Sticky Postings
By fabric | ch
-----
As we continue to lack a decent search engine on this blog and as we don't use a "tag cloud" ... This post could help navigate through the updated content on | rblg (as of 08.2021), via all its tags!
FIND BELOW ALL THE TAGS THAT CAN BE USED TO NAVIGATE IN THE CONTENTS OF | RBLG BLOG:
(to be seen just below if you're navigating on the blog's html pages or here for rss readers)
--
Note that we had to hit the "pause" button on our reblogging activities a while ago (mainly because we ran out of time, but also because we received complaints from a major image stock company about some images that were displayed on | rblg, an activity that we felt was still "fair use" - we never made any money or advertise on this site).
Nevertheless, we continue to publish from time to time information on the activities of fabric | ch, or content directly related to its work (documentation).
Tuesday, January 17. 2023
Note: fabric | ch is thrilled to be part of Pro Helvetia's Shanghai best of 2022! Thanks for this new post and for the support to the exhibition at the HOW Art Museum, as well as it's performances and online lectures program during the pandemic!
We were glad to see that the architectural installation fabric | ch realized in this context remained useful also for remote interaction, exchange of ideas and collaboration.
...
And it's also a way – and still the time – to wish everyone a good start in 2023! With, we hope, many successes, exciting projects and creative statements responding to the challenges of our time.
Via Pro Helvetia (Visual Arts)
-----
Our Best Picks of 2022
For art practitioners or audiences alike, it has not been an easy year. The path of global encounter seemed distant for a while, but has never vanished. Somehow we know, maybe in the most surprising manner, that we will meet each other again halfway. It could be one of these reassuring moments that convinced us of hope when the world is turned upside down: the flipping of bookpages, the smiles from digital rooms, a concert without performers, a recital without playwrights. We are so eager to present what has excited, motivated, or touched us in the past year. Scroll down and discover a diverse selection of projects highlighted under the three overarching themes -- support, connect, and inspire.
Wish you a brilliant start and a Happy New Year 2023!
Pro Helvetia Shanghai
Pro Helvetia Shanghai
Swiss Arts Council
Room 509, Building 1
No.1107, Yuyuan Road, Changning District
Shanghai 200050, China
shanghai@prohelvetia.cn
-----
Beneath the Skin, Between the Machines
Exhibition overview
---
---
“Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.” When Paul Valéry wrote this down, he might not foresee that human beings – a biological organism – would indeed be incorporated into machinery at such a profound level in a highly informationized and computerized time and space. In a sense, it is just as what Marx predicted: a conscious connection of machine[1]. Today, machine is no longer confined to any material form; instead, it presents itself in the forms of data, coding and algorithm – virtually everything that is “operable”, “calculable” and “thinkable”. Ever since the idea of cyborg emerges, the man-machine relation has always been intertwined with our imagination, vision and fear of the past, present and future.
In a sense, machine represents a projection of human beings. We human beings transfer ideas of slavery and freedom to other beings, namely a machine that could replace human beings as technical entities or tools. Opposite (and similar, in a sense,) to the “embodiment” of machine, organic beings such as human beings are hurrying to move towards “disembodiment”. Everything pertinent to our body and behavior can be captured and calculated as data. In the meantime, the social system that human beings have created never stops absorbing new technologies. During the process of trial and error, the difference and fortuity accompanying the “new” are taken in and internalized by the system. “Every accident, every impulse, every error is productive (of the social system),”[2] and hence is predictable and calculable. Within such a system, differences tend to be obfuscated and erased, but meanwhile due to highly professional complexities embedded in different disciplines/fields, genuine interdisciplinary communication is becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible.
As a result, technologies today are highly centralized, homogenized, sophisticated and commonized. They penetrate deeply into our skin, but beyond knowing, sensing and thinking. On the one hand, the exhibition probes into the reconfiguration of man by technologies through what’s “beneath the skin”; and on the other, encourages people to rethink the position and situation we’re in under this context through what’s “between the machines”. As an art institute located at Shanghai Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Industrial Development Zone, one of the most important hi-tech parks in China, HOW Art Museum intends to carve out an open rather than enclosed field through the exhibition, inviting the public to immerse themselves and ponder upon the questions such as “How people touch machines?”, “What the machines think of us?” and “Where to position art and its practice in the face of the overwhelming presence of technology and the intricate technological reality?” Departing from these issues, the exhibition presents a selection of recent works of Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen, Simon Denny, Harun Farocki, Nicolás Lamas, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Lu Yang, Lam Pok Yin, David OReilly, Pakui Hardware, Jon Rafman, Hito Steyerl, Shi Zheng and Geumhyung Jeong. In the meantime, it intends to set up a “panel installation”, specially created by fabric | ch for this exhibition, trying to offer a space and occasion for decentralized observation and participation in the above discussions. Conversations and actions are to be activated as well as captured, observed and archived at the same time.
[1] Karl Marx, “Fragment on Machines”, Foundations of a Critique of Political Economy
[2] Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems
---
fabric | ch, Platform of Future-Past, 2022, Installation view at HOW Art Museum.
Work by fabric | ch
HOW Art Museum has invited Lausanne-based artist group fabric | ch to set up a “panel installation” based on their former project “Public Platform of Future Past” and adapted to the museum space, fostering insightful communication among practitioners from different fields and the audiences.
“Platform of Future-Past” is a temporary environmental device that consists in a twenty meters long walkway, or rather an observation deck, almost archaeological: a platform that overlooks an exhibition space and that, paradoxically, directly links its entrance to its exit. It thus offers the possibility of crossing this space without really entering it and of becoming its observer, as from archaeological observation decks. The platform opens- up contrasting atmospheres and offers affordances or potential uses on the ground.
The peculiarity of the work consists thus in the fact that it generates a dual perception and a potential temporal disruption, which leads to the title of the work, Platform of Future-Past: if the present time of the exhibition space and its visitors is, in fact, the “archeology” to be observed from the platform, and hence a potential “past,” then the present time of the walkway could be understood as a possible “future” viewed from the ground…
“Platform of Future-Past” is equipped in three zones with environmental monitoring devices. The sensors record as much data as possible over time, generated by the continuously changing conditions, presences and uses in the exhibition space. The data is then stored on Platform Future-Past’s servers and replayed in a loop on its computers. It is a “recorded moment”, “frozen” on the data servers, that could potentially replay itself forever or is waiting for someone to reactivate it. A “data center” on the deck, with its set of interfaces and visualizations screens, lets the visitors-observers follow the ongoing process of recording.
The work could be seen as an architectural proposal built on the idea of massive data production from our environment. Every second, our world produces massive amounts of data, stored “forever” in remote data centers, like old gas bubbles trapped in millennial ice.
As such, the project is attempting to introduce doubt about its true nature: would it be possible, in fact, that what is observed from the platform is already a present recorded from the past? A phantom situation? A present regenerated from the data recorded during a scientific experiment that was left abandoned? Or perhaps replayed by the machine itself ? Could it already, in fact, be running on a loop for years?
---
Schedule
Duration: January 15-April 24, 2022
Artists: Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen, Simon Denny, fabric | ch, Harun Farocki, Geumhyung Jeong, Nicolás Lamas, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Lu Yang, Lam Pok Yin, David OReilly, Pakui Hardware, Jon Rafman, Hito Steyerl, Shi Zheng
Curator: Fu Liaoliao
Organizer: HOW Art Museum, Shanghai
Lead Sponsor: APENFT Foundation
Swiss participation is supported by Pro Helvetia Shanghai, Swiss Arts Council.
---
[Banner image: fabric | ch, Platform of Future-Past, 2022, Scaffolding, projection screens, sensors, data storage, data flows, plywood panels, textile partitions, Dimensions variable.]
Event I
Beneath the Skin, Between the Machines — Series Panel
Investigating Sensoriums: Beyond Life/Machine Dichotomy
Schedule
Organizers: HOW Art Museum, Pro Helvetia Shanghai, Swiss Arts Council
Date: March 19, 2022
Time : 15:00 -16:30 (CST) / 8:00 – 9:30 (CET)
Host: Iris Long
Guests: Zian Chen, Geocinema (Solveig Qu Suess, Asia Bazdyrieva), Marc R. Dusseiller
Language: Chinese, English (with Chinese translation)
Event on Zoom（500 audience limit）
Link: https://zoom.us/j/92512967837
---
This round of discussion derived from the participating speakers’ responses toward to the title of the exhibition, Beneath the Skin, Between The Machines.
What lies beneath the skin of the earth and between the machines may well be signals among sensors. Geocinema’s study on the One Belt One Road initiative and exploration of a “planetary” notion of cinema relate directly to the above concern. Marc R. Dusseiller as a transdisciplinary scholar draws our attention to the possible pathways that skin/machines may generate for understanding to go beyond life/machine dichotomy. Zian Chen’s recent research attempts to bring the mediatized explorations back to our real living conditions. He will resort to real news events as cases to show why these mediatized explorations are embodied experience.
HOW Art Museum in collaboration with Pro Helvetia Shanghai, Swiss Arts Council, invite Zian Chen (writer and curator), Geocinema (art collective) and Marc R. Dusseiller (transdisciplinary scholar and artist) to have a panel discussion, probing into the topic of Beneath the Skin, Between The Machines from the perspectives of their own practice and experience. The panel will be moderated by curator and writer Iris Long.
* Due to pandemic restrictions, the panel will take place online. Video recording of the panel will be played on Platform of Future-Past (2022), an environmental installation conceived by fabric | ch, studio for architecture, interaction and research, for the exhibition.
---
About the Host
About the Guests
Zian Chen, Geocinema, Marc R. Dusseiller
---
Event II
Schedule
Organizers: HOW Art Museum, Pro Helvetia Shanghai, Swiss Arts Council， Conversazione (CVSZ)
Date: April 16, 2022
Time : 14:00-15:30（CST）/ 7:00 – 8:30 (CET)
Host: Cai Yixuan
Guests：Chloé Delarue, fabric | ch, Pedro Wirz, Chun Shao
Language: Chinese, English (with Chinese translation)
Event on Zoom（500 audience limit)
Link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85822263121
---
In the hotbed to breed new forms of life, the notion of “life” and digital intimacy are under constant construction and development.
Unfolding the histories of nature and civilization, what kind of interactions could be perceived from the materials, which we constantly used in past narratives, and the environment? How have these interactive relationships, perceivable yet invisible, been evolving and entwined?
This Saturday from 14:00 to 15:30, HOW Art Museum in collaboration with Pro Helvetia Shanghai, Swiss Arts Council and Conversazione, research-based art and design collective based in China, invite Chloé Delarue, whose ongoing body of work centers on the notion of TAFAA – Towards A Fully Automated Appearance; fabric | ch, studio for architecture and research who present an environmental installation at HOW Art Museum where discussions and events could take place; Pedro Wirz whose practice seeks to merge the supernatural with scientific realities; and Shao Chun whose new media artistic practice is dedicated to combing traditional handicrafts and electronic programming to have a panel discussion.
The event intends to probe into the topics covered in Beneath the Skin, Between The Machines and participants will share with audience their insights to materials and media from the perspectives of their own practices. The panel will be moderated by curator Cai Yixuan.
---
About the Host
About the Guests
Chloé Delarue, fabric | ch, Pedro Wirz, Chun Shao
---
Event III
Beneath the Skin, Between the Machines — Online Performance
Holding it together*: myself and the other by Jessica Huber
Schedule
Artist: Jessica Huber, in collaboration with the performers Géraldine Chollet & Robert Steijn, video by Michelle Ettlin
Date: May 31, 2022, 21:00-June 4, 24:00, 2022
Organizer: HOW Art Museum
Performance Support: Pro Helvetia Shanghai, Swiss Arts Council
Technical Support: Centre for Experimental Film (CEF)
Online Screening: Link
---
*Due to COVID-related prevention measures, this projection of the performance will take place online via CEF.
Performance projection will be played when the museum can reopen on Platform of Future-Past (2022), an environmental installation conceived by fabric | ch, studio for architecture, interaction and research, for the exhibition.
HOW Art Museum (Shanghai) will also be temporarily closed during this period.
---
About the artist
Jessica Huber works as an artist in the field of the performing arts and is also together with Karin Arnold a founding member of mercimax, a performance collective based in Zürich.
After finishing her dance studies in London, she danced for various dance companies and most of her early pieces have been dance pieces too. Though her recent work and the forms and formats she chooses, have become more diverse during the past few years. Recently she has been collaborating with the British artist and activist James Leadbitter aka the vacuum cleaner on the hope & fear project.
Jessica works with curiosity and has a special interest in the texture of relationships and in how we function as individuals and as communities in society. She regularly gives workshops to professionals and non-professionals (different social groups) and teaches as a guest tutor at the Hyperwerk in Basel (Institut for studies for Post Industrial Design – or as they call it “the place where we think about how we want to live together in the future”) and is one of two artists who are part of the newly founded dramaturgy pool of Tanzhaus Zürich. She deeply enjoys diversity and is fascinated by the many possible aesthetics of exchange and sharing.
---
About the performance
Picture in the dark: Fletcher/Huber, picture daytime: Ettlin/Huber *pictures from “holding it together”: Nelly Rodriguez
Holding it together*: myself and the other is first of all an encounter between the two performers Géraldine Chollet and Robert Steijn – and the underlying questions of what binds us together and how we create intimacy, playfulness and trust by sharing rituals and treatments with each other.
Two very different and differently old bodies nestle together, doing silent rituals of gentle intimacy. They explain, apparently quite privately, how they met at a party and worked with each other – one with, one without a plan – and what this resulted in. The Dutch performer with a penchant for Shamanism and the dancer from Lausanne offer each other a song, a dance and neither shy away from deep feelings…
“Holding it together” is a series of collaborations, performances and researches Jessica Huber created in collaboration with different artists. The first idea for ‘Holding it together’ sparked during her studio residency in Berlin in 2013. This led to a collection of ideas, approaches to movement and formats under the thematic umbrella: ‘Holding it together’. Four thematic chapters or acts stem from this period: – The Thing; The Mass; Myself; Myself & the other(s).
“Holding it together” is not only a reference to the series’ overarching theme of cooperation and the question of how we perceive and create our world, but also an announcement of the working method: At the core of this series were reflections about the aesthetics and praxis of exchange and sharing, about rituals, as well as the longing for space and time for encounter.
Wednesday, November 30. 2022
Note:
The exhibition related to the project and European research Beyond Matter - Past Exhibitions as Digital Experiences will open next week at ZKM, with the digital versions (or should I rather say "versioning"?) of two past and renowned exhibitions: Iconoclash, at ZKM in 2002 (with Bruno Latour among the multiple curators) and Les Immateriaux, at Beaubourg in 1985 (in this case with Jean-François Lyotard, not so long after the release of his Postmodern Condition). An unusual combination from two different times and perspectives.
The title of the exhibition will be Matter. Non-Matter. Anti-Matter, with an amazing contemporary and historic lineup of works and artists, as well as documentation material from both past shows.
Working with digitized variants of iconic artworks from these past exhibitions (digitization work under the supervision of Matthias Heckel), fabric | ch has been invited by Livia Nolasco-Roszas, ZKM curator and head of the research, to present its own digital take in the form of a combination on these two historic shows, and by using the digital models produced by their research team and made available.
 
The result, a new fabric | ch project entitled Atomized (re-)Staging, will be presented at the ZKM in Karlsruhe from this Saturday on (03.12.2022 - 23.04.2023).
Via ZKM
-----
Opening: Matter. Non-Matter. Anti-Matter.
© ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Visual: AKU Collective / Mirjam Reili
Past exhibitions as Digital Experiences
Fri, December 02, 2022 7 pm CET, Opening
---
Atrium 1+2, 2nd floor
Free entry
---
When past exhibitions come to life digitally, the past becomes a virtual experience. What this novel experience can look like in concrete terms is shown by the exhibition »Matter. Non-Matter. Anti-Matter«.
As part of the project »Beyond Matter. Cultural Heritage on the Verge of Virtual Reality«, the ZKM | Karlsruhe and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, use the case studies »Les Immatériaux« (Centre Pompidou, 1985) and »Iconoclash« (ZKM | Karlsruhe, 2002) to investigate the possibility of reviving exhibitions through experiential methods of digital and spatial modeling.
The digital model as an interactive presentation of exhibition concepts is a novel approach to exploring exhibition history, curatorial methods, and representation and mediation. The goal is not to create »digital twins«, that is, virtual copies of past assemblages of artifacts and their surrounding architecture, but to provide an independent sensory experience.
On view will be digital models of past exhibitions, artworks and artifacts from those exhibitions, and accompanying contemporary commentary integrated via augmented reality. The exhibition will be accompanied by a conference on virtualizing exhibition histories.
The exhibition will be accompanied by numerous events, such as specialist workshops, webinars, online and offline guided tours, and a conference.
---
Program
7 – 7:30 p.m. Media Theater
Short lectures by
Sybille Krämer, Professor (emer.) at the Free University of Berlin
Siegfried Zielinski, media theorist with a focus on archaeology and variantology of arts and media, curator, author
Moderation: Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás, curator
7:30 – 8:15 p.m. Media Theater
Welcome
Olga Sismanidi, Representative Creative Europe Program of the European Commission (EACEA)
Arne Braun, State Secretary in the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts of Baden-Württemberg
Frank Mentrup, Lord Mayor of the City of Karlsruhe
Peter Weibel, Director of the ZKM | Karlsruhe
Xavier Rey, Director of the Centre Pompidou, Paris
8:15 – 8:30 p.m. Improvisation on the piano
Hymn Controversy by Bardo Henning
8:30 p.m.
Curator guided tour of the exhibition
---
The exhibition will be open from 8 to 10 p.m.
The mint Café is also looking forward to your visit.
---
Matter. Non-Matter. Anti-Matter.
Past Exhibitions as Digital Experiences.
Sat, December 03, 2022 – Sun, April 23, 2023
The EU project »Beyond Matter: Cultural Heritage on the Verge of Virtual Reality« researches ways to reexperience past exhibitions using digital and spatial modeling methods. The exhibition »Matter. Non-Matter. Anti-Matter.« presents the current state of the research project at ZKM | Karlsruhe.
At the core of the event is the digital revival of the iconic exhibitions »Les Immatériaux« of the Centre Pompidou Paris in 1985 and »Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art« of the ZKM | Karlsruhe in 2002.
Based on the case studies of »Les Immatériaux« (Centre Pompidou, 1985) and »Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art« (ZKM, 2002), ZKM | Karlsruhe and the Centre Pompidou Paris investigate possibilities of reviving exhibitions through experiential methods of digital and spatial modeling. Central to this is also the question of the particular materiality of the digital.
At the heart of the Paris exhibition »Les Immatériaux« in the mid-1980s was the question of what impact new technologies and materials could have on artistic practice. When philosopher Jean-François Lyotard joined as cocurator, the project's focus eventually shifted to exploring the changes in the postmodern world that were driven by a flood of new technologies.
The exhibition »Iconoclash« at ZKM | Karlsruhe focused on the theme of representation and its multiple forms of expression, as well as the social turbulence it generates. As emphasized by curators Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, the exhibition was not intended to be iconoclastic in its approach, but rather to present a synopsis of scholarly exhibits, documents, and artworks about iconoclasms – a thought experiment that took the form of an exhibition – a so-called »thought exhibition.«
»Matter. Non-Matter. Anti-Matter.« now presents in the 21st century the digital models of the two projects on the Immaterial Display, hardware that has been specially developed for exploring virtual exhibitions. On view are artworks and artifacts from the past exhibitions, as well as contemporary reflections and artworks created or expanded for this exhibition. These include works by Jeremy Bailey, damjanski, fabric|ch, Geraldine Juárez, Carolyn Kirschner, and Anne Le Troter that echo the 3D models of the two landmark exhibitions. They bear witness to the current digitization trend in the production, collection, and presentation of art.
Case studies and examples of the application of digital curatorial reconstruction techniques that were created as part of the Beyond Matter project complement the presentation.
The exhibition »Matter. Non-Matter. Anti-Matter.« is accompanied by an extensive program of events: A webinar series aimed at museum professionals and cultural practitioners will present examples of work in digital or hybrid museums; two workshops, coorganized with Andreas Broeckmann from Leuphana University Lüneburg, will focus on interdisciplinary curating and methods for researching historical exhibitions; workshops on »Performance-Oriented Design Methods for Audience Studies and Exhibition Evaluation« (PORe) will be held by Lily Díaz-Kommonen and Cvijeta Miljak from Aalto University.
After the exhibition ends at the ZKM, a new edition of »Matter. Non-Matter. Anti-Matter.« will be on view at the Centre Pompidou in Paris from May to July 2023.
>>>
Artists
Josef Albers, Giovanni Anselmo, Arman, Art & Language, Jeremy Bailey, Fiona Banner, DiMoDa featuring Banz & Bowinkel, Christiane Paul, Tamiko Thiel, Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga, Samuel Bianchini, Bio Design Lab (HfG Karlsruhe), Jean-Louis Boissier & Liliane Terrier, John Cage, Jacques-Élie Chabert & Camille Philibert, damjanski, Annet Dekker & Marialaura Ghidini & Gaia Tedone, Marcel Duchamp, fabric | ch, Eric J. Heller, Prof. Dr. Kai-Uwe Hemken (Art Studies Kunsthochschule Kassel / University of Kassel), Joasia Krysa, Leonardo Impett, Eva Cetinić, MetaObjects, Sui, Michel Jaffrennou, Geraldine Juárez, Martin Kippenberger, Carolyn Kirschner, Maria Klonaris & Katerina Thomadaki, Joseph Kosuth, Denis Laborde, Mark Lewis & Laura Mulvey, Kasimir Malevich, Pietro Manzoni, Gordon Matta-Clark, Peo Olsson, Katarina Sjögren, Jonas Williamsson, Roman Opalka, Nam June Paik, Readymades belong to everyone®, Jeffrey Shaw, Annegret Soltau, Daniel Soutif & Paule Zajderman, Klaus Staeck, Anne Le Troter, Manfred Wolff-Plottegg, Erwin Wurm
>>>
Further locations and dates:
| Mar 14, 2022 – Mar 29, 2022 |
Väre, Aalto University, Espoo |
| Apr 20, 2022 – Apr 25, 2022 |
The Cube /
Helsinki Central Library Oodi |
| Apr 25, 2022 – May 5, 2022 |
Väre, Aalto University, Espoo |
| May 16, 2022 – May 22, 2022 |
Design Museum Helsinki |
| June 25, 2022 – August 28, 2022 |
Tirana Art Lab, Albanien |
| Dec 3, 2022 – Apr 23, 2023 |
ZKM |
| Summer 2023 |
Centre Pompidou, Paris |
Project
Cooperation partners
  
 
Supported by
  
Friday, November 25. 2022
Note:
An upcoming exhibition for fabric | ch, which will open next week at the ZKM in Karlsruhe.
We'll present a new work in this context (Atomized (re-)Staging), about which we'll hopefully find time to post some documentation on this blog later.
Via @beyondmatter
---
Matter. Non-Matter. Anti-Matter delves into the significance of digitality and computer-generated environments in the context of the material understanding of art production and the showcasing of it.
The exhibition presents the digital models of Les Immatériaux (Centre Pompidou, 1985) and Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art (ZKM, 2002) on the newly developed Immaterial Display.
Furthermore, a selection of artworks and artifacts, mainly from the collections of the @centrepompidou and @zkmkarlsruhe, attest to a conceptual dematerialization and digital re-materialization of artworks.
---
Via @ptrckkllr
Monday, August 31. 2020
Note: during the long shutdown of the museums in Switzerland last Spring, fabric | ch has nevertheless the chance to see Public Platform of Future Past (pdf), one of its latest architectural investigations, integrated into the permanent collection of the Haus der elektronischen Künste (HeK), in Basel.
We are pleased that our work is recognized by innovative and risk taking curators (Sabine Himmelsbach, Boris Magrini), and become part of the museum's collection, along several others works (by Jodi, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Olia Lialina, Christina Kubisch, Zimoun, etc.)
It is also the first of our work whose certificate of authenticity has been issued by a blockchain! (datadroppers)
A second work - currently in production - will enter the collection in the spring of 2021, which will be documented at that time.
-----
Via Haus der elektronischen Künste
By Sabine Himmelsbach
HeK Sammlung - Sabine Himmelsbach über fabric | ch from HeK on Vimeo.
---
The video work is composed of four distinct videos, each showing a distinct but static view into a timelapse of the pavilion and its evolving light.
All four video must be displayed simultaneously by following minimal instructions.
Thursday, November 22. 2018
Note: open since last September and seen here and there, this exhibition at the Withney about the uses of rules and code in art. It follows a similar exhibition - and historical as well - this year at the MOMA, Thinking Machines. This certainly demonstrates an increasing desire and interest in the historization of six decades - five in the context of this show - of "art & technologies" (not yet "design & technologies", while "architecture and digital" was done at the CCA).
Those six decades remained almost under the radar for long and there will be obviously a lot of work to do to write this epic!
Interesting in the context of the Whitney exhibition are the many sub-topics developed:
- Rule, Instruction, Algorithm: Ideas as Form /
- Rule, Instruction, Algorithm: Generative Measures /
- Rule, Instruction, Algorithm: Collapsing Instruction and Form /
- Signal, Sequence, Resolution: Image Resequenced /
- Signal, Sequence, Resolution: Liberating the Signal /
- Signal, Sequence, Resolution: Realities Encoded /
- Augmented Reality: Tamiko Thiel
Via Whitney Museum of American Art
-----
.jpg)
Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018 establishes connections between works of art based on instructions, spanning over fifty years of conceptual, video, and computational art. The pieces in the exhibition are all “programmed” using instructions, sets of rules, and code, but they also address the use of programming in their creation. The exhibition links two strands of artistic exploration: the first examines the program as instructions, rules, and algorithms with a focus on conceptual art practices and their emphasis on ideas as the driving force behind the art; the second strand engages with the use of instructions and algorithms to manipulate the TV program, its apparatus, and signals or image sequences. Featuring works drawn from the Whitney’s collection, Programmed looks back at predecessors of computational art and shows how the ideas addressed in those earlier works have evolved in contemporary artistic practices. At a time when our world is increasingly driven by automated systems, Programmed traces how rules and instructions in art have both responded to and been shaped by technologies, resulting in profound changes to our image culture.
The exhibition is organized by Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of Digital Art, and Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, Melva Bucksbaum Associate Director for Conservation and Research, with Clémence White, curatorial assistant.
Thursday, October 04. 2018
Note: As a direct follow-up to the May 1968 celebrations, Makery published (in French) an article retracing a history of "inhabitable utopias", or different architectures that have since been experimented with or thought about.
The short article is mainly illustrated with an interactive timeline presenting these experiments carried out over the past 50 years.
Via Makery
-----
Depuis l’urbanisme utopique issu de Mai 68 jusqu’aux «Lieux infinis» mis en avant par le collectif Encore Heureux à la Biennale de Venise 2018, Makery balaie cinquante ans d’alternatives architecturales.
En savoir plus:
La webographie suit le déroulé de la chronologie ci-dessus.
L’image qui ouvre cette chronologie est le Makrolab de Marko Peljhan, à Rottnest Island, en Australie, 2000.
---
Instant City, Peter Cook, Archigram, Royaume-Uni, 1968.
« Structures gonflables », exposition au musée d’Art moderne de la ville de Paris, du 1er au 28 mars 1968.
Whole Earth Catalog, édité par Stewart Brand, de 1968 à 1971 aux Etats-Unis.
L’église gonflable de Montigny-lès-Cormeilles, par Hans-Walter Müller, France, 1969.
Inflatocookbook, du collectif Ant Farm, Etats-Unis, 1970.
Le laboratoire urbain d’Arcosanti, Paolo Soleri, Arizona, Etats-Unis, 1970.
La « ville libre » de Christiania, Copenhague, Danemark, 1971.
Le restaurant FOOD de Gordon Matta-Clark, New York, 1971, exposition Gordon Matta-Clark, anarchitecte, musée du Jeu de Paume, du 5 juin au 23 septembre 2018.
Superstudio, agence d’architecture, Italie, 1966-1978.
Shelter, Lloyd Kahn, Etats-Unis, 1973.
Lutte du Larzac, France, 1973-1982.
Sunspots, Steve Baer, Zomeworks, Etats-Unis, 1975.
Comment habiter la terre, Yona Friedman, 1976.
Casa Bola, Eduardo Longo, São Paulo, Brésil, 1979.
Les cabanes de Josep Pujiula à Argelaguer, province de Gérone, Catalogne, Espagne, 1980-2016.
Bolo’Bolo, P.M., 1983.
Le Jardin en mouvement de Gilles Clément, 1985.
Le Magasin à Grenoble, Patrick Bouchain, 1986.
Future Shack, Sean Godsell, Australie, 1985.
Brevétisation du container en habitat par Philip C. Clark, Etats-Unis, 1987.
Black Rock City, la ville éphémère du festival Burning Man, Nevada, Etats-Unis, 1990- .
Le projet A.G. Gleisdreieck, Berlin, Allemagne, 1990- .
Reclaim The Streets, Londres, 1991- .
Castlemorton Common Festival, Royaume-Uni, 1992.
Les maisons en carton de Shigeru Ban, Kobe, Japon, 1995.
Muf (Londres), Stalker (Italie), Coloco (Paris), Bruit du Frigo (Bordeaux), créés en 1996.
Makrolab, Marko Peljhan, Projekt Atol, Slovénie, 1997-2007.
Manifestations de Seattle contre l’Organisation mondiale du commerce, Etats-Unis, 1999.
Ecobox, Atelier d’architecture autogérée, Paris, 2002.
L’architecture du RAB, Exyzt, Paris, France, 2003.
Parking Day, Rebar, San Francisco, Etats-Unis, 2006.
Zone à Défendre, Notre-Dame-des-Landes, France, 2008- .
Tactical Urbanism, Mike Lydon et Anthony Garcia, Island Press, 2015.
Cloud City, Tomás Saraceno, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Etats-Unis, 2012.
Fab City Global, création en 2014 et Fab City Summit, à Paris du 11 au 13 juillet 2018.
Assemble Studio (Royaume-Uni), Turner Prize 2015.
Elemental, Pritzker Prize 2016.
Accueil des migrants porte de la Chapelle, Julien Beller, Paris, 2016-2018.
Mai 68. L’architecture aussi !, Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, Paris, du 16 mai au 17 septembre 2018.
Lieux infinis, agence Encore Heureux, Pavillon français de la Biennale internationale d’architecture de Venise 2018.
----
Direct translation with DeepL (no links):
To know more about it
The webography follows the chronology above.
The image that opens this chronology is Marko Peljhan's Makrolab, Rottnest Island, Australia, 2000.
---
Instant City, Peter Cook, Archigram, United Kingdom, 1968.
"Inflatable structures", exhibition at the Musée d'Art moderne de la ville de Paris, from 1 to 28 March 1968.
Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand, from 1968 to 1971 in the United States.
The inflatable church of Montigny-lès-Cormeilles, by Hans-Walter Müller, France, 1969.
Inflatocookbook, by the Ant Farm collective, United States, 1970.
The Arcosanti Urban Laboratory, Paolo Soleri, Arizona, USA, 1970.
The "Free City" of Christiania, Copenhagen, Denmark, 1971.
The FOOD restaurant of Gordon Matta-Clark, New York, 1971, Gordon Matta-Clark exhibition, an architect, Jeu de Paume museum, from June 5 to September 23, 2018.
Superstudio, architectural firm, Italy, 1966-1978.
Shelter, Lloyd Kahn, United States, 1973.
Larzac struggle, France, 1973-1982.
Sunspots, Steve Baer, Zomeworks, USA, 1975.
How to Live on the Earth, Yona Friedman, 1976.
Casa Bola, Eduardo Longo, São Paulo, Brazil, 1979.
Josep Pujiula's huts in Argelaguer, province of Girona, Catalonia, Spain, 1980-2016.
Bolo'Bolo, P.M., 1983.
Le Jardin en mouvement by Gilles Clément, 1985.
Le Magasin à Grenoble, Patrick Bouchain, 1986.
Future Shack, Sean Godsell, Australia, 1985.
Patenting of the container in housing by Philip C. Clark, United States, 1987.
Black Rock City, the ephemeral city of the Burning Man festival, Nevada, USA, 1990- .
The A.G. Gleisdreieck project, Berlin, Germany, 1990- .
Reclaim The Streets, London, 1991- .
Castlemorton Common Festival, United Kingdom, 1992.
The cardboard houses of Shigeru Ban, Kobe, Japan, 1995.
Muf (London), Stalker (Italy), Coloco (Paris), Bruit du Frigo (Bordeaux), created in 1996.
Makrolab, Marko Peljhan, Projekt Atol, Slovenia, 1997-2007.
Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade Organization, United States, 1999.
Ecobox, Atelier d'architecture autogérée, Paris, 2002.
L'architecture du RAB, Exyzt, Paris, France, 2003.
Parking Day, Rebar, San Francisco, USA, 2006.
Zone à Défendre, Notre-Dame-des-Landes, France, 2008- .
Tactical Urbanism, Mike Lydon and Anthony Garcia, Island Press, 2015.
Cloud City, Tomás Saraceno, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, United States, 2012.
Fab City Global, created in 2014 and Fab City Summit, in Paris from 11 to 13 July 2018.
Assemble Studio (United Kingdom), Turner Prize 2015.
Elemental, Pritzker Prize 2016.
Reception of migrants at Porte de la Chapelle, Julien Beller, Paris, 2016-2018.
May 68. Architecture too, Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine, Paris, from 16 May to 17 September 2018.
Lieux infinis, Encore Heureux agency, French Pavilion at the 2018 Venice International Architecture Biennale.
More about it HERE.
Friday, July 13. 2018
Note: following the exhibition Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959–1989 until last April at MOMA, images of the show appeared on the museum's website, with many references to projects. After Archeology of the Digital at CCA in Montreal between 2013-17, this is another good contribution to the history of the field and to the intricate relations between art, design, architecture and computing.
How cultural fields contributed to the shaping of this "mass stacked media" that is now built upon the combinations of computing machines, networks, interfaces, services, data, data centers, people, crowds, etc. is certainly largely underestimated.
Literature start to emerge, but it will take time to uncover what remained "out of the radars" for a very long period. They acted in fact as some sort of "avant-garde", not well estimated or identified enough, even by specialized institutions and at a time when the name "avant-garde" almost became a "s-word"... or was considered "dead".
Unfortunately, no publication seems to have been published in relation to the exhibition, on the contrary to the one at CCA, which is accompanied by two well documented books.
Via MOMA
-----
Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959–1989
November 13, 2017–April 8, 2018 | The Museum of Modern Art
Drawn primarily from MoMA's collection, Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959–1989 brings artworks produced using computers and computational thinking together with notable examples of computer and component design. The exhibition reveals how artists, architects, and designers operating at the vanguard of art and technology deployed computing as a means to reconsider artistic production. The artists featured in Thinking Machines exploited the potential of emerging technologies by inventing systems wholesale or by partnering with institutions and corporations that provided access to cutting-edge machines. They channeled the promise of computing into kinetic sculpture, plotter drawing, computer animation, and video installation. Photographers and architects likewise recognized these technologies' capacity to reconfigure human communities and the built environment.
Thinking Machines includes works by John Cage and Lejaren Hiller, Waldemar Cordeiro, Charles Csuri, Richard Hamilton, Alison Knowles, Beryl Korot, Vera Molnár, Cedric Price, and Stan VanDerBeek, alongside computers designed by Tamiko Thiel and others at Thinking Machines Corporation, IBM, Olivetti, and Apple Computer. The exhibition combines artworks, design objects, and architectural proposals to trace how computers transformed aesthetics and hierarchies, revealing how these thinking machines reshaped art making, working life, and social connections.
Organized by Sean Anderson, Associate Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, and Giampaolo Bianconi, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Media and Performance Art.
-
More images HERE.
Monday, October 09. 2017
Note: I'll have the great pleasure to be in discussion tomorrow with Fabio Gramazio, Prof. & Head for Digital fabrication at ETHZ and partner at Gramazio Kohler, during the much-awaited symposium "Research in Art and Design", at ECAL.
If you can attend, please do so! As we're expecting great presentations from the likes of Xavier Veilhan, Roel Wouters, Skylar Tibbits, Catherine Ince and several others... including Fabio Gramazio of course, who will speak about their rescent researches at the Swiss Institute of Technology / Department of Architecture in Zürich.
Via ECAL
-----
10+10 Research in Art & Design at ECAL
A symposium celebrating 10 years of Research in Art and Design
Tuesday 10 October 2017, 8.00–18.30
IKEA Auditorium, ECAL, Renens
www.researchday.ch
On the occasion of the 10 years since the moving of ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne to its current premises in Renens and marking the 10th anniversary of the foundation of EPFL+ECAL Lab, ECAL is hosting a symposium on Research in Art and Design, featuring artists, designers and scholars in these fields from all over the world, in conversation with ECAL faculty members.
Admission is free upon registration through the online RSVP form at www.researchday.ch
Due to the limited number of seats in the auditorium, the maximum number of participants is 350.
---
Programme
8.00–8.30 Registration
8.30–9.00 Welcome
Alexis Georgacopoulos director, ECAL
Introductory notes on Research in Art and Design in Switzerland
Davide Fornari professor, ECAL
Moderation
Vera Sacchetti design critic, Basel
Design Research: from Academia to the Real World
9.00–9.45 Alba Cappellieri professor, Politecnico di Milano, Milan
in conversation with Nicolas Henchoz director, EPFL+ECAL Lab
9.45–10.30 Sophie Pène vice president, Conseil National du Numérique, Paris
in conversation with Davide Fornari professor, ECAL
10.30–11.00 Coffee break
Research Through Art and Design: Materials and Forms
11.00–11.45 Xavier Veilhan artist, Paris
in conversation with Stéphanie Moisdon professor, ECAL
11.45–12.30 Fabio Gramazio co-founder, Gramazio + Kohler Architects, Zurich
in conversation with Patrick Keller professor, ECAL
-
12.30–13.30 Lunch
-
Research Practices in Curating Art and Design
13.30–14.15 Catherine Ince senior curator, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
in conversation with Anniina Koivu professor, ECAL
14.15–15.00 Astrid Welter head of programs, Fondazione Prada, Milan/Venice
in conversation with Federico Nicolao professor, ECAL
15.00–15.15 Coffee break
The Future of Art and Design Research
15.15–16.00 Roel Wouters co-founder, Moniker, Amsterdam
in conversation with Vincent Jacquier professor, ECAL
16.00–16.45 Skylar Tibbits co-founder, MIT Self-Assembly Lab, Cambridge (MA)
in conversation with Christophe Guberan professor, ECAL
16.45 Closing remarks, panel discussion
Alexis Georgacopoulos
Vera Sacchetti
Davide Fornari
---
17.30 Exhibition openings at Cinema Studio, Gallery l’elac and EPFL+ECAL Lab
- Caustics, curated by Mark Pauly, EPFL RAYFORM
- Projects for Victorinox, curated by Thilo Alex Brunner
- The Sausage of the Future, curated by Carolien Niebling (preview)
- Augmented Photography, curated by Milo Keller (preview)
- EPFL+ECAL Lab Research Land, curated by Nicolas Henchoz
- Rapid Liquid Printing, curated by Christophe Guberan, MIT Self-Assembly Lab, Steelcase
ECAL will launch the book Making Sense: 10 Years of Research in Art and Design at ECAL on the occasion of the symposium.
---
18.30 Cocktail
10+10 Research in Art and Design at ECAL
In collaboration with EPFL+ECAL Lab
With the support of HES-SO
Media partner Disegno
Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne
5, Avenue du Temple, Renens
Thursday, September 14. 2017
Note: we used references to China Mieville in past works (for example Heterochrony) to depict dual realities in some of our architectural devices. Yet in our case with a twist regarding the notion of narrative as it is described by Geoff Manaugh, even so the article mainly discuss the use of architecture and cities especially in a narrative (by Ch. Miéville), so as the relations between architecture and text here.
In the context of architecture and our personal work, I would rather tend to consider that an environment (built or natural) provides some kind of (open framing) for various narratives (in the same sense that a forest, for example, can host many narratives --from frightening to "feng shui"--, especially with changing conditions, yet by not being a specific narrative in itself, or maybe a very fuzzy narrative). It is not the purpose of a space to tell a story or even many stories therefore, but to be the host for stories, variable, multiple yet partly "framed" or contextualized.
I would rather consider that a space willing to tell a story is too "enclosed" and "enclosing" (a church for example). I prefer variations, some level of interactions en feedbacks and the capacity for the inhabitants of that space to take the environment (built or natural) as a base to create their own "stories", that will change and evolve over time.
Via BLDGBLOG
-----
By Geoff Manaugh (in 2011)
In his 2000 novel Perdido Street Station, for instance, an old industrial scrapyard on the underside of the city, full of discarded machine parts and used electronic equipment, suddenly bootstraps itself into artificial intelligence, self-rearranging into a tentacular and sentient system. In The Scar, a floating city travels the oceans, lashed together from the hulls of captured ships:
They were built up, topped with structure, styles and materials shoved together from a hundred histories and aesthetics into a compound architecture. Centuries-old pagodas tottered on the decks of ancient oarships, and cement monoliths rose like extra smokestacks on paddlers stolen from southern seas. The streets between the buildings were tight. They passed over the converted vessels on bridges, between mazes and plazas, and what might have been mansions. Parklands crawled across clippers, above armories in deeply hidden decks. Decktop houses were cracked and strained from the boats’ constant motion.
In his story “The Rope of the World,” originally published in Icon, a failed space elevator becomes the next Tintern Abbey, an awe-inspiring Romantic ruin in the sky. In “Reports Of Certain Events In London,” from the collection Looking for Jake, Miéville describes how constellations of temporary roads flash in and out through nighttime London, a shifting vascular geography of trap streets, only cataloged by the most fantastical maps.
And in his 2004 novel Iron Council, Miéville imagines something called “slow sculpture,” a geologically sublime new artform by which huge blocks of sandstone are “carefully prepared: shafts drilled precisely, caustic agents dripped in, for a slight and so-slow dissolution of rock in exact planes, so that over years of weathering, slabs would fall in layers, coming off with the rain, and at very last disclosing their long-planned shapes. Slow-sculptors never disclosed what they had prepared, and their art revealed itself only long after their deaths.”
BLDGBLOG has always been interested in learning how novelists see the city—how spatial descriptions of things like architecture and landscape can have compelling effects, augmenting both plot and emotion in ways that other devices, such as characterization, sometimes cannot. In earlier interviews with such writers as Patrick McGrath, Kim Stanley Robinson, Zachary Mason, Jeff VanderMeer, Tom McCarthy, and Mike Mignola, we have looked at everything from the literary appeal and narrative usefulness of specific buildings and building types to the descriptive influence of classical landscape painting, and we have entertained the idea that the demands of telling a good story often give novelists a more subtle and urgent sense of space even than architects and urban planners.
Over the course of the following long interview, China Miéville discusses the conceptual origins of the divided city featured in his recent, award-winning novel The City and The City; he points out the interpretive limitations of allegory, in a craft better served by metaphor; we take a look at the “squid cults” of Kraken (which arrives in paperback later this month) and maritime science fiction, more broadly; the seductive yet politically misleading appeal of psychogeography; J.G. Ballard and the clichés of suburban perversity; the invigorating necessities of urban travel; and much more.
...
BLDGBLOG: I’d like to start with The City and The City. What was your initial attraction to the idea of a divided city, and how did you devise the specific way in which the city would be split?
China Miéville: I first thought of the divided city as a development from an earlier idea I had for a fantasy story. That idea was more to do with different groups of people who live side-by-side but, because they are different species, relate to the physical environment very, very differently, having different kinds of homes and so on. It was essentially an exaggeration of the way humans and rats live in London, or something similar. But, quite quickly, that shifted, and I began to think about making it simply human.
For a long time, I couldn’t get the narrative. I had the setting reasonably clear in my head and, then, once I got that, a lot of things followed. For example, I knew that I didn’t want to make it narrowly, allegorically reductive, in any kind of lumpen way. I didn’t want to make one city heavy-handedly Eastern and one Western, or one capitalist and one communist, or any kind of nonsense like that. I wanted to make them both feel combined and uneven and real and full-blooded. I spent a long time working on the cities and trying to make them feel plausible and half-remembered, as if they were uneasily not quite familiar rather than radically strange.
I auditioned various narrative shapes for the book and, eventually, after a few months, partly as a present to my Mum, who was a big crime reader, and partly because I was reading a lot of crime at the time and thinking about crime, I started realizing what was very obvious and should have been clear to me much earlier. That’s the way that noir and hard-boiled and crime procedurals, in general, are a kind of mythic urbanology, in a way; they relate very directly to cities.
Once I’d thought of that, exaggerating the trope of the trans-jurisdictional police problem—the cops who end up having to be on each other’s beats—the rest of the novel just followed immediately. In fact, it was difficult to imagine that I hadn’t been able to work it out earlier. That was really the genesis.
I should say, also, that with the whole idea of a divided city there are analogies in the real world, as well as precursors within fantastic fiction. C. J. Cherryh wrote a book that had a divided city like that, in some ways, as did Jack Vance. Now I didn’t know this at the time, but I’m also not getting my knickers in a twist about it. If you think what you’re trying to do is come up with a really original idea—one that absolutely no one has ever had before—you’re just kidding yourself.
You’re inevitably going to tread the ground that the greats have trodden before, and that’s fine. It simply depends on what you’re able to do with it.
BLDGBLOG: Something that struck me very strongly about the book was that you manage to achieve the feel of a fantasy or science fiction story simply through the description of a very convoluted political scenario. The book doesn’t rely on monsters, non-humans, magical technologies, and so on; it’s basically a work of political science fiction.
Miéville: This is impossible to talk about without getting into spoiler territory—which is fine, I don’t mind that—but we should flag that right now for anyone who hasn’t read it and does want to read it.
But, yes, the overtly fantastical element just ebbed and ebbed, becoming more suggestive and uncertain. Although it’s written in such a way that there is still ambiguity—and some readers are very insistent on focusing on that ambiguity and insisting on it—at the same time, I think it’s a book, like all of my books, for which, on the question of the fantastic, you might want to take a kind of Occam’s razor approach. It’s a book that has an almost contrary relation to the fantastic, in a certain sense.
[Image: The marbled intra-national sovereignties of Baarle-Hertog].
BLDGBLOG: In some ways, it’s as if The City and The City simply describes an exaggerated real-life border condition, similar to how people live in Jerusalem or the West Bank, Cold War Berlin or contemporary Belfast—or even in a small town split by the U.S./Canada border, like Stanstead-Derby Line. In a sense, these settlements consist of next-door neighbors who otherwise have very complicated spatial and political relationships to one another. For instance, I think I sent you an email about a year ago about a town located both on and between the Dutch-Belgian border, called Baarle-Hertog.
Miéville: You did!
BLDGBLOG: I’m curious to what extent you were hoping to base your work on these sorts of real-life border conditions.
Miéville: The most extreme example of this was something I saw in an article in the Christian Science Monitor, where a couple of poli-sci guys from the State Department or something similar were proposing a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. In the case of Jerusalem, they were proposing basically exactly this kind of system, from The City and The City, in that you would have a single urban space in which different citizens are covered by completely different juridical relations and social relations, and in which you would have two overlapping authorities.
I was amazed when I saw this. I think, in a real world sense, it’s completely demented. I don’t think it would work at all, and I don’t think Israel has the slightest intention of trying it.
My intent with The City and The City was, as you say, to derive something hyperbolic and fictional through an exaggeration of the logic of borders, rather than to invent my own magical logic of how borders could be. It was an extrapolation of really quite everyday, quite quotidian, juridical and social aspects of nation-state borders: I combined that with a politicized social filtering, and extrapolated out and exaggerated further on a sociologically plausible basis, eventually taking it to a ridiculous extreme.
But I’m always slightly nervous when people make analogies to things like Palestine because I think there can be a danger of a kind of sympathetic magic: you see two things that are about divided cities and so you think that they must therefore be similar in some way. Whereas, in fact, in a lot of these situations, it seems to me that—and certainly in the question of Palestine—the problem is not one population being unseen, it’s one population being very, very aggressively seen by the armed wing of another population.
In fact, I put those words into Borlu’s mouth in the book, where he says, “This is nothing like Berlin, this is nothing like Jerusalem.” That’s partly just to disavow—because you don’t want to make the book too easy—but it’s also to make a serious point, which is that, obviously, the analogies will occur but sometimes they will obscure as much as they illuminate.
[Image: The international border between the U.S. and Canada passes through the center of a library; photo courtesy of the Center for Land Use Interpretation. “Technically, any time anyone crosses the international line, they are subject to having to report, in person, to a port of entry inspection station for the country they are entering,” CLUI explains. “Visiting someone on the other side of the line, even if the building is next door, means walking around to the inspection station first, or risk being an outlaw. Playing catch on Maple Street/Rue Ball would be an international event, and would break no laws presumably, so long as each time the ball was caught, the recipient marched over to customs to declare the ball.”].
BLDGBLOG: Your books often lend themselves to political readings, on the other hand. Do you write with specific social or political allegories in mind, and, further, how do your settings—as in The City and The City—come to reflect political intentions, spatially?
Miéville: My short answer is that I dislike thinking in terms of allegory—quite a lot. I’ve disagreed with Tolkien about many things over the years, but one of the things I agree with him about is this lovely quote where he talks about having a cordial dislike for allegory.
The reason for that is partly something that Frederic Jameson has written about, which is the notion of having a master code that you can apply to a text and which, in some way, solves that text. At least in my mind, allegory implies a specifically correct reading—a kind of one-to-one reduction of the text.
It amazes me the extent to which this is still a model by which these things are talked about, particularly when it comes to poetry. This is not an original formulation, I know, but one still hears people talking about “what does the text mean?”—and I don’t think text means like that. Texts do things.
I’m always much happier talking in terms of metaphor, because it seems that metaphor is intrinsically more unstable. A metaphor fractures and kicks off more metaphors, which kick off more metaphors, and so on. In any fiction or art at all, but particularly in fantastic or imaginative work, there will inevitably be ramifications, amplifications, resonances, ideas, and riffs that throw out these other ideas. These may well be deliberate; you may well be deliberately trying to think about issues of crime and punishment, for example, or borders, or memory, or whatever it might be. Sometimes they won’t be deliberate.
But the point is, those riffs don’t reduce. There can be perfectly legitimate political readings and perfectly legitimate metaphoric resonances, but that doesn’t end the thing. That doesn’t foreclose it. The text is not in control. Certainly the writer is not in control of what the text can do—but neither, really, is the text itself.
So I’m very unhappy about the idea of allegoric reading, on the whole. Certainly I never intend my own stuff to be allegorical. Allegories, to me, are interesting more to the extent that they fail—to the extent that they spill out of their own bounds. Reading someone like George MacDonald—his books are extraordinary—or Charles Williams. But they’re extraordinary to the extent that they fail or exceed their own intended bounds as Christian allegory.
When Iron Council came out, people would say to me: “Is this book about the Gulf War? Is this book about the Iraq War? You’re making a point about the Iraq War, aren’t you?” And I was always very surprised. I was like, listen: if I want to make a point about the Iraq War, I’ll just say what I think about the Iraq War. I know this because I’ve done it. I write political articles. I’ve written a political book. But insisting on that does not mean for a second that I’m saying—in some kind of unconvincing, “cor-blimey, I’m just a story-teller, guvnor,” type-thing—that these books don’t riff off reality and don’t have things to say about it.
There’s this very strange notion that a writer needs to smuggle these other ideas into the text, but I simply don’t understand why anyone would think that that’s what fiction is for.
BLDGBLOG: There are also very basic historical and referential limits to how someone might interpret a text allegorically. If Iron Council had been written twenty years from now, for instance, during some future war between Taiwan and China, many readers would think it was a fictional exploration of that, and they’d forget about the Iraq War entirely.
Miéville: Sure. And you don’t want to disavow these readings. You may think, at this point in this particular book, I actually do want to make a genuine policy prescription. With my hand on my heart, I don’t think I have ever done that, but, especially if you write with a political texture, you certainly have to take readings like this on the chin.
So, when people say: are you really talking about this? My answer is generally not no—it’s generally yes, but… Or yes, and… Or yes… but not in the way that you mean.
[Image: “The way a cop inhabits the city is doubtless a fascinating thing…” Photo courtesy of the NYPD].
BLDGBLOG: Let’s go back to the idea of the police procedural. It’s intriguing to compare how a police officer and a novelist might look at the city—the sorts of details they both might notice or the narratives they both might pick up on. Broadly speaking, each engages in detection—a kind of hermeneutics of urban space. How did this idea of urban investigation—the “mythic urbanology” you mentioned earlier—shape your writing of The City and The City?
Miéville: On the question of the police procedural and detection, for me, the big touchstones here were detective fiction, not real police. Obviously they are related, but they’re related in a very convoluted, mediated way.
What I wanted to do was write something that had a great deal of fidelity—hopefully not camp fidelity, but absolute rigorous fidelity—to certain generic protocols of policing and criminology. That was the drive, much more than trying to find out how police really do their investigations. The way a cop inhabits the city is doubtless a fascinating thing, but what was much more important to me for this book was the way that the genre of crime, as an aesthetic field, relates to the city.
The whole notion of decoding the city—the notion that, in a crime drama, the city is a text of clues, in a kind of constant, quantum oscillation between possibilities, with the moment of the solution really being a collapse and, in a sense, a kind of tragedy—was really important to me.
Of course, I’m not one of those writers who says I don’t read reviews. I do read reviews. I know that some readers were very dissatisfied with the strict crime drama aspect of it. I can only hold up my hands. It was extremely strict. I don’t mean to do that kind of waffley, unconvincing, writerly, carte blanche, get-out-clause of “that was the whole point.” Because you can have something very particular in mind and still fuck it up.
But, for me, given the nature of the setting, it was very important to play it absolutely straight, so that, having conceived of this interweaving of the cities, the actual narrative itself would remain interesting, and page-turning, and so on and so forth. I wanted it to be a genuine who-dunnit. I wanted it to be a book that a crime reader could read and not have a sense that I had cheated.
By the way, I love that formulation of crime-readers: the idea that a book can cheat is just extraordinary.
BLDGBLOG: Can you explain what you mean, in this context, by being rigorous? You were rigorous specifically to what?
Miéville: The book walks through three different kinds of crime drama. In section one and section two, it goes from the world-weary boss with a young, chippy sidekick to the mismatched partners who end up with grudging respect for each other. Then, in part three, it’s a political conspiracy thriller. I quite consciously tried to inhabit these different iterations of crime writing, as a way to explore the city.
But this has all just been a long-winded way of saying that I would not pretend or presume any kind of real policing knowledge of the way cities work. I suspect, probably, like most things, actual genuine policing is considerably less interesting than it is in its fictionalized version—but I honestly don’t know.
[Images: New York City crime scene photographs].
BLDGBLOG: There’s a book that came out a few years ago called The Meadowlands, by Robert Sullivan. At one point, Sullivan tags along with a retired detective in New Jersey who reveals that, now that he’s retired, he no longer really knows what to do with all the information he’s accumulated about the city over the years. Being retired means he basically knows thousands of things about the region that no longer have any real use for him. He thus comes across as a very melancholy figure, almost as if all of it was supposed to lead up to some sort of narrative epiphany—where he would finally and absolutely understand the city—but then retirement came along and everything went back to being slightly pointless. It was an interpretive comedown, you might say.
Miéville: That kind of specialized knowledge, in any field, can be intoxicating. If you experience a space—say, a museum—with a plumber, you may well come out with a different sense of the strengths and weaknesses of that museum—considering the pipework, as well, of course, as the exhibits—than otherwise. This is one reason I love browsing specialist magazines in fields about which I know nothing.
Obviously, then, with something that is explicitly concerned with uncovering and solving, it makes perfect sense that seeing the city through the eyes of a police detective would give you a very self-conscious view of what’s happening out there.
In terms of fiction, though, I think, if anything, the drive is probably the opposite. Novelists have an endless drive to aestheticize and to complicate. I know there’s a very strong tradition—a tradition in which I write, myself—about the decoding of the city. Thomas de Quincey, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Iain Sinclair—that type-thing. The idea that, if you draw the right lines across the city, you’ll find its Kabbalistic heart and so on.
The thing about that is that it’s intoxicating—but it’s also bullshit. It’s bullshit and it’s paranoia—and it’s paranoia in a kind of literal sense, in that it’s a totalizing project. As long as you’re constantly aware of that, at an aesthetic level, then it’s not necessarily a problem; you’re part of a process of urban mythologization, just like James Joyce was, I suppose. But the sense that this notion of uncovering—of taking a scalpel to the city and uncovering the dark truth—is actually real, or that it actually solves anything, and is anything other than an aesthetic sleight of hand, can be quite misleading, and possibly even worse than that. To the extent that those texts do solve anything, they only solve mysteries that they created in the first place, which they scrawled over the map of a mucky contingent mess of history called the city. They scrawled a big question mark over it and then they solved it.
Arthur Machen does this as well. All the great weird fiction city writers do it. Machen explicitly talks about the strength of London, as opposed to Paris, in that London is more chaotic. Although he doesn’t put it in these words, I think what partly draws him to London is this notion that, in the absence of a kind of unifying vision, like Haussmann’s Boulevards, and in a city that’s become much more syncretic and messy over time, you have more room to insert your own aestheticizing vision.
As I say, it’s not in and of itself a sin, but to think of this as a real thing—that it’s a lived political reality or a new historical understanding of the city—is, I think, a misprision.
BLDGBLOG: You can see this, as well, in the rise of psychogeography—or, at least, some popular version of it—as a tool of urban analysis in architecture today. This popularity often fails to recognize that, no matter how fun or poetic an experience it genuinely might be, randomly wandering around Boston with an iPhone, for instance, is not guaranteed to produce useful urban insights.
Miéville: Some really interesting stuff has been done with psychogeography—I’m not going to say it’s without uses other than for making pretty maps. I mean, re-experiencing lived urban reality in ways other than how one is more conventionally supposed to do so can shine a new light on things—but that’s an act of political assertion and will. If you like, it’s a kind of deliberate—and, in certain contexts, radical—misunderstanding. Great, you know—good on you! You’ve productively misunderstood the city. But I think that the bombast of these particular—what are we in now? fourth or fifth generation?—psychogeographers is problematic.
Presumably at some point we’re going to get to a stage, probably reasonably soon, in which someone—maybe even one of the earlier generation of big psychogeographers—will write the great book against psychogeography. Not even that it’s been co-opted—it’s just wheel-spinning.
BLDGBLOG: In an interview with Ballardian, Iain Sinclair once joked that psychogeography, as a term, has effectively lost all meaning. Now, literally any act of walking through the city—walking to work in the morning, walking around your neighborhood, walking out to get a bagel—is referred to as “psychogeography.” It’s as if the experience of being a pedestrian in the city has become so unfamiliar to so many people, that they now think the very act of walking around makes them a kind of psychogeographic avant-garde.
Miéville: It’s no coincidence, presumably, that Sinclair started wandering out of the city and off into fields.
[Image: Art by Vincent Chong for the Subterranean Press edition of Kraken].
BLDGBLOG: This brings us to something I want to talk about from Kraken, which comes out in paperback here in the States next week. In that book, you describe a group of people called the Londonmancers. They’re basically psychogeographers with a very particular, almost parodically mystical understanding of the city. How does Kraken utilize this idea of an occult geography of greater London?
Miéville: Yes, this relates directly to what we were just saying. For various reasons, some cities refract, through aesthetics and through art, with a particular kind of flamboyancy. For whatever reason, London is one of them. I don’t mean to detract from all the other cities in the world that have their own sort of Gnosticism, but it is definitely the case that London has worked particularly well for this. There are a couple of moments in the book of great sentimentality, as well, written, I think, when I was feeling very, very well disposed toward London.
I think, in those terms, that I would locate myself completely in the tradition of London phantasmagoria. I see myself as very much doing that kind of thing. But, at the same time, as the previous answer showed, I’m also rather ambivalent to it and sort of impatient with it—probably with the self-hating zeal of someone who recognizes their own predilections!
Kraken, for me, in a relatively light-hearted and comedic form, is my attempt to have it both ways: to both be very much in that tradition and also to take the piss out of it. Reputedly, throughout Kraken, the very act of psychogeographic enunciation and urban uncovering is both potentially an important plot point and something that does uncover a genuine mystery; but it is also something that is ridiculous and silly, an act of misunderstanding. It’s all to do with what Thomas Pynchon, in Gravity’s Rainbow, called kute korrespondences: “hoping to zero in on the tremendous and secret Function whose name, like the permuted names of God, cannot be spoken.”
The London within Kraken feels, to me, much more dreamlike than the London of something like King Rat. That’s obviously a much earlier book, and I now write very differently; but King Rat, for all its flaws, is a book very much to do with its time. It’s not just to do with London; it’s to do with London in the mid-nineties. It’s a real, particular London, phantasmagorized.
But Kraken is also set in London—and I wanted to indulge all my usual Londonisms and take them to an absurd extreme. The idea, for example, as you say, of this cadre of mages called the Londonmancers: that’s both in homage to parts of that tradition, and also, hopefully, an extension of it to a kind of absurdity—the ne plus ultra, you know?
BLDGBLOG: Kraken also makes some very explicit maritime gestures—the squid, of course, which is very redolent of H.P. Lovecraft, but also details such as the pirate-like duo of Goss and Subby. This maritime thread pops up, as well, in The Scar, with its floating city of linked ships. My question is: how do your interests in urban arcana and myth continue into the sphere of the maritime, and what narrative or symbolic possibilities do maritime themes offer your work?
Miéville: Actually, I think I was very restrained about Lovecraft. I think the book mentions Cthulhu twice—which, for a 140,000 or 150,000-word novel about giant squid cults, is pretty restrained! That’s partly because, as you say, if you write a book about a tentacular monster with a strange cult associated with it, anyone who knows the field is going to be thinking immediately in terms of Lovecraft. And I’m very, very impressed by Lovecraft—he’s a big presence for me—but, partly for that very reason, I think Kraken is one of the least Lovecrafty things I’ve done.
As to the question of maritimism, like a lot of my interests, it’s more to do with how it has been filtered through fiction, rather than how it is in reality. In reality, I have no interest in sailing. I’ve done it, I think, once.
But maritime fiction, from Gulliver’s Travels onward, I absolutely love. I love that it has its own set of traditions; in some ways, it’s a kind of mini-canon. It has its own riffs. There are some lovely teasings of maritime fiction within Gulliver’s Travels where he gets into the pornography of maritime terminology: mainstays and capstans and mizzens and so on, which, again, feature quite prominently in The Scar.
[Image: “An Imaginary View of the Arsenale” by J.M.W. Turner, courtesy of the Tate].
BLDGBLOG: In the context of the maritime, I was speaking to Reza Negarestani recently and he mentioned a Russian novella from the 1970s called “The Crew Of The Mekong,” suggesting that I ask you about your interest in it. Reza, of course, wrote Cyclonopedia, which falls somewhere between, say, H.P. Lovecraft and ExxonMobil, and for which you supplied an enthusiastic endorsement.
Miéville: Yes, I was blown away by Reza’s book—partly just because of the excitement of something that seems genuinely unclassifiable. It really is pretty much impossible to say whether you’re reading a work of genre fiction or a philosophical textbook or both of the above. There’s also the slightly crazed pseudo-rigor of it, and the sense that this is philosophy as inspired by schlocky horror movies as much as by Alain Badiou.
There’s a phrase that Kim Newman uses: post-genre horror. It’s a really nice phrase for something which is clearly inflected in a horror way, and clearly emerges out of the generic tradition of horror, but is no longer reducible to it. I think that Reza’s work is a very, very good example of that. As such, Cyclonopedia is one of my favorite books of the last few years.
BLDGBLOG: So Reza pointed me to “The Crew of the Mekong,” a work of Russian maritime scifi. The authors describe it, somewhat baroquely, as “an account of the latest fantastic discoveries, happenings of the eighteenth century, mysteries of matter, and adventures on land and at sea.” What drew you to it?
Miéville: I can’t remember exactly what brought me to it, to be perfectly honest: it was in a secondhand bookshop and I bought it because it looked like an oddity.
It’s very odd in terms of the shape of its narrative; it sort of lurches, with a story within a story, including a long, extended flashback within the larger framing narrative, and it’s all wrapped up in this pulp shell. In terms of the story itself, if I recall, it was actually me who suggested it to Reza because it has loads of stuff in it about oil, plastic resins, and pipelines, and one of the characters works for an institute called the Institute of Surfaces, which deals with the weird physics and uncanny properties of surfaces and topology.
Some of the flashback scenes and some of the background I’ve seen described as proto-steampunk, which I think is highly anachronistic: it’s more of an elective affinity, that, if you like retro-futurity, you might also like this. At a bare minimum, it’s a book worth reading simply because it’s very odd; at a maximum, some of the things going on it are philosophically interesting, although in a bizarre way.
But foreign pulp always has that peculiar kind of feeling to it, because you have a distinct cultural remove. At its worst, that can lead to an awful kind of orientalism, but it’s undeniably fascinating as a reader.
BLDGBLOG: It’s interesting that depictions of maritime journeys can maintain such strong mythic and imaginative resonance, even across wildly different cultures, eras, genres, and artforms—whether it’s “The Crew of the Mekong” or The Scar, Valhalla Rising or Moby Dick.
Miéville: The maritime world in general is an over-determined symbol of pretty much anything you want it to be—just fill in the blank: yearning, manifest destiny, whatever. It’s a very fecund field. My own interest in it comes pretty much through fiction and, to a certain extent, art. I wish I had a bit more money, in fact, because I would buy a lot of those fairly cheap, timeless, uncredited, late 19th-century, early 20th-century seascapes that you see on sale in a lot of thrift shops.
You also mentioned Goss and Subby. Goss and Subby themselves I never thought of as pirates, in fact. They were my go at iterating the much-masticated trope of the freakishly monstrous duo, figures who are, in some way that I suspect is politically meaningful, and that one day I’ll try to parse, generally even worse than their boss. They often speak in a somewhat odd, stilted fashion, like Hazel and Cha-Cha, or Croup and Vandemar, or various others. The magisterial TV Tropes has a whole entry on such duos called “Those Two Bad Guys.” The tweak that I tried to add with Goss and Subby was to integrate an idea from a Serbian fairy-tale called—spoiler!—“BasCelik.” For anyone who knows that story, this is a big give-away.
Again, though, I think you have to ration your own predilections. I have always been very faithful to my own loves: I look at my notebooks or bits of paper from when I was four and, basically, my interests haven’t changed. Left to my own devices, I would probably write about octopuses, monsters, occasionally Tarzan, and that’s really it. From a fairly young age, the maritime yarn was one of those.
But you can’t just give into your own drives, or you simply end up writing the same book again and again.
[Image: Mapping old London].
BLDGBLOG: Along those lines, are there any settings or environments—or even particular cities—that would be a real challenge for you to work with? Put another way, can you imagine giving yourself a deliberate challenge to write a novel set out in the English suburbs, or even in a place like Los Angeles? How might that sort of unfamiliar, seemingly very un-Miéville-like landscape affect your plots and characters?
Miéville: That’s a very interesting question. I really like that approach, in terms of setting yourself challenges that don’t come naturally. It’s almost a kind of Oulipo approach. It’s tricky, though, because you have to find something that doesn’t come naturally, but, obviously, you don’t want to write about something that doesn’t interest you. It has to be something that interests you contradictorally, or contrarily.
To be honest, the suburbs don’t attract me, for a bunch of reasons. I think it’s been done to death. I think anyone who tried to do that after J. G. Ballard would be setting themselves up for failure. As I tried to say when I did my review of the Ballard collection for The Nation, one of the problems is that, with an awful lot of suburban art today, it is pitched as this tremendously outré and radical claim to say that the suburbs are actually hotbeds of perversity—whereas, in fact, that is completely the cliché now. If you wanted to do something interesting, you would have to write about terribly boring suburbs, which would loop all the way back round again, out of interesting, through meta-interesting, and back down again to boring. So I doubt I would do something set in the suburbs.
I am quite interested in wilderness. Iron Council has quite a bit of wilderness, and that was something that I really liked writing and that I’d like to try again.
But, to be honest, it’s different kinds of urban space that appeal to me. If you’re someone who can’t drive, like I can’t, you find a lot of American cities are not just difficult, but really quite strange. I spend a lot of time in Providence, Rhode Island, and it’s a nice town, but it just doesn’t operate like a British town. A lot of American towns don’t. The number of American cities where downtown is essentially dead after seven o’clock, or in which you have these strange little downtowns, and then these quite extensive, sprawling but not quite suburban surroundings that all call themselves separate cities, that segue into each other and often have their own laws—that sort of thing is a very, very strange urban political aesthetic to me.
I’ve been thinking about trying to write a story not just set, for example, in Providence, but in which Providence, or another city that operates in a very non-English—or non-my-English—fashion, is very much part of the structuring power of the story. I’d be interested in trying something like that.
But countries all around the world have their own specificities about the way their urban environments work. I was in India recently, for example. It was a very brief trip, and I’m sure some of this was just wish fulfillment or aesthetic speculation, but I became really obsessed with the way, the moment you touched down at a different airport, you got out and you breathed the air, Mumbai felt different to Delhi, felt different to Kolkata, felt different to Chennai.
Rather than syncretizing a lot of those elements, I’d like to try to be really, really faithful to one or another city, which is not my city, in the hopes that, being an outsider, I might notice certain aspects that otherwise one would not. There’s a certain type of ingenuous everyday inhabiting of a city, which is very pre-theoretical for something like psychogeography, but it brings its own insights, particularly when it doesn’t come naturally or when it goes wrong.
There’s a lovely phrase that I think Algernon Blackwood used to describe someone’s bewilderment: he describes him as being bewildered in the way a man is when he’s looking for a post box in a foreign city. It’s a completely everyday, quotidian thing, and he might walk past it ten times, but he doesn’t—he can’t—recognize it.
That kind of very, very low-level alienation—the uncertainty about how do you hail a taxi, how do you buy food in this place, if somebody yells something from their top window, why does everyone move away from this part of the street and not that part? It’s that kind of very low-level stuff, as opposed to the kind of more obvious, dramatic differences, and I think there might be a way of tapping into that knowledge, knowledge that the locals don’t even think to tell you, that might be an interesting way in.
To that extent, it would be cities that I like but in which I’m very much an outsider that I’d like to try to tap.
• • •
Thanks to China Miéville for finding time to have this conversation, including scheduling a phone call at midnight in order to wrap up the final questions. Thanks, as well, to Nicola Twilley, who transcribed 95% of this interview and offered editorial feedback while it was in process, and to Tim Maly who first told me about the towns of Derby Line–Stanstead.
Miéville’s newest book, Embassytown, comes out in the U.S. in May; show your support for speculative fiction and pre-order a copy soon. If you are new to Miéville’s work, meanwhile, I might suggest starting with The City and The City.
|
