and clear: release yourself. That timeless incentive amplified the notion that Raf Simons is about to take Dior on a long and glorious ride. Tim Blanks for Style.com

http://www.style.com/fashionshows/complete/slideshow/2014RST-CDIOR/#1

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