Show to See: Manuf(r)actured

Let me put in a plug for my good friends Steven Skov Holt and Mara Holt Skov who have a new show they have curated which just opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Portland, Oregon. It’s called Manuf(r)actured, and is described as:

Manuf®actured: The Conspicuous Transformation of Everyday Objects introduces a provocative new class of objects emerging from the permeable edges of art, craft and design. The exhibition highlights works from fifteen international artists who appropriate manufactured products to create sculptural works and installations of all sizes and scales. Rather than transform a single natural material, the artists on view employ a variety of pristine goods culled directly from manufacturers and store shelves as their raw materials. Nevertheless, each piece exhibits craft’s time-honored, labor-intensive repetitive processes as a strategy for object-making.

Steven is a former editor at ID Magazine and creative director at frog design, and Mara is a curator and author, and both are about the scarily smartest people I know.

The show runs until January 4, 2009, so if you are in Portland in the next few months I’m sure it will be worth checking out.

Show website.

Computer Museum

I stumbled across a rather good computer museum while in Paris, at the top of the Grande Arche of all places. It had a great collection of vintage gear. Here are a few of the more interesting images of some classic computing paraphenalia. You can see the whole gallery here.

The Apple IIc, designed by frog design, where I work, back in the day

A rather interesting leather-wrapped one designed to mimic a briefcase, for the high-powered executive looking to lug around 20 pounds of gear

Ah, the Sinclair ZX81, which I learned to program in BASIC on. Very cheap, very slow, very little memory (1 kilobyte of RAM, no hard drive), but actually quite innovative in many ways.

The “Trash 80” from Radio Shack. Back when Radio Shack was a computing super-power…

No idea what these buttons do, but they look cool

A recreated “typical” teenage computer geek bedroom, circa 1982

I’m not sure that “Environment of exploitation” means the same thing in French as it does in English, but it is humorously apropos for Microsoft

A Cray Super Computer in stylish green vinyl. When it’s cold in the winter, you can sit on its warming bench.

Lastly, some switches on an old piece of equipment