Double Wonderland

A second Second Life post in row? I must be running out of stuff to post here... Truth is I'm swamped with approaching deadlines and these images have been hanging around for a while. One day I was bored walking around looking for cool 3D stuff and happend on a game yard with casinos and slot machinesand shoot them games and Miltos came online and he's always obsessed with video games so I showed him that you can actualy play a game even when you are inside another game. Which is exactly the scenario from one of my totally favorite films, David Kronenbergs' "eXistnZ". So anyway we walked right up to the Duck Hunt and realised that not only we could shoot ducks but that the space was enterable! We could enter the space of the screen! Like two video game Alices in a double wonderland, we were inside the space of a game which was inside the space of a place that is not really a game which was inside the screens of our multitasking laptops that a lot of people use for work but not for play.

I Tube for YouTube

Just re-did the house for Angelo and me on our ridiculously small piece of land on Second Life. The upside-down leopard pyramids are gone (though I kept a copy on my account just in case), and I tried out the Tube House. This was an idea I've been playing around for a while, in a way similar to Blue Wave, with texture maps instead of concrete and standard tubes instead of the floppy blue wave form. If you watch the video you'll notice I'm bumping my head a round, though I tried to edit those parts out to appear cool and in control (always). Anyway, it's not so easy to walk around this tube maze when you're an avatar.

New AngeloPlessas.com

Angelo is in London, I just got home after teaching for 6 hours then driving 6 hours back in the rain etc and I know that apart from being tired, I'm also super biased about this, but I cannot help blogging Angelos' new website, simply because it ROCKS.

Tickets for 2

If you're in Athens, RUN dont walk to get tickets for Dimitris Papaioannou's "2", the amazing dance performance that Angelo wrote about here when we the saw the rehearsal for the first time last April. Last night I saw it again in a more official rehearsal with a fantastic musical score by Konstadinos B, beautiful video work by Athina Rachel Tsangari and much much more. Part of the cast is Foivos Papadopoulos whose work was in the Anathena exhibition @ Deste Foundation. Get your tickets here, though I heard it's sold out until after the holidays. Opens Friday.

My Magritte Obsession

Les compagnons de la peur 1942

I was lost, looking for something unrelated to this blog, and then I bumped into these paintings by Magritte and I remembered just how fantabulous they really are.

Les tables de la loi 1966

Le plagiat 1940

Les fanatiques 1955

Tomba Brion

Normally I dont' care for cemeteries but this is such an exception. Tomba Brion was designed by Carlo Scarpa as a falmily tomb for the wealthy Brion family. It is a wacked out surrelist landscape of abstract geometries and just bizzare all over. Plus it's designed to look better as it gets older, in fact it's designed like a future ruin. I got the pics all from all over the place, in Flickr, from my friends N&E over at Myspace and more that I cant remember. And here apparently you can download a 3D model of the place, in case u want to add it to your custom videogame environment.

Drop City

Drop City was a post hippy rural community, with a slight brokeback mountain feel in Trinidad Southern Colorado. They built their homes using the Buckie Fuller Geodome and Zdomes but with recycled materials: Car parts, scrap wood, trees, plastic and stuff. They were architects, writers, poets, painters and scientists who just had enough and wanted to drop out of contemporary society. Yes taxi driver, you can definetly drop me off here.
some more info here

I was wandering over Athens and then I saw this

It looks scary and it is scary too: I think this is part of the main garbage processing (dumping) plant. Somehow this looks like it could have been part of OMA's sushi urbanism a couple of years ago? or a couple of decades ago? or maybe its just too late at night to concentrate on anything. This is just over the hills of Nikea, I wonder what it is.
Classic polka dot wasteland.
Lightbulb Piazza? How useless to cut a freeway through a park. Somebody obviously got carried away at the drawing board and forgot what they were drawing.

Lost Post

Naturally I'm obsessed with Lost, and today we watched the last episode of the 3rd season: It just gets better all the time. If you havent seen it, its a metaphysical Robinson Crusoe situation with a fantastic cast of characters surrounded by a super spooky tropical island and threatened by The Others, Polar bears , whispers in the jungle and my favourite enemy, the Smoke Monster, a obvious referance to the bad guys in Playstations' ICO.

Random Objects in Amsterdam

I always take too many pictures, and this time I was even bored with my heavy camera so the photos did not go into Gigabytes as usual. Still there was tons to see in Amsterdam, and here is some more stuff.
A curious fur covered tea pot in the fabulous Frozen Fountain store. And speaking of stores, another one not to miss is SPRMRKT on Rozengracht.
and again a better view of the tilted cube building which I like so much but have no idea what it is
A human explosion painting and a salt related polygon object-thing in Rijksmuseum
an ambiguous and amazingly colored red tree in Vondel Park
and the sunset from OA flight bla bla bla, a picture I always take and it never looks the same again.

Random Amsterdam I

Been walking around Amsterdam for the past 3 days, and here's some things that tickled my fancy, like this stripped building somewhere close to Leitze Pleijn
Ballons on Lijnbaansgracht
random urban agglomeration close to Post CS
A candy stripe by Felix Gonzales-Torres at Stedeljik CS
Urs Fischer at Stedeljik CS
Somebody's hippy meditation flotilla

A Neen Evening

So last saturday in Amsterdam we had a Neen evening, which Rafael put together, as part of White Nights, a night in the year where all museums + art centers stay open late.

Rafael and Chihiro walking amongst the towels at Club11

The Neen Evening took place at Club11, on the 11th floor of the soon-to-be-gone Post CS building in a mini urban wasteland next to the Central Station. Angelo showed recent works, Nikola recited some of his new poems inside his MeetInANiceRestaurant, Rafael made really great Neen towels that people took home on their way out and Aux Raus gave a really sexy performance. Later on AuxRaus took us to a Pub that played only music related to weather (Purple Rain etc) and later-er over to Studio 80 which a gay night and where we bumped into the Boys of Butt. All in all a very neen evening.

Angelo Plessas' MereExposureEffect.com

I showed the ScreenTree animation and some others Andy Simionato from ThisIsaMagazine.com with Isabelle Arvers
Karen ann Donnachie from this is a magzine inside my wineglass
Gert Jonkers and Rob Meerman at Studio80
afterhours

Anonymous is Famous

The most famous blogger is of course Anonymous. S/HE manages to be everywhere all the time in every language all over the place disco non stop. And finally an exhibition dedicated to this most contemporary of concepts: "ANONYMOUS In the Future No One Will Be Famous" runs at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt until 14 January 2007 with works by 11 international artists who – like the curator – will remain unnamed. In their Notes toward a Manifesto, the initiators of the exhibition proclaim: “Anonymous artists wish to wriggle the status quo into a status incognitus. Their aim is to remove the increasing barbarization of thought via short circuits and fast lanes created by the marketing of artists as brands whose works have become masterpieces in ignorance of philosophy.” How absolutely cool.