Fascinating tour through some of the major artists creating “playscape”-style interactive installation artworks from knstrct:
Most art pieces don’t say sit on me. Most don’t say touch me, squeeze me, roll up in a ball and tumble around in me. We tend to keep art at an arms length, god forbid it get destroyed by our curious minds and wondering hands. Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto, croatian-austrian design collective numen/for use and Berlin-based artist Tomás Saraceno are just a few who would rather make art that elicits all encompassing joy. Playscapes, as we like to call them, are large, soft, biomorphic sculptures that fill an exhibition space that viewers can touch, poke, and walk on or through. Art for the kid at heart.
Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto uses transparent, stretchy material, styrofoam pellets and pungent spices to create his installations of soft, biomorphic sculptures. Although often considered minimalist, his works differ from those of artists working in this tradition through their interactive, and intense olfactory quality.
Numen/For Use’s Net Blow up is a further development of the Net project both in means of construction and appearance. The object is inflated till the outer surface reaches adequate tension for stretching the nets connected on the inner side of the object. This construction excludes any use of additional structure. The result is a soft object which deforms and mutates with every movement of its temporary inhabitants. The outer membrane acts both like a “soft box” diffuser of the outside light, or a projection screen in case of inner illumination of the installation.
A gigantic installation work by Tomás Saraceno, entitled “in orbit,” was assembled in the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Germany. At a height of more than 20 meters above the piazza of the K21 Ständehaus, Saraceno has suspended a net construction within which visitors can move, apparently weightlessly. Saraceno’s net construction, which is accessible on three levels, resembles a cloud landscape: those bold enough to clamber high into the web set beneath the glass cupola perceive the museum visitors far below them from the lofty heights as tiny figures in a model world.
Read and see more plays capes projects back at instruct.
Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!
