- Email: [email protected]
Sculpting with fish skins
CULTURELAB
Beautiful waste Kitchen cast-offs are the raw materials for an experimental artist, finds Kat Austen
Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva ‘A Wish’/Photo: Sean Gibson
THE workspace of Elpida Hadzisalmon skin, pointing out that Vasileva smells like a cross some are more bleached or between a fishmonger’s and warped than others. a chemistry lab. One of the pieces for her That’s not surprising residency is made of scallop considering the materials she skirts, or mantles, which secrete uses in her artworks: discarded the mollusc’s shell. She washes, scallop skirts, salmon skins, quail sprays and dries these tender bones and other waste she gathers membranes to fashion ephemeral up from the kitchens at Pied à Terre, the well-known restaurant “From discarded scallop skirts she fashioned in London where she is artist in sculptures that resemble residence. After sloshing her way pearl-studded clouds” back to her studio in West Sussex with bags full of fishy refuse – drawing variously curious and ceiling-hung sculptures that horrified stares on the train – now float above diners’ heads, Hadzi-Vasileva experiments with secured by beads and fishing different chemical treatments wire so they resemble pearlto turn kitchen scraps into the studded clouds. stuff of art. On her desk is one of several When I visited the artist in her studio, she explained how she mixes her own solutions from taxidermists’ staples like the tanning agent aluminium sulphate. Unwilling to share specifics, as I poked my way around her macabre workspace – with its fridges stocked with frozen lab rats and roadkill – she explained only that her process requires a lot of patience and organisation. The testing period for a single material can sometimes run for months, and each step she meticulously records in a logbook. Every time she uses something new, monkfish rather than salmon skin for instance, she goes through a process of testing the best way to treat it. “Every material reacts differently,” she says, “and different chemicals give different effects.” She shows me a range of tiles, covered by Make a wish: gold-plated quail bones on display at Pied à Terre 62 | NewScientist | 24 September 2011
works featuring quail bones; dozens of tiny gold-plated sterna stood in neat rows, like a spooky skeletal army awaiting battle. Yet as we chatted, I couldn’t help being distracted by one of her longest-running experiments: a chicken head suspended in a wire basket above her desk. “I left it there to see what would happen,” she informed me. Three years later, its eyes and feathers are still intact. The artist told me that other visitors have been surprised that the skull is not infested with maggots. So what is Hadzi-Vasileva’s motivation for all this gruesome experimentation? “Some of the stuff I work with looks like puke,” she says. “It is refuse. I’m interested in the transformation of something that is disgusting when you talk about it, but when you have finished working on it, becomes a thing of beauty.” Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva’s work will be exhibited at Pied à Terre restaurant in London until 31 October
Cybercrime DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, cybercops and you by Misha Glenny, Bodley Head/Knopf, £20/$26.95 Reviewed by Andrew Keen
AT THE beginning of DarkMarket, a fast-paced journey through the murkiness of the internet underworld, Misha Glenny arrives on the Google campus in Mountain View, California. Describing what he calls the “trance-like smile” of the people he meets at the Googleplex, Glenny writes: “I cannot quite gauge whether this is a dream or a nightmare.” I suspect that Glenny wrote DarkMarket with a similar smile fixed to his face. Certainly, the book has the qualities and drawbacks of both a dream and a nightmare. This story of bigleague online credit card thieves is a vertiginous narrative – moving with sometimes bewildering speed around the globe from, say, Istanbul, Turkey, through to Scunthorpe, UK. A frenetic story of hackers and online thieves, DarkMarket moves in cybertime, switching cities, countries and continents with such speed that we might as well be on the internet itself. Indeed, Glenny’s narrative style is akin to an online fantasy, more like the infinite video games to which all the hackers are addicted than a traditional non-fiction book. The problem with DarkMarket is that while it is compelling on the cyberthieves and cybercops – who, as in all good crime stories, sometimes turn out to be the same people – it is weak on context. Glenny seems so infatuated with cybercriminality that he forgets to explain why it matters to the rest of us. So, I’m afraid, DarkMarket is rather like one of those dreams or nightmares that is instantly forgotten as soon as you wake up.
Beautiful waste Kitchen cast-offs are the raw materials for an experimental artist, finds Kat Austen
Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva ‘A Wish’/Photo: Sean Gibson
THE workspace of Elpida Hadzisalmon skin, pointing out that Vasileva smells like a cross some are more bleached or between a fishmonger’s and warped than others. a chemistry lab. One of the pieces for her That’s not surprising residency is made of scallop considering the materials she skirts, or mantles, which secrete uses in her artworks: discarded the mollusc’s shell. She washes, scallop skirts, salmon skins, quail sprays and dries these tender bones and other waste she gathers membranes to fashion ephemeral up from the kitchens at Pied à Terre, the well-known restaurant “From discarded scallop skirts she fashioned in London where she is artist in sculptures that resemble residence. After sloshing her way pearl-studded clouds” back to her studio in West Sussex with bags full of fishy refuse – drawing variously curious and ceiling-hung sculptures that horrified stares on the train – now float above diners’ heads, Hadzi-Vasileva experiments with secured by beads and fishing different chemical treatments wire so they resemble pearlto turn kitchen scraps into the studded clouds. stuff of art. On her desk is one of several When I visited the artist in her studio, she explained how she mixes her own solutions from taxidermists’ staples like the tanning agent aluminium sulphate. Unwilling to share specifics, as I poked my way around her macabre workspace – with its fridges stocked with frozen lab rats and roadkill – she explained only that her process requires a lot of patience and organisation. The testing period for a single material can sometimes run for months, and each step she meticulously records in a logbook. Every time she uses something new, monkfish rather than salmon skin for instance, she goes through a process of testing the best way to treat it. “Every material reacts differently,” she says, “and different chemicals give different effects.” She shows me a range of tiles, covered by Make a wish: gold-plated quail bones on display at Pied à Terre 62 | NewScientist | 24 September 2011
works featuring quail bones; dozens of tiny gold-plated sterna stood in neat rows, like a spooky skeletal army awaiting battle. Yet as we chatted, I couldn’t help being distracted by one of her longest-running experiments: a chicken head suspended in a wire basket above her desk. “I left it there to see what would happen,” she informed me. Three years later, its eyes and feathers are still intact. The artist told me that other visitors have been surprised that the skull is not infested with maggots. So what is Hadzi-Vasileva’s motivation for all this gruesome experimentation? “Some of the stuff I work with looks like puke,” she says. “It is refuse. I’m interested in the transformation of something that is disgusting when you talk about it, but when you have finished working on it, becomes a thing of beauty.” Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva’s work will be exhibited at Pied à Terre restaurant in London until 31 October
Cybercrime DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, cybercops and you by Misha Glenny, Bodley Head/Knopf, £20/$26.95 Reviewed by Andrew Keen
AT THE beginning of DarkMarket, a fast-paced journey through the murkiness of the internet underworld, Misha Glenny arrives on the Google campus in Mountain View, California. Describing what he calls the “trance-like smile” of the people he meets at the Googleplex, Glenny writes: “I cannot quite gauge whether this is a dream or a nightmare.” I suspect that Glenny wrote DarkMarket with a similar smile fixed to his face. Certainly, the book has the qualities and drawbacks of both a dream and a nightmare. This story of bigleague online credit card thieves is a vertiginous narrative – moving with sometimes bewildering speed around the globe from, say, Istanbul, Turkey, through to Scunthorpe, UK. A frenetic story of hackers and online thieves, DarkMarket moves in cybertime, switching cities, countries and continents with such speed that we might as well be on the internet itself. Indeed, Glenny’s narrative style is akin to an online fantasy, more like the infinite video games to which all the hackers are addicted than a traditional non-fiction book. The problem with DarkMarket is that while it is compelling on the cyberthieves and cybercops – who, as in all good crime stories, sometimes turn out to be the same people – it is weak on context. Glenny seems so infatuated with cybercriminality that he forgets to explain why it matters to the rest of us. So, I’m afraid, DarkMarket is rather like one of those dreams or nightmares that is instantly forgotten as soon as you wake up.