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A collection of images and thoughts on design, aesthetics and performative urban culture.
Didier Fiuza Faustino, Opus Incertum, 2008, shown at the 11th Venice Biennial.
“The prevalence of diagram or program in recent design approaches to all things architectural, like once of the principle of autonomy or the spirit of place, now gives place to every possible aspect of the performative in architecture.
Beyond the activation of program’s abstractions, and behind such a turn lies, as it would be expected, one relevant paradigm shift. And here we may speak of a return of the user – not to say simply the return of the repressed – to the troubled horizon of current architectural concerns.
After the delusions of grandeur of the recent architectural self, the ever-cyclic return to the needs of the end-user of architecture now takes place by integrating use narratives into conceptual strategies of design, but also by introducing expressions of these concerns into the very shaping of built forms.
Thus one discovers the very imprints of bodies blooming in recent projects – reconnecting architecture with traditions of performance art –, just as one recognizes the performatic aspects of participation and self-building as instrumental in reconnecting architecture’s profession of faith with local communities and broader urban audiences.”
Via: http://shrapnelcontemporary.wordpress.com/tag/european-capital-of-culture-2012/
“The city is the new computer – the city is the platform, the network, the sensors and the interface”
view slides: http://www.slideshare.net/frogdesign/the-metacity
Belgium and the Netherlands have a long history of draining the wetlands on which they are founded. At the same time, a multitude of factories settled along the canals, leaking toxins and metals over the centuries, and making the water unusable for consumption or for watering edible gardens.
ReMarshing is a process of enabling the ecosystem to rebuild itself as a wetland while also cleaning the water of its toxins.
An autonomous system of a wind-powered water wheel keeps pulling water out of the canal and slowly, but continuously flooding the surrounding landscape. In this growing marsh, local remediation plants such as poplar, rap seed, willow, clover and grasses take up metals and toxins that reside in the water and riverbeds.
“Tom Holert intends to reframe and re-imagine design in post-capitalist terms. By tracing the appearance of the term ‘design’ in contemporary critical theory he develops an optimistic micro-political approach, which tries to go beyond well-rehearsed figures of critique, namely, those accusing design of being complicit with capitalist commodification and, ultimately, exploitation.”
More at: http://bedfordpress.org/forthcoming/civic-city-cahier-3/
Via: http://andreasangelidakis.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/civic-city-cahiers.html
The first screening of Urban Research Films on Monday the 13th of February at the Directors Lounge, a festival running in parallel to the Berlinale in Berlin, showed a diverse range of experimental short films addressing urban space. As the director mentioned before the screening, it is hard to treat urban space not from an introspective perspective hence his decision to show rather artistic interpretations of urban space.
Most of the films struggled to establish a novel perspective on the urban landscape and where rather re-interpretations of past approaches. Three artworks which positively stood out where
Heart of Durham was by far the most interesting work, the artistic documentary merged the two genres of artistic short film and documentary elegantly and with a unique aesthetic. It immersed the spectator truly into the poetic interpretation of the space and on top managed to tell its own stories.
The program Urban Research, curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr for Directors Lounge 2012, reaches beyond the genre “city films”. Contemporary artists are engaged in local politics, they are concerned with specific urban problems and developments, and they are directly interacting with the public with performances and public interventions. Due to rapid changes of urban environment, place is no more a reliable urban structure connected with consistency and collective memory. Place must be reinvented and newly defined over and over, and this does not only apply for spaces of temporary use. Public space in the sense of social interchange and interaction — as well as just a space free to use — is not a given opportunity any more, which can be taken for granted. International artists address these themes and issues with a variety of forms, experimental, documentary, abstract, and narrative; they intervene directly or they show their visions of public space, and a new urban landscape.
More Information at: http://www.richfilm.de/DL2012/framesUrbanResearch.html
“Metropolis II is an intense and a complex kinetic sculpture, modeled after a fast paced, frenetic modern city. Steel beams form an eclectic grid interwoven with an elaborate system of 18 roadways, including one 6 lane freeway, and HO scale train tracks. Miniature cars speed through the city at 240 scale miles per hour; every hour, the equivalent of approximately 100,000 cars circulate through the dense network of buildings. According to Burden, “The noise, the continuous flow of the trains, and the speeding toy cars, produces in the viewer the stress of living in a dynamic, active and bustling 21st Century city.”
Islands of LA is an evolving study and engagement with the history, desire and potential for meaningful connection in urban public space. This ideal is pursued by exploring the seemingly absurd use of traffic islands as terrains for peaceable assembly and speech among friends and strangers that is both creative and critically minded. This use is not unprecedented: a rigorous site analysis reveals a global history of the use of traffic islands for gathering and expression, in spite of the difficulties of the space. Extending this tradition through events, interactive maps, and an archive of stories, Islands of LA invites us to explore the desire, the fear, and the possibility for connection and voice in the urban landscape. The current focus is on the notion of peaceable or public assembly.
Islands of LA was conceived of as a project to investigate the use and availability of the marginalised yet highly visible public spaces of traffic islands. Islands of LA views the traffic islands as everyday spaces and venues with a complex history and environment. The project explores the dynamics of these spaces through various ways including experimenting with the use of them. The exploration and usage of these spaces examines questions about public land use, law, urbanism, art and other topics specific to traffic islands. The project began on 9/16/07 and was conceived of by Ari Kletzky.
As Islands of LA expands beyond Los Angeles, “LA” will take on other meanings such as: Local Association and Legal absurdity. Los Angeles becomes Lawful Assembly…for Public Safety. In this case, the public is viewed as protected by the use and availability of islands of publicly owned, public space for peaceable assembly, which has a history of functioning as a collective activity that served as a check and balance on representative democracy and functioned to create a rich public and street life in cities in the United States
Read more at: http://islandsofla.org
Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland is seeking proposals for an upcoming major exhibition and festival HACK THE CITY
Call Opens: Monday 5 December
Call Closes: Friday 20 January
Exhibition duration: 22 June 2012 – 07 September 2012
Festival dates: 11-15 July 2012
Calling all hackers, makers, doers, data nerds, hobbyists, artists, citizen scientists, tech geeks, activists, edgy engineers and DIY urban planners…
Science Gallery is seeking proposals for its 2012 flagship exhibition HACK THE CITY launching in June 2012. HACK THE CITY is curated by Teresa Dillon – Lead Curator/Researcher & artist, Linda Doyle – Director of CTVR, Josh Klein – TED Speaker and author of Hacking Work, Martin Kelly – IBM Venture Capital Group and Michael John Gorman – Director of Science Gallery.
Currently more than half of the world’s population lives in towns and cities. This trend is expected to continue. Between 2025-2030 of the approximate 8 billion people who will live in the world 5 billion will live in cities. Yet the majority of our city infrastructures are based on inherited historical layouts and systems.
Science Gallery’s 2012 flagship exhibition and festival HACK THE CITY will rethink our cities from the ground up through the spirit and philosophy of the hacker ethos – to bend, mash-up, tweak and cannibalise our city systems, to create possibilities, illustrate visionary thinking and demonstrate real-world examples for sustainable urban futures. It will capitalise on Dublin city’s history, legacy, population and infrastructure, transforming the city itself into a nimble “playground” and live urban hack lab. The exhibition and events will explore hacking for good – the repurposing of useful resources, the innovators who customise existing tools for new uses and who purposefully challenge existing hierarchies. What creative ways can we release untapped resources, harnessing what maybe considered as by-products or waste, to create alternative systems for public good?
HACK THE CITY is Science Gallery’s major international exhibition and festival for 2012 and a flagship programme of Dublin City of Science. We are interested in receiving proposals for experiments, exhibits and events, which go beyond Science Gallery in to the city of Dublin and even connect multiple cities globally. Potential venue partnerships include The Ark, Temple Bar, Dublin and international partnerships with ZER01 in San Jose, California. Working with our international partners and local councils we will be creating city zones, which will test potential new technologies, creating situations for energy visualisation, play, social networking and communications. As a centrepiece in Dublin’s tenure as European City of Science 2012, we are especially interested in submissions which utilise Dublin’s position, geography and demographic – as the capital of a small island, on the periphery of Europe, struggling to recover from a post-economic boom and the European home for a number of key multinational tech companies (IBM, Google, Facebook), innovators and entrepreneurs. Drawing on this vibrant community we encourage novel approaches to social and commercial ideas, which can be piloted and prototyped during HACK THE CITY.
The exhibition will include existing and proposed works, innovations and inventions around the theme of HACK THE CITY. The exhibition will extend beyond the gallery through workshops, labs, events and off-site projects with Science Gallery becoming a hub connecting difference city zones to mobile and online worlds. Alongside artworks, designed objects and documentary artefacts, HACK THE CITY will encourage thinking differently about how we set up new business products and services, which address our urban demands, plus include special live performances, innovative installations, unique physical and mental experiences, high-profile talks, discussions and debates, web-focused interactions, games and collaborative experiences.
More information at: http://www.sciencegallery.com/hackthecity
