deconcrete

^ Empire II, as featured in Dubai-based Brusselssprout Curatorial Magazine #2 [Fall 2010]

‘Empire II is the continuation of Empire.

On Saturday 25 July 1964 (46 years ago) Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas filmed the movie Empire.

Empire is a silent, black and white film that lacks a traditional narrative or characters. The passage from daylight to darkness becomes the film’s narrative, while the protagonist is the iconic building that was (and is again) the tallest in New York City. Non-events such as a blinking light at the top of a neighboring building mark the passage of time.

It was filmed from 8:06 p.m. to 2:42 a.m. from the 41st floor of the Time-Life Building, from the offices of the Rockefeller Foundation.’

Empire II is the continuation of the Andy Warhol work: creation of non-media as media, film as non-film. The film was shot on July 27th, 2010 by Andre Orione, David Payton and Lohra Ydna and presents Burj Khalifa (aka Burj Dubai).

Taking the notion of ‘orwellian‘ that refers to a destruction of the welfare of a free and open society in a regime of surveillance and control as reflected in George Orwell’s work, dpr-barcelona just launched a new publication exploring the possibilities of Architecture-related publications within new media. The graphic content of Orwellian has been adapted for Augmented Reality interaction, and presented last week at the Apple Store in Barcelona. The potential of expanding the printed matter beyond its material format, thanks to smartphone possibilities, allows adding complementary layers of simultaneous information.

Contributions included our net-friends The Funambulist, radarq, THNMD, as well as deconcrete.

You can check the issue here, and explore it with the application developed by Aurasma.

More on Augmented Reality:

^ Using Spider-Web Patterns to Determine Toxicity. Results of a drug-free spider and after giving it peyote, LSD, marijuana, caffeine, cocaine and chloral hydrate_NASA 1995 via funnyjunk

‘A method of determining the toxicities of chemicals involves recording and analysis of spider-web patterns. The method is based on the observation that spiders exposed to various chemicals spin webs that differ, in various ways, from their normal webs. […] The more toxic the chemical, the more deformed a web looks in comparison with a normal web. Inasmuch as the shape of a spider web resembles that of a crystal lattice in some respects, techniques of statistical crystallography are applied to obtain several quantitative measures of toxicity as manifested in the differences between photographs of webs spun under toxic and normal conditions. The images of the cells are digitalized and processed by an image-data-analysis program that computes various measures of the cellular structures of the webs, including numbers of cells and average areas, perimeters, and radii of cells. It appears that one of the most telling measures of toxicity is a decrease, in comparison with a normal web, of the numbers of completed sides in the cells. […]‘

[David A. Noever, Raymond J. Cronise, and Rachna A. Ralwani. NASA Tech Briefs Vol. 19, No. 4, P.82, April 1995 via briancbenett]

How fantastic would be if real estate could also be patternized in the same way, detecting constructions that were carried out by humans intoxicated by speculative money flows, high on political power, boozed up on controlling an occupied territory or just a bit tipsy for destroying natural landscapes…

Thanks, edu!

^ Colonganos. Austis, Sardinia, Italy. All photos by Charles Fréger.

The Wild Man is a legendary creature, son of a bear and a woman, a sort of medieval superman. The tradition of celebrating once a year the return of the Wild Man spreads all over Europe and adapts the myth into different materials and hybrids. Costumes use local plants, hey, tree branches; goat horns, cow horns, bullhorns; bear fur, sheep skulls, twisted deer bones, skins, hair, and gigantic cowbells… Landscape acquires a humanoid dimension through a fiction character that wears portions of its natural surroundings, and dances, scares, swarms around the forest, celebrating a new season, and marking time cycles as a living calendar.

Charles Fréger’s photograph series Wilder Mann compiles a long tradition of European masquerades of outstanding liminal zones at the edge between civilization and wilderness. As he explains, the anthropomorphic figures can be divided into two categories: those who belong to another world and represent a different kind of state or moment of change and transition (the devil, strangers, beggars, madmen, dead men), and those that need to be supplemented by an additional figure and create atypical couples because they represent only half a reality (the beauty and the beast, the human and the animal). Meanwhile, the zoomorphic masks use the most powerful beasts of the area in order to be grateful to the fertility of the soil, fecundity of women or the benignity of weather.

^ Perchten. Werfen, Austria.

^ Perchten. Werfen, Austria.

^ Souvakari. Banishte, Bulgaria.

^ Wilder. Telfs, Austria.

^ Babugeri. Bansko, Bulgaria.

^ Babugeri. Bansko, Bulgaria.

^ Certi. Nedasov, Czech Republic.

^ Mobile stalls and devices to let the train pass through. Rom Hoob Market, Thailand. images via othermarkets

Rom Hoob Market / Mae Klong Railway Market Thailand

[Phenomena of Transition. read full text by Soranart Sinuraibhan at othermarkets]

[...] There is no definite entrance to Rom-Hoob market. People can, and do, access it at the beginning of the market (next to Mae-Klong station) or through small passageways which are situated at oblique angles through the market and connect the main road with the central market. All stalls are set up next to the railway track with out-stretching sun-shades that informally establish a defined corridor through the whole market. The track is then transformed in this manner into a footpath. The sun-shade is simply improvised from a tent sheet, ropes, a bamboo pole, a steel post and whatever else locals can find at the site. The entire structure is simply designed and constructed by locals. It is easy to operate and can be collapsed by just one to two people. After assembly, the tent sheet can be stretched out up to 2 meters in length and lifted up to 2-3 meters high. Interestingly, the sun-shade attached to each stall and its stands are designed to be able to close and move each time the train passes through (6 times daily). 

Through critical examination of each stall, the relationship between the everyday architecture (occupied by its inhabitants) and the flows of space is revealed. The stalls can be categorized into several forms according to different foods and products. Vegetables and fruits are put in baskets and placed next to or immediately on top of the track. There is no need to move these baskets when the train comes as the space between the wheels allows it to pass completely over the baskets. Seafood, chili paste, or light weight products are laid on small tables, which are readily assembled from a piece of wood and metal stands. These can be easily dismantled, lifted up and moved. Heavier products, such as meats or household items, are placed on bigger and stronger stainless-steel tables with wheels attached. These tables are custom made and come in different sizes. They can slide in and out when the train passes through and are simply operated by hand. Most sellers, however, prefer to sit on the floor or existing railings, as in one view, it is more convenient and easier to move when the train comes.

[...]

By looking at the urban context of Rom-Hoob market, we see that it is not only shaped by the movement of trains and users, but in fact by the flows of capital and economics themselves. The form of the market is squeezed and stretched along the railway track because of the space limited within the city which is in turn affected by the flows and growth of the capital. Moreover, the utilized spaces within the market are similarly defined by the particular flows of transportations and goods. The language of this colloquial architecture which emerges within this context is then constructed by the everyday lives and needs of the community; and in particular the energy of flows. This suggests that the existence of Rom-Hoob Market (excludes street markets) disprove Castells’ historical claim, namely that flows displace spaces of places. Today’s architecture seems to survive only when it reflects what the society or culture expects of it and particularly when our society and (architectural) culture rely on the flows. But Rom-Hoob Market offers a way in which places are perceived and appropriated across the internal space of time and culture. This suggests that it may not be necessary to search for emergent possibilities in constructing architecture in our fluid world. Perhaps by looking back to the local and the everyday discourses, an idea or alternative conception of what architecture in the space of flows can be will emerge.

^ EXOTE, EXHIBITION#1 by Kris Verdonck, 01.05-21.08.2011 at Z33. Photos by Kristof Vrancken via wemakemoneynotart and featured at Volume#31 – Guilty Landscapes.

EXOTE [Exhibition#1, by Kris Verdonck] is a metaphorical garden installation with a selection of invasive alien species (fauna and flora) in Belgium that form a potential danger for biodiversity, economy and human health. It is some sort of ‘end-of-the-world’ landscape and a metaphor for a world in which man has to protect himself against an environment that he created himself. The indoor garden is part of a route with some of Kris Verdonck’s earlier projections and installations, gathered in a new context.

^ EXOTE, EXHIBITION#1 by Kris Verdonck

—–

^ END, by A Two Dogs Company / Kris Verdonck

In the performance END artist Kris Verdonck shows the possible final stages of a human society in ten scenes. Melting glaciers, burning forests, cities under water, ubiquitous screens and cameras spying on us, the uncontrolled availability of weapons of mass destruction, and so on. 

END starts out from the images the media project onto our retinas all day and every day. The ten scenes are linked by a monologue spoken by a single character: the witness who sees it all happen. While this survivor – like the messenger in Greek tragedy – talks unceasingly, a series of ‘Figures’ appears on stage: machines and people or a combination of the two. They go from one side of the stage to the other, all in the same direction. Are they fleeing something? If so, what?

[rather watch it mute!]   via LiveLeak

Deconcrete for The Funambulist:

<Our friend from Deconcrete, Daniel Fernández Pascual wrote this week’s guest writer essay in which he questions the idea of sovereignty on territories that remain legally blurry. Indeed, the paradigm of the two-dimensional map cannot be enough anymore to describe lands (sky, underground, space, other planets etc.) whose sovereignty had never necessitated to be discussed in another way than theoretically in the past. Our era opens a new paradigm in which the legal action of a State on a territory will be defined through the complexity of space and its multiple layers.>

read full essay

thanks, Léopold!

< 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]

How to visualize Neo-Agrosophy and the hypothetical reterritorialization of a field when living off-grid:

< FieldMachine 1.0 [developed by FieldClub] is an interactive webtool which you can use to design your own self-sufficiency ‘unit’ based on what you would like to eat in a Britain without imports, and what kind of fuel you would like to burn for heating and cooking. The FieldMachine 1.0 allows the individual to plan and achieve recommended daily levels of essential nutrients. As your chosen options are entered, the FieldMachine 1.0 determines how much land is needed to produce each chosen food/fuel item, and also how many other humans could live in Britain if everyone did the same.

Step 1: Use the sliders in the Daily Food Values table below to achieve a daily balanced diet (Blue = too little,Red = too much, Green = balanced).
Step 2: Choose your strawbale house size and renewable fuel type.

Tips:

Daily Kcals will be affected the most by high carbohydrate foods such as Wheat, Potato, and Butter.

Daily Proteins – by Meat, Egg, Beans and Nuts. Daily fats – by Cheese, Butter and Nuts.

The fuel type you choose can radically affect the area of timber required (for example Native Broadleaf Woodland yields at 3 tonnes per hectare, whereas Short Rotation Coppice Red Alder yields at 15 tonnes per hectare).
The equations in this calculator use data from the USDA, the CIA, the World Health Organisation, Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs (UK gov), and the Organic Farm Management Handbook – (Organic Farming Research Unit, Institute of Rural Studies, University of Wales).
The ‘Population Discriminator’ calculation uses the current usable agricultural land (including woodland) in the UK (22,205,000Ha – DEFRA), and the current UK population (60,600,000 – CIA). >

[TRY DEMO to calculate your sef-sufficiency unit]

In a world of perfection and appearances, we become more and more eager to peep at failures. Specially, we enjoy finding out that celebrities and myths also belong to our everyday realm. With irony, sense of humor and a great dose of Dutch transparency, emergent Rotor collective has just curated the work of OMA/AMO for barbican under the title Progress. But far from being a standard show of chronologically ordered fetishized projects, we are delighted with a labyrinth of things that could conventionally been regarded as failures. They are however celebrated here as part of a successful trajectory to generate spaces. Walls are recycled from former shows without repainting; everyday objects are shamelessly displayed with a honest attitude towards the audience.

Tired as we are of overabundance of glamorous and glossy representations of OMA/AMO’s projects, this exhibition provides a representation of reality through images mediated by failures. Hidden stories from processes of building a building are rescued; politically incorrect tricks behind-the-scenes are simply revealed. Therefore, labels underneath every piece of work become even more important than the physical work itself. This exhibition of exhibits resembles a cabinet of curiosities compiled by some enlightened collector; but every item is here for a specific reason. Thus, they make a close connection between the visitor’s experience and the everyday reality at OMA/AMO.

Rotor collective debuted in Venice Biennale 2010 with a brilliant exhibition on users wearing out building materials and leaving trace evidence (Usus/Usures):

As a trace of use, wear reminds us that most of the time other users have gone before us, and still more will follow. In some cases, wear even provides a valuable clue as to the nature of these uses. In this sense, traces of wear play a vital part in our ability to read our environment and, by extension, appreciate it. […] Wear is always about situations.

One of their most relevant study cases when tracing back how building environment mutates was their photograph Blue Limestone Plinth (Brussels, 2010). It automatically unveiled how an area of the city was informally used:

The traces of wear on the plinth shown in this picture reveal the activity of prostitutes leaning against it, on a strategic corner in the centre of Brussels. The darkest marks show a polishing of the stone’s surface by different parts of the women’s bodies, while the lighter marks are scratches caused by their high heels. An analysis of the different traces of wear on the entire wall reveal the most popular spots, either because they are in full view of the street or because they offer slight protection from the rain.

This approach to architecture is what made them been commissioned for a similar curatorial concept. The unusual tandem at barbican composed of a curator that is not a great fan of the curated has made the collaboration even more thrilling. In words of Rem Koolhaas: This exhibition was a risk for us and we multiplied the risk by suggesting Rotor for curating it.

In addition, and following OMA/AMO’s current research on Preservation, the exhibition has opened up the Gallery West Entrance for the first time in history after completion of the building. A dead end has been turned into a public path, where pedestrians are allowed to see (only) part of the show free of charge.

[images 1-13> OMA/Progress, Curated by Rotor. barbican art gallery London 6/10/11-19/2/12. By deconcrete2011] [14> Blue Limestone Plinth by Rotor 2010]

< 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]