November 1st brings about the introduction of Creative Commons licences to the UK. Developed to allow a more flexible approach to copyright, the licences allow control over various aspects of reproduction and adapation.
"The project is the brainchild of Stanford University's law professor Lawrence Lessig, and the licences allow artists to move away from traditional copyright's "all rights reserved" towards a more digital age-friendly "some rights reserved"."
[
Guardian Unlimited]
RMJM Competition text - UPDATE
The ballet of the steel dinosuars
or
animating the invisible
Six listed cranes line Imperial basin, striding in line to Imperial Dry Dock. The six are of different designs, articulated and balanced according to soon-to-be redundant industrial requirements. We believe these industrial artefacts should be not simply retained, but re-animated as interactive elements of a new living vibrant city quarter.
Leith has changed dramatically over the past fifty years, and in the next ten years will change further under the development of the proposed masterplan. We should not be seeking to preserve the 'Old Leith' in stasis, but, as if reassembling the skeletons of dinosaurs, we should be seeking out infrastructures, artefacts and elements of the industries that enabled Leith to prosper and bringing them to life as part of the contemporary city. Just as the skeletons become an entirely different entity on their reassembly (yet still undeniably give us the idea of a dinosaur), so we aim for the true nature of these redundant infrastructures to be revealed in their alien reincarnation.
Thus we take control of the cranes, adding electronic controls to the servos, replacing the human hands on the levers with computer link ups. The cranes become reanimated, ready to do our bidding. So what do they do? In the absence of the demand for heavy moving ability, What part of the massive industrial labour of loading and unloading do we ape or recreate? In the absence of ships and cargo, What modern (or virtual?) goods do we metaphorically move from ship to shore or shore to ship in remembrance of their former massive efforts?
No and none. We reject the idea of such a reworking of history as false and niave. Instead we put the cranes to work moving daily to relentless natural cycles and by night to ephemeral, whimsical and truly contemporary human impulses. Through their slow, balletic and most un-crane-like movements, we aim to reveal their true power and the importance of their presence in Leith of the past and the future.
At daybreak (come rain or shine) the cranes will wake and unfold, flower-like, to offer their tiny dinosaur heads to the sun, warming cold-bloodedly in the weak rays. Following the path of the sun across the sky, the cranes move in varying paths through the year and work as some oversize seasonal clock. At sunset, they fold into themselves and pause, as if gathering their thoughts before the frenzy of activity that fills the time from sundown until midnight.
During this time, the cranes act independently of each other, with movements that are as fast as can realistically be expected from their structures. Responding in movement to mobile phone text messages from the public and website visitors, the cranes trace letters and messages in light across the night sky, much like a child signing their name with the light of a sparkler. These traces are not immediately discernable to the human eye due to the slow nature of the cranes, but can be viewed through specially adapted telescopes that capture the letters through video and long-exposure photograpy and are relayed on the website. Several of these viewers are distributed throughout the park opposite the cranes and allow an intimate viewing of the messages. Otherwise invisible, the messages drive the cranes into their graceful, curving movements that would otherwise be alien to their former staccato, repetitive labour.
The Prelinger Library is currently being set up in San Francisco. Billed as "an appropriation-friendly setting", the library will be equiped with all manner of digitizing equipment to allow copies to be made of the items for use away from the library itself. "Though libraries live on (and are among the least-corrupted democratic institutions), the freedom to browse serendipitously is becoming rarer. Now that many libraries have economized on space and converted print collections to microfilm and digital formats, it's become harder to wander and let the shelves themselves suggest new directions and ideas. Key research libraries are often closed to unaffiliated users, and many libraries keep the bulk of their collections in closed stacks, inhibiting the rewarding pleasures of browsing. Despite its virtues, query-based online cataloging often prevents unanticipated yet productive results from turning up on the user's screen.
...
We are interested in exploring how libraries with specialized, unique, and arcane collections such as ours can be liberated from protected academic environments and made available to people working outside of those environments, especially artists, activists and independent scholars."
See also this article about the idiosyncratic shelving method.
Notes on "The Wee Red Book 2004/05"
The Wee Red Book 2004/05 is an (somewhat) anonymously produced and written A5 pamphlet distributed for free through the Student Representative Council within eca. Subtitled "A book about, certain things that one needs to know, when entereing an unfamiliar environment where people dress ostentatiously", the content (both in design and writing) demonstrates many of the key concepts that I have been reading about with regard to futureacademy and the "University without condition" that Derrida describes.
Whilst haphazard and amateur in presentation - cut and past laster-print text overlaid on ink drawings and frames then photocopied and collated with a simple double staple - the writing is exactly the kind of 'truthful' content that Derrida states must be the aim of the contemporary and future university. Texts frankly tell of the character and position of various workers within the college, from janitors ("the key master, the gatekeeper, Saint Peter; they are before the Law, and they are really big and scary") to management ("Driven by money, fame and banquest at the Balmoral"). The writing also offers useful pointers to the way students ("incidental extras who justify the funding especially if they are foreign") and schools within eca regard each other: at the end of the publication a text describing the actions and character of students of individual schools is counterpoised with a cocktail recipe. Thus the School of Sculpture is represented by the (non-alcoholic) cocktail Bitters Highball with the text:
"Ceramics
Sculpture
Now with its very own ceramics suite so people can make their own coffee cups this department is on the move. Run by Edinburgh's very own Alexander the Great it's a privilege to be on board. There is a fantastic atmosphere in the sculpture department fuelled by job insecurity and its resultant alcoholism, which creates a heady cocktail of artistic creativity. We cultivate metal bending, fire fetishism, wood frottage, and a diverse programme of unnatural feelings toward inanimate objects and their physical properties"
Through such plain language (whether or not written by someone from the department or not) it is apparent the way the school is viewed by others, both the good and the bad.
Notes on "Architecture from the outside" - part 1
Notes from Introduction
xix
The book asks the question: How can we understand space differently, in order to organize, inhabit and structure our living arrangements differently? It proposes two direction in searching for an answer: first in the direction of time, duration, or temporal flow, which is usually conceptualized as the other, the outside, or the counterpart of space. My central argument throughout is that architecture, geography, and urban planning have tended to neglect or ignore temporality or to reduce it to the measurable and the calcuable, that is, to space. It is central to the future of architecture that the question of time, change and emergence become more integral to the process of design and construction. [Second question regards a search in the direction of sexuality and sexual specificity]
Notes from
Embodying Space
p7.
Deleuze's idea may be useful not simply for rethinking the static or fixed plan, but also for addressing questions about what happens to a structure one it already exists. After it is built, structure is still not a fixed entity. It moves and changes, depending on how it is used, what is done with and to it, and how open it is to even further change. What sorts of metamorphoses does structure undergo when it's already there? What sorts of becomings can it engender? These kinds of issues cannot simply be accommodated or dealt with by plan or blueprints.
p12
Deleuze points to really interesting questions about technology. For example, his writings on virtuality have a certain resonsance with the field of architecture, which is interested not just in technological incorporation but also in the openness of building to futurity or virtuality. Not simple virtual technologies, but virtual buildings...This work may involve focusing on Deleuze's reading of Bergson's conception of virtuality. The possible is an already preformed version of the real. The transition from the possible to the real is a predictable one, not involving anything new or unexpected. The relationship between the virtual and the actual is one of surprise, for the virtual promises something different to the actual that it produces and always contains in it the potential for something other than the actual. Bergson is in effect a theorist of virtuality, of the openness of the future to what befalls it. This idea could be highly productive for architecture, a discipline primarily concerned with space. Architecture considers time as historical time, or past time, but it has never really thought a c concept of futurity....The virtual encompasses much more than the technological: indeed, it is the condition of the possibility of technology. It is the very condition of life, and historical development, the very milieu of technological development.
p18
While some think of cyberspace as a world of their own, which is the fantasy of autogenesis, a sort of Frankenstein fantasy of building a body or an entire world, many women working in cyberspace - producing art or writing - have never had that fantasy. What they see instead is that computer technology provides a space, an opportunity, a promise, of the possibility of working and producing differently. It is an incredibly effective tool - something that speeds everything up, makes it look shiny, gives it a polished look, yet it also transforms how we can work. This is quite different from (and considerably more modest than) the idea of its producing another world, or the simulation of this world....Much of the appeal that cyberspace holds fur those of us outside the field of fiction is simply practical: the technology enables just o do interesting things quickly and simply.
p20
Q. You have used in the past Roger Caillois' construction of psychoasthenia - a depersonalization by assimilation in space.
A. There is certain joy in our immersion in space. It is important to recognize that you can attain a certain (temporary) depersonalization and still enjoy it, enjoy the expansion and permeability of bodily boundaries...The spaces of the mall, ironically, are for many people precisely the spaces of the most intense pleasure. It is not simply the pleasure of consumption and acquisition, but also a certain pleasure in the spectacle and community interactions.
p21
Psychasthenia occurs when the boundaries of personal identity are collapsed and the subject is no longer able to distinguish what is inside from what is outside, what is self and what is other. It is clearly a very disturbing and debilitating psychical disorder. Cyberspace does not in itself induce psychosis or psychasthenia: one requires a certain bodily and conceptual cohesion to even enter cyberspace with all its apparatus and equipment.
p24
This [cyberspace] can't be your only space. This computerized or virtual space is always housed in side another space - the space of bodily dwelling. You can't be in a computer space unless you're also in another space [but for how long?]. This is why it's always only augmentational.
Grosz, E. A. (Elizabeth A.)
Architecture from the outside : essays on virtual and real space. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c2001.
There had been a time he would sometimes lift his head enough to see his hands. What of them was to be seen. One laid on the table and the other on the one. At rest after all they did. Lift his past head a moment to see his past hands. Then lay it back on them to rest it too. After all it did.
Stirrings Still is one of the last texts by “the last modernist”, as Samuel Beckett has been called. It was first published in 1988 in a limited edition that actually came out in 1989 and almost simultaneously in a newspaper edition (The Guardian, 3 March 1989) [Literary Encyclopedia]
As referenced in Jacques Derrida, L’Université sans condition (p31. Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader. Tom Cohen, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.)
Notes:
State apparatus in place to enfore encryption by governments that seek to protect borders from terrorists actually threatens population more than from so-called terrorists. Discussion of politics of the internet frequently restricted to which company is able to make the most income from a particular configuration.
At time of writing there were 30 million users (how many now?) so still considered an elite forum. "One may characterize postmodern or postMarxist democracy in Laclau's terms as one that opens new positions of speech, empowering previously excluded groups and enabling new aspects of social life to become part of the political process."
Development of the internet
The internet is above all a decentralized communication system. Promoted decentralization (to survive nuclear attack). Designed by a group of people (Cold War Defense Department computer programming engineers) with freedom of speech and freedom of information at the core to their counterculture ideas. Compare this to Derrida's ideas of university without condition. The original premise for the internet and continuing support for its current form relate to freedoms without condition. "If the technological structure of the Internet institutes costless reproduction, instantaneous dissemination and radical decentralization, what might be its effects upon the society, the culture and the political institutions?" (and art?)
"what the Internet technology imposes is a dematerialization of communication and in many of its aspects a transformation of the subject position of the individual who engages within it." transform relationships between humans and matter. It is more like a social space than a thing. There are aspects and components where the internet is more of a 'thing' (searching databases, email purely in place of post etc) but otherwise it could be considered an arena of exchange: "the notion of a public sphere suggests an arena of exchange, like the ancient Greek agora or the colonial New England town hall." These places were spaces of somewhat organized political discussion, but citizens have now been isolated by the media (such as television), forcing the exchange of ideas to other spheres. Quote from Paul Virilio "Avenues and public venues from now on are eclipsed by the screen, by electronic displays, in a preview of the 'vision machines' just around the corner". Public sphere as face-to-face contact is now limited, must take into account "electronically mediated discourse." The traditional definition of public sphere as discourse by subjects in symetry is not applicable to the internet as political domain. 'Noise' and 'static' that media interjects into discourse is not a new phenomena - radio and television were both critized for interference in politics long before the internet.
"What remains of the notion of things 'public' when public images (in real time) are more important than public space?" (Paul Virilio again)
Identity & Gender
As people can change identity at will on the internet, any notion of democracy that relies on a fixed identity of a person is invalid. Race, class, age, gender are less important. "as a result the relation of cyberspace to material human geography is decidedly one of rupture and challenge."
Experts
The stability of the expert is challenged as the "formation of canons and authorities is seriously undermined by the electronic nature of texts. Texts become "hypertexts" which are reconstructed in the act of reading, rendering the reader an author and disrupting the stability of experts or "authorities"."
Conclusion
If scholarly authority is challenged and reformed by the location and dissemination of texts on the Internet, it is possible that political authorities will be subject to a similar fate. If the term democracy refers to the sovereignty of embodied individuals and the system of determining office-holders by them, a new term will be required to indicate a relation of leaders and followers that is mediated by cyberspace and constituted in relation to the mobile identities found therein.
[
Journal of art research and critical curating]
"Philosophy. In Plato, chora is used in a sense close to space, or place in space; the milieu in which Forms materialise.
"Chora, which Derrida insists must be understood without any definite article, has an acknowledged role at the very foundations of the concept of spatiality, place and placing: it signifies, at its most literal level, notions of "space", "location", "site", "region", "locale", "country": but it also contains an irreducible, yet often overlooked connection with the fuunctions of feminity, being associated with a series of sexually-coded terms -- "mother","nurse","receptacle", and "imprint-bearer". From Elizabeth Grosz (1995) Space, time and perversion.
ABSTRACT
The author contrasts a current representationalist definition of virtuality, according to which this concept "represents" the effects of communication and informational technology on our way of knowing and building the world, with an alternative concept according to which virtuality describes a constitutive component of experience, and, as such, resists all reduction to physical processes as well as quantification and formalization.
The author suggests rethinking virtuality in terms of the Nietzschean notion of perspectivism, which amounts to the assumption that experience contains a virtual dimension. The move calls into question a whole range of philosophical categorizations and architectural presuppositions, first and foremost the Cartesian notion of space. A new concept of virtual space emerges, which is articulated in Nietzschean as well as in Bergsonian terms.
Giovanna Borradori
Associate Professor of Philosophy, Vassar College
"Things that Move Through the Air" by Sam Hecht"Like Pawson, I spent many years living in Japan- not the uniform skyscrapers and colured neon lights Japan, but a small house, a very small house. It was ina a narrow street where al the doors were small and with no locks, old people living side vy side with youngsters, each house connnected by telephone wires. The house was made of simple materials - wood, glass and paper - and it allowed the seasons to enter it rather than insulating from them. The entrance was small, with a place to chnage into sandals, leading to the main room consisting of Tatami - used for sleeping, dining and entertaining. Storage was kept out of sightm concealed by light, sliding doors. THe bath was a square container set on bricks, so that water could overflow naturally. Its simplicity became therapeutic, an antidote to the electronic landscape just a few hundred yars away."
p58, Pawson, John. "John Pawson : themes and projects". edited by Anita Moryadas and Alison Morris. Published: London ; New York, NY : Phaidon Press, 2002.
Weekend reading
Grosz, Elizabeth A, "Architecture from the outside : essays on virtual and real space"
Allen, Stan. "Practice : architecture, technique and representation". for "Mapping the unmappable" and "Plotting traces"
Perspecta 34. "Temporary architecture" / Noah K. Biklen, Ameet N. Hiremath, Hannah H. Purdy, editors ; Dan Michaelson, Deena Suh, designers.
From the Harvard Design Magazine, Fall 2003/Winter 2004, Number 19, this article on the emergence of landscape urbanism points to several texts/projects that suggest further investigation in relation to the future academy project. The first is Stalking Detroit edited by Georgia Daskalakis, Charles Waldheim, and Jason Young which examines the rise and fall of Detroit's manufacturing industry and the accompanying impacts on the city and its disappearance.
The second is Cedric Price's project for a mobile university on abandoned railway tracks Potteries Think Belt of 1964–1965.
See also Landscape Urbanism: A Manual for the Machinic Landscape
and Downsizing Cities by Witold Rybczynski
Propositions for an architecture of a future arts college: some notes
Tutorial with Clementine Deliss & Lynda Wilson
Initial dialogue
Is Leith ready for an 'obscene' institution? Is Leith an obscene place? The port has traditionally been a place of 'obscene' acts/people/places, with the influx of people, trades, objects. Is this applicable to Leith? What is obscene in Leith at the moment? Ocean Terminal may be described as obscene when 'obscene' is as defined in the language of a typical "morning television programme" because it bears no response or responsibility toward its surroudings. But it is not obscene in the abstract sense, but in a pejorative sense.
We must interview and gather data to support our arguments. Tape the interviews, transcribe the interviews.
Who should be speak to about the future of the art school? All professions have something to add - from photographers to gynecologist. In 50 years time (when the tutors are dead), what will this institution be like?
There is economic worth (in GDP) to defining carefully the future academy.
To what end does the complex architecture of eca determine the difficulty in interdisciplinary working between departments? That combined with fiefdom.
Where is there truly promiscuous space? Heavily programmed
University of Greenwich - tutorials held in the foyer of the National xxxx
Proposed during the tutorial
There are two streams that seem to be emerging from the contemporary art school - one that is technologically based, one that is based on more traditional, manual forms of craft-art (eg. letter press, weaving, printing). I contend that there is still a huge demand and respect for the products and processes of such traditional manual art and that there is a danger that this may be lost. As architects we should be protecting this niche. Is this a Luddite view? Neo-luddite? Conservative neo-luddite? Where is the data to back up this statement? What are the numbers involved in letter press etc? To watch extent is technology involved in these manual processes?
Texts
Jacques Derrida. De l'Hospitalite and L’Université sans condition
Elizabeth Grosz. Architecture from the outside
Research laboratories are the avant-garde art galleries of the twenty-first century. That shouldn't come as a surprise though. Art is a lens through which engineers can raise tough questions about the science fiction that they create, and we inhabit.
See also:
Simple Text
SimpleTEXT is a collaborative audio/visual public performance that relies on audience participation through input from mobile devices such as phones, PDAs or laptops. SimpleTEXT focuses on dynamic input from participants as essential to the overall output. The performance creates a dialogue between participants who submit messages which control the audiovisual output of the installation.
Textually.org
A spectacular mobile phone operated light sculpture by a Penzance artist has become the centrepiece of a Cleveland town, according to the BBC. "Spectra-txt, unveiled in Middlesbrough last week, is 10 metres high and weighs a hefty two tonnes and incorporates a light show. And this is the clever bit: the steel tower has been designed to change colour when sent one of six special text message commands.
Helloworld
Send in your message, and see how it is projected by a laserbeam onto a mountain overlooking Ipanema Beach in Rio de Janeiro, onto the UN building in New York City, onto the most prominent building in downtown Mumbai or onto a 140 metre tall water fountain in Geneva. SAY IT NOW!
Amodalsuspension
"Amodal Suspension” was a large-scale interactive installation developed for the opening of the new Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM) in Japan. From the 1st to the 24th of November 2003 people could use this website to send short text messages to each other using a cell phone or web browser. However, rather than being sent directly, the messages were encoded as unique sequences of flashes with 20 robotically-controlled searchlights, turning the sky around the YCAM Center into a giant communication switchboard.
Cognitive image submission
Image of submission to follow
The Anatomy of Place and its Mental Image
The first submission for 'future academy' with Dr. Faozi Ujam explores the cognitive image of a place.
"Images do not help us in identifying places and orientating ourselves in them only, they stimulate us to project our expectations drawing on deeply embedded memories and passions. We should allow ourselves the freedom to shape these images in a way that responds to the need to transcend and refine the realm of our world we live in. Much of the innovative trasformations were driven by mental images that are challenging, provocative and loaded with imagination...Create a free and powerfully provoactive image for the place of your choice."
[pdf of brief] to follow
What is 'future academy'?
This is a question to which I will be returning many, many times over the coming academic year. It is the title/theme/polemic of the degree project which will form the bulk of my submission for the BArch degree. The definition of future academy is the responsibility of the individual student, and to this end, a full design brief will be written at the end of term 1, defining both the conceptually premise and the more pragmatic programmatic requirements upon which an architectural project will be built.
Before even contemplating such matters however, a series of submissions and exercises are planned that will help define the theme. These include visits and analysis of the various sites (all situated in Leith), an interdisciplinary group competition with students from the schools of Drawing & Painting and Sculpture (sponsored by RMJM architects) and other excerises yet to be announced. No drawings will be made in this ter, only models.
