Lunch over IP

"Bean" art

This is my new favorite piece of urban art -- the Chicago "bean":

Its real name is actually "Cloud Gate", but Chicagoans call it "the bean" because -- obviously -- of its shape. The 20-meter-long sculpture by British artist Anish Kapoor, installed in Millennium Park, is covered with polished stainless steel plates that reflect the city's skyline and the sky. Otherwise said: what brings the "bean" to life is the city surrounding it. Under the sculpture, a concave chamber (the "gate") multiplies your image like in a vortex.

The Da Vinci fingerprint

Anthropologists at the Italian University of Chieti claim they have been able to reconstruct Leonardo Da Vinci's left index fingerprint (via Wayne Hall). The result is a composite of photos of about 200 fingerprints - most of them partial, such as the one at left - taken from 52 papers handled by Leonardo in his life, five centuries ago. Says anthropologist Luigi Capasso:

"It adds the first touch of humanity. We knew how Leonardo saw the world and the future ... but who was he? This biological information is about his being human, not being a genius".

Waves of steel and glass

Visited the new Paul Klee Zentrum in the outskirts of Bern today. Designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, the museum in the shape of three undulating waves of steel and glass  emerging from the hill is in itself a phenomenal artwork:

Seeing is believing

The Kunsthaus in Zurich, one of Switzerland's foremost museums, is showing an exhibition called "Expanded Eye" - a wink to the "Responsive Eye" exhibit of optical art at MoMA four decades ago. The curator's opinion is that "the eye is the dominant organ of our time" and the show wants to be an exploration of the "ever-widening horizons of the human eye in the age of its physiologically and technologically extended faculties".

Most of the exhibit is rather uninteresting. Except maybe two works that you don't need to pay to see, because they are installed in front of the Kunsthaus. One, by the UK artist Cerith Wyn Evans, is a searchlight that, in the evenings, beams towards the sky a Morse-code version of a text by Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt discussing mankind and the universe. The other is this one:

It's a work by Italian artist Monica Bonvicini that was already installed in other cities in the past and, yes, it's a functioning public toilet. Externally (picture left) it looks like a cuboid covered with mirrors (in recent weeks it has been the object of protests by drivers that "suddenly saw another car appear next to theirs"), and the reflection prevents passers-by from peeping in. But the mirrors are one-way, so the perspective from the inside (picture right) is rather unsettling, as it makes you acutely aware of your bodily and psychological bareness.

Here, seeing is believing: you know nobody can see you, but you see that nothing protects your privacy, and reconciling this cognitive dissonance requires some serious mental will.