Gizmogs

"Wouldn't It Be Nice" is not only the title of a 1966 song by the The Beach Boys, but also the title of an exhibition about wishful thinking in art and design at London's Somerset House. Before its stop in the UK, the show was on at the Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva and at the Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich.

When Brian Wilson wrote the song he was imagining "what you can't have, what you really want" so, almost in reply, the show proposes a "modest form of utopianism, a whistle of optimism for how things could be, set against a bass note of misgiving".

A tidbit from the recent This Happened in London, where Semitransparent Design from Japan, Matt Jones and Russell Davies, Simon Oliver and Brendan Walker gave some insights in the inner workings of their recent projects.

Brendan Walker as Thrill Engineer

While in London i went to see a few photography exhibitions. And yes! i realize i wrote a couple of days ago that i'd focus on the RCA show this week but i can't keep that promise, i'm starting to bore myself. Now one of those photo shows is called freshfacedandwildeyed and it marks the launch of an annual exhibition presenting the most striking work by visual arts graduates from BA and MA courses across the UK. There were 25 photographers selected. Some of them had all my attention:

Dewars being filled. Cryonics facility, Phoenix, Arizona

The largest part of the pharmaceuticals and chemicals we take go through our bodies and eventually end up in waste water. As water and waste treatment plants haven't been designed to filter them, the content of our medicine cabinets are eventually passed into the water supply. In London, tap water comes from surface water which implies that traces of our medicine can end up in our drinking water. This results in local differences in tap water, based on the food and drugs we ingest.

Tuur van Balen, one of the graduates of Design Interactions at the RCA, decided to explore this issue in a project which imho had the perfect balance between speculation and solid anchorage into reality.

Haunch of Venison London is running until July 5 Home Lands, Land Marks, an exhibition presenting works from seven contemporary artists from South Africa. Although i have less opportunity to see (and thus report on) shows of contemporary art from South Africa, what i've discovered of their practice over the past couple of years makes me think that we need to see more of their works.

Artist and taxidermist Reid Peppard's narrative environment Not With a Bang but a Whimper asks what would happen if we just ended today. Set in the office of someone mysterious who had a taste for stuffed rats (or did they conduct experiments on them?), plants are taking over and faux sunlight is falling through the blinds.

I encountered Stockholm-based artist Albin Karlsson's work at the recent Icon Experiment, an island of interesting projects of an otherwise often ghastly design expo at the ExCeL center in London's uber-gentrified Docklands.

1g/min spinning a fine web

Tate is archiving dozens of videos of artist talks, performances and cultural debate which took place in the museum from 2001 until today. They haven't finished re-encoding all of the existing material but so far there are over 600 hours of audio and video available.