The Great Exhibition

Wanting to see Paul Chan's show in the Serpentine, I bumped into friends on the way and joined them to see "a graduate show in a tent" instead (I had seen Paul Chan in Boston already) It turned out to be a afternoon of exitement, arousal and inspiration. The RCA has coined this year's presentation of its students "The Great Exhibition" in hommage to the original in 1851 - and as far as I can say I have discovered some revolutionary and thought provoking concepts and ideas.

Let's start with The Race by Michael Burton, a series of interventions tackling the issue of antibiotics - human mankind cannot live without it yet bacteria are developing faster than R&D labs can spin out drugs. He suggests that "with the end of the antibiotic era we have no other choice but to symbiotically evolve to meet the pressures of hostile new diseases. The photo above is called bacteria harbourer, and another piece on display (as well as video) is a fist-size fabric cage that is woven into a women's hair in order to hosts a praying mantis. Yes, it may sound absurd, but when you see it it kind of makes sense, for future generations though.


My favourite is EXTREME GREEN GUERRILLA, a project by Michiko Nitta, that responds to global warming and other threats to contemporary civilisation. Among other radical solutions, he proposes an Animal Messaging Service, in which humans send digital messages from e.g. London to New York - not through the existing infrastructure of glassfibre cables but - by using biological transmitters: whales, birds, rats and other species. The 'interface' to carry the information is stored on RFID tags that are implanted into the animals, as demonstrated below with a Mackerel.

Surely, this isn't exactly the most efficient way to communicate, but that would miss the point. Screaming of with and humour on the one hand (species are clustered into fast and slow, or low and high risk; think predator and prey...the Mackerel belongs to the latter) this project also gives amazing impulses to think about carbon footprint and other hot topics.

To Andreas Molgaard, the most pressing issues is mankind's survival in the 21st century. Focussing on the big picture of global change, he comes up with 11 ways to survive, ranging from the funny, wouldn't it be nice, to extreme thoughts of erasing one continent completely or limiting life to 33 years (like Jesus). Like it or not, this is somebody with the vision (and guts - since this is pretty controvertial stuff) to list some of the options, viable or not, the history of the future will tell...

These days however, a big imminent problem in cities like London is social unrest, in form of gangs hanging out on the streets, women getting harressed, juveniles drinking on playgrounds and so on. Nothing new so far. But did you know that the police can declare an area - ranging from a phone box to the entire borough - a so-called "dispersal zone" legally prompting suspects to leave the declared zone and keep them at bay with a 3 months prison threat if violating this order? I didn't! And I am very glad that Tamsin Fulton is pointing this out in her project www.thedispersalzone.org.uk Using the API of Google Maps she publicises all DZs in London with Tags when it was declared for what duration and what the reason was. The fact that she uses readily available yet hardly known information (to the local residents) makes this project very Mark Lombardi-ish (he re-shaped newspaper clips into intricate graphic webs of state corruption across the world) More on her blog http://tamsdesigninteractions.blogspot.com


From the Mean Streets of London to the Great Oceans of our Planet: Daniel Sjoholm thinks that current abundance in Yacht design suffers a misguided focus on marble, gold and other Oligarch toys. He sees a need for an update in Yacht design, and promotes a new luxury in the form of glass bottom "speed lounges" that look like spaceships cruising lagoons and reefs. Can he also somehow reconcile his vision with the manifesto of the EXTREME GREEN GUERRILLA folks?

Other highlights of bionic design included Il Hoon's aluminum table, that could both be interieur of Sjoholm's yachts and vanguard of a new wave of organism-inspired architecture and furniture design. Bauhaus is dead. Long live Colani.

Emphasising round forms as well are Henny van Nistelrooy's old-magazines-turned-artworks. Starting from the outside, he works his way through these magazines carving out holes of different sizes and angles to create a paper-based sculpture. When you then flick through the pages, these meticulously crafted holes appear like wormholes trying to link the (often shallow and meaningless) world of fashion and advertising with your own imagination of how you might fill these voids with your personal stories. Having always admired paper cuts (Matisse, Felix Droese to name two) I felt inclined to get one for £20, which rounded-up this fantastic endeavour on a Sunday afternoon.

Until 28 June at Kensington Gardens