Wednesday, June 09. 2010Floating Mobile Gardens(Image by Rael San Fratello Architects.) What better way to introduce invasive species; cluster bomb pollens on nature-deprived asthmatic children and, to the delight of Big Pharma, Claritin-addicted allergy sufferers; and deplete the coffers of post-econopocalypse cities by littering their streets with fallen fruits and leafy detritus for their under budgeted public works department to clean up, than with a floating mobile garden. (Image by Rael San Fratello Architects.) As envisioned by Rael San Fratello Architects, these nomadic gardens “would be suspended in the air from large remotely controlled dirigibles. Each inflatable craft would house thousands of smaller plants attached to long vines. A family of dirigibles would migrate within a city, moving towards areas where the heat island effect is greatest, and also migrate seasonally, traveling to southern cities during winter months and northern cities during summer months.” One wonders if there will be an outbreak of botanical piracy, whereby someone lassos in one of the floating mobile gardens by the tentacles and anchors it right above his house all summer long, its cooling shades cutting down his air conditioner use, not to mention his electricity bill. Perhaps urban adventurers will also snag one of these gardens, but only temporarily, long enough for them to explore its feral tendrils and gelatinous parterres. They'll emerge out of their sewers and their abandoned hospitals, and, squinting hard at the fullness of the sun, they'll climb up, up, up, up towards the clouds, the heaviness of their claustrophobic playgrounds giving way to buoyancy and vistas. Nearby, meanwhile, will be another parked garden crawling with Avatar cosplayers. (Image by Rael San Fratello Architects.) Finally, we read that “each plant is attached to an individual propelled device that allows it to be set free from it’s base. Controlled by GPS and GIS information and organized in flocking patterns, plants move through the city in swarms hydrating, providing shade, and bring oxygen to greenless spaces in the urban field.” Clearly this means that any rogue robo-botanical hacker will be able to stage a vegetal version of The Birds. (Go see Rael San Fratello Architects in Consume at Exit Art in New York from June 18 to August 28, 2010. A project of SEA (Social Environmental Aesthetics), Consume “is a multimedia group exhibition and event series that investigates the world's systems of food production, distribution, consumption and waste.”)
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Territory
at
09:43
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, artificial reality, ecology, mobility, nature, speculation, territory
Tuesday, May 18. 2010Rethinking Location Anytime Anywhere Everything [Berlin]Rethinking Location Anytime Anywhere Everything :: until June 19, 2010 :: Sprüth Magers, Oranienburger Straße 18, D-10178 Berlin. With works by Rosa Barba - Cyprien Gaillard - Andreas Hofer - Koo Jeong-A - David Maljkovic - Trevor Paglen - Christodoulos Panayiotou - Sterling Ruby - Paul Sietsema - Taryn Simon - Armando Andrade Tudela - Andro Wekua. Curated by Johannes Fricke Waldthausen. Evolving from the work of twelve conceptual artists, filmmakers and photographers presenting alternate interpretations of fictional geographies, imaginary sites and ‘mash-up’ destinations, the exhibition Rethinking Location reconsiders the notion of location. In an era characterized by a rapidly changing perception of time and space due to ever increasing mobility, migration and globalisation, our understanding of what a location is has significantly transformed. Taking these changes for granted, the exhibition investigates how artists consider location and geography as source material for their work. The work of Rosa Barba and Taryn Simon often derives from an interest in unusual places or improbable situations: Barba’s film The Empirical Effect (2010) explores a geographical ‘Red Zone’: weaving a fiction around the Vesuvio Vulcano, her film was shot during an actual evacuation test and, on another level, points towards the complex relationships between society and politics in Italy. Collaborating with the scientific research laboratory Observatorio Vesuviano in Naples, Barba creates a fictional documentary including surveillance cameras, seismographs and early archival material of Naples by the Lumière Brothers. Empathizing with the role of a contemporary ethnographer, the work of New York based photographer Taryn Simon oscillates between an aesthetisized realism and collective memory. The works shown in Rethinking Location symbolically refer to sites of geopolitical weight, such as the Interior of Fidel Castro’s Palace of the Revolution in Havanna and night shots of a checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah on the West Bank. In his work Cyprien Gaillard alters the hierarchy of geographical sites and their representative value by detaching them from their original connotations: it deconstructs and conflates actual landscapes perpetuated by a spirit of anachronism and ruin of both past and present. His Fields of Rest series (2010) evolves around decomposed architecture of Second World War bunkers at the coastlines of the French Normandy. Paul Sietsema’s 16 mm films, drawings and sculptures bridge color, space and movement through subjects spanning a broad geographic and temporal range. Over the last years, Sietsema has gathered archival photographs of artifacts of ‘lost cultures’, often from rare anthropological and ethnographic books. The artifacts he examines and transcribes into his own work often derive from western colonialism, industrialisation and geographic explorations including Oceania, South Asia, and Africa. In his film analyse d´une épouse (2008) he traces a ship-wreck, capturing its ruins on celluloid like timeless sculptures of a lost cultural memory. Recalling thoughts by Bourriaud of the artist as Semionaut, treating geography as source material for new work, the drifting and the displacement between different cities allows artists to enter multi-dimensional, seminal dialogues within different contexts. Within both a local and global artistic practice charted by increasing displacement, expeditions, sites, destinations, distances and routes are elements that become incrementally significant. Interested in topographies of detachment and displacement, Peru-born Aramando Andrade Tudela explores the notion of ‘tropical abstraction’. Referring to the potential of 1960s utopian modernist architecture from South America, his 16 mm film Espace Niemayer (2007) takes place in the headquarters of the French communist party in Paris. Shot mostly in close-up mode, Tudela transformed the site built 1967 – 1972 by Brasilian architect Oscar Niemayer into a non-place: a fictional site without geographical foundation. Koo Jeong-A creates mythologies and imaginary sites within the logic of existing places. Her work often gives prominence to the hidden, the ephemere, and the invisible. For the exhibition Koo Jeong-A produced a new series of works, consisting of geological and social layers where maps, drawings and signs extend to a notional geography. Furthermore, she created a site specific, secret surprise location yet to be discovered. Andreas Hofer’s work overlaps science fiction, scientific research and popular culture. Often evolving around early film noir, comics and crime literature, his multi-media installation Robert and Matt Maitland (2010) responds to the notion of the artist as an explorer. His work in the exhibition archly superimposes the protagonist from J.G. Ballard’s 1974 science fiction novel Concrete Island and the setting of a geographic exploration from a 1950s comic classic. By blending two originally detached storylines, Hofer proposes a new imaginary landscape. Today intersections between actual sites, mass media and communication technology transform places into virtual mash-up locations: archipelagos of alternating signs oscillating between the actual and the virtual. Moreover, the internet has significantly increased the presence of maps and navigation systems in our thinking. For example, it has become easier to generate maps, to share and alter them, and to create them collaboratively (e.g. GPS and geo-tagging systems like Google Maps and Google Earth). The art of Trevor Paglen blurs the border of art, science, and politics. Holding a Ph.D. in geography and operating at USC Berkeley’s geography department, Paglen uses data analysis, advanced research skills and state-of-the-art photo observation techniques to map the terrain of American military secrets. He appropriates scientific imagery and dicourses of astronomy to provide the framing for what he calls an ‘experimental geography’. In his series The Other Night Sky Paglen turns our attention to some 189 secret intelligence satellites operated by the U.S. military to keep most of the world under surveillance. The juxtaposed positions within Rethinking Location express a vast area of interconnected ideas and systems in a world where places are increasingly re-articulated and interrelated. Fostering an interdisciplinary approach, the exhibition aims to serve as inspiration to reconsider what the notion of location implies today. After the recent emphasis on networks and communities, could the focus now shift to location as a new key dimension?
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Territory
at
09:34
Defined tags for this entry: environment, exhibitions, geography, globalization, interferences, mediated, mobility, territory
Wednesday, May 05. 2010Cold Comforts: Antarctic Research Bases Are Seriously Self-SustainingVia Mammoth -----
At Wired, Andrew Blum surveys the architecture of Antarctic research stations, which, as it includes buildings which have to be towed to remain at fixed geographic points, hydraulic lifts that raise buildings in reaction to snowfall, and architecturally-induced “subzero maelstroms”, reads like a photographic companion to the recently opened Archigram Archival Project. Related Links:Tuesday, May 04. 2010Theatre for One[Image: Theater for One by Christine Jones and LOT-EK].
LOT-EK and set designer Christine Jones will be premiering their project Theater for One in Times Square, two weeks from now. It "will be up for 10 days, with performances open to the general public"—but, as the architects point out, the public is only invited "one at a time." [Image: Theater for One by Christine Jones and LOT-EK]. Specifically, the petite space is "a theater for one actor and one audience member. Inspired by small one-to-one spaces—such as the confessional or the sex peep-booth—Theater for One explores the intense emotion of live theater through the direct and intimate one-to-one interaction of actor and audience." [Images: Theater for One by Christine Jones and LOT-EK]. In many ways, I'm reminded of the dramatic intensity of Nancy Bannon's Pod Project, which consisted of "13 private, one-on-one performances housed within 13 sculpted spaces." In Bannon's work, "the viewer actually enters the performance environment and experiences a one-on-one exchange in unconventional proximity. The interiors of the sculptures/pods are personalized"—but this also means that each pod has been architecturally stylized so as to fit the dramas involved. [Image: Theater for One by Christine Jones and LOT-EK]. What I like about the LOT-EK/Christine Jones project is the blank architecturalization of this dramatic experience; portable, easily deployed, and externally neutral, the Theater for One could just as easily be reused as an interviewing station, a place for personal confrontation, or even a writing lab. It could be a dressing room, private cinema, or staging ground for psychedelic self-actualization—and I would actually love to see this thing hit the road someday, popping up all over the U.S. and abroad, to see what flexibly subjective uses people wish to put it to. NPR meets Storycorps, by way of a one-actor play.
Monday, April 19. 2010Capsule Hotel - 9 HoursVia Archinect
-----
The 9 Hours is the brand new capsule hotel unveiled in December 2009 by Tokyo-based Cubic Corp. Designed in a collaboration with designer Fumie Shibata of Design Studio S, it looks nothing like its predecessors and represents a revolution in the capsule concept. Monocle's video journalist Gabriel Leigh visits the hotel to see what's different.
Related Links:Monday, April 12. 2010The Tiniest RoomVia Yanko Design ----- In each little room is a little place where you can stay between trips. This sort of project has been done on Yanko before, see if you can spot it! But this is definitely a bit different. For shizzle. This one’s for a larger cross-section of locations. Small, independent bubbles made for versatility. For placement in places with large concentrations of people like airports, sea ports, events, resorts, international fairs. Micro locations for the macro plan. They’re small, but luxury. Equipped with a bathroom, a bedroom, a high degree of technology in a small area. Inexpensive, reduced to the essential. And guess what inspired this little ditty? A womb. The designers aim this project to transmit a feeling of wombness, I’d call it: a feeling of protection “in contrast to the movement and agitation to the outside world.” I know I get agitated by the outside world. Inside this world though, that’d be really rad! Not unlike many designers, lots and lots of them, D&F encourages you contact them if you’ve got questions (or I’m sure further their bubbletastic cause.)
Related Links:Tuesday, March 16. 2010Event:Electrosmog Festival (Amsterdam, March 18-20)by admin
International Festival for Sustainable Immobility http://www.ElectroSmogFestival.net http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=365624342173 March 18 – 20, 2010 Concept ElectroSmog is a new festival that revolves around the concept Sustainable Immobility. The festival will introduce and explore this concept in theory and practice. With Sustainable Immobility we refer to a critique of current systems of hyper mobility of people and products in travel and transport, and their ecological unsustainability. The exploration of Sustainable Immobility is a quest for a more sustainable life style, which is less determined by speed and constant mobility. A lifestyle that celebrates stronger links to local cultures, while at the same time deepening our connections to others across any geographical divide, using new communication technologies instead of physical travel . What we propose may sound a bit like a paradox: The proposition of the festival is that the unfolding crisis of mobility can only be effectively addressed by deepening our connections across geographical divides through new communication technologies. The festival wants to engage the fundamental promise of the information age that communication technologies can replace the need for physical mobility, and thus both contribute to ecological stability as well as a more rewarding both deep-local and translocal life-style. While this promise has existed since the dawn of the information age, it was never realised. New material realties, however, force us to critically re-examine these promises and seriously start to turn them into viable choices. Nothing is self-evident for us. We will also critically question the underlying premise that reliance on electronic connections and local roots is self-evidently more energy efficient and more ecologically sustainable than current systems of globalised mobility of people and goods. Is ‘going local’ the only solution? What are the true energy costs and environmental and health hazards of using even more electronic technologies (increased levels of electrosmog)? How can remote connections become a truly rewarding experience in and of themselves? We believe that only by answering such questions a viable alternative to the current unsustainable systems of hyper-mobility can be found. Bringing together a broad coalition The ElectroSmog festival brings together a broad coalition of designers, environmentalists, urban and spatial planners, technologists, artists, theorists, and engaged and concerned citizens, to explore and ‘design’ sustainable immobility. The festival stakes its claim for a radical break with the current systems of hyper-mobility not simply by discussing the issue, but by actually implementing it. To achieve this the very concept of an international festival and its traditional conventions need to be rethought and redesigned from the ground up. Connecting the local off-line local with the international on-line ElectroSmog is a truly international festival, with everything you might expect of such a festival: international debates and discussions, performances, art projects, exhibits, site specific projects, screenings, design competitions, and much more. However, no presenter will travel beyond their local or regional boundaries to participate in this event. A crucial dimension of the festival will be its on-line presence, where audiences from basically anywhere with an internet connection can follow events on-line, join in discussions and debates, and contribute to the program. Beyond the broadband enclaves ElectroSmog acknowledges from the start that bandwidth is not equally distributed across and within societies. Therefore remote connection to lower bandwidth spaces, do-it-yourself telematics, and information technologies for the majority world will be one the central concerns the festival wishes to address, again both in theory and in practice. Thematic discussions, presentations and connected debates The ElectroSmog festival-program is organised around a series of interlocking thematic programs, connected discussions and debates all transmitted live over the internet. Themes covered by these events include: Around the main program a host of satellite events is organised locally and translocally. These include: • Art projects and local interventions, including original works by Bureau des Etudes, Karen Lancel & Hermen Maat, John Cohns, Sean Kerr, Kevin McCourt & Bartolo Luque, and others. • Special events, screenings, book launches, and more. • A program of connected and localised workshops • On-line projects and environments designed specifically for the festival. ----- Via The Mobile City Personal comment:
I re-publish this announcement just to underline the term "sustainable immobility", the very interesting related questions and the growing trend about moving less (people and goods), while mainly replacing/substituting physical mobility by digital communication (mediated mobility, so to say).
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Design, Interaction design, Sustainability, Territory
at
10:02
Defined tags for this entry: conferences, design, exhibitions, interaction design, mobility, sustainability, territory
Wednesday, March 10. 2010See Who's Really Responsible for CarbonWhen someone in the States buys shoes that were made in China, the carbon emitted in their production gets added to China's tally, despite the fact that the shoes get exported. What would it look like if carbon emissions traveled with products and services as they moved from country to country? Check out the map above. Those arrows show the megatons of carbon and the direction of export. You can think of them as arrows of guilt. China, for example, emits 395 megatons of carbon making things for consumers in the States. The countries in red are the net importers of carbon and the countries in blue are the net exporters. From CBC News:
Reserachers at the Carnegie Institution used trade data from 2004 to create a model of the global flow of products in 113 countries and regions. They then associated those products with carbon emissions to determine which countries are net "importers" of emissions and which are net "exporters." "Just like the electricity that you use in your home probably causes CO2 emissions at a coal-burning power plant somewhere else, we found that the products imported by the developed countries of western Europe, Japan, and the United States cause substantial emissions in other countries, especially China," said the study's lead author Steven Davis of Carnegie, in a statement. In Copenhagen it was hard getting counties to agree to domestic emissions limits. But as this map shows, looking at domestic emissions is a simplistic way of accounting for the responsibility of carbon. In our entangled global economy, we need a more holistic approach.
----- Via GOOD Tuesday, March 02. 2010The World in a ShellOf all the shipping containers that will pass through For five years, Hans Kalliwoda and Delft The World in a Shell will premiere in Rotterdam, thereby starting its journey. Since art, technology and architecture come together In the container, the Netherlands Architecture Institute and V2_Institute for the Unstable Media are joining forces to organize a number of activities in and around the container. There will be workshops and a seminar on sustainability in art, architecture and science on April 1 at V2_. Follow Hans Kalliwoda's journey at http://www.worldinashell.net, or drop by The World in a Shell!
Because, technology and architecture coincide in The World in a Shell, the NAi and V2_ are joining forces to organize a number of activities in and around the container: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Official Opening: The World in a Shell March 27 | 17:00 | NAi Museumpark, Rotterdam
Seminar: Art, Architecture-Science Collaboration in Sustainability With Ute Meta Bauer, Robert Zwijnenberg and Hans Kalliwoda April 1 | 19:30 | Admission: € 7,50 | V2_, Eendrachtsstraat 10, Rotterdam | Reservation required
Workshop: The Power of Logic Versus the Logic of Power With Ion Sorvin (N55) and Anne Romme April 2 | 10:00–18:00 | Admission: € 20,00 | Reservation required
Urban Adventure: A Walk in the Invisible City With Petr Kazl and Wilfried Houjebek April 9 | 16:00–18:00 | Reservation required ----- Via V2_
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Sustainability
at
16:16
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, artists, conferences, exhibitions, mobility, sustainability
Monday, March 01. 2010Sonic Acts 2010: On the Poetics of Hybrid Spaceby Martijn de Waal
I just visited an interesting panel on the Sonic Acts 2010 Conference called The Poetics of Hybrid Space. When over here at The Mobile City we talk about Hybrid Space, we usually refer to the work of Adriana de Souza e Silva who in several articles has convincingly argued against the dichotomy between physical or real space on the one hand and virtual or mediated spaces on the other. The very fact that these two can longer be separated is one of the central themes of The Mobile City: media spaces and virtual networks extend, broaden, filter or restrict the experience of physical spaces, and the other way around. Interestingly, over at Sonic Acts they have adopted a broader concept of hybridization. Moderator Eric Kluitenberg explained that hybrid space is not a technical concept. Rather hybridization is about heterogenic logics that are simultaneously at work in the same space. For instance there is the top down logic of the build environment developed by the architect. But the same space may also be subjected to the logic of an informal street economy that may or may not be compatible with the ideas operationalized by the architect. The mediated experiences of the mediascape make up only one of the logics that operate in a space. Sometimes these different logics clash, sometimes they overlap, sometimes they just negate each other. However, we should understand all these different logics as real. They are all operative at the same time and together make up how a place is lived and experienced. Having said that, the addition of the new media technologies such as mobile phones has increased the density of different logics operational in (urban) space, and new cultural practices and adaptations of space are emerging as a result. This makes the urban experience more complex and messier than ever. It’s even doubtful whether we can truly get a grasp on these processes. What we can do is try to increase our sensitivity of the complexity of different logics at work. It was this issue that most of the presentations in this session addressed. Duncan Speakman’s Subtlemob The work of sound artist Duncan Speakman, who discussed his subtlemob-project, addressed several aspects of the hybridization of space through the advent of digital media technologies. A Subtlemob is a collective urban audio-experience set in urban space. Participants download an mp-3 file, head to a location in the city, and at a particular time they all press play at the same time, thereby collectively experiencing the same soundtrack. The soundtrack does not only consist of music but also of spoken instructions that the participants have to carry out (And sometimes there is different instructions for different groups of participants). It is like a flash-mob, yet more subtle. That is: flash mobs are often staged experiences that gain most of their audience and impact not at the moment itself, but because the event is taped on video and broadcasted on Youtube. A subtlemob is only to be experienced live, there are no recordings, it is all about the experience you have when you are there. You just have to be there to get it. Popout One of the starting points of this project is the work of audio culture researcher Michael Bull (I happend to do a podcast interview with him a few years ago, just in case you’d care). Bull studied the experience of the city of first walkman and later iPod users and came up with a few conclusions. First of all, a lot of people used music to augment their experience of the city, they purposely add a soundtrack to extend or alter their mood. This is not something most composers take into account, Speakman realized. Usually music is not composed with a particular spatiality in mind. One composes for an abstract listening experience, not for the person that listens to an iPod in the back of the bus. But how can you compose for those specific experiences? Speakman therefore decided to change this around, so when composing he often goes to the location his music is intended for to check out if the match is right. The second theme that has come up in the work of Michael Bull is the idea of the bubble-experience. Digital media have the affordance to make personal spaces warmer, but at the same time they make public spaces cooler. With an iPod one constructs one’s own intense experience in urban space, but it also privatizes this experience. Similarly many critics have argues that also mobile phones play a similar role. They create a ‘full time intimate community’ in which throughout the day a network of friends keeps continuously in touch with each other, even if friends are not physically present. Again this can be understood as a privatization (or parochialization) of public space.
The idea of the subtlemob is to ‘hack’ these devices to turn their logic around. Can mp3-players also be used to construct collective experiences that heighten the experience of being in public? That encourages people to observe one another rather than retracting in their mediated bubbles of private space. Teletrust The other three presentations, including work of Peter Westenberg and Elizabeth Sikiaridi, addressed related issues. Karen Lancel en Hermen Maat showed their Teletrust-installation, which consists of a full body veil that on the one hand extends the idea of a personal bubble-space. Yet at the same time it enables the wearer – by touching oneself and activating the sensors in the veil – to get in touch with stories told by other people. Is it possible to use networked media to create intimate spaces within public space?
----- Via The Mobile City Related Links:
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Interaction design, Territory
at
10:36
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, artificial reality, hybrid, interaction design, mediated, mobility, sound, territory, urbanism
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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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