deconcrete

< Häxan is a documentary about the history of witchcraft, told in a variety of styles, from illustrated slideshow to dramatised events of alleged real-life events, right up to the early twentieth century (when the film was made, in 1922). Grave robbing, torture, possessed nuns, and a satanic Sabbath: Benjamin Christensen’s legendary film uses a series of dramatic vignettes to explore the scientific hypothesis that the witches of the Middle Ages suffered the same hysteria as turn-of-the-century psychiatric patients. >

A highly recommendable promenade through psychiatric fictional space…

Bacteria as Space-Time Machines

Microbes and bacteria don’t understand political man-made borders. They just expand and react freely; they are sovereigns of their surroundings. They deterritorialize human topographic order to delimit their own dominion. And they always leave some sort of trace behind them. Trace evidence is left behind when different objects come into contact with one another revealing a past narrative, like fingerprints indicate a hand that was once in contact with a surface, or a warm seat in the tube, which reveals that somebody was seating there before us.

Once the cap of a Boletus Erythropus mushroom is nicked and the cell walls are broken, oxygen alters its colour from brownish-orange to a range of iridescent tones. Walking amongst these psychedelic fungi in a forest could produce fantastic blue-black footsteps, as their colour transfers onto the shoes, which tread upon them. Colours and shape distortions that appear on them provide some sort of forensic evidence. A dynamic landscape narrative starts also on us after watching these traces. Landscape sensitive properties are nonetheless preserved in spite of continuous deformations.

This process of tracking back a series of events in space deals with re-enacting and re-mapping. In this sense, it could be also considered a Deleuzian reterritorialization process, where Euclidean coordinates turn into a set of dynamic parameters. Microbiological mutations can be perceived as space-time machines as well. After watching them, our brain takes us to a different time and place through a set of topological relations. How humid an environment was that turned bacteria samples into a pale tone? Or were they rather affected by loads of dust floating in the air?

Hidden layers of reality become automatically visible for us. The essence of different places is registered and captured during a certain time lapse.  Aren’t these on-going maps almost more real than reality?

In observing microbes mutations, space is both represented and built anew in a constant negotiation of different agents; as Martina Löw puts it when referring to the relational production of space, which she understands by Spacing: the situating of social goods and people and/or the positioning of primarily symbolic markings in order to render ensembles of goods and people recognisable as such constitute space. Goods and people are connected to form spaces through processes of perception, memory and fantasy; we want to imagine what has really happened, why there is a round-shaped stain on the floor in front of us…

Building space can be considered as an architectural act, but not in the most classic perspective as the Vitruvian Triad has monopolised over centuries. The real fundaments of constructing space have actually never been Firmitas, Utilitas and Venustas (firmness, utility and beauty). As Miguel Paredes states, built space must actually be unstable, dysfunctional and ugly, changeable and blurry.

daniel fernández pascual (text contribution, 2011)

—

With the work DOMINIONS, Julian Charrière and Andreas Greiner captured a series of landscapes through bacteria (installation at Program Berlin, 2011. Curated by Carson Chan). Each box was exposed to a different ambience in remote places of Germany and Switzerland; then, displayed at a height proportional to the altitude of each site.

[all images> Dominions by Julian Charrière and Andreas Greiner. Installation at Program Berlin 2011. Curated by Carson Chan]

In the middle of nowhere they date back to the early 2000s. But these lines are still very well preserved. They measure around 70 feet wide (21,3 metres). Oblique lines configuring two main gigantic structural grids that cover around 1 square mile each, made to be seen from above. One of them is framed in a rectangular shape. For the other one, they might have realized that it was not necessary any frame. Instead, they drastically increased its Albedo (light reflectivity coefficient) through a highly reflective mineral composition. This fact together with the alignment of both mega-structures with seasonal alluvial flows lead to different speculations on their actual function, either related to war, power or natural resources (issues which surprisingly tend to be linked altogether):

(a) Calibrate optics for Chinese satellites or even weapons.

(b) Geo-engineering attempts to guide or redirect the unpredictable alluvial fans caused by water flow through the desert.

(c) Assist in mining exploration guidance by discovering the flow patterns of alluvial gold, silver, platinum or other metal/mineral deposits. Which for me appears to be the most plausible hypothesis.

The decay of the lines is not simply due to natural abandonment but a way to be easily monitored from above. Are we assisting to a gold rush in the Gobi Desert? The region of nearby Altay Mountain (“the place producing gold”) has over 138 ores located in the same area. Vehicle tracks and tailings reveal the trace of intensive mining operations. If that were the case, it would be all about humans modifying a landscape to observe how it changes; watching the metamorphosis of the metamorphosis.

Looking forward to what the alteration of the image of the territory eventually unearths.

Thanks, laura!

[speculations & images via quora]

< ” It is odd how the tree has dominated Western reality and all of Western thought, from botany to biology and anatomy, but also gnosiology, theology, ontology, all of philosophy…: the root-foundation, Grund, racine, fondement. The West has a special relation to the forest, and deforestation; the fields carved from the forest are populated with seed plants produced by cultivation based on species lineages of the arborescent type; animal raising, carried out on fallow fields, selects lineages forming an entire animal arborescence. The East presents a different figure: a relation to the steppe and the garden (or in some cases, the desert and the oasis), rather than forest and field; cultivation of tubers by fragmentation of the individual; a casting aside or bracketing of animal raising, which is confined to closed spaces or pushed out on to the steppes of the nomads. The West: agriculture based on a chosen lineage containing a large number of variable individuals. The East: horticulture based on a small number of individuals derived from a wide range of ‘clones’ Does not the East, Oceania in particular, offer something like a rhizomatic model opposed in every respect to the Western model of the tree? André Haudricourt even sees this as the basis for the opposition between the moralities or philosophies of transcendence dear to the West and the immanent ones of the East: the God who sows and reaps, as opposed to the God who replants and unearths (replanting of offshoots versus sowing of seeds). Transcendence: a specifically European disease. Neither is music the same, the music of the earth is different, as is sexuality: seed plants, even those with two sexes in the same plant, subjugate sexuality to the reproductive model; the rhizome, on the other hand, is a liberation of sexuality not only from reproduction but also from genitality. Here in the West, the tree has implanted itself in our bodies, rigidifying and stratifying even the sexes. We have lost the rhizome, or the grass.

[…]

Unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states.

[…]

A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb “to be”, but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and…and…and…’ “>

excerpt from RHIZOME in Deleuze, G / Guattari, F 1987: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

[music & scores by Sylvano Bussotti]

< A garden is the most intimate landscape ensemble I know of. It is close to us. There we cultivate the plants we need. A garden requires care and protection. And so we encircle it, we defend it and fend for it. We give it shelter. The garden turns into a place.

Enclosed gardens fascinate me. A forerunner of this fascination is my love of the fenced vegetable gardens on farms in the Alps, where farmers’ wives often planted flowers as well. I love the image of these small rectangles cut out of vast alpine meadows, the fence keeping the animals out. there is something else that strikes me in this image of a garden fenced off within the larger landscape around it: something small has found sanctuary within something big.

The hortus conclusus that I dream of is enclosed all around and open to the sky. Every time I imagine a garden in an architectural setting, it turns into a magical place. I think of gardens that I have seen, that I believe I have seen, that I long to see, surrounded by simple walls, columns, arcades or the façades of buildings – sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time. > [Peter Zumthor, May 2011]

Hortus Conclusus (Peter Zumthor + Piet Oudolf) at the Serpentine Gallery London, until 16 October 2011.

[all images> Hortus Conclusus_the Serpentine Gallery Summer Pavilion_London, September 2011 by deconcrete]

A statue of the Virgin was turned into a personification of Justice, simply by removing the Christ Child and replacing him with scales.

Network artist Oliver Laric reinterprets Susan Sontag’s statement that just about everything had been photographed (1977), and proclaims that just about everything has been photoshopped. His video essay and statement on visual culture Versions (2010) also features the Iranian incident from 2008, where the Revolutionary Guards released an image with a digitally added missile. This resulted in an explosion of versions and speculations about the real amount of missiles that had actually been fired, at both official and informal level. Dozens of anonymous graphic jokes also explored fantastic and absurd re-combinations of missiles.

Versions coexist. […] Authenticity is decided by the viewer. […] In the telling and the retelling (of different interpretations), the people reveal not the action but themselves. […] We have an innate preference for the represented subject over the real one. Laric collects text fragments and squeezes them with collages out of images found in the Internet. In Versions, he shows resemblances between animation movies (Winnie the Pooh, the Jungle Book or ET); different ways of reproducing Zidane’s kick incident; bootleg recordings of films; celebrities’ faces replacing porn actors’; as well as simultaneous visits to a modernist architecture icon in LA. Laric (also co-author of vvork platform) uses available Internet material for his remixes dealing with iconoclasm and iconography.

PN: How do you use stealing?

OL: Stealing creates a feeling of liberty because everything belongs to you while simultaneously causing stress as you have to constantly make restrictions what not to use.  (Oliver Laric interviewed by Peter Nowogrodzki for Incite!)

There are more books about books than any other subject.

[see also Oliver Laric's Versions 2009]

The Funambulist has rescued this week an impressive piece of architecture without architects from last year. The monsoon flood of July 2010 left 2,000 casualties in Sindh region, Pakistan, and forced more than 20 million people out from their homes. One-fifth of the country’s total area was under water (the equivalent to the whole size of England). Spiders could not find any other way to survive, but to climb up on trees. The extreme concentration of arachnids at these points turned those trees into completely cocooned structures, with endlessly overlapping spider webs. The fact of being surrounded by a vast area of stagnant waters provided them with more than enough succulent mosquitoes, and thereby reducing the risk of a malaria epidemic; locals reported fewer mosquitoes than it would have been expected after such a disaster. Photographer Russell Watkins captured in these swamped areas webs which were sometimes even stretching from tree to tree. As he witnessed: <It was an extraordinary sight, really quite spooky and surreal. Seemingly endless lakes of mill-pond-calm water, with cotton-candy trees reflected like mirrors. It was both beautiful and disturbing. As we talked to local people, dozens of tiny spiders were dropping out of the trees, onto our heads, over the camera. I think they were white crab spiders, just a few millimeters long, and not harmful – almost imperceptible.>

A lack of sunlight killed most trees, since multiple webs acted as an opaque veil over them. When the waters began to recede, displaced villagers tried to resettle their communities. The scarce amount of remaining trees led nonetheless to a lack of natural sun shelters against scorching temperatures.

Despite the shiver that they might provoke on the viewer at first sight, these images only show an  spatial consequence of the much larger extent of an still on-going tragedy.

all images by Russell Watkins: [1-4>via The Funambulist][5>via National Geographic]

One topic, two points of view:

INK, by Isabel Martínez Abascal & Deconcrete at TheBiBlog

BRUISE by Rachel Engler and Deconcrete at TheBiBlog

Damon Zucconi´s piece Sólarsteinn / Fata Morgana is an application, which deletes the whole content of googlemaps, just leaving the names of every single place. Like the phenomena of optical illusions called “Fata Morgana” in the desert or in the sea, Zucconi speculates with the real existence of real locations:

“Seasoned explorers, vehemently insisting on what they had seen, set down mountains and islands on their charts where there was nothing but empty sky … Expeditions sent out later to verify these new lands sometimes saw the same fata morgana, further confusing the issue. Only by prolonging their arduous journeys, thereby observing a constant receding of the image, did they prove that the land was not there at all.” [source> Gentili Apri Gallery]

Hacking and perverting on-line maps applications makes one question the huge amount of information from interactive sites we are bombarded with everyday. In the same line, GlobalMove.Us by JODI is a constant mutation of googlemaps icons.

As Annet Dekker points out: “JODI are consciously concerned with raising technical standards for discussion, and modifying them. But rather than producing predictable results, JODI go a step further by employing the unpredictability in the use of software and playing with the expectation patterns of the viewer/user.”

thanks, álvaro!

[image1> fata morgana by damon zucconi via gentili apri] [images2&3> fata morgana optical illusions at the desert and the sea via wikipedia] [image4> JODI´s GlobalMove.Us via GentiliApri]

Yesterday there was a big full moon at dusk. One of those which seems to be almost part of an advertising billboard, instead of a real one. And then we went to see Junya Ishigami’s Small Images and tiny drawings in my favourite bookshop. Thousands of delicate minuscule objects, only readable when you touch the new-smelling paper with your nose.

Today, a new hallucinating lunar map has been published in the media, showing an accurate number of 5,185 craters; a result of all historic suffered impacts, that the Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter (LRO) has made possible to divulge. We cannot touch the moon with our nose, but geology on its surface can meanwhile be readable for us.

[image1> lunar map via elpais] [images2-4> minerals on the moon surface via simplecomplexity]

In his post about narrow urbanisms in New Orleans, Candy Chang refers to the phenomenon of FORM FOLLOWING TAX LAWS. Government taxing according to property frontage led to extraordinary inventions, both in housing (the “shotgun” typology) and also in the skinny land lots along the Mississippi River.

The government taxed two-story houses more; so people added second floors to the rear, where it didn’t count. The government taxed houses based on the number of rooms; so people didn’t make closets or hallways, which counted as rooms. [...] Doors are arranged so that in some homes you could potentially shoot a shotgun straight through from the porch to the backyard, hence the name.

In the same way that houses minimised their access to the front street, farmers reduced the size of their plantations to the minimum frontage along the Mississippi, just enough to allow ships transport their goods along the main river.

[image1> shotgun house in New Orleans from candychang via strangemaps] [image2> Southern Mississippi map showing narrow lot tenure structure, 1858 from candychang via strangemaps]

Usus/Usures explores the wearing down of architecture from a material point of view. An exhibition at the Belgium Pavilion for the Venice Biennale 2010 by ROTOR, which shows users’ traces in a generic city.

They collect scratched benches, a prostitute’s waiting corner, eroded granite tiles surrounding an elevator’s button, a worn down door handle, or a hard-to-clean rubber flooring from the subway…

Construction materials go through several phases over the course of their lives [...] Consider one of these in particular: the time when the material is subjected to use. When a material is used in the exposed surface of a building, it is gradually transformed by deposits, imprints, scratches and other traces of wear. [...] It can no longer be a convenient abstraction [...] and must from now on confront the uses and the users who mark and shape its very substance.

The more muddled, the richer.

Worn out urban objects collected by Rotor for the Venice Biennale 2010 [image1> by eric mairiaux] [images2,3,4> by deconcrete2010]

What if buses could fly? Science fiction seems to be more real in last proposal for sustainable urban mobility in Chinese cities. The “straddling bus” looks like a light-rail train bestriding the road, reducing the cost of commuting systems to a third, when compared to subway construction. Its construction will begin at the end of this year in Beijing.

It is 4/4.5 m high with 2 levels> passengers board on the upper level while other vehicles lower than 2 m can go through under. powered by electricity and solar energy, the bus can speed up to 60 km/h carrying 1,200-1,400 passengers at a time without blocking other vehicles’ way. {…} it can reduce traffic jams by 20-30 %.

[source and image> straddling bus via chinahush]

my grandfather enjoyed growing champignons in a dark sandy cave. maybe he could have been growing a small house too…

“Mycotecture, or the creation of architectural forms with fungus, is being pioneered by Philip Ross at Far West Fungi in California. He doesn’t use the caps of the mushroom; he’s interested in the mycelium, the white root-like fibers that form a network in the soil below. Grown in a mold, and then dried, it is an amazing material. It is nontoxic, fireproof, mold-resistant and extremely tough. [...] Mushrooms are grown by packing sawdust into airtight bags, then steam cooking the packed bags for several hours. After these pasteurized wood chips have cooled down small pieces of mushroom tissue are introduced into the bag, which eagerly devours the neutralized wood. As the fungus digests and transforms the contents of the bag it solidifies into a mass of interlocking cells, slowly becoming denser and taking form. [...] After the mushroom tissue has colonized all of the sawdust the tops of the bags are cut off and moved into a growing room with high humidity. The bricks are then unwrapped and moved to a drying room for about a month.” [Source> technovelgy]

thanks laura & tanner!

[all images> mycotecture installation out of fungus bricks by philip ross via technovelgy]

O Campo is a photography series by Joachim Schmid, concerning irregular Brazilian football fields. These organic invented fields are resulting products of vacant/waste lands together with a rising demand for playgrounds. A pure example of contextual urbanism, where the built existing context is the one who fixes the rules.

As the photographer states: the desire for playing the game has clearly surpassed and ignored the limitations of natural topography and FIFA’s laws.

[source> la periferia domestica]

[all images> joachim schmid photographing brazilian football fields via multicipios brasil]

No clue to be found about this diagonal partition in a village house of middle Spain. However, i wonder which reasons hide behind this beautiful Wonder. The house lies between the old and the new. But given that we consider it is not simply an architect’s capricho, could it be a result of perverting nonsense regulations allowing transforming only 50% of the surface of historic fassades? or is it rather the result of two brothers inheriting their parents’ house and refusing to split it into two vertical narrow pieces? or is it the house for an astronomer with an integrated telescope to watch stars? or the trace of a former ladder linking balconies together to ease night-lovers access? maybe all urban policies should be ambigous enough, or even much more restrictive, to provoke such playful inventions…

thanks, tito!

[image> diagonal partition in Arroyo del Rio, Caceres, Spain by Yeiart]

Who has stolen our bodies? are 27 soap bars in different states of diminishment, miniature sculptures made from human flesh and skin. Chinese artist Chu Yun conceived this piece in 2002, capturing our everyday routines in a specific instant, before some of the bars simply disappeared…

Human present absence also occurs in worn-away staircases; or timber flooring scratches under a loosen door. But it could also be hygienic, that city neighbourhoods would shrink in size, the more people use them (contrary to today’s Detroit); forcing to be replaced by a new one and reinvented again and again…

He also visualized in his beautiful piece Constellation (2006) the amount of everyday objects in state of error that surround us, by illuminating a room only with their chaotic alert LEDs: a printer out of paper, a cell phone with an unread SMS or a laptop out of battery. Once inside the dark space filled with inoffensive objects, one gets the frightening feeling of being in front of a robotic machine controlling Life.

[Source and images> Hans Ulrich Obrist: The China Interviews, 2009]

The only Chinese settlement allowed in British territory in HongKong was the over-saturated Kowloon walled city, once the most dense place of the planet.

Before its destruction in 1993, a Japanese team could map informal housing inside this amazing maze, drawing a cross-section of this squatting paradise.

Chinese authorities could not but beg local mafias not to build over 15 floors. Brothels, opium smoking rooms, illegal hospitals and trashy eateries led to another conventional Chinese-style public park today, once all dwellers were evicted.

[Images 1,2> Kowloon walled city cross section via Zoohaus] [Images 3,4> views before destruction in 1993-94 by Ian Lambot via der Spiegel] [Image 5> current Kowloon city Park from googlemaps]

increasing disorder in a dining table by diller scofidio [source: 375gr] Sarah Wigglesworth and Jeremy Till in relation to the strawbale house and quilted office project [correction by: swarch]