Friday, September 27. 2013Two Opposite Ideologic Territories: The Imperialist Mediterranean Sea vs. the “Archipelic” & Creolized Caribbean
Via The Funambulist -----
My regular readers would have understood that I develop a certain amount of quasi-pathological obsessions for a certain amounts of ideas or concepts that tend to come back regularly in my articles, in such a way that one could say that each article tends towards an attempt to articulate always the same idea. Among these obsessions is the idea of the archipelago and you will soon see that I did not finish to articulate a few thoughts around this idea yet, since an ambitious project of the same name will soon complement my writing on this blog. In the following text, I would like to approach the archipelago through the same way that I first did, through a philosopher that has been highly influential to me in this last decade, Édouard Glissant. The archipelago is for him a figure of a utopia towards which the world should tend in order to construct a politics of “the relation” rather than a politics of the universal. Of course, an archipelago is a very evocative example of territories that construct simultaneously the difference between each island, and a collective identity as a group; that is what makes it a strong figure for a new paradigm of sovereignty (see past article). However, according to Glissant, there is an additional complexity to it that enriches this territory of an exemplary ideology. In order to look at it more closely, we need to first observe its opposite, the continental sea — etymologically, the archipelago is also a sea before being a group of islands. The paradigmatic example of the continental sea, because of both its history and its contemporaneity is the Mediterranean Sea. The following excerpt is what he writes about it in one of his only translated books in English, about which we might want to observe the difficulty to translate the language — Glissant was talking about translation as an emerging art in itself — that Betsy Wings brilliantly managed to translate from French to English:
When one looks at maps of the history of the Mediterranean Sea, whether dominated by the Greeks, the Romans, the Christians, the Muslims, the Ottomans, or the European colons (French, British and Italians), one can easily understand the consistence of the efforts that have been deployed for centuries to force the multiple into the uniform. In this regard, the Mediterranean itself a sort of virtually neutral territory that each nation, one by one, attempts to dominate in order to bring one’s identity to the rank of universal norm. The fact that the three largest monotheist religions — two of which are still the most populated in the world — emerged and developed around the Mediterranean, is symptomatic for Glissant of this obsessive will to unify. The geography of the region is, of course, not alone to blame, but one understands that in the case of the Mediterranean Sea, the territory of water constitutes a certain object of covetousness for the nations that surround it. The Caribbean, as an archipelago constitutes, on the contrary, a layout of islands for which the water is the environing milieu; there is therefore no desire to dominate it since it has virtually no limits, and thus does not constitute a territory per se. History has not been ‘tender’ with these islands as they were the first territories discovered in the late 15th-century by Christopher Columbus who enslaved the indigenous population. Starting in the beginning of the 18th-century, during the colonial domination of the Spanish, the French and the British, hundreds of thousands of African slaves were brought by boat — the vessel of colonial uniformization for Glissant — and provided the manpower of the colonies until the first part of the 19th-century when slavery was progressively abolished. In the meantime, in 1791, Toussaint L’Ouverture and the slaves of Saint-Domingue won a historical war against the French colons and created an autonomous territory on what is now Haiti. The current blockade on Cuba from the United States is also revealing the various tensions that are still operative around this special territory. Nonetheless, the Caribbean is also the territory of a concept that Glissant work his all life around, the one of creolization. Creole itself often refers to one of the local languages spoken in the Caribbean as something that emerged from the encounter of the colonial language (mostly Spanish and French) and the various languages spoken by the slave population. In general, creole can refer to a similar linguistic evolutionary process between any number of languages (colonial/colonized or not), and even at a broader level, the phenomenon of creolization, as understood by Glissant, constitutes a process in which any aspect of an individual or collective identity encounters another to create a new one, richer because integrating the difference, if not opposition, from which it is born. The jazz is one of the mot evocative example of such a process, as it was invented in the American plantations by slaves after their encounters with European music instruments. This music cannot possibly be considered without the resistive struggle that its birth constituted, since any act of freedom — creativity being at the paroxysm of it — accomplished by the slave materializes by definition a negation of his or her status. The archipelago is the territory of creolization par excellence, as it embodies a geography of islands whose coast are in continuous contact with the unexpected — another important component of Glissant’s philosophy/poetry — of the otherness. The processes of exchanges — pacific or violent — that occur on it are a form of recognition of the difference with the otherness, that then construct voluntarily or not new aspects of individual and collective identities that are richer than a simple synthesis of the two original ones. In this regard, Glissant’s philosophy of the Relation can be understood as the social interpretation of Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy of affects that I have been evoking many times in the past. Just like Spinoza, Glissant starts by analyzing the world in a ‘neutral’ way, unfolding the nature of exchanges between humans and nations, and only then establishes an ethics based on this philosophical scheme. For Glissant, the archipelago constitutes the territory of his ethics. For more in English about the philosophy and history of the Caribbean, consult the excellent Public Archive edited and written by Professor Peter Hudson.
Saturday, September 21. 2013fabric | ch new project: a geo-engineered troposphere in the form of open data feeds (@Close_Closer)
By fabric | ch -----
Deterritorialized Living is a new project by fabric | ch that we've just published online last week, in relation with the Call and the Talks we are presenting during Close, Closer, the 3rd Lisbon Architecture Triennale curated by Beatrice Galilee (first talk is today, September, 21 at 5pm, LX Factory, Rua Rodrigues Faria, Lisbon, while the second one will be on December, 14). This project is the result of a residency we did in Beijing last spring, at the Tsinghua University (TASML) and has certainly some unconscious relation with the experience of climate we had in the city!
http://www.deterritorialized.org, the server of Deterritorialized Living, the artificial and livable troposphere.
Deterritorialized Living is an artificial troposphere that reverses our causal relationship to the natural rhythms of day and night, air, seasons, time. It is a “man made” environment where the atmosphere is the effect, continuously shaped from the global activities on the networks produced by humans and robots. The aim of this artificial, almost fictional atmosphere is to give permanent presence (at this stage only in the form of data flows) to what has paradoxically become an ambient, "atmospheric" and contextual experience of deterritorialisation / detemporalisation induced by the massive use of networks, transportation devices, flows of data or communication technologies. Therefore, to literally become able to "breathe" the environment we are generating through our common actions. To some extent, Deterritorialized Living could then also be considered as an information design, delivered in the form of an atmosphere. As the result of its initial and designed rules, this milieu develops strange behaviors: daylight is always “on” (as there are always activities on the networks) but at variable strengths, nighttime never occurs, air composition regularly reaches “physiological enhancement” levels of high altitude, it is composed of a unique single day that goes back and forth and that ideally last forever, continuous. There are no months, no years. Deterritorialized Living is delivered in the form of open data feeds which define this “geo-engineered” yet livable environment, computed by the deterritorialized.org server. We expect to develop and use the troposphere in the future in the form of installations, responsive devices and architecture projects. But the artificial troposphere is also freely available to architects, artists, designers, scientists and makers of all kinds in the form of different “services”: Deterritorialized Air (N2, O2, CO2, Ar), Deterritorialized Daylight (visible light Intensity, IR, UV) and Deterritorialized Time (HH:MM:SS). Additional feeds and refined rules will be added along the time to mature this generated atmosphere.
The live parameters, data and charts that show the evolution of values for Deterritorialized Air (N2, O2, AR, CO2).
Values for Deterritorialized Daylight, including Intensity (lm, visible light), Infrared (w) and ultraviolet (w) as well as Deterritorialized Time (HH:MM:SS), with their related charts. It is interesting to note that the generated time changes along time... but not in a linear manner, it varies between 06:32 and 19:36.
Man page explaining how to access the different data feeds for the ones who would like to develop their own project out of Deterritorialized Living.
These algorithmically designed data feeds can therefore be used independently or combined to drive experimental devices, interfaces, software and speculative livable environments of all kinds (under the responsibility of their authors...). Let us know if you'll be using it!
Related Links:
Posted by Patrick Keller
in fabric | ch, Architecture, Interaction design, Territory
at
10:19
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, artificial reality, atmosphere, climate, data, fabric | ch, interaction design, interferences, public, territory, variable
Wednesday, September 18. 2013Lightning Farm
Via BLDGBLOG -----
[Image: Triggered lightning technology at the University of Florida's Lightning Research Group].
[Images: From a project by Farah Aliza Badaruddin at the Bartlett School of Architecture].
[Image: Triggered lightning technology at the University of Florida Lightning Research Group].
[Images: From a project by Farah Aliza Badaruddin at the Bartlett School of Architecture].
[Image: Triggered lightning technology at the University of Florida's Lightning Research Group].
[Image: Aerial collage view of the lightning farm, by Farah Aliza Badaruddin at the Bartlett School of Architecture].
[Image: Collage of the lightning farm, by Farah Aliza Badaruddin at the Bartlett School of Architecture].
[Image: Farah Aliza Badaruddin].
[Images: From a project by Farah Aliza Badaruddin at the Bartlett School of Architecture].
[Images: From a project by Farah Aliza Badaruddin at the Bartlett School of Architecture].
[Images: From a project by Farah Aliza Badaruddin at the Bartlett School of Architecture].
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Territory
at
14:23
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, artificial reality, ecology, energy, engineering, fiction, geography, research, speculation, territory
Tuesday, September 10. 2013Open call by fabric | ch & TASML: Deterritorialized Living / Inhabiting the Computer Cabinet
By fabric | ch ----- Following our residency in Beijing at the Tsinghua University that ended last July, fabric | ch transformed itself into the organizers of a call (!) that will run between next september and october, in partneship with TASML (Beijing). The call is closely related to the work and workshop we've done in Beijing. The results of this CALL (1st price) will be presented during the next Lisbon Architecture Triennale, CLOSE, CLOSER (curator Beatrice Galilee), so as another list of EVENTS, as an Associated Program and during a talk together with fabric | ch. An Award of Distinction is open to international submissions. You can find below a copy of this open call dedicated to individuals or interdisciplinary groups of students and faculty members of Tsinghua University in the fields of Architecture, Design, Art and Sciences (1st prize), so as to the international community (students and professionals, Award of Distinction).
Call: http://call.deterritorialized.org/ Download the call in pdf: http://bit.ly/18LozDr Download the poster: http://bit.ly/1amu7Gk Events during Close, Closer: http://beijing.deterritorialized.org/
Please spread the message!
-----
Download the call in English (PDF) Download the call in Chinese (PDF) Call : radical designs and sustainable strategies for shared, open and livable personal data centers (& clouds)
In collaboration with fabric | ch, Tsinghua Art & Sciences Research Center Media Laboratory (TASML) is pleased to announce an open call to the Tsinghua community for individuals or interdisciplinary groups of students and faculty in the fields of Architecture, Design, Art and Sciences. Conceived by fabric | ch, the competition is inspired by Deterritorialized Living, a workshop, a project and series of online “tools / atmospherics” developed on the Tsinghua campus during a recent residency. The purpose of the competition is to explore a radicalized experience of deterritorialisation / detemporalization through intensive use of network, transportation and sometimes biochemical devices as well as to investigate alternative strategies in lieu of corporate approaches to data, data centers and cloud computing. The competition aims to develop speculative and innovative artifacts (code, interfaces, programs, objects, devices, spaces, etc.) for this contemporary situation. Inhabiting the Computer Cabinet competition (Deterritorialized Living, the Beijing sessions) will be an Associated Project during Close, Closer, the much anticipated Lisbon Architecture Triennale that will take place in late summer and fall of 2013, curated by Beatrice Galilee, Liam Young, Mariana Pestana and Jose Esparza Chong Cuy.
BriefContext: Since the public emergence of the Internet and the web in the mid ’90s and the ubiquitous presence of wireless communication, peer to peer exchanges, and social networks of all kinds in recent years, we have witnessed a growing tendency towards horizontally mediated decentralization. These conditions have not only deeply influenced the ways in which people and societies interact (social interactions, exchanges, mobilities, artifacts, economies, etc.), but have also affected how clusters of computers and hardware collaborate or exchange information. To some extent, networks have generated some sort of “geo-engineered” milieu that triggers an experience of delocalization: ambient deterritorialization that is always around, always on. Recently the “network” concept has started to widen its influence: the energy industry is planning to adopt the horizontal model with its “smart grid” plans, in which everybody should be able to produce their own clean energy and store it or share it with the rest of the community. We can witness something similar in alternative, locally produced food: the idea of distributed food that is produced close to the place where it will be eaten, through the approach of highly decentralized and small scale “gardening” or through certain forms of urban “farming”. Rapid prototyping also helps to spur a similar movement in the product design community. Yet, on the data side, we are witnessing the exact opposite: we have moved from a fundamentally decentralized model towards a highly “mainframed” (centralized) structure of corporately owned data, services and data centers, although these seemingly “immaterial” information architectures appear to be deceptively decentralized, accessible everywhere, anytime. Should we then consider personal-urban-“data-farming” instead of corporate data centralization too? Or should we rather try urban-“data-gardening” instead? Could we build a highly decentralized, almost atomized open system of small interconnected data centers? Could we possibly inhabit these data centers, taking advantage of the heat they generate, the high-bandwidth network access they provide, the data they collect? Should we also consider their necessary relocation while taking into account their highly mediated nature?
Or should we simply consider the data center figure (and its services) for what it is: the furtive icon of our modernity and of the radically modified relation we maintain to global territory? Should we therefore think about it in even more radical or speculative terms? Based on the context above, we are calling for proposals under the title of Deterritorialized Living (Beijing sessions) / Inhabiting the Computer Cabinet.
Objective: An abstract space of 9 square meters is proposed for the competition, to be designed into a large computer cabinet that is inhabitable. Its exact shape, height and volume are to be defined by the candidates. The cabinet can be situated in any natural or artificial place on Earth. It can also be located in an ideal environment (which should be defined in detail). Cooling (natural or artificial) is the only necessary condition: fresh air (and/or other refreshing means) needs to enter the space and to cool down the machines. It is then transformed into hot air charged with positive ions by the processing units that could in turn be used for any other meaningful purposes or symbiotic uses, before eventually being extracted. The computer cabinet functions as a small data center. A certain number of servers, NAS (networked attached storage), virtual machines, etc. are therefore also installed within this space. The inhabitant(s) have to share the space with the machines in some ways. The status and/or security of the data could also be addressed in some creative ways. The cabinet is part of a network and can be combined or aggregated with others to form a larger, possibly mobile, mediated and/or networked structure. Goal: by taking advantage of the physical, informational, computational, chemical, biological, environmental or climatological features of the facility (inside and outside), the project focuses on creating a livable environment within the computer data cabinet (or personal data center). The outcome of the project could be to engage with the overall design or to develop a very specific device, object, software, interface and/or installation within this given framework.
Ressourceshttp://www.deterritorialized.org is an artificial atmosphere conceived by fabric | ch that is delivered in the form of algorithmically constructed data feeds. It is composed by a set of web services and libraries that were developed in the context of a residency on the Tsinghua University campus in Beijing, between Spring and Summer of 2013 (at TASML). The open data feeds of this "geo-engineered" climate can be addressed and used by any custom designed program or device (the website will be open from the 6th of September). These open-source, “ambient deterritorialization” data feeds and environments in the form of Deterritorialized Air (N2, O2, CO2, Ar), Deterritorialized Daylight (Lm, IR, UV) and Deterritorialized Time can be freely used in the context of this competition.
Eligibility / RulesThe call is open to all students and young faculty members of Tsinghua University. The application should include candidate’s name and school or department affiliation. The Award of Distinction of US$ 1000 is open to international submissions. Works submitted by individuals or teams are all welcome. However we highly encourage interdisciplinary, transdepartmental team participation. All submissions should be written in English. Submissions shall not be published or made public in other venues until a final decision by the jury is made public.
Submission DeadlineThe submission deadline is October 14, 2013, 10pm Beijing time. Any uncompleted submission by the time of the deadline will be excluded from judgment by the Jury.
ScheduleCompetition launch: August 30, 2013
Submission GuidelinesEmail submission, in one email with one pdf file attached, to call@deterritorialized.org, maximum size limit is 20mb, with the title of the message as the title of your project. File to be attached to your mail: A - Information
B - Project
Note:Proposal should be written in English. Project title should be listed in the lower right corner of each page on all documents.
Evaluation guidelinesTransformative potential, speculation, risk taking, and the originality yet feasibility of the proposal will be key factors for the jury. Quality of presentation and documentation (including technical, scientific description and visual presentation). Note:
Jury membersAn international jury will select the winning proposal. Jury members will be disclosed along with the announcement of the winning candidates.
Awards / PrizesTwo prizes will be awarded by the jury, along with two honorary mentions. 1st prize: A trip for the winner or one representative of the winning team to Lisbon (including airfare and hotel) to present the results of their proposal during a talk, along with fabric | ch and TASML. Free viewing of the Triennial Close, Closer. 2nd prize: 3000 RMB. 2 honorary mentions
Award of DistinctionPrice: 1000 US Dollars This award is open to international submissions from students and professionals.
About the organizersfabric | ch is a Swiss based art and architecture studio that combines experimentation, exhibition and production. It formulates new architectural proposals and produces singular livable spaces that mingle territories, algorithms, “geo-engineered” atmospheres and technologies. Through their works, the architects and scientists of fabric | ch have investigated the field of contemporary spaces, from networked related environment to the interfacing of dimensions and locations such as their recent works about “spatial creolization”.
TASML (Tsinghua University Art and Science Research Center Media) is conceived as a research and production unit that aims to synergize the rich resources available among the University’s diverse research institutions and laboratories to create an incubator for crossbred, interdisciplinary experiments among artists, designers, scientists and technologists. TASML also functions as a center and a hub for worldwide exchange and collaboration both with academic and research institutions and the global media art and design community. Through information sharing and knowledge transfer, TASML can also be seen as a catalyst of innovations for other disciplines in the arts and for the creative industry in general.
COWORKLISBOA is a 750 m2 shared office for startups, nano companies and independent or mobile professionals such as designers, architects, illustrators, translators, among others. Getting fat and lazy @ home? Come, it is at LX Factory and Central Station in Lisbon.
Close, Closer, the third Lisbon Architecture Trienale will put forward an alternative reading of contemporary spatial practice from the 12th of September to the 15th of December in Lisbon, Portugal. For three months chief curator Beatrice Galilee and curators Liam Young, Mariana Pestana and José Esparza Chong Cuy will examine the multiple possibilities of architectural output through critical and experimental exhibitions, events, performances and debates across the city.
Related Links:
Posted by Patrick Keller
in fabric | ch, Architecture, Interaction design, Territory
at
09:15
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, artificial reality, atmosphere, data, devices, environment, fabric | ch, infrastructure, interaction design, mobility, territory
Friday, September 06. 2013Landscape Futures Arrives
Via BLDGBLOG -----
[Image: Internal title page from Landscape Futures; book design by Everything-Type-Company].
At long last, after a delay from the printer, Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions is finally out and shipping internationally.
[Images: A few spreads from the "Landscape Futures Sourcebook" featured in Landscape Futures; book design by Everything-Type-Company].
Of course, everything just listed supplements and expands on the heart of the book, which documents the eponymous exhibition hosted at the Nevada Museum of Art, featuring specially commissioned work by Smout Allen, David Gissen, and The Living, and pre-existing work by Liam Young, Chris Woebken & Kenichi Okada, and Lateral Office.
[Images: Interview spreads from Landscape Futures; book design by Everything-Type-Company].
In any case, I've written about Landscape Futures here before, and an exhaustive preview of it can be seen in this earlier post.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Territory
at
07:56
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, books, design (environments), design (interactions), landscape, speculation, territory, thinking
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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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