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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've never made any money or advertised 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).
Note: speaking about time, not in time, out of time, etc. and as a late tribute to Stephen Hawking, this experiement full of malice from him regarding the possibilities of time travel.
Who among us has never fantasized about traveling through time? But then, who among us hasn't traveled through time? Every single one of us is a time traveler, technically speaking, moving as we do through one second per second, one hour per hour, one day per day. Though I never personally heard the late Stephen Hawking point out that fact, I feel almost certain that he did, especially in light of one particular piece of scientific performance art he pulled off in 2009: throwing a cocktail party for time travelers — the proper kind, who come from the future.
"Hawking’s party was actually an experiment on the possibility of time travel," writes Atlas Obscura's Anne Ewbank. "Along with many physicists, Hawking had mused about whether going forward and back in time was possible. And what time traveler could resist sipping champagne with Stephen Hawking himself?" "
By publishing the party invitation in his mini-series Into the Universe With Stephen Hawking, Hawking hoped to lure futuristic time travelers. You are cordially invited to a reception for Time Travellers, the invitation read, along with the the date, time, and coordinates for the event. The theory, Hawking explained, was that only someone from the future would be able to attend."
Alas, no time travelers turned up. Since someone possessed of that technology at any point in the future would theoretically be able to attend, does Hawking's lonely party, which you can see in the clip above, prove that time travel will never become possible? Maybe — or maybe the potential time-travelers of the future know something about the space-time-continuum-threatening risks of the practice that we don't. As for Dr. Hawking, I have to imagine that he came away satisfied from the shindig, even though his hoped-for Ms. Universe from the future never walked through the door. “I like simple experiments… and champagne,” he said, and this champagne-laden simple experiment will continue to remind the rest of us to enjoy our time on Earth, wherever in that time we may find ourselves.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
"Throughout my journey as an author, journalist, curator and member of collectives, meeting artists has always been a chance for me to develop my knowledge and theory around speculative fields that go well beyond the fixed borders of academic reflection.
As such, while curating exhibitions, art directing festivals, coordinating residencies and directing productions, I have always sought out a relationship between art practice and theory that, rather than merely being mutually beneficial, leads to a true exchange. I have always felt more enriched working with the artists, rather than simply writing about them. For me, an exhibition is not a final goal but a platform where each player enriches their sensory knowledge and collectively participates in opening up new ways of perceiving and acting in society, faced with our accelerated world. These are the mutual cosmic exchanges that give artworks their “value”… and can help us to rethink our politics of recombinatory commons.
So I took the opportunity of this online curation to revisit a decade of collaborating with artists and to see where this new perspective on mutual exchange (with the gallery, the collector) can lead us. During these years, Slovenian artistic life has been a major source of inspiration for me, and this is expressed in the selection, which is faithful to the community spirit. (...)"
Created at the occasion of an exhibition in Montreal and revisited for this edition of 20 copies, Interference Dimensionnelle 1 is as a “matrix” in scale 1: X which instantly combines the spatial, temporal or even climatic dimensions/data of actual or virtual terrestrial locations.
Athens, Brasilia, Dubai, intersection of the Arctic Circle and Antemeridian, Montreal: 37 ° 58 ‘N / 23 ° 43’ E; 15 ° 46 ‘N / 47 ° 54’ W; 25 ° 16 ‘N / 55 ° 19’ E; 66 ° 33 ‘N / 180 ° 00’ E; 45 ° 30 ‘N / 73 ° 40’ W.
Five emblematic places representative of the architectural, territorial and energetic approaches of Western society and its history, five coordinates located on a world map and then gathered. These situations, when supplemented by the”original” mark 0,0,0, form a set of six interlaced benchmarks for new contemporary spatial situations.
21 x 18 x 18 cm, transparent and black acrylic polymer, edition of 20. €1200.-
“World Brain” by Stéphane Degoutin and Gwenola Wagon (2015):
World Brain proposes a stroll through motley folkloric tales : data centers, animal magnetism, the Internet as a myth, the inner lives of rats, how to gather a network of researchers in the forest, how to survive in the wild using Wikipedia, how to connect cats and stones…
The world we live in often resembles a Borgesian story. Indeed, if one wanted to write a sequel to Borges’ Fictions, he could do it simply by putting together press articles.
The World Brain is made out mostly of found materials : videos downloaded on Youtube, images, scientific or pseudo scientific reports, news feeds… [...] World Brain takes the viewer through a journey inside the physical places by which the Internet transits: submarine cables, data centers, satellites. The film adopts the point of view of the data. The audience view the world as if they were information, crossing the planet in an instant, copied in an infinite number of instances or, at the contrary, stored in secret places.
My regular readers would have understood that I develop a certain amount of quasi-pathological obsessions for a certain amounts of ideas or concepts that tend to come back regularly in my articles, in such a way that one could say that each article tends towards an attempt to articulate always the same idea. Among these obsessions is the idea of the archipelago and you will soon see that I did not finish to articulate a few thoughts around this idea yet, since an ambitious project of the same name will soon complement my writing on this blog.
In the following text, I would like to approach the archipelago through the same way that I first did, through a philosopher that has been highly influential to me in this last decade, Édouard Glissant. The archipelago is for him a figure of a utopia towards which the world should tend in order to construct a politics of “the relation” rather than a politics of the universal. Of course, an archipelago is a very evocative example of territories that construct simultaneously the difference between each island, and a collective identity as a group; that is what makes it a strong figure for a new paradigm of sovereignty (see past article). However, according to Glissant, there is an additional complexity to it that enriches this territory of an exemplary ideology. In order to look at it more closely, we need to first observe its opposite, the continental sea — etymologically, the archipelago is also a sea before being a group of islands. The paradigmatic example of the continental sea, because of both its history and its contemporaneity is the Mediterranean Sea. The following excerpt is what he writes about it in one of his only translated books in English, about which we might want to observe the difficulty to translate the language — Glissant was talking about translation as an emerging art in itself — that Betsy Wings brilliantly managed to translate from French to English:
Compared to the Mediterranean, which is an inner sea surrounded by lands, a sea that concentrates (in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin antiquity and later in the emergence of Islam, imposing the thought of the One), the Caribbean is, in contrast, a sea that explodes the scattered lands into an arc. A sea that diffracts. Without necessarily inferring any advantage whatsoever to their situation, the reality of archipelagos in the Caribbean or the Pacific provides a natural illustration of the thought of Relation. (Édouard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation, trans Betsy Wing, Ann Harbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997)
When one looks at maps of the history of the Mediterranean Sea, whether dominated by the Greeks, the Romans, the Christians, the Muslims, the Ottomans, or the European colons (French, British and Italians), one can easily understand the consistence of the efforts that have been deployed for centuries to force the multiple into the uniform. In this regard, the Mediterranean itself a sort of virtually neutral territory that each nation, one by one, attempts to dominate in order to bring one’s identity to the rank of universal norm. The fact that the three largest monotheist religions — two of which are still the most populated in the world — emerged and developed around the Mediterranean, is symptomatic for Glissant of this obsessive will to unify. The geography of the region is, of course, not alone to blame, but one understands that in the case of the Mediterranean Sea, the territory of water constitutes a certain object of covetousness for the nations that surround it.
The Caribbean, as an archipelago constitutes, on the contrary, a layout of islands for which the water is the environing milieu; there is therefore no desire to dominate it since it has virtually no limits, and thus does not constitute a territory per se. History has not been ‘tender’ with these islands as they were the first territories discovered in the late 15th-century by Christopher Columbus who enslaved the indigenous population. Starting in the beginning of the 18th-century, during the colonial domination of the Spanish, the French and the British, hundreds of thousands of African slaves were brought by boat — the vessel of colonial uniformization for Glissant — and provided the manpower of the colonies until the first part of the 19th-century when slavery was progressively abolished. In the meantime, in 1791, Toussaint L’Ouverture and the slaves of Saint-Domingue won a historical war against the French colons and created an autonomous territory on what is now Haiti. The current blockade on Cuba from the United States is also revealing the various tensions that are still operative around this special territory.
Nonetheless, the Caribbean is also the territory of a concept that Glissant work his all life around, the one of creolization. Creole itself often refers to one of the local languages spoken in the Caribbean as something that emerged from the encounter of the colonial language (mostly Spanish and French) and the various languages spoken by the slave population. In general, creole can refer to a similar linguistic evolutionary process between any number of languages (colonial/colonized or not), and even at a broader level, the phenomenon of creolization, as understood by Glissant, constitutes a process in which any aspect of an individual or collective identity encounters another to create a new one, richer because integrating the difference, if not opposition, from which it is born. The jazz is one of the mot evocative example of such a process, as it was invented in the American plantations by slaves after their encounters with European music instruments. This music cannot possibly be considered without the resistive struggle that its birth constituted, since any act of freedom — creativity being at the paroxysm of it — accomplished by the slave materializes by definition a negation of his or her status.
The archipelago is the territory of creolization par excellence, as it embodies a geography of islands whose coast are in continuous contact with the unexpected — another important component of Glissant’s philosophy/poetry — of the otherness. The processes of exchanges — pacific or violent — that occur on it are a form of recognition of the difference with the otherness, that then construct voluntarily or not new aspects of individual and collective identities that are richer than a simple synthesis of the two original ones. In this regard, Glissant’s philosophy of the Relation can be understood as the social interpretation of Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy of affects that I have been evoking many times in the past. Just like Spinoza, Glissant starts by analyzing the world in a ‘neutral’ way, unfolding the nature of exchanges between humans and nations, and only then establishes an ethics based on this philosophical scheme. For Glissant, the archipelago constitutes the territory of his ethics.
For more in English about the philosophy and history of the Caribbean, consult the excellent Public Archive edited and written by Professor Peter Hudson.
LA-based artist Julian Hoeber created his installation (for a gallery in West Chelsea) which make visitors deliberately uncomfortable by distorting their sense of balance. Without the use of strobe lights or fake skeletons, Demon Hill 2 can make visitors queasy.
Heterochrony consists of a 40m long passageway architecture, or rather an "archaeological" observation deck: an architectural device that overlooks a public park (existing), that paradoxically connects its entrance directly to the exit -- so to have the opportunity to become an "observer " of what is happening in the park and walk through the square without really entering it, like in archaelogical gangways -- ... , that opens to contrasted atmospheres and try to reorganize the different spaces/common uses on the ground with a minimal physical touch and a maximal visual transparency.
The peculiarity of the project consists in the fact that it also tries to generate a dual perception and a temporal disruption, which leads to the title of the work, Heterochrony: if the present time of the park and its users is in fact the "archeology" to be observed and monitored from the deck, as well as recorded on the project's servers, and therefore a potential "past", then the present time of the passageway would become a possible "future", viewed from the ground ... It's an attempt to materialize such a mysterious temporal zone, induced by the combination of two different referentials in the same space.
The architectural device itself (the deck architecture) is equipped in five selected areas (observation points) with many multisensory monitoring devices. The sensors record as much data as possible over time, these being generated by the ever changing conditions, presence and uses in the park (its climate, atmosphere, molecular and gas composition, sounds, users, usages). The data are then stored on Heterochrony's servers and endlessly replayed in loops, on the computers, in the form of bits of information, as part of the overall architecture. It is a "recorded moment", in some ways "frozen" on data servers, and that potentially replays itself forever, or that is waiting for somebody to reacivate it.
The data are kept publicly accessible on the servers, with the utopian aim that they could allow to regenerate the "present" in another time (if a present, indeed, can still be identified within this project), thus reinforcing the feeling of time disruption about the place. A "control room" on the deck, with its set of interfaces and visualizations screens, let the visitors-observers follow the process of recording.
The work could be considered as an architecture proposal that is built upon the idea of a massive production of data that will very soon come out (be monitored) from our environment, be stored, mined (for whatever -- good or bad -- immediate, near and far future uses). Every second, our world and lives are producing/will produce massive amount of data, stored "forever" in some distant data centers, like millenia old bubbles of gas trapped in the ices of the polar caps... The project can undoubtedly be seen as a reference to the novel of A. Bioy Cassares, The Invention of Morel that resonates with the idea of monitoring/recording the real (and also to some extent to the recent "The City and the City", by China Miéville, for its dual and densified space).
As so, the project tries to introduce a doubt about its true nature: would it be in fact possible that what is observed from the platform is already a recorded present from the past? A ghost situation? A present regenerated from the recorded data by an unknown scientist, or maybe by the machine itself (the architectural recording device) and that would in fact also endlessly run in loops, for years?
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An "observer" at two different "observation points", overlooking the surrounding environment and while doing so, triggering unwittingly the illumination of a strong projector on the park and its users, as well as the the recording of dedicated data.
" Two distinct times, two "presents" were observing each other, close to one another: the present of a public park with its "scene", its "garden", its "bar", its "festival-goers" and the present of a second place, the footbridge or "almost archeological" path that overlooked the whole, allowing to openly structure, observe, sense and record it.
Seen from this observation platform, a possible scientific device equipped with a multitude of presence detectors, of atmospheric and gas sensors, the present time of the park and its users seemed to be situated in an indefinite past, or maybe in a parallel present, at a different time. Or was it rather that all these recorded events were replaying in loops, for a long time?
The traces left by comings and goings, the ones of the molecules of the "party" and the present moment had indeed been monitored and recorded, stored and kept indefinitely on a data server, somewhere, for a utopian future, or past, replenishement. (...)"
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"Deux présents distincts se frôlaient et s’observaient : le présent d’un parc public avec sa « scène », son « jardin », son « bar », ses « festivaliers », et le présent d’un second lieu, la passerelle ou le cheminement « presque archéologique » qui surplombait l’ensemble, l’articulait et permettait de l’observer, de l’enregistrer. (…)
Perçu depuis cette plateforme d’observation, probable dispositif scientifique équipé d’une multitude de sondes de présence, de capteurs atmosphériques et gazeux, le présent du parc et des ses usagers semblait se situer dans un passé indéfini, ou peut-être dans un deuxième présent, à un autre moment. Ou simplement les événements s’y rejouaient-ils en boucle, depuis longtemps ?
Les traces de va-et-vient, celles des molécules de la « fête » et de l’instant présent y avaient en effet été enregistrées, analysées, stockées pour une durée indéterminée sur un serveur de données, en vue d’une utopique reconstitution future, ou passée. (…)"
The passageway architecture over the park, with observation points, probes, strong spot lights to illuminate the observed areas. The deck organizes semi-fluid areas in the square with dedicated pop-up uses over time (a bar, a scene, a park, a street). Each of this areas/functions is topped by an observation point on the deck.
Inside the observation deck, a long central pathway connecting the entrance of the square to its exit, with radiating paths to observation points or to the "control room".
The overall lighting of all led bars is driven by data analysis: the lights on the platform behave like a data graph in the sense that the more data collected in an area (observation point), the stronger the lighting. But the overall lighting remains stable, meaning that the data mitigate the intensity of lighting of the different areas. At some time (every three hundred inputs), a "glitch" happens in the lighting to resynchronyse and reset everything.
Observation points on the deck, with their spot lights (oriented toward the surrounding environment) activated by the presence of observers which also triggers the recording of the data on the servers. The probes that equip each observation point are equipped with presence, molecular and gas composition, temperature, humidity, pressure, light and noise sensors, as well as titling pannels about what is seen, observed and replayed in loops (?) ("(...), around the beginning of the 21st century").
"Control room" with interfaces, live data variations and visualizations.
The website of the project remains accessible and the recorded data downloadable (www.heterochronie.cc). It runs now in loops, endlessly replaying the weeks duration that lasted the experience.
Pictures: Nicolas Besson, David Colombini, Patrick Keller.
Project team: Patrick Keller, Christian Babski, Christophe Guignard, Stéphane Carion, Nicolas Besson, Sinan Mansuroglu, David Colombini, Maxime Castelli.
Mathieu K. Abonnenc, Yaacov Agam, Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil, Davide Balula, Etienne Chambaud, Nicolas Chardon, Ceal Floyer, Lars Fredrikson, Liam Gillick, Piero Golia, Jeppe Hein, Rainier Lericolais, Sol Lewitt, Ivan Picelj, Guy de Sauvage
Curated by Marc Bembekoff
"The 'Mystery Spot' is located in California, in a wooded valley a few miles north of Santa Cruz. In this zone of about 150 feet in diameter, the laws of gravity seem completely out of order. On the hillside, the visitor enters a wood cabin inclined at 75º, which further emphasizes the sensation of a loss of balance. While the physical phenomenon tied to the place is undeniable, the means used to reveal it are what really amplifies this ambiguous sensation in which the real phenomenon and a completely fabricated illusion cannot be told apart. At any rate, all people involved become more aware of the presence of their bodies in a given, rather singular space-time. Art, like some incongruities of nature such as this gravity hill, sometimes also tricks our senses. Artists do enjoy exploiting our gullibility. The relation established with the artwork confronts us and may sometimes lead us to call into question our ways of thinking, at once generating an illusion and deconstructing it in an opposite movement. Each of the works presented in The Mystery Spot evokes this loss of bearings in its own way, disturbing visitors as they physically walk through the space, but even more in their intellectual progression. All the pieces presented here, which come from the collection of the Centre national des arts plastiques, play with our senses, repositioning our point of view in space.
Some thus play with a different hanging and occupy spaces that are typically not considered conventional (the ceiling, for instance, with Liam Gillick). Others question a metaphysics tinged with an evident poetry (Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil, Piero Golia, Guy de Sauvage…). Some sorcerer's apprentices do not hesitate to experiment with science and the laws of gravity (Jeppe Hein, Nicolas Chardon). Finally, between Plato's allegory of the cave and the myth of Zeuxis, other artists directly place the spectator at the center of a deceptive arrangement (Lars Fredrikson…)."
The organizers of this exhibition, which brings together pieces from the modern and contemporary collections of the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP), would like to acknowledge the support of the CNAP and the Fondation d'entreprise Ricard to contemporary creation in its diversity through acquisitions and exhibitions, respectively. The attention of the CNAP to emerging artists, in particular, has made it possible in the past, and early on, to acquire works by artists who have now become internationally recognized. This prospective collection, unique by its range, totals 90,000 works today and follows the current artistic scene very closely. Through their strong interest for creation and its global developments, the Fondation d'entreprise Ricard and the CNAP bring their backing to a whole generation of French and foreign artists, contributing in a decisive manner to the ongoing development of an art scene.
The Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP) The Centre national des arts plastiques plays a major role in the French Ministry of Culture and Communication's contemporary visual art policy. With both cultural and economic impact, the CNAP contributes to artistic diversity, supporting both artists and art world professionals. It acquires artworks on behalf of the French State, oversees their preservation and makes them available to the public, throughout France and worldwide. The CNAP also issues State commissions in its vocation to promote and encourage the arts. It collaborates in large-scale contemporary art events such as the Triennale, Monumenta and the Venice Biennale French Pavilion. It is especially committed to ensuring access to contemporary art for all.
The Fondation d'entreprise Ricard The Fondation d'entreprise Ricard for contemporary art supports the young creation in the domain of plastic arts. The Foundation organizes 8 exhibitions or so every year and regularly gives young curators a carte blanche to put on collective shows. It is also a place of exchange and discussion: every month the public is invited to take part in debates about sociology, poetry, contemporary art and performance in a spontaneous and convivial atmosphere. The Fondation d'entreprise Ricard also helps to fund the publication of artists' monographs and collective works.
Has our environment (space-time-social relationships-etc.), in fact and through it's permanent (re)engineering, technologification or (data)mediation for decades and in some cases centuries, become some sort of global "mystery spot"? That's certainly our point of view at fabric | ch ...
We remained relatively quiet on | rblg recently, as you may have noticed... This is mainly due to the fact that we were working hard on two new exhibitions for which we were setting up two different architectural installations.
One of these installations was an old work, Perpetual (Tropical) Sunshine (re-exhibited in the context of the Transat Festival 2012, the work was presented in one of the oldest churches of the city) and the other was a new one, Hétérochronie, quite large for an installation (~40m long), that we were presenting in a very crowded festival (Festival de la Cité 2012), in the park of the old academy (16th century building, old school of theology). It was in this later case a real "crash test" for this type of work as the public was 1° not used at all to this type of architecture and 2° very "undisciplined", with lots of kids running everywhere... (that enjoyed it a lot by the way, but were so disappointed that the screens were not "touchable"...)
For once, both exhibitions happened in our home town and base camp: Lausanne and that was the first occasion for us to show our work to our... parents! Worse public, frightening! ;) As the Transat Festival is at first a music festival, as there was a fantastic organ in the church, we took the chance to set up a special sound performance with ensemBle baBel around John Cage's work during the exhibition of Perpetual (Tropical) Sunshine: Tropical - Cage.
I'll make a detailed post later this summer about the new work, Hétérochronie (Heterochrony), once we'll be back from the "Summer break". We'll also start to post again on a more regular basis on | rblg back in September. But before that, we'll go unplugged for a few weeks!
Till then, here are a few shots from both exhibitions:
Perpetual (Tropical) Sunshine, Église Saint-François, Lausanne, June 2012.
Heterochrony, Cour de l'Académie, Lausanne, July 2012.
This 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.