A nice video done by Lily Henderson

As a follow up to the discussion started with my post on the project, Taking From, Leaving in, Moving on, I thought that the installation “Waste Not” by the Beijing artist Song Dong is very relevant. It is currently at MOMA. I saw it last Friday before leaving for London.

The installation consists of objects collected by Song Dong’s mother during 50 years. “The assembled materials, ranging from pots and basins to blankets, oil flasks, and legless dolls, form a miniature cityscape that viewers can navigate around and through.”My first thoughts were for the concept of materiality, of evocative objects, of the importance of “stuff” in our lives when I first came in the space. My second thought was “His mother did not move!”. I had thrown so much before moving to London, and had been throwing so much before (which is hard for me who tend to get attached to objects, and who love my books - these I don’t throw them. I left a few behind, but only a few and I keep shipping them… ). It also reminded me Yasmine’s post: All what I own or another post by Yasmine: How much does home takes?

These are issues we started exploring with Aileen in a curating collaboration on neo-nomads, evocative objects and a sense of place, with Baseera Kahn at Rotunda Gallery planned for March 2011 (I know it seems far away… to us too! but it’s an exciting project. We’ll keep you posted).

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An interesting article was posted by Jesse Shapins and Brian House (who collaborate on the Yellow Arrow) on the Urban Omnibus entitled Designers and citizens as critical media artists. They discuss their views on maps, cities, technologies and the role of art as a research practice.

Here are few themes and quotes that I found really interesting. I let you read the whole article and I’d be curious to read your thoughts.

On the method (which is a theme that emerged from our discussion on this blog - collaboration between artists and scientists, social scientists), they have several interesting points and a great quote:

“Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.”

- Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” (1917)

Jesse and Brian note: “We wanted to stimulate another mode of urban practice that was based fundamentally in the physical, social spaces of the city. In other words, we wanted to get students out of the classroom and onto the streets. We were inspired by Shklosvky’s concepts of estrangement and “Art as Technique”, we then aimed to use media arts critically as a mode of research to gain new perspectives.”

On language and ” a mutually transformative relationship between language and the city”:

An interesting project they mentioned: ” One of the projects I’ve always found fascinating is ABCDF: A Graphic Dictionary of Mexico City. The general principal of this book is to re-define the city through a new form of dictionary. Thousands of words are defined by images from a wide variety of sources, ranging from the home photographs of ordinary citizens, to historical newsprints, to the work of famous contemporary artists. These images are complimented by short texts in a glossary at the back. What emerges is a highly detailed mosaic of the city that brings to life the everyday life of the metropolis.”

… and a project they develop for their students: “Furthering the language theme, we built on De Certeau’s understanding of walking through the city as an act of reading and writing. After each student defined around 35 words for their territory, the final assignment aimed to synthesize this material and create a series of design interventions in physical and virtual space. Writing in this new language, the core component of the students’ final project was to write a “poem” that linked together multiple words they had defined in their territory. In addition to the longer and visual media, students had to also now define their words in 140 characters as text messages. The poem would be read, then, as an SMS-based walking tour of their territory that poetically connects the words in physical space using the new vocabulary they have defined. We created the interface and the messaging infrastructure, which they could then script for their particular walks. The walks provided an experiential tour of the multiple layers of physical, social, historical and fictional qualities that students identified through their research throughout the summer.”

Go and check Periplurban their research platform

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Yasmine Abbas is involved in a book project Taking from, leaving in, moving on by the Austrian architect and artist, Renate Mihatsh

Her contribution will be about neo-nomads whom she defines as “individuals constantly on the move who construct and reclaim a sense of belonging to places through digital means.” She argues that technology allows people to recreate a sense of place and notes that neo-nomads “sample cultures and the urban environments they roam in to reuse in the creation of a comfortable, personal and movable space.” Technology seems to allow people to carry with them, in their laptops, Iphone, Ipod, or any other portable devices, as well as by allowing access to various platforms, much more than one could put in a box, a bag or a suitcase. Our letters, packs of photos, favorite CD (or tape)… can be saved “online”. Yet, what is then the evocative object? The content or the object which allows to store or gives us access to the storage place?

Related to the theme of the suitcases, an interesting exhibition on immigrants: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/gallery/2009/mar/11/communities-immigration?picture=344441838

Attached is an essay by Yasmine Abbas (one of our blog members) on the co-production of space and the role of participatory and crowdsourcing practices.

c2-yasmineabbas.pdf

She discusses BSWW as an attempt of “communal space making”…

Please see below. An interesting event on the collaboration between social scientists and artists in which, Lucy Kimbell, one of our blog members is involved. If you happen to be in London, make sure you attend and please post your thoughts afterwards.

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Tactical Play
A one-day colloquium for social scientists and artists about playful enquiry as a tactic for research
Birkbeck Institute for Social Research
1 July 2009, 09.30am–5pm
Room GO1, Clore Management Centre, Birkbeck, University of London

Speakers include: Anne Douglas (Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen); Lynn Froggett (University of Central Lancashire); Pat Kane ( author of The Play Ethic); Lucy Kimbell (Clark Fellow in Design Leadership at Said Business School, University of Oxford); Justin McKeown (artist, Spartaction.com) and Christian Nold (artist, Softhook.com). Convened by Sophie Hope and Elaine Speight.

Informed by discourses of cross-pollination between art and social science, this colloquium will discuss the role of “play” as a tactic for social change within reflexive and performative social science methods and socially engaged art processes.

Positioning playful enquiry as both a method and meeting place between the disciplines, the event will seek to address the following questions through the presentation of case studies and open discussion:

- In what way do the essential characteristics of one discipline offer possibilities for “play” within the other?

- How is research through performance, fiction, collaboration and conversation employed by each discipline and what are the individual motivations for this?

- At what point does playful enquiry meet “hard edged” research, and what are the academic implications?

- In what way is “play” a politicised method, and how can members of each profession use it to antagonise the frameworks in which they operate?

To book a place go to: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/bisr/news/tacticalplay

Cost (includes vegetarian lunch): £35 standard, £15 students.

Numbers are strictly limited, please register early.

to follow up on Yasmine’s post about distributed spaces (April 5th) and her idea of “simultaneous happenings in various locations”

and just a cool project aiming to create a sense of place through sound

Two weeks ago I went to see the last production of Merce Cunningham at BAM, “Nearly Ninety”.

I liked the performance and I thought of two ways in which it relates to some of the discussions on this blog.

First of all, while the dancers were dancing videos of a rehearsal were projected … there were a few screens but many of the projected images “hang in the air” (as there were no screens) and it was as if the dancers were dancing with or better to say “in parallel” with these projected dancers. This created this dual space which reminded me of our attempt to create a hybrid space - virtual and physical.

Moreover, as I was reading about Merce Cunningham’s work (see for example, the NY Times article), I thought of John Weeks’ post and on the role of the “memory” of the blog. Here is a quote by Cunningham:

About Merce”: “You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls.” (merce.org)

I was also very intrigued by his conception of collaboration and multi-disciplinarity. Indeed, he’s been working with composers - John Cage for many years - as well as with visual artists. Yet, while collaboration is often seen as a dialogue and we have indeed discussed this issue at length on the blog - how to build a shared understanding? - he seems to see it as different perspectives, that developed individually and are assembled only at the end. Hence, he  decided (since the 1950’s) to consider the dance as completely distinguished from the music. They are not coordinated. They just take place at the same time. The music, designs and choreography are made separately and they are assembled only on the first night.

He said in an interview to the BBC:

“(…) It’s at that time that we began to separate the music and the dance and that was so interesting to me.

Was that his suggestion? Cage’s suggestion?

Well his feeling was that not, one of the two elements should not support the other or be in charge, that they should be equal but separate. And I liked that idea.

Yes, the idea of going rumpety, tumpety tump and, and matching the music was awful.

Yes. Yes, well as he said it’s a form of slavery and so those first solos about three or four of them were made, were, we, given a kind of time structure between us as to how long, and certain divisions, we separated and he made the music to the structure and I made the dance. “

I’ve just read on the urban omnibus about a project at the intersection of space and discourse: how one will tag buildings the same way one tags posts, pictures or videos online? … when the “online” practice moves to the physical world…

Cassim Shepard writes “On the web, we tag images, or describe them with language elements, for purposes of communal organization, identification, sharing. But the communal part of that practice is, by nature, limited to the common experience of those who understand the chosen label. In architecture, it is no different: parallel vocabularies often do not intersect. Much of the communication impasse between the different stakeholders in physical design processes is attributable to the narrowness of these vocabularies. And the exasperation different user groups feel when “their” language is misunderstood or unheeded is equal on all sides.”

An attempt for building a shared vocabulary, a common interpretation but that presupposes that the definitions of the tags (the labels) are understood and shared… I would argue that there is never a complete shared understanding and that this shared understanding is constantly renegotiated and in a sense that negotiation process can take place during the physical design process while online we might end up following a complete path that the one we thought we would…

To explore these differences in interpretations, “architect and information designer Kadambari Baxi has started a game of tag. She has chosen a series of recently completed, visually striking buildings and invited architects, an architecture writer and passersby to assign them a list of word associations that correspond to the built project.” The Urban omnibus offers you to play tag with 3 photos on their website.

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Was talking the other day with Michael – Dub Studios principal – about his work on distributed high schools. The idea of distributed spaces reminds me / fits with the meta-architecture of storage spaces in the making and observed when studying neo-nomads (neo-nomads collect spaces). Sure these spaces are networked… what fundamentally changes the architecture of buildings though, is the fact that with technologies, distributed spaces can happen / be managed. So while blogger congregated to formulate and shape BSWW, I can’t help thinking of another movement… simultaneous happenings in various location.