Portuguese artist Miguel Palma is fascinated by technology and the way that it affects people’s lives. So when he found his 1963 Jaguar Mark Ten in his native Lisbon, a natural curiosity about the graceful beauty’s lineage led him to create his latest exhibition, which is currently showing at Coventry’s Warwick Arts Centre.

Inspired by the Jag’s weighty charisma, the artist decided to trace the car’s journey from its birthplace in the Coventry Jaguar factory to a dealership in Paris and eventually into the hands of the owner of France’s biggest chocolate factory.

The Chez Wonka connection is just one interesting byway down which the Jag has driven — the exhibition includes Palma’s drawings about cars and technology as well as archive material from the Jaguar Daimler Heritage Centre in Browns Lane, Coventry. There is also film of the car’s journey back home to the West Midlands, where it forms part of the Heritage Centre’s collection in its own right.

And it seems to makes sense to us. Truly classic cars have a tons of charisma, the sort of panache that is manifest when passionate and creative design is crossed with a rich life-history.

Why shouldn’t the stories of cars, their owners’ lives and the complexity of that connection be discussed in the same way as, say, a painting or a static sculpture?

Stumbled across this really attractive line work over the weekend. Reminds us of what is often overlooked about the popularity of classic race bikes: their simplicity.

Illustrator Gianmarco Magnini evokes the raw, purposefulness of a racing classic in the lines and the duotone that he uses in his designs, which are available as collectible prints through his site.

There is a really strong graphic history of bike culture and in motor racing in general. And it’s not surprising. ‘Go faster stripes’ are essentially dynamic graphic art that have evolved to reflect the power and the glory of moving with mechanical speed.

Stick them on an underpowered family runabout and they’ll look stupid. But combine go faster stripes with stripped-down, purposeful design and you’ve got a classic racer.

German writer Sven Voelker recently published a very interesting book on the subject. A cool graphic paint job is as much about intimidating the opposition and inspiring the racing team to victory as it is about pure aesthetics.

Screen grabs. Social networking. Iphone apps. A world without walls was dreamt up by software marketing people to make you think that working everywhere, any time would be a benefit to your own sense of freedom and transcendence of the bread and butter drudge of making a living.

In reality, this ‘world without walls’ has enslaved so many of us to the computer screen, the SMS and the email account.

Respect then, to people like those at It’s Better In the Wind, who use the tech at their disposal to disseminate a message that when all’s said and done getting out there in the elements on the road, looking for adventure, accepting what ever in real visceral time, may come your way — that that is the way to transcend the dull realities of simply getting by.

Have a great weekend. Load up, and get out there.

Photographer Tim Smyth has launched a joint exhibition with artist Guy Gormley called ‘Vehicles’ at Son Gallery in London’s less-than-fashionable peckham.

The exhibition runs until April 11 and explores the relationship between humans and cars through documentary and abstract photography.

The pair have taken inspiration from an excerpt from ‘Soft Machine’, an accompanying text by photographic editor Michael Grieve: “The French surrealist, George Bataille once remarked that ‘no collector could ever love a work of art as much as a fetishist loves a shoe’. Or a car for that matter. The car’s reality is open to projection.”

The exhibition concentrate on cars’ place in culture and its impact upon the broader human society.

Right up our strasse.

LA based artist Andrew Bush graduated from Yale University with an MFA in Photography in 1982 and has been pursuing the Vector Portraits series since he moved to Los Angeles in 1989. For this series of photos he uses his car as a tracking device, strapping a medium format camera and a flash gun to the side of his car, and then, basically, going for a drive and snapping away at his fellow motorists.

The Vector portrait series is eerily intimate – reflecting those fascinating moments of imagination you experience when you peer into someone else’s automotive bubble.

It’s an often-repeating truism that Americans become who they really are only when they are behind the wheel of a car. Bush tempts us to imagine what that reality consists of.

The work has been exhibited extensively in solo and group shows, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College (Wellesley, Massachusetts) and Staatliche Kunsthalle (Baden-Baden, Germany).

For more info on this and other of Andrew Bush’s work, go to http://www.mbfala.com/artists/_Andrew%20Bush/_other%20works/

Now I know we might be accused of becoming a little obsessed with the rakish lines of the BMW CSL of late, and that we also bang on a little about the relationship between art and the car.

But indulge us on a little bit of Friday morning admiration.

Imagine being able to make a living from a) driving cars quickly, and b) from painting colourful creations, making mobiles and innovative scultpures in all the colours of the pallete. That’s one thing that seem to us a healthy aspiration.

When you combine these two things, then something special just may happen.

When French gallerist and racing driver Hervé Poulain commissioned American born avant garde artist Calder to tag up his CSL in 1975, it was a stroke of genius in itself.

Calder’s art was all about movement and colour in space — the man was after all in credited with the invention of the now kid-bedroom-standard ‘mobile’.

Three strokes of genius. BMW’s Poulain’s and Calder himself.

That’s what we call the art of the motor.

Italy-based British artist Chris Gilmour has to be one of the most meticulous cardboard engineers in the world.

His renderings of everything from a ’32 Ford Hotrod to the classic Cinquecento – and from a Vespa scooter to the delectable Aston Martin DB5 –make the strength of the original designs all the more powerful.

“The objects call up memories and emotions connected to our experience of these things…” the artist told an interviewer recently, “…many people assume that the works were ‘real’ things that had been painted or covered in paper”.

There is indeed a very strange leap in your mind when you first see Gilmour’s work. The cardboard cars seem to us a poignant homage to design and engineering values that are lost somewhere back in the twentieth century.

The fact that these pieces are made from materials regarded often as useless only adds to their power. They feel almost like a lament for devalued mechanical beauty.

http://www.chrisgilmour.com

No city in the world is more geared toward the motor car than Los Angeles.

It’s a commonplace to discuss the fact that the vast majority of Angelino interactions take place through the windows of a car; that no one walks the streets except for the homeless and the insane; that the gridlocked future is happening right now in LA.

Mirko Martin, who originally hails from Germany, has been photographing the dystopia created by a city’s over-reliance on cars since 2006.

There are 55 photos to date in his LA Crash series – and as well as featuring the twisted wreckage of Detroit steel, some of the most interesting images focus on the human reactions to mechanical collision.

Captured by chance encounters on LA’s strangely familiar streets (you’ve seen them on a thousand  cop movies), they nonetheless appear as if stills from a movie set, bathed in the hyper-real light light of  Hollywood.

For the complete set, go to:

http://mirkomartin.com/lacrash001E.htm

We at Influx towers are always looking at interesting ways of presenting stories of people and their cars.

And in the daily hunt for things that inspire us, we recently stumbled upon Joe Goode’s simple but lovely way of presenting a calendar.

The piece dates from the end of the  1960s. All he did was photograph twelve of his friends in a simple square format in their cars. There’s nothing particularly interesting about the individual photos in themselves. For a while we were scratching our heads trying to work out what is so nice about this little piece of incedental automotive art.

Then, it dawned on us. What makes this little piece of interesting is the variety of design in each individual car. That individuality seems to reflect and feed back upon the personality of the person sitting in the car.

The obvious question is: if you attempted to replicate this project in twelve straight-ahead contemporary cars, would the piece be half as interesting?

Rest assured in a spirit of experimentation we’re going to try to do just that.

Watch this space for 2010 update of Joe’s forty year old offering.

More reasons to believe that cars are not only works of art in themselves, but a legitimate subject for artists who might normally not give a hoot about the beauty of industrially-wrought movement.

Walk the Plank’s illuminated Art Car Parades took over Manchester’s streets last Thursday (26th) and in Edinburgh on Saturday the 28th November.

Ben Wilson was one of three artists to be awarded commissioning money to create a mobile work of art, which joined the existing troupe of vehicles.

Ben’s ARTIKCAR (below) is inspired by a child’s wooden toy car. The Pedal Powered vehicle is made from steel tubing, it steers by leaning and uses an innovative technology to illuminate the car.

The illuminated Art Car Parades have been created and produced by outdoor arts specialists Walk the Plank Supported by Art Council England and will be presented in association with Manchester City Council and Edinburgh’s Homecoming celebrations.