Academy of Imagination machines
and other inventions
Academy of Imagination machines
and other inventions
The other project was, a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever; and this was urged as a great advantage in point of health, as well as brevity. For it is plain, that every word we speak is, in some degree, a diminution of our lunge by corrosion, and, consequently, contributes to the shortening of our lives. An expedient was therefore offered,‘that since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express a particular business they are to discourse on.’ (…)
He has been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. (…)
There was a most ingenious architect, who had contrived a new method for building houses, by beginning at the roof, and working downward to the foundation; (…)1
In his Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift tells the story of an adventurous doctor who travels during the time of the great maritime exploration, finding new islands and fantastic lands that satirized the European society of his time. We could read these lands’s imagined geographies and no place (utopias), as world’s deformed mirrors. In the Balnibarbi region, under the authority of Laputa (floating island), it operates an academy of inventors and scientists, always busy for uncovering how everything in the world works.
The creative act impels man to be focused on building the future, by modifying the present. This is how artistic and utopian thinking relate. Art and utopia give response to the artists's will that, as the inventor, extends the real trough their artistic practice, which is their imagination machine.
Seven Fine Art students (masters and bachelor) will be in residence for a month at RAUM.
Six different projects will be public, each one reflecting their unique artistic process and production. However, all of them used the utopian impulse as mesure for their creative acts.1 Swift, Jonathan (1726). Gulliver’s Travels, George Bell and Sons, Londres, 1892. (2009, June 15. In www.gutenberg.org.)
Constança Bettencourt Comunicating Space I have decided to create an utopian object that would function as research and orientation. Its made out of objects trouvé, a coulter (the plow section that opens furrows in the ground) and an old window frame. There is a duality between the terrain—crude, real vs the dream, the access, the path. I see the window as relational, the sky and the coulter as weight— its connection to the ground.
Pedro Brito & Ema Gaspar Hocera Our intent with this project was to create a map of an imaginary place, in which its inhabiting references and sensations overlap, just like in the creative process.
Kevin Claro Chewing Gum Chewing Gum is a performance documented in video, showing one of the processes implied in the delve for the self. The image works as a residue of the continual reinvention and disclosure of the self. Or is it just a representation of an image?
Patrícia Henriques Soft Touch Short animated movies built upon appropriated images from “The National Geographic Magazine”. The original images are transformed, becoming blots and colored lines.
Guilherme Silva
Object-error
24 frames per second, the object only exists in a constructive and procedural present - its timeline is real, it’s live stream.
I try to give shape to sound, the shape of sound, as I understand it. How does the error behave individually and how does it work integrated on a web of erratic nature
Pedro Lira Erratic Block To recognize simultaneously, within the gap between fiction and reality, the strangeness and the familiarity of the Other’s gestures and results. As an erratic bloc seen in a completely different context from its genesis, the assigned performer is framed and legitimized through praxis, questioning not only authorship as well as the essence of the object done.
