Thursday, April 12. 2012
(Paranoid Shelter) - Globale Surveillance
By fabric | ch
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Last week I published a post about Paranoid Shelter, a recent architectural installation by fabric | ch that deals with "smartness", sensing and surveillance. As explained then, this new work can be displayed on its own, as a study on the "contemporary shelter" that articulates the notions of (the nearly fantasized) shelter and the one of surveillance. But this installation or "architectural device" was also created with a collaborative context in mind.
This collaboration, or at lest the first one, was for a theatrical: Globale Surveillance, for which we worked on the scenography and co-initiated the project. This is a project and performance-like theatrical staged by Eric Sadin, a french essayist and writer, based on the books Globale Paranoïa (Éditions Les Petits Matins, 2009) --fiction-- & Surveillance Globale (Climats/Flammarion, 2009) --theory--, both written by him. NOhista (sound and video design) as well as Abigail Fowler (light design) joined the team to finalize the project as well, of course, as the two comedians, Laure Wolf and Gurshad Shaeman.
Rehearsals and opening of Globale Surveillance were last February and March in Caen (France), at the Comédie de Caen-Centre Dramatique National de Normandie (CDN). The play should travel to Paris for the new theater season (12-13) and then hopefully to other cities in France and Switzerland, before, eventually to travel further away and in english.
GLOBALE SURVEILLANCE
About the play (notice from the Comédie de Caen):
We live in a world under surveillance, no one would dispute that point anymore. But what configurations do the new devices of control take, in what forms and in which way are they different from the practices of the last century? How do they alter our relationship to the world and to the others? Do they reach the point of threatening the right to privacy? Globale Surveillance sets up an hyper-monitored zone, within which actors and spectators are subject to quantities of traceability procedures, in this case made visible, conversely many scary mechanisms at work daily that are affected by the phenomenon of invisibility.
Text & staging : Éric Sadin
Scenic architecture, responsive spatial device : fabric | ch
Sound & video design : Nohista
Light design : Abigail Fowler
Comedians : Laure Wolf & Gurshad Shaheman
Paranoid Shelter on stage during the play with the two comedians (Laure Wolf, Gurshad Shaeman), CDN (Centre Dramatique National) / ESAM of Caen in France.
GLOBALE SURVEILLANCE from Bruno Ribeiro on Vimeo.
A compressed preview and short of the play by NOhista.
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Pictures: Nicolas Besson, Patrick Keller, Alban Van Wassenhove
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Co-production: Comédie de Caen-Centre Dramatique National de Normandie (CDN), France; Ecole supérieure d'arts et médias de Caen (ESAM), France.
With the support of: DICRéAM, France; Office Fédérale de la Culture, Swirtzerland; Pro Helvetia, Switzerland; Ville de Lausanne, Switzerland and Etat de Vaud (Switzerland).
Related Links:
Friday, November 11. 2011
Live Stage: Tracing Mobility [Berlin]
Tracing Mobility: Cartography and Migration in Networked Space — Exhibition, Symposium and Open Platform :: November 24 - December 12, 2011; Opening: November 23; 7:00 pm :: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10, 10557 Berlin.
Tracing Mobility sets out to examine the shifting terrain of global versus individual mobility and how its hand in hand development with networked infrastructure is transforming our conceptions of time, space and distance.
Where can we escape to when online- and offline worlds converge? What does the movement of a body in a landscape indicate when every point of the earth is within reach through the aid of digital technology? How do mobile devices and media alter our mindset and change our perception of time and space?
With installations, videos, performances and paintings, but also iPhone Apps, maps and open-source collaborations, we see artists developing strategies in order to position themselves within this dynamic topography.
A Symposium and the Tracing Mobility Open Platform offer further explorations of these themes via lectures, talks and workshops.
Exhibiting artists: Frank Abbott (UK), Aram Bartholl (DE), Neal Beggs (UK/FR), Heath Bunting (UK), Janet Cardiff / George Bures Miller (CAN), Miles Chalcraft (UK/DE), Simon Faithfull (UK/DE), Yolande Harris (UK/NL), Folke Köbberling & Martin Kaltwasser (DE), Landon Mackenzie (CAN), Open_Sailing, plan b (Sophia New & Dan Belasco Rogers) (UK/DE), Esther Polak & Ivar yan Bekkum (NL), Gordan Savicic (AT/NL), Mark Selby (UK), Michelle Teran (CAN/DE)
Programme:
November 23
7pm Opening
9pm Artist Talk with Simon Faithfull, Landon Mackenzie, Esther Polak & Ivar van Bekkum
November 26
11 – 5pm Symposium, Entrance: 20 €/15 €
2pm Participatory Performance „Performing StreetView“ by Esther Polak & Ivar yan Bekkum (NL)
(registration required)
December 12
7pm Finissage | Artist Talk with Aram Bartholl, Folke Köbberling & Martin Kaltwasser, plan b
(Sophia New & Daniel Belasco Rogers)
High-res pictures are available on request: presse [at] trampoline-berlin.com
Tracing Mobility is a project by Trampoline - Agency for Art & Media, in cooperation with Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Radiator Festival Nottingham, curated by Miles Chalcraft and Anette Schäfer.
Wednesday, July 06. 2011
This Is the Connected States of America
This is what our state lines might look like if we drew them based on who actually talks with each other, at least according to cell phone data gathered by MIT. These are the geographic clusters of who texts with whom within an area, from the MIT Senseable City Lab's Connected States of America mapping project.
If volume of communication determined state lines, New York City would break ranks with the state that shares its name and join up with oft-maligned New Jersey. Mississippi and Alabama would merge, so would most of New England. Wisconsin would split in two to join Illinois and Minnesota.
But one can also look at how a given regions talk with other regions, and how close those ties are, distance factored in. The map below is of Los Angeles' connections to the rest of the country. Red areas are those with the most connections to L.A. according to cell phone conversations.
The Connected States of America project's interactive maps and visualizations show us how different parts of the country interact, and raise the question, what is a community? There was a simple answer 60 years ago when geography determined who you talked with, bonded with, and spent your life with. Now that families are scattered across the country for college, jobs, or wanderlust, and companies set up bi-coastal offices without a second thought, that's no longer true. Should we care that the people we're most connected with aren't necessarily nearby?
Play around with the maps at MIT's site. For a little inspiration, watch this short video.
Related Links:
Tuesday, March 01. 2011
Electronic Topographies | Peter Jellitsch
Via dpr-barcelona
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“Observing the radiowave behaviour becomes a means to understand the present and anticipating the future of urban environments. In my observation the dimension unit for public space is not meter, kilometer or decibel anymore, it’s milliwatt, hertz and gigabyte.” This is Peter Jellitsch statement on his project Electronic Topographies.
This statement inevitably makes us go back in time to 1971 and think on Ugo La Pietra‘s project Sistema disequilibrante: Casa Telematica [The Domicile Cell: A Microstructure: within the Information and Communications Systems], where he aimed to create a living environment which postulates the development of information and communications systems with respect to their technical, mechanical and electronic characteristics; using them in a way that will overcome the “barrier” that they create between us and reality. Felicity Scott pointed on her article for Grey Room Architecture or Techno-Utopia:
La Pietra’s “Domicile Cell”, for instance, operated precisely through situating itself within this system. As La Pietra [optimistically] explained the strategic intimacy of his domicile unit, “it becomes a center for gathering, processing and communicating information; a microstructure that can intervene in the information system by enlarging and multiplying exchanges among people, with everyone participating in the dynamics of communication.”
The “unbalancing systems” proposed by La Pietra were based on a serie of physical and mediatic interventions within the urban landscape. In that sense, we can consider his project as a predecessor of the Electronic Topographies.
Casa Telematica by Ugo La Pietra. Pic by dpr-barcelona
After this look into the past, we can clearly talk about the interest of architects in new communication technologies and what now is called the Sentient City. Jellitsch points that cities are slightly transforming due to several phenomenas. Radio wave and the resulting ubiquitous communication possibilities is one of the very contemporary factors with which a city has to deal with. Since the beginning of the 90s a high effort was taken on the distribution of mobile communication aerials. His research is based in Austria, and he points that now, 20 years later, Austria is one of the densest covered regions in the world with 20% more mobile phone subscribers than inhabitants. Jellitsch argues that the city center of Vienna was used as testing laboratory wich stands exemplarily for the extremly dense Austrian network coverage.
The electronic topographie drawing series is trying to simulate the actual situation on electromagnetic cones which are coating the physical space. Focusing on transmitter heads for mobile communication, the drawing series allows to have a alternate view on public areas which are now qualified through it’s connecting possibilities. And he adds:
In June 1881 the commercial ministry of the K&K monarchy gave the Viennese private telegraph society a concession for the cablephone arrangement in a radius of 7,5km around the “Stephansturm”. Literally said, the communication spreading in austria has started in a small area around the Stephansdom nearly 130 years ago. Since 1993 the 1st viennese district has a 100% mobile network coverage that startet with basic technologies like GSM, followed by UMTS and now has 100% connection in 3G technologie. Due to several reasons, the inner city of Vienna has the highest connecting qualities compared to the other districts, as well as the densest transmitter pattern.
The current sentient city is subdivided, carved, segregated and coated by electromagnetic oscillation.
Complete map of Vienna’s communication network
Based on the previous data, Jellitsch worked on a “rastogram“, which basically describes how we inhabit and coexists with urban spaces where our body gets coated from electronic waves.
We can also mention here Fabien Girardin‘s research for his PhD thesis on human interactions with ubiquitous geographic information. Girardin focus his research on the increasing use of mobile devices, wireless infrastructures, and the Internet that, according to him, is changing our daily lives, not only in the way we communicate with each other or share information but also how we relate to the environment. And he adds:
Through our interactions with these technologies we access and generate an informational membrane, hovering over the spaces we live in and visit. However, this information layer only imperfectly models the reality due to coarse digitization and technological limitations, challenging the human interaction. On the other hand, the presence of this user-generated ubiquitous geographic information opens novel perspectives in understanding human activities over space and time.
The common link between Girardin and Jellitsch projects are the aspects of human interactions with ubiquitous geographic information.
Measuring connections. Peter Jellitsch
Connectivity Figure. Peter Jellitsch
The operator topographies drawn by Jellitsch shows the valency of public areas related to the amount of mobile communication users. The mobile operator firms have to install the right amount of transmitter heads, to ensure a maximum of quality. Through reading, drawing, simulating and translating the construction plans, one is able to reflect the quality of transmitter heads back to intensive public areas.
The electronic topographies’ drawing series is trying to simulate the actual situation on electromagnetic cones which are coating the physical space. Focusing on transmitter heads for mobile communication, the drawing series allows to have a alternate view on public areas which are now qualified through it’s connecting possibilities, that are reflected on the complete set of the Electronic Topographie maps.
Electronic Topographie map. Peter Jellitsch
Electronic Topographie map. Detail. Peter Jellitsch
As a final point of his research, Peter Jellitsch worked on two specific issues of the project:
[1] The roentgenograms. These are two models made with acetate sheet, plexiglas, lightconstruction, aluminium sticks and a tripod. Roentgenograms shows an alternative top-view on two public spaces in the 1st Viennese district. Cutted through an invisible electromagnetic cone, the viewer is looking through a 54m thick electronic data-cloud that is coating the city of Vienna.
Roentgenogram. Model 1. Peter Jellitsch
[2] Coated Environment [animation, 1:20min]. The general technical progress has led to an estrangement and perceptual change of a person in the relation to his/her environment. The coated environment animation could be seen as recording and notional grading of our surrounding through crossing hidden audiovisual signals. The intent of the animation is the concentrated and conscious perception of an existing physical realm, and attempts to extend the pure seeing into an alternate cognition.
Coated Environment. Filmstill 02. Peter Jellitsch
The “hybridization” of space is only an expression of wider radical changes between analytical systems [order and spacing] to synthetic [complexity, connectivity, permeability] ones. In a system characterized by its high capacity for communication, if space becomes a mix between reality and virtual presence, the separation between private and public space becomes obsolete. According to this theory of urban permeability, the concept of “filter” is important as a new indispensable device. Filter as a mean of connection with the capacity of handling private/public, real/virtual, inside a system where the channels are not separated anymore. Now these channels are communicating -APERTURE-.
From the paper Aperture, Urban Hybridization
Now we’re facing a renewal of the urban experience. With the growing complexity of cities and the fragmentation of urban space, the experience of the city ceases to be static-reflected by city maps and grows as dynamic flows. And the importance of the Electronic Topographies project lies in the way it shows how public spaces become the sum of the built environment and our virtual interactions.
Are we already leaving inside Ugo La Pietra’s “Domicile Cell”?
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Thanks to Peter Jellitsch for sharing his project with us!
Recommended readings:
- The video Coated Environment by Peter Jellitsch can be visited at vimeo
- Fabian Girardin PhD Thesis Aspects of implicit and explicit human interactions with ubiquitous geographic information
- El espacio público como catalizador de colectividades locales by Domenico di Siena [SPANISH]
- To this date, Ecosistema Urbano is working on Smart Streets: a research proposing “a public space equivalent to the innovative self-organizing and exchange processes occurring on the web”
Personal comment:
To my knowledge, Dunne & Raby are among the first who brought (back --as communication was a quite proheminent theme in the architecture of the late 60ies and early 70ies--) this theme of electromagnetism into design and architecture during the late 90ies and early 00oes and study the effect of these invisible landscapes. A lot of work has been done since around this theme then.
More recently, the research of Timo Arnall about elastic space can be mentioned (he just recently published this video about wifi territories, that has been rebloged a lot since).
"fabric | ch", Art Contemporain et Nouveaux Médias (éd. D. Moulon), Scala (Paris, 2011)
Thursday, February 17. 2011
Interview with Zach Gage
Via Rhizome
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By Joshua Noble on Wednesday Feb 16th, 2011
”Between the ubiquity of Internet access and the fact that data has no objective tangible form, internet users have long been plagued with the problem of determining the value of the content they are ingesting.” - Zach Gage
Seen in a certain light, the core of technological mediation has always been presence, absence, and distance. Writing established the possibility of presence during absence, arrows and gunpowder created force at a distance, the telephone created presence at distance, and network computing fundamentally altered the nature of being “absent” or “present” to an almost unrecognizable degree. No small surprise then that contemporary “media art” practice seems to return to these questions as being fundamental investigations. The question of what “presence” could be was explored and expanded throughout the dawn of the internet age: Ken Goldberg’s TeleGarden, Eduardo Kac’s concept of Telepresence, Sven Bauer, Heath Bunting, to grab but a few names. Each possibility of a new field of entry, a new method of retaining, mapping, signifying, and storing, opened a rich possibility. Now fast forward fifteen years and ever-presence is exhausting, a nuisance that forever asks and returns only the vague rewards of a slot-machine and seems to fray our sense of privacy, meaningfulness, boundary, and perhaps even self. So how then to artistically respond to this? Exhibit: Zach Gage.
His works are at once sophisticated and remarkably simple, both in presentation and concept in a way that might be recognizable to Joseph Kosuth or Lawrence Weiner, rather than the Baroque conceptual complexity on display in much media art in the 90’s. Computational art or interactive art has generally taken two tacks in dealing with the complexities of technology itself -- unabashed celebration and dystopian anxiety. At either extreme is the grandiose challenge of prediction: this possible or actual relationship to technology will lead to this consequence or benefit. The reality of living with technology is not only simpler but is often much more banal. The most refreshing element of Gage’s work is how it asks us to do nothing more than consider what is. Working with the instantly familiar data sources, Twitter, Google, chat servers, at their simplest, his work often resembles a refreshingly sharp Occam’s Razor taken to notions of the richness of data and networked experience.
His thesis show, “Data”, is an extremely visually and thematically understated installation comprised of several pieces. Small wooden boxes, wires, and simple placards: none of the forced estrangement, hand-waving interactivity, or spectacle that one associates with computer arts. In particular, one of the pieces in the show, Hit Counter stands out as particularly poignant: a simple measurement of the number of times someone has stood in front of the work. Face recognition software is used to keep track of the actual viewers and the number is displayed on an old-fashioned mechanical counter. Gage states “with no other means to judge it, Hit Counter demands to be assigned a worth based solely on its popularity.” But then, Hit Counter is not merely asking to be judged on popularity. It, like so many things in our media culture, is popularity. It’s nothing else, and it’s not any kind of popularity other than actual physical presence; a sharp reminder of the relationship between presence and popularity. No matter how many people hear about it online, what is written about it, what buzz is generated, it’s a simple box that generates a number based on how many unique people have stood in front of it. I’m not sure whether I’m more struck by the concept itself or that I am so struck by the concept as an ontological exercise: something that simply is actual physical presence. It’s odd that it is odd and, in that oddness, it is a stance closer to Sol Lewitt “Sentences on Conceptual Art” than many other re-interpretations of his legacy and ideas. Reformulating the simplest data object imaginable in the simplest terms has a markedly clarifying effect and in clarification is a rare kind of beauty. I spoke with Zach Gage about Hit Counter, as well as his larger practice.
More about it HERE.
Tuesday, February 01. 2011
Fourth Natures: Mediated Landscapes
InfraNet Lab is pleased to announce that we will be hosting a conference entitled ‘Fourth Nature: Mediated Landscapes’ at the University of Waterloo, School of Architecture, in Cambridge, ON, this Friday, Feb. 4th and Saturday, Feb. 5th. The conference brings together scholars and practitioners working at the disciplinary intersection of architecture, infrastructure, landscape and environment to present research and projects that propose emerging models for understanding ‘nature’, in its various scales and guises, in the 21st century. From the territorial to the nano-scale, mutant environments which fuse natural and artificial, technologic and infrastructural have been proliferating. Natures are monitored and controlled, ecologies are amplified or manufactured and interior landscapes are conditioned, with the intent of augmenting performance, controlling the flow of resources, monitoring data or redressing environmental imbalances. In the current scenario, the dialectic is no longer nature versus city, or natural versus artificial, but positions within a spectrum of mediation and manipulation of nature, landscape and built environment.
Speakers include:
Keynote
François Roche (R&Sie(n))
Fourth Natures: New Contexts
Cary Wolfe (Rice University, Series Editor of Posthumanities )
Alessandra Ponte (Universite de Montreal)
Christine Macy (Dalhousie University)
Andy Payne (University of Toronto) (Moderator)
Fourth Natures: New Disciplines
Lydia Kallipoliti (Cooper Union, Columbia University, Director of Ecoredux)
John J. May (UCLA and University of Toronto, Millions of Moving Parts)
John McMinn (University of Waterloo) ( Moderator)
Fourth Natures: New Practices
Martin Felsen (Illinois Institute of Technology, Archeworks, Director of UrbanLab)
Janette Kim ( Columbia University, Director of Urban Landscape Lab)
Sean Lally (University of Illinois at Chicago, Director of WEATHERS)
Liat Margolis (University of Toronto) ( Moderator)
Detailed information about the conference schedule and speakers can be found at: http://www.architecture.uwaterloo.ca/fourthnatures/
Friday, October 22. 2010
Ludlow 38 presents Maryanne Amacher's City-Links
Thursday, August 26. 2010
Skinput: Appropriating the Body as an Input Surface
fabric | rblg
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.
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