A showreel that includes work to date.

And a link to a sneak bootleg teaser trailer of the new Tron movie, TR2N, currently slated for a 2011 release which Kosinski is directing and is looking as though it will be in 3D.

The Air Holds Still On My Breath

Philip Clemo‘s film ‘The Air Holds Still On My Breath’ which accompanies ‘The Rooms’ album is currently in post-production and should be out by Christmas. The trailer can be found on YouTube…

…and the tracks from the album can be now be listened to for free on Last FM.

The film was shot on location in Iceland in the summer of 2008 and features a collection of abstract and ambiguous mood paintings, using the hugely diverse Icelandic landscape as a metaphor for different states of being, echoing the journeys taken on the album. The 50 minute high-definition project was shot using specialist camera technology to capture extreme slow motion details of geothermal activity and waterfalls, and from the air using an ultra-smooth gyro-stabilised camera mounted on a helicopter.

More updates soon.

Section of combination-power source street light

What if…

Step 1 : Take street light.

Step 2 : Fit the street light with heat and light (thermo- and photo-voltaic) collectors which could capture some of the wasted light and heat spillage from the bulb, applied either to the inside of the glass diffuser of the light itself, or on the reflector which needs to be opaque anyway. Crucially, the distance from light source to light capture is not much at all, meaning that there would be a higher efficiency of recycled energy both in the high lumens capture of light from the bulb, and also in the minimal resistance-based wastage in transmission from the collector to the storage medium and back to the bulb due to the short distances involved. Thin and flexible photovoltaics (PV)s on the top housing of the light would harness solar power during the day.

Step 3 : The captured energy recharges a battery attached to the base of the bulb.

Step 4 : Once the battery is full, the street light changes its power source to the battery.

Step 5 : Once the battery is exhausted, the street light reverts to mains power.

These adjustments would be almost invisible to the naked eye and would aid in reducing overall power consumption.

Solar powered street lights already exist, but energy savings could be maximised by combining the following into the design:

a) Adding a movement sensor that would dim the light when there was no movement sensed in the vicinity of the street light after a certain period of time.

b) Using LED light sources that consume less power in the first place.

c) Using a thin, flexible and cheap solar technology such as Nanosolar’s SolarPly™. Because it is flexible, it allows the PV component to be more sculpted aesthetically to the form of the light housing, maximising possible solar collection.

Nanosolar : SolarPly™ / Nanoparticle Ink

The development of SolarPly™ is also significant in that it is 100 times faster to produce than existing solar technologies and uses 100 times less material than silicon wafer panels. This of course leads to a whopping potential 5-10 times cost saving over current panel prices. The flexibility comes from a conducting foil-based approach, while the manufacturing cost can be so reduced over traditional silicon panel production by the way it is produced off an assembly line, essentially ‘printed’ from rolls in mile-long sheets and then cut to size.

Key to this innovation is the Nanoparticle ink used, applied homogeneously, that evenly distributes the conducting elements in the semiconducting medium so that the conducting path does not need to be so rigid. So even if there is a flaw in the application of the ink, or damage to part of the panel, it will still work because, being a ‘field’, the current should find its way to the converter through any direction where the ink has been applied rather than through a specific predetermined path.

The SolarPly™ could be integrated either to the top of the light (as in the illustration above) or could even be used as a manufacturing material to clad the entire light. The holy grail of this type of Nanoparticle Ink approach of course would be to have a PV ‘paint’ that could be applied as a coating to virtually any surface. It then follows that you could add it to any building with enough exposed area, both new or existing, to harness solar energy – though many technical hurdles regarding the capture and channelling of the energy to somewhere useful still has to be addressed.

Cost savings would still need to be calculated, but because of the combination nature of the energy collection, the street light could feasibly end up being power neutral.

Aesthetically Invisible

Further reading of existing solutions:

Bright Green Energy

Sollatek

Carmanah Lighting

Until November 30th

The scale and production of “Seizure” is ambitious. After reinforcing the walls and ceiling and covering them in plastic sheeting, 80,000 litres of a copper sulphate solution was poured in from a hole in the ceiling. After a few weeks the temperature of the solution fell and the crystals began to grow. The remaining liquid was pumped back out and sent for special chemical recycling.

More information on its creation from the folks at Iconeye.

Until November 30th.

Opening times
11:00-17:00 Thursday to Sunday
Closed Monday to Wednesday

Location
151-189 Harper Road, SE1
www.artangel.org.uk

Until November 30th

Released 20th October 2008

Philip Clemo’s latest album, ‘The Rooms’, is a hauntingly beautiful progression through different sound “rooms” or “spaces” featuring artists such as Clive Bell, Theo Travis, Kevin Pollard, Simon Hopkins, and even a Prague string quartet. It recalls numerous musical forebears, from Australian jazz-improv trio The Necks to another threesome, Jansen/Barbieri/Karn, formerly of Japan. The album is engineered by Phill Brown.

Available in all good record shops, iTunes and here.

October Press:

Reviewed by the Times and the Independent On Sunday here:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/cd_reviews/article4986449.ece

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/reviews/album-philip-clemo-the-rooms-all-colour-arts-974104.html

Reviews

© Todd White Art Photography

New York artist Josiah McElheny‘s installation ‘Island Universe’ opens at White Cube.

It consists of five sculptural elements that will occupy the entire ground floor of the gallery. Each of these five elements in Island Universe is a kind of explosion of highly reflective chrome-plated aluminium, with a central sphere from which radiate rods of varying lengths; each rod ends with either a unique cluster of objects, which include smaller rods topped by hand-formed glass discs and globes, or a single light.

This spectacular sculpture, almost 5 metres across, is at once a play on the Lobmeyr-designed chandeliers in New York’s Metropolitan Opera and a vivid diagram of the Big Bang. The design of these chandeliers and the discovery of the first data supporting the Big Bang both occurred in 1965, and McElheny sees the confluence of these two events as representative of a time when our understanding of modernity started to fall apart, to be replaced by a new set of narratives.

The exhibition also includes a film upstairs, and I assisted Paul Schütze in his commission to create a soundtrack for it. Filmed on location in Super 16mm at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, each of its five sections depict the types of universes in the installation, and each section is titled based on the theoretical structure of each element, such as Small Scale Violence, Frozen Structure, and Late Emergence. The music and the editing convey a rhythm that shifts, freezes and develops in relation to the scientific speculations about other worlds.

The exhibition runs from the 14th October to the 15th November 2008.

White Cube is located at : 48 Hoxton Square, London N1 6PB

Open : 10am-6pm Tuesdays-Saturdays. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

PDF download: The Journey

© 2008 Kevin Pollard