As we continue to lack a decent search engine on this blog and as we don't use a "tag cloud" ... This post could help navigate through the updated content on | rblg (as of 09.2023), via all its tags!
FIND BELOW ALL THE TAGS THAT CAN BE USED TO NAVIGATE IN THE CONTENTS OF | RBLG BLOG:
(to be seen just below if you're navigating on the blog's html pages or here for rss readers)
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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).
Now we know for sure that the residents of China aren’t watching their sunrise on a giant plasma screen (phew!) we thought it was high time to investigate how the most populated nation in the world actually spends its days. Enter Zhang Xiao, a 32-year-old photographer from China’s Shandong province. Since graduating with a degree in Art & Design from the architecture department at Yantai University he’s been documenting his homeland with an insider’s attention to detail and an unflinching eye for composition.
Not only do his images afford a close-up look at a culture so similar, yet unwaveringly different to our own, but they do so with an extraordinary awareness of aesthetics. In Zhang’s images we’re not just looking at the people’s lives within them, we’re appreciating a balance of colour, structure and form captured in the most fleeting of moments. His Coastline series somehow manages to make even the most rubbish-littered stretches of beach look appealing enough for a bit of a paddle.
Note: an interesting and superb photo/documentary collection about the electrification of the Los Angeles Basin (40-90ies). Thanks Yoo-Mi Steffen for the link!
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A project by William Deverell and Greg Hise.
"In the aftermath of Pacific Standard Time (PST), a uniquely successful collaborative project of exhibitions, public programs, and publications which together took intellectual and aesthetic stock of southern California’s artists, art scenes, and artistic production across nearly the entirety of the post-World War II era, the Getty launched an initiative with a tighter focus on architecture during the same era. “Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A.” has as one of its ambitious goals a collective explication of “how the city was made Modern.” For PST, the Getty partnered with dozens of cultural and educational institutions to offer a diverse and eclectic array of exhibits and programs. The institutional and grant-making alchemy of Getty leadership mixed with centrifugal funding and freedom worked magnificently; in sheer volume and insight alike, the meld of scholarly consideration with public programming revolutionized our collective understanding of the regional art world across four or five decades of the twentieth century. Pacific Standard Time Presents (PSTP) benefits from and builds on that considerable momentum. And that is where this on-line photographic exhibition comes in."
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.
The short film "Cannonball" artfully follows a group of skaters in search of newly empty pools behind foreclosed homes in and around the arid sprawl of Fresno other inland California suburbs that have been blighted by the housing collapse and ensuing recession. It has some NSFW language, but it's undeniably powerful—and a poignant meditation on greed, materialism, and an enduring kind of joy.
Beside the nice critical and twisted skateboarder's view of this documentary (I always liked twisted skaters and the way they "read" the city... probably because I was one myself...), its photography looks quite great too!
Noted at the excellent thingsmagazine.net is a new project from photographer Michael Wolf, who navigated his way through Google's Street View map of Paris to create some beautiful images of the city...
Those familiar with Street View will know that in addition to capturing the topography of a city at street level, the programme also, inevitably, captures its inhabitants. With their circular, air-brushed faces, the majority of the figures digitised for Street View are largely unaware of the Google cars with their rooftop cameras.
Now the inhabitants of Paris also find themselves in Wolf's artistic take on the Google mapping project. And he's retrieved some lovely moments of people and things caught for a single arbitrary moment on a particular day in the city.
By way of an explantion of his intentions with the Paris Street View project, thingsmagazine offers this quote from Wolf:
"The problem is that compared to Asia, Paris is a stagnant city – very little has changed architecturally since Atget's times, and the cliches are a nightmare to get out from under of. Strangely enough, it was Google Street View which enabled me to take any photos at all of Paris.
"I spent weeks going through the city on my monitor, street by street, looking into windows, discovering reflections, searching out interesting juxtapositions, topologies, trying various crops/styles (Frank, Doisneau, Ruscha, and so on). The lack of a third dimension wore me down at times, but it was quite an interesting journey."
To see all the images from the project, check out the Paris Street View page at photomichaelwolf.com.
Growth rendering device [dwbowen.com] by David Bowen is a charming hybrid installation at display in the BioLogic Art Gallery at SIGGRAPH09. It consists of a pea plant fed by a hydroponic solution, a scanner and inkjet printer, joined into a self-documenting feedback system: the system documents the plant's growth - enabled by the system's nurture and light - by scanning it every 24 hours and printing the resulting outline on a paper roll right underneath the plant. The paper roll is then scrolled four inches to make space for the next print. The result is a growing series of daily plant portraits, documenting the full lifecycle of the plant.
This post was written by Moritz Stefaner, a researcher and freelance practitioner in the field of information aesthetics. Occasionally, he blogs at well-formed-data.net.
In a feat of self-explanatory titling, David Lynch has just launched Interview Project. It is, as the filmmaker states in his video intro, "a road trip where people have been found and interviewed." Taking in 20,000 miles across the US, a new film will be up online every three days...
Despite Lynch's hilarious misgivings concerning watching films on the small screen, Interview Project's natural home is clearly the internet.
Viewiers can watch each short film online and also follow the route of the filmmakers as they trek the 20,000 miles from the US west coast to east (and back) in 70 days.
Lynch says that "the people who were interviewed – each... was different" and hopes that the films will offer viewers the chance to "meet these people." So far so vague, but this is partly the attraction of Lynch's project.
From the pseudo-quaint welcoming of the viewer who has "tuned in" to Interview Project, Lynch introduces the first of the films: Jess interviewed in Needles, California.
Jess talks briefly about his life, his regrets and, in the most poignant line of the film, reveals that his ex-wife "liked drugs and other men better than me".
With 121 interviews filmed so far (all billed as Coming Soon on the site) no doubt there will be some more surprises along the way.
Un projet web intéressant en cours de réalisation par David Lynch: documentaire distillé durant une longue période qui rend compte de sa traversée des Etats-Unis.
Toutes proportions gardées, cela me rappelle un peu ce qui avait été fait avec le site Parisienne dans les années 2000: voyages de membre de la communauté d'alors "sponsorés" par Parisienne contre un contenu publié chaque jour ou presque (photos et textes uniquement à l'époque). Deux voyages avaient été soutenus alors: Zurich to Pakistan (qui s'était arrèté en Iran juste après le 9.11) et un second Lausanne to Los Angeles (Siggraph symposium, pour présenter le projet Networked Parisienne People).
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.