Teaching AutoCAD to sing...

Ray Bennett, an architect at McCarthy Hammers Architects in Dallas, went to architecture school on a music scholarship. And though he was aware of similarities between the two arts, that was the most direct link they had in his mind until he was inspired by a Rem Koolhaas lecture on the topic.

"The lecture was on a Thursday night," he said. "By that Monday, I had the program completed. It didn't take me very long to do, but it took 20 years to come up with the idea."

"The idea" was that he could run the numerical values that his Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) system assigned to songs through AutoCAD, and see what the songs look like when rendered. The program he wrote to do the conversion, which he calls Alchemist, won a 2002 AutoDesk iDesign award.

"I've got time in the X value, pitch in the Z value, and then pan, where the instrument actually sits in the orchestra, in the Y value," he said.
He can play keyboards; he can design buildings; and now he's linked the two. But Bennett is still looking for new challenges: "I'm teaching myself to play guitar," he said. "It's not going very well at the moment."

Olafur Eliasson

The cubic structural evolution project 2004

2 March to 13 May 2007 Ground Level, NGV International Admission free

Olafur Eliasson is a Danish contemporary artist who lives and works in Berlin. Concerned with the way we see the world, his photographs, sculptures and installations explore relationships between perception and reality, nature and technology, the individual and the environment. Inspired by the landscapes of his ancestral homeland Iceland, many of his installations incorporate natural phenomena such as ice, mist and light, often reconstructed artificially within a gallery environment.

The cubic structural evolution project 2004 is a spectacular installation that invites visitors to participate in the construction of a cityscape using thousands of pieces of Lego. For Eliasson, audience collaboration is of central importance. As he has stated, ‘I see that the person, when engaging in a project of mine, influences the meanings generated.’

Olafur Eliasson represented Denmark in the 2003 Venice Biennale and received widespread attention for his installation The Weather Project at Tate Modern, London in 2003-04. on loan from the Queensland Art Gallery.