“A body only exists to be other bodies”
— William S. Burroughs, The Electronic Revolution

OTHER BODIES + ANTIBODIES

Other Bodies + Antibodies is a Burroughsian slip on a banana peel, transgressing the real and the imaginary, while blurring the boundaries between what is material and immaterial in contemporary culture.

The exhibition consists of four mind warping sculptures - Woman Taking a Selfie Bisected by a Mirror (The Mirror Stage), Gold Hip-Hop Dancer In Relative Simultaneity, Virtual Reality Expedition in Grand-Antique d'Aubert (The Lovers), and The Three Red Bicyclists, or Menage Trois.

Plato stated that “reality is created by the mind,” John Beckmann asserts that society exists in a unconscious state of ‘cognitive dissonance.’ He envisions the lived world as a permeable space that is continually being altered, destabilized, and manipulated by a multiplicity of events that are both real, digital, and imaginary. Arguing that specific conceptual effects derange the senses and the mind, he makes assemblages of art and philosophy, intersecting, interpenetrating and embedding bodies with other bodies, objects and architecture which provide insights into the artistic event as a form of a manufactured consensual hallucination.

Sculpture: John Beckmann
Visualizations: Kirill Lynkovsky
Conceived for the Saatchi Gallery, London
© 2020 Axis Mundi Design LLC

DICHROIC GLASS PAVILION: The Sensation of Color

Axis Mundi's recent architectural project ingeniously features dichroic glass, a contemporary non-translucent material created by stacking layers of metal oxides. This composite glass exhibits a mesmerizing interplay of colors, shifting dynamically with the viewer's perspective—an exemplary display of thin-film optics. In their design, Axis Mundi skillfully emphasizes the inherent beauty of dichroic glass, embracing a refined aesthetic marked by understated elegance. The pavilion stands as a sophisticated statement, challenging conventional notions of opulence as a prerequisite for true beauty. Through a minimalist approach, Axis Mundi transforms the pavilion into a canvas for the ethereal dance of light and color, inviting the public to appreciate the nuanced transformations facilitated by dichroic glass. This architectural marvel not only showcases design expertise but also symbolizes a celebration of simplicity and the sublime effects of color in a space that transcends mere functionality.

Design: John Beckmann
© 2024 Axis Mundi Design LLC. 

FILM SET DESIGN for a Science Fiction Film

The intersection of architecture, design, and film set design epitomizes a dynamic and collaborative synergy between these creative realms. Architecture, with its emphasis on spatial functionality and aesthetics, converges with design, encompassing a broader spectrum of visual elements and user experience considerations. When these disciplines intersect in the realm of film set design, a unique fusion unfolds.

The film set becomes the canvas where architects and designers collaborate seamlessly, transcending individual specialties. Architects bring their spatial expertise to ensure structures enhance storytelling dynamics, while designers infuse a keen sense of aesthetics, influencing everything from color schemes to furniture choices. This interdisciplinary approach enriches the cinematic experience, emphasizing the interconnectedness of these creative realms. The convergence of diverse skills results in the creation of immersive cinematic worlds that resonate profoundly with audiences. Embracing this interdisciplinary nature not only blurs the boundaries between architecture, design, and film set design but also fosters innovation, pushing the artistic frontiers of each field.

Design: John Beckmann
© 2023 Axis Mundi Design LLC. 

SUPER YACHTS + TENDERS

Contemporary super yacht design embraces design thinking, revolutionizing luxury at sea through a fusion of creativity, functionality, and user experience. Departing from conventional methods, it centers on empathizing with yacht owners and guests, shaping floating masterpieces aligned with individual tastes. Collaboration among architects, engineers, and designers spans diverse realms, integrating inspiration from technology, sustainability, and ergonomics. The use of cutting-edge materials and advanced technologies is paramount, exceeding modern expectations. Prioritizing sustainable practices reflects the industry's commitment to minimizing environmental impact. The design process underscores adaptability and multifunctionality, with spaces crafted for seamless transformation, catering to various needs. Incorporating smart navigation technologies and versatile entertainment spaces enhances the overall journey, exemplifying a holistic approach to super yacht design.

Design: John Beckmann, with Catherine Readick
© 2022 Axis Mundi Design LLC. 

PRESENCE OF THE INVISIBLE: A Memorial to the Victims of Covid 19

"Cultural memory" acknowledges that memory extends beyond individual or social realms to include a cultural dimension. In "Acts of Memory," Mieke Bal proposes that this cultural phenomenon allows navigation or transformation of challenging past episodes, impacting the present with severe consequences.

Transitioning from theory to practice, "The Invisible Presence" serves as a Covid-19 tribute. Utilizing mirrors to create an illusion of transparency, the memorial interior remains imperceptible to approaching mourners. A nested cube conceals victims' names on reflective facades, challenging expectations. The project aims to memorialize the pandemic, drawing the public into its core space, symbolically presenting names unconventionally.

Considering the experiential aspect, it evokes loss and empathy as visitors seemingly disappear within the memorial, symbolizing life's transient nature and the pandemic's impact. Embracing technology, the project incorporates mobile technology for a richer experience, connecting the physical space with the digital realm.

Exploring invisibility poetically, the project encompasses the absence/presence of the departed, real-time witnessing of loss, hazards from unseen pathogens, and life's delicate nature. "The Invisible Presence" synthesizes theory and practicality, aiming to create a poignant and thought-provoking Covid-19 memorial.

Concept + Design: Michael Silver, John Beckmann, and Catherine Readick
Renderings: Kirill Lynkovsky
© 2022 Axis Mundi Design LLC

“Hart Island does not appear on the MTA's subway map or the Department of Transportation's bicycling maps. The AAA map in my car shows the blue dotted line of a public ferry from City Island to Hart Island, but the ferry closed to the public in 1976. Panorama, the room-sized Robert Moses-commissioned sculpture at the Queens Museum of Art — which displays every street and nearly every building in New York City — excludes the island entirely.”
— Christopher Maag

CORONAVIRUS LIGHT MEMORIAL FOR HART ISLAND, Bronx, New York

NUMINOUS is a proposed annual light installation consisting of twelve (12) powerful light beacons arrayed in a 250-yard grid across Hart Island. The intention of the project is to create a sacred space imbued with light, that would honor the interned, both the known and unknown.

”The history of Hart Island is almost mythic, it truly is an island of lost souls. I’ve had a visceral fascination with the island for some time, and I’ve been touched by the enormous tragedy of the place, the burials of the unknown and forgotten, the stacked pine boxes in unmarked graves. I’ve thoughtfully considered what would be the most appropriate way to pay tribute to their lives, yet leave no traces on the landscape itself. Hence I arrived at the concept for Numinous, which is a concept derived from the Latin numen meaning "arousing spiritual or religious emotion; mysterious or awe-inspiring ” stated John Beckmann, the founder of the interdisciplinary design firm Axis Mundi.

Hart Island measures approximately 1 mile long by 0.33 miles wide, where more than one million bodies are buried in unmarked graves. Beginning as a Civil War prison and training site and later a psychiatric hospital, the location became the repository for New York City’s unclaimed dead. The island’s mass graves are a microcosm of New York history, from the 1822 burial crisis to casualties of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and the victims of the AIDS and Coronavirus epidemics. The dead are buried in trenches. Babies are placed in coffins, which are stacked in groups of 1,000, measuring five coffins deep and usually in twenty rows. Adults are placed in larger pine boxes placed according to size, and are stacked in sections of 150, measuring three coffins deep in two rows. There are seven sizes of coffins, which range from 1 to 7 feet long. Each box is labeled with an identification number, the person's age, ethnicity, and the place where the body was found.

Concept + Design: John Beckmann
Illustrations: Nicole Girdo and Sara Kostić
© 2020 Axis Mundi Design LLC

“First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme 'impact.' Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable."
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

BLACK SWANS

The phrase "black swan" derives from a Latin expression; its oldest known occurrence is from the 2nd-century Roman poet Juvenal's characterization in his Satire VI of something being "rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno" ("a rare bird in the lands and very much like a black swan"). When the phrase was coined, the black swan was presumed not to exist. The importance of the metaphor lies in its analogy to the fragility of any system of thought. A set of conclusions is potentially undone once any of its fundamental postulates is disproved. In this case, the observation of a single black swan would be the undoing of the logic of any system of thought, as well as any reasoning that followed from that underlying logic.

For this installation two giant black swans float in a pool of black oil framed by a ring of polished stainless steel.

Sculpture: John Beckmann
Visualizations: Kirill Lynkovsky
Conceived for the Gagosian Gallery, New York
© 2020 Axis Mundi Design LLC.

It's getting faster, moving faster now, it's getting out of hand,
On the tenth floor, down the back stairs, it's a no man's land,
Lights are flashing, cars are crashing, getting frequent now.
— Joy Division, Disorder

AMERICA: STATE OF EMERGENCY

Conceived for the David Zwirner Gallery, AMERICA: State of Emergency is a deafening auditory and visual assault on the senses, an immersive environment of chaos and mayhem. Two perfectly fused NYPD Police Cruisers sit at the center of a series of film projections, which start with one flashing light in the east and slowly take over the four walls with a discordant collage of police cars, fire trucks and emergency service vehicles’ flashing lights and sirens. The projections gradually build in intensity from thrilling to terrifying as the colors become more hallucinatory, images break down to abstraction, flashing lights morph into dazzling strobes and the soundtrack rises to an mind numbing 120 decibels.

This installation is a machine for accelerating the transformation of news coverage into panic. The projections use found footage in homage to director Kenneth Anger’s stylized, hypnotic vision. The films mimic public hysteria caused by media over-saturation, causing rational judgement to give way to fear. The two merged police cars behave as if they are themselves immaterial projections that can pass through each other as easily as light. In a world where the real and the virtual become indistinguishable, the police cars seem to speed through each other, ominously merging into the shape of a post-truth crucifixion accident.

Video: https://vimeo.com/391013372

Sculpture: John Beckmann
Visualization: 3DRS
Run Time: 23 minutes
Materials: Two NYC Ford Police Interceptors
© 2017-2020 Axis Mundi Design LLC.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced”
— James Baldwin

ILLUMINA BEACON OF HOPE for Washington, D.C. and The United States of America

A new dawn has risen above the horizon of this great nation; this new awakening seeks to foster justice and equality for all Americans. ILLUMINA will tangibly restore the center of Washington D.C., shining symbolically as a beacon of hope and as a tribute to the constitutional principles on which this country was originally founded—"Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

“Most people don’t realize that the Washington Memorial is off-axis by some 371 feet from where Pierre L’Enfant originally envisioned it. I posit that this misalignment haunts the capital city and the nation to this day. Our proposal, ILLUMINA, will demarcate the original x, y, and z alignments between the Capitol and The White House and conceptually restore equilibrium to Washington D.C.,” says John Beckmann, the founder of the interdisciplinary design studio Axis Mundi.

The Center is Missing: The L’Enfant Plan, The Washington Memorial, and the Three Misalignment’s

In his design for the capital city of the new world, the eighteenth-century military engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant formulated a foundational pattern for the city of Washington. L’Enfant conceived of the capital as the center of the new country; one vertical and two horizontal axes passing through it. He established east-west and north-south axes across Washington to function as a new, global, zero-degree meridian.

Three misalignments occurred. Due to errors when initially surveyed in 1804 or when it replaced the Jefferson Pier in 1889, the Washington Monument was built 2.23 ft off of the north-south axis. When building commenced on the Washington Memorial in 1848, it was larger and heavier than what L’Enfant had imagined and had to be placed off-axis to avoid marshy ground. Therefore, it resides about 371 feet southeast of the crossing point. In 1901, under redesigns in the McMillan Plan, the Mall was skewed 1 degree to accommodate the shifted visual axis of the Washington Memorial. 

Restoring the Center

Martin Luther King said “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that.” For one day, on September 17, the day the on which the Constitution was signed, ILLUMINA will shine brightly as a tribute to L’Enfant’s bold vision for a new world and it’s founding principles.

Concept and Design: John Beckmann, with Linda Jopen
Imagery and diagrams: John Beckmann, Sara Kostić, Nicole Girdo, and Linda Jopen
© 2019 - 2020 Axis Mundi Design LLC.

“Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that aroused it.”
— Denis Diderot

FALSE FLAG

America was established as an empire, with George Washington dubbing it an "infant empire." However, today the nation finds itself in ruins, victim to a malfunctioning government, the mishandling of a rampant pandemic resulting in over 1,181,607 deaths, a record-breaking number of unemployed citizens, collapsed businesses, a widening wealth gap, imminent environmental disasters, and disenfranchised minorities spanning various colors, creeds, and sexual orientations. The once-prominent "American Dream" has officially come to an end.

Illustrating this fractured American landscape is John Beckmann's "False Flag," featuring an exploded flag as its new symbol. Welcome to the devastated empire of the Divided States of America.

Sculpture: John Beckmann
Materials: Lacquered wood, dimensions variable
Visualizations: Kirill Lynkovsky
© 2020 Axis Mundi Design LLC.

“Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together.”
— Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Minima XL Berlin
The Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany

The Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery) in Berlin is not only a museum but also an architectural milestone. The last building of the great German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), it is widely considered one of the most perfect statements of his aesthetic, with its monumental steel columns and cantilevered roof with glass enclosure.

As a bold counterpoint, John Beckmann has created the futuristic Minima XL, a large scale outdoor sculpture employing minimal surface geometry. In mathematics, a minimal surface is a surface that locally minimizes its area. This is equivalent to having zero mean curvature. Physical models of area-minimizing minimal surfaces can be made by dipping a wire frame into a soap solution, forming a soap film, which is a minimal surface whose boundary is the wire frame. The origins of minimal surface theory date back to 1762.

Dimensions: 10’ ht. x 15’ w. x 15’ d. Materials: Mirror-polished stainless steel with color coating

Sculpture: John Beckmann
Visualizations: Kirill Lynkovsky
© 2020 Axis Mundi Design LLC

”Reality is not always probable, or likely”
— Jorge Luis Borges

Winning entry for LA+ ICONOCLAST COMPETITION TO REDESIGN CENTRAL PARK 2018 (sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania)

MANNAHATTA PLATEAU FOR FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED: A Re-Enchantment for a Post-apocalyptic Ecology: presents an ecological vision of nature integrated with urbanism. The ravaged original surface of Central Park is left as a regenerating wilderness, a temple to the raw power of nature. Built over it is a green mega-structure, a plateau that supports a raised parkland consisting of a patchwork of abundantly diverse interconnecting environmental zones.

The bold, linear aesthetic of the plateau offers a new perspective upon the wilderness that lies partially revealed beneath its cut-out surface. The 200ft high structure is inscribed by the lines and scale of the city itself — the typical Manhattan building lot (25x100ft) serves as the basic modular. The street grid is celebrated by being projected across the park’s surface, yet the rigid geometry of urban forms is broken down into sub-sections defined by the flowing lines of nature. In addition, supporting structures containing vertical circulation are clad in glass that directs light back onto the dystopic landscape below, whilst optically blurring the distinction between nature and architecture.

The plateau is infused with plants native to the region to re-establish the island of "Mannahatta" prior to the Dutch colonization. These plants form the basis of wild meadows, wetlands, wildlife refuges and insect habitats. Sustainable agricultural zones, including hydroponic farming enabled by rainwater harvesting, feature hanging gardens of local species of fruits and vegetables pollinated by nearby bee colonies. The plateau also foregrounds renewable energy sources, such as solar tiles, Wattway pathways (solar roads) and windmills oriented toward the prevailing wind.

The aesthetic of the plateau manifests an underlying conceptual scheme. As with Gilles Deleuze’s "A Thousand Plateaus", this structure allows us to envision the conception of the plateau as a ‘patchwork’ of dynamic juxtapositions that foster endless new connections. Unexpected juxtapositions and extensive circulation pathways are created between diverse zones for theatre, cinema and music, visual arts and local history, as well as activities such as hiking, swimming and ice-skating.

The MANNAHATTA PLATEAU uses its aesthetic to bring the diverse elements of nature and urban design into dynamic co-existence. As this project matures, new organic connections and cross-pollinations will occur between the revived Mannahatta plateau and the unplanned wilderness of Central Park beneath, creating a new ecological future from two versions of the past.
- Dr. Jane Partner

Design: John Beckmann, Laeticia Hervy, and Hannah LaSota
Visualizations and collages: John Beckmann, Laeticia Hervy, Ashley Lam and Alyssa Egnew
© 2018 Axis Mundi Design LLC

VW Mutations

This playfully subversive proposal takes one of the most famous design icons and transforms it into a new work that issues a challenge to some of the most important norms of contemporary art. The VW beetle has a loaded history. The Volkswagen company (meaning ‘people’s car’) was established in 1932 by the German Labor Front under Adolf Hitler.  Ferdinand Porsche’s Beetle design was chosen by Hitler as the means to fulfill his desire that every idealized German family should have a car. The Nazi-flag-red forms in the VW Mutations demand that we take a new perspective.

Cars form the building blocks of numerous prominent contemporary artworks, compelling because of their associations with freedom, prosperity, and status. The common characteristic of these works is that the vehicles are de-glamorized and de-aestheticized. Cars are buried as dystopian monoliths by Ant Farm, dismantled by John Chamberlain, stripped down by Walter De Maria and inflated by Edwin Wurm.

Taking inspiration from auto-designer J Mays’s experimental redesign of the Beetle that transposed its front and rear, this work extends the design process into a surrealist game. The cars have a particular affinity with Hans Bellmer’s dissected and recombined cut-and-shut bodies, where two sets of legs might converge into a single headless torso. The application of these seemingly organic mutations to industrial forms is equally unsettling, transforming the familiar into the uncanny.

In reimagining surrealist sensuality and Dadaist mischief for the contemporary moment, this work challenges the supremacy of Jeff Koons’ sterile reproductions and proposes a daring new approach to re-working found objects. In an art world that so often fetishizes the truth-value of the ugly, we are dared to be unafraid of beauty and pleasure, and reminded that art and design are just as closely conjoined as the fused elements of these sculptures.

Concept: John Beckmann
Visualization: 3DS
Materials: Volkswagen Beetle, Type 1, 1966
© 2018 Axis Mundi Design LLC.