Tuesday, May 18. 2010Rethinking Location Anytime Anywhere Everything [Berlin]Rethinking Location Anytime Anywhere Everything :: until June 19, 2010 :: Sprüth Magers, Oranienburger Straße 18, D-10178 Berlin. With works by Rosa Barba - Cyprien Gaillard - Andreas Hofer - Koo Jeong-A - David Maljkovic - Trevor Paglen - Christodoulos Panayiotou - Sterling Ruby - Paul Sietsema - Taryn Simon - Armando Andrade Tudela - Andro Wekua. Curated by Johannes Fricke Waldthausen. Evolving from the work of twelve conceptual artists, filmmakers and photographers presenting alternate interpretations of fictional geographies, imaginary sites and ‘mash-up’ destinations, the exhibition Rethinking Location reconsiders the notion of location. In an era characterized by a rapidly changing perception of time and space due to ever increasing mobility, migration and globalisation, our understanding of what a location is has significantly transformed. Taking these changes for granted, the exhibition investigates how artists consider location and geography as source material for their work. The work of Rosa Barba and Taryn Simon often derives from an interest in unusual places or improbable situations: Barba’s film The Empirical Effect (2010) explores a geographical ‘Red Zone’: weaving a fiction around the Vesuvio Vulcano, her film was shot during an actual evacuation test and, on another level, points towards the complex relationships between society and politics in Italy. Collaborating with the scientific research laboratory Observatorio Vesuviano in Naples, Barba creates a fictional documentary including surveillance cameras, seismographs and early archival material of Naples by the Lumière Brothers. Empathizing with the role of a contemporary ethnographer, the work of New York based photographer Taryn Simon oscillates between an aesthetisized realism and collective memory. The works shown in Rethinking Location symbolically refer to sites of geopolitical weight, such as the Interior of Fidel Castro’s Palace of the Revolution in Havanna and night shots of a checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah on the West Bank. In his work Cyprien Gaillard alters the hierarchy of geographical sites and their representative value by detaching them from their original connotations: it deconstructs and conflates actual landscapes perpetuated by a spirit of anachronism and ruin of both past and present. His Fields of Rest series (2010) evolves around decomposed architecture of Second World War bunkers at the coastlines of the French Normandy. Paul Sietsema’s 16 mm films, drawings and sculptures bridge color, space and movement through subjects spanning a broad geographic and temporal range. Over the last years, Sietsema has gathered archival photographs of artifacts of ‘lost cultures’, often from rare anthropological and ethnographic books. The artifacts he examines and transcribes into his own work often derive from western colonialism, industrialisation and geographic explorations including Oceania, South Asia, and Africa. In his film analyse d´une épouse (2008) he traces a ship-wreck, capturing its ruins on celluloid like timeless sculptures of a lost cultural memory. Recalling thoughts by Bourriaud of the artist as Semionaut, treating geography as source material for new work, the drifting and the displacement between different cities allows artists to enter multi-dimensional, seminal dialogues within different contexts. Within both a local and global artistic practice charted by increasing displacement, expeditions, sites, destinations, distances and routes are elements that become incrementally significant. Interested in topographies of detachment and displacement, Peru-born Aramando Andrade Tudela explores the notion of ‘tropical abstraction’. Referring to the potential of 1960s utopian modernist architecture from South America, his 16 mm film Espace Niemayer (2007) takes place in the headquarters of the French communist party in Paris. Shot mostly in close-up mode, Tudela transformed the site built 1967 – 1972 by Brasilian architect Oscar Niemayer into a non-place: a fictional site without geographical foundation. Koo Jeong-A creates mythologies and imaginary sites within the logic of existing places. Her work often gives prominence to the hidden, the ephemere, and the invisible. For the exhibition Koo Jeong-A produced a new series of works, consisting of geological and social layers where maps, drawings and signs extend to a notional geography. Furthermore, she created a site specific, secret surprise location yet to be discovered. Andreas Hofer’s work overlaps science fiction, scientific research and popular culture. Often evolving around early film noir, comics and crime literature, his multi-media installation Robert and Matt Maitland (2010) responds to the notion of the artist as an explorer. His work in the exhibition archly superimposes the protagonist from J.G. Ballard’s 1974 science fiction novel Concrete Island and the setting of a geographic exploration from a 1950s comic classic. By blending two originally detached storylines, Hofer proposes a new imaginary landscape. Today intersections between actual sites, mass media and communication technology transform places into virtual mash-up locations: archipelagos of alternating signs oscillating between the actual and the virtual. Moreover, the internet has significantly increased the presence of maps and navigation systems in our thinking. For example, it has become easier to generate maps, to share and alter them, and to create them collaboratively (e.g. GPS and geo-tagging systems like Google Maps and Google Earth). The art of Trevor Paglen blurs the border of art, science, and politics. Holding a Ph.D. in geography and operating at USC Berkeley’s geography department, Paglen uses data analysis, advanced research skills and state-of-the-art photo observation techniques to map the terrain of American military secrets. He appropriates scientific imagery and dicourses of astronomy to provide the framing for what he calls an ‘experimental geography’. In his series The Other Night Sky Paglen turns our attention to some 189 secret intelligence satellites operated by the U.S. military to keep most of the world under surveillance. The juxtaposed positions within Rethinking Location express a vast area of interconnected ideas and systems in a world where places are increasingly re-articulated and interrelated. Fostering an interdisciplinary approach, the exhibition aims to serve as inspiration to reconsider what the notion of location implies today. After the recent emphasis on networks and communities, could the focus now shift to location as a new key dimension?
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Territory
at
09:34
Defined tags for this entry: environment, exhibitions, geography, globalization, interferences, mediated, mobility, territory
Ghosts Of The Future: Borrowing Architecture From The Zone Of AlienationVia BLDGBLOG
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by noreply@blogger.com (Geoff Manaugh)
[Image: From Stalker, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky].
[Note: This is a guest post by Jim Rossignol]. During the period in which 3D videogames began to use textures imported from photography, rather than hand-drawn pixel tiles, it became common to hear game developers discuss their photo references. Drew Markham, director of Return To Castle Wolfenstein, spent the 2001 pre-release press tour for his game talking about the time he had spent in Europe, sourcing textures from "real" locations that had played host to the war. Crumbling French flagstones, Teutonic concretes, and other useful built surfaces: these details would add a certain level of authenticity that other games lacked. When the Wolfenstein sequel finally arrived, British gaming journalists were amused to see the ubiquitous British "H" fire hydrant signs scattered deep within the occult bunkers of Himmler's SS Paranormal Division. [Image: Photo by Jim Rossignol]. A few years later, another photo-reference tour was being cited for the gaming press, only this time it was not a cheery holiday in Europe, but a trip to the Zone Of Alienation. This 30km area of Ukraine and Belarus remains poisoned and largely off-limits to mankind, thanks to the radioactive caesium that dusted it after the explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986. While it has remained quarantined and closed to (legal) habitation, it hasn't kept out sight-seers. The production team at GSC Gameworld, a games studio based in nearby Kiev, intended to use the derelict zone as the basis for environments in their action shooter, STALKER: Shadow Of Chernobyl. The team went into the zone and photographed urban dereliction: a snapshot of an abandoned Soviet Union. They would go on to fill their game world with the zone's rusting fences and collapsing grain silos, but that was not all that came with the material: the landscape and its decaying architecture was already charged with mythology—with narrative. Creative director Anton Bolshakov explained this in an interview in 2007: "The Soviet system was sealed, many facts were kept secret. Even the most harmless objectives or events generated unbelievable rumours and legends." One example, he says, is
The antenna wall—actually an early-warning radar system developed for Cold War defense, which has been preserved thanks to being inside the zone—made it into the game as "the brain scorcher," a device that must be shut down before the player can progress into the abandoned city of Pripyat. The environment of Chernobyl not only provided the game with an authentic atmosphere, it was also to influence the events that players could experience. [Image: The "brain scorcher," via Jim Rossignol]. However, the zone as an idea already existed before the explosion in 1986. It appeared, for instance, in a 1972 science fiction novel called Roadside Picnic. A mysterious, contaminated pocket of landscape, quarantined from the outside world, was the main theme of that book, which was written by two brothers, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. In the Strugatsky's book, an alien visitation to the earth—an extra-terrestrial "roadside picnic"—has left dangerous and incomprehensible materials strewn across a zone of Northern Canada. Although sealed off for scientific research, this zone is raided by "Stalkers" who sell the unnatural trinkets for black-market cash. To do so, they brave bizarre dangers, because the zone has been transformed into a place that is utterly at odds with our own world. The alien is never seen or even described, and all the characters encounter is its terrible remainder: landscape made alien. Pools of jelly that will cripple a man lurk in basements, extra-terrestrial cobwebs that can stop a heart beating are strung across doorways, and gravitational mantraps will crush anyone who passes over the wrong patch of mud. The zone of Roadside Picnic was seen by many as an allegory for the entire Soviet experiment: not simply in the literal sense of the poisoned landscapes created by the industrial excesses of the region, but the entire social order that was created by the Communist government. Polluted expanses, continually washed by acid rain, became shorthand for describing the bizarre political situation of a country in which Communism had failed, and yet robotically continued. Russian film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky shot a movie, called Stalker, which told a story based on that of Roadside Picnic. A glacially slow, almost event-free film about landscape and longing, it's a work that lingers for long minutes over broken wastelands of abandoned industry. It encapsulates Tarkovsky's style, as well as his interest in dereliction and decay—themes that would be revisited by the STALKER videogame, thirty years on. [Image: From Stalker, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky]. Tarkovsky's film manages to imbue derelict industrial landscapes with a terrible sense of threat. Largely unable to realize the alien properties of artifacts in Roadside Picnic, Tarkovsky projected the danger into the architecture itself. Passive landscapes that could swallow a man. Tunnels which tear them to shreds. These effects were never demonstrated, but also never doubted, thanks to the tentative way the actors explored their surroundings. In much the same way that the images of the real Chernobyl zone seem like lush vegetative scenes, despite being formidably radioactive, so Tarkovsky's zone is calm and invisibly dangerous. Cinematic legend had it that the power station shown in the final background scenes of the film was in fact Chernobyl NPP, although the truth is the entire film was shot in Estonia. That's not to say that Stalker was without poisonous consequences of its own, however. The first version of the movie was shot entirely on corrupted film, which was unsalvageable when Tarkovsky's production team returned to their Russian studios. Worse, the second shooting took place down stream from a poorly regulated chemical works. The effluent from the plant was responsible for many of the astonishing visuals in the river scenes from the movie, but team members came to suffer serious side-effects from this exposure, including cancer. They had, it seems, suffered side-effects from their time in the zone: just like the fate of the fictional Stalkers in the Strugatsky books. It was as if the fiction and reality were blurring back through each other. As if—to quote Alan Moore—the written page was too fragile a boundary. Or perhaps, as Steven Shaviro suggests in his book Connected, Roadside Picnic, like all science fiction, actually exists to cast a shadow over the present. "It shows us how profoundly haunted we are by what has not yet happened," says Shaviro of science fiction writing. In the specific case of Roadside Picnic and Tarkovsky's film, what had not happened yet was the Chernobyl disaster. After 1986, however, there were others for whom the ideas of Roadside Picnic were to be immediately accessible and useful in describing the world that they faced. People going into the Chernobyl exclusion zone, to loot buildings or show tourists around, began to call themselves "Stalkers." For them, the zone of the Strugatsky's vision was immediate and first-hand, a kind of fictional reference for the reality they were facing. They were living it—and it was strangely convenient to have the Stalker nomenclature to hand. [Images: STALKER game images from this very extensive Flickr set]. As for Bolshakov and his creative team, borrowing from both the Strugatskys and the real world has proven fruitful. Real world ruins seem to connect with players far more readily than their fantasy counterparts. No one has been able to come away from STALKER without talking about the architectural waste that GSC borrowed from the zone. The game has now reached three iterations and supports an energetic fan community. Bolshakov suggests that there is more to this than simply commerce or escapism, however: "The motif behind STALKER was to create a game which would remind people of the Chernobyl accident and at the same time warn mankind against any possible fatal mistakes in the future." The warning seems likely to go unheard, but perhaps it has another message: to tell game developers that the architecture of the real world comes prefixed with meaning. Even now, when cities can be raised procedurally from the blank canvas of a game engine, perhaps it's worth taking a look at the real world and the mythology that has been strewn around it. If borrowing architecture from the zone proves anything, it's that simulation should not exist in a vacuum. Jim Rossignol is a games critic, blogger, occasional guest writer on BLDGBLOG, and author of the excellent This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities, published by the University of Michigan Press. He is @jimrossignol on Twitter.
Related Links:Personal comment: Amazing antennas! ...
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Interaction design
at
08:53
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, fiction, games, interaction design, movie, science & technology
Facebook Personal Data a Security Risk-----
Making more user information public has both privacy and security dangers, experts warn.
By Robert Lemos
Last month, Facebook finally crossed a line. The company announced that it would make certain user information--including a user's name, hometown, education, work, and "likes" and "dislikes"--permanently public. Facebook's default privacy policy has gradually shifted to expose more user data to the wider Web, but the reaction to this latest change has been significant. Last week, a collection of European data-protection authorities known as the Article 29 Working Group sent Facebook a letter chastising the company for not allowing users to limit access to their social data. The letter follows a similar criticism of Facebook by several members of congress, such as Sen. Charles Schumer, D-NY, over the past month. The reaction from privacy advocacy groups, and from many of Facebook's users, has also been vocal. Some experts also say that the increase in information disclosure could have a serious side-effect--opening up new opportunities for hackers. Kevin Johnson, a senior researcher with security firm InGuardians, uses Facebook as a starting point for his job: testing companies' network security. Many times, he says, the most significant vulnerabilities are not in hardware or software, but in a users' use of social networks. The information leaked on social networking sites can be used to impersonate a legitimate person, in order to recover a password, for example; or to trick users into opening a malicious file by making it appear to come from a friend or a colleague. "As a penetration tester--as an attacker--Facebook's privacy settings have made my job easier," Johnson says. "In the past, before two years ago, we had to trick people into running a [rogue] application [to collect data]. Now, the majority of people out there--the bulk of Facebook--run under default privacy settings." Pushed by a need to monetize the data entered by users, Facebook has increasingly loosened its privacy policies. In 2005, the company's original policy stated that no information would be shared with people "who [do] not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings." By 2010, the policy had changed to one that focuses on sharing much more information, stating that applications and Web sites "will have access to General Information about you." The text of the company's privacy policy has grown nearly 500 percent and users are now required to navigate some 50 different privacy settings. "Facebook says that they are introducing more privacy settings because they want to give users more control, but what they have done is make things more confusing," says Fred Stutzman, a privacy researcher and PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "Over time they have made changes that make people's information more open, because that is how they drive the use of the network." "This is something that is different from how Facebook had been operating," says Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "In the past, they encouraged sharing that information, but now they have taken information that many people consider private and made it public, and they did so in a very heavy-handed way." Yet, as Facebook has grown, users have become savvier about their data security, Stutzman says. Students at UNC Chapel Hill, for example, have increasingly opted to set their Facebook privacy to the highest possible setting, with almost 60 percent of students using the "Friends Only" setting in 2008 compared with less than 20 percent in 2005. Stutzman says that people have to overcome their preference to run under the default settings and opt not to change them. Alessandro Acquisti, associate professor of information science and policy at Carnegie Mellon University, argues that Facebook is likely counting on that psychology to limit the number of people who ratchet up the privacy settings. "What is happening, it is almost a bait and switch technique," he says. "Every time they change the status quo, they are getting people more and more adjusted to the habit of disclosing information. If you told people five years ago that all these different fields are public, they would say, 'No way.' " Facebook says that some information--a person's name, her network of connections, and pages that she likes and dislike have always been public. The user's photo, gender, and current city have all been added to the must-be-public profile information, the company acknowledges, but it says that only a small fraction of users are changing their settings to restrict access to information. "The overwhelming majority of users have made all of this information available to everyone," a spokesman says. "We've found that the small percentage who have restricted any of this information have intended to prevent contact from nonfriends." However, Facebook may not find an easy way out of the current controversy. In February 2009, when users were upset about other changes to its terms of service, the company created its Facebook Principles, a list of promises of how the company would treat its users and their data, including that "people should own their information, they should have the freedom to share it with anyone they want and take it with them anywhere they want, including removing it from the Facebook Service." The company has failed to live up to those principles, says the EFF's Opsahl. "It is not just a matter of, can Facebook weather the storm of criticism and keep their users--they have a real situation here," Opsahl says. "But they have an opportunity as well. They can try and fix this problem and regain their users' trust." Copyright Technology Review 2010.
Personal comment: In connection with the post below... A question that rises now every month or two months and that is turning into a fight between "privacy" vs "publicy" advocates. I'm on the side of "open publicy" and "proprietary privacy", certainly not on the side of changing rules every two weeks for profit reasons...
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Science & technology
at
08:25
Defined tags for this entry: data, identification, monitoring, privacy, science & technology, surveillance
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fabric | rblgThis blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research. We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings. Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations. This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
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