Where is "Untitled"?

On Locations and the Lack of Them in Gursky's Photography

... it is this claim to universality... (and) its reference to no-man's land, a non-location, a place which could be called "u-topia", something which is a fundamental concept in what we call Modernity...

In formal terms, man is never at the center of Gursky's photography. And yet people remain his only real concern... Despite his analytical view of mankind and society, Gursky always remains indulgent. If he wanted to focus on all the harsh social realities of the conflict between the individual and the constraints imposed on us by the politcal or economic system in which we live he would portray man as a slave of the machine... But his is not the case. In Gursky's photography the tragic element is missing. Instead, the artist maintains an ironic distance. normally man is viewed as a part of the whole and not as its instrument... it is never the case that he is completely dominated by his surroundings.

-Marie Luise Syring

blanket modernism that reproduces itself - simulacra, that which only references itself will soon exhume itself of any rhetoric or ideology - it becomes a end in itself, it is made because it has been made. "the coexistence of a number of apparently unconnected buildings which, by the simple fact of sharing a certain proximity, form an urban condition."

Bear say "moo"

"... where i can dream a bit more freely."

Today for the first time I felt truly lost in the supermarket, only this time, to the extent I didn't know or expect that I'd find myself in the supermarket, which was in Target, which brings the whole thing to a whole new level of disorientation. The Clash was right.

But dinner at Local was good - friendly waiters and a chill neighbourhoodish stylish crowd, and the silverlake lounge across the street.

at DWP building, the prefect example of all that is right and wrong with monumental modernism: the grand scale and dehumanizing vastness of it.

"Acknowledging Koolhaas as the consummate contemporary architect who is able to look past what constitutes the discipline's own boundaries, we became interested in his response to urbanism, a dissolution of the discourse and its transformation into a discussion of events rather than definitions and limits. Five or six of OMA's projects in "S,M,L,XL" focused on discovering unnameable hybrids rather than fixed typologies, and on the manipulation of infrastructure rather than discrete building blocks. More importantly, all of these projects approach urbanism through a loose diagrammatic set of associations between the formal, social and the political"

"Wal-mart was of interest to us because of it was the exact antithesis of what urban design projects typically deal with. We wanted to confront the nitty gritty of how to design for a large multinational corporation, to effectively re-arrange and re-formulate their building type to manifest something new."

"More important than the visual transparency was the idea that this kind of abrupt juxtaposition actually creates positive friction. Something that is lacking in many other new urban propositions where segregation and division are the primary operations at hand. In a certain perverse sense, typology offered us raw material to manipulate although our concern for rules regarding corridors, atriums, and other such features were always to leverage them in unexpected ways."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574403293064136098.html?mod=loomia&loomia_si=t0:a16:g12:r1:c0.211192:b27778496

Slavoj Žižek (pronounced [ˈslavoj ˈʒiʒɛk]) (born 21 March, 1949 in Ljubljana, PR Slovenia, SFR Yugoslavia) is a Hegelian philosopher, Lacanian theoretical psychoanalyst, Marxist political thinker, film theorist, andcultural critic.

Žižek is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia and a professor at the European Graduate School. He has been a visiting professor at, among others, the University of Chicago, Columbia, London Consortium, Princeton, The New School, the University of Minnesota, the University of California, Irvine and the University of Michigan. He is currently the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana.^[1]

Žižek uses examples from popular culture to explain the theory of Jacques Lacan and uses Lacanian psychoanalysis, Hegelian philosophy and Marxist politico-economic critique to interpret social phenomena. He writes on many topics including subjectivity, ideology, capitalism, fundamentalism, racism, tolerance, multiculturalism, human rights, ecology, globalization, the Iraq War, revolution, totalitarianism, postmodernism,popular culture, opera, cinema, and religion.

role of media in determining the resolution of the world view. previously technically-limited, it is now open and thus necessary to regulate and self-censure

Narrative, Storytelling

the contemporary lack of a metanarrative, giving way for the micronarrative that requires less facts and intersecting events to prop up its authenticity.

"Curation remains a dominant condition of network culture... the new is played out, novelty is now created through aggregation and commentary. Digital technology aids greatly in this, making remixing a part of everyday life for many individuals..."

[self conscious curation to create an overlap between the physical and the information landscape to create more persuasive relalities. right now, the information is either dis-engaged or location in another time frame/period.]

augmented realities

Andrea Branzi - "Superarchitecture accepts the logic of production and consumption and makes an effort to demystify it."... thus, the pursuit not of resistance or autonomy but rather of exacerbation and overload was achitettura radicale's seminal innovation. Architecture is an act of analysis, not merely a project of formal delirium or self-legitimizing theory.

i.e. = yes is more

Slavoj Zizek, "... it is not only that Hollywood stages a semblance of real life deprived of the weight and inertia of materiality - in the late capitalist consumerist society, 'real social life' itself somehow acquires the features of a staged fake, with our neighbours behaving in 'real' life as stage actors and extras... [T]he ultimate truth of the capitalist-utilitarian de-spiritualized universe is the de-materialization of the 'real life' itself, its reversal into a spectral show."

..in order to tell a compelling story and to make our world comprehensible, we preplan, script and edit our lives... In order to keep going in a world where every desire and every decision is valid, we have to creatively bring a sense of order to our lives. Non-fiction allows us to believe that the stories we tell ourselves about our existence have meaning and importance.

much ado about nothing: creating internal ecologies that do nothing

oblique catalyst

A Strong Century, Andrea Branzi

The code of classic modernity presents itself today as a rigid concept, overwhelmed by the fluidity of commerce, the invasion of innovations, the ungovernable natures of the world economy, and a climate facing a constant pollution crisis. Neo-capitalism, which has trumped throughout the world since 1989, seems to survive itself solely on the condition that it knows how to reform, modify, and in practice deny its own doings on a daily basis.

[a suspension of moral judgement]

The end of this epoch of forced modernization, marked by strong logic and the search for irreversible and definitive solutions, therefore coincides, as franccois fouret claims, with the end of the historic epoch begun by the French Revolution and ended in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

[winning isn't winning, its just not losing]

this was always understood as a dicovery of the true, of the authentic hidden under the overstructures and hypocrisy of history. this was a search, therefore, aimed at broadening the available repertory of certainties, always looking for a truth that already existed, but was previously unseen.

[latent potentials, which raises questions about identity as a reaction or as an invention]

this is an epoch more attuned to the values of normalcy, even if composed entirely of exceptions , in a context where spread out laboratories of permanent vanguards work... this is an epoch in search of energetic systems capable of producing, without trauma, vast social and physical upheaval.

the new times are signaled by an ability to work in a world constructed according to a logic that we will call weak and diffuse

[able to absorb alternatives and the periphery]

Weak thought, that is, a type of hermeneutics that develops without looking to the great syntheses of the twentieth century, or to the unifying systems of politics and projects that were typical of classic modernism. INstead, this hermeneutics proceeds folloing more incomplete, imperfect, disarticulated types of cognizance and transformation, which are more ductile and therefore able to absorb the new and confront the surprises and complexities that this produces.

[one that can absorb it (miesian "universal space", where its relevance is hinged upon its non-specificity or generic nature vs one that is a catalyst for new forms of lifestyle and use (e.g. SPL)]

investigation of consequences produced by information technologies and weak logics they create.

architecture as a form of imagineering, but it seems as if every realization of it, when its stated intent is revealed, promises its own failure. im thinking of the IBA housing, corbusier's villa radieuse. its almost as if for a concept to live, it should not be built.

and yet its the alternative such as the projects of raymond hood etc, where such a conceptual vacuum gives room for it to absorb its own character. what do you think?

Contemporary architectural culture can be summerized as a series of hermetic arguments, each sealed into their own air-tight closed-loop arguments where A equals B therefore B equals A. The irony is that this babel-confusion is at a time when communication is at its most fluid.

Compelling as it may seem at first, it has, at the end of the day, the conceptual elegance of a dog chasing its own tail.

Perhaps architecture really is a series of mis-intepretations and conceptual flights off the thinnest springboard of reality. Like a Hockney splash, the culprit isn't real because he never was there.

"Newness cannot always be invented. Sometimes its just about making a space nice."

"... it is a method of systematic idealization, an automatic overestimation of what exists, a bombardment of speculation that invests even the most mediocre aspects with retroactive consceptual and ideological charge",

a delirium of interpretation.

do you feel like sometimes you're doing more without really doing anything in the end?

running in place