Even the most worldly and well-traveled among us will have their perspectives shifted by Hans Rosling. A professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, his current work focuses on dispelling common myths about the so-called developing world, which (he points out) is no longer worlds away from the west. In fact, most of the third world is on the same trajectory toward health and prosperity, and many countries are moving twice as fast as the west did.

What sets Rosling apart isn’t just his apt observations of broad social and economic trends, but the stunning way he presents them. Guaranteed: You’ve never seen data presented like this. By any logic, a presentation that tracks global health and poverty trends should be, in a word: boring. But in Rosling’s hands, data sings. Trends come to life. And the big picture — usually hazy at best — snaps into sharp focus.

Rosling’s presentations are grounded in solid statistics (often drawn from United Nations data), illustrated by the visualization software he developed. The animations transform development statistics into moving bubbles and flowing curves that make global trends clear, intuitive and even playful. During his legendary presentations, Rosling takes this one step farther, narrating the animations with a sportscaster’s flair.

Rosling developed the breakthrough software behind his visualizations through his nonprofit Gapminder, founded with his son and daughter-in-law. The free software — which can be loaded with any data — was purchased by Google in March 2007. (Rosling met the Google founders at TED.)

Rosling began his wide-ranging career as a physician, spending many years in rural Africa tracking a rare paralytic disease (which he named konzo) and discovering its cause: hunger and badly processed cassava. He co-founded Médecins sans Frontièrs (Doctors without Borders) Sweden, wrote a textbook on global health, and as a professor at the Karolinska Institut in Stockholm initiated key international research collaborations. He’s also personally argued with many heads of state, including Fidel Castro.

As if all this weren’t enough, the irrepressible Rosling is also an accomplished sword-swallower — a skill he demonstrated at TED2007.


"Rosling believes that making information more accessible has the potential to change the quality of the information itself."

Business Week Online

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“Princeton psychologists recently showed that certain faces, even when expressionless, strike people as trustworthy or untrustworthy. Features like the shape of the eyebrow are part of an unconscious language of trust that powerfully affects human interaction.”

via fita cola

Carl Wooley takes pictures of urban landscapes, mostly at night, and shoots short films. In 2005 he became the Akira Kurosawa Short Film competition finalist, while in 2007 his documentary about farmers from Dominican Republic won Grand Prix at Seattle International Film Festival. Clean and minimalist!

Complex City by Lee Jang Sub

Each one of branches in a big tree seems to be disorderly spreaded with no rules, but when you see the whole tree, you can find it is in perfect harmony. Nature has a balance which we cannot see with our vision. Lee Jang Sub created these trees with patterns of roads spontaneously developed in a city.

Therefore, the map of a city is composed of naturally created patterns in which there is no rule or regularity. This work tries to find a new possibility from these disordered patterns.

The installation work consists of a tree and space surrounding it. The tree composed of patterns of a disordered city is actually maintaining a state of harmony, although invisible. Also it resembles lives of nature and symbolizes the invisible order of the city. The patterns surrounding the tree are connected to one another and they become more and more complicated. However as a whole, we can find it as a process of forming a new order.

Through this work, Lee Jang Sub would like to suggest they don't see the complexity of a city only as an object that should be neatly arranged. Instead he proposes a new approach of finding order in the ComplexCity.

from text by Lee Jang Sub

Acrylic on canvas

Statement by James Roper

The construction of each painting fuses disparate images from a variety of sources such as fashion magazines, animation stills, comics, the Internet as well as my own photo's and drawings. I predominantly choose images and try to create forms which I feel register a visual 'peak shift', a term given to the phenomena of 'neurological attraction' that appears in both humans and animals to an extreme characterisation of an object. Peak shift has been suggested by the neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran as one of the '10 universal laws of art'.

This peakshift is present within advertising, Hollywood blockbusters and Haute couture fashion as well as in the extreme forms of body exaggeration found in bodybuilding and pornography. Japanese animation, which also uses this technique, has for some time informed my painting style and is where I appropriated images exclusively for my 'Hypermass' series. By isolating out what I see as the crucial parts of such images and collaging them together into the work my intention is to intensify these visual triggers even further so they form a sort of neurological hyperactivity.

Another hyper-stylistic visual form which has informed my painting is that of Catholic iconography from the Baroque period, specifically in the sculptural work of Bernini. Bernini used the technique of exaggeration in the folds in robes, body structure and cloud formations to express an abstract form of 'spiritual energy'. But in contrast to their subjects stoic origins the aesthetic of Bernini's work manifests as lustful and extremely materialistic, and within the theatrical architecture of the cathedral or church (the expressive Baroque style has part of its genesis in opera), acts more as a form of psychological escapism than that of a form through
which religious truth can be revealed. Religion constructed as a Baudrillardian hyperreality in which intensified or peakshifted models of reality seem 'more real than real' and the lines between reality and fantasy are blurred. But, what seems at first to be a form of escapism from the 'Desert of the Real' can also act as a stimulus to wake us up to reality. Just as the Zen master hits his student and as a result the student attains his enlightenment, a jolt in the senses via an intensified version of reality can allow us to see how intensely real and visceral our direct physical relationship with our world really is.

This proliferation of peakshift within the Baroque, as well as modern media, is a signifier of our apparent need for extreme forms of sensory stimulation which can adversely lead to what the author J.G. Ballard described as 'The Death of Affect'. Another indication of this is just the shear saturation of images we are all exposed to particularly across the Internet where I predominantly find the images to put into my work. I have found though that the more images I have intentionally bombarded myself with the more successful I am in refining them down, allowing what I see as only the most vital visual forms to filter through into the work.

As Ballard described in such novels as 'Crash' and 'The Atrocity Exhibition', I have similarly explored this theme through the structure and landscape of the body, how our bodies move through our environment and their physical relationship to architectural forms as well as the immediate folds in the fabric of our clothes. Also the fetishism of inanimate objects and the fusion of body and object or self and other which is apparent within many religious practices especially in Eastern Philosophy. This inter-connection between the internal and external can also be seen in Deleuze's concept of the fold:

“The outside is not a fixed limit but a moving matter animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside.” (Deleuze – Foucault)

Ancient theologies worked through a process of mental dissection and analysis of an apparent self, intending to peel off the layers of our gross physical body to reveal a divine soul beneath in order that we could release this bound entity and find spiritual exaltation. Instead having dissected ourselves and unfolded our physical reality through the progress of science we have found nothing but sparking synapses, molecular structures and subatomic particles leading to an eventual slide into the chaos of quantum physics.

In contrast to El Greco's ushering of the spirit towards the heavens my paintings spit, ejaculate, regurgitate and projectile vomit the spirit out, rejecting it's bodily form in a fit of maniacal hysterics, a nonsensical reflexive outburst like the spasmodic speaking in tongues of those 'slain in the spirit'.

-James Roper

Ben Grasso, like many contemporary painters, takes decay as his subject matter, but unlike those painters (often eager to watch the world burn), Grasso seems to follow the enthusiasm of his brushstrokes and the buoyancy of his color into realms laced with whimsy and imagination. His houses are in shreds and crumbling, you see a white flag of surrender, he dashes off a couple of shacks in the jungle, but Grasso doesn’t believe that these ruins denote the end of things — flickers of light shimmer and whirls of white burst into the air.

The strongest work in show is American Oblique, 2008, a fascinating mixture of Ed Ruscha’s palindrome paintings, the Hudson River School, and maybe a touch of the Wizard of Oz. A house floats up and out of the canvas, twirled and pulled apart by planes circling around through its wreckage. It is hard to believe that plane wreckage can come across as charming and delightful but this is exactly what Grasso has accomplished. Though this house (maybe a home even) is coming apart, there’s no threat here, not a trace of dread. This is somehow, in spite of itself, a joyful exercise.

-Ed Schad

Peter K. Koch was born 1967 in Cologne, and studied design in Krefeld. He has exhibited in Vilnius, Zurich, Chicago and Berlin. He mainly works with perceptions of area and space, construction and deconstruction, the inside and outside. The simplest three-dimensional bodies are often the basis of his sculptural work. The performative aspect is the centre of attention. The suspended movement of brutally cutting open areas that were previously hermetically sealed

”Nam” is a japanses graphic collective originally established by garphic designer Takayuki Nakazawa and photographer Hiroshi Manaka. Currently over ten artist from various backgrounds are belonging to Nam. They are searchinf for possibilities in the world of visual arts, and exploring the art based on their theme ”A fantasy in Life”.

Jesper Rasmussen was born in 1959. His Off Location consists of a series of photographs that represent buildings and recognizable locations in the public space. The buildings at first appear familiar, but at the same time there is something alienating and uncanny about these pictures. They have all been digitally retouched, so that all traces of human presence and activity have been removed.

[...]

The retouching contributes to the disquieting effect of the images. The familiar, the recognizable, hides within it something inhuman, uncanny, reducing our ordinary, trivial, everyday spaces to an uninhabited, set-piece universe that shows a deceptive resemblance to reality.

Excerpts from Off Location cathaloque text

It kind of reminds me of the work by Joseph Schulz. Even if in in a somewhat lower key..

Hubert Blanz was born in 1969 on Hindelang, Germany. He lives and works in Vienna and produces some wildly complex image collages.

in Klaus - the blog

The architects Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas have designed a new church in Foligno, Italy.

The project was won in 2001 after a national competition organized by the Conferenza Episcopale Italiana for the construction of new churches, the jury gave the following reasons for choosing, “as a sign of innovation that meets the latest international research, becoming a symbol of rebirth for the city after the earthquake.”

seen first in Contemporist

Tent Keeps Campers in City
Actors: Michael Rakowitz
Location: Vienna, Austria; Trento, Italy;

Velour Suits Challenge Authority,
Actors: Sarah Ross
Location: Los Angeles, USA, 2005

Photocopies Create Promenade
Actors: Friends of the High Line (Robert Hammond and Joshu...
Location: New York City, USA, since 1999

Umbrellas Join Forces for Shelter
Actors: Kengo Kuma and Associates
Location: Milan, Italy, 2008

The CCA [Canadian Center for Architecture] presented the exhibition Actions: What You Can Do With the City, an exhibition with 99 actions that instigate positive change in contemporary cities around the world.



Seemingly common activities such as walking, playing, recycling, and gardening are pushed beyond their usual definition by the international architects, artists, and collectives featured in the exhibition. Their experimental interactions with the urban environment show the potential influence personal involvement can have in shaping the city, and challenge fellow residents to participate.

The accompanying website presents a toolkit to inspire actions in the city. Its databank of individual actions featured in the exhibition can be sorted and browsed in multiple ways, including by the type of tool employed in the action or the curatorial organisation of the exhibition. The website features photographs and video resources, and challenges users to respond by posting their own thoughts or initiatives on how to improve the city through individual action.

in About Actions

Lucong também conhecido como Cong Hua Lu é, nas suas próprias palavras, um "artista americano contemporaneo de retratos" e nasceu a 1978, em Shanghai, China. A Outubro de 1989, ele e a sua mãe emigraram para os Estados Unidos para se juntarem ao seu pai. Nomeado como um de cinco dos "Mestres de Hoje Criando Marcas" pela revista Fine Art Connoisseur, ele é um artista cuja imaginação e infância pós Socialista juntam histórias sem fim que podem ser encontradas nas suas pinturas.

mais aqui

Lucong also known as Cong Hua Lu is in his own words a "Contemporary American Portrait Artist" and was born on 1978, in Shanghai, China. In October of 1989, he and his mother immigrated to the US to join his father. Named as one of five “Today’s Masters Making Their Marks” by Fine Art Connoisseur magazine, he is an artist whose imagination and post Socialist childhood cobble together endless stories found on his paintings.

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