August 2010
4 posts
“Be utopian. We want to build new worlds where fiction is reality and games form...”
– studio EXYZT’s manifesto
“The city we love is that in which anything is possible, where there is still...”
– alex romer, nicolas henninger, sara muzio on the southwark lido
July 2010
3 posts
nytimes essay: relating to the city through the... →
‘I did not know until I came to New York how intimately you can relate to your streetscape and how personal and grounding experiencing architecture can be.’
‘It is hard to predict where the eye will focus and find meaning in this restless on-going spectacle of a city, but to make an intimate connection with the streetscape is a way of putting down roots, of asserting your...
June 2010
6 posts
Watcha day out: as seen from the back left seat of the car
[i hadn’t been for a drive in a car in ages (almost forgot what it feels like) and as it also felt like summertime, i kept sticking my head out the window - so this is a result of that, snapshots of a day experienced through the motion of a car.]
May 2010
10 posts
“Architecture, we hope, is first of all a field of knowledge, and only then of...”
– Lebbeus Woods
Lebbeus Woods: architecture of energy
The first task of experimental works of architecture and art is to stake out new points of view on what already exists. The second task is to test them.
The energy-systems view of the city and its life have strong political implications, in particular, regarding prevailing ideas of identity and, its corollary, property. Individuals, in such a view, are identified not so much by what they ‘own’ or...
Tino Sehgal, artist
Tino Sehgal (b. 1976, London) constructs situations that defy the traditional context of museum and gallery environments, focusing on the fleeting gestures and social subtleties of lived experience rather than on material objects. Relying exclusively on the human voice, bodily movement, and social interaction, Sehgal’s works nevertheless fulfill all the parameters of a traditional artwork with the...
Sights Unseen, Julia Spicer
Julia Spicer recorded her journeys through the centre of London using a camera concealed in her backpack, capturing images at random along the way. A fictional correspondence with a reclusive film maker acts as a framing device for the work - Spicer appears to be following routes and ground rules set by an elusive auteur as part of an initiative test. This test required Spice to ‘reacquaint’...
Nights in this City/ sheffield 1995/ rotterdam...
ROTTERDAM
My love,
We are making a guided tour for this city and in trying to determine the route we are helped by many people who live and work here.
We start by asking them questions like:where is the tourist centre of the city, where is a rich neighborhood, where is a poor neighborhood, where is an industrial area?
But these boring question get teh boring answers they probably deserve. We...
“This is one of the concerns of performance art - the reinvention of the art of...”
– Anthony Howell and Fiona Templeton, Elements of Performance Art
Video Shakkei: Post-Performance Drawings →
Kreider + O’Leary
Video Shakkei: Post-Performance Drawings
A series of drawings, as word-and-image composites, reflecting on the process and practice of site-specific performance and time-based drawing in Video Shakkei - a series of 14 performances or ‘live drawings’ enacted in locations throughout the Kansai region of Japan. There are five pieces in total, each produced directly...
“Drawing is thinking made manifest: a graphic record of thought and intention....”
– Kreider + O’Leary
bodies in urban space →
Willi Dorner is keen on creating events that give the audience the opportunity for new experiences, insights and a different perception of every day’s life.
“bodies in urban spaces” is a temporarily intervention in diversified urban architectonical environment. The intention of “bodies in urban spaces” is to point out the urban functional structure and to uncover the restricted movement...
“Travel through the city creates a sequence of experience. This sequence is a...”
– Donald Appleyard, ‘Motion, Sequence and the City’
April 2010
6 posts
[book] things worth seeing :: a guide to the city...
this is a real good one, written just so nicely by william firebrace
a film set and the wapping project
today, as I was walking along, I got pulled off the street to be an audience member for this channel four tv show they are filming. it’s for sure going to end up being some bad tele [think documentary/reality tv show based on parents who are out of their minds cause their darling little children won’t sleep through the night ever, haven’t since they came into this world,...
the nature and art of motion
March 2010
14 posts
“‘Cities demand that we move through them - arrival is only the beginning - but...”
– Nick Barley, Breathing Cities: The Architecture of Movement
adventures_ on the tower of grain
a now derelict, once fortified defense tower situated in the estuary of the river medway off the east coast of England, becoming accessible only at low tide.
the tower of grain is a study in contradictory impressions: seeming simultaneously formidable and indestructible from afar and yet quite tenuously hanging on against the forces of nature when experienced close up; feeling alternatively...
“Any action for Diller & Scofidio revolves around what they call an...”
– Architectural Review, 1989 p57
“Perhaps it is the personal interaction with the meaning of a narrative, in film...”
– Architectural Review 1989, p54
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they...”
– William Shakespeare, As You Like It
WatchStriptease: also by Tony Linkson, a diagram of time elapsing; a pattern of duration.
WatchThe Fleeting: by Tony Linkson, A video sculpture of a past event.
[maybe as a next step, I could construct my layered images I have been working with in a similar way, turning a series of two dimensional drawings into three-d space?]
[the royal ballet]
last night I went to the ballet. partly for research, partly to see inside the theater, partly to have a fancy night out, partly to watch people and be a part of another world for an evening. anyways I didn’t expect to like it, the actual ballet part, as much as I did- I mean I really liked it, a lot. the dancers were not only graceful and beautiful as would be expected, but the minimal sets...
February 2010
26 posts
converting body movements into electricity →
Michael C. McAlpine of Princeton and colleagues have developed a promising approach for converting body movements into electricity. They have printed piezoelectric crystals onto flexible, biocompatible rubberlike material.
“And if Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine are interested in understanding what happens...”
– Roberto Zancan, ‘Stabilizing the Image’
on the film ‘Koolhaas HouseLife’
koolhaas houselife →
Koolhaas HouseLife is a film on one of the masterpieces of contemporary architecture of recent years: the house in bordeaux. unlike most movies about architecture, this feature focuses less on explaining the building, its structure and its virtuosity than on letting the viewer enter into the invisible bubble of the daily intimacy of an architectural icon. this experiment presents a new way of...
project_Refresh constructed fictional narratives...
He only wears clothing of solid colors to better camouflage himself into the colorless field of the image. Periodically through the day, he takes refuge in the blind zone behind his monitor. His disappearance is usually prompted by the entrance of a delivery boy. They come frequently, sometimes two to three hours apart. They enter from the bottom or right edge of the screen. As soon as he spots...
henri lefebvre, the production of space
developed the concept of the ‘moment,’ a fleeting, intensely euphoric sensation which appeared as a point of rupture which revealed the totality of possibilities of daily existence.
philosophy of lived experience.
what we are concerned with here is not texts but texture…we already know that a texture is made up of a usually rather large space covered by networks or webs; monuments...