loud paper

let's connect

Earlier this month the NYTimes brought us the steampunk webcam by Paul St George. Okay, it was really his Brooklyn Telectroscope. Installed on the Fulton Ferry Landing, the contraption connects Brooklyn and London.

Now, Jordan Geiger links downtown San Jose to the world at large—Dubai, Dublin, Ouju, Melbourne, Paris, Banff—inverting time and place, local and global. Day for Night is part of the ZeroOne Festival and the piece is located in a vacant retail space overflowing with an inflatable structure (Gaga hearts Ant Farm). Sensors on the skin respond to visitors’ presence with a live audio-video. "This feed is sent constantly from sources in various time zones removed from San Jose, perpetually dislocating visitors, giving a midday opportunity to occupy midnight and vice-versa; but at the price of leaving San Jose," writes Jordan.

San Jose is a weird place. the seemingly abandoned heart of techy Silicon Valley. I always feel a little  disembodied there, so Day for Night seems appropriately sited. (Of course, the last time I was in San Jose it was to attend a memorial service, which only heightened the placelessness.)

Here's Jordan again:

Consider San Jose’s downtown streetlife: curiously sleepy by day, and just as surprisingly bonkers by night. There would be little during either time to suggest the secret life that these streets lead during the other half of each day. And yet, there it is: a downtown with a double life. Vacant retail spaces, vacant office spaces, and streets that are well maintained but a little sterile—these are the visions of the day. Traffic jams, honking horns, wild dancing, cocktails, a frenzy of evening wear and seemingly nowhere to find a quiet rest—these are the visions of the night.

Wouldn’t the night enjoy one grand, alien chillout room? Wouldn’t the day perk up to have a little disco at lunch? Wouldn’t twilight be a little more magical by sunrise? These are some of the questions that this temporary urban intervention asks.

Beyond these questions, the installation also asks what our relations are between this specific place and locations more generic to us - whether we relate to them via tech support and labor outsourcing (Bangalore, for example), financially (Dubai), or culturally (Paris, Banff).

Mark your calendars, happenings are planned:

Special Concert—Live from Paris—in Day For Night!
The Bosch Duet - Rada Boukova and Aalam Wassef  with special guest Yroyto
Friday, 6 June,  1–2 p.m. California Time—10 p.m. Paris Time

Closing Party!
Saturday, 14 June, 7 p.m.
featuring
Special Video Projection Dance Performance:
Jodi Lomask of Capacitor

trip the elastic fantastic

Big props to Archinect's Aaron Plewke who managed to wrangle reviews of MoMA's Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition out of a bunch of ne'er-do-well architects, designers, and thinkers. My contribution (an extension of wig in a box) is included among a fine bunch: Brian Moroz, Rosten Woo (who nails review with the line "...being there feels less like stuffy MoMA and more like being at a world’s fair or Expo 86"), Michael Surtees, Adam Greenfield (blessedly barbed as ever), Addie Wagenknecht, and Fred Scharmen. The exhibit is kinda great and kinda muddled. Having seven reviewers wade through it doesn't exactly create a common consensus as much as it surveys the messy territory. On the other hand, since the show feels like it springs from Internet culture, it seems homey and appropriate to have multiple posts.

Everyone's featured here.

fwd: thinking

Braulio of Architect magazine just wrote in to say that his new blog, Fwd: Architecture, is finally live. I've been on the receiving end of his link-filled emails for awhile, so I know that he's got great, broad taste in architecture, music, and tech.

And I am totally biased, since Fwd: Architecture's second post links to an article I wrote on 4-D Cities. That piece covers research going on at Georgia Tech. The team's developing software that creates a 4-D virtual model of the urban environment out of historic and new photographs. If it resembles Photosynth, that's because both spring from the same research department and have similar core code. But 4-D Cities adds a snazzy timeline to the program making it possible to time travel the model.

pink and green

This weekend is the AIA Conference in Boston, exciting, no? No.

Sure, I'll roam the expo floor, but I am really going to Beantown for the new exhibition, Parti Wall, Hanging Green, at pinkcomma gallery. The show features some of my fave firms, young offices that I've been lucky enough to write about or work with over the last couple of years, including: Höweler + Yoon Architecture; MOS; over,under; Studio Luz Architects; and UNI. I love it when the world gets small.

Here's the info:

Ten emerging architecture and design firms collaborated to create a prototype green wall. The planted installation will be suspended from a blank brick surface on the newly converted loft building at 90 Wareham Street in Boston’s South End. The five-story-high structure will be visible from the entrance to the gallery, where the installation’s collaborative design process and works of individual firms will be on display. The ten firms—all of which were formed in the last six years—joined together to establish the Young Architects Boston Group in January. The group’s prototype green wall will illustrate how Boston’s scattered brick surfaces could become opportunities for zero footprint public art that improves the city visually and environmentally.

Friday, May 16, 2008
Viewing, 5:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.
After Party, 10:00 p.m. - midnight

pinkcomma gallery
81B Wareham Street, Boston, Massachusetts

house and home

Ben Grasso
Whatever Was Left of It, 2007
Oil on Canvas,
108" x 72"

Heads up! Supernatural is closing this weekend. The exhibition at Thierry Goldberg Projects features works by Martin Basher, Jane Benson and Ben Grasso. I am particularly struck by Grasso's explosive works. His oil paintings seem allegorical to what is going on in today's real estate market. Their vivid style also carries a windblown, Wizard of Oz quality—a tornado trope standing in for global warming?

Writes Goldberg:

The reality of the house, composed alongside its state of distress, provides an uncanny dialogue between conscious and subconscious appearance. It is the maintenance of façade that perpetuates suburban dreams, the modern American embodiment of hope and security, which Grasso repeatedly disrupts.

There is no place, no place like home.

Via Little Paper Airplanes.

Ben Grasso
Untitled (House), 2006
Oil on Canvas,
70" x 50"