Luce Gallery presents Astonishing Alterations for the Anterograde Amnesic Where Peter Mohall will present new paintings and sculptures from his ongoing series The Brushstrokes painting series where the compositions are made through a plurality of identically molded brushstrokes is an examination of the aesthetic consequences of repetition the series have evolved into included not only multiplied identical brushstrokes Videlicet the same brushstrokes but different in form and length but are limited to a constant group of brushtools The title "Ab-x" suggests a fictive catchy trademark for abdominal training devices and also a reference to abstract expressionism The form is designed to fit and support the natural movement of the body and there is a conceivable parallel in the shape of the steel structure to the gestural language of the brushstrokes in abstract painting Both gestures are fixed and limited to the relation of the human body Though addressing painting in a sculptural form the series also comment on modern lifestyle with body ideal self-improvement and TV shopping as a phenomena The exhibition is Mohall's second soloshow at the gallery Recent exhibitions includes Vestjyllands kunstpavillon Norway — In a sun-drenched classroom a few miles south of Oslo Jean-Baptiste Huynh stood in front of a class of rapt first-graders who watched as he played a video game Huynh was showing off his new Dragonbox Numbers in which the digits 1 through 10 appear as different-sized creatures who can "eat" one another The resulting creature represents the sum of the two They scrambled back to their desks and their school-issued tablet computers and got to work and Dragonbox Numbers had yet to be released on Apple's iTunes Store These 3-foot-tall beta testers were among the first in the world to try it These students are attending school at an interesting time a neighboring country whose success in education has reverberated far beyond its shores their oil-dependent country is going through an economic upheaval that threatens to dwarf the recent recession has been to look for ways to improve education across the board in part by doubling down on giving students better technological tools Feeding the demand for better educational technology is an emerging local sector that is already making waves on the other side of the Atlantic The emergence of the education technology industry comes at a key time: Oil accounts for about a quarter of Norway's GDP But oil prices are down by more than half from their highs last year In a speech to bankers in New York last March said the Norwegian economy "must adapt to considerably lower demand from the oil sector" if it is to survive "We will be more dependent on growth in other sectors to support growth in the economy." said oil and gas have driven innovation for the past 40 years "Now what is happening is that oil prices are coming down and everybody sees that we have to start something new," she said Norway is already heavily digitally enhanced: Virtually the entire country is connected to the Internet A larger share of Norwegians own smartphones than anywhere else in Europe. A 2013 survey by Google found Norwegian smartphone ownership at more than two-thirds, putting it fifth worldwide behind the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Singapore. By contrast, Finland, home of Nokia, boasts only 46% smartphone ownership. In the United States, it's about 56%. "I think we are kind of early adopters," Amelie said. "Norway is a country where the 'American Dream' is actually possible. You have a lot of possibilities here," she said. The result is an emerging startup culture in a place that, until recently, didn't prize competition, she said. In Norway, a plumber can earn more than a doctor. "But the oil crisis and climate changes are now used to spark more entrepreneurship and challenge people to create new companies." But she said Norwegians "are not very good at selling, at commercializing the product. We're really good at making products — technology and research. And part of the culture is very super-shy people — so humble. We kind of have to learn the culture of pitching." The oil crisis is making shyness a luxury. As Rolf Assev of Startup Lab Oslo looked around the room at a raucous evening "pitch session," in which a handful of winners among dozens of tech startups recently vied for investors, he estimated that nearly one of every three companies there was founded by people who, a year or two ago, were in the oil industry. "The last two years — amazing," he said. "Last year, after oil prices went down, we were getting the best people. The people who used to be hired into the oil sector are now starting to become entrepreneurs, which is very positive." It is similar, he said, to what has happened with Nokia, the Finnish tech giant, which has shed jobs for the past three years. Even the sale of its phone business to Microsoft in 2014 didn't stop the bleeding. "When all the people at Nokia didn't have a job anymore, they had to come up with something," Assev said. Since 2012 or so, a small but growing cluster of technology companies has emerged around Oslo, with about one in four focused on education. Many have been attracted to Assev's incubator, which is backing 64 startups and has invested in another 19 established companies — among them Huynh's tiny video game company, We Want to Know. In 2012, We Want to Know scored a hit with its first Dragonbox game, which taught algebraic thinking to children as young as 4 years old. The game and its sequels have sold more than half a million copies in the United States alone, at $4.99 and up — a high price for games on the App Store. For a while, Dragonbox was more popular in Norway than the gaming sensation Angry Birds. Last year, Huynh and a collaborator persuaded children throughout the entire country to spend a week solving nearly 8 million algebra problems together — the collaborator, a University of Washington researcher named Zoran Popovic, adapted Dragonbox to offer more help to students who needed it. The "algebra challenge" underwent smaller trials in 2013, with students in Washington state, who solved nearly 391,000 problems. In Wisconsin a few months later, students solved nearly 645,000 problems. Assev was an early investor — he admits that Huynh, a Vietnamese Frenchman married to a Norwegian child psychologist, was the one who "opened my eyes for ed tech." The company started in Huynh's Oslo apartment. Startup Lab occupies the bottom floor of an office complex next door to Oslo University. It often attracts potential talent by offering the best coffee in the neighborhood, as well as free beer on Fridays. "Students who are smart come in here and have a free beer and we talk," Assev said, recalling that he hired four people for Huynh's company over Friday beers. A long-time tech entrepreneur — he was employee No. 10 at Opera, the Norwegian web browser creator — Assev said ideas in the tech world aren't as important as ability to execute them. "There are so many ideas. For us, the way we invest in companies is that we let them work with us for three months and we get to know them. We see how they work, how early they get up, how late they work, how smart they work. And they get to know us. It's a good starting point for investing." Among the other efforts emerging here: a kind of dating service for app developers and researchers, created by Ingrid Somdal-Åmodt Vinje, a graduate student in educational pedagogy. She's developing a way for companies that create apps, games or other learning tools to quickly find researchers willing to evaluate their products. Most ed tech companies "want to know if their product works," she said. "They want to put their product up on a pedestal and test it — I think that's brave and I also think that's necessary for them to sell it." The service is set to debut in December with about a dozen researchers and companies meeting face-to-face. Perhaps the fastest-growing Norwegian ed tech export is Kahoot!, a game-based platform that allows teachers and students to create interactive quizzes out of any content they wish. Students use mobile devices such as cellphones or tablets to participate in live classroom sessions, and the results show up instantly on a classroom screen. "It's really about having fun — and when you're having fun, things happen," the company's CEO, Johan Brand, told a gathering of educators in Oslo recently. A games industry veteran — he'd previously worked on Mercedes-Benz's Driving Academy in the United Kingdom — Brand said the platform provides a way to help students get engaged in school in a deeper way than usual. "If people are going to learn something and fall in love with it, it needs to be a life-long commitment to improve yourself and not just pass your tests," he said. The company, incubated here in 2012 alongside Huynh's game company, now has offices in London and Austin and boasts 40 million players in over 150 countries. But Brand is quite open about the fact that participating in a classroom game created by your teacher, or, for that matter, your classmates, represents a kind of transgressive undertaking. That, as much as anything, is the key to the company's success. "You're doing something with your teacher that you're not supposed to do," he said. "You're doing something with your friends that you're not supposed to do." That builds class cohesion, which is key to a healthy learning environment. "In the long term, we're building class culture," Brand said. "Culture eats any strategy." At Oslo's Elvebakken Upper Secondary School, as students changed classes one recent morning, a quintet of boys stood in the middle of the commotion, gathered around a laptop and talking about the results of a stock trading video game. Moments later, in a classroom a few feet away, vice principal Knut Halvard Roald looked on as one student soldered a circuit board and another built a computer power supply. Students at Elvebakken are expected to work together. Hedda Marie Stene-Johansen, 16, said a Facebook group chat, used as a study aid by the 33 students in her homeroom class, "kind of bonds us." But she recalled that one day before a recent test it got a little out of hand: "There were a thousand unread messages," she said. "It didn't take very long, really." Roald said the school's flexible schedule — students can take days off for independent study — allows them to feel they're in control of their time. Most, however, choose to come to school even when they've got more credits than they need "because they like it." Indeed, a recent international comparison found that while Norwegian students perform just above average worldwide on key skills, 87% "feel happy at school," second only to Iceland at 90%. Like many schools in Oslo, Elvebakken has invested heavily in technology. Students, who attend through the age of 19, routinely tote laptops to class, and the school recently expanded into an old electrical transfer station across the street, where it built a chemistry lab and, improbably, a huge experimental concrete wave tank. "We are in a constant revolution, all the time, when it comes to technology," Roald said. This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. 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Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page. the musician/model who emerged as a key presence during the collections Wilkins delivers atmospheric melodies and soulful lyrics that inform the work she’s been able to do for designers such as Demna Gvasalia she’s just starting to take in the full scope of her accomplishments “I don’t think I was able to feel it that much while it was happening because I was running around so much but I’ve been able to sit down these past couple days “I met so many interesting people and I was exhausted Wilkins made music with her metal-drummer older brother Sebastian Briefly shifting to dance during her teens when she studied movement Wilkins started modeling after being discovered by scouts at age 15 Landing in the pages of indie publications like Pop and on the runway during Copenhagen Fashion Week before moving to New York Wilkins’s first go at the industry was successful but didn’t provide much gratification she initially found being a professional poser uninspiring “At first I used [music] as my personal therapy a way to just deal with stuff that was on my mind,” she says “When I moved to the States again I just had an inkling that this could be a way to express myself in a different way.” Writing and making songs in her Brooklyn apartment Wilkins’s music moved from being something private to becoming artistry that she was ready to share with the world Inspired by everyone from classic soul singers including Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding to contemporaries like friend Moses Sumney Wilkins now headlines tour dates and has performed at showcases at SXSW “It’s very raw to step out of my little apartment and be like I’m interested in the relationships between people and having people connect so it’s great to be able to do that in a live setting.” Though she admits to the occasional pre-performance jitters having an outlet beyond fashion has opened her up to a whole new community and I've always found a lot of strength in my peers or my friends who are strong female artists,” says Wilkins “It’s incredible to see women supporting each other It’s I think crucial for me to be able to even just share a stage with someone I admire–it’s what makes it worth it Stepping back on the runway after a brief hiatus Wilkins has found that having her own thing makes her fashion career considerably more rewarding “It’s been really good to find my passion outside of modeling I think it’s like chilled me out–I’m much more comfortable in my skin more than I have ever been.” She’s also happy her moment has come right as modeling has begun to place importance on inclusiveness “There is still a long way to go but there have been a lot of incredible diverse women that I’ve been able to walk for and with,” says Wilkins who has both Scandinavian and African-American roots “I thought Balenciaga was really interesting that way with the musicians and creative people walking Her season may have wrapped but Wilkins still has plenty on her plate With an album in the works and a charity concert for RAINN this Wednesday night at Brooklyn’s San Damiano Mission her schedule is focused on performing and giving back Making art with a message has become a priority Confident in her role as an artist and her future in fashion Wilkins hopes to connect further with her creative community “I would really just like to collaborate with other artists and photographers and stuff like that and make beautiful things,” says Wilkins so we’ll see—things have been beautiful so far.” By subscribing, you accept the terms and conditions in our privacy policy.