Day: November 30, 2009

Liking this drawing, by Stephanie Syjuco, of a man walking through a gallery of life-sized sculptures based on Google SketchUp. Syjuco also made actual art objects based on the designs, a neat-but-too-pat idea that I learned about via Vvork. (Haven't seen the sculptures in person--maybe they're collectively mindblowing--but in reproduction they look like bland facsimiles of bland Anthony Caros.) More interesting is this, second layer of transformation--a "mockup" of the show. This gives you most of what you need to know about the idea. Don't know if it was necessary to build the sculptures to get this image, or if the mockup could have been generated in SketchUp based on imagining the show. I think it's the latter--as there is nothing like the giant sculpture in the background in the actual gallery installation photo.

Guthrie Lonergan has also been working with Google SketchUp, collecting designs in the 3D Warehouse and making some of his own. I prefer his good/bad renderings and his eye for other people's good/bad ones. It's not just about picking plain vanilla designs--it should be a comment on the clumsy pathos of the whole enterprise. Lonergan even found a collection of "modern art" on Google 3D Warehouse, so this idea has been pretty well covered.