Friday, January 07. 2011Critical Futures Debate: A Domus Event in LondonCourtesy of Domus Moderated by Joseph Grima (Domus), all are invited to the free Critical Futures event starting at 6:30pm on January 13th, which will focus on a debate on the future of architecture criticism followed by complimentary drinks and further discussion after the talk. Participants include Charles Holland (author, Fantastic Journal), Peter Kelly (Blueprint), Kieran Long (architecture critic, Evening Standard), Geoff Manaugh (author, BLDGBLOG), and Beatrice Galilee (writer, curator, DomusWeb, The Gopher Hole). The event is located at The Gopher Hole, 350-354 Old Street, London, EC1V 9NQ. More event description after the break. Over the past decade, epochal transformations have profoundly reshaped the context within which architecture is conceived and debated. The Internet has made images and information free and instantly ubiquitous; magazines, once the undisputed platforms for the criticism of architecture and design, have been challenged to redefine their purpose and economic model in the light of dwindling readerships; blogs have given a global audience, potentially of millions, to anyone with an Internet connection. In all of this, architecture criticism in the traditional sense appears to have all but vanished – not only from the Internet but from magazines themselves. As Peter Kelly, editor of Blueprint, wrote in a recent editorial, “As traditional publishing media and institutions become less influential, one wonders where architects can go to find informed, intelligent criticism of their work”. Does, as author of BLDGBLOG Geoff Manaugh proposes, the designer of the videogame Grand Theft Auto have more influence as an architect than David Chipperfield? Is criticism in the traditional sense still relevant or useful? If the role of the print publication in contemporary production irreversibly declines, what is its future role? What forces will shape architectural production in a post-critical environment? Is, as Kelly writes, a more realistic and rigorous approach to architectural criticism online urgently needed? As the first in a three-part series of debates on the future of architecture criticism organized by Domus in London, Milan and New York to celebrate the launch of its new website, this discussion will bring together writers, editors, bloggers and theorists active in the field today to address these and other questions. The event will be hosted by The Gopher Hole, an exhibition and events space in Shoreditch, London.
Wednesday, December 15. 2010What should design researchers research? Report from 2020-----
I was invited by the Design Research Society to speak at their symposium in Birmingham [UK] . Their theme: "2050 and All That". So first I did a quick scamper through Peak Everything: peak climate, peak biodiversity, peak oil, peak food, peak water, peak credit and so on; I touched on Adbusters' notions of a Doomsday Machine Economy and True Cost economics; and I repeated my proposition that we are all emerging economies now For part 2 of my talk, I tabled two keywords that I find work well in re-framing our situation as "terrible - but not hopeless". The first word was catagenesis which means “renewal through reversion to a simpler state - followed by the emergence of a novel form of society”. The second word was resilience which means [in the words of Transition Towns] "the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance, and reorganize, while undergoing change". I concluded this second part of my talk with the proposition that design research needs to evolve from a human-centered to an all-of-life-centered activity. In preparing part 3 of my talk, I had a good idea that, given what I know about design researchers, they'd be thinking by this point: "yeah, yeah, end of civilization, yadda yadda - but where's the cool research opportunity?" So I went to Birmigham prepared. I asked the design researchers to imagine, with me, that a Doors of Perception University had been established and that, in 2020, a degree-awarding ceremony was about to take place:
Twenty-five PhDs were to be awarded at this ten-years-from-now ceremony - and I had brought along copies of the theses of the successful candidates to show them. And here they are:
[I believe Dena Fam may aleady be busy on just this PhD, in which case apologies].
Wednesday, December 01. 2010“Distance versus Desire” by Eric KluitenbergVia Networked Performance ----- by Jo
Distance versus Desire* by Eric Kluitenberg: Clearing the ElectroSmog
The desire to transcend distance and separation has accompanied the history of media technology for many centuries. Various attempts to realise the demand for a presence from a distance have produced beautiful imaginaries such as those of telepresence and ubiquity, the electronic cottage and the reinvigoration of the oikos, and certainly not least among them the reduction of physical mobility in favour of an ecologically more sustainable connected life style. As current systems of hyper-mobility are confronted with an unfolding energy crisis and collide with severe ecological limits — most prominently in the intense debate on global warming — citizens and organisations in advanced and emerging economies alike are forced to reconsider one of the most daring projects of the information age: that a radical reduction of physical mobility is possible through the use of advanced telepresence technologies. ElectroSmog and the quest for a sustainable immobility The ElectroSmog festival for ‘sustainable immobility’, staged in March 2010 [1], was both an exploration of this grand promise of telepresence and a radical attempt to create a new form of public meeting across the globe in real-time. ElectroSmog tried to break with traditional conventions of staging international public festivals and conferences through a set of simple rules: No presenter was allowed to travel across their own regional boundaries to join in any of the public events of the festival, while each event should always be organised in two or more locations at the same time. To enable the traditional functions of a public festival, conversation, encounter, and performance, physical meetings across geographical divides therefore had to be replaced by mediated encounters. The festival was organised at a moment when internet-based techniques of tele-connection, video-telephony, visual multi-user on-line environments, live streams, and various forms of real-time text interfaces had become available for the general public, virtually around the globe. No longer an object of futurology ElectroSmog tried to establish the new critical uses that could be developed with these every day life technologies, especially the new breeds of real-time technologies. The main question here was if a new form of public assembly could emerge from the new distributed space-time configurations that had been the object of heated debates already for so many years? There was a sense of unease when looking back at the bold promises of remoter life and work in the ‘electronic cottage’ that futurologists such as Alvin Toffler spelled out for us in the early 1980s, in books such as “The Third Wave” (the ‘coming information age’ as the third wave, after agricultural and industrial society) [2]. As part of his near-future explorations conducted well before the rise of widespread internet use, Toffler enthusiastically embraced the suggestion that a radical reduction of (physical) mobility would become possible by the rise of ever more sophisticated communication and information technologies and the integration of home and workplace in the electronic cottage. Not only would this transformation, in Toffler’s vision, reap great ecological benefits, it would also initiate a grand revitalisation of the ‘oikos’, the household and the family unit. The electronic cottage should ideally be a real-time connected living and working space, allowing a new kind of digital artisan / entrepreneur to emerge who would be absolved from rush hour-traffic while being ultimately flexible in making his or her own work and private arrangements. The main advantage of the new work/life unit was its inherent efficiency, where meetings would be arranged solely when strictly necessary and flexible according to need and availability of everyone involved in the process. The main element won back from the congested systems of collective work and travel was time. Time that could instead be invested in the ‘oikos‘, the home, family life, and local social relations, that could help to restore the psychic fabric of society, which had become unravelled through the brutal forces of ‘second wave’ grand scale industrial modernisation. Work and life at home could now be brought into unison again. Today, however, more than 25 years after these all bold claims, we can observe exactly the reverse trend: Never before have wo/men travelled more and farther. Not least because of their improved capabilities to keep in touch with the ‘home base’ from afar. With advanced communication techniques work has entered the sphere of private life and mostly diminished the space and time for the oikos. The simultaneous exponential innovation of transport technologies and logistics, in particular in the automobile and aviation industry, have had a cataclysmic effect on this ‘fatal’ trajectory. The system of hyper-mobility has quite literally overheated itself, and seems unstoppably heading for a crash. Even more so, it seems to exhaust itself at an exponential rate. While most people do enjoy living in a global village, few appreciate a forced life in the local village. Rather than moving towards a sustainable immobility, we seem to be heading towards a global ecological disaster scenario. The crucial question for ElectroSmog was whether a critical reconsideration of this idea of a sustainable immobility was possible, both in theoretical and practical terms. Necessity and failure The urgency of the search for alternatives for the current crisis of hyper-mobility was illustrated graphically by the opening conversation of the festival “Global perspectives on the crisis of mobility”. In our first video chat with the crew of Sasahivi media in Nairobi we talked about the daily commute in Kenya’s capital. The city has seen a sharp increase in motorised travel in recent years, leading to over-congested roads and unbearably intense rush hour traffic. To avoid the worst the people at Sasaivi traditionally would leave their homes early in the morning, before rush hour, and return only late, often very late at night. During the day roads were simply too busy. So, how long would a daily commute take? - “about two to three hours”, and what distance would they have to cover? - “about 2,5 to 3 kilometres” (!). Next we connected with Dutch architect Daan Roggeveen who is conducting the research project Go West together with journalist Michiel Hulshof about the development of new metropolises in Central and Western China [3]. They had just come back from a field trip in Wuhan, and Roggeveen explained that they had found that about 500 new cars were entering the streets of Wuhan every day. We then asked him how many cities of similar size were currently present in China, and he replied about 30, not counting Shanghai and Beijing. In short, by a (very) moderate count some 15.000 new cars were entering Chinese roads daily as we spoke. We then listened to a short video message by Partha Pratim Sarker from Dhaka, Bangladesh relating similar experiences and being hopeful that new communication technologies could do something to alleviate the stress of the streets. Next up film maker Aarti Sethi from Delhi told us that by her estimate some 1000 new cars entered Delhi roads every day, especially intensified by the introduction of the Tata, the low cost automobile that obviously replaces many polluting motor-ricksha’s, but still. In a nutshell we received a chilling summary of a global exponential rise of motorised mobility through these first hand reports. With car use, air travel and motorised transportation not diminishing in the developed economies this system of hyper-mobility out of control seems to approach its limits rather sooner than later, and virtually all counter-strategies so far seem entirely ineffective. The Spectre of Imaginary Media Imaginary Media are machines that mediate impossible desires. Imaginary media typically emerge in situations where the living environment imposes inherent limitations that one cannot transcend. The desire to exceed these limitations produces beautiful phantasies, and in the case of imaginary media they are projected onto technological systems — both existent and inexistent — that are supposed to realise what an ordinary human existence is unable to deliver. Imaginary media are the techno-imaginary constructs that populate the domain of impossibility. One manifestation of this desire to transcend the limitations of living experience is the longing for immediate contact across any distance or divide. And it is this desire for a ubiquitous telepresence, replacing the actual presence here and now, more than anything else, that has fuelled the development of new media and communication technologies. This desire is in fact so strong that even in lowest bandwidth environments tremendous investments of mental and emotional energy can be observed, across different technological and historical settings (recent examples are for instance the IRC text chat or SMS text messaging). ‘Signal’ in these case is interpreted as ‘contact’, and a phantasmatic projection of connection and interaction is projected onto the faintest of signals, aided further by the curious emergence of synaesthetic perceptions where minute changes in tone, rhythm or even wording can produce intense bodily sensations and responses. This intermingling of imaginary and actual qualities of connection-media has obscured the discussions about the benefits and limits of telepresence technologies thoroughly. Regardless if one is talking about mobile phone use, deep technological experimentation in telepresence labs, on-line virtual environments of the Second Life type, high powered tele-work centres, or more regular real-time web applications and video chat systems, it seems very difficult to escape this aspect of the phantasmatic. Critical scrutiny, however, needs to cleanse itself from these phantasmatic distortions if it is to get anywhere with its task of establishing clear boundaries and areas of possibility. For ElectroSmog the central question was, can we convene a public event, a festival, with everything you might expect from it, where audiences and presenters from a host of different countries and regions of the earth can meet, interact, encounter, exchange without having to travel outside of their locale? Or in even more mundane terms, can an international festival be staged without anybody travelling and still be a viable public event? And while the technologies used worked fine most of the time, the answer to this central question was clearly “No”. However, this ‘failure’ became clear in a rather surprising way. What the festival showed through its radical approach to this question is that remote connection works excellent in an active network. In situations where connections were established between active contributors to a discussion or project, exchange was often very productive and the experience rewarding for all participants. But when attempts were made to integrate a public of relatively passive observers, the traditional ‘audience’, the experience broke down. Remote connection also did not bring people together locally. The overwhelming sense of all festival events was that in the (remote) communicative process all nodes of the network must be active ‘throughout’. No real sense of co-presence between local audiences in different sites (even though they were often visible and audible to each other) came about, while locally audiences seemed little inspired to physically show up at the networks nodes to witness a process they could also follow from the comfort of their home via the webcast. The interesting question here is why? Could playful interfaces, allowing audiences to interact across different localities have helped to create this sense of co-presence? Certainly it would have helped to create this sense in situations where audiences were actually present in different connected spaces. However, curiously, exactly those programs were generally well visited that showed strong local participation and a minimum (the ‘at least one’ rule) of connected localities. Much can be done to improve the experience, but even in the deliriously transmediated environment of the ElectroSmog central connection node, the theatre space of De Balie in Amsterdam, the energy never entirely seemed to materialise. The rather inevitable conclusion that must be drawn from this is that the idea of a replacement of physical encounters by mediated encounters is simply an illusion. First of all, this mediated encounter denies the unspoken subtle bodily cues that shape actual conversation.The experience of co-presence in the same space is determined by so many perceptible and sub-liminal incentives that digital electronic media do not capture, that the idea of an immersive experience relies more on the phantasmatic cover of these absent cues and the curious human capacity for synaesthetic perception, than on the performative capabilities of the medium. A digital video-link certainly does not replace these subliminal cues. Still, more important for the ultimate failure of the telepresence ideology is that it denies the libidinal drive for encounter, belonging, and identification that is so important for a successful staging of a public event such as an arts and culture festival.There is also a sobering lesson for curators that excellent content and contributors as such do not translate into public success. The desire for sharing the space with others and with the influential in a particular social circle or figuration, is a much stronger motor it seems for public appeal. Remoteness, one of the themes in the festival, cannot be so easily transcended in the telepresence scenario as hoped for. It is this libidinal drive for connection, identification and belonging that propels the development of new media and communication technologies. These technologies are greeted with great enthusiasm as long as they are able to conjure up a phantasmatic image of connectedness that is able to cover (u)p the lack of actual presence and (physical) contact. However, this phantasmatic projection is never able to displace the feeling of a lack entirely, and thus a surplus desire remains that needs to be satisfied by other means. The consequence is that an intensified use of communication technology does not lead to less, but instead to an increased desire for physical encounter. This observation is also remarkably concurrent with what mobility researchers have concluded about the actual behaviour of people in environments deeply saturated with advanced communication technologies. While some effects can be observed that can lead to a moderation of certain forms of travel and transport (tele work, on-line and phone conferences and so on), the indirect generative effects of these communication media tend to create intensified mobility patterns in these same regions (i.e. not necessarily work of profession related). Communication media serve all kinds of practical purposes, obviously, and also those that can replace the necessity of physical encounter, movement, travel and its associated hassles. There is, however, a point at which the lack presence and contact brings the phantasmatic projection of the technologically enabled communication process to a point of crisis. And this is the moment when people start up the engine of their cars - the moment when the imaginary medium and the libidinal drive meet in a frontal crash. Dilemmas after the crash of media and before the crash of hyper-mobility In all this the urgency of our quest for a sustainable immobility is not lessened. The apparent failure of telepresence technologies leaves us stranded with a huge dilemma. Not to act is really not an option given the intensified pressures of a mobility system out of control. But are there any solutions? Unfortunately there are as yet not too many reasons to be hopeful. The first step forward towards a new more sustainable regime of mobility and connectivity, and a new balance between mobility and immobility, would be not to believe in linear narratives, neither positivistic nor fatalistic. More communication technology does not automatically lead to less physical mobility. But equally, the current systems of hyper-mobility cannot grow at an exponential rate indefinitely. They will encounter new energetic, ecological, and with that also increasingly economic limits. The other observation that mobility researchers generally point to (next to the failure of communication technology) is that price is about the only mechanism that does seem to have a discernible effect on actual (mobility) behaviour. As currently widely used energy systems (fossil fuels) become increasingly scarce, their price will inevitably go up. This will transform mobility from a right (or a perceived right) into a privilege, constructed along the traditional lines of socio-economic segregation (income, profession, class). The struggle over the privileges of mobility and movement will create a new consciousness about their spatial deployment (who is allowed to travel where and by which means?). This new consciousness of segregation will undoubtedly spark conflict and critical debate. The second step would be to accept the need for hybrid and therefore ‘messy’ solutions. The economics of mobility will undoubtedly play an important role in shaping future mobility regimes. The exploration of alternative sources of energy and alternative transportation systems and technologies provide another avenue to look for viable escape routes. The on-going refinement of communication tools, media environments, tele-work arrangements and 21st century electronic cottages and other models of sustainable immobility will also play a role in those situations where practical advantages take priority over the libidinal drive for encounter. (Tele-)Presence researcher Caroline Nevejan emphasises that the new communication technologies do not offer us ideal solutions at all, but they will in the future become increasingly indispensable. [4] The least desirable scenario is that of the crash, the ‘accident-catastrophe’ preprogrammed in current systems of hyper-nobility. Given the tidings from a confused planet rushing at high-speed into a global traffic jam, reported at ElectroSmog, this scenario cannot be excluded from our considerations for now. Eric Kluitenberg
Notes: 1 - An overview of documentation resources from the festival can be found at: * This text was written for the upcoming issue in the Acoustic Space series (No.8), co-published by RIXC centre for new media culture in Riga and the Art Research Lab of Liepaja University: “Following the theme of ENERGY this issue will look at different social and cultural aspects of energy in the contemporary human society. It will also investigate the notion of ’sustainability’ from various perspectives - artistic, scientific, technological, architectural, environmental.” (More info soon at the RIXC on-line store: http://rixc.lv/kiosks/) The text is an extended version of a talk given at Impakt Festival 2010 “Matrix City”, in Utrecht as part of the Superstructural Dependencies Conference, October 15, 2010.
Related Links:Personal comment: We already published around this question of "mediated mobility" or "immobile mobilities" within the frame of the sustainable approach on | rblg. John Thackara is on this question too and it interests us quite a lot in the context of future projects. We published on this particular event some time ago and this is an interesting, yet nuanced follow-up by Eric Kluitenberg about the "ubiquity" and/or "tele-" concepts. Tuesday, July 13. 2010Clip/Stamp/Fold - The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197XVia WMMNA ----- Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196x-197x is a traveling exhibition that started its journey at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City back in 2006, flew to Montreal, Oslo, Kassel, Murcia, Vancouver and London. It has now landed at NAiM/Bureau Europa in Maastricht (NL.)
Clip/Stamp/Fold chronicles the eruption on the architecture scene of the 1960s and 1970s of architectural little magazines that challenged the discipline and saw it as a space for experimentation and debate. The term "little magazine" doesn't refer to the size of the publications. It was coined in the mid-twentieth century to designate progressive literary journals, produced without concern for immediate commercial gain.
The exhibition was conceived by architectural historian Beatriz Colomina whose fantastic work i discovered 2 years ago through one of her books Domesticity at War. She researched the Clip/Stamp/Fold show together with her architecture students at Princeton University. More recently, Colomina sent some of them to Playboy's archives in Chicago to investigate the critical role that the magazine played in promoting modern architecture and design in the '50s, '60s and '70s. I wouldn't mind a book or exhibition describing the result of that exploration.
Many of the radical magazines featured in the exhibition were self-published and short-lived, they were written by dissatisfied student, architects who championed a more political approach to buildings and cities, theoretician, etc. Others are commercial and professional magazines still printed today that, at some point in their history, were influenced by the graphics and discussions of their avant-garde contemporaries. In addition to a selection of rare originals displayed inside plastic bubbles, and a timeline following the evolution of little magazines over two decades, the exhibition screens video interviews with some of the editors involved. The covers and names of the magazines have a punk attitude that still attracts the eye, their content ranged from the presentation of experimental architecture to dry theory and articles akin to political pamphlets. Some critics have claimed that the energy and inventiveness of that era has long been glamored away by swanky design and glittering starchitects. I'm not so sure of that, sometimes i have the feeling that blogs such as BLDGBLG bring a new spin on the architecture discourse by the way they constantly and often unexpectedly go back and forth from past and future and introduce in the discussion ideas from different disciplines and perspectives.
It was interesting to see how much Archigram popped up throughout the exhibition. Not only because they had some of the most flamboyant and catchy graphics but also because of the way other magazines would refer to their work.
From Ron Herron's 1964 Walking City advancing onto the cover of both Aujourd'hui: Art et Architecture and Design Quarterly in 1965....
To the photomontage on a cover of ARse from 1971. Much more critical, this one stars Peter Cook commenting a drawing of Archigram's first commissioned project, the Monte Carlo Entertainments Centre, to other members of Archigram. The sub-title "Archigoon Wins at Monte Carlo" implicates Archigram as part of contemporary architecture's fixation on consumer culture at the expense of social issues, during a time, ARse argued, that demanded architects' political engagement.
By the way, the elegantly-named title ARse was the acronym for a variety of words that changed from issue to issue - "Architects for a Really Socialist Environment," or "Architectural Radicals, Students & Educators" - but was always followed by the invitation, "Or Whatever You Want to Call Us."
Every new installation brings a local or regional addition to the core of the exhibition. The stopover in Maastricht extended the focus to Dutch magazines published from the 80s up to the present, in an attempt to investigate how little magazines continued to act as vehicles of critical expression after the '70s. Volume reviewed the opening of Clip/Stamp/Fold in Maastricht. The images i took are on flickr. Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196x-197x is at NAiM/Bureau Europa in Maastricht until September 26, 2010.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture
at
09:28
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, design (graphic), history, magazines, research, speculation, theory, thinkers
Friday, July 09. 2010Quotes of the Day: On the Evils of Air ConditioningVia TreeHugger -----
Cover, Henry Miller's Air Conditioned Nightmare Air conditioning is not only an environmental problem, it is also a social problem. In the post Air Conditioning and Urbanism, I wrote: We should consider also the insidious effect of central air- how it enables the development of parts of the country previously uninhabitable and which would still be but for the constant cooling, and how it is destroying the street culture of areas already established. How we are sacrificing neighbourhood and community by forcing our immediate personal climate to adapt to us instead of us adapting to it. Read the full story on TreeHugger
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture
at
10:02
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, artificial reality, books, climate, conditioning, theory, thinkers, urbanism
Tuesday, June 15. 2010William J. MitchellVia Archinect ----- Bill Mitchell, former dean of MIT's School of Architecture and Planning, dies at age 65 He was an outspoken advocate for radically transforming infrastructure to create responsive sustainable cities, and played an instrumental role in transforming MIT's physical campus.
- MIT Personal comment: That's a real sad news... His books, in particular City of Bits (published in 1996) had a great influence on our work and approach when we started fabric | ch, back in 1997. Wednesday, May 19. 2010The Anthropocene Debate: Marking Humanity’s ImpactVia WorldChanging & Is human activity altering the planet on a scale comparable to major geological events of the past? Scientists are now considering whether to officially designate a new geological epoch to reflect the changes that homo sapiens have wrought: the Anthropocene.
In a recent paper titled “The New World of the Anthropocene,” which appeared in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, a group of geologists listed more than a half dozen human-driven processes that are likely to leave a lasting mark on the planet — lasting here understood to mean likely to leave traces that will last tens of millions of years. These include: habitat destruction and the introduction of invasive species, which are causing widespread extinctions; ocean acidification, which is changing the chemical makeup of the seas; and urbanization, which is vastly increasing rates of sedimentation and erosion. Human activity, the group wrote, is altering the planet “on a scale comparable with some of the major events of the ancient past. Some of these changes are now seen as permanent, even on a geological time-scale.” Prompted by the group’s paper, the Independent of London last month conducted a straw poll of the members of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), the official keeper of the geological time scale. Half the commission members surveyed said they thought the case for a new epoch was already strong enough to consider a formal designation. “Human activities, particularly since the onset of the industrial revolution, are clearly having a major impact on the Earth,” Barry Richards of the Geological Survey of Canada told the newspaper. “We are leaving a clear and unique record.” The term “Anthropocene” was coined a decade ago by Paul Crutzen, one of the three chemists who shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for discovering the effects of ozone-depleting compounds. In a paper published in 2000, Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, a professor at the University of Michigan, noted that many forms of human activity now dwarf their natural counterparts; for instance, more nitrogen today is fixed synthetically than is fixed by all the world’s plants, on land and in the ocean. Considering this, the pair wrote in the newsletter of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, “it seems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing to use the term ‘anthropocene’ for the current geological epoch.” Two years later, Crutzen restated the argument in an article in Nature titled “Geology of Mankind.” The Anthropocene, Crutzen wrote, “could be said to have started in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane.” Soon, the term began popping up in other scientific publications. “Riverine quality of the Anthropocene,” was the title of a 2002 paper in the journal Aquatic Sciences. “Soils and sediments in the anthropocene,” read the title of a 2004 editorial in the Journal of Soils and Sediments. Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist at the Britain’s University of Leicester, found the spread of the concept intriguing. “I noticed that Paul Crutzen’s term was appearing in the serious literature, in papers in Science and such like, without inverted commas and without a sense of irony,” he recalled in a recent interview. At the time, Zalasiewicz was the head of the stratigraphic commission of the Geological Society of London. At luncheon meeting of the society, he asked his fellow stratigraphers what they thought of the idea. “We simply discussed it,” he said. “And to my surprise, because these are technical geologists, a majority of us thought that there was something to this term.” In 2008, Zalasiewicz and 20 other British geologists published an article in GSA Today, the magazine of the Geological Society of America, that asked: “Are we now living in the Anthropocene?” The answer, the group concluded, was probably yes: “Sufficient evidence has emerged of stratigraphically significant change (both elapsed and imminent) for recognition of the Anthropocene... as a new geological epoch to be considered for formalization.” (An epoch, in geological terms, is a relatively short span of time; a period, like the Cretaceous, can last for tens of millions of years, and an era, like the Mesozoic, for hundreds of millions.) The group pointed to changes in sedimentation rates, in ocean chemistry, in the climate, and in the global distribution of plants and animals as phenomena that would all leave lasting traces. Increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, the group wrote, are predicted to lead to “global temperatures not encountered since the Tertiary,” the period that ended 2.6 million years ago. Zalasiewicz now heads of the Anthropocene Working Group of the ICS, which is looking into whether a new epoch should be officially designated, and if so, how. Traditionally, the boundaries between geological time periods have been established on the basis of changes in the fossil record — by, for example, the appearance of one type of commonly preserved organism or the disappearance of another. The process of naming the various periods and their various subsets is often quite contentious; for years, geologists have debated whether the Quaternary — the geological period that includes both the Holocene and its predecessor, the Pleistocene — ought to exist, or if the term ought to be abolished, in which case the Holocene and Pleistocene would become epochs of the Neogene, which began some 23 million years ago. (Just last year, the ICS decided to keep the Quaternary, but to push back its boundary by almost a million years.) In recent decades, the ICS has been trying to standardize the geological time scale by choosing a rock sequence in a particular place to serve as a marker. Thus, for example, the marker for the Calabrian stage of the Pleistocene can be found at 39.0385°N 17.1348°E, which is in the toe of the boot of Italy. Since there is no rock record yet of the Anthropocene, its boundary would obviously have to be marked in a different way. The epoch could be said simply to have begun at a certain date, say 1800. Or its onset could be correlated to the first atomic tests, in the 1940s, which left behind a permanent record in the form of radioactive isotopes. One argument against the idea that a new human-dominated epoch has recently begun is that humans have been changing the planet for a long time already, indeed practically since the start of the Holocene. People have been farming for 8,000 or 9,000 years, and some scientists — most notably William Ruddiman, of the University of Virginia — have proposed that this development already represents an impact on a geological scale. Alternatively, it could be argued that the Anthropocene has not yet arrived because human impacts on the planet are destined to be even greater 50 or a hundred years from now. “We’re still now debating whether we’ve actually got to the event horizon, because potentially what’s going to happen in the 21st century could be even more significant,” observed Mark Williams, a member of the Anthropocene Working Group who is also a geologist at the University of Leicester. In general, Williams said, the reaction that the working group had received to its efforts so far has been positive. “Most of the geologists and stratigraphers that we’ve spoken with think it’s a very good idea in that they agree that the degree of change is very significant.” Zalasiewicz said that even if new epoch is not formally designated, the exercise of considering it was still useful. “Really it’s a piece of science,” he said. “We’re trying to get some handle on the scale of contemporary change in its very largest context.”
Image of person overlooking sea of clouds courtesy of Flickr photographer ewan and donabel under the Creative Commons License. Related Links:
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Sustainability, Territory
at
09:55
Defined tags for this entry: ecology, environment, geography, sustainability, territory, theory, thinkers
Friday, May 14. 2010Save the Date: Postopolis! DFVia Edible Geography
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by Nicola
In just under a month, I am delighted to announce, I will be eagerly exploring the edible geography of Mexico City. The occasion is Postopolis! DF, the third in a series of events organised by Storefront for Art and Architecture. Postopolis! was launched in New York City in 2007, and it happened all over again in L.A. in 2009. I was lucky enough to attend both events as an audience member, and to be invited to participate this time is an honour indeed. IMAGE: Postopolis! LA The way Postopolis! works is that a handful of bloggers are invited to co-curate five days of back-to-back presentations and discussions that approach the field of urban and landscape design from as many disciplines and perspectives as possible. The list of participating blogs this year forms an impressive group: Urban Omnibus (Cassim Shepard), Intersections (Daniel Hernandez), DPR Barcelona (Ethel Barona Pohl), Toxico Cultura (Gabriella Gomez-Mont), Tomo (Guillermo Ruiz de Teresa), Mudd Up! (Jace Clayton a.k.a DJ /rupture), We Make Money Not Art (Regine Debatty), Strangeharvest (Sam Jacob), and Wayne & Wax (Wayne Marshall). Together, we’re putting together a list of speakers that ranges from government officials to DJs, academics to urban farmers, and waste disposal experts to documentary filmmakers—via a healthy sprinkling of artists, architects, and designers. IMAGE: The courtyard at El Eco. The five-day marathon will take place from 4 p.m. onwards between Tuesday, June 8, and Saturday, June 12, at the Museo Experimental El Eco in the Reforma Avenue neighbourhood of Mexico City. It is completely free and open to the public, the talks will be conducted in either Spanish or English, with simultaneous translations available, and each day will end with an after-party hosted by local music blogs. Rumour has it, the entire event will be streamed live online—I’ll confirm that nearer the time. IMAGE: Clockwise: street food, the Bordo de Xochiaca dump, chinampas, and Mexican refrigerated trucks waiting to cross into the U.S. Mexico, and Mexico City itself, offer a huge amount to discuss in terms of edible geography, from the chinampa system and the wheat and maize research of CIMMYT, to a fabulous diversity of street food and the U.S. FDA’s overseas expansion. Although the full speaker list and schedule is yet to be confirmed, Postopolis! DF is shaping up to be a pretty interesting event, and I definitely hope to see some of you there. Related Links:Personal comment: This is a great event to which we took paert last year in LA (Postopolis! LA). Lots of ideas and speculations pop out from this event. If you have the occasion to go or be around (which won't be my case unfortunately), go!
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Territory
at
09:54
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, blog, conferences, fabric | ch, speculation, territory, thinkers
Monday, March 08. 2010Rethinking Curatingby mediachef
Colleagues and friends Sarah Cook and Beryl Graham have just published Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media. I had the privilege of writing the Foreword for the book, and this is, in part, how I discuss their thesis.
It is perhaps wishful thinking that this book will end the eternal recurrence of the same set of questions about what is new media, but it is a huge step forward.
Buy it. Read it. Enjoy it. Ask some new and different questions. ----- Via Northern Lights Personal comment: Following an earlier post about the same book, some short developments here by Steve Dietz.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Art, Interaction design
at
10:36
Defined tags for this entry: art, books, curators, exhibitions, interaction design, museum, theory, thinkers
Friday, February 26. 2010Vague Terrain 16: Architecture/Actionby Ruairi
Joshua Noble’s new issue of Vague Terrain is definately worth a look. He described this issue as “an exploration of space, functionality in space, and the relationship of the body to the systems around it. All technologies reshape the body and the space around the body, from the bow and arrow to the steam engine to the telephone. It may be that we are beginning to truly see how computing and ubiquitous devices will once again reshape our bodies and our conceptions of ourselves in space. It is with this emphasis that we present a selection of thinkers, artists, architects, and designers and examine and explore how their ideas will shape art, aesthetics, design, living spaces, and social structures and how those ideas will ultimately be shaped by their users and their spaces.” Articles have been written by Golan Levin, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Marilena Skavara, Mark Shepard, Pierre Proske and Joshua himself. ----- Related Links:
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Interaction design, Territory
at
13:12
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, interaction design, magazines, territory, theory, thinkers
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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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