Wednesday, February 15. 2012
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de Léopold Lambert
King Kong meets the Gem of Egypt / Partially Buried Wood Shed. Image from Field Trips: Bernd and Hilla Becher / Robert Smithson. Porto: Museu Serralves
In the chapter Threshole of the great book Formless: A User’s Guide, (Zone Books, 1997) Yve-Alain Bois addresses more specifically architecture to illustrates this concept created by Georges Bataille. I hope to make a review of the whole book sometimes soon, but for now I would like to focus on Robert Smithson‘s work which, along with Gordon Matta Clark’s share the focus of this chapter. Yve-Alain Bois introduces Smithson as somebody who is interested in strategies of entropization of architecture on the contrary of the latter’s pretention:
“The ideal is architecture, or sculpture, immobilizing harmony, guaranteeing the duration of motifs whose essence is the annulations of time.”
Thus the dream of architecture, among other things, is to escape entropy. This dream may be illusory on its face; but this is something that must be demonstrated nonetheless – which is to say that one must “exit the domain of the project by means of a project.” (P187)
This project that exit the domain of the project, Robert Smithson will first attempt to achieve it in 1970 with a project entitled Island of the Dismantled Building that was going to build and dramatize a ruin/island in Vancouver Bay. In the end, this project never occurred (because of local associations) but few months later, he will re-iterate such attempt with his Partially Buried Wood Shed on Kent State University campus, associating his fascination for formlessness and entropic architecture. Indeed, a year earlier, he created one of his most famous work Asphalt Rundown which dramatized the slow drip of hot asphalt on an earthly slopped. This artificial geological interaction is fascinating for a lot of reasons. The slow movement of this black matter winning over the earth is not without making us think of an anti-matter that would absorb whatever interacts with it, the asphalt drip characterizes quite convincingly a materialization of formlessness, one can also think of this fluid mass that will eventually dries-up and somehow strangle the earth below it etc.
As I wrote above, this project exit project will motivates Robert Smithson to realize a similar operation, this time with mud instead of asphalt and architecture in the place of the earth. Partially Buried Wood Shed (1970) is thus dramatizing a process of acceleration of entropy on architecture that does not seem to be able to resist to this shapeless matter winning over it. Yve-Alain Bois describes such a process with the following text:
Partially Buried Woodshed is a “nonmonument” to the process Smithson calls “de-architecturization”: a dump truck poured earth onto the roof of an old woodshed to the point where its ridge beam cracked. Architecture is the material, and entropy is the instrument. (P188)
Asphalt Rundown (1969). Image from Field Trips: Bernd and Hilla Becher / Robert Smithson. Porto: Museu Serralves, 2001.
Asphalt Rundown (1969). Image from Field Trips: Bernd and Hilla Becher / Robert Smithson. Porto: Museu Serralves, 2001.
Asphalt Rundown (1969). Image from Field Trips: Bernd and Hilla Becher / Robert Smithson. Porto: Museu Serralves, 2001.
Partially Buried Wood Shed (1970). Image from Field Trips: Bernd and Hilla Becher / Robert Smithson. Porto: Museu Serralves, 2001.
Partially Buried Wood Shed (1970). Image from Field Trips: Bernd and Hilla Becher / Robert Smithson. Porto: Museu Serralves, 2001.
Partially Buried Wood Shed (1970). Image from Field Trips: Bernd and Hilla Becher / Robert Smithson. Porto: Museu Serralves, 2001.
Asphalt Rundown (1969). Image from Field Trips: Bernd and Hilla Becher / Robert Smithson. Porto: Museu Serralves, 2001.
Asphalt Rundown (1969). Image from Field Trips: Bernd and Hilla Becher / Robert Smithson. Porto: Museu Serralves, 2001.
Asphalt Rundown (1969). Image from Field Trips: Bernd and Hilla Becher / Robert Smithson. Porto: Museu Serralves, 2001.
Personal comment:
Classics! #2
Tuesday, November 22. 2011
Via GeekOSystem via Computed·Blg
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A new installation at the Amsterdam Foam gallery by Erik Kessels takes a literal look at the digital deluge of photos online by printing out 24 hours worth of uploads to Flickr. The result is rooms filled with over 1,000,000 printed photos, piled up against the walls.
There’s a sense of waste and a maddening disorganization to it all, both of which are apparently intentional. According to Creative Review, Kessels said of his own project:
“We’re exposed to an overload of images nowadays,” says Kessels. “This glut is in large part the result of image-sharing sites like Flickr, networking sites like Facebook, and picture-based search engines. Their content mingles public and private, with the very personal being openly and un-selfconsciously displayed. By printing all the images uploaded in a 24-hour period, I visualise the feeling of drowning in representations of other peoples’ experiences.”
Humbling, and certainly thought provoking, Kessel’s work challenges the notion that everything can and should be shared, which has become fundamental to the modern web. Then again, perhaps it’s only wasteful and overwhelming when you print all the pictures and divorce them from their original context.
Friday, November 18. 2011
Via @chrstphggnrd
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A curious project and fake old book about the future that Christophe Guignard pointed out to me. Designed as an exhibition project by designer/photographer Cameron Baxter.
Tuesday, August 09. 2011
Via NextNature
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The rock formations in the High Altitude photo series don’t exist physically, yet they are very present in our society of simulations. The photos visualize the development of the leading global stock market indices over the past 20-30 years.
Each stock market index, such as the Dow Jones (shown above), Nikkei, Nasdaq or the more specific Lehman Brothers stock quote downfall, corresponds to a impeccably rendered unique mountain range. Photographer Michael Najjar used the images captured during his trek to Mount Aconcagua (6,962m) as the basis of the high altitude data visualizations.
Lehman 1992-2008
Nasdaq 1980-2009
Nikkei 1966-2009
Hangseng 1980-2009
Dax 1980-2009
MSCI 1980-2009
Bovespa 1993-2009
RTS 1995-2009
Senex 1983-2009
Personal comment:
In a time when stock data has so much (bad) impact on our daily lives, natural landscape of data that look half beautiful and half hazardous... as seen also on the cover of one of the latest book about data design: Data Flow 2.
Or, could we inverse-design the mountains' profiles and consider to which data they correspond? Discover their hidden message? Maybe are they silently screaming for millenias "get rid of those stupid bankers"!
Tuesday, July 12. 2011
Via BLDGBLOG
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by noreply@blogger.com (Geoff Manaugh)
[Image: The infrastructure of bullet time].
A digital image-processing system under development since 2007 will allow photographers "to artificially create photos taken from a perspective where there was no photographer." It uses "a computer-vision technique called view synthesis to combine two or more photographs to create another very realistic-looking one that looks like it was taken from an arbitrary viewpoint," as New Scientist explains.
One expert quoted refers to this as "anonymizing the photographer."
The images can come from more than one source: what's important is that they are taken at around the same time of a reasonably static scene from different viewing angles. Software then examines the pictures and generates a 3D "depth map" of the scene. Next, the user chooses an arbitrary viewing angle for a photo they want to post online.
The photo then goes through a "dewarping" stage, in which straight lines like walls and kerb angles are corrected for the new point of view, and "hole filling," in which nearby pixels are copied to fill in gaps in the image created because some original elements were obscured.
While the article rightly emphasizes the political implications of this—writing that the technology "could help protestors in repressive regimes escape arrest—and give journalists 'plausible deniability' over the provenance of leaked photos"—there are, of course, other possibilities inherent in the technique that seem worth exploring. These include virtualizing photographs taken of a landscape, building, person, or city, producing views, angles, and perspectives never actually seen by human beings; this would be like something out of the work of Piranesi, specifically as interpreted by Manfredo Tafuri in The Sphere and the Labyrinth, in which impossible scenes overlap to produce a single, yet far from comprehensive, spatial reality.
Perhaps some editor somewhere could send Iwan Baan and Fernando Guerra out to shoot a new building together, then "hole fill" their images to create a virtual, third photographer. Every image thus published in the resulting article documents a viewpoint neither photographer either experienced or saw. It is the building as seen by no one, virtually extruded from otherwise real-world photographs.
To throw another gratuitous theory reference out there, it's like Foucault's analysis of "Las Meninas" in The Order of Things, where we read that the painter may or may not have included an obscured vantage point from which his painting was supposedly painted. To translate Foucault's hypothesis into New Scientist's terms, this would be "location privacy," that is, "a way of disguising the photographer's viewpoint."
[Image: "Las Meninas" by Diego Velázquez].
Or, imagine, for instance, an entire film assembled from "dewarped" images—intermediary, falsified frames precipitated out from between the cameras—creating an uncanny motion picture of interstitial imagery. Virtual films between films; films recombined to create a third cinema of gaps; virtual still images taken from virtual films, overlaid and dewarped to form fourth and fifth and sixth films generationally removed from the original, in an infinite splintering of derivative film stills. We won't document the world as everyone sees it; we'll document it from places where no one's ever been.
(Thanks to Luke Fidler for the tip).
Monday, June 06. 2011
Personal comment:
We blogged on something similar already, but here comes another set of pictures of "ghosts" spaces. Like if the past could be unfolded from the present. Time interferences.
Of course, we see some similarities here between this post and the one above about China Miéville's book "the City and The City", only here the "city and the cities" have existences in different time frames.
Tuesday, May 31. 2011
Via alt
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By admin
Anthony Leporeʼs New Wilderness is a provocative series of photographs that lay bare nature as an historical construct governed by human invention and intervention.
M+B, Los Angeles. 21.05.2011 > 30.06.2011.
Thursday, May 26. 2011
Via Fubiz
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by Versa
Le photographe Terence Chang parvient avec talent à prendre et capter les lumières des avions et propose une série de clichés autour des tracés de lumières. Illustrant des lumières dans le ciel, ces visuels capturés à San Francisco sont à découvrir dans la suite.
Personal comment:
We've seen this for cars, but with cars it is slightly different: they are on the road that already has a shape. In the case of long exposure with planes, we see invisible shapes and "luftbahns"... Some shapes of global & physical mobility.
Friday, April 29. 2011
Pictures taken out from the BLDGBLOG post about Nicholas Monchaux's recent book: Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo.
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[Images: From Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo by Nicholas de Monchaux].
Friday, April 15. 2011
Via dpr-barcelona
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The relationship between architecture and photography is so old as both disciplines. While Anne Elisabeth Toft asks “Is it possible to capture, translate and transmit architectural experience via representations?” we can recall to the most recent work of the filmmaker and artist Wim Wenders, called Places, strange and quiet which is based on a fascinating series of large-scale photographs taken in countries around the world from Salvador, Brazil; Palermo, Italy; Onomichi, Japan to Berlin, Germany; Brisbane, Australia, Armenia and the United States. Wenders pointed on his latest publication:
When you travel a lot, and when you love to just wander around and get lost, you can end up in the strangest spots. I have a huge attraction to places. Already when I look at a map, the names of mountains, villages, rivers, lakes or landscape formations excite me, as long as I don’t know them and have never been there … I seem to have sharpened my sense of place for things that are out of place. Everybody turns right, because that’s where it’s interesting, I turn left where there is nothing! And sure enough, I soon stand in front of my sort of place. I don’t know, it must be some sort of inbuilt radar that often directs me to places that are strangely quiet, or quietly strange.
But what about photographing not buildings, but landscape, urban voids and ruins? Can we talk about the same relationship as in between architecture and photography?
Most of Wim Wenders‘ photographs are created during his personal travels and while location-scouting for his films. From his iconic images of exteriors and buildings to his panoramic depictions of towns and landscapes, it’s not strange to find some of his movies accompanied by photo exhibitions and publications such as The Heart is a Sleeping Beauty as part of The Million Dollar Hotel or his 1999 film Buena Vista Social Club which was featured with the companion book by Wim Wenders and Donata Wenders.
Wim Wenders was a painter before he started working on film and photography, and he talked about this in an interview with Michael Coles:
I was heavily influenced by the so-called New American Underground. A lot of American painters made movies in the mid to late ’60s, Warhol being the most famous one. There was a whole retrospective traveling through Europe at the time. I saw these films in ’66 or ’67, and that was very important for me. I wrote about them, too. I wrote about Michael Snow especially, and a film that he had made called Wavelength (1967). It was the first article I wrote. Wavelength was a painter’s film. It was actually only one shot, a painstakingly slow zoom across a room toward the windows. Day and night were passing. Nothing much happened. It was very painterly. My first films were basically landscape paintings, except that they were shot with a movie camera. I never moved the frame. Nothing ever happened in them. Each scene lasted as long as a 16-millimeter daylight reel, which was about four minutes. There was no editing involved, other than attaching one reel to the other.
Wenders photographic work is obviously very cinematic. His approach to catch the right moment and the right place, his sensibility to transmit with images what a urban place can mean and the way he freezes different urban context is widely poetic and full of literary references.
Wenders points that he doesn’t think that any photographer has anything else in mind than that particular moment he is capturing. This is the main guideline of the photo-work of the exhibition that will take place at the Haunch of Venison, in London.
“…but a story,
from that story came a script,
and from the script a film -
which never wanted to conceal
that it might just as well have become a song:
a song about a different America
beyond that great big Dream,
where truly
everyone
is
equal.”
- Wim Wenders
As he said, “discovering the story that a place wants to tell. That’s my main concern, my attitude. Listening to the place. For me, taking a picture is more an act of listening, so to speak, than of seeing.” Now, the questions hidden in every picture are always the same:
What happened to that place? What happened to those people? How does this house or this street or this landscape look now, 10 or 30 years later?
—–
Image credits:
[1] Ferris Wheel, Armenia 2008, C-Print, 151,3 x 348 cm © Wenders Images GbR
[2] Open Air Screen, Palermo 2007, C-Print, 186×213 cm © Wenders Images GbR
[3] The Red Bench, Onomichi, 2005, C-Print, 186 x 200,6 cm © Wenders Images GbR
[4] Cemetery in the City, Tokyo 2008, C-Print, 132×133 cm © Wenders Images GbR
[5] Moscow Backyard, Moskau 2006, C-Print, 125×139 cm © Wenders Images GbR
[6] Ferris Wheel (Reverse Angle), Armenia 2008, C-Print, 151,3 x 348 cm © Wenders Images GbR
The book Places, strange and quiet has been published by Hatje Cantz Verlag. More info at their web-site
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