AN EXPERIMENT
"one half of all architects and urbanists in the entire world should, as of now, stop designing new buildings and new developments altogether. Instead they should invest the historical depth and intellectual nuance of their architectural imaginations into the design and programming of new software that provides for the better use of structures and systems we already have. It is a simple matter of good content management. The other half, the control group, may continue as before."
POSSIBILITIES
"The range of services and opportunities for savvy urbanists is vast: location-aware augmented reality viewfinders, macrosensing and reality-mining of composite crowd-sourced behavioral data, citizen activists using GIS and mass market Geobrowsers and plugging open map layers into their Ruby and MySQL applications, realtime disease outbreak visualization and real-time microgovernance of biopolitical swarms, traffic control sensor and tollbooth hacks, individually reconfigurable interior partitions collapsing rooms and even floors, proprietary parking apps, post-Twitter apps keeping one always at the tent-pole center of his or her concentric and now minutely reflexive social networks, bus bench RSS feeds, pigeons that blog, lifelong syncing of car-phone-home-cloud, in-pocket web servers, realtime traffic, congestion and crime data patterns informing personal routeware, point-and-scan barcode readers, 4.5 inch Bloomberg terminals, instant carbon footprint visualization, real-time voice-to-voice language translations, location based serial cinema, Google Habitat, realtime cab-spotting, personal arphid managers, data privacy consulting services, gray market concierges, etc. all posted with at least partially open API's enabling other apps to further build on the existing stacks."
WARNING 1: SPEED
"The co-evolution of urban behavior and urban software: the iPhone City is embryonic, but it's evolution will happen quickly. Furthermore, the devices themselves and their capacities will appear to be evolving more in relation to each other than to us. This Darwinism of the device will make it seem that we are their media and not the other way around. Appearances can be factual."
WARNING 2: COMPLEXITY
"The co-mingling of the hypersocial & the post-social: the explosion of hyperlocal and hypervisual information will both amplify and multiply the intensities of social interaction, but will also reveal the complexity of communication between non-humans (animals, ecologies, infrastructures). Just as collective urban cognition comes online it will be exposed as a hopelessly outflanked minority discourse."
WARNING 3: INSTABILITY
"The diegesis of the cinematic interface: the computational intensification of the interface will make it more and more cinematic, and more affectively factual. This will exacerbate everything we already know about the instability of cinematic memory, action, projection, repetition and pixelation, and will bring these deeper into everyday life."
http://www.bratton.info/projects/texts/iphone-city/
Monday, January 31, 2011
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Implant Matrix – Philip Beesley
Implant Matrix by Philip Beesley is an interactive geotextile that could be used for reinforcing landscapes and buildings of the future. The matrix is capable of mechanical empathy. A network of mechanisms react to human occupants as erotic prey. The structure responds to human presence with subtle grasping and sucking motions, ingesting organic materials and incorporating them into a new hybrid entity.
Implant Matrix is composed of interlinking filtering 'pores' within a lightweight structural system. Primitive interactive systems employ capacitance sensors, shape-memory alloy wire actuators and distributed microprocessors. The matrix is fabricated by laser cutting direct from digital models. The project is supported by the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology, the Ontario Arts Council and the University of Waterloo School of Architecture.
Resource: interactive architecture.org
Project Video: Hylozoic Ground
Aphorisms and Interesting Segments from The Situationist City by Simon Sadler
1. The situationists, who seem to have had difficulties getting on with “everyday” citizens, preferred to experiment on themselves, analyzing the factors affecting their mood, behavior, and choice of route as they wandered their “drift” (dérive) through the city. (20)
2. Situationists and Independents felt that indigenous living patterns were best nurtured through the “clustering” of the city. (20)
3. But the tides are turning: CIAM knows that the tyranny of commonsense has reached its final stage, that the same attitude which, 300 years ago, found expression in Descartes’ philosophy is at last losing ground. (27)
4. Détournement would provide for a society of pleasure instead of the stoicism and sacrifice of Stalinism of the peer pressure of consumerism. (33)
5. Huizinga’s thesis, which was more widely distributed and readily acknowledged than Bakhtin’s, had a different emphasis, positing that the wellspring of all culture, or at least all great culture, was the instinct for play. (35)
6. The sleeping creator must be awakened, and his waking state can be termed ‘situationist.’ (36)
7. Détournement would permit anyone to take part in the raids on official culture, weakening the polarization between “author” and “reader,” nullifying the importance of attribution, originality, and intellectual property. (44)
8. Situationism now presupposed that it was possible for people to synthesize or manage these situations as an act of self-empowerment. (45)
9. Situationists mythologized the poor as fellow travelers on the urban margins, treating the ghetto as an urban asset rather than an urban ill. (56)
10. The Architectural Review and Potlatch basically concurred that the ideal town would be one where humane, pedestrian social spaces, endowed with mixed architectural compositions and curios, would take priority over any abstract, CIAM-ish principle for purely “rational” planning. (73)
11. “Beauty, when it is not a promise of happiness, must be destroyed.” (The Lettrist International) (73)
12. Rather than float above the city as some sort of omnipotent, instantaneous, disembodied, all-possessing eye, situationist cartography admitted that its overview of the city was reconstructed in the imagination, piecing together an experience of space that was actually terrestrial, fragmented, subjective, temporal, and cultural. (82)
13. Still, Pomerand was right to focus upon the role of urban subculture in forming language and consciousness. (96)
14. The situation construitte, the “constructed situation,” is best thought of as a sort of Gesamtkunst-werk (total work of art). (105)
15. The constructed situation would plunge its participants into an examination of individual and collective consciousness: redeeming Shakespeare’s famous dictum that “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players,” the Lettrist International envisaged the construction of situations as twenty-four-hour tragedy played out for real. (106)
16. At least two perceptions of the situationist project were apparent. One perception was held [ ] by Constant [in] his commitment to the construction of situations. Another perception of situationism, most typical of the ideas imported from the Lettrist International, expected that an ambient architecture would be created through détournement, recycling the old city and existing sources. (107)
17. Situationists claimed the analogical structure of images that occurs in advertisements and in poetry of Lautréamont as their inspiration. (108)
18. If détournement were extended to urbanistic realizations,” Debord wondered, “not many people would remain unaffected by an exact reconstruction in one city of an entire neighborhood of another. Life can never be too disorienting: détournements on this level would really make it beautiful.” (110)
19. Under unitary urbanism, however, architecture would merge seamlessly with all other arts, assailing the senses not with a single aesthetic but with a panoply of changing ambiances. (119)
2. Situationists and Independents felt that indigenous living patterns were best nurtured through the “clustering” of the city. (20)
3. But the tides are turning: CIAM knows that the tyranny of commonsense has reached its final stage, that the same attitude which, 300 years ago, found expression in Descartes’ philosophy is at last losing ground. (27)
4. Détournement would provide for a society of pleasure instead of the stoicism and sacrifice of Stalinism of the peer pressure of consumerism. (33)
5. Huizinga’s thesis, which was more widely distributed and readily acknowledged than Bakhtin’s, had a different emphasis, positing that the wellspring of all culture, or at least all great culture, was the instinct for play. (35)
6. The sleeping creator must be awakened, and his waking state can be termed ‘situationist.’ (36)
7. Détournement would permit anyone to take part in the raids on official culture, weakening the polarization between “author” and “reader,” nullifying the importance of attribution, originality, and intellectual property. (44)
8. Situationism now presupposed that it was possible for people to synthesize or manage these situations as an act of self-empowerment. (45)
9. Situationists mythologized the poor as fellow travelers on the urban margins, treating the ghetto as an urban asset rather than an urban ill. (56)
10. The Architectural Review and Potlatch basically concurred that the ideal town would be one where humane, pedestrian social spaces, endowed with mixed architectural compositions and curios, would take priority over any abstract, CIAM-ish principle for purely “rational” planning. (73)
11. “Beauty, when it is not a promise of happiness, must be destroyed.” (The Lettrist International) (73)
12. Rather than float above the city as some sort of omnipotent, instantaneous, disembodied, all-possessing eye, situationist cartography admitted that its overview of the city was reconstructed in the imagination, piecing together an experience of space that was actually terrestrial, fragmented, subjective, temporal, and cultural. (82)
13. Still, Pomerand was right to focus upon the role of urban subculture in forming language and consciousness. (96)
14. The situation construitte, the “constructed situation,” is best thought of as a sort of Gesamtkunst-werk (total work of art). (105)
15. The constructed situation would plunge its participants into an examination of individual and collective consciousness: redeeming Shakespeare’s famous dictum that “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players,” the Lettrist International envisaged the construction of situations as twenty-four-hour tragedy played out for real. (106)
16. At least two perceptions of the situationist project were apparent. One perception was held [ ] by Constant [in] his commitment to the construction of situations. Another perception of situationism, most typical of the ideas imported from the Lettrist International, expected that an ambient architecture would be created through détournement, recycling the old city and existing sources. (107)
17. Situationists claimed the analogical structure of images that occurs in advertisements and in poetry of Lautréamont as their inspiration. (108)
18. If détournement were extended to urbanistic realizations,” Debord wondered, “not many people would remain unaffected by an exact reconstruction in one city of an entire neighborhood of another. Life can never be too disorienting: détournements on this level would really make it beautiful.” (110)
19. Under unitary urbanism, however, architecture would merge seamlessly with all other arts, assailing the senses not with a single aesthetic but with a panoply of changing ambiances. (119)
Banham: First to Apply Situationist Understandings in America
"In its emphasis upon the behaviour and emotions provoked by the experience of the city Banham's text appropriates understandings of 'psychogeography' and urban 'drift' advanced by Guy Debord and the situationists, applying them in an American urban context, arguably for the first time. For the distinctive quality of Los Angeles, according to Banham, resides not merely in its architecture but in the range of feelings, emotions and kinetic sensations that the city encourages and elicits."
Edward Dimendberg, "The Kinetic Icon: Reyner Banham and Los Angeles as Mobile Icon," Urban History, 33(May 2006):110.
Edward Dimendberg, "The Kinetic Icon: Reyner Banham and Los Angeles as Mobile Icon," Urban History, 33(May 2006):110.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Situationism in New Media: Michael Naimark
Michael Naimark
View more presentations from Hugo Santana-Lemes.
Description: New Media artist whose work touches on some Situationist principles involving technology, and interactive participation/collaboration.
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