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Tony Candido's resume includes a roster of legendary mentors. After studying at the Illinois Institute of Technology under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Ludwig Hilberseimer, he worked as an architectural designer for I.M. Pei and contributed to Konrad Wachsmann's groundbreaking Air Force airport hangar design.

But Candido has also pursued his own vision. He began painting professionally in the early 1950s, using sweeping brush strokes to create abstract explorations (as with "Night Paintings", from 1956), figural studies ("Asahikawa Heads", in 1988) and conceptual, architecturally driven works, such as his continuing "Cable Cities" series (pictured), which depicts structures embedded in the landscape.

Now aged 85, Candido paints regularly and teaches at Cooper Union's Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture. Students in his studio class tackle the idea of the urban farm, a concept Candido pioneered in the 1990s that intersects ideas of farming, architecture and urban planning. This month Cooper Union has mounted "The Great White Whale is Black", a retrospective exhibition honouring five decades of Candido's work. The day the show opened Candido took a moment to speak with More Intelligent Life about his approach to painting, his fascination with spatial relationships and the relationship between cities and their surroundings.

More Intelligent Life: You've worked with some huge names in the architecture world, including Mies van der Rohe and I.M. Pei. Did either of them influence you as an artist?  read more »

As an X-certificate actress, Sasha Grey perfected a thrashing sensuality far more cathartic and psychologically fraught than her moaning, grunting contemporaries. Her smouldering looks and unapologetic public appearances snared millions of mostly male fans and turned the teen porn performer into a cult figure. She is considered cool to watch.

Buoyed by her status as an underworld icon, Grey has participated in fashion spreads, starred in a Smashing Pumpkins music video and worked the talk-show circuit. Then at the age of 21 she made her first foray into “legitimate” cinema, landing the role of the laconic escort in Steven Soderbergh’s "The Girlfriend Experience". But Grey might better be suited to highbrow performance art than Hollywood glitz.

She spoke with More Intelligent Life after appearing at PERFORMA 09–a biennial performance-art festival organised by RoseLee Goldberg. She had just performed in "Case", a six-hour theatrical reading of William Gibson’s science-fiction classic "Neuromancer", arranged by Brody Condon, a performance artist, and adapted by Brandon Stosuy. She appeared in the role of Molly Millions, a clawed, mercury-eyed assassin.

Grey, who was home-schooled, retains the strange intellectual sparkle of a true autodidact. Here she considers the line between porn and performance art, the cultural appeal of pre-war Berlin and the beginnings of a new cyber-hierarchy.

More Intelligent Life: How did you get involved in this performance piece? Did they approach you with the part, or you them?  read more »

Remember burying a time-capsule as a kid? These care packages to our future selves usually included a letter and any valuable possessions we could bear to part with: stickers, a mood ring, a key chain. How much would you pay for that mossy stuff now, and the letter explaining them? How much would those objects be worth to a stranger? The value of such things is complicated, and largely subjective. This is why I still have my Breyer horse collection, and why I would pay real money to have any of those time-capsules back.  read more »

Dan Chiasson’s poetry is “unsettled and unsettling,” wrote Kay Ryan in the New York Times. “So much in Chiasson is uncomfortable and misproportioned. So much suffers. At the same time, his poetry is mischievous and meant to be understood playfully.” Ryan made those observations in 2005, just after the release of Chiasson’s second collection of poetry, “Natural History”. But her description remains apt. In “Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon”, published by Knopf on February 2nd (and out in Britain later this year), Chiasson applies his analytical, nervous, literary and often playful sensibility to the poignancy of parenthood.

"It's very easy to identify with your child," Chiasson says over the phone from his home in Sudbury, Massachusetts. "It's also very weird because there are things about your child that you'll envy in a way. So there's a split consciousness. You can see yourself as the child and you can see yourself as the father."

In new poems, such as "Man and Derailment" and the multi-part "Swifts", Chiasson juxtaposes childhood memories of his own father with a decidedly adult consciousness. (In the former, a man takes his son to a ravine to view a train crash; the child internalises the scene by wondering "how he would remember the scene / and, once he knew his father better, later, / and later, knew himself better, what it would mean.")  read more »

"Bring earplugs," a friend IM'ed me recently when I told him I was going to see the band A Place To Bury Strangers perform at the Barfly in London. "I think they might be going in a more poppy, Joy Division direction now, but they're still fu*!ing loud."

For about six years, the New York-based three-piece band has won over audiences–and driven some away–with an ample supply of volume. The New York Times credited them with "reviving the ominous, feedback-drenched drones of the 1980s", while the Washington Post described them as "the most awesome, ear-shatteringly loud garage/shoegaze band you'll ever hear."

At the 2008 SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, the band ended its set with a ten-minute-plus sonic meltdown that surely inflicted some hearing loss. At some point during the show I had to stuff my ears with tissue-paper from the bathroom; I could still hear them ringing afterwards. Yet I never considered leaving early.

In October the band released their second album, "Exploding Head", on Mute, a London-based label. There's been much chatter about how their sophomore effort is weaker, softer, more drab, too much like My Bloody Valentine or Jesus & Mary Chain. But others have praised the new material as "noisily cathartic and epic".  read more »

Nils Frahm is poised to become something of a sensation. Raised on a musical diet of classical and jazz, Frahm started playing the piano as a young student of Nahum Brodski, himself a student of Tchaikovsky’s last protégé. When the budding musician wasn’t hovering over a keyboard, he was sifting through his father’s vast collection of ECM records. Now, aged 27, Frahm has become a masterful improvisational pianist.

In December Frahm released his first two albums simultaneously: “Wintermusik”, a stunning three-song piano suite, coloured by celeste and the reed organ, and "The Bells”, a broader, more complex collaboration with Peter Broderick, a fellow musician on the Erased Tapes record label.

“The Bells” is a collection of improvisational pieces played during two nights in an old church in Berlin. The acoustics of the building lend the recording a voluptuous resonance. The music—played by Frahm and directed by Broderick—lurches, swells and glides its way through stifled rage, deep melancholy and delicate beauty. It is a testament to the talents of the duo that the record hardly seems improvised at all.

Frahm has also been establishing his name as a producer, and in 2008 he founded Durton Studio in Berlin. He took a moment to talk to More Intelligent Life about his fascination with improvisation, the beauty of imperfection and the inspiration that can come from thematic constraints.  read more »

Gabriella Gómez-Mont always feels a twinge of panic when she has to fill out her profession on immigration cards at various far-flung airports. The dynamic Mexican founder of Tóxico Cultura, an experimental creative lab, and a TED senior fellow, she is also a writer, photographer, visual artist and cultural entrepreneur–not exactly an easy title to put in a box.

Unsurprisingly, Gómez-Mont is fascinated by the intersections of different disciplines, creative and otherwise. This motivated her to create Tóxico Cultura in Mexico City four years ago, which functions as a kind of multidisciplinary think-tank. Artists, filmmakers, photographers and writers come here to discuss and present their work amid cultural workshops, lectures, exhibitions and film screenings. The city's creative types have all heard of Tóxico, and everyone wants to be a part of it.

Committed to reviving what she calls Mexico’s “cultural legacy”, Gómez-Mont is embarking on even more ambitious adventures. Bubbly and passionate, she gushes enthusiastically about filming her first documentary (about a reclusive Mexican scientist and artist), and about her creative approaches to social-justice problems. Here she talks to More Intelligent Life about Tóxico Cultura's mission, her interest in outsider artists and the impact of TED on her creative thinking.

More Intelligent Life: How would you describe what Tóxico Cultura does?  read more »

In November Art Review magazine named Hans Ulrich Obrist the number-one most influential person in the art world. But according to Obrist, the excitement hasn’t interrupted activities at London’s Serpentine Gallery, where he is co-director of exhibitions and programmes and director of international projects. For decades, Obrist has authored analytical commentaries on contemporary art, while simultaneously redefining its presentation at renowned institutions such as the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Obrist also conducts interviews. In the past few years he has released two 1,000-page volumes of his collected conversations with the most talented artists, architects, scientists, engineers and thinkers living today. Most recently he interviewed Jeff Koons for the artist's new book "Hulk Elvis", which features works from the series of the same name. 

It could be intimidating to interview someone with a C.V. like Obrist's, but the man at the other end of the telephone line is disarming and reassuringly self-possessed. He draws his interlocutor into a cocoon of seemingly all-encompassing knowledge about everything involving aesthetics. Obrist speaks incredibly fast, and crams in so many snippets of insight that it would be impossible to relay them all in one pass. Here we present the highlights, including his thoughts on the trouble with meetings, the world's most exciting new art scene and why it is vital to consider posterity.

More Intelligent Life: What did you eat for breakfast this morning?  read more »

Jeff Wall has been credited with validating photography as contemporary art. For his large-format works (he calls them “prose poems”, borrowing the term from Charles Baudelaire), he routinely employs actors to help realise his vision. Roles range from deceased soldiers who converse in the afterlife ("Dead Troops Talk") to weekend warriors who preen outside a nightclub ("Outside a Nightclub"). Wall then digitally manipulates the images and presents them as back-lit phototransparencies, so that the photographs glow. These arch, staged tableaux have a dreamy effect, odd and cinematic.

Phaidon just released a definitive account of Wall’s work to date— "Jeff Wall: Complete Edition", a 280-page monograph that includes Wall’s own writings as an art historian and theorist. In the days before the book's release, we struck up an e-mail correspondence with the Vancouver-based conceptual artist. While he was content to leave some answers at "Yes" or "No" (including an inquiry into his decision to not carry a camera), he also succinctly held forth on such topics as the tiresomeness of film, the trouble with historical references and how art can teach us about survival.  read more »

In the realm of industrial design, Dieter Rams is Yoda. The foundations were laid during a 40-year tenure as design director of Braun, a German electronics manufacturer. Rams helped to usher a functional modernist agenda into households the world over.

Elevating audio speakers from the carpet and removing the record player from its heavy wooden tomb, Rams ignited a design revolution with a philosophy of “less but better”. He took a functional and aesthetically streamlined approach to everything from alarm clocks to cigarette lighters, and then to arm chairs and shelving units while at Vitsoe, an international furniture manufacturer.

His Ten Principles of Design are routinely referred to as “commandments” in the field. Designers such as Jonathan Ive, Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa hew closely to Rams's precepts, such as “design is consequent to the last detail” and “design is as little design as possible.”  read more »