Tuesday, March 27. 2012San Alfonso del Mar, ChileBy Patrick Keller -----
Please welcome San Alfonso del Mar... the second (or third ?) degree of artificality: the "spanish costa brava buildings" over the horizon pool over the XXL sized horizon (sailing) pool over the ocean. Who says better?
Related Links:Personal comment: Would it be in Las Vegas, I could possibly understand, even if it would still be ridiculous. But there, just behind a beach and the ocean it goes beyond understanding.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Territory
at
16:55
Defined tags for this entry: artificial reality, conditioning, culture & society, territory, tourism
Monday, March 26. 2012By Revealing the Existence of Other Worlds, the Book is a Subversive ArtifactVia The Funambulist
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de Léopold Lambert
Excerpt from Le Processus by Marc-Antoine Mathieu (Delcourt 1993) Following the three last articles in which I was preparing my reference texts in addition of those that I have been already writing in the past, this following article is an attempt to reconstitute the small presentation I was kindly invited to give by Carla Leitão for her seminar about libraries and archives at Pratt Institute. This talk was trying to elaborate a small theory of the book as a subversive artifact based on six literary authors that have in common a dramatization of their own medium, the book, within their books. The predicate of this essay lies in the fact that books are indeed subversive -and therefore suppressed by authoritarian power- as they reveal the existence of other worlds.
REFERENCE TEXTS/DRAWINGS ON THE FUNAMBULIST FOR CHAPTER 1 In his series Julius Corentin Acquefacques, prisonnier des rêves, Marc-Antoine Mathieu continuously explores and questions graphic novel as the medium he uses for his narratives to exist, and therefore to acquire a certain autonomy as soon as they have been created. In reusing the constructive elements of drawings within the narrative (preparatory sketches, vanishing points, framing bars, anamorphoses etc.) he creates several layers of universes that include our own, and therefore makes us wonder if our reality couldn’t be the fiction of a higher degree of reality. In The Trial written by Franz Kafka and published in 1929, the book as an artifact is not literally present. However, the existence of other worlds within the narrative can be found in the fact that the version we know is the one assembled by Kafka’s best friend, Max Brod who re-assembled the chapters of the unachieved book according to his own interpretation and on the contrary of his friend’s wishes who wanted it to be burnt. Brod, in a research for rationality starts the narrative by the scene in which K., the protagonist, learns that he will be judged for something he ignores, continues it by K.’s experience of the administrative labyrinth and eventually finishes it by K.’s execution. In Towards a Minor Literature, Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze criticize this order, cannot seem to accept that such chapter about K.’s death has been written by Kafka and eventually consider that this event is nothing more than an additional part of the character’s delirium or dream within the story. As I have been writing before in an essay entitled The Kafkian Immanent Labyrinth as a Post-Mortem Dream, my own interpretation consists in starting with this ‘last’ chapter in which K. is executed, thus attributing the following delirium to the visions that K. experiences before dying. In other words, K. never really dies for himself even though he dies in the point of view of others, of course (to read more about this topic read also my review of Gaspard Noe’s Enter the Void). His perception of time exponentially decelerates tending more and more towards the exact moment of his death without ever reaching it: this is the Kafkian nightmare.
Jorge Luis Borges, whose filiation with Kafka is not to be demonstrated, is also well known for his quasi-Leibnizian (see previous article) invention of an infinity of parallel worlds through books. The Library of Babel (see previous post) is the most famous example as it introduces an infinite library containing every unique books that can be written in 410 pages with 25 symbols. At the end of this short story, Borges precises that this library could be in fact, contained in a single book which will be introduced later on in The Book of Sand (see the recent post about it): a book with an infinity of pages.
Many Borges’ readers will indeed know that himself lost his sight few decades after he wrote this story. What was this God that he was looking for in the many book of Buenos Aires’ National Library? Which kind of Kaballah did he create to find an esoteric meaning in the mathematics of the profane scriptures? Maybe did he have a glance to this infinity that he has been chanting for many years and became blind as a price to pay for it.
In 1962, Philip K. Dick writes a novel entitled The Man in the High Castle (see previous article) which dramatizes an uchronia for which Roosevelt died before ending his first mandate of President of the USA, replaced by an isolationist President who refuses to engage his county in the second World War. It results from this choice that the Nazis conquest Europe while the Japanese army colonizes East Asia (including Siberia) and eventually both combine their forces to invade the USA. Dick’s plot thus occurs in United States under nippo-nazi domination in which it is said to exist a book, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy written by a certain Hawthorne Abendsen who would describe in it a world in which the Allies won the over against the Axis. The book is, of course, forbidden as it allows the depiction of another reality than the one which is imposed by colonial empires:
The ban of books depicted in Dick’s uchronia brings us to worlds in which books have been definitely suppressed from society. In the well known 1984, written in 1949 by Georges Orwell, the only remaining book is the dictionary of the Newspeak which, editions by editions becomes thinner and thinner as the language is subjected by a strict progressive purge. Language, indeed, allows the formulation of other worlds which can be punished as thoughtcrimes. The Book is therefore not destroyed literally but its principal material is voluntarily put in scarcity.
The quintessential narrative dramatizing the destruction of books is of course Fahrenheit 451 (see the recent article about it) written by Ray Bradbury in 1953. In this story, firemen are not people in charge of fighting against fire, but on the contrary, those in charge of inflaming books that have been banned as principal element of discord and inequality within society. Fahrenheit 451 (233 degrees Celsius) is indeed the temperature for which paper burns. Books are thus the object that allows the various human writings to remain archived for virtually eternity but which allow carry with them, their own fragility as their main material, paper, is vulnerable to the elements and fire in particular. Francois Truffaut, who released an excellent film adaptation of Bradbury’s novel in 1966, by showing a copy of Mein Kampf in his movie, did not miss to point out that a resistance movement that would undertake to save the books from fire could not possibly judge which books deserved to be kept and which one could be let to the institutional purge. In the theater play Almansor that he wrote in 1820, Heinrich Heine makes the following tragic prophecy: Where we burn books, we will end up burning men. On May 10th 1933, the Nazis who recently reached the head of the executive and legislative power in Germany will burn thousands of books including Heine’s, which do not fit within the spirit of the new antisemitic/anti-communist politics they are willing to undertake. About a decade later, they will industrially kill eleven millions people (including six millions Jews) in what remains as the darkest moment of mankind’s history: the Holocaust. Among the books burned in 1933, one could find the ones written by Marx, Freud, Brecht, Benjamin, Einstein, Kafka but also one of the father of science fiction, HG Wells. This last example illustrates well the will of the third Reich to annihilate any vision of the future that was not compliant with the one elaborated by the Nazis. The books are therefore agents of infection in the point of view of an authoritarian ideological power. Their authors place in them the germs of subversion that are then spread to whoever read them. Knowledge is power as Foucault was insisting, imagination is, in fact, power to the same extent. The virtual access to other worlds via books is the possibility of a resistance in this given reality. For that, books have to be salvaged at any price. They constitute the archives of a civilization as much as they are the active agents of vitalization of a society that accepts the multiplicity of their narratives.
Friday, March 23. 2012Free Universal Construction KitVia Treehugger ----- By Lloyd Alter
Free Art and Technology/Public Domain
The Free Universal Construction Kit is a wonderful idea, "a matrix of nearly 80 adapter bricks that enable complete interoperability between ten popular children’s construction toys." It is not a set of physical objects, but instructions for a 3D printer. My first thought upon seeing it on every website from Kottke to Geekologie is that the patent lawyers will be on the case in seconds; In Canada, we have watched the endless battle between LEGO and Montreal's Mega Blok that went all the way to the Supreme Court. (LEGO lost). It turns out that the designers of the Free Universal Construction Kit (I cannot use the acronym on this family website) were preoccupied with the issue as well. In fact, it seems to be one of the prime motivations of the design, " to provide a public service unmet—or unmeetable—by corporate interests."
Free Art and Technology/Public Domain
The designers describe the Free Universal Construction Kit is a sort VLC open source video player for hardware; a tool that disrupts the system, that lets anyone play with their toys any way they want instead of the way the toy manufacturers plan it.
The Free Universal Construction Kit from Adapterz on Vimeo.
The most important aspect of the Free Universal Construction Kit is what it portends for the future.
No wonder that the first people they thank in their credits, after their families, are their lawyers. More at Free Art and Technology.
Free Art and Technology/Public Domain
Related Links:Personal comment: A very interesting approach for opensource projects: to bridge the gap and position themselves between branded (and/or proprietary) products.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Design
at
09:42
Defined tags for this entry: culture & society, design, digital fabrication, games, opensource, print, public
Tuesday, March 20. 2012Essays: Introducing SuperNormalVia cityofsound
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de Dan Hill
A quick word about a new series I’m curating for Domus, the Italian art, architecture and design magazine. Called SuperNormal, it’s an attempt to ‘sketch’ a different kind of technology journalism, recognised how cultural it is. A few years ago, in response to the usual diminished depiction of contemporary technology as simply “IT”, someone—I forget who—said something like “Is a 14 year-old girl updating her Facebook status from her mobile phone as she walks down the street ‘IT’?” Of course it is, but more importantly, it isn’t. It is more than that; contemporary technology is deeply cultural. We might argue that all technology always has been “deeply cultural”, from the Stone Age axe onwards, but given that symbolic consumption and production—one definition of culture—is now actively and deliberately embedded in objects we design and build, and that these objects are embedded in the patterns, habits and rituals of everyday life—another definition of culture—we must now see technology for what it is. So with Domus, Joseph Grima and I saw an opportunity to write in a different way about everyday technology. Domus has a long tradition of writing about such things, driven by the strong Italian heritage of post-war industrial design, covering Brionvega radios, Elica hoods, Vespa scooters, or Olivetti typewriters, for instance. But as I suggest in my series opener (below), perhaps a culturally powerful contemporary equivalent of these things now exists in the form of social media, mobile phones, web services, information graphics, smart cards, personal informatics, robots, and so on. It might be a stretch to suggest that these things are the equivalent of an Olivetti Valentine in a number of ways, but not in terms of the way such things now shape our lives. Yet the vast bulk of journalism concerning this everyday technology is dominated by the technology press, which is rarely critical in the sense that Domus is, rarely covers design aspects with any depth, and rarely attempts to place developments in a wider cultural context. While I have no problem with the likes of Engadget, Techcrunch, Wired and the rest—not that they’d notice either way if I did!—there did seem a gap in the market here. Conversely, this was also a way to introduce discussion of the recent design disciplines of interaction design, experience design, service design and information design, to this more established strata of design media. For what it’s worth, my motive for doing this—discussing the technology in terms of culture, and discussing its design in the context of other design practices—is in order to try to understand it better; which is in turn in order to design it better, to realise it better, to procure it better, and so on. (By the way, it’s a huge honour to work for Domus. There can have been few more influential titles in design history since its inception in 1928 and Joseph Grima, who I first worked with on Postopolis, has repositioned the magazine at the forefront of media once again, for me alongside Eye and Idea as the best design magazines out there. It’s also been a pleasure to work increasingly closely with the designers, Salottobuono, and particularly Marco Ferrari.) The series will run in the magazine and online. We’re using the website to carry more in-depth versions of the print articles, and including video and other contextual information such as interviews where relevant. The first covered the Nokia N9 (and to some extent its successor, the Lumia running Windows Phone) but pitches that in the context of the wider skirmishes in the mobile phone market, tactility, sounds and ocularcentrism in cellphone design, the hegemonic power of Apple, the importance of materials and the “dark matter” of licensing and logistics, European design history and entrepreneurship, via Roland Barthes and the Citröen DS19. The second piece concerns Facebook Timeline, and so timelines, information design, social graphs, identity and representation, and so on —but also the broader context of a shared social memory, and how that might affect the way we forget and function. (Additionally, Facebook were good enough to get us an interview with Timeline’s lead designer, Nicholas Felton—he of Feltron Annual Reports fame)—and his early mockups of Timeline, to accompany this article. Thanks to both Nicholas and Meredith Chin for that.) These initial articles are markers, sketching out the trajectory and territory of the series to some extent. But as the series opener suggests below, the terrain should get increasingly rich, diverse and fertile and I’m lining up a set of great writers ready to explore it and map it. More on that to follow. I’ll pitch in from time to time too. Have a read of the first two—‘Portable Cathedrals’ on the Nokia N9 and ‘In Praise of Lost Time’ on Facebook Timeline—and let me know what you think: here; at Domus; or elsewhere. And here, below, is the original text for the series—which I’ve dubbed SuperNormal, in respectful homage to Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa’s great book and exhibition, noting its title Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary. This text introduces and frames the venture, and is a slightly different version to that which appears on the Domus website and in the magazine. SuperNormal The humble form of the mobile phone galvanises culture and design like few other products ever have. Well beyond its original brief of connecting voices in real-time, and now dissolved in social media substrate, the mobile phone is essentially a tool for cultural production and consumption, for the everyday projection, dissembling or articulation of identity itself. As such, the cellphone represents an entirely new form of industrial design; it is intimate physically, psychologically and culturally, as well as framing the city and its activities. It can only be understood in the context of the few genuinely new design disciplines of the last two decades: the overlapping circles of interaction design, experience design, service design. And for mobile phones, read Facebook Timeline’s interface design, the organising principles underpinning operating systems like OSX and Google Chrome OS, the platform service ecosystem of iTunes+iPhone, an RFID-based airport check-in system, the architecture of Angry Birds, what XBox Live says about community; what transport data apps say about contemporary urbanism; what the Microsoft Word interface says about our approach to tools; how the design strategy of the New York Times sketches the future of journalism, how Spotify follows in a lineage of music experiences from Brionvega to Technics … When Domus started, there was no equivalent of these kind of devices, these kind of platforms, these kind of issues, although Domus has a long history of reviewing the products of everyday life, particularly through its coverage of industrial design. The publication absorbed these daily objects from its earliest days, particularly placing domestic products, furniture and office equipment on its pages. These are technology too of course. But now we must see beyond furniture to the glowing devices lying upon them. The iPhone, Facebook and Chrome are the descendants of Sottsass’s Olivetti Lettera, in a way. Perhaps Sottsass sensed this:
It turns out that these are the new objects, products and services of everyday life, the “new total possibilities”. They are ‘Super Normal’, though perhaps not in the sense that Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa intended in their exhibitions of 2006-2007. Our reading of the situation attempts to move beyond the traditional frames for assessing industrial design, and assesses designs that are intended to be usable, functional, meaningful, personal, productive, strategic, participative. In the introduction to the accompanying Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary book, Gerrit Terstiege mentioned the 1976 Darmstadt exhibition ‘Das gewöhnliche Design’, and in particular the opening talk by Bazon Brock, professor of Aesthetics in Wuppertal:
This would entail critically unpicking the social and cultural meaning of everyday products, not simply assessing their form, material or technical characteristics, but getting to their point; what each product says about our time and place. So the cultural potency—the sheer relevance—of products like mobile phones, social media, and operating systems, has prompted Domus to start a new form of technology criticism, in a series that politely and respectfully hacks the name ‘Super Normal’. Our idea is to offer an alternative to a discourse dominated by the likes of Engadget, Techcrunch, DPReview, Gizmodo et al. Sites like these cover products and services in unparalleled levels of technical detail and with respected in-depth knowledge. Yet they rarely discuss design in any meaningful way or the wider cultural impact of such things. Domus won’t cover technical details, as they are ably covered by those sites, but it will assess what these products say about contemporary design. It won’t pore over unboxing videos, but it will try to unpack the wider issues that these products imply for contemporary culture. It won’t attempt to second-guess business strategy, but will describe how products and services are now linked as never before to the spheres of economics, logistics, environment and community. So this is no buyer’s guide, but it may be a user guide of sorts, to the key products and services of the 21st century; the things that surround us, yet are currently not on the radar of design criticism. Stay tuned.
SuperNormal: series opener [Domus]
Personal comment: We met Dan Hill during Postopolis!LA back in 2009, then collaborated on a project together with Philippe Rahm. We will now read his "SuperNormal" articles in Domus (which is certainly the most interesting architecture magazine at the moment) with great interest.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Culture & society, Interaction design, Science & technology
at
17:25
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, culture & society, interaction design, magazines, science & technology
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fabric | rblgThis blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research. We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings. Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations. This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
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