As the last American soldiers left Iraq in December, so, too, did many of the journalists who had covered the war, leaving little in the way of media coverage of post-war Iraq. While there were some notable exceptions — including two fine articles by MIT’s John Tirman that asked how many Iraqis had been killed as a result of the US invasion — overall the American press published few articles on the effects of the occupation, especially the consequences for Iraqis.
As a college professor, I have a special interest in what happened to Iraqi universities under US occupation. The story is not pretty.
Until the 1990s, Iraq had perhaps the best university system in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein’s regime used oil revenues to underwrite free tuition for Iraqi university students — churning out doctors, scientists, and engineers who joined the country’s burgeoning middle class and anchored development. Although political dissent was strictly off-limits, Iraqi universities were professional, secular institutions that were open to the West, and spaces where male and female, Sunni and Shia mingled. Also the schools pushed hard to educate women, who constituted 30 percent of Iraqi university faculties by 1991. (This is, incidentally, better than Princeton was doing as late as 2009.) With a reputation for excellence, Iraqi universities attracted many students from surrounding countries — the same countries that are now sheltering the thousands of Iraqi professors who have fled US-occupied Iraq.
Written by Hugh Gusterson, The Bulletin of Atomic Sciences. Continue HERE
“If you design with a view to optimize anything, it is bound to end up suboptimal, because it can’t cope with change. This applies as much to political constitutions, universities and buildings”
~ Jeff Mulgan
It began as a housing marvel. Two decades later, it ended in rubble. But what happened to those caught in between? The Pruitt-Igoe Myth tells the story of the transformation of the American city in the decades after World War II, through the lens of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing development and the St. Louis residents who called it home. At the film’s historical center is an analysis of the massive impact of the national urban renewal program of the 1950s and 1960s, which prompted the process of mass suburbanization and emptied American cities of their residents, businesses, and industries. Those left behind in the city faced a destitute, rapidly de-industrializing St. Louis , parceled out to downtown interests and increasingly segregated by class and race. The residents of Pruitt-Igoe were among the hardest hit. Their gripping stories of survival, adaptation, and success are at the emotional heart of the film. The domestic turmoil wrought by punitive public welfare policies; the frustrating interactions with a paternalistic and cash-strapped Housing Authority; and the downward spiral of vacancy, vandalism and crime led to resident protest and action during the 1969 Rent Strike, the first in the history of public housing. And yet, despite this complex history, Pruitt-Igoe has often been stereotyped. The world-famous image of its implosion has helped to perpetuate a myth of failure, a failure that has been used to critique Modernist architecture, attack public assistance programs, and stigmatize public housing residents. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth seeks to set the historical record straight. To examine the interests involved in Pruitt-Igoe’s creation. To re-evaluate the rumors and the stigma. To implode the myth.
Speakers: Professor Craig Calhoun, Professor Bruno Latour, Alan Rusbridger, Professor Judy Wajcman, David Adjaye, Professor Geoff Mulgan, Lord Richard Rogers, Polly Toynbee.
This event was recorded on 14 May 2010 in Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building.
In this exciting half-day conference two panels on ‘Public Life and Public Policy’ and ‘Cities and the Public Realm’, discuss these themes in the context of the work of Professor Sennett, the eminent sociologist whose recent books include The Culture of the New Capitalism and The Craftsman.
A mysterious band of hacker-artists is prowling the network of tunnels below Paris, secretly refurbishing the city’s neglected treasures. Photo: UX
Thirty years ago, in the dead of night, a group of six Parisian teenagers pulled off what would prove to be a fateful theft. They met up at a small cafè near the Eiffel Tower to review their plans—again—before heading out into the dark. Lifting a grate from the street, they descended a ladder to a tunnel, an unlit concrete passageway carrying a cable off into the void. They followed the cable to its source: the basement of the ministry of telecommunications. Horizontal bars blocked their way, but the skinny teens all managed to wedge themselves through and ascend to the building’s ground floor. There they found three key rings in the security office and a logbook indicating that the guards were on their rounds.
But the guards were nowhere to be seen. The six interlopers combed the building for hours, encountering no one, until they found what they were looking for at the bottom of a desk drawer—maps of the ministry’s citywide network of tunnels. They took one copy of each map, then returned the keys to the security office. Heaving the ministry’s grand front door ajar, they peeked outside; no police, no passersby, no problem. They exited onto the empty Avenue de Sègur and walked home as the sun rose. The mission had been so easy that one of the youths, Natacha, seriously asked herself if she had dreamed it. No, she concluded: “In a dream, it would have been more complicated.”
The unauthorized cinema that UX built beneath the Palais De Chaillot. Photo: UX
A Sardine Street Box of Tricks is a handbook for anyone who wants to make their own ‘mis-guided’ tour or walk.
Written by ‘Crab Man’ and ‘Signpost’ (Phil Smith and Simon Persighetti – both members of Exeter-based Wrights & Sites group), the book is based on the mis-guided ‘Tour of Sardine Street’ that they created for Queen Street in Exeter during 2011.
The book is designed to help anyone who makes, or would like to make, walk-performances or variations on the guided tour. It describes a range of different approaches and tactics, and illustrates them with examples from their tour of Queen Street. For example:
– Wear something that sets you apart and gives others permission to approach you: “Excuse me, what are you supposed to be?”
– Take a can of abject booze from the street or a momentary juxtaposition of a dove and a plastic bag and mould them, through an action, into an idea
– Attend to the smallest things
– Examine the cracks in your street and the mould on its walls, note its graffiti, collect its detritus, observe how its pavements are used and abused
– Set yourself tasks that passers-by will be intrigued by: they will enjoy interrupting and even joining in with you
– Draw upon ambiguous, ironical or hollowed-out rituals to complement the multiplicity of your walk with intensity of feeling or depth of engagement.
– And so on…
Everything you need to build a town is here – Wrights & Sites
City Grazing is a San Francisco-based goat landscaping business. An environmentally friendly solution to weed control, our business rents out goats to clear public and private land. Whether you have acres or an overgrown backyard, our goats would be eager to eat your weeds and aid in fire prevention, naturally. While they are not out on the job, our herd lives on pasture in San Francisco’s Bayview district, between the SF Bay Railroad and cement recycling plant.
Goats grazing is an ecologically sound practice that eliminates the need for toxic herbicides, chemicals, and gas-powered lawn mowers. They clear brush in areas that people or machines cannot easily reach, like steep slopes or ditches. The goats can help restore soil fertility by providing organic fertilizer.
No other form of weed control comes with such a great character! Our herd is very friendly, lively, and great with children. As we work around the city, City Grazing teaches about animal husbandry and ecological stewardship of industrial land. Our goats are available for birthday parties and educational visits at the railyard coming soon!
Why Choose Goats?
– Goats can eat weeds in terrain that is difficult or impossible to mow – steep slopes, gullies, between rocks, etc.
– Goats can eat plants that are hard to remove by hand, such as poison oak, thistles and blackberry.
– A managed goat grazing plan can reduce and potentially eliminate species of weeds and invasive plants from an area.
– They eat the plants that fuel wildfires, improving firefighters’ ability to manage and stop fires.
– Goats only need one tool: an appetite! There are no chemicals, mowers, chainsaws, or machines. This means no fuels are used and no emissions are generated, and you don’t have the liability of a worker injuring his or herself with dangerous equipment.
– There is no hauling or dumping of debris. They automatically recycle your plant mass into fertilizer, and work it into the soil with their hooves.
– Watching our goats work is a fun and educational experience that you’ll want to share with your friends and family. They’re the cutest weed eaters we’ve ever seen!
Once upon a time there was a primitive tribe that hunted and gathered in a verdant forest in a temperate clime.
I call them a “tribe” but that name may mislead if it suggests some rigorous form of social organization. In fact, the group was about as un-organized as it is possible for people to be. There were among them no elders, chiefs, shamans or any other kind of leader with authority over his fellows. With one exception– which we will soon discuss — there were no laws, rules or taboos that were obeyed or enforced among them and no judges or police to enforce them.
This lack of norms was reflected in their language which (luckily for our narrative purposes) was much like modern English but which lacked any moral or legal vocabulary. The natives never spoke of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘legal’ or ‘law’. They had no words for ‘promise’, or ‘contract’ and none for ‘property’ or ‘ownership’.
Even so, as I just averred, there was one rule that the natives generally acknowledged and mostly conformed to. They called it “The Rule”.
The Rule: No Bullying!
By ‘bullying’ the natives seem to have meant, roughly, hurting other people or using force or the threat of force to compel others to do what they would otherwise not do. But not every use of force or infliction of harm was regarded as bullying.
It was, for example, not considered bullying to use force or its threat to defend oneself or someone else against a bully. The Rule permitted self-defense and “other defense” and this had important consequences for all of tribal life.
Alinka Echeverría: “Six Million Pilgrims (2009) is a photographic typology of the backs of three hundred Mexican Catholic pilgrims on their journey to the
Basilica de Guadalupe in Mexico City. This yearly pilgrimage, undertaken by approximately six million people every year takes place on the anniversary of the five apparitions of the Virgin of Guadalupe between the 9th and 12th December 1531 to the indigenous man Juan Diego in Tepeyac, the sacred place of the Aztec goddess Tonantzin. The myth of the apparitions marks a turning point in the spiritual conquest of native Mexicans by the Spanish and lead to the amalgamation of Tonantzin and the Virgin Mary. This is the origin of the devotion of Mexicans to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Since the spiritual conquest of Mexico (arguably one of the most important legacies of the colonial period), the image of the Virgin has been of central importance in the history of Mexico. Her image was used by political leaders as a symbol of faith and freedom during the Independence movement in 1810, and again during the Revolution a century later.
In 2010 the Virgen de Guadalupe continues to be the center piece of our cosmology as Mexicans. This work is an observation of her role in contemporary visual culture and the vast layers of symbolism transmitted through her iconic image. I am also interested in the pilgrimage as a socio-political and cultural phenomenon and in the psychological and emotional relationship that each individual has with the Virgin. The work is inspired by the Becher tradition of systematic documentation. I chose to photograph the pilgrims that are carrying their virgin, which is usually hanging in their home. They take their paintings, sculptures, posters or cloaks of the Virgen to the Basicila to be blessed and to give thanks. Each portrait was taken separately, then ‘cut out’ and mounted onto a plain background. This decontextualization is intended to focus our attention on the individual. It also functions as a means to be able to then recombine it with the other hundreds of pilgrims. When placed back into the series the image has a direct relationship to the other portraits
rather than with the rest of the elements originally in the image. The large number of portraits creates a visual maze of similarity and difference, perhaps metaphoric of Mexican identity and makes us imagine the millions of pilgrims that visit the Basilica every year.” www.alinkaecheverria.com
An interview by soso Magazine about sexual attraction to urban objects, featuring the love story between Erika Eiffel (aka. Mrs. Berliner Mauer) and the Berlin Wall: A radical extreme of literally appropriating public space.
Generations of chain-smoking writers, skinny-jeaned bloggers and people with guitars have howled on about the subject. Love. Why do we love when all heavenly odds seem to be working against us? Why do we love after the other has disappointed us? Heck, why do we even love at all? During 5½ hours worth of tea, Erika Eiffel and I attempted to answer the unanswerable. It took us just that long to realize that, well, it’s beyond us, but we’ll probably never regret that we tried.
Erika’s objectum sexual – the sexual orientation of individuals engaged in romantic relationships with objects. Meaning, like your friend Benny can love boys, and your friend Andrea can love girls, your friend Alex can love his broomstick, or floorboard, or loudspeaker. Erika’s partner, her soul mate and love of her life, is the Berlin Wall. Now, this is not an easy object to love. It’s chipped, it’s graffiti-smeared, it’s crooked and it’s disappearing. It tore the city of Berlin – and the world – in two, ripped apart families, cost countless lives and helped define decades of a very chilly war. Erika’s Wall may be the human equivalent of that boyfriend with a terrible past. The one who ended up in jail, or the one who lied and cheated and hurt everyone you cared about. Yes, the one you loved anyway.
Before the Wall, Erika had a string of successful relationships with truly inspiring objects of affection. The kind that looks great on paper, at least. There was her love for a bow, which earned her two world champion titles on the US national archery team. Then there was the Japanese sword that made her the youngest world champion in the art of Iai-batto-jutsu. And her relationship with the admittedly very sexy F-15 jet got her one rare congressional nomination to the US Air Force academy. Finally, in 2007, she settled down and had a public commitment ceremony with the Grand Madame of Paris — the Eiffel Tower. Everyone agrees the tower is beautiful. With its straight lines and sturdy steel it’s an architectural marvel. Although she loves the tower to this day, she now knows that the ceremony was her attempt to have an at least somewhat accepted, mainstream objectum sexual relationship. It didn’t feel quite right. So just like I moved on from my eerily beautiful, learned and sophisticated ex-boyfriend to be with someone I had loved for years, Erika packed her bags and moved to Berlin to be with her Mauer.
[Interview conducted by Jennifer Hofmann; photographs by Anastasia Loginova]:
Okay, let’s get to it. When did you first realize that you were objectum sexual?
Well, I always knew. I used to hate manufactured toys so I built my own. For example, I found these two small planks of wood that I really connected to. So I nailed them together and took them with me wherever I went. To school, to bed, to play dates…everywhere. Of course, people thought it was cute then.
Synopsis: This conference aims to reflect on the relevance of the concept of dissidence for architectural practice today. Although dissidence has been primarily associated with architectural practices in the Eastern Bloc at the end of the Cold War period, contemporary architectural and other aesthetic practices have in recent years developed a host of new methodologies and techniques for articulating their distance from and critique of dominant political and financial structures. Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence asks how we can conceive of the contemporary political problems and paradoxes of architecture in relation to their precedents? Devoid of the agency of action, Cold War dissidents articulated their positions in drawings of fantasy-like paper architecture, while contemporary forms of architectural practice seem to gravitate towards activism and direct-action in the world. The political issues – from interventions in charged areas worldwide to research in conflict zones and areas undergoing transformations – currently stimulate a field of abundant invention in contemporary architecture. Both, Cold War dissidents and contemporary activists encounter problems and paradoxes and must navigate complex political force fields within which possible complicities are inherent risks.
New forms of critical practice, and political and spatial dissent are manifold, appearing in stark contrast to contemporary architectural practice in which professional courage seems to have been translated into structural “virtuosity” of surfaces. This conference seeks to map out and expand on the methodologies of architectural action and reinvigorate the concept of dissent within the architectural/spatial field of the possible. A more historical thread that runs through the programme will seek to weave the genealogy of political/spatial practices from the Cold War dissidents of the Soviet Bloc to the activists of South American favelas.
Dissidents in the former communist countries used a specific set of codes to question the ideological doctrine of the state party. Architects who were otherwise employed in state run architectural collectives, or as staff in architecture schools met to produce writings, private lectures, secret installations and architectural articulations of allegories and legends – activities that challenged the ’stifling’ standardized language of Soviet architecture. Many of these ‘paper architects’ questioned the relationship between art, architecture and politics, but also, and significantly so, the ideological, and thus also ethical function of various forms of ‘creative practices’. The political melt-down of the Soviet Bloc reconfigured this complex field of political codes, architectural gestures and references. The withdrawal of the architect from large ideological concepts regarding social utopias mirrored that fragmentation and dissemination of (neo)liberal market structures. Large ideological battles were replaced with a multiplicity of local, or issue-specific conflicts within which forms of activism have been integrated. Dissent against large integrated and complex networks is no longer possible. All that is left is to navigate the complex fields of forces in a reflective and innovative manner. But can the assemblage of gestures and techniques of past struggles and ‘dilemmas’ of working in politically suppressive regimes help to inform those of today?
The conference thus seeks to attract contemporary spatial practitioners, architects, urbanists, journalists, activists, filmmakers and curators, asking them to reflect upon contemporary forms and conditions of dissent and their potential problems and inevitable paradoxes. It welcomes, too, the reflections of architects and architectural historians to reflect upon previous articulations of political dissent through architectural practice.
“One of the most radical solutions in the field of shelter is represented by the underground towns and villages in the Chinese loess belt. Loess is silt, transported and deposited by the wind. Because of its great softness and high porosity (45%), it can be easily carved. [...] The dark squares in the flat landscape are pits [...] about the size of a tennis court. Their vertical sides are 25 to 30 feet high. L-shaped staircases lead to the apartments below whose rooms are about 30 feet deep and 15 feet wide, and measure about 15 feet to the top of the vaulted ceiling. They are lighted and aired by openings that give onto the courtyard.” [from LeopoldLambert's boiteaoutils on B. Rudofsky's Architecture without architects]
Amazon: In this book, Bernard Rudofsky steps outside the narrowly defined discipline that has governed our sense of architectural history and discusses the art of building as a universal phenomenon. He introduces the reader to communal architecture–architecture produced not by specialists but by the spontaneous and continuing activity of a whole people with a common heritage, acting within a community experience. A prehistoric theater district for a hundred thousand spectators on the American continent and underground towns and villages (complete with schools, offices, and factories) inhabited by millions of people are among the unexpected phenomena he brings to light.
The beauty of “primitive” architecture has often been dismissed as accidental, but today we recognize in it an art form that has resulted from human intelligence applied to uniquely human modes of life. Indeed, Rudofsky sees the philosophy and practical knowledge of the untutored builders as untapped sources of inspiration for industrial man trapped in his chaotic cities.
A new school system in Sweden eliminated all of its classrooms in favor of an environment that fosters children’s “curiosity and creativity.”
Vittra, which runs 30 schools in Sweden, wanted learning to take place everywhere in its schools — so it threw out the “old-school” thinking of straight desks in a line in a four-walled classroom (via GOOD).
Vittra most-recently opened Telefonplan School, in Stockholm. Architect Rosan Bosch designed the school so children could work independently in opened-spaces while lounging, or go to “the village” to work on group-projects.
All of the furniture in the school, which looks like a lot of squiggles, is meant to aid students in engaging in conversation while working on projects.
The school is non-traditional in every sense: there are no letter grades and students learn in groups at their level, not necessarily by age.
Admission to the school is free, as long as the child has a personal number (like a social security number) and one of the child’s parents is a Swedish tax payer.
Written by Meredith Galante for Business Insider. Continue HERE
Protestors in Sulaimaniyah’s Sara Square on Mar. 25, 2011. (Photo credit: (c) 2011 Samer Muscati/Human Rights Watch)
Iraq’s recent re-entry into American public discourse was marked by the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country as well as hagiographies marking the death of the Iraq war’s foremost advocate, Christopher Hitchens. This renewed interest in Iraq serves as a reminder not only of the country’s displacement from public consciousness, but also the likelihood that U.S. military withdrawal signals Iraq’s final dismissal from the American narrative.
Although it is easy to now scoff at Bush’s misplaced Mission Accomplished banner and boasts in 2003, for most Americans the gap between rhetoric and reality on Iraq has by no means narrowed. This is evident in the widespread assumption that the withdrawal of American forces means that the war in Iraq is over. This conclusion erroneously assumes that the imprint of America’s material legacy in Iraq can be magically erased, and is as misplaced as Bush’s confidence in the immediate success of the Iraq campaign.
The enduring nature of the Iraq war is reflected by recent developments on the ground. U.S. announcement of the war’s end was met with a coordinated bombing in Baghdad on December 22, 2011, consisting of 16 explosions that involved 9 car bombs, 6 roadside bombs, and 1 mortar. Within two hours, 63 people were killed and 185 wounded. Amidst these bombings, the tributes to Christopher Hitches, who had succumbed to cancer on December 15, 2011, were a particularly fitting reminder of the American disconnect between reality and rhetoric on Iraq. Commentators were effusive in their praise of Hitchens’ rhetorical form and debating style. Transitioning easily from lamenting the war to celebrating one of its cheerleaders, these hagiographies mirrored the facile and absurd reconciliation of rhetoric and reality characteristic of a culture Hitchens “helped create and has left behind. It’s a culture that has developed far too easy a conscience about, and sleeps too soundly amid, the facts of war.”
Written by Nahrain Al-Mousawi at MUFTAH. Continue HERE
Welcome to Designing Civic Encounter an initiative by ArtTerritories, engaging in existing and potential forms of urban development and public culture in Palestine. The event which took place between July 21-24, 2011, unfolded through an URBAN BUS TOUR traversing urban locations within and around Ramallah city enabling debates and conversations at different stations, a two-day SYMPOSIUM on questions of urban transformations in Palestinian and Arab cities, and a full day WORKSHOP with visionary social architect Teddy Cruz.
Designing Civic Encounter opened a forum in the real for the inquiry and discussion of the public urban experience under the current trends in planning, financing and building practices. Attracting an active local and international roster of architects, artists, educators, environmentalists, community activists and politicians, this online publication compiles video documentations generated from the events and also features art works and newly commissioned texts and photographs.
You can navigate the web publication through the names of the contributors listed on the right hand column and the listed summaries on the left hand column.
The Guerrilla Grafters are a group of San Franciscans who believe urban trees are a precious thing to waste on simple flowers. Their goal is to graft- albeit illegally- fruit bearing branches onto non-fruit bearing fruit trees, in hopes that over time the cities ornamental trees can provide food for residents free of charge.
In this video, we follow Guerrilla Grafters Tara Hui and Booka Alon as they check up on their surreptitious grafts, perform a bit of pruning and search for their trees’ first fruit.
The Guerrilla Grafters graft fruit bearing branches onto non-fruit bearing, ornamental fruit trees. Over time, delicious, nutritious fruit is made available to urban residents through these grafts. Our web application helps grafters to find graftable trees, to track how grafts are doing, and helps to facilitate gleaning of fruit. It is built by a laterally organized group using all open source code. We aim to prove that a culture of care can be cultivated from the ground up. We aim to turn city streets into food forests, and unravel civilization one branch at a time.
To consider compiling an encyclopedia (of any kind) in post-Wikipedia times is an exercise in emotional withdrawal.
From a position of bewilderment and confusion we choose to act by producing and employing another tool from the land of the naive and outdated, represented by encyclopedic work, devoid of all logic and meaning considering current cultural conditions and speed. What the first edition Dubai graphic and visual encyclopedia presents is a reality that acts as a counterpoint to all the excess of attempts to decipher and understand Dubai. Attempts that are mostly unable to uncover items that shed light on the question ‘What’s it all about’?
Organizing scanning devices for the entire physical reality and processing information in much the same way as the early explorers did in order to reach unknown lands. The encyclopedia will be updated periodically so as to provide an authentic (temporal) guide and a database for Dubai and its times. With the suspicion that perhaps behind all this there’s a new grammar, we also need to develop new dictionaries. Brusselsprout
Guerrilla depaving is an illicit form of urbanism wherein impermeable hard surfaces are wholly removed or perforated to reveal the underlying soil bed. This site preparation precedes the introduction of agriculture, ornamental gardens, cryptoforests and other pata-artisinal land-uses, which alleviate the urban heat island effect. However, the primary goal is to mitigate urban stormwater runoff by facilitating soil infiltration and seepage.
Pickaxes, sledghammers and elbow grease are the usual tools of the guerilla depaver, but these are being gradually replaced by robotics as fast as DARPA can declassify its research. A popular depaver is the BigDog, as it is cheaply available, easily programmable and configurable, and can traverse rough terrain en route to its target asphalt or while escaping. In the video above, a very early prototype can be seen tippy tapping on a parking lot, somewhat auguring its future reuse.
So far, guerrilla depaving activities are concentrated on medium-sized municipalities suffering from depressed tax revenues and minimal federal aid. These twin crises have left them unable to provide basic infrastructural services. Faced with the prospect of failed sewers, stagnant pools and destructive flooding, the guerrilla depaver works to knit an alternative urban hydrology.
About the film: Half a world away from Cairo’s Tahrir Square, an aging American intellectual shuffles around his cluttered terrace house in a working-class Boston neighbourhood. His name is Gene Sharp. White-haired and now in his mid-eighties, he grows orchids, he has yet to master the internet and he hardly seems like a dangerous man. But for the world’s dictators his ideas can be the catalyst for the end of their regime.
Few people outside the world of academia have ever heard his name, but his writings on nonviolent revolution (most notably ‘From Dictatorship to Democracy’, a 93-page, 198-step guide to toppling dictators, available free for download in 40 languages) have inspired a new generation of protesters living under authoritarian regimes who yearn for democratic freedom.
His ideas have taken root in places as far apart as Burma, Thailand, Bosnia, Estonia, Iran, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Venezuela and now in Syria, Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East as old orders crumble amidst the protests of their disgruntled citizens.
Fabrizio Saiu works with Italian and European musicians and in some ensembles: Radici Ensemble, Ligatura and Pasceri Rinaldi Saiu Trio. In Perform Art he collaborates with ClgEnsemble; in Video Art and Photo with Alessandro Ligato, Stefano Mazzanti and Paolo Asaro; In Theater/Dance with the TIDA. He works within improvisation and contemporary music he works with Phi4, Ligatura and with the composer M. Montalbetti. Currently he is working on Objet sans corps: a performance focused on the dynamics of matter transformation, of movement, and of resonance in the relationship between man and environment.
Objet Sans Corps III and IV
The audio-visual document Objet sans corps is composed of 5 scenes and it lasts 14 minutes. The document is the Trace, the residue, the Supplement of a research on the dynamics of
matter transformation, of movement, and of the resonance on the link between man and environment. Every scene is focused on the circular repetition of the same movement and it is characterized by a precise and essential displacement of the body in the environment. The corporal acts do not have a ultimate aim, and their self-referential frees the body that on them produce itself from every functionality, canceling it inside itself. Is it through this alienation that Objet sans corps become an effect of the process instead of his outcom.
How did the Dutch get their cycling infrastructure? This question keeps coming back because it is of course relevant to people who want what the Dutch have.
Road building traditions go back a long way and they are influenced by many factors. But the way Dutch streets and roads are built today is largely the result of deliberate political decisions in the 1970s to turn away from the car centric policies of the prosperous post war era. Changed ideas about mobility, safer and more livable cities and about the environment led to a new type of streets in the Netherlands.
Posted by Mark Wagenbuur for “A view from the cycle path…” Continue HERE
This tool is being developed to provide a low cost, easy to use, and a safe method for making aerial image maps. Over the last two years, we’ve build a global community of mappers who are engaged in discussion around the development and use of these tools. Normally aerial image maps are made from satellites and airplanes. This activity introduces easy methods for making on-demand image maps. Our community is particularly interested in applying this to civic and environmental issues.
Applications and example uses
Residents of the Gulf Coast are using balloons and kites to produce their own aerial imagery of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill… documentation that will be essential for environmental and legal use in coming years. We believe in complete open access to spill imagery and are releasing all imagery from the oil spill mapping project into the public domain. Browse maps and data from the Gulf Coast in the Public Laboratory Archive
How to make your own
at least 1000 ft of string on a spool
a cheap digital camera with “continuous mode”
a balloon or kite
a rubber band
tape & scissors
leather or cloth gloves
How to use it
The illustrated guide includes lots of tips for a successful flight; print it and bring it with you!
Be sure to review the Balloon Mapping Regulations for the US, or the equivalent wherever you are planning to map.
Try to launch your balloon to at least 1000 ft for a good compromise of high resolution vs. large area.
Stay away from power lines, airports, and traffic.
Source: Public Laboratory. More info and download material HERE
An example without the mapping: iPad Survives 100,000+ Foot Fall From Space Near Area 51.
Gordon Monahan: Six long piano wires are suspended from the tower of the Royal Castle in Warsaw and are connected to a piano positioned in the middle of the square below. At the connecting point high above on the balcony of the tower, audio recordings played into an amplifier are transmitted into the long piano strings using vibrating coils in small motors attached to the wires, which cause the piano strings to vibrate in sympathy with the audio signals. The vibrations in the long piano strings are transmitted down the long piano wires and are amplified by contact to the piano soundboard below. The audio recordings are thus reproduced without any loudspeakers – instead, the motor coils, the long piano wires and soundboard become substitutes for a loudspeaker system.
Audio recordings transmitted into the piano strings consist of note sequences derived from piano compositions by Frederic Chopin. The note sequences were extracted from midi files of Chopin’s piano pieces and ‘recomposed’ using midi software, to form new pieces that were then recorded using a software-based piano. In total, twenty-six ‘recompositions’ were derived from twenty Preludes, two Etudes Opus 10 and 25, the Fantaisie Impromptu Opus 66, one Nocturne Opus 27 Nr. 1, one Polonaise Opus 53, and the first movement of the Sonata, Opus 35.
In addition to the piano sounds vibrating in the wires, whenever the wind blows perpendicular to the piano strings, they vibrate with Aeolian tones, thus adding a spontaneous audio event manifested by natural forces. These Aeolian tones blend with the audio signals or they sometimes drown out the audio signals, which re-emerge once the wind dies down or changes direction.
Andrea Zittel, American, b. 1965, “Indianapolis Island,” 2010. Fiberglass, foam, mixed media. Commissioned by the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
The Indianapolis Museum of Art is issuing a call for proposals for a summer 2012 six-week residency on Andrea Zittel’s Indianapolis Island within the IMA’s 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art and Nature Park. Graduate and undergraduate students and emerging professionals in the fields of art, design, architecture and performing arts are encouraged to apply to customize and reside on Indianapolis Island.
Anchored in the 35-acre lake within 100 Acres, Indianapolis Island is a habitable “off-the-grid” structure accessible by rowboat. At about 20 feet in diameter, the island serves as an experimental living structure that examines the daily needs of contemporary human beings. Residents collaborate with Zittel by adapting and modifying the island’s structure according to their individual needs. The project blends elements of environmental art, sculpture, design and performance in a unique way, offering a challenging and experimental forum for exploring ideas about individualism and self-sufficiency. Visit www.imamuseum.org/islandresidency for more information, including photos and renderings of the structure, and to apply for the residency.
The 2012 residency will be the third to take place on Indianapolis Island. During the artwork’s inaugural summer in 2010, Herron School of Art and Design (Indianapolis, Ind.) students Jessica Dunn and Michael Runge activated the installation through a series of visitor interactions based on a system of exchange with their project titled Give and Take. The 2011 island resident was Katherine Ball, a student of Portland State University’s Art + Social Practice MFA program (Portland, Ore.). Over the course of her residency, titled No Swimming, Ball initiated a series of ecological interventions in the Park’s lake and engaged a local audience through a series of public programs centered on the topic of water. For more information about the past residencies, visit www.imamuseum.org/100acres/artists/andreazittel.
Proposals are due Friday, January 13, 2012, and should include a brief written statement about the planned residency with renderings. Residencies must last six weeks or longer and be conducted between May and September 2012.
About Contemporary Art at the Indianapolis Museum of Art
The IMA’s robust contemporary art program is a model for how encyclopedic museums engage the art of our time. With a renewed focus on its contemporary collection, programs, and publications, the IMA has been actively seeking out the works of emerging and mid-career international artists through both gift and acquisition, and organizing major traveling exhibitions and newly commissioned projects. In recent years, the IMA has worked with artists including Ingrid Calame, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Los Carpinteros, Amy Cutler, Tara Donovan, Tony Feher, Orly Genger, Jeppe Hein, Robert Irwin, Alfredo Jaar, Josephine Meckseper, Joshua Mosley, Ernesto Neto, Type A, and Andrea Zittel, among others.
In June 2010, the IMA launched its new 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park to wide critical acclaim, and it has been hailed across the United States as a new model for site-responsive sculpture parks in the 21st century. Among the backdrop of woodlands, wetlands, and a 35-acre lake, the park currently includes nine commissioned art installations by artists from throughout the world as well as the Ruth Lilly Visitor Pavilion designed by architect Marlon Blackwell. 100 Acres is one of only a few sculpture parks in the United States dedicated to the ongoing commission of site-responsive artwork.
Lisa Freiman, the IMA’s senior curator and chair of the Department of Contemporary Art, was appointed the 2011 U.S. Commissioner for La Biennale di Venezia, the 54th International Art Exhibition. During the Biennale, the IMA presented six new works by the collaborative Allora & Calzadilla in the U.S. Pavilion for the exhibition titled Gloria.
Indianapolis Museum of Art
www.imamuseum.org
Twitter: @imamuseum
Preview of The Gaits: a High Line Soundwalk, by Lainie Fefferman, Jascha Narveson, Cameron Britt, and Daniel Iglesia. Produced by Friends of the High Line for Make Music Winter, December 21, 2011. The Gaits: A High Line Soundwalk composed by Lainie Fefferman, Jascha Narveson, and Cameron Britt.
Download a free iPhone application that turns footsteps into electric guitar chords, car horns, and more, and become a musical instrument as you stroll down the High Line. The first fifty participants can rent free, wearable speakers for the duration of the soundwalk; visitors are encouraged to bring their own and join the fun.
An article by SLATE claims that the independent bookstore is not the last stronghold of literary culture you think it is.
Farhad Manjoo: Amazon just did a boneheaded thing, and it deserves all the scorn you want to heap on it. Last week, the company offered people cash in exchange for going into retail stores and scanning items using the company’s Price Check smartphone app. If you scanned a product and then purchased it from Amazon rather than the shop you were standing in, Amazon would give you a 5 percent discount on the sale. (Disclosure: Slate is an Amazon affiliate; when you click on an Amazon link from Slate, the magazine gets a cut of the proceeds from whatever you buy.)
I’m generally a fan of price comparison—like everyone else, I hate spending more than I should—but I can understand physical retailers’ fear of the practice becoming widespread. When you walk into Best Buy and get a salesperson to spend 10 minutes showing you a television, then leave empty-handed so you can buy the TV for less on Amazon, you’ve just turned Best Buy into Jeff Bezos’ chump. The Price Check promotion (which lasted only one day) was, like Amazon’s aggressive efforts to dodge the collection of sales tax, a brazen attempt to crush local retailers, and I (as did many others) found it distasteful. Sure, I’m a fan of Amazon and devote a substantial portion of my income to its coffers—but does it have to be so wantonly callous about destroying its competitors? Continue HERE
WiFi at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design
YOUrban: “It has been very exiting to see how our film ‘Immaterials: Light Painting WiFi’ has being linked to and discussed across a broad range of audiences, disciplines and fields of research, including urbanism, technology, architecture, advertising and art.
A common question, particularly from interaction design and technology communities is how we designed and built the WiFi measuring rod. So we thought it would be a good idea to go into some details about the design and development of the probe and the techniques, and also point towards how design research can contribute to understanding immaterial phenomena of networks and the city.”
Making WiFi measuring rod
“In 2009 we started investigating the concept of ‘immaterials’ in a collaboration between the AHO based research-project Touch and the design studio BERG from London. ‘Immaterials: Light painting WiFi’ is is a continuation of our explorations of intangible phenomena that have both have implications for design and effect how products and cities are experienced. Jack Schulze of BERG explains that:
‘The products we design now are made with new stuffs. Service layers, video, animation, subscription models, customisation, interface, software, behaviours, places, radio, data, APIs and connectivity are amongst the immaterials for modern products.’
Jack Schulze (BERG)
Jack’s colleague Matt Jones have summarised and discussed the concept of ‘immaterials’ further, and uses sociality, data, radio and time as key examples. The networked city is filled with several forms of intangible phenomena that can be described as ‘immaterials’, such as data from embedded sensors, GPS signals and RFID travel cards. Radio and wireless communication are a fundamental part of the construction of networked cities. In my ongoing PhD research, entitled ‘Pockets and cities’, I specifically want to get at the material, spatial and contextual qualities of these immaterials of the networked city and how they relate to daily city life.” Continue HERE
This video is about exploring the spatial qualities of RFID, visualised through an RFID probe, long exposure photography and animation.
It features Timo Arnall of the Touch project and Jack Schulze of BERG.
CONDITIONS, is a new Scandinavian magazine focusing on the conditions of architecture and Urbanism. Presenting new perspectives, in the way of conceiving and analyzing designs, works and theory for architecture.
In opposition to ignorance and superficiality this magazine is conceived in order to search for knowledge and predicaments of our continuously evolving society. It is organized in a fluctuating network of agents reflecting the present globalized state of a dynamic society, economics, politics and culture which are the motivators of architecture. Through a play of thoughts in an open ended forum, predefined “facts” will be unsecured and constantly reinvented. The forum will gather the architect, client, politician and the public, a communion of ideas creating conditions for evolution.
Contents of issue 9 “New Knowledge / New practices?”
THE PERFECT ARCHITECT
Interview with Dominique Unathi Xenos
INTERVIEW WINY MAAS, MVRDV
OSLO 27TH OF MAY 2011
HAVE EGO, WILL STRUGGLE
by Antti Nousjoki
MONEY
THE SPECIAL GENERALIST
Interview with Kristian Kreiner
THE ARCHITECT AS DEVELOPER
Interview with Bjørnar Johnsen
TOOLS
POWERTOOLS
Interview with Erik L. Olsen / Transsolar
CONSTRUCTLAB / EXYZT
IS EXTERNAL THERMAL INSULATION GOING TO REVOLUTIONIZE THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE 21ST CENTURY?
by Phillipe Rahm
NEW TECHNOLOGIES / EMERGING FIRMS
Interviews with Marco Vanucci, Marco Verde and Manuel Aust by Scully Beaver-Lynch
PRESCIENCE
by Mitchell Joachim
NEEDS
HYPERCONNECTIONS
Interview with Daniel Dendra
ABOUT U-TT
by Urban Think Tank
NOTES FROM TOHOKU, JAPAN
by Sören Grünert
APEX: RETRACING THE EGYPTIAN PYRAMIDS
by Ole J Bryn
In conjunction with the Living as Form exhibition, an online archival database of over 350 socially engaged projects from around the world has been compiled. This database, made possible by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is the work of researchers, advisers, and writers, working together to create the first encyclopedic collection of social practice work from the last 20 years, categorized by a range of criteria. We hope these categories will encourage more research into the phenomenon of social practice and its possible histories, geographies, and interpretations. +++ HERE
According to their Statement, Penny Productions is a collective of artists from different disciplines who make temporary installations.
Their projects include the creation of color inflatables that completely occupy spaces erected by others, giving them a new identity. This simplification of the space unifies the shapes and textures, creating a different atmosphere.
As benchmarks for these projects they acknowledge the work of iconic artists such as Christo and Jeanne-Claude, while still contemplating contemporary artists such as Rachel Whiteread, Kimihiko Okada, Doris Salcedo, Hans Hemmert, Michael Landy, Tomas Saraceno and Ernesto Neto, among others.
Carlos Veron: Cinematographer
Kevin Zimmerman: Editor
Ritu Paramesh: Producer
The Mill NY
Colorist: Damien Van Der Cruyssen
Producer: Cat Gulacsy
3d Artist: Navdeep Singh, Thomas Bardwell, Joshua Merck
MassMarket NY
Producer: Marcus Lansdell
3d Artist: Aldrich Torres, Entae Kim, Yuheng Chiang,
Juan Cristobal Hernandez.
Compositing: David Parker, Cole Schreiber.
Sound
Original score: Peter Lauridsen @ Stimmung
Sound design and Mix: Lindsey Alvarez @ Lime studios
Perhaps a take on our wasting energy habits. On another note, this video reminds me of Raoul Sinier’s EV.Panic in terms of an ominous luminous body growing slowly to take over public space.
A mysterious band of hacker-artists is prowling the network of tunnels below Paris, secretly refurbishing the city’s neglected treasures. Photo: UX
The unauthorized cinema that UX built beneath the Palais De Chaillot. Photo: UX
Marrakech (Morocco)
Protestors in Sulaimaniyah’s Sara Square on Mar. 25, 2011. (Photo credit: (c) 2011 Samer Muscati/Human Rights Watch) 
Gene Sharp
Cycling protest tour 1979, Amsterdam.
View of installation for Doris McCarthy Gallery, University of Toronto–Scarborough, March, 2011
Andrea Zittel, American, b. 1965, “Indianapolis Island,” 2010. Fiberglass, foam, mixed media. Commissioned by the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
Jupiterimages/Thinkstock.
WiFi at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design
Making WiFi measuring rod
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