"I will define transArchitectural Topography as the substrata or virtual/physical topography which underlie all connected virtual and physical spaces. transArchitectural Topography encompasses a physical location, virtual location(s), and any infrastructure that connects the two. Specifically, the transArchitectural Topography extends from a single physical space, into a single virtual space uniting the two."
michael ditullio, via marcos novak http://transtopography.blogspot.com
transarchitectural topography
double negatives
"An attempt to extract autonomous architecture responding to the environment through information network: Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM) holds a new installation“Corpora in Si(gh)te” by “doubleNegatives Architecture.” doubleNegatives Architecture is an architectural group who is engaged in crossover activities in a new area of architecture, making good use of various media and information technologies."
haecceity
"You are longitutde and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses between unformed particles, a set of non subjectified affects. You have the individuality of a day, a season, a year, a life (regardless of its duration) - a climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm, a pack (regardless of its regularity). Or at least you can have it, you can reach it." Delueze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
motion perception
"The simplification of space in Three Studies of Lucien Freud, (1969) is a necessary and typical element of all his images. With a more complex elaborated environment, the bodies would become more specifically disfigured rather than contorted by painterly motion being stretched towards its limit." Michael Betancourt ctheory.net
contour
"The contour in Francis Bacon is what Deleuze describes as a "place of an exchange in two directions: between the material structure and the Figure, and between the Figure and the Field. The contour is like a membrane through which double exchange flows" (13). This exchange links the different aspects of the painting together in a way that subverts narrative: "If a painting has nothing to narrate and no story to tell, something is happening all the same, which defines the functioning of the painting" (13). The contour in Bacon's paintings establish a relationship through which things are linked together." Lindsey Collins nwe.ufl.edu
fourth dimension
"The third bridge between design and science fiction is based on the postulate of the existence of a fourth dimension, that of time, which, when associated with the other three dimensions, becomes a gateway to a parallel world. Breaches in space-time may be found through these “wormholes”, teleportation doors and other black holes. Neither anticipation nor prediction nor retro-future, these parallel worlds are juxtaposed with present reality." (image:AntFarm) via egodesign.com
the new public
“It depends upon the passer-by
Whether I am tomb or treasure trove,
Whether I speak or remain silent,
That is due to you alone:
Friend, enter not without desire.”
Paul Valéry (arts & societies)
open work
"The poetics of the “work in movement”... sets in motion a new cycle of relations between the artist and his audience, a new mechanics of aesthetic perception, a different status for the artistic product in contemporary society. It opens a new page in sociology and in pedagogy, as well as a new chapter in the history of art. It poses new practical problems by organizing new communicative situations. In short, it installs a new relationship between the contemplation and the utilization of a work of art." Umberto Eco, “The Poetics of the Open Work” (via "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics" by Claire Bishop)
surveillance
"Surveillance cameras by necessity record interzones, the hot spots where crime might breed or deviance might spontaneously generate, in locations beyond the reach of our unenhanced optic nerves, or where everything and everyone has simply shut up shop. Business parks at night, city squares cast in gloomy shadow, empty swimming pools, the hooded entrances of hospitals, the city-like scale of airport perimeters, motorway feeder roads where human interaction is factored out of the landscape and the only transaction occurs between speed and machinery. Ballard’s work precisely records such territory, a rich topography inset with mysterious ley lines, weaving a grid to support shadowy lifestyles enacted far away from mainstream thought." Simon Sellars , ballardian.com SurveillanceSaver
concrete island
"As we drive across a motorway intersection, through the elaborately signalled landscape that seems to anticipate every possible hazard, we glimpse triangles of waste ground screened off by steep embankments. What would happen if, by some freak mischance, we suffered a blow-out and plunged over the guard-rail onto a forgotten island of rubble and weeds, out of sight of the surveillance cameras?" J.G. Ballard, Introduction to Concrete Island, 1994
lab[au]
"Instead of considering this infrastructure as a flat screen (surface) displaying pre-rendered video loops, the project is working on the architectural characteristics of the tower and its urban context. The characteristics of the building; orientation, volume, scale... are used as parameters to set up a spatial, temporal and luminous concept, which moreover allows people to directly interact with the tower.." www.lab-au.com
surveillance
"Researchers and security companies are developing cameras that not only watch the world but also interpret what they see. Soon, some cameras may be able to find unattended bags at airports, guess your height or analyze the way you walk to see if you are hiding something..... "If you think of the camera as your eye, we are using computer programs as your brain", said Patty Gillespie, Army Research Laboratory in Adelphi, Md. Today, the military funds much of the smart-surveillance research." Associated Press, msnbc
big shadow
"Shadows of the participants movements are projected upon a massive wall of a building, 7-stories high. When participants perform particular actions such as raising their arms over their heads, a giant dragon shadow appears out of the participants' shadows."
remix
"Remixability becomes practically a built-in feature of digital networked media universe. In a nutshell, what maybe more important than the introduction of a video iPod, a consumer HD camera, Flickr, or yet another exiting new device or service is how easy it is for media objects to travel between all these devices and services - which now all become just temporary stations in media’s Brownian motion." Lev Manovich
interception
"A surveillance camera being used to monitor public space was hijacked and reinstalled in a subway station. The camera was used intentionally to broaden consciousness concerning the problem of increasing lack of privacy. People entering and exiting the station were tracked by the camera,and their “capture” was projected on a station wall. The action was illegal." Roch Forowicz, via rhizome
the logo
There is a growing relationship between the corporate logo and the religious symbol. Each symbol proposes a direct relationship with the entity that it represents. Mutilation of that representation is strictly prohibited. Whereas simply representing religious iconography can result in death, the use and abuse of a corporate logo can lead to innumerable lawsuits, bouts of unemployment and banishment to the fringe of capitalist culture. (photo courtesy of rhizome.org)
gesture
"Artist Christian Jankowski... noticed a Hula-Hooper practicing regularly on a rooftop across from his apartment on Division Street. He rang her doorbell; she introduced him to other practitioners, and a performance piece was born, with performers sharing coordinated gestures from blocks away. Whatever you call the results art, aerobics, dance it was one of the most thrilling sights I’ve seen in the city all year, and one of the most poignant. The choreographer Trisha Brown did a similar piece, minus Hula-Hoops, on the rooftops of SoHo just before that neighborhood was effectively lost to artists." Holland Cotter, NYtimes
the culinary event
"The meal was open to just 40 people. They had to sign up before they could learn the address, that of a vacant bank in this city’s industrial-chic Georgetown neighborhood. Inside, a video projection played an endless loop of two women kissing. Diners sat at a long table lighted by votive candles and covered with a tablecloth made of blouses from the Salvation Army. As they passed dishes from “The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook,” guests read aloud from Gertrude Stein’s “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.” David Hochman, NYtimes
walter murch
"On every film I try to think as deeply as I can about the implied acoustic space of each scene; I then try to tailor the reverberant quality of the sound, and the tonality, to the spaces that we’re looking at. It’s endlessly fascinating, particularly because this technique flies “below the radar” of the audience. The filmmaker can have an effect on the audience without the audience knowing where that effect is coming from. Which I would guess is something that architects enjoy playing with, too." Walter Murch, on BLDGBLOG... 4/6/07
winer and karwas
"WA is a site-specific video installation created for Knoll InternationalGabriel Winer and Dana Karwas. Large-scale architectural projections turn the existing seventeenth century facade into a drive-by cinema and pedestrian spectacle."
interface
"Interactive computer music improvisation duo -interface- creates sonic textures ranging from delicate imperceptible noise to a high energy wall of sound. They have extended, surrounded, and obscured their electric stringed instruments with a variety of technologies, creating an organic, gesturally powerful computer music." arts.rpi,edu/crb
gesture
"...the work of art, its very "formation", is based not so much on a model of creativity or construction, much less on one of expressivity, but rather on a process of separation, by which an intentional, teleological movement -call it a "plot"- is arrested, dislocated and reconfigured. Reconfigured as what? Precisely as gesture." Samuel Weber
doors and passages
"If anything is described by an architectural plan it is the nature of human relationships, since the elements whose trace it records--walls, doors, windows and stairs--are employed first to divide and then selectively to re-unite inhabited space." Robin Evans
wall of silence
"The installation tackles questions of control, surveillance, transparency, permanence and the role of the public. A high wall in the shape of a pentagon is erected on Vaterlandtorget square. It consists of a wooden frame with the sides covered in a material that will disintegrate during the course of the exhibition. Initially the wall is smooth, while the weather and the interactions of birds and passer-bys transform it over time. Writing on and penetration of the wall is encouraged." oslo.urban-interface.net
from work to text
"The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination. The plural of the Text depends... on what might be called the stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers (etymologically speaking, the text is a tissue, a woven fabric). The reader of the Text may be compared to someone at a loose end...this passably empty subject strolls...on the side of a valley, an oued flowing down below (oued is there to bear witness to a certain feeling of unfamiliarity); what he perceives is multiple, irreducible, coming from a disconnected, heterogenous variety of substances and perspectives: lights, colours, vegetation, heat, air, slender explosions of noises, scant cries of birds, children's voices from over on the other side, passages, gestures, clothes of inhabitants near or far away. All these incidents are half-identifiable: they come from codes which are known but their combination is unique..."
Roland Barthes, "from work to text"
Brian Eno and the "Quiet Club", Peter Suchin
fluid life
"If we say that "LIFE" was an experiment conducted in opera's linear, modern form at the end of the 20th Century, then the installation configuration of "LIFE--fluid, invisible, inaudible..." must surely be a non-linear, decentralized flow of audio and visuals which the visitors themselves enter to experience."
ambient music
"Writing in the 1960s, Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander argued that: Under present conditions men are beginning to lose the capacity to discriminate between sound and noise - between the desirable and the irrelevant...The problem of isolating undesirable sounds is technically so hard to solve that acoustics engineers now recommend the simpler expedient of providing artificial background noise in one's own domain as an acoustic cushion or muffler. Making more noise is the only economical way, apparently, of drowning out unwanted noise and of not being overheard. It seems that the illusion of quiet can only be maintained in noise." www.slashseconds.org
panoptic fantasy
"The design of social networking and internet dating sites, showing all your friends faces in an array, seduces us with a kind of panoptic fantasy, being able to see many at once.... Just like the panopticon embeds tiny theaters in an array, these social technologies embed so many small panopticons in a matrix of connectivity. Each cell is now its own theater and watchtower."
Tony Schultz, http://thewinger.com/words/category/tony/
sensual body
"The sensual body finds itself living amidst an expansive set of technologies. In this ever-evolving computational world we encounter texts of varying forms and functionalities -- visual, sonic, and code-related. Text may also take physical and/or environmental form. The continuum that bridges distributed bodies with the recombinant communicative and associative functionality of technology is charged with the potential of extending humankind's ability to experience, generate, operate on, store, edit, and disseminate meaningful patterns of experience."
unregulated urban landscapes
"Destruction of communities (foreign and local) are lamented and eulogised in the songs that follow, culminating in the album closer: an ode to the empty railyard terrain adjacent to the neighbourhood where the band, along with many other Montreal musicians and artists, have lived for a decade or more. This land is now being swallowed up by big box and condo development. This is Our Punk-Rock... addresses the local/universal demise of uncontrolled and unregulated urban landscapes -- a demise that stretches from the docile walls of superstore complexes and protest 'pens' in the West to outright military surveillance, harassment and murderous 'surgical' strikes by Western-backed armies in South America and the Middle East."
los angeles
"Last night, again, I dreamed
my children were back at home,
small boys huddled in their separate beds,
and I went from one to the other
listening to their breathing --- regular,
almost soundless --- until a white light
hardened against the bedroom wall,
the light of Los Angeles burning south
of here, going at last as we
knew it would." ralphmag.org
red wind
"Named after Southern California's Santa Ana Canyon and a fixture of local legend and literature, the Santa Ana is a blustery, dry and warm wind that blows out of the desert. In Raymond Chandler's story Red Wind, the title being one of the offshore wind's many nicknames, the Santa Anas were introduced as "those hot dry [winds] that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen."
locative media
"Jeremy Hight, one the first locative media theorists, coined the term, "Narrative Archeology," a concept which became a corner stone of locative media. It refers to the process of peeling back layers of a place, and finding the stories underneath." photo:mlab.uiah.fi
los angeles
"If history is any guide, vast areas blackened in Greece's deadly wildfires eventually will sprout anew -- with luxury villas, fancy hotels and expensive vacation homes.
Among the most insidious triggers, according to officials and environmentalists, is a practice by unscrupulous builders of deliberately setting fire to forests to render the land available for development."
los angeles
"No matter what you do in L.A., your behavior is appropriate for the city. Los Angeles has no assumed correct mode of use. You can have fake breasts and drive a Ford Mustang – or you can grow a beard, weigh 300 pounds, and read Christian science fiction novels. Either way, you're fine: that's just how it works. You can watch Cops all day or you can be a porn star or you can be a Caltech physicist. You can listen to Carcass – or you can listen to Pat Robertson. Or both. That's how we dooz it." by Geoff Manaugh, BLDBLG
computer vision
"Messa di Voce, created by this article's author in collaboration with Zachary Lieberman, uses whole-body vision-based interactions similar to Krueger's, but combines them with speech analysis and situates them within a kind of projection-based augmented reality. In this audiovisual performance, the speech, shouts and songs produced by two abstract vocalists are visualized and augmented in real-time by synthetic graphics."
immigration museum
"It’s hard to say who will go to the National Center at the moment, save for bored schoolchildren on compulsory field trips, although the place has the potential to be a constructive troublemaker. Mr. Toubon promises, in time, a program of events to add meat to the bare-bones display, which he says will also change. Clearly the place needs to do more than cheerlead, feign scholarly impartiality and make vague noises about past injustices to have any impact. It needs to try to steer a debate that is reshaping France and the rest of Europe."
dumb type
Founded in 1984, the artist collective Dumb Type is based in Kyoto, Japan. Members are trained in varied disciplines, including visual arts, theatre, dance, architecture, music composition and computer programming. Their work ranges across such diverse media as art exhibitions, performances, audiovisuals and publications.
the parking garage
"He presents the modern, built environment as this kind of psychological field lab for testing new ways of being human. He encodes all this, or hardwires it, into the actual landscapes of his novels. You get humans trying to understand and psychologically accommodate themselves to the presence of vast, empty car parks, derelict hospitals, redundant freeways, under-subscribed exurban high-rises and so on. It’s a ‘malfunctioning central nervous system’ in spatial form, on the scale of a whole civilisation." Geoff Manaugh, BLDBLG "Too many car parks – always a sign of a troubled mind”. JG Ballard
ballard
Reality and fiction were crossing each other.
"Yes, they’d begun to reverse — the only point of reality was our own minds. It seemed to me that the only way to write about all this was to meet the landscape on its own terms. Useless to try to impose the conventions of the 19th-century realistic novel on this incredible five-dimensional fiction moving around us all the time at high speed. And I tried to develop — and I think successfully — a technique of mine, the so-called condensed novels, where I was able to cross all these events, at right angles if you like. Like cutting through the stem of a plant to expose the cross section of its main vessels. So this technique was devised to deal with this fragmentation and overlay of reality, through the fragmentation of narrative."
mediastorm
MediaStorm's principal aim is to usher in the next generation of multimedia storytelling by publishing social documentary projects incorporating photojournalism, interactivity, animation, audio and video for distribution across multiple media.
mologogo
Mologogo is a free service that will track you and your friends using GPS-enabled mobile phones.Use Mologogo to:
- See where you are and where you've been
- Find friends who are close by and chat with them
- Search for local points of interest
- Check real-time local traffic and weather
- Share your location info on blogs or web pages
- Post your location to Twitter
- And whatever else you dream up...
terminal beach
"This obsession with strange, liminal zones of possibility is explored often in Ballard’s short fiction, notably ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964) and ‘The Reptile Enclosure’ (1963), These beach fictions, in which the beach is figured as a marginal zone: ‘I think the psychological role of the beach is more interesting. The tide-line is a particularly significant area, a penumbral zone that is both of the sea and above it, forever half-immersed in the great time-womb. If you accept the sea as an image of the unconscious, then this beachward urge might be seen as an attempt from the existential role of ordinary life and return to the universal time-sea’..."
ghostbustour
"Listen! do you smell something? Sites relevant to the original 'Ghostbusters' compose the tour path, with ... geography and history of New York comprising the tour. Watching film footage on a portable media device, while standing in the site of its creation some 20 years ago, 'media memories' become real memories and mediated experience becomes actualized. ghostbustour is an attempt to re-attach "media memories" with our real experience of space and time."
body augmentation
"Cyprus-born Stelios Arcadiou, known as Stelarc, says his extra ear, made of human cartilage, is an augmentation of the body's form."
sensescapes
"The study of ‘SenseScapes’ is a newly emerging interdisciplinary field focussing on sensorial studies of human interaction with physical environments. Challenging an ocular-centricism that arguably underpins much scholarship in the arts, humanities and social sciences, a new multi-sensory research agenda is being critically developed. The concept of ‘sensescapes’ incorporates the full range of sensory experience in the broadest range of disciplines as sensual experience is mediated through hearing, smell, touch, taste, as well as sight. Including the visual, the auditory, the olfactory, the gustatory and the haptic, the concept of sensescapes enables an interrogation of everyday life that incorporates the meeting of mind, body and environment."
Dr Mags Adams, senses and societY, senses and the city
sense of the city
"The most banal and ubiquitous phenomena," remarked curator and CCA director designate Mirko Zardini, "like asphalt, the second crust of the earth, cacophonies of everyday sounds and smells, competing light effects, manipulations of temperature and climate, heat and cold, the junk and graffiti that disfigure buildings and streets, as well as the subtle, mostly hidden signs of regeneration in the urban environment, will be presented through artefacts and images that collectively suggest the rich array of urban experiences and behaviours lying just beyond traditional interpretations of the city."
buildering
Main Entry: builder
Pronunciation: 'bil-d&r
Function: verb
Etymology: from boulder, to climb boulders.
Date: circa 1970
Synonyms: urban climbing, stegophilism
1. to climb a man-made structure, of which the design is for purposes other than climbing.
cartography
"Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation of models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory — PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA — it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire but our own: The desert of the real itself."
Jean Baudrillard, "The Precession of Simulacra"
Tonic
"Sound installation transforming street noise into musical harmonics in real time. The sound of traffic resonates a 12-foot tuning tube on the wall just around the corner and the resulting harmonies are played from these two cement loudspeakers. There is no tape or CD. What you are hearing is the music hidden within the traffic's roar at this very moment."
2002. Bruce Odland, with Compound Design Collective
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