I took the time today to today to head out to the Barbican to see Celeste Boursier-Mougenot’s latest creation involving 100 hundred tiny little zebra finches. The exhibition was bloody amazing and despite the excessive queues, one of the best art installations I’ve ever been to. Completely enveloping and escapist, these tiny little creature create music right in front of you—the highlight being when a couple of the little guys tried to undo my shoe laces to use as nest building materials.

It’s only on for one more day (till 23rd May 2010) so if you can get down to the Barbican today to enjoy it yourself.

As I mentioned a couple of posts back, last week I had some time off and took the opportunity to go see the Decode exhibition on show at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

If you’re interested in programming based digital art then you’ll be pleased to see this niche area that has usually be restrictend to being presented online, instead taking centre stage in a broader forum. The show is relatively small but features around 20 or so exhibits from animations to interactive pieces and emmersive interior environments. For anyone who’s no stranger to Processing based art will recognise some popular artists such as Matt Pyke and Daniel Rozin to name but a few.

Like always there’s an album on Vimeo with all the video I shot at the exhbition along with some shots over on my Decode flickr set.

The V&A in South Kensington is probably one of my favourite galleries in London because of it’s amazing architecture and stunning collections. I took the chance whilst I had some time off earlier in the week to go check out an exhibition about digital interaction and art called Decode. I shot a fair bit of video and a lot of photos which are going up on my flickr and vimeo.

In the mean time though I also had a mosey around the Fashion collection where they had a special exhibit on by Royal College of Art students and graduates called Future Fashion Now alongside the permanent fashion collection.

On show were some amazing examples of garment design and tailoring showing off a lot of technical competence in making clothes. A few pieces stuck out in my mind including this oversized gold embellished cable dress knitted on these huge metre long knitting needles. As well as a few others including this very soft knitted pattern dress that was slightly felted. There’s plenty more photos from this temporary exhibition on the SansGil flickr and you can find full details of the Future Fashion Now exhibition on the V&A website.

Very nice flyer for Kemistry’s next exhibition by Hvass&Hannibal. There’s a definite infographic feel about it.

I took the time out to visit Anthony Burrill’s latest exhibition last night at Kemistry gallery. ‘In a New Places’ the title of the exhibition was very fitting, with the work on show moving away from previous iconic typographic pieces that have become synonymous with Burrill’s brand of prints. The bold lines, flat colours and simple geometric shapes are all still present, but there’s clearly a focus on illustration taking influence from nature. The show also showed Burrill’s experimentation with with laser cut perspex in the form of some beautiful wall mounted sculptures.

All in the all the private view was pretty packed, as always at Kemistry, with a small collection card reproductions of prints in the show, being given away (I’m sure I’ll post them later on in the week) along side small postcard books that showed off more of Burril’s work that most of his patrons would be familiar with. There’s also a really bold mural on the wall outside Kemistry, so make sure you don’t miss it.

Wallpaper* magazine were also there last night and have put together a small critique of the site along side production shots of the show as it was hung yesterday. The show runs until and check out the Kemistry website for more information and opening times.

Image lovingly borrowed from Wallpaper*.

I took the time yesterday to visit the Royal Academy of Art’s highly anticipated Summer Exhibition. There’ was over 1200 amazing pieces of work on show that took me the good part of an afternoon to get round. One of the artists that caught my eye where some amazing prints by Claas Gutsche (the work above was not in the show) as well as a very impressive sculpture from Damien Hirst.

Darn it, looks like I missed the Secret Blisters exhibition at the Dalston Print Club again this year. By the looks of it though, there was a lot of tasty screenprints available to purchase and a great turnout.

Hopefully I’ll remember to check out their next show, which no doubt will be the same time next year. How annoying.

I got sent a promo video for Edinburgh College of Art’s up and coming exhibition Open Here. Though the video isn’t mind blowing and never quite seems to get going it did bring back a bit of nostalgia for me, especially the bits I’m in. No wait, I’m barfing at that shameless self promotion. Unfortunately I’m not gonna make it to the exhibition but there’s some of the work on the Open Here site which I can only presume was designed by Curious Group in Glasgow who redid their existing academic website and their award winning prospectus, which is leaps and bounds above eca’s previous efforts — one thing that’s always perplexed me about art institutions, just how bad they can be at communication and design internally. This may have just been the case for eca but at least their adoption of Curious Group for their branding is a step in the right direction.

The exhibition is on 4-12th October at eca, Edinburgh. It’s worth going just to see the print workshop alone.