this is troubling.
2010-07-31
Mental Gum
title idea: fform
"the additional F is for fuck."
if, against the implication of the title, the presentation shows no form, it becomes a negation of the negation: it is an active critique of visual representation through the absence of form and the presence implied in the title.
// wtc conversation about its loaded history
- www.fastcodesign.comSnøhetta is the most famous architecture firm you’ve never heard of. Headed by Norwegians Craig Dykers (above left) and Kjetil Trædal Thorsen (right), the studio--named for a snowy peak in Norway--has brought off some of the splashiest international projects of the past two decades, from a striking ...
Brainfarts
So did Berlin.
London and Berlin are great centers of culture. New york has no wall: it does, slightly, via association to the river and to central park.
Could it be when islands of growth are cultivated, like colonies of bacteria. And then released on each other. Boom! you have new unimagined forms of interactions and contradictions arising. Do these walls have to be physical? If they aren't physical, how would they separate spatial adjacencies (as an architect, one has to believe that space in its immediacy is still important)? What are they separating?And then what would signal their symbolic demise.
2010-07-28
Brainfarts
The Autonomy of Individual Collectivity
If the fall of the Berlin Wall signified the “end of (a) history”, “Nevermind the Bollocks” marked the beginning of a new one: ours. The emergence of subculture, or alterity, has today matured to the point of eroding center/periphery arguments. There is no “collective”, We are all the same unique individual.
#“The End of History and the Last Man” is a 1992 book by Francis Fukuyama that argues that the advent of Western liberal democracy may signal the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government. "What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of [collective] human government.”
//readings: Jean-Francois Lyotard // The Desire Named Marx // The illusion of the organic whole body
Imaginary Conversations
"all that is solid melts into air", Marx
Solid and air are just relative states. When everything has melted, there will still be solids. its just that they won't be solid
"For the longest time I didn't know what I was writing about. I wrote to figure it out and by the time I did I was done.", Jonathan Safran Foer
Just do it, you'll figure "it" out in the process
"Stop asking "Is this a good or bad thing?" and start asking "What's going on?"", Marshall McLuhan
analyse, questions, critique. cross contaminate. tag thinking
2010-07-27
Brainfarts
Illustration showing giant squid attack, p.275 from Jules Vernes, 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea', First English edition, 1870. F5715-004.
The semiotic relationship between the illustrations and the text in Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires is interesting.
The semiotic relationship between the illustrations and the text in Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires is interesting.
As Georges Borgeaud has described it: “It is not the text which defines the illustration, but the illustration which defines the text and which transports the reader beyond...it is a catalyst to dream."
Never fully revealed, text and image are weaved into a mental landscape with a third element: memories.
For a mental construction to be richer than as is, one should appeal to memories, elements of nostalgia, shared or personal.
2010-07-25
Imaginary Conversations
"I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic but I love plastic. I want to be plastic."
intepretation: on plasticity of meaning
"once you 'got" Pop, you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America in the same way again."
intepretation: popular, also known as the lowest common denominator for the average man that doesn't exist.
"Isn't life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?"
intepretation: in the forever now, progress is moot
"I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of 'work', because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don't always want to do. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep."
intepretation: the bio-political
"It's the movie that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it and how to look how you feel about it."
intepretation: Social "Programming"
2010-07-24
testa desk crit // take-away points // 23-07-2010
industrialized homogenization is boring. there is no material agency, no potential for accident. A clear cut delineation forecloses the possibility of conversation, locking the building forever within the limits of the architect's imagination.
there is a paucity of ideas and a surfeit of images.
industrialized homogenization is boring. there is no material agency, no potential for accident. A clear cut delineation forecloses the possibility of conversation, locking the building forever within the limits of the architect's imagination.
there is a paucity of ideas and a surfeit of images.
2010-07-22
testa desk crit // take-away points // 21-07-2010
On the role of the designer: "to make the invisible visible and to give value to what other people did not consider previously." This is also beyond the issue of form: where visual splendor has given way to aesthetic anesthesia, it is the commitment of this project to reveal other forms of relationships and undermine autonomy. this is not anthropomorphic.
On the project: creating a scaffold for situations to occur, but also creating loose conditions where indeterminancy can play itself out. "because in the jurisdiction of what can happen, there is also the underlying notion of what cannot." the role of the designer here is to, within reason, give a spectrum of scenarios, understand how it might play out and then how it might be used toward a design ambition. In this paradigm, instead of mistakes in an idealized condition, there are only opportunities within a scenario.
On representation: we need new forms of representation to accompany these ways of seeing. To wrap the old in a new skin is the equivalent of running in place, the illusion of progress to assuage the anxieties of modernity. To show the new through the lens of the old is equally useless. To describe vision through words that describe smell is equally useless, because it makes one evaluate it through old modalities. Softness, "zonal", use of gradients.
On investigation: you can't really solve all the problems. don't get bogged down in the technicalities. realize that what you are proposing are a series of proto-investigations, proposals for its investigation. The actual project should be overly constrained by it: the intentions of the investigation should support the architectural ambition, not the other way around. this also means that there need to be an overarching ambition that supersedes it. what's the big concept?
Statement:
Climates, as we conceive of them, are really typologies of growth. This project attempts to deconstruct our understanding of the environment, to shift the concept of nature as "natural" to one of enthropic negotiation.
Synthetic Ecologies: Programming Indeterminacy
Synthetic Ecologies: Beyond Zero
The Biosphere model: order not disorder, problems not opportunities, stable not entropic,
These are paradigms of thought upon which the Biosphere was modelled on.
This project is a critique of the biosphere. If there is no natural, then there is no artificial. All it is then, what we have, are the sum of flows within a system. The impulse to control these has led to reductive modes of thought: categorical boundaries, while toward the designer, creates stunted ends. to try and accept the multiple richness of a project, i had to look it at through multiple forms of representation. simulation was also a way.
The biosphere is a metaphor. In the end, the journey is the destination. "There" is never really "there" except in its pursuit.
2010-07-20
Studio Testa: Take 2
*sidenote: Anaglyph images are used to provide a stereoscopic 3D effect, when viewed with 2 color glasses (each lens a chromatically opposite color, usually red and cyan). Images are made up of two color layers, superimposed, but offset with respect to each other to produce a depth effect.
take 1:
Climates, as we conceive of them, are really typologies of growth. This project attempts to deconstruct our understanding of the environment, to shift the concept of nature as "natural" to one of enthropic negotiation.
Synthetic Ecologies: Programming Indeterminacy
Part 1: Internal influences and their natural intepretations
Part 2: Synthetic intepretations and Control systems
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Gerald Heng http://www.fastcodesign.com/1661977/meet