Truth to Materials is a tenet of modern architecture, which holds that any material should be used where it is most appropriate

and its nature should not be hidden and the means of its construction should be celebrated. Personally, I like brick walls to be exposed, natural wood floors, granite counter tops and concrete and glass to be visible. And painted wood is appropriate and lovely when done well and we know it s wood underneath. On the other hand, I understand they re cheap and can be kept clean but fake laminate floors or countertops, they just don t feel right. When it comes to programming for mobile and gaming, these tenets can still hold true when we consider the programming tool or language as the material. You may need something built fast and cross platform is key with a limited budget, in which case tools like Corona or Titanium may make sense or the mobile web app or web approach is best suited. As an artist/ iOS developer, I know that whatever tools or materials allow you to achieve the end effect you want for your intended audience that s the way to go. Yet as in architecture, an understanding of a programming tool like a material is critical before deciding whether it s the most appropriate for a desired outcome. The reality is it s seductive to get carried away with tools that appear to allow for shortcuts and leverage to your time and money. On and off over the past 2 months I have been investigating other tools for game development. Outside of working with Apple s SDK, my favourite is Unity. In part I ve been inspired by the culture behind the founders of Unity3D that are apparent from this interview between Om Malik and David Helgason, CEO. For 2D, we started out with Cocos2D for VectorBloom the game and have decided to continue and complete the gameplay with this Open Source tool. Back a month or so ago, a tonne of publicity influenced me to look at Corona. I was impressed and I still highly recommend it for anyone who is intimidated by Objective-C or really wants the advantage of being able to release a simple app or a 2D game that will also compile for Android. What I didn t like about working with Corona was how in order to test any change I made to the code on an iPhone or iPad, I had to go through a series of steps that I don t have, if I am working straight from Xcode. The steps are minimal, 1. first build which sends the code to Anscamobile s servers for compiling and returning an app product, 2. then upload this Ad hoc build to iTunes and 3. then install it on my device by syncing with my iTunes library of apps. It gets tedious when making small tweaks to code that need to be tested on a device. On the positive end, Particle Candy is awesome and it takes less Lua code for various effects and outcomes with Corona than with iPhone s SDK. Either way being familiar with the possibilities available with any programming tool is key. We re applying the tools that are most appropriate and the nature of these tools may not be evident to every user but certainly there s a philosophy behind the choices that comes through in our approach as mobile architects. For our own projects, we ll be gamifying ArtCards by Elizabeth Boylan with separate release versions for the iPad and the Mac. For this project, UIKit s animation capabilities will be enough, while Cocos2D would be overkill, and Corona wouldn t allow us use the latest available iOS libraries and frameworks along with 3rd Party Native libraries until Corona decides whether to support them. VectorBloom the Game will be completed with Cocos2D and Unity3D is our game engine tool for the longest project that we have begun work on in combination with Maya 3D. Until we re at the 90% completion mark I won t be sharing much about the details of this 3D game. Some of us don t have the time to research or investigate all tools. So if I have any advice it s to choose the tool that you really enjoy working with or have been inspired by through the works of other artist/developers who have chosen that tool to achieve the results you admire. It takes time to build things well and with the right materials From: http://vectorbloom.com/2011/05/architecture-truth-to-materials-applied-to-programming/ LUCID DREAMING by Beth Wilson The Truth in Materials

Traces of Manganese and Ochre, Grace Bakst Wapner, high-fire clay & pigment, 7x19x13 inches, 1998. Before the advent of modernism, when people looked at art they expected to see something other than a painting or a sculpture: They

were looking to see the subject matter, the person or objects represented by the artist in the work. While certain styles of painting, for example, might feature more or less pronounced brushstrokes or surface texture, on the whole the aim of the artist was to represent someone or something that was not there, or at least would not be there when the work was exhibited. A painting was a window onto another world, and the materials of paint and canvas were to be as transparent as a pane of glass. Marble was to transmogrify into flesh, leaving its own reality behind. By the time the 20th century rolled around, this sort of illusionism was challenged by all sorts of avantgarde artists, who became enchanted not so much with the power of representation itself as with the reality of the matter in their hands paint, chalk, marble, wood, plus a thousand other materials never before thought of as the stuff of art. By focusing on the medium, the substance of the message was irrevocably changed: Rather than creating an art predicated on fooling the viewer s perception, the issue became one of heightening the viewer s awareness of the reality of the materials themselves. Early 20th-century master Constantin Brancusi insisted on what he called truth to materials : The sculptor was to reveal in his very means of working the material the quality and personality of that material wood would show its grain, metal its tensile strength, stone its texture etc. In post-revolutionary Russia, this new reality-consciousness became the basis for a whole new politically-based theory of art, Constructivism, in which the honest presentation of the materials themselves was intended to cultivate in the audience a deeper appreciation of Marx s historical materialism. The desire for this directness, I think, stems from our coming to grips with a world that ever since the Industrial Revolution has spun further and further out of anyone s control, in which a web of images and ideas is woven so quickly through the media that the very question of what reality itself means has become utterly baffling. By contrast, when artists allow the dross material of their work to speak most clearly, even to become the content of the work, they provide a reassuringly tangible alternative to the perplexity that normally grips us in this confusing modern world. There are a number of shows this month that feature work that insists upon the recognition of its own materiality (although without the Soviet political program attached). The common denominator for all of these artists seems to be striking a balance between the demands of a fairly formal beauty and the relative resistance offered by the particular medium or media used by the artist to accepting that sort of aesthetic patterning. The question constantly hovering around the periphery of this balancing act is: To what degree does the pattern or the form imposed on the materials pull us toward yet another misapprehension? or will it ever be possible to fully reconcile the materiality of a medium with the immaterial language of form itself? Vera Lambert Kaplan s Fabric of Life paintings, at Albert Shahinian s Poughkeepsie gallery through April 22 raises such questions by using fabric, paint and mixed media in a way that both clarifies and complicates the issue of materiality. She layers various patterns, images and multicultural references in mixed media, using bright, often dissonant colors to create intricate, multi-dimensional webs that are intended to parallel the complexity of life itself. In the most recent painting in the show, she layers two different fabrics/paintings over one another, literally tearing holes through the top layer to expose choice bits of what lies underneath, and wittily gluing the resulting flap back to leave no doubt as to the process involved. The puzzle of this work is the way in which it plays the reality of presence and absence off the very openness and truth of the method of its creation. In last month s column I discussed at some length the beauty and tactility of encaustic, a painting medium in which the pigment is suspended in a beeswax medium. Just next door to the Kaplan exhibition, Lorraine Kessler s group show, open through May 6, includes some interesting abstract encaustic work by Laura Moriarty, in which she pours the hot pigmented beeswax across a wooden panel, and then incises and scrapes into the thick surface when it has set. Whether to consider this painting or sculpture is an interesting question; although, given the primarily two-dimensional orientation of the panels, I d tend to vote for the former. Pamela Blum s strong black-and-white encaustics, also in the show, have their own scuffed, lived-in quality that softens and humanizes the otherwise purely abstract imagery. Art Design Digression in Hudson opens its premiere show of sculptor Sydney Blum s recondite formations of peat moss and cement (with bits of bone thrown in for good measure) on April 7. The largest grouping in the show, esoterically titled 9x WRVH flock L, presents the viewer with nine roughly similar reiterations of the same abstract form, which strikes me as a sort of a cinder block surmounted by a tilted little house. By grouping them in this way, Blum calls attention to both the relationships between the forms and the idiosyncratic construction of each they re bent at differing angles, some with bits of bone showing here or there, some exposing the fractured veins where different lumps of the peat moss/concrete mixture were pressed into the form. The final effect is oddly endearing, a kind of Minimalism with a human face. And returning to the figure (as it seems it always must), an exhibition of Grace Bakst Wapner s recent sculpture opens at the Muroff Kotler Visual Arts Gallery at UCCC on April 4 with a slide presentation by the artist at 7 p.m. While figurative, her ceramic sculptures also rely on a strong feel for the clay, allowing the texture of the material and the marks of its molding to speak in the final product. Baked earth is one of the most ancient of art materials, and Wapner uses the truth of this presence to underscore the deep, emotive core of the forms that she creates with it. This promises to be a quite beautiful and moving show. Uncertainties (work by Pamela Blum, Laura Moriarty and Wayne Montecalvo) through May 6 at the Lorraine Kessler Gallery, 196 Main Street, Poughkeepsie. 452-7040.

Vera Lambert Kaplan, Fabric of Life through April 22 at Albert Shahinian Fine Art, 198 Main Street, Poughkeepsie. 454-0522. Sydney Blum (and Michael Schwartz), April 7 through May 1 at A.D.D. Gallery, 22 Park Place, Hudson. 518-822-9763 . Grace Bakst Wapner, Recent Sculpture, April 4-28, at the Muroff Kotler Visual Arts Gallery, Ulster County Community College, Stone Ridge. 687-5113. The parabola house Architect Yasuhiro Yamashita of Atelier Tekuto has recently completed a minimalist house design for a family in Tokyo. The site is located in a quiet residential area surrounded by nature. 6m in width and 27m in length, it is a long and narrow site, which has been constructed 3m above road-level so that on clear days, it enjoys views of Mount Fuji. Minimal design and a parabolic ceiling on the top floor are the building s distinctive features. Splashes of colour provide a contrast to the undulating white surroundings, giving rhythm to the space. The flowing three dimensional ceiling, which dips and rises to varying levels ofheight, arouses contrasting feelings of tension and release and gives the room a sense of boundlessness. Thus, even when observing the room from a fixed position, the fluctuating density invokes a sense of movement, which unconsciously guides the observer right through and beyond the room s boundaries, as if following the flow of air, giving the impression of endless space. Studio Kaze Paulista Mon , 28 June 2010 The program solicited by the client was a commercial space, which would be the seventh hair salon for chain located in the city of So Paulo. The building should be according to the aesthetic language developed as well by FGMF for the Kaze salon at Mooca neighborhood, in 2004, which became a symbol and standard for the entire chain. The Kaze salon Paulista unit was therefore established on a small and narrow lot, semi-detached on both sides in which the dimensions of a previous existing building could not be change because of a change in So Paulo construction legislation. Due to the minimal dimensions, the four floors of the building and the need for daylight, the faade composed by angled glass plates and the atrium gained great importance. The faade is the element wich gives a contemporary look to the building, as its faceted form turns into a powerful lantern for the city at night. The atrium at the center of the building runs through all floors. Its main feature is a big panel made of ceramic tiles, designed by the plastic artist Fbio Flaks. It has become the area where clients lay their eyes while getting a haircut. The spaces are organized in a simple way along four floors wich communicate by a metal staircase on their frontal portion. The lower floor contains the reception and changing rooms. There are on the second and third floors diferent areas for haircut, washing, hair coloring, epilation, bathrooms, and pantry. On the fourth floor is the administration. As well as a means for natural ilumination, the glass faade is part of a controlled ventilation and passive temperature control system. Some window panes can be opened, allowing the passage of air through all the internal environment, cooling it on its way to exhausters on the last floor. The small sized lot allowed the building to merge with its urban environment, semi-detached as it is, but at the same time it is able to show individuality in the contrast with the surrounding buildings, qualifying the neighborhood in wich it is settled. http://www.archello.com/en/project/studio-kaze-paulista