(alternate versions...)
Big Ideas, Don't Get Any, James Houston
Bjork at Coachella, All Is Full Of Love
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
from our good friend rob
"I've been watching the Olympics sporadically. Who even knew there was such a thing as synchronized diving? I'd already read articles and watched a couple of documentaries on the Bird's Nest and Water Cube--though as much as I enjoy the design, I can't help noting that from the air the Water Cube resembles nothing so much as a quilted mattress. I caught the beginning and end of the opening ceremony. The 2008 drummers were a not altogether flattering look into the soul of the Chinese regime, which I guess we're supposed to call authoritarian rather than totalitarian these days, and the spookiness of the spectacle was only heightened by the rictuses the drummers were instructed to display after they seemed too intimidating in the dress rehearsal. But the moment that most got to me was the Red Army soldiers raising the PRC flag. They'd been made up with some goo that made them positively glisten. It was the perfect counterpart to the '36 Olympics' Aryan ubermenschen.
Did you notice how during the start of their opening ceremony coverage, NBC peppered the script with phrases like "great leap" and "long march" that have enormous resonance in recent Chinese history, but used the phrases utterly out of their historical context, an inappositeness that was especially jarring considering the human suffering caused by the Great Leap Forward? So now we know (1) the Olympics are not just a small step for China, they're a great leap, (2) it's been a long march for China to these Olympics, and (3) NBC's writers are brainless hacks. Only the last of these is an insight that's likely to stay with us."
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Mao, Monkey forever
Text for the SCI_Arc 2008 Thesis Catalog
heurme(neu)tic formations
or the productive space of the creative impasse
heurme(neu)tic formations
or the productive space of the creative impasse
The Memorial to Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China (constructed in 1977) is the final resting place of the embalmed body of Mao Zedong. It supports an ongoing ritual of public visitation to this body – a ritual with profound implications for the larger symbolic order of contemporary Chinese culture. This thesis explores the possibility for reformulating the memorial and the visitation ritual in relation to its physical and cultural-symbolic context. In particular, it seeks to re-direct Tiananmen Square towards its original, most radical (and perhaps idealized) conception as a post-enlightenment political formation; a pure, oceanic space, outside of history, perpetually restructuring itself in the contingency of its daily inhabitation.
This thesis starts with the presumption that the problems posed by the Mao Zedong Memorial are in many ways too big for architecture. As such, it has embraced and attempted to stay honest to what might be described as a schizophrenic design process (operating through multiple, and at times contradictory personalities). In doing so it poses a deeper question that must be asked of any conceptual architectural project: how and at what moment – without sacrificing the intellectual dimensions of the project – does the designer make the transition from objective observer to one who is complicit with the narrative of the design? In this sense, the thesis evolves into a deeply personal project, seeking to understand and make productive the impasse between my own sense-of-self and the external ecology of architectural, socio-political and philosophical discourse.
This thesis starts with the presumption that the problems posed by the Mao Zedong Memorial are in many ways too big for architecture. As such, it has embraced and attempted to stay honest to what might be described as a schizophrenic design process (operating through multiple, and at times contradictory personalities). In doing so it poses a deeper question that must be asked of any conceptual architectural project: how and at what moment – without sacrificing the intellectual dimensions of the project – does the designer make the transition from objective observer to one who is complicit with the narrative of the design? In this sense, the thesis evolves into a deeply personal project, seeking to understand and make productive the impasse between my own sense-of-self and the external ecology of architectural, socio-political and philosophical discourse.
3/4 Review Continued
Dynamic Diagram/Visualization/Simulation of embedded sensor network in Tiananmen Square. Scripted in processing, with help from Roland Snooks. Sorry for the terrible quality...
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Final showdown of the anamorphic kernel
Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In The West is perhaps a more elegant and effective/affective version of what Zizek is talking about. that which is background (harmonica's memory of his brother's murder) bubbles forth into the foreground in the final showdown between harmonica and the man in black. as the viewer, one is directly confronted with the raw kernel of the narrative (the memory, the event which defines the structure of the narrative), forcing a (radical) reconsideration of the structure (and also shattering the dramatic tension built up by keeping the kernel in the background, thus ending the movie, and perhaps, as was Leon's intention, the entire genre of the western). the elaborate choreography of the scene can be understood in ritualistic terms as a sort of cinematic preparation for the unveiling of this (totemic) kernel...
and another fascinating moment in the film, as described by Henry Fonda:
and a great BBC documentary on the film
"The traditional gunfight in Hollywood Westerns is linear, in the sense that you have goodie at one end of the main street, like in High Noon, and baddies walking down the street. Leone was much more interested in circles rather than lines: one character comes forward, choreographed to the music, every second of it, another character comes forward, we get a close up of one, a close up of the other, they walk around each other like two dogs waiting to have a scrap. It is like a dance, a sort of military two step."
and another fascinating moment in the film, as described by Henry Fonda:
and a great BBC documentary on the film
"The traditional gunfight in Hollywood Westerns is linear, in the sense that you have goodie at one end of the main street, like in High Noon, and baddies walking down the street. Leone was much more interested in circles rather than lines: one character comes forward, choreographed to the music, every second of it, another character comes forward, we get a close up of one, a close up of the other, they walk around each other like two dogs waiting to have a scrap. It is like a dance, a sort of military two step."
Zizek on Children of Men
wish the film lived up to Zizek's observations and really pushed the "paradox of anamorphosis" in the "tension between the foreground and background..."
Cloverfield camcorder
how the staging of a cinematic experience can be contanimated by the persepective of the viewer, or perhaps, as an alternate possibility, how architecture can be contanimated by the "perspectives" of the site...
The devil speaks fashion
worth a gander and a ponder...
i imagine this relates to any design discipline, or more loosely, to any expert model of organization, which, if understood in a pluralistic sense (ala wikipedia or the java development, etc.), might be speculated to be the future political model. do we believe in this model, that it is not possible to exempt oneself from certain expert systems, that they are so ingrained in the fabric of our culture, that one cannot participate in culture without being contaminated in some way, indirect but profound? and to what extent can we rely, as designers, on the "trickle-down" economics of style to justify the speculative flights of fancy that play out in the academy and the gallery?
i imagine this relates to any design discipline, or more loosely, to any expert model of organization, which, if understood in a pluralistic sense (ala wikipedia or the java development, etc.), might be speculated to be the future political model. do we believe in this model, that it is not possible to exempt oneself from certain expert systems, that they are so ingrained in the fabric of our culture, that one cannot participate in culture without being contaminated in some way, indirect but profound? and to what extent can we rely, as designers, on the "trickle-down" economics of style to justify the speculative flights of fancy that play out in the academy and the gallery?
3/4 Review
w/ Jason Payne and Hernan Diaz Alonso
August 11, 2008
(i'd like to post the recording of the review, but can't figure out how to upload an audio file. tried to gapcast thing to no avail. any suggestions?)
Instead of Science(fiction) remaining a domain for positivist and determinist propoganda, it should norish the seeds of our own monstrosity – our own loss of control and indeterminism, chaos theory and biogenetics – as a force striking alliance with harpies and earthly creatures, the Faustian dark side and the Strum und Drang, against the rationalist wigs and the works of Hegelian spirit, and open up to a world where even fears become fables, as lovely as they are carnal...
...Architecture is not something to be thought or produced later, like the standard bearer for a morality. It can only be negotiated live, in its contingency on a situation and its solubility in a set of givens. This critical and territorialized attitude is in sharp contrast to macrocynical flights of fancy (the market creates the form!)...and instead launches processes that reactivate the concept of throbbing, complex and unfinished localism.
- Francois Roche, (Science)Fiction & Mass Culture Crisis, 2003
August 11, 2008
(i'd like to post the recording of the review, but can't figure out how to upload an audio file. tried to gapcast thing to no avail. any suggestions?)
Instead of Science(fiction) remaining a domain for positivist and determinist propoganda, it should norish the seeds of our own monstrosity – our own loss of control and indeterminism, chaos theory and biogenetics – as a force striking alliance with harpies and earthly creatures, the Faustian dark side and the Strum und Drang, against the rationalist wigs and the works of Hegelian spirit, and open up to a world where even fears become fables, as lovely as they are carnal...
...Architecture is not something to be thought or produced later, like the standard bearer for a morality. It can only be negotiated live, in its contingency on a situation and its solubility in a set of givens. This critical and territorialized attitude is in sharp contrast to macrocynical flights of fancy (the market creates the form!)...and instead launches processes that reactivate the concept of throbbing, complex and unfinished localism.
- Francois Roche, (Science)Fiction & Mass Culture Crisis, 2003
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