"Between October 2006 and December 2006, the City of New York has removed or obscured 59 illegal banners on sidewalk sheds. In that same period, Citibank Chase was forced to remove all illegal sidewalk projections at branches around Manhattan. And now, years into NYC’s crackdown on graffiti writers and protesters, after we’ve watched our friends be detained, arrested, beat, fined, tried, and given real jail sentences, not a single corporate toy from any ad firm has had to do any time." graffiti research lab
light criticism
building on cinematic vision
"Sonny Astani walked into a Westwood movie theater in 1985 and saw the film that changed his life: "Blade Runner," the science-fiction tale that imagined a dystopian Los Angeles where jet-powered cars zoom past skyscrapers covered with enormous, cinematic advertisements. Decades later, the Iranian-born businessman is determined to bring some of those futuristic images to life. His plan? Attach an animated sign 14-stories tall on the 33-story condominium project he is building in downtown L.A." David Zahniser, Los Angeles Times
Akousmaflore
"Akousmaflore is a garden made with real musical and interactive plants or flowers. Each plant reacts to the human touch of a spectator by a specific sound language.Our aura is hot, electric and invisible. It can act here on the vegetable foliages by offering the experiment of a reactive environment. When the spectators caress the plants, they start to sing. Become sensitive musical instruments, they make it possible to compose a floral orchestration." scenocosme.com, thanks manuel
mediascapes design review
"The MediaSCAPES design studio final review took place on December 13, 2007. We were joined by a diverse range of critics attending from Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco- Jason Anderson, Juan Azulay, Benjamin Bratton, Christian Bruun, Jean Michel Crettaz, Rene Daalder, Blair Ellis, Jeffrey Inaba, Carla Leitao, Marcos Novak, and Scott Perry." Ed Keller
Projects were presented by:
Kenneth Cameron. Nina Marie Barbuto & Bjork Christensen. Jordan Kanter, Arthur Switalski & Bao Quoc N. Doan. Christopher Norman. Guillermina Chiu & Sepehram Khamjani. Jihyeun Byeon. Saman Hosseini-Pou & Salman Masmouei. George Labeth. Hao-yun Ambrose Chuang. Valentina Vasi
color like no other
"Y'know that bouncy ball add wasn't actually very original - every year at Reed College in Portland, OR (for as far back as anyone can remember bouncy balls) they've had a midninght "ball drop" down Woodstock Ave. in front of the college - it's an amazing experience and part of an even more amazing experience called Renn Fayre - which, despite the name is more like a techno-geek-mind-altering-drug event than a fantasy-D&D-fair." MOR, davidweiss.blogspot.com/
Graziano Cecchini
"Mad-hatter artist Graziano Cecchini has struck again. The public-art prankster who filled the Trevi Fountain in Rome with blood-red dye last October released 500,000 brightly colored plastic balls Wednesday from the top of the Spanish Steps in Rome."
wooster collective
The Wooster Collective was founded in 2001. This site is dedicated to showcasing and celebrating ephemeral art placed on streets in cities around the world.
flow
"Flow 5.0 is an interactive sculpture made out of hundreds of ventilators which are reacting to your sound and motion. By walking and interacting an illusive landscape of transparancies and artificial wind is created. Moving through Flow 5.0 the visitor becomes conscious of himself as a body, in a dynamic relation with space and technology." Daan Roosegaarde
gravity and resistance
"The spatial expression of "gravity+resistance" is rendered consistently by the real time calculation of the dynamics. The dynamic movements are composed of the counter powers around gravity. Gravity is not materialized without the reaction force." sieko mikami
transarchitectural topography
"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
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
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