Chris Cunningham x Aphex Twin
Remember this video directed by Chris Cunningham? See full video here.
Fast fact, the French term for window shopping is faire du lèche-vitrine, which literally translates to “licking the windows”.
To get free tickets to see Chris Cunningham’s latest work at Audi City London on July 19th & 20th follow @audicity on Twitter and wait for our special tweet.
Floris Dreesman: Sci-Fi Audi Future
How does one write the future, not for a novel but for one of the largest transportation companies in the world? At the Terminal Competence Centre they work closely with science fiction writers such as Bruce Sterling.
Sterling’s Mirrorshades anthology helped shape the cyberpunk genre. It was a compilation of short stories and the first was by Williams Gibson, entitled “The Gernsback Continuum”. The story is about a photographer in the future who has been given the assignment of photographing old architecture. The architecture, though largely forgotten at the time of the story, embodied the concept of the future for the generation that built it.
Sterling is also known for coining the term “slipstream” which is a type of speculative fiction between traditional science fiction fantasy and mainstream literature. Together with William Gibson, Sterling has written The Difference Engine, an alternate view of a fictional history that won several literary awards.
Get the book Mirrorshades here
Bruce Sterling’s blog Beyond the Beyond on WIRED
Chris Cunningham x Audi City
Chris Cunningham is a relentlessly experimental creator who defies categorisation. His work is shaped by the sci-fi films and electronic music he devoured in his youth. The frenetic, wildly inventive music videos he made for Aphex Twin ( “Windowlicker”, “Come to Daddy”) and Bjork ( “All Is Full of Love”) redefined the form and has influenced high fashion, advertising, blockbuster movies and low-budget horror flicks alike over the last decade.
In recent years he has moved further away from the music video genre and now creates independent video works, which no longer have their starting point as commissions. His video and sound art has been shown in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Venice Bienalle, the Barbican, the Anthony D’offay gallery amongst others and his live show at The Royal Opera House, The Roundhouse and Royal Festival Hall.
Chris has created his own disturbing visual language, that pits the grotesque imperfections of human anatomy against high technology embodied in robots and hallucinatory motion effects.
Always driven forward by its ethos of Vorsprung durch Technik, Audi City is a new venture that uses technology to create space in the city centre. For five days in Mayfair, Audi reveals a site-specific installation of Chris Cunningham’s latest work. Enormous industrial robots veer around one another in a mysterious room. Their motors are syncopated with the room’s metronome and they embark on a frenetic interchange over a mechanical ‘brain’.
Stay tuned for more information on the installation and how YOU can win tickets to experience this artwork.
Follow us on Twitter here.
Natural Design by Audi & RCA
Last week, Audi gathered together a present the final designs from a group of promising Royal College of Art design students. The young designers were asked to dream up a new carbon-neutral mobility concept for the future inspired by the natural world. The ten best teams showed off their prototypes to a rapt audience, a culmination of six months of hard work and collaboration between the students and Audi experts. These models show the incredibly important prototype stage when developing new design ideas.
See the short film here. Vote on your favorite design on AudiUK’s Facebook page here.
Audi A 0 by Edward Starkey
Functional outer scaling sites on a skeletal chassis structure. It senses other road entities through biomechanics sensors, mimicking those seen in nature. Swarm Intelligence allows road users to work together as one entity, negation some of the congestion problems of today.
Audi V-Tron by Kaori Takasu, Alei Verspoor and Ferran Mestres
The function of the wires which are attached to the doors is to create easy access. The top exterior surface of the car is a special fabric which uses electrical stimulations to open/close small eye-like holes in order to change driving modes.
Audi E-Flux by Samuel Johnson and Emma Sheldon
This concept explores the transition of air, light and sound from the surrounding environment into the vehicle’s interior space. Using this principle the E-Flux reverses the trend of vehicle design which focuses on the interior rather than the outside world. This has allowed us to explore a new design direction while keeping the core identity of an Audi.
Dolphin by Michal Vlcek
This project explores how a vehicle can alter and adapt its movement with reference to the knowledge it acquires by observing the nature around it. It pursues ‘advancement through technology’ from a different perspective.
Design Miami/Basel
Last week Design Miami/Basel opened in Switzerland showcasing some of the best galleries for collectible design.
The ground floor opened up to a Jean Prouvé Metropole Aluminum House. The structure won an award in a competition to create a “mass producible rural school with classroom and teacher accommodation” in 1949. Even though Prouvé was very interested in housing production on a mass scale in the 50s, only a few of these were actual built.
Other galleries featured egg crate foam furniture by the industrial designer Roger Tallon. There was an incredible chandelier by Frederik Molenschot of lots of small mushroom shaped lampshades arranged on a swooping infinity loop. Libby Sellers from London presented a variety of chess sets made from such materials as free weights and tree branches (see the one by Rolf Sachs in photo). A great wall piece, aptly called The Clock Clock that uses programmed mechanical clocks to form a digital clock.
Audi was the automotive sponsor, giving VIPs a lift to their next destination.
