building_space_with_words is featured on Caught in the Act: Art in Brooklyn, on
Brooklyn Independent Television (Time Warner 56 and Cablevision 69). It was premiered on October 28 at 10 pm.

For the next month, it will repeat every Monday & Wednesday at 2pm & 10pm.

It’s also on their website:

http://www.bricartsmedia.org/community-media/brooklyn-independent-television/caught-in-the-act

I have mentioned several times the role of writing and the research we’ve been doing with Anca Metiu on the role of writing for knowledge sharing and the expression of emotions. Our argument is that a lot of the debates about online communication focuses only on the media, forgetting the modality - writing - which supports key mechanisms involved in the expression of emotions and the sharing of knowledge. Here is an interesting article by Nicholas Carr where he raises similar issues for reading.Carr cites Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain who argues that “We are not only what we read. We are how we read.”  Therefore she worries that  when we read online, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” and not interpret and make sense of the text.

Carr also cites a very interesting example of how Nietsche’s style changed when he started using a typewriter instead of a pen:

“Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.””

Last month when I was in Paris I went to see “Verticale Rouge, Paroles en l’air”(which you can translate Red vertical, idle words. Note that “paroles en l’air” means idle words or empty promises, “en l’air” also means in other context “up in the air”), the work of Brigitte Brandeau in a group exhibit at La Madeleine.

In this work Brigitte is exploring how text disappears behind its shadows. The text (made of copper) is hanging in the air, a floating panel, projected on a white background. One can’t read the copper words; in fact they don’t even really look like words but the projected shadow does look like, “is” text. It reminded me of these old handwritten letters, with a fading ink. Brigitte told me how she was aiming to explore the ephemeral nature of the text which does not “really” exist, while its shadows seems more “real”. I won’t get into a discussion about the notion of reality (it’ll take us too far, and this has been an on-going discussion for centuries) but I was really intrigued by this approach as in my work with Anca Metiu on writing and correspondences, we’ve been looking at writing as a trace and as an objectifying process. Brigitte’s notion of text (close for me to the work of Blanchot) also reminded me some previous posts on literary texts as creating a space for the reader. (Once again we could have a very long discussion on the notion of text, esp. literary text, but it will take us far away from the issues - already broad - discussed in this blog).

It also made a lot of sense for our work with Aileen as while by projecting text on semi-transparent panels we were aiming to create a “physical” space for people to walk through, Brigitte by projecting a “physical” text made of copper made it disappear in front of its shadow. Yet in both cases, we all worked with materials. Brigitte told me about the tenuous work of writing the text with copper and it reminded me of our work with the wires, fabrics, projectors and ladders…

If you’re in Paris, stop by. Verticale Rouge is at the end of the Church, on the right.

I heard, read and wrote  about The listening post by Hansen and Rubin but I never experienced it.

Today I went to the Science Museum with my kids as we were wandering in London… and I noticed on the museum map: 1st floor, Listening Post. Could it be? There can’t be many Listening Posts, can it? After doing all the interactive spots on the 3rd floor, I dragged my kids to the 1st floor and after a little bit of search found a sign “science art projects”. At the end of a corridor, there it was!

I really liked the piece although I wish it was not stuck behind a glass fence and that one could stand in front, walk around. People sat at there were seats in the middle of the room. I thought it took away some of the experience. People did not walk around. They just sat and “watched and listened”. I also realized that many people were puzzled. The audience was not right in a sense. People did not come to see art installations and they were not expected it, and they did not know how to interpret it, experience it.

Yet I was still very happy to see this work which in many ways is very close to the themes we explored with Aileen:words,online interactions, sounds. In a way Hansen and Rubin’s work highlights more the cacophony and the random aspect of the web, while we looked at the construction of connections, of relationships.

It was just a nice surprise and it made my day!

al

My friend Nicole was in Paris for the first time and sent me this clip (mostly audio though) that she recorded in a taxi.

She wrote “It was on a late Monday night and the streets of Paris were very quiet.” and she tried to capture “the sounds from that night in the cab, including the taxi headlights blinking, an ambulance, 2 really great French songs which I heard for the first time” and a conversation between the taxi driver and her friend.

I thought it was interesting how her perception of the city was linked to her experience of the taxi, her emotions while listening this song… It was even more meaningful to me as the first song, “Ma ligne de chance” is a song I love in one of my favorite movies - Pierrot Le Fou from Godard. It was interesting that she sent me the link which is recording of her “perceptions” to which she added a comment to give us some content and describe the emotions associated with the perceptions (in fact perceptions are in some ways never neutral, aren’t they?) and to me it became an evocative object because I knew the song, the sound of the Paris ambulances (so different than the NY or London ones). I’m just wondering how she would have shared it with us if she had had only words — It’s also interesting that she “needed” the title “Sounds of the city” and the commentary to make this clip meaningful… to me, maybe to her.

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

al

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.

al

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.

During the fall, Anne-Laure invited me to become a member of this blog. I agreed. And life was as complex as ever, and I did not get around to thinking about this until flying to California (I live in Connecticut) for Thanksgiving. I printed out the postings and began working through them from the start. Very thought-provoking. Lots of notes. Not enough time. So I continued the effort over Christmas, with additional posts of course. More thoughts. In January I explained the situation to Anne-Laure who encouraged me to make a contribution. And just about the point that I was going to post, I noticed that all I had been looking at were the posts, and none of the comments. Well, that stopped me cold. As did work, and the pressures of life. I had to miss the opening of the installation, and feared that I would miss the whole thing.

So finally, I set aside a day - this Monday -, and Lynne (my wife) and I headed into “The City” to have lunch with Anne-Laure and experience the installation before it was only a memory. And so I found myself walking into the space. And enjoying it immensely.

And then it occurred to me that I had not been worried about entering the space even though much had already gone on there and I was clearly not “up to speed.” But in contrast, I had been seriously blocked about just entering the blog without having “done my homework” - reading what had gone before. What was the difference?

Possibly it was the fact that my entry into the installation was understood (by me, and the culture I live in) to not carry any expectation that I know what was happening. Walk into a space, and it is assumed that you will be able to join in even if it takes some effort to feel out the scene, align with what’s happening, and then engage. And this expectation is based on the reality that the hjstory of the preceding activity has not been is captured and made available by the space. In contrast, all that has gone before in a blog is available. And so feeling out, and aligning before engaging is a much taller task.

A second reason that when I walked into the installation, I could see who I was engaging, I could evolve my interactions with them with awareness of the effect that I was having. I could limit my interaction to one or a few at a time, I could make “turns at talk” suit the immediate and local situation and correspondents; I could practice “recipient design.”  In contrast, in the blog, Without reading everything, or at least a lot, I could not know who my recipients were. Indeed, with lurkers, even reading would not help. I was flying blind, interacting without any sense of the “audience” and their purpose.

Thirdly, in the installation I knew why I was there. I wanted to see the embodiment of a word-based virtual space.  I was aware of the difficulties and a-priori non-alignments of the installation space and the virtual words-space, and was there to experience the installation as a provocation around the metaphor of space. But with the blog, I was not so sure why I was there - other than that Anne-Laure had invited me. And this was less about the subject matter - it was the same as the installation - and more about the genre. For in truth, as all the above shows, I am not at all competent in the the dance that is participating in blogs.

So my opening thought is this: spaces built with words have accessible history, and that can be understood by newbies to imply something very different that is understood by experienced bloggers - namely, that you are responsible for everything that is there. Instead, Anne-Laure tells me that you have already discussed the sense that a blog is (like) a party - A Blog Party - something that you can enter into and accelerate into. It seems like an excellent metaphor.

And so here am I, late to the party, and looking to accelerate into whatever is happening.

I went to see Jenny Holzer’s exhibition at the Whitney Museum a few days ago. It was interesting to me and look at someone for whom words, language, is the main material. Moreover, the way the exhibition was organized with only a few pieces and a lot of space was aiming to create a space where the visitors could walk through looking at the different LED pieces from different perspectives.

I like a lot her piece “For Chicago” very nicely described in the NY Times review:

“Using recently developed, thinner-than-ever LED signs, “For Chicago” is the first Holzer piece made specifically to lie flat on the floor. Its 11 48-foot-long LED signs, placed parallel about two feet apart, nearly reduce language to pure light. Stand at the end of the piece, and the words seem to flow from your shoes. The whole configuration suggests a lighted runway or weirdly geometric rows of crocuses in a field. As the punctuation-averse artist herself might put it, the piece means to stop you in your tracks and does.”

Words become material, texture and their meaning does not matter and I guess that might be why Jenny Holzer uses the same text in different pieces. Yet, if you read them, you realize that the sentences have some power. Reusing them might be a signal of their never ending power?

Reading the comment below:

“But above all, the exhibition demonstrates that as the times have caught up with Ms. Holzer, she has turned from poetic soothsaying to simply reporting the facts. Her newest LED pieces, as well as the silkscreen paintings she started making in 2005, have a single source: declassified and redacted government documents concerning Iraq and the Middle East.”

I could not stop thinking of Ben Rubin’s comment to Aileen’s post as an interesting example of achieving balance between form and content. In fact, the question of the balance between the form and the content came up to me while in the museum, especially while standing in front of Lustmord, an installation that consists of human bones laid out on a table. I understand the point and it is a strong one. Yet, I am not sure of the “aesthetic” value of it. I am not contesting the role of artists to raise issues, related to politics and death, but the question is “how” and how to define the work through which they express their ideas. I have no answers and will be happy to have your thoughts, esp. if you’ve been to the Whitney, but more generally too.

ciao,

al