Monday, October 25. 2010
Via Archdaily
-----
A Necessary Ruin: The Story of Buckminster Fuller and the Union Tank Car Dome from Evan Mather on Vimeo.
Upon its completion in October 1958, the Union Tank Car Dome, located north of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was the largest clear-span structure in the world. Based on the engineering principles of the visionary design scientist and philosopher Buckminster Fuller, this geodesic dome was, at 384 feet in diameter, the first large scale example of this building type.
“A Necessary Ruin” tells the history of the Union Tank Car Dome via interviews with architects, engineers, preservationists, media, and artists; animated sequences demonstrating the operation of the facility; and hundreds of rare photographs and video segments taken during the dome’s construction, decline, and demolition.
Visit handcraftedfilms.com for more information and to purchase the DVD.
-----
Remember the movie Lawnmower Man? Here's why we're not even close.
The early 90's were awesome. Bill Watterson was still drawing Calvin and Hobbes, the tattered remnants of the Cold War were falling down around our ears, and most of Wall Street was convinced the Macintosh was a computer for effete graphic designers and Apple was more or less on its way out.
Into this time of innocence came a radical vision of the future, epitomized by the movie Lawnmower Man. It was a future in which Hollywood starlets had virtual intercourse with developmentally challenged computer geeks in Tron-style bodysuits and everything looked like it was rendered by a Commodore Amiga.
Anyway, at that time Virtual Reality was a Big Deal. Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist most closely associated with the idea, was bouncing from one important position to another, developing virtual worlds with head mounted displays and, later, heading up the National Tele-immersion initiative, "a coalition of research universities studying advanced applications for Internet 2," whatever the heck that was.
Google Trend shows the steady decline in searches for "Virtual Reality" |
Even so, some sensed that the technology wasn't bringing about the revolution that had been promised. In a 1993 column for Wired that earns a 9 out of 10 for hilarity and a 2 out of 10 for accuracy, Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab (who I'm praying will have a sense of humor about this) asked the question that was on everyone's mind: Virtual Reality: Oxymoron or Pleonasm?
It didn't matter if anyone knew what he was talking about, because time has proved most of it to be nonsense:
"The argument will be made that head-mounted displays are not acceptable because people feel silly wearing them. The same was once said about stereo headphones. If Sony's Akio Morita had not insisted on marketing the damn things, we might not have the Walkman today. I expect that within the next five years more than one in ten people will wear head-mounted computer displays while traveling in buses, trains, and planes.... One company, whose name I am obliged to omit, will soon introduce a VR display system with a parts cost of less than US$25."
Affordable VR headsets were just around the corner, really? And the only real barrier to adoption, according to Negroponte? Lag. Computers in 1993 just weren't fast enough to react in real time when a user turned his or her head, breaking the illusion of the virtual.
According to Moore's Law, we've gone through something like 10 doublings of computer power since 1993, so computers should be about a thousand times as powerful as they were when this piece was written - not to mention the advances in massively parallel graphics processing brought about by the widespread adoption of GPUs, and we're still not there.
So what was it, really, that kept us from getting to Virtual Reality?
For one thing, we moved the goal posts - now it's all about augmented reality, in which the virtual is laid over the real. Now you have a whole new set of problems - how do you make the virtual line up perfectly with the real when your head has six degrees of freedom and you're outside where there aren't many spatial referents for your computer to latch onto?
And most important of all, how do you develop screens tiny enough to present the same resolution as a large computer monitor, but in something like 1/400th the space? This is exactly the problem that has plagued the industry leader in display headsets, Vuzix. Their products are fine for watching movies, but don't try using them as a monitor replacement.
Consumer-level Virtual Reality, it turns out, is really, really hard - not quite Artificial Intelligence hard, but so much harder than anyone expected that people just aren't excited anymore. The Trough of Disillusionment on this technology is deep and long.
That doesn't mean Virtual Reality is gone forever - remember how many false starts touch computing had before technologists succeeded with, of all things, a phone?
And, just a coda, even though the public long ago gave up on searching for Virtual Reality, the news media never got tired of it. Which just shows you how totally out of touch we can be:
Friday, October 22. 2010
Via Places via Archinect
-----
Bompas & Parr: Alcoholic Architecture, 2009. [Photograph: Bompas & Parr. All images courtesy of Air: Alphabet City No. 15]
In late 2009, researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, validated some horrifying claims: 24 slaughterhouse workers from two states had reported symptoms ranging from numbness to paralysis. What all the claims had in common was the workers' location at or near the “head table” in pork processing plants where pig heads are butchered. Investigations revealed that the workers had inhaled a mist of pig brains, and that this had in turn triggered an auto-immune response, causing neurological disorders. This was not only disgusting; it was also a surprise to scientists to learn that “aerosolized” pig brains, the microscopic industrial byproduct of mechanically blowing out every last piece of flesh from a pig's head, can impair the motor functions of anyone who breathes them in.
Perhaps it shouldn't have been a surprise. Almost a century ago, the air we breathe was first understood to be, potentially, a weapon — an innovation that was, like so many innovations, born in warfare, and which marked a turning point for the modern mind. So argues German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk in Terror from the Air, his exploration of the rise of environmental warfare, starting with the German army's deployment of chlorine gas against French and Canadian soldiers at the battle of Ypres in 1915. [1] With the invention of poison gas, the air itself — the imperceptible atmosphere that surrounds us — could be activated, differentiated and unleashed as a killer — as a kind of anti-air. It could be weaponized, and as such used against civilian as well as military populations, a latent concern that became newly pressing in the post-Sept. 11 autumn of 2001 when somebody, most likely a scientist in an American army lab, sent packets of anthrax spores though the U.S. mail, killing five people and infecting seventeen others who breathed in the dust that became airborne when they opened the envelopes.
As architecture theorist Enrique Ramírez has noted, on his site, aggregat456.com, all airborne attacks — he traces a line from the U.S Army's Chemical Warfare Service in Japan during World War II to the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, attributed to the Aum Shinrikyo cult — take malign advantage of the diffusing properties of the air, and of the workings of our pulmonary systems, which deliver the oxygen our bodies need to live. Indeed, the history of weaponized air is long and sometimes macabre. For the past couple of decades — to cite just one more example — the U.S. military has been contaminating otherwise safely breathable air by shooting uranium-tipped bullets. When fired, the bullets become extremely hot, which enables them to pierce armored tanks. Such bullets have been used on battlefields from Kosovo to Baghdad, and also on bases such as the former practice range at Vieques, Puerto Rico. They leave a barely detectable plume in their wake, polluting the air and exposing local civilians to the dangers of radioactivity.
Nerea Calvillo, In the Air, 2008.
Air in Art and Architecture
Aerosolized pig brains and various forms of weaponized air suggest we have underestimated the presence of air, and what it can potentially do. Whatever the spur, we need to take seriously the materiality of air. And today, in fact, a growing number of artists and architects are engaging air in new ways. They are exploring air as a design component, studying how airborne particles can be manipulated into various textures, surfaces and spaces. They are transforming the scales at which architects typically work. And they are bringing the multiple temporalities of air into play through designs that actually collect and archive air from different times. This work could bring about a new consciousness and perhaps an expanded understanding of the meaning of a public architecture — an effort to reclaim the air from those who've attempted to control it in irresponsible and dangerous ways.
Some of the designers who have begun this reclamation project use whimsical strategies, experimenting with tints, adhesives, odors, vapors and other airborne media to harness the latent architectural possibilities of our atmosphere. Especially notable is the work of the Madrid architect Nerea Calvillo, who refers to urban air as “invisible layers that also are landscapes,” and who has worked with a multidisciplinary team to investigate and reveal the hidden or less apparent geographies of cities. Calvillo's project, In the Air, aims “to make visible the microscopic and invisible agents of Madrid’s air (gases, particles, pollen, diseases, etc.), to see how they perform, react and interact with the rest of the city.” To do this Calvillo and her team mixed bright, organic paint tints with water vapors and released them into Madrid’s air; in effect, they have made a mechanical prototype of an atmosphere, which they call a “diffuse façade.” Calvillo's goals, as the project develops, are to explore how these diffuse facades might operate as an index revealing the particulate content of the air, and more broadly, to render the atmosphere visible to the city's residents. Calvillo's "invisible layers" or "diffuse facades" might also be integrated into the actual facades of buildings, in this way "blurring architecture with atmosphere." [2]
There are, of course, potential hazards with this sort of visualization. It might become confusing, a mass of undecipherable information that a viewer can’t easily sort through. It might also become merely an aesthetic spectacle — a razzle-dazzle data performance sans political meaning or artistic depth. And no matter the goals of the designers, information that unexpectedly becomes visible can be politically suspect — unclear in its motives and methods. Its persuasive capabilities can be elusive as well as treacherous. But Calvillo hopes to empower public health activists who seek to verify or disprove air quality claims made by interests ranging from the state to corporations.
Top: Nerea Calvillo, In the Air. 2008. Bottom: Diller + Scofidio, Blur pavilion, 2002.
When viewed formally, as architectural spaces of uncertain shape, Calvillo's clouds are part of a contemporary trend, and bring to mind other architectural experiments, most famously the Blur Building, created by Diller Scofidio + Renfro for the Swiss Expo 2002. That project, an "architecture of atmosphere," in the designers' term, challenged the materiality and permanence of conventional construction, using a misting-nozzle "smart weather" system that responded to changing atmospheric conditions. Although, like most expo projects, the Blur was a temporary structure, it worked largely in the tradition of the architecture project of a certain scale, and its atmospheric element — its blur — is conceived and experienced as a monolithic unit, in contrast to the “invisible layers” of Calvillo's In the Air.
Another building conceptualized as a response to its atmospheric environment is the B_mu, a museum project in Bangkok, by the Paris-based architecture practice R&Sie(n). Never built, the radical project, which has achieved a kind of cult status, consists of a stack of rectilinear gallery spaces wrapped in a drooping shroud coated with an electromagnetic material that would attract particles from the polluted city air, much the way the screen of a computer monitor attracts dust. The project drew inspiration from Man Ray’s 1920 Dust Breeding (Duchamp’s Large Glass with Dust Notes), a long-exposure photograph of dust collecting on Duchamp's The Large Glass. As envisioned by the architects, the museum would, with time, become fuzzy and sooty. In this sense R&Sie(n) wanted to harvest the air itself. Yet much like the Blur Building, the project remains conventional in program, organization and scale — and even the social meaning of the pollution itself remains unclear and thus unchallenged. Cocooned in the climate-controlled museum, visitors would have been literally protected — and politically distanced — from the complex networks of relations that enabled the pollution in the first place.
New Airscapes
Given the social provocations of In the Air, even recent projects like Blur and B_mu seem increasingly to belong to an early generation of air design that replicated customary scales of architectural work. Calvillo’s work opens up something new, something that might eventually allow users to “make” new atmospheres based on diverse personal or group agendas. Her sights are set on transforming the smallest pieces of architectural form, what she calls "the microscopic agents that are with us" — spaces that we are often unaware of, but which are everywhere.
David Gissen, Reconstruction: Smoke. 2006–2010.
Architectural historian David Gissen has written powerfully about the challenge of how to use and to avoid one type of air: smoke. In his book Subnature and on his website, Gissen has speculated about what it might mean to reconstruct the soot-filled air that once dirtied industrial cities like Chicago and Pittsburgh. The goal would not be to re-pollute the city but to create a kind of archive of the older, smoky air, as a way to better understand the industrialization that once defined the experience of living and working in those cities. Gissen has no illusions of actually implementing this proposal. Rather, he wants to critique the increasingly bourgeois, sanitizing goals of the historic preservation movement, and the type and scale of building often chosen for preservation; and he wants to reveal how the presence — or absence — of smoke in the environment can indicate "social rank and the level of command one has over his or her environment." [3]
Another experimentalist historian, the architect Jorge Otero-Pailos, is focusing on historical preservation at a smaller, more domestic scale. Along these lines, he has proposed recreating the smells of cologne and tobacco that once filled the air of the now landmarked Glass House, by Philip Johnson, in New Canaan, Connecticut. Here too, the idea is to make us think about the atmosphere of the place when it was a salon crowded with architects and artists — and smokers — like Mies van der Rohe and Andy Warhol, cluttered with ashtrays and hazy with smoke.
Gissen and Otero-Pailos’s speculations resonate with Calvillo's work, and especially with one of her observations about air: Calvillo has pointed out that when we occupy a space we are inevitably experiencing its accumulated atmosphere. We are inhaling air in the moment, but we are also inhaling air that has lingered, sometimes for a long time. (This becomes especially apparent in sealed-off spaces like basements and attics.) Thus In the Air extrapolates a dreamy urbanism, where atmospheric layers become a kind of mosaic, a perceptible vision, and one moves through fogs of various colors, or even of different smells and perhaps of inebriants that might mentally transport us, as the madeleine transported Proust, to other places or times. (On a related note, Bompas & Parr, architect-producers of what we might call à la carte happenings, concocted a cloud of breathable gin-and-tonics for a London gallery opening in April of 2009.)
Bompas & Parr, Alcoholic Architecture. 2009.
The designers of In the Air, on their detailed website, imagine a future when we might all participate in atmospheric creation: "A domestic version of the prototype will be developed. Assembly instructions will be posted on the web and each user will be able to make a unit for their balconies or windows. This will generate a distributed net of visualizations, representing the data collected throughout the city. An individual can “tune” their unit to select the pollutant they are interested in tracking — this will allow for the construction of a collective map of personal environmental interests."
These days we read many claims and assertions about ecology and clean air. What if, as In the Air suggests, we could suspend a plume of tinted air created from years-old data and evaluate it next to a plume created from current data? Has the air improved, or not? Is the particle density greater or lesser? Using In the Air's instruction manual, perhaps one could sift out the air made by a certain polluter, and even re-situate it or blow it into a different location — perhaps toward the polluter’s corporate offices. One could colorize the pollutants that hover over a landscape we are forbidden to enter, like the base at Vieques, with its uranium cloud, so that local residents could identify it from afar. (The base has been demobilized as a “wilderness refuge” — a U.S. government tactic for avoiding the remediation entailed by Superfund designation.) These actions could take air into the realm of political contestation, activating streets and public spaces. But all of this will only be possible when we no longer perceive air as monolithic, singular and static.
In Subnature, Gissen notes that architectural theory and history offer fleeting glimpses of the problem of vapors and dirty air, usually in discussions of chimneys, vents, and other building technologies meant to exhaust smoke from spaces while at the same time retaining the heat and the social pleasure of a hearth fire. Smoke or pollution that contaminates homes, workplaces or entire cities has sometimes signified urban dysfunction or lack of progress, or conversely, modernity and industrialization. Today we are exploring ever more technologically advanced techniques for carbon capture and sequestering, and for using toxic residue like fly ash to make concrete for roads and buildings. Certainly these techniques serve to minimize harmful emissions; they also perhaps reinforce our tendency toward "out of sight, out of mind." In comparison, the projects envisioned by Calvillo, Gissen, Otero-Pailos and others have the opposite aim: to make bad or questionable air visible, part of our perceptible experience, and in this way to make it a real part of our political discussion.
Via Art-Agenda
-----
Ludlow 38 is pleased to present the exhibition Maryanne Amacher: City-Links. Between 1967 and 1981 the pioneering sound artist produced 22 City-Links projects in total, connecting distant microphones to installations and performances using dedicated FM-quality analog phone lines. Areas of downtown Buffalo, MIT, Boston Harbor, the Mississippi River, the New York harbor, studios in various locations, and other sites in the USA and abroad were transported, sometimes integrating performers near the microphones (such as John Cage and George Lewis for City-Links #18 performed at The Kitchen in 1979). The exhibition at Ludlow 38 brings together a number of documents, images and sound samples selected and reproduced from the nascent Amacher Archive as a first look at this important series of early telematic art works about which little has been published.
Maryanne Amacher wrote about her City-Links series: In my first sound works I developed the idea of sonic telepresence, introducing the use of telecommunication in sound installations. In the telelink installations "CITY-LINKS" #1-22 (1967- ) the sounds from one or more remote environment (in a city, or in several cities) are transmitted "live" to the exhibition space, as an ongoing sonic environment. I produce the "CITY-LINKS" installations using real-time telelinks to transmit the sound from microphones I place in the selected environments, spatializing these works with many different sonic environments: harbors, steel mills, stone towers, flour mills, factories, silos, airports, rivers, open fields, utility companies, and with musicians "on location." The adventure is in receiving live sonic spaces from more than one location at the same time - the tower, the ocean, the abandoned mill. Remote sound environments enter our local spaces and become part of our rooms. Instal lations of "CITY-LINKS" include works created for solo and group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1974); Walker Arts Center "Projected Images," Minneapolis (1974); Hayden Gallery MIT, "Interventions In Landscape," Cambridge, Mass (1975); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Mass. (1975); Corps de Garde, Groningen, Holland (1978); the Kitchen Center, NYC (1979); Radio France Musique (1976); Mills College (1980 & 1994).
Maryanne Amacher was born on February 25, 1938 in Kane, PA and died October 22, 2009 in Rhinebeck, NY. At Maryanne Amacher's urging The Amacher Archive was initiated by her friends Robert The and Micah Silver during her illness in the summer of 2009. For more information or to support the project: maryanneamacher.org
A tribute to Maryanne Amacher will be held on the first anniversary of her death, October 22, 2010 and is organized and hosted by the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology in Cambridge, MA.
Maryanne Amacher: City-Links has been curated by Tobi Maier, Micah Silver, Robert The and Axel Wieder.
---
Maryanne Amacher
City-Links
October 21 – November 28, 2010
Opening:
Wednesday October 20, 6-8pm
Ludlow 38 Künstlerhaus Stuttgart Goethe-Institut New York
38 Ludlow Street
New York 10002
Tel. 212 228 6848
info@ludlow38.org
Gallery hours: Thursday – Sunday 1-6pm and
by appointment
www.ludlow38.org
---
Personal comment:
Sound telepresence. Sounds "usual" today, but it must be underlined that Amacher's works, City-Links (this could be the title of one of our work today!), date back from the 70ies. And where one more time, we see the Name of John Cage pop up...
Thursday, October 21. 2010
Via Vague Terrain
-----
by Greg J. Smith
Electric Fields, the Ottawa-based AV culture biennial festival programmed by our peers at Artengine draws near. The event runs from Nov. 3-7th and one of the participants is Paul Jasen, a PhD candidate researching "low-frequency sonic experience". Paul posted an annotated mix on the Artengine blog in advance of a talk he'll be giving at the festvial and we've reblogged it below.
--
Not sympathy in the sentimental sense. Sympathetic vibration has nothing to do with the personal or emotional. For Helmholtz, it meant transduction of energy, resonance induced in a body – a room, a building, a glass, an eyeball – by an external force. At its resonant, or natural, frequency a body ceases to dampen energy and begins to oscillate with it, amplifying it, even to the point of self destruction.
A 40-minute, sub-centric mix, ahead of my talk (Bass: A Myth-Science of the Sonic Body) at this year’s Electric Fields festival. So much discussion about bass focuses on dancefloor material, so this mix goes the other direction, collecting a series of low-frequency investigations into industrial and earthly hum, pure tones, pipe organs, peculiarities of bodily resonance, and overlapping fictions of sound and signal. Listen loud. To borrow Eleh’s instruction: Volume reveals detail.
MP3: DOWNLOAD (320kbps / 95Mb)
TRACKS & NOTES:
Demdike Stare ‘Suspicious Drone’ (Modern Love)
“…a dense 6 minute opening that chugs along like a malfunctioning mechanical beast, honing in on Lancashire’s dark industrial landscapes.” Following on the heels of labels like Mordant Music, Skull Disco and Ghost Box, Demdike Stare wed body-humming sound system sensibilities and (occasional) frenzied percussion, with smatterings of occulture and Radiophonic hauntology.
Bass Communion ‘Ghosts on Magnetic Tape III’ Original and Reconstruction (Headphone Dust)
Unsettling vibrations, voices in the ether. Bass Communion looks for spectral encounters in the crackle and grooves of manipulated 78rpm shellacs, drawing equally on theories of the infrasonic uncanny and the peculiar phenomenon of EVP. Supplemented here with excerpts and Raymond Cass commentary from The Ghost Orchid: An Introduction to EVP (Parapsychic Acoustic Research Cooperative/Ash International)
Thomas Köner ‘Permafrost’ and ‘Nieve Penitentes 2′ (Barooni/Type)
More of the ice than about it, Köner’s geologic drone work would sit well alongside John Duncan’s Infrasound-Tidal, NASA’s Voice of Earth, and the tremor tones of Mark Bain. The theme is The North, but these aren’t field recordings. Instead, Köner builds his glacial terrain from the shimmer of pitch-shifted gongs. Augmented here by a dark piece from Ruth White, the little acknowledged American electronic composer who’d have made good company for Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. ‘Mists and Rains,’ from the 1969 album Flowers of Evil, sets the Baudelaire poem to an electronic windscape.
Eleh ‘Together We Are One’ (Taiga)
Anonymous and secretive, Eleh is a minor sonic fiction unto itself, its album art drawing on the retina-skewing experiments of Op Art while minimal sleeve notes give faint clues to method and aims. Titles of the first three releases – Floating Frequencies/Intuitive Synthesis volumes I-III – would seem to sum up the project, reputedly based on the layering of outputs from aging audio test oscillators. Subsequent releases Homage to the Square Wave and Homage to the Sine Wave, along with track names like ‘Pulsing Study Of 7 Sine Waves’ (parts 1 & 2), ‘Phase Two: Bass Pulse In Open Air,’ and ‘Linear To Circular / Vertical Axis,’ are nods to both the minimalist tradition and a clinically empiricist attitude toward sonic investigation. But others – ‘In The Ear Of The Gods,’ ‘Phase One: Sleeps Golden Drones Again’ – show a mystical side that revels in the autopoietic strangeness of the subbass encounter.
Nate Young ‘Under the Skin’ (iDeal Recordings)
If Eleh finds the mystical in impersonal vibration, Nate Young’s Regression is the sound of signal possessed, angry, and on the move. ‘Under the Skin’ is a churning slog – submerged in a liquid-matter mush, broken occasionally by a taught screech, before resuming its subcutaneous march.
Sunn o))) ‘Sin Nanna’ (Southern Lord)
Metal with bass weight, indebted to the gravity-enhancing sounds of Earth. ‘Sin Nanna’ is a largely guitar-free interlude, gutteral chanting like the nightmare version of new-agey Gregorian revival. Elsewhere, 2008′s Dømkirke had the band pulling ungodly rumbles from the massive 16th century organ at Rokslide Cathedral, Norway.
Christian Fennesz plays Charles Matthews ‘Amoroso’ (Touch)
And into the light… A 7″ offshoot of Touch Record’s ongoing Spire project (below) which focuses on organ-based and organ-inspired works. 2300 years on, the pipe organ still mystifies. An acoustic synthesizer, one of the earliest machines, it’s clearly been designed to direct force at the body as well as emit musical notes. “Audible at five miles, offensive at two, and lethal at one,” was the contemporary description of the 10th century organ at Winchester said to require 70 men to operate its bellows. Note the mastering credit on this release: Jason Goz at Transition Studios – the name attached to virtually every foundational dubstep release between 2003 and 2006; dubcutter for Jah Shaka, Mickey Finn, Grooverider, DJ EZ, Mala, Loefah, kode9… London bass flows through Transition.
BJNilsen ‘La Petite Chapelle – Rue Basses’ (Touch)
An excerpt from Spire: Live in Geneva Cathedral, Saint Pierre (2005). From the notes: “In a duet with himself, BJNilsen moved back and forth between organ and electronics. He established a link between the old sound inherited from centuries past and a new one being instantly generated. The organ sound was decomposed and in a way, tortured, in order to get at the core of the sound… BJNilsen’s piece ended with a background organ sound, as if to remind us that after all, even if altered, the organ had remained the core of the entire concept.”
Paul Jasen is a PhD candidate in Cultural Mediations at Carleton University. His research focuses on low-frequency sonic experience. He also DJs under the names Autonomic and Mr. Bump. Writing and mixes at Deeptime.net & Riddim.ca.
Personal comment:
Something for us... possibly in relation with Circuit.
Although we missed it yesterday (thanks Joel Vacheron for the pointer nonetheless), this link to an evening at the LUFF with Michael Gendreau that was probably interesting...
|