loud paper

whether underground

Early on in Rob Walker’s upcoming book, Buying In: the Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, he discusses the “new consumer’s” slightly irrational obsession with authenticity. He writes:

While evoked constantly, the word is seldom defined. But one can presume that the authentic symbol is grounded in some kind of empirical, provable reality—that if you burrow down behind it, you will find exactly the things that the symbol purports to represent.

I was reading an advance copy of Rob’s book on the train up to Columbia on Monday night, so it was still resonating in my head as took my seat for Ant Farm: Radical Hardware, a panel discussion featuring Ant Farm members, Chip Lord and Curtis Schreier, and moderated by professors Felicity Scott and Mark Wasiuta. Ant Farm’s the kind of countercultural, prankster, media-savvy, architecturally off-the-wall group for whom I always have a soft spot. The sixties/seventies work is great, but also kind of awful: equal parts spectacle, pop, psychedelia, hi-tech, and Krazy Kat. A postcard of their piece, Media Burn (1975), where they drove a tricked-out Cadillac into a wall of burning TVs used to hang above my desk. If anyone was looking to latch onto something authentic, this was it.

Ant Farm’s been on the university circuit before, but what were these former radicals doing this time around in an academic institution, aside from helping Scott promote her new book on their work? Were they not there as authentic symbols of a history rapidly being embraced by architecture historians, even as they were brushed off when contemporary? Introducing the panel, Dean Mark Wigley, who likes to stir the pot a bit, remarked that Ant Farm’s appearance and exhibition at the Buell Center was not nostalgic, but all about the future.

And yes, in some ways it is. Scott and Wasiuta awkwardly attempted to mine the seventies oil crisis, environmental architecture, and communal living scene for its present day resonances, but seemed more comfortable in the past, focusing on the pre-Media Burn work. By contrast, Lord and Schreier, as working artists/architects fully versed in television and web 2.0, and with new installations in the works, made fluid leaps into today. Their easy demeanor was real, yet somehow dismissible (or dismissed) within the lecture auditorium context.

Lord summed it up best in a quip: “How to make subversion suitable for the institution? Add time.”

mouthy motor city

Quick props to my friend Kirsten Palm who's new book, The Straits, was just published by Palm Press. Kirsten is a Detroit native who now lives in San Francisco.The book is two narrative essays on her hometown.

The jacket copy reads:

In The Straits, Kristin Palm presents us with a portrait of the mythological city of Detroit. By tracing its construction and destruction, Palm invokes the glory and tragedy of America in the 20th century. Among Palm’s lyric narrative of the names and places, the ruins of Detroit represent promise and possibility as a model for urban landscapes.

I can't wait to get my hands on a copy.

parched

Ian Baguskas, Two Structures, Death Valley, California, 2007 30x38.3" C-print

Jen Bekman sends word that Sweet Water, an exhibition of new work by photographer Ian Baguskas, opens tomorrow evening at her Spring Street gallery. Baguskas's images are full of bleak, bleached out light and represent failed utopias in the landscape—moments where all the spry optimism of modern America just gives up the ghost. The photographs resonate with current economic fears, and realities—manifested in tent cities outside of LA (Thanks, Kazys). Our own contemporary aspirations gone tragically wrong.

From the press release:

Sweet Water presents us with striking images of vast land and open skies, lying in contrast to artificial, isolated structures, portraying a landscape fractured by modern aspirations’ collisions with the formidable, often unbeatable powers of nature. While journeying from one end of California to the other, Baguskas documented the remains of human attempts to transform untamable landscapes into personal utopias. The resulting images are at once archaeological, anthropological and aesthetically beautiful.

The show runs through April 26.

Rincon Artificial Island and Pipeline, Ventura, California, 2007 40x51" C-print


Luxury Homes, Provo, Utah, 2006. 30x38" Chromira C-print

grafting

Web meme as guerrilla marketing? PFSK recently posted a graph generated by a script that transforms HTML tags into lovely organic pattern: blue for links, violet for images, and orange for line breaks and block quotes.

Enter a site and let the graph grow. As it makes the rounds, pinged to and fro, the site spreads word of Salathe Marcel's art project 356specialdays.com. The concept is so sweet, it makes me feel cynical for calling attention to the self promotion.

365specialdays.com is a conceptual online and offline art project. If one day of the year is a special day for you, let me know and I will create a drawing of what made that day so special for you. You will then get the drawing by postal mail, and I will upload the drawing to this website (including your story - anonymously if you prefer). Over time, this website will be a collection of special days all over the world, and remind us just how special each and every day can be.

it's a gas

Eric Paulos, Ergo

CO2, CH4, N2O, NOx, SO2, or  O3?

I am not sure that this is the party for smokers, SUV drivers, or people who struggle with body odor, but Berkeley-based architect and all around character Jordan Geiger sends word of Vapor, the new show at San Francisco's Southern Exposure gallery which opens tonight. Geiger and co-curator Alison Sant have assembled a group of artists, architects, and designers preoccupied with air quality, an illusive medium at best. The works are varied, some object-driven, some conceptual, some techy, all with a whiff of the political. The exhibition features: Amy Balkin, Futurefarmers, Natalie Jeremijenko, The Living, Eric Paulos, and Preemptive Media.

The curators write:

Vapor is a survey of new art, architecture and design that takes our declining air quality as subject matter, medium and metaphor.

Often inspired by forms of activism, the works react to the sources of climate change through the use of technologies—sensors, databases, and communications equipment— that are only recently accessible outside a lab. In this sense, the show's title also refers to the growing means by which this art is being produced, in addition to the ubiquity of greenhouse gases and other air conditions that serve as this art's medium. Vapor proposes new ways of modeling, testing and finding solutions to the problems of air quality and greenhouse gas emissions.

The curators have also put together an impressive line up of public events and lectures, as well the Vapor Symposium, co-sponsored by and hosted at the California College of the Arts, will take place April 19, 2008. Who doesn’t want to tour Jeremijenko’s One Trees Project? (Which involves biking around to some of the piece’s 1,000 cloned trees.) There is a catch: “Participants will also help to render air pollution evident by wearing Clear Skies Facemasks that visualize urban air quality.” Breathe deep.

resurrecting boring: boredom as generator

Cedric Price's Generator via activesocialplastic.com

Yesterday, I took a light stroll around my Clinton Hill neighborhood. The sun was out, my coat too warm, and my vision heightened by a dose of pseudoephedrine. Unwinding my cashmere scarf, I looked down and saw narcissus stalks gingerly poking out of the earth. A sprig of nature in the urban jungle moment: Spring, at last. This winter in Brooklyn was dull. Few snow storms, just very cold days. I ticked off the weeks in word counts and deadlines. I wouldn’t say it was boring, per se, but when Molly emailed asking if I’d break up my routine and sit on a SXSW Interactive panel in Austin (which is this Sunday), I jumped at the chance to get away, to get exposure to new ideas, new people, and the promise of vegetarian BBQ. I leave tomorrow. Oh, little green sprout.

Molly’s recently made her architecture, urbanism, design, interaction, landscape, music, and literature blog public. On activesocialplastic.com she’s posted a brief history of boredom, positing the state as a kind of provocation, a lull that fosters response. Writing:

It has its own typology: situative boredom (waiting for someone or taking a train), the boredom of satiety (too much of the same thing), existential boredom and creative boredom (in which someone is forced to do something new or different). Situative boredom, the momentary ennui presented by a certain state of things, can be shaken off by action. Lars Svendsen writes, "To the extent that there is a clear form of expression for profound boredom, it is via behaviour that is radical and breaks new ground, negatively indicating boredom as its prerequisite." He notes the example of Alberto Moravia's novel, La Noia, in which the narrator's father's boredom "that does not require anything else to be assuaged than new, unusual experiences."

The piece, which I’ll file into the Boring Issue, also cites Cedric Price’s late 1970s Generator, in which the petulant building machine takes over the design if it gets bored with the input. More on the project here.

virtual seduction

Thomas Wilfred at Clavilux keyboard

This afternoon I met up with Molly Steenson, Enrique Ramirez, and John Szot to hash out just what we are going to cover on our Meet the Architects panel at SXSW Interactive. Amped on good coffee and thick slices of grilled pita bread, we dashed from tangent to tangent. Somewhere in there, John, an architect who works for the media firm Digital Foundry in Brooklyn, noted that these days it is easy to get so caught up in what is flashing on the screen, and calling it architecture, that actual buildings become an afterthought.

I bring up the conversation not to (re)start any paper architecture debate, but because with this discussion in mind I came across a paper written in 1947 by inventor and light artist Thomas Wilfred.

Wilfred’s work has fallen into obscurity of late. Ranging from the surreal to the psychedelic, his career stretched from the 1920s until his death in 1968. His medium was light, manipulated into dreamlike compositions of varying colors and intensities. A practice he called lumina, it falls somewhere between music, painting, and sculpture. Trained as a musician, he would build complex contraptions, Clavilux, to play his works.

Describing this “new art form” he wrote:

The lumia artist conceives his idea as a three-dimensional drama unfolding in infinite space.

In order to share his vision with others he must materialize it. This he may do by executing it as a two-dimensional sequence, projected on a flat white screen by means of a specially constructed projection instrument controlled from a keyboard.Seated before the keyboard he may, by manipulation of sliding keys, release white light, mold the light into form, add color and imbue the result with motion and change. But the original vision—the three-dimensional drama in space—is constantly before him and he strives to add, by optical means, an illusion of the missing third dimension to his flat screen image, and to perform it so convincingly in a spatial way that the screen creates the illusion of a large window opening on infinity, and the spectator imagines he is witnessing a radiant drama in deep space.

A couple visuals here.

I came across this article because a friend recently gave me a DVD of Wilfred’s work to check out. While I was dubious at first, picturing lava lamps and Sparkletts’ Dancing Waters, but then the jadedness washed away. Here was something proto-digital, which without bits or bytes and certainly not filmic, created space on screen. While I think the projections are pretty groovy, the projectors fascinate me. Unlike sleek laptops, the Clavilux were clunky boxes full of gears: objects desperate to escape the physical, but ultimately tied to their bulk.

For more images, the Yale University Library has an archive of ephemera related to the artist and the majority of Wilfred’s work is privately conserved by the Epstein Collection.