‘Unvoice’: paying tribute to the voids

The Silence Project [& sons, 2011] is a compilation of gaps that refill a new meaning. Suddenly, the most referential lyrics are removed from iconic songs that everybody has in mind to be simply reduced to their negative breaks, the anti-song. During these uncomfortable visual silences, the performer needs to force a smile, invent a gesture, anticipate a facial expression or intensify a feeling previously expressed in her last sentence. The melody is deconstructed, decontextualized, and so are the dancing movements and the audience clapping. A mix of anxiety and eager to know what we have missed invades us. We are presented with multiple preludes and epilogues that use voids to build a new entity. But we can only guess the actual content through the sweat, breath, wrinkles or opening of the mouths.

the silence project #2 Dolly Parton from & sons on Vimeo.

the silence project #1 Raphael from & sons on Vimeo.

the silence project #4 Olivia Newton John from & sons on Vimeo.

Published on December 27, 2011 13:48.
Filed under: homo ludens, invisible cities

Pornotopia: Architecture & Sexuality

 

The same images of naked women that the military had approved and openly distributed among soldiers during WWII – as a way to keep their souls more stable through masturbatory practices – were automatically stigmatised after the end of the war, for being utterly illicit pornography. The nation urgently demanded stable heterosexual couples producing kids for the future. The suburban house with garden, car and electric appliances became the American dream. But Hugh Hefner decided to shake the deep roots of society in 1950s when he founded a Disneyland for adults: the Playboy empire. Philosopher Beatriz Preciado, in her sharp analysis Pornotopia: Architecture and Sexuality in “Playboy” during the Cold War (only Spanish and Italian editions available), makes a necessary reading of the implicit domesticity of this new paradigm of modernity.

< Playboy was not merely a magazine featuring girls with or without bikini, but a vast media-oriented architectural project, which aimed to supersede the heterosexual dwelling as the nucleus of consumption and reproduction by new spaces orientated towards the production of capital and pleasure. […] In the same way that enlightened society thought of the individual prison cell as a means of healing criminal souls, Playboy envisioned the bachelor’s mansion as the way to construct the modern man. […] Inspired by pioneering sexual utopias conceived by Sade and Ledoux, this complex worked as the first multimedia brothel in history; a modern pornotopia erected from mass media and the architecture of the spectacle. It is a laboratory to study the mutations from Cold War to hot Capitalism, through sex, drugs and information as means of production, and where architecture plays the role of a stage on which male identity is performed. >*

As queer theoretician Preciado reveals, woman’s role – of an “imprisoned” housewife dominating the domestic realm – was something that Playboy magazine would try to end up with. It was not in favour of female rights at all, since the role of many suburban housewives as exploited sex workers did not differ much from the bunnies legally hired by Playboy. Quite on the contrary, it was all about the male recovering the sphere of the house that he had lost. The new masculine character should be sovereign of his bachelor urban refuge, where he would enjoy licentiousness while preparing exquisite cocktails. Modern architecture and design was used as a weapon to free 1950s American bachelors from their Victorian moral-led lifestyles. The aim was not to walk towards a more feminized man at home, but towards a more masculinized domesticity as a contemporary way of inhabiting space.

Preciado (interviewed by Ibrahim B.) sustains that even today the models of producing subjectivity invented by Playboy influence our everyday life: our contemporary ways of meeting people and producing pleasure are prosthetic, mediatized and psychotropic. However free we are, we are still trapped in a virtual world of laptops, as well as Hefner was in his round hyper-connected bed. Our sex relationships are determined by pharmacological technologies (the morning-after pill, Viagra…) and surveillance (we fall in love via SMS, we record and document our meetings, we broadcast and share them via Youtube or Facebook…). Hence, she concludes, our way to love directly inherits the pornotopia of Playboy, being absolutely kitsch and telecommunicative.

Preciado, B., 2010. Pornotopía: Arquitectura y sexualidad en “Playboy” durante la Guerra fría. Barcelona: Anagrama.

[*my translation]

Thanks, Bea!

[1>Hugh Hefner in the Playboy Mansion_1960 via Ibrahim B.] [2-4>The Playboy Town House designed by R. Donald Jaye; renderings by Humen Tan_published in May 1962 Playboy issue via HighStreetMarket]

 

 

 

 

Published on November 18, 2011 18:42.
Filed under: BOOKS/news, homo ludens

juridical masks

Masking is one of the most complex and secretive, yet profoundly important, phenomena in Africa. […] Why, despite the changes that have taken place since the early 20th century, does masking persist in such vibrant form in parts of Africa and its diaspora? What is it that motivates the communities and individuals still so committed to the practice, despite the threats posed by the combined, if antithetical, forces of secularization, fundamentalist Christianity and radical Islam? [Chika Okeke-Agulu]

In Maske photo essay (Chris Boot 2010), Phyllis Galembo provides a visual platform to enter everyday African life through the politics behind masquerades. There are many functions of masking nowadays: planting and harvesting (Chi Wara masks, Bamana people); juridical functions (Glewa masks, Dan people); boyhood initiation rites, memorials after their owners’ deaths (Lukwakongo masks, Lega people); fostering gender and social harmony (Yoruba people).

But they also function as a way of protest in contemporary culture. In some cases, masks have been used as a means of complaint against enriched citizens abusing of power, oppressed people sending the most terrifying masks to their homes. As Okeke-Agulu describes it: “masks as agents of law enforcement and coercion”. In patriarchal communities, female masqueraders take the chance to reveal against imposed hierarchies through their costumes.

<Among the Ibibio and Efik people, all-male societies such as Ekpo and Ekpe still preside over social, legal, economic and political disputes, and this practice functions openly alongside the modern legal system.> [P.Galembo]

Built with local materials, performers camouflage with their surrounding constructions and vegetation. Costumes and houses, plants and stones, all mingle with each other: Woven plant fibre materials (sisal, cotton), painted wood, resinous materials (beeswax and tar), twigs, bushes, leaves, lizard excrement (white colour), boiled acacia seed pods (black), iron-rich hematite stone (red), grass, vines, feathers, fur, sugar syrup mixed with coal dust, roots, branches… Materials might be ever lasting or ephemeral. African expats in the US even send actual animal heads preserved by taxidermy back to Sierra Leone, whereas Burkina Faso masks are supposed to fall apart during every ceremony.

Urban space is profoundly altered during masquerades. In Eastern Nigeria Uzo-Iyi, no social event, market or funeral can be held during the festival. In Zambia, there is a spatial dislocation during boyhood initiation rituals; it is by leaving the settlement boundary during some months into the surrounding forest, that a new life calendar is set by the fact of returning to their settlement wearing Makishi masks. Boys leave the city to come back as real men. As Giorgio Agamben puts it, when talking about juridical identity and masks: <Persona originally means mask and it is through the mask that the individual acquires a role and a social identity.>

Masks also serve as a display of current issues. New technologies are applied on the motives of the masks, some including airplanes, helicopters or Hondas. Other masks in Benin, for example, provide moral lessons, ranging from “you can’t buy wisdom at the market” to prevention from AIDS.

African masks are wild and shapeless, and they reveal a whole society behind their powerful aesthetic appeal. In words of Okeke-Agulu, contemporary masking inhabits a space in which faith in new religions combines with residual beliefs in indigenous metaphysics to produce ontological uncertainties; this mixture of foreign and inherited cultural traditions is responsible for the complex, dramatic, rich and extreme social and cultural life in Africa and its diaspora today.

 

 

 

[all images> Maske by Phyllis Galembo, via Stephen Kasher Gallery, Tang Museum, DUST]

 

Published on August 30, 2011 11:28.
Filed under: BOOKS/news, homo ludens, mutant

Parangolés & Penetráveis

Parangolés and Penetráveis. The former consist of a series of complicate capes that only reveal their intricate nature to the viewer when the person who wears one moves and dances. The latter are labyrinth-like constructions waiting for the viewer to penetrate their boundaries and get lost in a series of tropical colourful panels. Hélio Oiticica’s works from 1960s Brazilian avant-garde contributed enormously to the world of interactivity. A Parangolé is both an object and the representation of its own movements; as long as the fabric waves in the air, it turns dancers’ changing trajectories automatically visible. They are able to visualize unstable spaces. As Simone Osthoff beautifully describes them:

<[Oiticica] created interrelations around the sensual body and the many spatial forms it interacts with. His participatory creations were based on two key concepts that he named “Crelazer” and the “Supra-Sensorial.” Crelazer, one of Oiticica’s neologisms meaning “to believe in leisure,” was for him a condition for the existence of creativity and is based on joy, pleasure and phenomenological knowledge. The second concept, the Supra-Sensorial, promotes the expansion of the individual’s normal sensory capacities in order to discover his/her internal creative center. The Supra-Sensorial could be represented by hallucinogenic states (induced with or without the use of drugs), religious trance and other alternate states of consciousness such as the ecstasy and delirium facilitated by the samba dance. For Oiticica, the Supra-Sensorial created a complete de-aesthetization of art underscoring transformative processes.

[…]

Oiticica’s work fused formal investigation with leisure activities, inviting viewer participation in the creation of “unconditioned behaviour”. In the cultural context of “the country where all free wills seem to be repressed or castrated”, the concepts of Crelazer and the Supra-Sensorial directly defied a pleasure-denying productivist work ethic, subverting it through activities that embraced pleasure, humor, leisure and carnivalesque strategies. Reverie and revolt were never far apart in Oiticica’s work, as Brett has pointed out. Leisure for him was first and foremost a revolutionary anti-colonialist strategy.

[…]

Oiticica described his relation to the popular samba, making reference to the intense experience provoked by dance: “The rehearsals themselves are the whole activity, and the participation in it is not really what Westerners would call participation because the people bring inside themselves the “samba fever” as I call it, for I became ill of it too, impregnated completely, and I am sure that from that disease no one recovers, because it is the revelation of mythical activity…Samba sessions all through the night revealed to me that myth is indispensable in life, something more important than intellectual activity or rational thought when these become exaggerated and distorted.”>

 Thanks, Santiago!

[sources> solarflareark, the art section, the boulevardier]

 

Published on July 29, 2011 09:20.
Filed under: homo ludens

priceless

In New Orleans Carnival (Mardi Gras), citizens and trees alike dress up to celebrate earthly pleasures. Since late 19th century, there is a traditional use of beads in the parade among participants. The extreme inexpensive price of such colourful strings of fake pearls make them be thrown and hung everywhere, local trees becoming part of the joyful show. But at the same time, these customised trees become a direct result of globalised production. Where do all these beads come from so that they can be lavishly given away? are they almost free or rather priceless?

Their cheap production was originally set in Czechoslovakia. But some decades ago, plastic fever made factories move to new locations, at the same pace as all other production sites have been doing throughout the globe. First to HongKong, then Taiwan and today China and India. In Mardi Gras: Made in China (2005), David Redmon follows the path of Mardi Gras beads from the streets of New Orleans during Carnival – where revelers party and exchange beads for nudity – to the disciplined factories in Fuzhou, China – where teenage girls live and sew beads together all day and night.

“Mardi Gras” cleverly juxtaposes the apex of American bacchanalian excess with the politely sweatshop-like conditions that facilitate the fun, but rather than prissily lecturing the audience, the filmmaker mostly lets the people and images speak for themselves. [L.A. Times]


[1>defendneworleans][2>justaddagua][3>joshyf][4>wikipedia]

Published on April 4, 2011 12:57.
Filed under: homo ludens

golfer on the Moon

Astronaut (Rémi GAILLARD)

Simply by a change of perspective, the same context can be understood in many different ways. Humour and fun can twist space, and turn it into something else. A golf course can also be read as the Moon surface, by the fact of introducing a random astronaut on the lawn. Then, a golf player does not hit the flag inside a hole with the ball anymore, because the flag is not a golf flag, but the US flag on the Moon; there is a sudden shift in the mental perspective of the viewer.

When alien elements are introduced in a conventional setting, it is our imagination which teleports the whole hybrid to another dimension, far away from the ordinary context. A public elevator can be understood as a private cabin. Your balcony can also be the Pope’s one. It is only a matter of language and standard visual codes.

Rémi Gaillard has been fostering these re-interpretations of public space already for 10 years in his actions between flash mob and “urban terrorism“. His motto: C’est en faisant n’importe quoi, qu’on devient n’importe qui (it is by doing whatever that one becomes whoever).

Pac Man (Rémi GAILLARD)

thanks, álvaro!

Published on March 17, 2011 19:10.
Filed under: co-optation/zwischennutzung, homo ludens

“dance, dance, otherwise we are lost” [P.B.]

There are deep noises of gallops. The brown earth covering the floor reveals hundreds of tracks of wild animals in stampede. But instead, it is a set of dancers what appears on scene. Their presence is heavily felt through their turbulent footprints. The Rite of Spring is one of Pina Bausch’s most celebrated choreographic pieces, included in the homage documentary PINA that Wim Wenders has just presented. A movie about the sign that her teachings on performative space left before her death in 2009: the Dance Theatre genre. [watch trailer]

In her choreographies, earth is heavy. Flying dust materializes air. The void weighs. Water drops densify the emptiness. Living bodies become inert corpses. A closed-eyed dancer lets her mass fall down until the trust on her partner saves her from a mortal knock. Hands and feet become detachable prosthesis. The lightness of matter clashes over the presence of the ephemeral. Optical illusions…

In Choreographed Environments, Eva Pérez de Vega points out that “considering immaterial effects in the production of a material practice, is not at all about ignoring the material per se. It refers more to the conception of a material production. It is about thinking how to make immaterial notions material; ultimately it is about creating material effects. [...] Architecture no longer consists of making building and Dance no longer consists of making dances. The hope is that as dancers continue to explore new territories as managers of space, architects too can conceive of space as managers of movement.

For the movie, many pieces were performed again in unusual urban settings, such as inside and underneath Wuppertal’s retrofuturistic sky-train, or inside other recent architectural iconic references (easy to guess!). Pina Bausch pioneered a strong performative approach to architecture and Wenders has made her pupils revive its immateriality in cult buildings for posterity: a clear effort to transmit Pina’s philosophy of movement constructing space. Bravo!

[1>Vollmond via olivia beasley][2>The Rite of Spring via byricardomarcenaroi][3>Vollmond via accessibleartny][4>still from Wim Wenders' PINA via jazzradio][6>Café Müller via nytimes]

Published on February 16, 2011 00:42.
Filed under: homo ludens, invisible cities

religion feat. fantasy



Feathers, sequins, glitter, crystals, mirrors, glow, jewellery, beads… Carnival celebration in Tenerife (Spanish Canary Islands) aims to be soon blessed with the intangible cultural heritage recognition from UNESCO. It is a practice, which finds its climax with the annual election of the Queen. The gala consists of a catwalk of aspirants showing off a specifically designed costume for the occasion. The larger, the better. The shiniest, the most successful. The most exaggerated, the most celebrated.

The evolution of such dresses runs faster than an arms race or even the Moon race: an open-ended process of wearable engineering development, with secrets, espionage and rivalries. Costumes range between 200–500 kilos weight and are to be carried by a young model on stage. Months of hard training of back and legs muscles precede the event; but also a whole backup of adapting 10 cm high-heels to such a load. This display of sumptuous flair has also made the costumes grow to no less than 4 m wide, 4 m long or even 6 m high. Teams behind their realisation deal with astronomic figures, ranging from 12,000-60,000 euros per costume, around 6 months of intense handcraft dedication and spontaneous structural inventions, such as reusing air/con pipes to support the whole fantasy.

Sam Jacob smartly related a few years ago the Popemobile to a motorised version of the Popes throne, a vehicular extension of the Papal robes, and even a detachable piece of the Vatican. A futuristic Archigram-esque moving architecture, which updates itself in every country visited, by means of design collaboration with a local automobile trademark (a weird kind of vernacularism).

Carnival Queen’s iridescent costumes can also be regarded as detachable pieces of architecture celebrating the farewell to meat: a female body pulling a sculptural building; she lives for and in it. Almost like a precious golden cage that she enjoys wearing. Dressmakers in Tenerife have lately required the need of hidden small wheels camouflaged by feathers, in order to facilitate Queen aspirants to perform their annual show (another McGiver’s trick).

Different versions of the Popemobile alike, these costumes  theoretically should also anticipate a period of religious conversion with their parade. If the Pope extends Church as an institution along his march, the Carnival Goddess celebrates worldly pleasures and excess as far as possible. But the following 40 days of fast and abstinence, which religion has traditionally imposed, seem to be eventually left aside.


















[1>hola][2> caco-lasandunga][3> santacruzmas][4> infashion][5,6>VIRoGo][7> canarias24horas][8> isladetenerife][9> dentrodelacolmena][10> kissfm]

Published on February 8, 2011 18:04.
Filed under: homo ludens

inmate thriller

“Always alone but never alone” (Breyten Breytenbach) is the feeling result of freezing time and space inside an encapsulated world which is a prison. But what if this sort of Place manages to keep good time?

In his article “At home in prison“, Lex Wouterloot sees in imprisonment a direct paradox of detention: Detention means banishment from house and family and isolation in a closed penitentiary. This social separation from family ties forms one of the greatest burdens of imprisonment. [...] (A) prisoner is thrown back totally upon his own psychological resources and made dependent upon the functioning of the penal system. Paradoxically, the prison places the inmate in an environment where scarcely any privacy exists. Locked up alone in a cell, the prisoner is subjected to permanent supervision by guards, who practise silent surveillance through a hatch in the cell door or via a video camera.

Even if he compares inmates with immobilised and isolated zombies fighting boredom and killing time, some initiatives try to impulse their privatepublic everyday life. By means of social interaction and promotion of motivation through personal skills, the Jail Warden of Cebu Prison in Philippines developed a 1,500 inmates group choreography. Michael Jackson’s Thriller was conscientiously rehearsed and performed in their leisure courtyard. A stage directly widening their daily cocooning routine, and indirectly catapulting them into the global celebrities market, making MJ’s choreographer eventually work together with them.

The virtual zombie life acquires at least a more meaningful existence.

thanks, paulo!


Des détenus philippins dansent sur Thriller
Hochgeladen von Nouvelobs. – Nachrichtenvideos aus der ganzen Welt.

[1> Dennis M. Sabangan via thefirstpost][2> Inmates performance via chinadaily]


Published on January 31, 2011 15:57.
Filed under: homo ludens

food as public space editor*

*Post series commissioned by Nicola Twilley (edible geography /foodprintproject / GOOD Magazine) as part of FOOD FOR THINKERS – An online festival on Food and Writing (18-23/01/2011)

The raised question about the actual role of contemporary food editing makes me think of Mary I and II, the Maries, also known as Daisies. Born in 1966 as main characters of Vera Chytilová’s film Sedmikrásky, they represent a post-Dadaist subversion of food; and food is their tool to show the excess of consumption through an extraordinary gluttony. Almighty goddesses in a Banquet of Profanities. They can see green apples from the Garden of Eden where nobody else does; they dare eat in reverse (dessert first, main course last) playing with sugar daddies to support their diet; they can use surgical scissors to cut and paste paper-printed courses; every meal is affordable for their imagination. Lick, smell, taste and swallow colourful pieces of magazines. Savouring phallus-shaped sausages, rolls, pickles and bananas…

Until they come across with a sumptuous and copious banquet for Czech Communist officials in a hidden room.  There they go our editors, altering any established order of course hierarchy, flavour mix, sitting protocol and eating manners. An explosive cocktail between food fight and a dining table catwalk. But afterwards, clean conscience makes them clear every damaged item in the most stunning naivety, resettling broken dishes together and reconstructing the lavish courses in their particular finesse.

Fighting with food – and not for food – is every spoilt adult’s dream. And it is one of the most interactive ways to reactivate space. Fruit of a local incident in 1945, one of the most celebrated tomato fights still takes place in Bunyol, Spain. For some hours, overripe vegetables turn a village into a democratic meeting space, where everyone is at the same level. No classes, no differences, no identities; simply enjoying a pacifist battle. How fascinating it is to have 99% of the existing buildings empty, because all their dwellers are painting the town red, together.

Its German version is the annual Gemüseschlacht in Berlin, a battle-for-fun between Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain neighbourhoods with rotten vegetables: less waste of food, higher filthiness; another perfect excuse for Berliners inventing kaleidoscopic war costumes, psychedelic weapon accessories and unexpected chariots.

Something as simple as food can be the superb public space catalyst.  Pop-up street tea parties already took place in London to commemorate the end of both World Wars. But it is still a recurrent tool for urban monotony: reclaim the streets for popular meals. Spain’s festivities like to fight for World Guinness Records of largest Paellas ever cooked. And interaction ad-hoc devices need to be built. How to prepare a single course for 100,000 companions? Spoons are replaced by pole vaults, building scaffolding instead of a kitchen worktop, distributing individual portions with a real-size digger… Kitchen-monuments allowing everyday celebrations just happen…And the edible may even turn into a landmark: insipid public space, which is converted both into a meeting point and a mental reference all of a sudden. Countless visitors go on pilgrimage to the bizarre Bubblegum Alley in San Luis Obispo, California.

The absurd spontaneous fact of sticking chewing gum to a random wall is far more powerful than any over-designed commemorative obelisk.

[1,2> stills from Daisies (Chytilová, 1966) via ][3-5> Tomatina fight in Bunyol, Spain via monoloco & sobreespana][6,7>Vegetable fight in Berlin via n24][8>Mountedofficer streetparty via bbc][9> Largest paella 1992 via portablepaella][10>largest paella 2001 via Mividainsustancial][11> Kitchen Monument by Raumlabor Berlin. Photo by Rainer Schlautmann][12> Bubblegum Alley, San Luis Obispo, California via MoleEmpire]

Published on January 20, 2011 13:08.
Filed under: co-optation/zwischennutzung, homo ludens

t-shirtable cities

In the 1970′s American graphic designer Milton Glaser coined the famous slogan “IloveNY” to promote city’s tourism. In 1974, Liverpool-born John Lennon was photographed wearing a New york City T-shirt, proudly expressing his love for the city.

As featured in last issue of Monu Magazine concerning Most Valuable Urbanism, Mika Savela presents his reflections about the most T-shirtable cities in the world. Taking as reference the amount of google hits, his top-100 leading cities are “IloveQuebec-Paris-London-Chicago-NewYork”. At the bottom of the list however, we find “IloveRiyadh-Tallinn-Pyongyang-Reykjavik-Kabul”.

Savela speculates that T-shirtability could help as a popular factor to measure the almost impossible dimension of which city is best to live in, or at least most beloved among its dwellers.

“… It’s about the ubiquitous framework where we associate ourselves with a city”.


[image1> IloveTokyo via NinjaVsPenguin] [image2> Most T-shirtable cities featured in Monu via Mika Savela]

Published on November 11, 2010 23:34.
Filed under: homo ludens

deconstruction of classics

^ orchestra & audience distribution on stage for Terretektorh, by I.X. 1965 via CCA

After a concert as indescriptible as incredible and amazing last night, i cannot but search for the making off of it. Director Peter Eötvös (Steine für Ensemble) conducted a beautiful interpretation of Iannis Xenakis experimental piece N’schima (1975) in a Scharoun’s Philharmoniker, which knew how to meet the challenge of the complex system of hanging microphones.

An on-going exhibition at CCA Montreal shows the drawings of the scores of this soundchitect:

Drawing was central to Xenakis’ working method as a designer of sound and space, and the meticulously hand-rendered scores and graphic studies, both architectural and musical, on view in the exhibition express a spatial understanding of the page as much as they do a palpable sonic quality. These innovative drawings reveal a radical visualization of sound and give insight into this extraordinary innovator’s process of “thinking through the hand.” The musical documents on view are evidence of one of Xenakis’s signature innovations, which was to integrate advanced contemporary mathematics as a compositional tool.

Notre Dame du Haut – Sound in Architecture from Tommaso Nervegna on Vimeo.

^ xenakis meets ronchamp

^Fusinato by I.X. via brancolina

By 1979, he had devised a computer system called UPIC, which could translate graphical images into musical results, producing his ‘arborescences’, which resembled both organic forms and architectural structures. The drawing is, thus, rendered into a composition. Mycenae-Alpha was the first of these pieces he created using UPIC as it was being perfected. [source>brancolina]

^excerpts from Mycènes Alpha by I.X. (1978) via tonewheels & brancolina ^

^ Adapted Scores for human hands by pianist John Mark Harris for Evryali by I.X. 1973 via complementinversion

^ Scores for Pithroprakta by I.X. 1955-56 via brancolina

Published on September 14, 2010 09:04.
Filed under: homo ludens, mutant

practical absurdity

Fiction was the only way to give a naive break to the hard reality of Dictator Franco’s Spain around 1940s and 1950s. Professor Franz from Copenhague was an invented characteristic character in national comics, who developed smart no-tech inventions for everyday life. One of the scarce tries to open the country to a European Humanism allowed in the fascist society of that time. The outlandish and eccentric drawings, which I rediscovered in my parents’ bookshelf, depict new folk solutions for an industrial man.

“The Great Invetions of TBO” (Los grandes inventos de TBO) was a compilation of weird devices ranging from mechanism to absurdity, which made one dream of collective umbrellas or hundred ways to optimize energy – sometimes in the most sustainable or even better, the least ecological one!

Threading a simple needle could require a machine as complex and big as one NASA’s computer, but activated with a simple pedal…

[all images> TBO inventions, 1977 printed compilation]

Published on September 7, 2010 15:32.
Filed under: homo ludens

bike-karaoke

Berlin finds its tricks to enhance entertainment. Edgy party clubs have been traditionally using the legal formula of the e.V. (association) to avoid paying taxes as a registered business, since they are, conceptually and physically, rather informal gatherings of people simply eager to enjoy.

Mauerpark is one of the hundreds of examples in the city, where the informal among the informal pops up. If 10 years ago a group of neighbours decided to found the Mauerpark e.V. in order to activate this former piece of Berlin NoMan’s Land, today it is one of the most vivid Sunday corners of the city. Just providing spaces for  meeting, this bottom-up urban governance team have left citizens free space for their spontaneous activities, such as weekly hero Joe Hatchiban and his open-air mobile bike-karaoke. A mix of freak-show and dream of fame, where a bike, a sun-protector and two speakers add an excuse for flanierenden Sundays.

[all images> open-air karaoke and hairdresser's at mauerpark berlin. stills from reportage by der spiegel]

Published on July 26, 2010 03:38.
Filed under: homo ludens

urban love scars

Love stories have two things in common with utopias: desire and destruction.

Sexually attracted by an object, Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer literally married the Berlin Wall in 1979, acquiring then her new husband’s surname as her own. East Berliners trapped in a desperate survival, would find such schizophrenia from West-siders, not an object of praise at all. If Ms. Berliner-Mauer saw the Fall of the Wall in 1989 as a terrible disaster, meaning her husband’s death, Koolhaas once read the void of the Wall as a true piece of convulsive architecture, to be also introduced in London periphery and Joseph Beuys ironically proposed that the Wall should be made taller by 5 cm for aesthetic purposes. [Robert Sumrell & Kazys Varnelis in Blue Monday: stories of absurd realities and natural philosophies]

On the other hand, it is also understandable to be appealed to the amount of dreams and tensions that introducing an alien mega-structure in a city generates. Just one block away from the former No-man’s land in Berlin, an urban renewal plan from the 1950s failed to destroy part of today’s most vivid area of Kreuzberg (including Görlitzer Park and Oranienstr.) and replace it with a huge freeway. My last home would have disappeared in this plan, but still, I would not discard a possible wedding with a meandering highway…

[image1> Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer with the Berlin Wall via berlinermauer.se] [image2> 1950s plan to build a highway through 19th century Kreuzberg in Berlin via wrangelkiez]

Published on June 16, 2010 09:32.
Filed under: homo ludens

happy street

Salvador Dalí met Le Corbusier in 1928 to tell him that his functional architecture did everything but actually function.  And he predicted that the future for architecture was however to become soft and hairy. Hairy are some renamed pavilions in shanghai world expo, but in order to see these zoological attractions, one needs to queue all around the security cage that protects them, from hypothetically dangerous invasions of onlookers.

These gated countries reflect very well current obsessions to impose borders to the city. So escaping from over-admired hairy Crown Jewels, my daily hero is the Happy Street/Dutch diorama. Conceived as an open walking-scape in form of a picnic lawn and an 8-shaped ramp for spatial appropriations, it is an explosion of irony and cynicism at the same time.

Denmark failed to make her lent bikes be driven all along the expo, but John Körmeling did succeed in not gating his pavilion with a fence; so the whole concept of representing a country also goes physically transparent. Expos do not need any more museum-like walled artifacts, but simply attractive meeting areas under the excuse of experiencing a local beer sitting on a mobile Dutch sheep. And people will just do the rest.

[all images> Dutch and Danish pavilion at shanghai Expo by deconcrete2010]

Published on June 2, 2010 05:45.
Filed under: homo ludens

golden feathers rock the block

golden cushions start to fly around, and golden feathers show up!

berlin 16.mai 2010. one truck parked outside is turned into a Greek amphitheatre towards the dj-stage.

Torstr.74 decides to organise a street Sunday party with other shops in the same block and a sudden rush for fun appears…

[images via lesmads]

Turning trucks into mobile discos is also possible by combining 4 lorries all together. Robin&Wientjes is the easyjet-like firm for renting trucks in Berlin. In February, a collective turned them into an itinerant bar.

[video via pop-up city]

Published on May 17, 2010 10:50.
Filed under: homo ludens, relational

playful miracles

“Almost Amusing: Rainbow is a mobile rainbow installation whereby natural and organic items are used to reveal a hidden image of our reality for a single moment.” To create this public illusion, conceived by Kasia Krakowiak for The Knot-Berlin, water will be blown up in the air with one button – the way the whales blow it up.

If Krakowiak appropriates herself of climate for the sake of joy, Kitegen profits from joy to rethink climatic conditions. Planned for optimizing current conventional windmills (only an average of 80 m height), 1 km-long kites might serve as more efficient energy generators. It is in the higher layers of the atmosphere (around 1,000 m) where wind speed is most optimal for turbines, only reachable by means of kites.

[image1>rainbow installation via kitegen]

[image2>kite energy infrastructure via the lonely horseman]

Published on May 5, 2010 15:47.
Filed under: homo ludens

splash of colour

Colour blossoms in Indian  spring season…welcome holy Holi festival…

…where separation between castes and genders are blurred in an ephimeral cloud…

[images1&2> holi festival from arthurmag] [image3> holi festival by poras chaudhary via photoshelter]

Published on April 25, 2010 03:15.
Filed under: homo ludens

viva la farándula

Happy birthday, Gran Via!

Madrid celebrates today your 100 anniversary since you were officially born in 1910, although it took you 99 years to be completed between the first proposal (1855) and your last building (1954).

As a typical result of the late medieval urban fabric, new hygienic and mobility voids urged in many European capital cities; either because of upcoming capitalist consumption or totalitarian military regimes and their parades. Destroying historic blocks for the sake of street-widening was therefore a common issue between 1850 and 1950. Aiming new modes of leisure for an increasing bourgeoisie, Madrid also demanded brand-new boulevards with exclusive boutiques for flâneurs, department stores, space for cars and tramways, cinemas, cabarets and theatres.

Today, writes Saravia, urbanism (in Europe!) cannot afford such operations, except for burying trains underground, and not always. Gran Via made 327 buildings to be demolished, and 32 blocks affected. Most expensive evictions cost an equivalent of 5 euros/m2. The stubborn-nail dwellers at the time were the Jesuits, who did not want to abandon their site; everything was solved when the 1st May 1931 (with a recently proclaimed Spanish Republic) some people set the whole building on fire.

Today, multi-cultural prostitutes, shopaholics, alcoholics and informal snack sellers (hiding their goods inside dustbins) meet next to VIP premiere red carpets. And it is this mix of decadent, tacky and lordly Gran Via, what probably makes most Madrileños choose it as their favourite street.

Still today, a classic spot for 24 h flâneurs; of all kind.

[Image1> Gran Via Madrid 1954 via Mundos] [Image2> demolitions Gran Via adapted from Wikipedia] [Image3> anniversary façade map released in 2010] [Image4> Capitol Building in Gran Via from ucm.es]

Published on April 5, 2010 11:24.
Filed under: homo ludens

party pirates

“Fleeing from hideous benefits of Imperialism such as slavery, serfdom, racism and intolerance” Buccaneers set up temporary Utopian societies wherever they sailed.

“In the middle of an inquisitor European 15th century, the New World saw these pirates intermarrying with Indians, accepting blacks and Spaniards as equals, electing their captains democratically, rejecting all nationalities, and forbidding flogging and punishments. These misunderstood “social bandits” created utopias almost ex nihilo in terra incognita, enclaves of total liberty occupying empty spaces on the map. These utopias were meant to be temporary, since their true republics were their ships.”

Pirates were known for their love for music and often hired musicians for the duration of each cruise. This party atmosphere and freedom of their everyday life extended to sexuality. B.R. Burg in Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition suggests that the vast majority of pirates were homosexual, enjoying both female prostitutes on board as well as their male companions.

MUSIC was declared to be the central principle of the Republic State of Fiume, regarded by Hakim Bey as the last pirate utopia and the only modern example. Gabriele D’Annunzio (poet, artist, musician, aesthete, womanizer, pioneer daredevil aeronautist, black magician, genius and cad) decided to declare independence in this harbour city in 1920, understanding the concept of music as revolutionary social change. Although it only lasted until 1924, the party never stopped. Artists, bohemians, adventurers, anarchists, fugitives and Stateless refugees, homosexuals, military dandies and crank reformers of every stripe began to show up at Fiume in droves.

Using Bey’s terms, psychic nomads (or rootless cosmopolitans) profiting from music-based societies, following an itinerant scene…

[Source> The Temporary Autonomous Zone, ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism by Hakim Bey] [eco-action.org] [pirate heterotopias by Brianne Selman]

[Image> pirate party from Jason Godesky via Anthropik]

Published on March 19, 2010 12:26.
Filed under: homo ludens

city as playground

Huizinga proclaimed that play is a serious matter.

In the picture above, 12 different floorplans of classrooms in Werner Seyfert’s school buildings. Depending on children’s age, space is organised in a forum-like or a blackboard-addressed configuration, avoiding monotonous authoritarian models of a rectangle.

“Hard, psychologically opaque, or merely intellectually conceived forms can stir semiconscious feelings of alienation in their users; they are not experienced as physically or psychologically user-friendly.” David Adams describing the organic functionalism of Rudolf Steiner’s school buildings for Waldorf pedagogic movement.

In order to recover that creativity, which rectangular Functionalism had already seized from citizens, 700 playgrounds were built in vacant derelict urban plots of postwar Amsterdam by Aldo van Eyck between 1947-1978.

“The focus of how space could be appropriated, stood in clear opposition to the prevailing modernist conception of space in architecture” (Merijn Oudenampsen). Just by providing variable and simple steel-bar structures all over the city, children would use their imagination to recreate worlds of fantasy.

[Image above> Werner Seyfert's floorplans for classrooms according to age from waldorf reserach institute]

[Image below> Aldo van Eyck's playground in Amsterdam from flexmens.org]

Published on March 7, 2010 14:55.
Filed under: homo ludens

jumping happens

1970s was a time of expanding consciousness and arranging urban space. Prototypes for new ideas for living were created, influenced by new building materials, and proposals for redesigning people’s living space.

Haus-Rucker-Co proposed Giant Billiard, an inflatable interactive device for people to provoke entertainment, and invite them to jump and play together, and be actors of a scene. However, the sterile, the minimal surroundings of the gallery threatened to drain the vitality from the work, transforming the projects into sculptures, static objects not to be touched. When confronted with the museum space, the artists chose to add an additional set of contextual objects comprised of furniture from their own apartments. They transported bed rooms and living rooms (televisions included) to the museum and moved into the commandeered gallery space for the duration of the show.

Above, Giant billiard relaunched in 2007 within a sterile background without additional dirtiness.

Moebel Olfe launched in February 2009 at the Modulor Haus in Berlin a memorable happening, open to spontaneous decisions, with another giant  inflatable device as main character and diverse surprises, turning a vast office derelict space into a vivid playground for grown-ups. Party-tecture as part of an enjoy-and-reuse interaction with an empty space.

furtherfield blog inflatable enclosures Steven Lauritano at Pidgin

Published on February 7, 2010 01:04.
Filed under: homo ludens