Posted by Steve Dietz on October 30, 2004 10:02 PM
City As Interface
Below are my introductory remarks to the panel on City As Interface panel with Sandi Buckley, Jeffrey Huang, and Marcos Novak, at the Informal Architectures Symposium..
Jef, who works with his partner Murield Waldvogel, talked about their Swiss House project, which is an example of architects' move to design space "in between" exclusively bricks and mortar and exclusively online (powerpoint image of this idea, left).
Sandi presented part of a remarkable paper based on her extensive research, "The Architecture of Mobility: Remapping the Tokyo Urbanscape," with Japanese "keitai" (mobile phone) users, which provided a real-world analysis of "being and not being with" and how new patterns of "collective assemblages of beings" challenge the architectonics of urban spaces.
With Art After New Media in mind, it was interesting to hear Anthony Kiendl, Director of the Walter Phillips Gallery and symposium organizer, introduce Graham's work as "immersive, participatory, and situational" - terms very familiar in the new media world, although Graham's work has almost nothing to do with technology per se. Graham himself described one of the central issues of his work as the "intersubjective gaze" (shades of Eduardo Kac's "dialogic art"), and said that it is "about the specator not the object" and that it "always mimics the surroounding urban architecture but tries to make it utopian and pleasurable."
Pictured (poorly) is Graham's skateboard bowl. He described the truncated pyramidal form above the bowl with its transparent two-way glass as "psychedelicizing the 80s." The superstructure is, in part, a reference to 80s architectural predilections for pyramidal pediments. By opening it up at the top, he allows light to refract on the differently mirrored surfaces.
Whether you agree with them or not, it was refreshing to hear an artist let it rip with comments about being "ripped off by my ex-friend Vito Acconci" and describing Bill Viola's workk as "Sony-sponsored New Age Buddhism," as well as lamenting his tribulations with Dia to create the magnificent Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube on their roof, by which, he says, he intended to shift Dia from an elitist institution to a more populist institute for contemporary art, complete with cafe.
Posted by Steve Dietz on October 26, 2004 11:54 PM
Database Imaginary 10.26.04
The Faculty of Taxonomy's nomadic office is currently at Banff for the opening of Database Imaginary, curated by Sarah Cook (pictured), Anthony Kiendl, and me, which opens Saturday, November 13, 2004 at the Walter Phillips Gallery. It's a great line-up, if I do say so myself, including Hans Haacke's 1971 Visitors' Profile, which he did for the Milwaukee Art Museum; a re-installation of Muntadas's seminal File Room; an updated version of The Status Project by Heath Bunting and Kayle Brandon, which is on the front page of the New York Times Arts section tomorrow; and 20 other projects. More later.
Posted by Steve Dietz on October 19, 2004 10:32 PM
The Aliens Have Landed
On first sight, the 2003 Kunsthaus in Graz appears to be a bad Photoshop hack. How else could such a barnacle-like structure cling to the sides of the red-roofed buildings of centuries-old Graz? As Will Alsop writes: " "This fantastic, hovering blob will be Archigram's revenge for its many earlier disappointments, for competition-winning schemes that were never realised." I have not seen the building in person, but it is a stunningly animating vision concocted by architects Peter Cook and Colin Fournier.
To push the matter even further over the top, Berlin-based realities:united designed "BIX," a matrix of 930 fluorescent lamps integrated into the acrylic glass facade, which can be adjusted to display low resolution films and animations at 20 frames/second. As Lev Manovichwrites
The presence of all kinds of electronic displays is an essential part of contemporary architecture. This new screen architecture . . . promises to become a whole new field.
realities:united has been nominaed for the 50,000 Euro "Inspire Award" for the BIX project, which will be determined by an online vote. Follow the step-by-step directions here.
Posted by Steve Dietz on October 17, 2004 10:31 PM
The ISEA2006 Symposium | ZeroOne San Jose International Festival of Art and Technology will take place August 5-13, 2006. One of the 4 main themes of the Festival is "Interactive City." For those of you who do not know the way to San Jose, here is a small picture album.
Interactive City
"The Great Kahn contemplates an empire covered with cities that weigh upon the earth and upon mankind, crammed with wealth and traffic, overladen with ornaments and offices, complicated with mechanisms and hierarchies, swollen, tense, ponderous. The empire is being crushed by its own weight Kublai thinks, and in his dreams, cities as light as kites appear, pierced like laces, cities transparent as mosquito netting, cities like leaves veins, cities lined like a hands palm, filigree cities to be seen through their opaque and fictitious thickness" Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
The city has always been a site of transformation: of lives, of populations, even of civilizations. With the rise of the mega city, however; with the advent of 24 x 7 rush hours; with the inexorable conversion of public space into commercial space; with the rise of surveillance; with the computer-assisted precision of redlining; with the viral advance of the xenophobic, the contemporary city is weighted down. We dream of something more. Not some something planned and canned, like another confectionary spectacle. Something that can respond to our dreams. Something that will transform with us, not just perform change on us, like an operation.
The ISEA2006 Symposiums Interactive City theme seeks urban-scale projects for which the city is not merely a palimpsest of our desires but an active participant in their formation. From dynamic architectural skins to composite sky portraits to walking in someone elses shoes to geocaches of urban lore to cybrid games with a global audience, projects for Interactive City should transform the new technologies of mobile and pervasive computing, ubiquitous networks, and locative media into experiences that matter.
There is an invisible city growing among the growth of the megacity, and it is the electromagnetic, hertzian spectrum that flows ceaselessly with data about and from and between us, but which is always activated by the interfaces of commerce and governmentcell phones, surveillance cameras, marketing databases, navigation systems that will alert us to a nearby sale.
We imagine the city itself as an interface, which accesses the future, the past, the distant, the present, the communal, the individual in marvelous ways that allow us to enjoy the opaque and fictitious thickness of an invisible city made visible.
There have been many exhibitions about the city, notably Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Hou HanrousCities on the Move, but none have treated the city itself as the medium. As Obrist noted in a talk about Cities on the Move:
"Cities on the Move developed through happenstance. The exhibition can be seen as a network. A previous speaker spoke of links to neurology. I draw the analogy again because of a very strong emphasis within the exhibition was placed on the idea of the city involving positive feedback-loops. This metaphor can be extended to the role of positive feedback-loops in learning that the exhibition as a city becomes a kind of learning system."
Projects for Interactive City should expand the feedback loop into and through the city itself.
The city has traditionally been a site of transformation: of lives, of populations, even of civilizations. With the rise of the mega city, however; with the advent of 24 x 7 rush hours; with the inexorable conversion of public space into commercial space; with the rise of surveillance; with the computer-assisted precision of redlining; with the viral advance of the xenophobic, the contemporary city is weighted down. We dream of something more. Not some something planned and canned, like another confectionary spectacle. Not something that will just perform change on us, like an operation, but something that can respond to our dreams; transform with us.
Panelists will present work and ideas about the city as not only an emergent space of information flows but also a site that is dynamically reactive, in flux with feedback.
I managed to catch the last day of Villette Numerique 2004, the second biennial show of computer art held at the Grande Halle de La Villette, a stunning park-com-cultural complex in northeastern edge of Paris. Benjamin Weil curated the show, which is titled Power and uses a graphic of an on/off button to hint at the sly humor found throughout the show. But the show really is powerful. One of the most enjoyable I've seen in a while. One of the best things about Power it is that it would have been tempting to fill up the cavernous exhibition space - it's housed in an old meatpacking factory - with another survey of everything new, but Weil clearly made a selection. Not always the right selection (meaning the ones I would have chosen) ;-), but a selection where he is saying that these are works that matter; not just everything that fits. Others have argued the opposite - that because there is no real thematic to the show (which is not wrong), there is no real selection. But for me, the overall pleasure of the exhibition more than made up for this.
The exhibition is an open plan installation and unlike for the exhibition of past Prix Ars winners installed at the Lentos Museum in Linz for Ars Electronica this year, which Weil also curated with Gerfried Stocker, there is enough room for it to work at La Villette. Each piece has its space, but as you look across it, past it, behind it, you have this amazing view of what's up ahead--not just black boxes. Also, almost all the works were working! Congratulations Benjamin and to the artists.
Jef, who works with his partner 
The 
On first sight, the 2003 
