Burger Queens

Jeremy Scott fall 06 collection.

You can make the Batman logo with your feet

Fiorucci: Eighties Memorabilia

I am browsing the book of Charta about the 80's fashion and underground. I always go back to these pages. Fiorucci 80's memorabilia.

From Iceland with Love

My friend Andrew Burgess has moved to Iceland. He took these amazing photos. This not Photoshop.

David Lynch's Flash animations

As a great fan of David Lynch and a self-taught Flash user I found an interesting interview that he gave to Juxtapoz magazine. He is talking about his series of flash animations called "Dumbland". The series are available on www.davidlynch.com. but unfortunately you have to pay to watch them (this is disappointing and does not seem very David Lynch)

There are some extracts of the interview worth mentioning:

Tell me about the Genesis of Dumbland:
DL: This thing started as a series of animated shorts for the Internet studio Shockwave. I learned Flash animation doing Dumbland. I had done some stop-motion animation and I understood cel animation, but I didn't know anything about the program Flash. I'd recently gotten going on a computer, so it was pretty strange. When you see Dumbland, you can see how I learned as I went along, and there's a real progression in sophistication from the first to the last episodes. I love Flash animation. ....

On Dumbland you used sophisticated technology to create animated drawings that look like something a kid might do. Can you talk about using that kind of technical approach to create something so simplistic?

DL:The thing about humor is that it's very abstract. A whole bunch of things have to marry for something to elicit a laugh and to feel correct, and Dumbland's name alone implies a kind of crude, unsophisticated thing. In a strange way, Flash is a vector-based thing that's very smooth, so it's hard to make it look bad. I worked to make it crude and stupid to make it funny, ans so I feel really good about the way it goes.

Mantalina Psoma

This is something I wanted to write from long time ago. Mantalina Psoma is a painter and lives between Athens and Berlin. Her paintings are sublime. Finally Andreas took some photos today at Rebecca Camhi gallery.

Dimitris Danikas: hail to the creep

Dimitris Danikas,
I read your article on the Greek Newspaper "TA NEA". On your "Capote" review two weeks ago you characterized Truman Capote as a "ruthless vain vampire" that he only cared to be famous and make money. And you concluded your phrase: " not only homosexual in body, but also homosexual at heart". In other words Mr Danikas, you used this old greek stereotype phrase to present gays as mean and ruthless persons. I won't comment on your review but allow me to add some new keywords when your name is searched on google : Dimitris Danikas, homophobic, racist, pseudo-intellectual, pretentious, hate crime, gay, Dol lambrakis, greece, ta nea, pasok, films, gay greek community, brokeback mountain, Capote, In cold Blood.

Δημήτρης Δανίκας, ομοφοβικός, ρατσιστής, ψευτο-διανοούμενος, άσχετος, εξεζητημένος, έγκλημα μίσους, ΔΟΛ Λαμπράκης, ομοφοβικός, Ελλάς, Τα Νέα, πασόκ, ταινίες, ελληνική κοινότητα ομοφυλοφίλων, Το μυστικό του brokeback mountain, Kαπότε, Εν-ψυχρώ.

god save all the Queens, god save Gooogle.

France ends Apple music monopoly

I-tunes is having hard times in France. The government is pushing a bill that iPods should also be able to play music purchased from competing Internet services. Additionally the bill, proposes to turn individual digital piracy into a misdemeanor (no more serious than a parking ticket). One of my favourite sites with the lowest rates (~70 cents per album) is this: http://allofmp3.com. .

(photo: Logo against Copyright and Intellectual Property made by Rafael Rozendaal)

Coming to a country near you

As advertised on a street in Havana, Cuba

Takis Zenetos

When Athens was cool there was an architect called Takis Zenetos. He made some of the most beautiful buildings during the 60's and early 70's. Apart from the beautiful houses and landmark buildings, Zenetos was designing areas where people will use their personal computers and "broadcast" their ideas outside. Unfortunately some of his buildings were demolished and some others there were very badly rebuilt (for example: the upcoming National Museum of Contemporary Art). The Greek state is still persistently destroying the few remaining modernist buildings. Zenetos committed suicide in 1977.

New Tagbanger line

Tagbanger is a T-shirt brand invented by Jonathan Maghen and Rafael Rozendaal. They have just launched their new line. Beautiful prints and good quality T-shirts. A must for the summer. Visit http://www.tagbanger.com

A new Porn Star

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Victor & Rolf Boutique

I conclude my trip to Milan with some photos of the Victor and Rolf boutique on Via Sant'Andrea. The whole interior is upside-down. You have a strange feeling when passing-by, almost having a vertigo.

Superneen opening

Superneen opening was SUPER finally. It was a wonderful night including a perfomance by Mai Ueda, a special edition magazine by Boiler magazine. A big number of people showed up with a very good response to the show. Thanks Milan!

Tomorrow is Superneen

If you happen to be in Milan tomorrow there is the opening of Superneen at Galeria Pack (foro buonaparte 60) at 7:00 pm.

A nice Nike idea

I got this new Nike stuff from the Milan branch. This cool jackets have a zipper all the way from the front to the back. This way you can make different combinations of colors.

Andreas Angelidakis Interview in Purple

You are always referred to as “the virtual architect” but you don’t seem very comfortable with this description.
Well I don’t care for virtual architect as much as I don’t care about Hospital Architect or any type of specialisation category. I’m interested in everything, and I actually prefer to work on very diverse projects at the same time. I think the virtual tag also came because a couple of years ago everything that had to do with computers and the internet and any communication technology was considered NEW! and VIRTUAL! and I just happened to be designing online spaces for online clients and most of this work was focused on blurring distinctinons between real, virtual, actual, perceived and imagined, and all of it was just different descriptions for potential buildings. Almost everybody has smiled at a cell phone or an instant messenger window so there is not need to separate the space of a text conversation from the space of a coffee shop chat because my reality is always virtual to you. I am still very inspired by the internet, as I am inspired by forests, and beaches and summer skies and strange buildings in weird edge condition, or websites that are art pieces and all the time I try to mix these things up, the experience of being lost in forest vs getting lost in a chatroom.

A lot of your work seems to refer to nature, like Blue Wave, Tetris Mountain, Cloud House. Is nature an important part of your thinking?I’m really interested in complete environments and in brand identity, and natural places such as forests and beaches have great brand recognition qualities. So when I’m designing a space I tend to see it more a world that could be extended infinitely, so at the same time I’m interested in reinventing the qualities of a beach in a building but also designing a beach or a forest from scratch. So in Neen world, which was a place for neenstars to meet and chat, a lot of the homes became structures based on idealized natural environments. The entrance was a forest of nametrees, trees with a neenstars name carved on them like you find in the woods, and when you clicked them you got teleported to that particular house. So in a way its very natural but very artificial, and somehow about a lifestyle structured by chance. Because Neen world was very much a sketchbook where I tested different ideas in real time with a real public, right now I’m developing these sketches further like in the Cloud House which comes from both nature and the web. It started because I liked the shape of the clouds in Rafael Rozendaal’s whywashesad.com and I had already done a house for Rafael based on this shape, a simple container with clouds cut out to make windows. The as it evolved I turned the whole container into a cloud shape and somehow it evolved to this corbusian idea of the house on pilotis because clouds like to be off the ground and also I’ve worked a lot on these half finished abandoned buildings you find in the mediterranean, so the cloud house has evolved in this gypsy un-finished ruin, a concrete structure that may or may not be habitable, or maybe it is a place for camping, and maybe retrocatively inspired by Constants’ “Model for a Gypsy Camp” which I hadnt seen but I’d site it as a major accidental influence. In these speculative projects I like to make different versions of buildings because I like to keep the direction that they could evolve open ended.

How would you describe yourself: architect, artist, designer?

Well I always hesitate just in case I change my mind later on! I think I could fit even more professions into the question and still feel that I’m limiting myself. But seriously, everything I do is in some way a description of a structure, a building or a space, though sometimes that building takes the form of a print or a DVD in a gallery, or it is represented by a piece of furniture. So I’m just an architect.

You seem to be designing new things non-stop but you are not building so much. Is this the classic case of the young architect who waits to build the first building?

Yes and no. A lot of the things that I’ve designed seem like proposals for projects when in fact the project is complete, like Chelsea and Neen World which were online communities, built and inhabited for quite a while. Other projects like the Pause space inside fargfabriken in stockholm was designed to look like it was never built, it was a space where models could walk around as if it were an electronic environment. When I sent the photos to an architect friend he was impressed by the quality of the rendering thinking it was a drawing. And then this space was demolished after the show, so it really was space that may or may not have existed. I’m really into this idea of the building that has dissapeared and the building that is in ruins, and how electronic buildings can become ruins. When you loose a virtual world because the hosting runs out does it become an atlantis, can we speak of electronic ruins? And how do you count time and decay in digital. I just did a music stage in Athens as an animated ruin from one of the buildings in Neen world. The neen world building was based on a graphic patternt from Mai Ueda’s philosophyinthebedroom.com and in the music stage I made this pattern as a fragmented and animated grotto, like a drawing from the romantic Grand Tour of ruins but made with a geometric, illuminated animated matrix. For the outside of the building we covered one corner in the fragmented ruined pattern, just like an electronic ruin in a brand new car-paint steel version and its’ severely out of context with the music that’s played there but the owner of the place is a great collector as is often the case with my projects. So anyway to answer your question: I build some, I design a lot and I want to build much more.

You showed me this building that walks. Is this something for fun or do you believe buildings should be walking?

Oh there is a great tradition of architecture that walks, like Ron Herron’s 1964 “walking city” and many others. It’s all speculative and probably should stay that way because I think one of the great advantages of buildings is that they stay put. After September 11 and being in New York at the time, I was very inspired by animated buildings, I did a series of videos called mirrorsite which were all about office buildings recomposing themselves, pieces of mirrors flying all over the place. This new project is really more about a real city, its inspired by a building in Athens, a beer factory designed by architect Takis Zenetos in the 60s. At the time that building was so alien to the scale of everything around it that it seemed like a spaceship just landed from planet architecture, so I was nostalgic for this kind of heroic gesture from the 60’s together with some ideas about museums of contemporary art, and I came up with this building that starts by walking around the city to find a form, then becomes internally alive to find content.

Blue wave is this strange hotel without any horizontal floors. Is this a virtual or a real project? Will it get built?
Somebody started a rumor that this was going to get built, so maybe I should just stick with that! There is no client, it was yet another speculative project, and it was done for an exhibition on new hotel design called invisible hotel. I think the rumor started because for once I really did develop it the whole way, even designing windows and railings and doors and stairs and in the video it looks very inhabited, for such a crazy building anyway. We even put graffiti in it, kind of inspired by spaces you see in video games but also to play around with the resemblance of a hotel to a beach and a squat, which was really the main theoretical approach here. The whole Bue Wave project started from a spare-time building inside Neen world, a place to go and just walk up and down the curved ramps, to test your walking skills as an avatar. Then with MU in Eindhoven we developed it into a spare-time public sculpture system, again a place to hang out, skate or spend your lunch time waiting to go back to the office, a kind of temporary escape or a place to squat for a while.

Recently your seem to be seem to be interested squats, gypsy living, random organization and illegal construction. How does this related the virtual/ digital landscape and to yout other works?

I’ve always been interested in this kind of alternative organization, in fact 10 years ago when we had a conversasion for this magazine with Miltos (Manetas) and Vanessa (Beecroft), I had just done my thesis in Columbia on the relationship of illegal buildings and computer networks. The internet is the perfect breeding ground for any type of activity that is outside the mainstream, and that can include anything from construction to journalism to bad bad stuff like terrorism. Organization of space is a bit different from organization of data, since you don’t have these ready made tools like Google Desktop to keep your files in check. So I’m into this potential mess of a space, and how to organically develop an unstructured mess of stuff into habitable structures. Recently I made a proposal for a New York Loft where the client wanted to move into a raw space and try to fix it while living there, which as we know is a great recipe for disaster, so I proposed a kind of mountain made up of all the moving boxes, just piled up in the middle of the space. The idea was to start from this big mess, and theoretically start opening the boxes right on the pile and grow the apartment gradually. Somewhere along the line a kitchen would form on one side of the pile, the inside of the mountain could be come a cave or a proper bathroom, then maybe a stair to climb up on the outside or a piece of wall starting to emerge from this mount of boxes, appliances, suitcases, computers and of course plants.

Mai Ueda Interview on Korean Elle

Mai Ueda at Palais De Tokyo on a golden BMW

Mai Ueda gave this interview for the next issue of Korean Elle. I like this interview very much and this is the english version.

1. How did you come about working with CELINE? What do you think appealed to CELINE about you? And, why did you accept to work with CELINE?
I was a friend of Jean Mark Loubier the president. We met because he came to see one of my performances in Paris . He understands artistic mood. I wanted Mai bag to be everywhere so It was good to collaborate with CELINE which is established internationally. Also I like CELINE's elegant and flexible identity.

2. For this project, did CELINE really not in any way oppose to or limit any of your suggestions or ideas?
A tag I wanted to have, was the Mai Bag for CELINE logo embossed inside, but they thought it will show opposit from out side that will be against idea of luxury. Also some content in Newspaper "Mai Ueda Times", we had to discuss a lot about having some things that I consider as my art which they considered as too sexual.

3. Do you think that the Mai Bag will appeal to the existing CELINE bag customers?
CELINE customers seem to like the bronze, other people love gold or silver.

4. What fashion style do you usually prefer?
I like mix of different style and make my own. I enjoy accidents.

5. Fashion and technology seem to be strongly present in your work. Why is fashion so important to you? What do you think is the borderline between fashion and art?
Art is about originality and changing existing value to next level.Fashion is about beauty and practicality. I care for both.

Mai Ueda and Olivier Zahm holding Maibag

6. Who decided the concept of the photos featured in the Mai Ueda Times? The photos are very different from the past advertising visuals of CELINE. Did CELINE express any concern regarding your photos?
Photos are my private photos, I did them with my friend on our trip. So, they are not planned and went thorough many people's decision as usual fashion photos by a professional photographer.

7. I read you saying in an interview, "I don't try to be an artist, but I would like to be an icon." How do you want yourself to be recognized, remembered, adored? How do you want to influence the general public?
I think when somebody is remarkable, things that people see becomes THEM. For example, Los Angeles is so David Lynch, that dress you bought at flea market is very Yves Saint Lauren, your attitude at the party last night was totally Paris Hilton etc... Whatever I create or I do should be very me and my goal is that people will start recognizing things as Mai someday.

8.Your performances are very sexual. In Korea, female artists who actively express sexuality meet with strong opposition of the existing art world. If your performances are introduced in Korea, they would be sensational and regarded as very original and daring. What are your thoughts on such conservatism?
I did already performed at Seoul biennale. It was not too sexual one, but people liked it. Although there were not much press. After the show, we went to "booking club". I was surprised to see such direct way of meeting people and having fun. I haven't seen something like that anywhere else in the world so far. So I am not sure if Korea is conservative, maybe it is just different.

9. Do you enjoy being considered sexual? What are your thoughts on the relationship between female artists and sexuality?
Having sexuality is like having nationality. Female artist often end up using sexuality as their subject, that's because womaness is in their personality.

10. Your work covers diverse genres from music, film, technology, fashion to drawing, etc. Amidst the different genres, what is the principle that you as an artist try to keep consistent?
I try to be cautious of content and timing and bring Mainess in it.

Thank you!

Thank you too!
Mai Ueda 2/ 22 /2006