By
Maria Chatzichristodoulou [aka Maria X] on
Wednesday, August 4th, 2010 at
10:00 am
Cover of Chris Salter's Entangled
Chris Salter's Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (MIT Press, March 2010) is a massive undertaking and a book long overdue. In this ambitious project, Salter sets out to provide a historical overview of the intersections between technology and artistic performance in order to demonstrate the profound entanglement in the historical trajectories of both sets of practices and developments. Entangled seeks to address how technological developments have altered our making and perception of artistic performance and the socio-political, cultural and economic contexts of such developments (p. xiii). Furthermore, Salter understands the histories of new media arts, theater, and other stage-based artforms as divided in a tension between the technophilic and technophobic, and his investigation is an attempt to fill this gap.
Peter Sellars describes, in his Foreword to the book, Salter's approach as radically inclusive. Indeed, Salter sets out to frame an impressively diverse range of practices as performance. Those practices include, but are not limited to, theatre, opera, scenography, architecture, video art, installations, environments, sonic arts, robotics, media arts, live and body art, expressions of popular culture such as music gigs, and more. Entangled consists of eight chapters, each focusing on a different form. This distinction is not designed to separate disciplinary trajectories though; instead, it challenges disciplinary boundaries through its fluid narrative that consistently foregrounds intersections, crossovers and common histories.
By
Joshua Noble on
Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010 at
12:00 pm
Rob Ley and Joshua G Stein, ReactiveVOID
One of the interesting challenges in discussing or writing about interactive architecture is the term itself. As its usage has increased so have the potential meanings of what an architecture that is truly interactive might mean. That the building might truly interact, become temporal, transform a viewer or inhabitant into a user and a physical space into an application, is such a tantalizing proposition, one can empathize with the artists, designers, engineers, and architects alike all springing to define and participate in the shaping of the term. Its aims may end up being similar to earlier conceptions of the role of architecture, shaping urban space, defining urban life, but its means will be, not new, but novel. A constellation of concepts, what Farshid Moussavi calls The Novel, that join architectural thinking with computational practices and interaction design strategies, a marriage of strategies for shaping space and engaging users. The notion of an interactive architecture first emerged in the 1960s as cyberneticists and architects Gordon Pask, Cedric Price, and Archigram in the UK, and Warren Brodey, Nicholas Negroponte in the US, all developed similar ideas of interactive environments and spaces that would sense, converse, and participate with their users. Since then interaction design, artificial intelligence, computer vision, environment sensing, mechanical engineering, interior design, have all been drawn into dialogue in different forms, creating solutions, informing practices, generating new ways of creating conversations between users and spaces. Terms have proliferated as well, ‘liquid’, ‘dynamic’, ‘reactive’, or ‘adaptive’ architectures, ‘interactive installation’, ‘cybernetic spaces’; all with a generalized conception of the notion of a space that communicates, that is computationally enabled and that provides a mode of input and some level of appropriate feedback. With the complexity of discourses involved and the range of intents and strategies employed, it’s difficult to discuss a coherent history or diagram spheres of influence but one can see general tendencies: goals, intentions, critical junctures, and points of convergence across a range of practices.
Why now? Why this rapid explosion of interest in interactive architecture? The crisis of urban space, ecological pressures, technological capacity, the exhaustion with and reaction to the iconic architecture of the last forty years all weigh heavily on present architectural practice. An interactive architecture offers an explicit engagement for the user, a de-emphasizing of the architect; allowing anyone who enters the space to become at minimum a collaborator and in some cases a co-creator. The moment of the aesthetic of the collaborative, the utilitarian, the designed and empowering solution has arrived. In the histories of kinetic sculpture, video, installation, performance, littoral practices, there exist historical antecedents for interactive art practices. To the architectural, participating in the computational data rich experience and the interactive, presents a new escape, a new collaborative attitude, and an antidote to the static, extemporal, and spectacular that has dominated architectural thinking over the last 50 years.
The medium of architecture itself is changing, becoming a combination of spaces, networks, and agents both mechanical and organic. We already experience architecture as a shifting array of mediums. Architecture bloggers Stephen Becker and Rob Holmes winkingly named the iPhone as one of the most important architectural works of the first decade of the new millennium, arguing: “urban systems are defined most fundamentally not by structure and infrastructure, but by practice, action, and thought-process; what act has more significantly altered the practices and thought-processes of urbanites in the past ten years than the mass distribution of smart phones?” The Rhinoscript-ing of Parametric Architecture is most certainly, if nothing else, a demonstration that compelling notions of space can be generated by algorithmic processes. Architecture historian Beatriz Colomina argues in Architecture Between Spectacle and Use that the fame of Mies van der Rohe is largely based on photographs of his work. The medium of architecture is already diffuse and complex. The interactive architectural environment simply extends that diffusion, integrating a dynamic system, an interconnected series of structures, situations, and objects that participate in the myriad ways that we consider and shape urban and living space.
The received notion of the public sphere in fact melds an array of narrative and structural elements into a domain of expressive possibility whose center of attention serves both aesthetic and intersubjective concerns. This commingling entails two dynamic affordances that have been especially open to manipulation through new media art: the presence of architecture as sculptural object, and the use of projective strategies for pluralistic communication. The latter works as a new branch of street performance, not for actors, but for media. The sense of novelty here is more than mechanical; it compacts the distance between human and machine, the latter increasingly assuming roles played by the former, but organizes both in a new coordinate space that is neither entirely physical/real nor virtual/technological.
By
Ceci Moss on
Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at
11:00 am
The spectacular view of the starry sky has long been a source of delight and curiosity, but the abundance of artificial light in urban areas produces a glow that covers the stars in the firmament. The largest mirror ball ever made was suspended from a construction crane 50 meters above the ground to render the starry sky to the citizens of Paris for one night in the Jardin du Luxembourg during the Nuit Blanche event. (photo Émilien Châtelain)
By
Patrick Ellis on
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 at
12:30 pm
Ahmet Öğüt, Exploded City, 2009 (Installation detail from Pavilion of Turkey, The 53rd Venice Biennale. Image Courtesy of the Berkeley Art Museum)
Children love Ahmet Öğüt’s Exploded City. Its miniature edifices are suited to the kid’s-eye-view; youthful height allows the same unobstructed vistas into the cityscape as one of its citizens might have. A further draw for children: there’s a model train underfoot (directly; museum security was busy), albeit stationary. And certain of the city's scaled buildings do resemble dollhouses, although there are no dolls here. Nobody lives in the Exploded City; there are no figurines amidst its reproductions. This vacancy is probably for the best, since Öğüt’s piece—on view at the Berkeley Art
Museum until April 11, 2010—is composed entirely of models of buildings that have been damaged or destroyed by terrorist strikes since the 1990s. The structures may be in their inviolate form, but nevertheless, human models placed throughout the doomed buildings would impart a macabre note to the city.
But the Exploded City is surprisingly not tragic, and while it could not be called vital, neither is it sepulchral. Compare, for instance, another recent miniature city: Seth’s (the mononym Gregory Gallant’s nom de plume) Dominion City, which was shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2005 and has been touring Canada since. It’s meant to represent a typical if idealized Canadian municipality of the 1950s or 60s. (To put it in the American context: a pre-Rust Belt Buffalo, New York.) Dominion City verges on the maudlin, mourning its subject while placing it upon a pedestal; Exploded City, meanwhile, strives to place its metropolis in the mythic context—it is a utopian city, in the original, “no-place” sense of the word.
N Building is a commercial structure located near Tachikawa station amidst a shopping district. Being a commercial building signs or billboards are typically attached to its facade which we feel undermines the structures' identity. As a solution we thought to use a QR Code as the facade itself. By reading the QR Code with your mobile device you will be taken to a site which includes up to date shop information. In this manner we envision a cityscape unhindered by ubiquitous signage and also an improvement to the quality and accuracy of the information itself.
By
Ceci Moss on
Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at
12:00 pm
synchronized 3-6 single channel video sound installation. dimensions variable. duration: 12:00 minutes/endless loop
Tender Prey is a modular, synchronized 3 to 6 channel video and sound installation expansion of an earlier work "Organic
Urbanic" from 2002. Inspired by satellite images, urban plans, kaleidoscopic examinations and signal interceptions. It is a cortex
of an imagined city. Aerial videos are joined into science fiction panoramas, in-versed fields of digitalia and disquiet, scenarios of
urban out foldings forming metallic robotic ornamentations. Tel Aviv is the dirty digital city behind "Tender Prey". It is featured in ultrasonic transparency, amplified, duplicated and warped.
By
Ceci Moss on
Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at
11:00 am
Still of Airshaft (to Piranesi)
Ana Maria Tavares is known for installations employing materials such as steel, glass and mirrors. Resembling architectural structures, her installations call to mind the artificial, emotionally vacuous atmosphere of airports, office buildings, and other forms of urban architecture. Through her re-deployment of industrial architectural materials, such materials lose their function, and viewers are subtly thrown off balance in their physical experience and sense of time. Recently, Tavares has been creating films in which steel columns connect with stairways running in all directions. By introducing reflections she renders the space in the films all the more complex. Airshaft (to Piranesi) (2008) examines the realities of human circulation through anonymous urban spaces as found all over the world. The video depicts a modern architectural space in the manner of the complex, labyrinthine expanses depicted by the 18th century Italian artist Piranesi, but wavering fluidly like a mirage. The chaos of Brazil’s enormous urban spaces is reflected here. Tavares’s videos produce an encounter with “somewhere” that is not quite “here” and make us aware of how unreal our reality can be.
By
Jenny Jaskey on
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at
2:00 pm
Archisuit consists of an edition of four leisure jogging suits made for specific architectural structures in Los Angeles. The suits include the negative space of the structures and allow a wearer to fit into, or onto, structures designed to deny them.
Based in Paris, Sharon Kanach worked very closely Xenakis for two decades, as a translator of his works, as a scholar and as Vice-President of Centre Iannis Xenakis (formerly CCMIX) in France. Carey Lovelace is an independent curator and writer based in New York. Both are former students of Xenakis.
I’m wondering how you, Carey and Sharon, began working on this exhibition and pulling together materials for the show.
Sharon: Iannis, during his lifetime, put his archives on deposit at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. So, these 80 moving boxes arrived at the Bibliothèque and the Bibliothèque called up Françoise, his wife, and said, “Now what do we do with them?” And then she said, call Sharon. I said we should start with an inventory. When I saw the wealth of the material, I said I couldn’t do it alone, and so we created a small team. It was through this inventory process that I was amazed, because here I had worked with him very very closely, but I had no idea of what was in those folders […] When I started this inventory process, I just saw that there was this treasure trove of material about everything, not only the architectural projects, but all of his sketches, for the musical works, and a lot of unpublished articles. As we said in the catalog, he was always thinking through the hand, one way or the other. Either drawing or writing, he always had a pen in hand. That’s when Carey and I happened to have lunch, and I said you have to see this. […] The idea of creating a critical edition of his writings came out of this inventory process. [Note: Sharon Kanach is working on a critical edition of Xenakis’s writings and unpublished papers with Makis Solomos and Benoît Gibson.]
Carey: Right, so Sharon was involved with this critical edition project, which was quite exciting and really interesting. She was talking about how these things had surfaced, launching an English edition here, and I said, well, we should do an exhibition together. Sharon said, you should come to France and look at the documents at the Bibliothèque Nationale, and I said that’s a great idea. […] When we were thinking about doing this show and where the dream place to organize it – I definitely thought of the Drawing Center because of the material itself and because I think it’s such a great institution. The more I got into this project, for me personally, the more I realized just how much he did think through the hand, and he did draw and it was so much a part of his process. It was so ideal for this place. I knew him really as a composer dealing with mathematical models, and I knew of his architectural background. The more you get into him, the more levels there are, and the more you discover. […]
By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 at
2:00 pm
Never mind that the decade really ends in a little over a year, it's time to take stock of it. Today's post looks back at the decade just past while tomorrow's will look at the decade to come.
As I observed before, this decade is marked by atemporality. The greatest symptom of this is our inability to name the decade and, although commentators have tried to dub it the naughties, the aughts, and the 00s (is that pronounced the ooze?), the decade remains, as Paul Krugman suggests, a Big Zero, and we are unable to periodize it. This is not just a matter of linguistic discomfort, its a reflection of the atemporality of network culture. Jean Baudrillard is proved right. History, it seems, came to an end with the millennium, which was a countdown not only to the end of a millennium but also to the end of meaning itself. Perhaps, the Daily Miltonian suggested, we didn't have a name for the decade because it was so bad.
It's time for my promised set of predictions for the coming decade. It has been a transgression of disciplinary norms for historians to predict the future, but its also quite common among bloggers. So let's treat this as a blogosphere game, nothing more. It'll be interesting to see just how wildly wrong I am a decade from now.
In many respects, the next decade is likely to seem like a hangover after the party of the 2000s (yes, I said party). The good times of the boom were little more than a lie perpetrated by finance, utterly ungrounded in any economy reality, and were not based on any sustainable economic thought. Honestly, it's unclear to me how much players like Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, and Larry Summers were duplicitous and how much they were just duped. Perhaps they thought they would get out in time or drop dead before the bubbly stopped flowing. Or maybe they were just stupid. Either way, we start a decade with national and global economies in ruins. A generation that grew up believing that the world was their oyster is now faced with the same reality that my generation knew growing up: that we would likely be worse off than our parents. I see little to correct this condition and much to be worried about.
By
Ceci Moss on
Friday, December 18th, 2009 at
2:00 pm
Dan Havel and Dean Ruck, Inversion, 2005 (Source: DesignVerb!)
The project Inversion will transform two Art League houses on the corner of Montrose Boulevard and Willard Street. The Art League offered Havel and Ruck the old studio buildings before they are demolished this spring making way for a new Art League building.
By
Ceci Moss on
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 at
10:00 am
Delhi's Sarai Media Lab posted a call for their City As Studio fellowship program. Brief description below, full details and information regarding applications available here. The fellowship will take place February 1, 2010 - October 31, 2010, with a bursary of Rs 65,000 spread over a period of nine months. Applications are due by December 26, 2009.
The Sarai Programme at the Center for Study of Developing Societies, Delhi is an interdisciplinary platform for the investigation and interpretation of contemporary urban experience. Sarai produces events and processes, publishes offline and online content and generates contexts for research and creative practice concerning contemporary urban conditions.
The Sarai Media Lab invites expressions of interest and intent from artists and practitioners in diverse media - textual, visual, aural, spatial and temporal - who could be - visual artists (photographers, sculptors, installation artists, graphic artists), writers and independent scholars, filmmakers, architects, experimental musicians and composers, sound recordists, performers and people whose practices straddle or transcend different areas of practice - for participation in the 'City as Studio' Project.
The City as Studio initiative will create contexts for high intensity inter-disciplinary processes at different locations in Delhi and at the Sarai space at CSDS. Sometimes these process(es) may be rendered as an exhibition, at other times as a gathering, as a library, as a temporary archive or as an occasion for performances, conversations and debates. At still other times it may take the form of a workshop, a temporary atelier, a media studio, a publication or an online platform. The City as Studio is neither a one off event, nor a workshop or a residency, nor a festival or a simple cluster of public programmes - though it has elements of all of the above. It is primarily a method of generating a new public profile for creative work in the city, a scanning of the horizon of possibilities that can be opened up in urban spaces through the presence of art, experimental cultural activity and public exchanges.
The studio process plans to bring together artists, filmmakers, photographers, discursive interlocutors, architects, writers, urbanists, scientists, architects, social actors and cultural workers, neighbourhood initiatives and diverse audiences to create art works, participatory performances, media works, and transmissions of different kinds of signals.
By
Ceci Moss on
Friday, November 6th, 2009 at
11:30 am
(Source for image and video: Creative Time)
Creative Time presents Playing the Building, a 9,000-square-foot, interactive, site-specific installation by renowned artist David Byrne. The artist transforms the interior of the landmark Battery Maritime Building in Lower Manhattan into a massive sound sculpture that all visitors are invited to sit and “play.” The project consists of a retrofitted antique organ, placed in the center of the building's cavernous second-floor gallery, that controls a series of devices attached to its structural features—metal beams, plumbing, electrical conduits, and heating and water pipes. These machines vibrate, strike, and blow across the building’s elements, triggering unique harmonics and producing finely tuned sounds.
