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

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.

Just read this article on NY Times on John Adams’ diary entries during his journey from Boston to St Petersburg in 1809 (Thanks Bojan for the link!)

“The diary, which Adams maintained until April 1836, is a rarity among the many he kept, in that the description for each day is no more than one line long. Historians believe he used the descriptions as references to longer entries in other journals.

Jeremy B. Dibbell, an assistant reference librarian at the society, said a graduate student at Simmons College here saw the diary a few months ago in the society’s archives and thought it looked like a Twitter feed, though written in Adams’s meticulous script and bound in leather.

Word spread, and the society decided to tweet the entries. They average 110 to 120 characters, below the 140-character limit imposed by Twitter, and there is nary an LOL or BFF among them.

Like most Twitter feeds, Adams’s will chronicle the substantial, including his arrival in St. Petersburg, and the mundane: the diary makes many references to weather, seasickness and card-playing, for example, on the voyage across the Atlantic.”

Why posting this? because I find it interesting to see how technology affordances were re-enacted with different media and technology. It also reminded me another NY Times article (sent to me by Anca, thanks Anca!) on twitter and the telegram (often limited to 150 characters like twitter).

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/us/06adams.html

Fiftypeopleonequestion: a very nice project based on a simple premise: asking 1 question to 50 people in one place and filming their responses.

Here is the way the people from the project describe it:

” Once upon a time, we awoke with a new question on our mind. We didn’t quite know what the buzz and bustle of a Brooklyn afternoon would bring. In search of nothing more than some fresh answers, we found a few dreams instead.

It’s a simple question and the answers can lead us anywhere. So go ahead, ask yourself…”

The result is a slice of life, or “a slice of humanity” as they call it.

From there anyone can post their own replies and continue the narrative…

Thanks Nicole for sharing this project.

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

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.

MAGNIFICENT! walls alive with the wonderful inchoate cacophany of the virtual world.

–Sunita

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

words enveloping bodies, bodies moving among, between words… in the space, through the sounds.

space shelters bodies and bodies make space visible… as well sounds make the space visible too…

the blog is really fun to post on because you can type and then see your words on the maze and everybody can see it.

But it’s really hard to see because sometimes it goes fast.

Jyoti