Tag Exhibitions

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Fragrance and Fracture

Feb 2, ’12 4:02 AM

This past weekend we attempted to see the Doug Wheeler show at David Zwirner, but were discouraged by the insanely long line. We did, however, manage to catch Christophe Laudamiel’s Phantosmia show at Dillon Gallery. There really wasn’t much to see here, but that’s the point. It’s not about seeing; it’s about smelling. Laudamiel makes scent sculptures.

The gallery looked a bit like a sad bazaar, with red and white plastic tents set up around the periphery and in the center of the room. Each tent enclosed a scent-space, and posted outside each was a lengthy wall text that described, in remarkably evocative language, what awaited us inside (below images via Dillon Gallery).

I don’t have any strong personal associations with Marlene Dietrich, and I really don’t know what strawberry, cucumber, and linden blossom would smell like all mixed together, so while I found Remembrance of Things Lost pleasant, it wasn’t particularly, uh, shall we say redolent for me. With Fear, however, I really came to appreciate the dimensional, sculptural qualities of these scents. Unlike tastes, whose multiple layers are often sequential, or temporally unfolding, the complexity of the fragrances unfolded themselves into multiple spatial dimensions. I was so aware of my existence in an olfactory…uh… — I don’t even know what to call it — any-space-whatever?, heterotopia?, non-space? that I momentarily forgot I was standing in a plastic tent inside a gallery in Chelsea. The only sense-of-place that mattered to me at that moment was the one whose identity, whose boundaries, were defined by my nose.

My favorite scent, for its spot-on realization of the promise on its wall text, was the Banana and the Monkey. it was just that: sweet banana with an undertone of simian rankness. It ruined my appetite. Perfect.

I’m all the more excited to see what comes of the Museum of Art & Design’s Center for Olfactory Art.

And now, in a complete non-sequitur, I’ll summarize Aaron Betsky’s “Architecture Beyond Building” lecture at SVA last night. I forgot my notebook, so I had to type notes on my iPhone — which means this synopsis is bound to be sloppy and impartial.

  • Apple, in its retail spaces, has reduced the architectural envelope. Now in Grand Central, there are no walls to demarcate boundaries between retail space and the rest of the station.
  • See also David Chipperfield’s renovation of the Neues Museum in Berlin
  • Many retail spaces are loft-like spaces partitioned into zones designed to market and make money
  • Dissolutions of objects, emergence of gridded modules
  • We live no longer in a grid, but in a cloud — in the ether — not connected to objects, but connected to one another by “magic”
  • Physical dimensions of these new systems are removed from the physical sensations of our bodies/ this is why the grid is disappearing. Architecture must respond to this new condition — via parametrics, proposal of “absurd forces” (wha?), fractures
  • Architecture must “stand witness” to the disappearance of humanity and the self. This requires looking at and through the grid and the screen.
  • Approaches and actions that represent this new “standing witness” approach to a new spatial reality:
    • Sarah Sze (my favorite!), who work is “reassembling bits and pieces of our reality”
    • Matthew Day Jackson
    • Artists, architects concerned with reuse and reassembly, like Doris Salcedo (I really enjoy her work, too), Rural Studio
    • Architecture that’s unstable — e.g., the installations of Do Ho Suh (yet another artist I admire!), who presents architecture as a ghost, as memory
  • Betsky’s not a fan of architecture exhibitions, because what you’re limited to showing is photos of buildings, process drawings, etc. It’s like “showing postcards of the Mona Lisa.”
  • For his work on the 2008 architecture exhibition at the Venice Biennale, he worked with the premise that architecture is “everything about buildings”; once a building is built, it becomes a “tomb of architecture.” In present society, buildings are defined more by codes (zoning finance, etc.) than by architecture. To find architecture we need to “look beyond buildings.” If we’re searching for critical architecture in particular, we need to look far beyond buildings.

I’ll leave it there, without comment.

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Being There: Chicago’s Open Door

Jan 7, ’12 4:49 AM

We just returned from a week in Chicago. Most of our time was dedicated to family (my husband’s family lives there), but we managed to spend a few afternoons downtown. I had never visited the Robie House, so we did that. And I finally found a Chicago pizza I like, although it’s more New Haven than Chicago style (I’m in Wicker Park so often — how come I’d never been to Piece before?!). I also tried to visit the Read/Write Library, the former Underground Library, in their new home in Humboldt Park — but unless I was confused, they seem to have gone back underground; the place looked vacant.

From the top o' the Hancock Tower -- Isn't she a beautiful city?

I did manage to visit one of the other libraries on my list: the library at the Poetry Foundation’s new home. I’ve studied a few other poetry places — the Alvar Aalto-designed Woodberry Poetry Room among them — and I was eager to see how the Foundation would translate Harriet Moore’s mission “to give to poetry her own place,” into architectural form.

The building, designed by local architect John Ronan, sits on the corner of West Superior and Dearborn. It’s a glass box within a box — a little Beinecke-esque, I suppose, in that the inner box displays the books — but here the interstitial space, in-between the outside and inside boxes, is still exterior. The outer black zinc screen wall surrounds a garden (which looks a little barren in these winter months, and whose pavers can get mighty icy), with a cut out on the corner to invite passage through to the building’s entrance.

In all the press coverage I’ve read of the new building (there doesn’t seem to be much), and in the Foundation’s own promotional material, Ronan is quoted as describing the garden as an “urban sanctuary, a space that could mediate between the street and the building, blurring the distinction between public and private.” Ah, the old “blurring the boundaries” schtick! I’ve heard that one before! I was hoping for a slightly more poetic, and original, articulation of the design concept. Nevertheless, the “sanctuary” description does seem apt; it is remarkably peaceful inside the garden — thanks, no doubt, to the fact that this stretch of Superior seems relatively calm.

In the lobby is a reception desk and an exhibition space, where the work of Black Sparrow, Burning Deck, and Fulcrum presses, each noted for its identifiable visual aesthetic, was on display. I admired not only the striking cover designs, but also the clever clips used to mount the books on the wall.

All the building’s public functions — in addition to the exhibition space, a performance hall and the library — are on the ground floor, off the lobby. But leading up the stairs, toward the private spaces where the Poetry magazine and foundation staff work, we see Harriet Moore’s declaration that Poetry should be an “open door” — a convenient metaphor for this new glass building that puts the poetic object on display.

The Open Door will be the policy of this magazine — may the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius! To this end the editors hope to keep free from entangling alliances with any single class or school. They desire to print the best English verse which is being written today, regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written. (Moore, 1912)

The library itself, with its 30,000 non-circulating volumes, is clean and bright, but a bit sterile (to be expected of a building funded by pharmaceutical money?; those critical of the gift might say so). There’s a palpable tension between rarefaction and accessibility, which perhaps echoes early Poetry‘s negotiation of the values of high modernism with Moore’s “open door.”

From the mezzanine, looking north (I think!)

In my quick visit I did discover a few fantastic books I’ll look for back in New York — but aside from the books themselves, the warmest, most charming things in the room were these lovely reminders that poetry — both in an abstract sense, and concretely, as it takes form in Poetry magazine — is a sensory, dimensional thing:

We ended the day with a trip to the Museum of Contemporary Art, where I was happy to revisit the book art of Dieter Roth and learn more about Gordon Matta-Clark’s history of site-specific work at the MCA (Lawrence Weiner fell into one of M-C’s cut-outs on an upper floor and landed down on Floor 2!). I was also grateful to have discovered the work of Ron Terada (creator of the “Being there” sign at the top of this post), David Hartt, and, especially, Iain Baxter&. Baxter’s reinvention as N.E. Thing Company, which doled out aesthetic judgments, and his detourned landscape art — particularly the impressionist landscapes on TV screens — were totally brilliant.

IAIN BAXTER&: Works 1958-2011 from MCA Chicago on Vimeo.

The Ian Baxter& Show, The City at Dusk & Me

To close on a completely random note: my dogs, with whom I was able to spend some time over the holidays, and whom I now miss terribly:

Dugan

Roxy & Rudy

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Strings, Stones and Skeletons

Jan 5, ’12 4:46 AM

Sarah Sze @ Asia Society

If I were an artist, I’d want to make work like Sarah Sze’s. Or, now that I think about it, I’d be happy to model myself after Ann Hamilton, too. As I see it, both play with techniques and structures of display, modes of communication and representation, objects’ physical properties, and dimensions and textures of the line. In short: all the stuff I nerd out on.

I’ve been following Sze’s work for the past decade or so, I guess, and last weekend I saw her lovely little show, “Infinite Line,” at the Asia Society. I say “little” not to trivialize the work, but to point out that the exhibition is significantly smaller than others I’ve seen — particularly her fantastic and sprawling show at Tanya Bonakdar gallery in Fall 2010 (see the two images below).

360 (Portable Planetarium) @ Tanya Bonakdar

The Uncountables (Encyclopedia) @ Tanya Bonakdar

“Infinite Line” focuses ostensibly on the relationship between drawing and sculpture (although the Times didn’t seem to find this theme particularly engaging), and consists of eight “closet-sized” (my term) installations (which Sze reportedly calls “Random Walk Drawings”) and, in a separate gallery, several rarely-exhibited drawings, some of which look an awful lot like Julie Mehretu’s work. Photography isn’t allowed in the museum, and there was a particularly vigilant guard in the south gallery, where the drawings were hung, so I managed to surreptitiously snap some photos of only a few of the installations in the north gallery.

Sze @ Asia Society

There's something Smithsonesque about this piece.

Many of Sze’s sculptures involve slight movement; in some pieces, pages are designed to flutter in ambient drafts, and in others, small fans create breezes that subtly sway strings or ruffle feathers. A similarly subtle kinetics characterizes another show that I was delighted to encounter on the Asia Society’s third floor: U-Ram Choe’s In Focus project. Choe has created an animatronic seal-like creature, the mythical Custos Cavum, which guards the channels between two worlds. As Choe explains it:

Whenever a Custos Cavum felt the generation of a new hole somewhere, it fell into a deep sleep. From the body of the quietly sleeping Custos Cavum grew winged spores called “Unicuses.” These spores took flight and each flew to a new hole, where it gave rise to a new Custos Cavum.

As the skeletal creature breathes, its unicuses sway, dispersing spores, and we marvel at the intricate, polished gears that make this organo-mechanical movement possible.

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Think Again: IBM, Eames, Informatics

Dec 31, ’11 4:19 AM

via http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history

While home with my family for Christmas, I read and thoroughly enjoyed John Harwood’s The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945 – 1976 (I also finished Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City, Richard John’s Network Nation, and the new “Digital Art” special issue of October, none of which matched up to Harwood). As I was reading The Interface, I heard Reinhold Martin echoing all over the place — as he should’ve been; he was Harwood’s advisor. Harwood’s project focuses on IBM as a new kind of corporation — one that calls for a new kind of management — one for which design, in all varieties, is a critical management tool. In 1956 IBM’s president Thomas Watson, Jr., hired Eliot Noyes to serve as “consultant director of design,” and Noyes brought in a crack team of fellow designers — Edgar Kaufmann, Paul Rand, George Nelson, Mies, and Eero Saarinen among them — to design not only a multi-channelled “interface” between IBM and its markets, but also, perhaps more lastingly, an “organic,” “modular” interface between computers and people and architecture.

There’s lots of great stuff in the book — about logistics, ergonomics, the connections between management theory and cybernetics, the difficulties of enforcing consistent design throughout a far-flung multinational corporation, etc. — but I most enjoyed Harwood’s fourth chapter, where he talks about IBM’s use of exhibitions and films to “naturalize the computer” — to help a wary public become more comfortable with the machine’s inevitable integration into their workplaces, their schools, their everyday lives. And what struck me most within this chapter (perhaps it shouldn’t have been surprising) were the parallels between the Eames’s IBM exhibition designs and the THINK exhibition my students and I saw, and I wrote about, a couple months ago. After seeing the modern-day THINK at Lincoln Center, we immediately noted the similarities between the zooms and scalar variety in the multimedia presentations, and the Eameses’ Powers of Ten.

powers of ten :: charles and ray eames from bacteriasleep on Vimeo.

But what I didn’t know back in October was that the Eameses’ multiscreen projection inside the IBM Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair was also called “Think” (of course the “Think” slogan had been in use within IBM since the 20s). Nor did I realize, from simply looking at photos of the 1964 exhibition, just how similar its design and rhetorical strategies were to those employed in THINK 47 years later.

People Wall

1964 had the People Wall, which required visitors to prop themselves up awkwardly “in a pose of heightened attention and readiness” (Harwood 190), while 2011′s gallery required people to stand amidst pods of monolithic screens, wondering which of their many faces we should strive to see. The People Wall rose 53 feet into the interior of the “Information Machine,” whereas at THINK we descended a ramp, gathered in a foyer then were led into a pitch-black room; both were altitude-altering “rites of passage” leading to a disorienting space. And both offered multi-screen extravaganzas: The Information Machine featured 15 screens of various shapes and sizes mounted on the curved wall, while the 2011 gallery contained 40 seven-foot screens rising from the floor.

via http://yaelod.wordpress.com/2011/10/02/ibm-think/

Harwood says that the Information Machine…

…displaced the spectator, several times over. First, deprived of any sense of direction by the labyrinth stairs, then set in bleachers without a point of reference, then lifted into the ovoid, and at last fragmenting and multiplying her points of view in a rapid succession of film segments and slides, the spectator has embarked on a kind of pilgrimage. She has quite clearly transcended three-dimensional (or even four-dimensional) space and has come to inhabit, however briefly, an entirely new medium (191).

One experienced a similar disorientation, as I described in my earlier post, in the Lincoln Center exhibition; we walked into a dark, subterranean space; found ourselves lost in a field of infinite regress; and divided our attention among the myriad screens and their reflections in the mirrored walls.

And in both exhibitions, visitors were (likely) simultaneously wowed and horrified by what they were seeing and hearing. At Lincoln Center, we couldn’t help but marvel at technology’s role in revolutionizing health care, finance, agriculture, etc., yet we couldn’t forget the promise, or threat, that these “systems are alive” — that there is potential danger in placing our basic needs for survival in the hands of sentient technologies. Similarly, the 1964 exhibition presented the computer as “wholly new and shocking, and [at the same time,] as a completely natural extension of everyday life” (194); “no effort was made to resolve this contradiction… The task of naturalizing the computer did not involve a true effort at ontology, of either human being or computer; rather, it involved a design logic of displacement and enclosure” (195).

History Wall - via http://www.exhibitfiles.org/mathematica

Finally, the 1964 Pavilion and other Eames exhibitions sought to “posit [IBM's] activities as the culmination of scientific and technological history” (196). The Eameses incorporated a History Wall into many of their exhibitions, showing the great traditions from which IBM’s work arises, and to which it represents a culmination, an apotheosis. Similarly, at Lincoln Center, we emerged from the multimedia gallery into an exit hallway featuring 100 iconic moments from IBM’s 100-year history. Once again, IBM finds itself “as the end of a great narrative of scientific and artistic achievement” (196).

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Books, Barges, Bones & Material Biographies

Dec 15, ’11 4:28 AM

Over the past month I’ve seen a number of exhibitions and attended several events that seem to have grouped around a few themes — namely, the aforementioned books, barges, bones, and biographies.

First, books:

In early November I went to Artists Space to see Dexter Sinister’s Serving Library and Identity projects. I’m really curious about this whole Serving Library thing.

“[It] comprises two collections, of books and artifacts, both drawn from ten years and twenty issues of Dexter Sinister’s house journal Dot Dot Dot. Each one of the artifacts served as original source material for an illustration accompanying an essay in an issue of the journal, and the bound books collate the most frequently cited works in Dot Dot Dot” (via).

I’ve been following, and admiring, their work for years, and I’ve availed myself of the many pdfs they make available on their website, which is regarded as part of the new Serving Library. I still don’t think I fully get what they’re going for here — particularly with the physical space — but I’m going to keep trying; I know there’s something there to get.

The Serving Library

The Identity piece, which “charts the emergence and proliferation of graphic identity since the turn of the twentieth century, with particular reference to contemporary art institutions,” wasn’t what drew me in initially, but I found it quite riveting. Rob Giampietro posted a lovely talk, related to the exhibition and to Artists Space’s own graphic identity, that he was invited to give a couple years ago.

Identity

Then this past weekend my husband and I went to the the New Museum to hear Paul Chan’s “proposition,” “What is a book?” I had heard him speak briefly about his Badlands Unlimited project at the Triple Canopy “On Artists’ Publications” panel discussion this past summer, so I was looking forward to hearing him contextualize his work within a larger discussion of “the medium.” No such luck, unfortunately. He started off promisingly, referencing a little scholarship on the history of the book, but spent the majority of his time portraying publishing as a vanity pursuit driven by nepotism and extreme privilege. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy the work, but I’m not sure that I can valorize his process.

And just last night I went to Storefront, on a whim, to the “On Architecture and Publishing” salon. As often happens in discussions that dare to predict the future of print, the conversation at times descended into generalizations and essentialisms: print is tactile and therefore better able to embody the “craft” of architecture!; “we read differently today,” so we need new publication forms to accommodate this new reading!; by the time something’s printed in a magazine, it’s old news!, etc., etc.  Storefront’s director, Eva Franch, who remembered me from the Critical Futures event back in March, asked me to say something, so I did. Eva herself made some astute comments regarding the temporal dimensions of publishing and reading in various media. I ran into my friend Robert Kirkbride there, and he and I had a lovely, if brief, after-event conversation with Benjamin Prosky, one of the panelists and Assistant Dean for Communications at Harvard Graduate School of Design. I found many, many parallels between last night’s salon, the Critical Futures panel, and some of the ideas I was playing with in my “Click/Scan/Bold” article.

Okay, now on to barges:

There’s really only one event in this category, but it was sufficiently memorable to deserve its own space. Last Monday night, after I taught my lecture class in Tishman Auditorium, the Vera List Center hosted, in the very same space, a screening of Allan Sekula & Noël Burch’s The Forgotten Space.

The Forgotten Space follows container cargo aboard ships, barges, trains and trucks, listening to workers, engineers, planners, politicians, and those marginalized by the global transport system. We visit displaced farmers and villagers in Holland and Belgium, underpaid truck drivers in Los Angeles, seafarers aboard mega-ships shuttling between Asia and Europe, and factory workers in China, whose low wages are the fragile key to the whole puzzle. And in Bilbao, we discover the most sophisticated expression of the belief that the maritime economy, and the sea itself, is somehow obsolete (via).

The Forgotten Space Trailer from The Forgotten Space on Vimeo.

It’s no small feat to convey the unfathomable complexity and overlapping scales of global capitalism — and, in the process, to portray this actor-network as simultaneously gorgeous and hideous, as sublime. The film does precisely this.

We might say that The Forgotten Space unearths the physical and virtual “skeleton” of global transit and trade — so we’ll transition into our third theme: bones.

Last month I attended part of the Forensic Aesthetics conference, co-organized by the Vera List Center, Goldsmiths, Bard, and Cabinet. Here’s the official explanation for this provocatively titled event:

…[T]he emergence of forensics in legal forums and popular entertainment signifies a new attention to the communicative capacity, agency, and power of things. This material approach is evident in the ubiquitous role that science and technologies now play in shaping contemporary ways of seeing, knowing, and communicating. Today’s legal and political decisions are often based upon the capacity to display and read DNA samples, 3D laser scans, nanotechnology, and the enhanced vision of electromagnetic microscopes and satellite surveillance. From mass graves to retinal scans, the topography of the seabed to the remnants of destroyed buildings, forensics is not only about the diagnostics, but also about the rhetoric of persuasion. The aesthetic dimension of forensics includes its means of presentation, the theatrics of its delivery, the forms of image and gesture. The forensic aesthetics of the present carries with it grave political and ethical implications, spreading its impact across socioeconomic, environmental, scientific, and cultural domains (via).

I missed the first evening’s events, a panel on osteobiographies (which would’ve made for a lovely transition into my fourth theme, material biographies — but alas) at Cabinet, but I was able to enjoy the first two panels — on “Forensic Architecture” and “Constructed Evidence” — on Saturday. The concreteness of these two panels made them extraordinarily compelling. While Norman Weiss (a fantastic presenter!) talked about the restoration of Fallingwater, we held a piece of FLW concrete in our hands. While Arne Svenson discussed his portraits of forensic heads, Linda — a bespectacled head with quite a head of hair — stared at us from the center of the table. The set up of the conversations — speakers surrounding a round table strewn with the objects under consideration; chalkboard at hand for impromptu illustrations; audience ringing the table — made for a palpable intimacy befitting forensics‘ etymological connection to “the forum.”

Arne’s portraits also served as a means of constructing biographies for — perhaps, as his gallery suggests, “bring[ing] back to life” — unidentified victims whose only material existence is through the form of a sculpted head.

Which brings us, of course, to my fourth category: material biographies.

This week I saw three exhibitions that captured, through media of multiple formats, the intellectual and creative lives of three fascinating individuals. The Private Collection of Rauschenberg, on display at the uptown Gagosian, displays art-objects and memorabilia that Rauschenberg traded with, or was “gifted” by, his friends and colleagues. In the Times, Roberta Smith referred to the exhibition, appropriately, as a “self-portrait collage. Nearly every item here is a glimpse of a connection between Rauschenberg and the artists he felt close to, as well as the various aesthetic ancestors from past generations and across cultures that he wanted present in his life in some way.” It’s a touching show, and there’s beautiful work here — much of it by many of my own favorite artists. Cy Twombly drew “Bob” several portraits of flowers as an expression of thanks for his frequent hospitality. I found the musical scores, especially John Cage’s Haiku, particularly beautiful.

And today I saw “Resonance: Looking for Mr. McLuhan” at the Pratt gallery near my office. McLuhan’s own ideas were so expansive and encompassing that pretty much all art mediums could be said to illustrate one of his “probes.” Perhaps for this reason, the show didn’t gel for me. It contained some interesting work (I can’t not  appreciate text or typographic art, and there was some of that here), but it relied a bit too heavily on some McLuhan cliches — there were quite a few references to the TV set as form — and was so wide-ranging that it needed a little more contextualization.

And finally, this past weekend I saw “The Study of Kabakov” — Ilya Kabakov — at Edelman Arts. The exhibition featured, in one half of the gallery, several works on paper, and in the other half, a “white glove” library of reference books on Kabakov. Through published work and primary documents — drawings — we are invited to piece together biographies, not only of Kabakov himself, but also of the “10 Characters” the artist portrayed in drawings he collected into “albums. And thus the writing of material biographies brings us back to the book. And so I stop.

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Manifesto Lost & Found

Oct 17, ’11 12:23 AM

Bread & Puppet Theater, 1984

In preparing my presentation for the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative on Tuesday night, I unearthed some student work from the “Processes of Placemaking” class I taught at Penn in 2003. We were working with the History of Art Department, PennPraxis, and the Center for Community Partnerships to explore what constitutes a public and how one makes a public place, to investigate town-gown relationships in West Philadelphia, and to propose ways to make various places along the 40th Street corridor into effective public places. We ended up working closely with the amazing Andrew Zitcer to create an exhibition in the Rotunda, a Carrere & Hastings-designed former Christian Science church that became an every-now-and-then venue for shows (I saw Mum, Mono, Interpol — while they were still an opening band! — and quite a few other shows there), exhibitions, impromptu gatherings, etc. We created an exhibition of the building’s history in the foyer, and were able to grant our visitors rare access to the sanctuary.

via West Philly Local: http://bit.ly/iBbIst

The students — all undergrads from across the university, from Wharton business kids to graphic designers and architects — wanted to create a take-away for visitors. In keeping with the ethos of The Foundation, which was (is?) responsible for programming the space, the students decided to create a manifesto, in zine form. I had completely forgotten about this, and was delighted to stumble upon it tonight. The timing is quite coincidental: it was only about a week ago that I went up to SVA’s D-Crit lecture series to hear Rick Poynor deliver a “Manifesto on Manifestos.”

 

 

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Thinking Think

Oct 11, ’11 3:55 AM

A group of my Urban Media Archaeology students organized a fieldtrip to the IBM Think exhibit at Lincoln Center this past weekend. We entered via a vamp bordered, along the east, by a series of panels enumerating the various ways that technology — particularly IBM’s technology, of course — can “mak[e] the world work better.”

Christo and I appreciated this mention of the city's "legacy systems" -- a Kittlerian reference to "city as computer"

Along the west side of the entry ramp was a 123-foot “data visualization wall” that animated quite a few of the applications represented on the aforementioned panels. None of my photos do justice to the wall, but there’s a really lovely slideshow on Scientific American‘s website. At the bottom of the ramp we got our free tickets for the 12-minute “immersive film” inside the exhibition space.

Once we got inside — Holy Kubrick! Monoliths galore! We found ourselves sharing the space with 40 seven-foot screens enclosed within mirrored walls, trapping them — and us — in a reflective zone of infinite regress.

via Scientific American

The screens were organized into six-panel “pods,” and we were advised to stand either in the center of one of the pods (there seemed to be three or four separate clusters of screens), affording a view of multiple screens simultaneously; or along the mirrored walls, where we could experience the immersive effect via reflection. Once the show began, we were, as IBM would have it, “enveloped in a rich narrative about the pattern of progress, told through awe-inspiring stories of the past and present.” The imagery was distributed across the screens; we frequently found ourselves spinning around to capture the full dimensionality of the visuals. A train that approached from the south screen could be seen, seconds later, receding into the distance on the north screen. A field of rice — the ‘before” shot — visible on the southeast screen stood opposite a steaming bowl of cooked rice — the “after” — on the northwest screen. (What do trains and rice have to do with IBM, you ask? It should be obvious! Technology touches every aspect of “humankind’s quest for progress!”) Christo pointed out that even the backs of the screens, which faced interstitial spaces where no one was standing, featured unique imagery. The film was as much a kaleidoscopic as an immersive experience.

Once the formal show was over, the 40 screens turned into interactive touchscreens, “transforming the space into a forest of discovery” (!) Each screen featured one of five steps — Seeing, Mapping, Understanding, Believing, Acting — from IBM’s gerund-based “approach to making the world work better.” This, we understood, is the recipe for world-changing — a “distinct, repeatable pattern” for progress. [all quotations via Think website]

Interacting with the screens via a gestural language — swipe, poke, pinch, etc. — familiar to us thanks to our smartphone training, we explored the history of measurement and visualization tools (Seeing); we traced the history of mapping and data visualization (Mapping); we studied models, prototypes, calculations, and other tools that allow us to better understand the complexity of the world’s systems (Understanding); we traveled to various sites of progressive action — attempts to thwart credit card fraud or enhance telecommunications infrastructures or improve health care — around the world (Acting): and we met, via a dozen or so interviews, individuals who believe in the possibility of technological process (Believing).

The entire experience had been overwhelmingly object-oriented and techno-centric — agency implicitly lies with the technology and the techno-social systems they construct — until we got to Believing. Here’s where we heard the human stories, where we saw human faces and heard human voices. Believing: this is what humans do best. We believe in technology’s potential to actualize progress.

Change is easy. It happens by itself. Progress, on the other hand, is deliberate. It won’t take root until someone believes it’s possible and convinces others that action will be worth the effort (via Think).

It’s our belief that transforms change into progress. Yet “sustainable progress requires massive coordination, cooperation, perpetual monitoring and automation. It takes teamwork and technology to manage complexity.” We need to form alliances, assemblages, with IBM’s techno-actants to effect ongoing progress. “Acting is never over,” IBM reminds us, “because our systems are alive.” Yeow. Unpack that sentence.

Repeatable patterns, algorithms, perpetual monitoring, infinite regress. I see where this is going.

After 20 minutes or so of touch-screen interaction, we were guided by attendants in “Think-branded” polo shirts out of the exhibition space — our “forest of discovery” — to make room for the next group. The exit hallway featured an display of 100 iconic moments from IBM’s 100-year history. Paul Rand was very much alive here — as were all kinds of fantastic dead media. This “exit experience” was meant to leave us with the impression that IBM’s historical “faith in science,…[and the] pursuit of knowledge” have fostered a shared “belief that together we can make the world better” — but instead, we Media Archaeologists reconceived this space as an exciting excavation of the strata of media history.

After all that thinking, I needed something a little less intellectually taxing — so I wrapped up the afternoon with a lot of dumb metal at the Richard Serra show at Gagosian.

 

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Click, Scan, Bold, Copy, Post

Oct 4, ’11 1:12 AM

Photo by Me, February 16, 2007

Over four years after first putting pen to paper — and after a pretty brutal editing session, during which I painfully extracted some key sections from my obnoxiously long first draft — I’ve finally received a final e-print of “Click/Scan/Bold: The New Materiality of Architectural Discourse and Its Counter-Publics,” which will be published in the forthcoming issue of Design and Culture. I had a great experience working with the journal staff, and I found the peer-review process to be fairly efficient and constructive, which is certainly not always the case.

I typically post pdfs of my publications here, but I’ve discovered that, according to the RoMEO database of “publishers’ policies regarding the self- archiving of journal articles on the web and in Open Access repositories,” Berg, Design and Culture‘s publisher, does not “formally” support archiving of D&C articles. Drat. In lieu of posting the entire article, which I hope to do eventually, I offer my abstract (which, now, months removed from its submission, seems a wee bit underwhelming; I’ve discovered that I need at least a year away from any writing project before I can fully grasp what I’ve done — and before I can write an abstract that does some justice to the piece):

The past five years have brought several exhibitions, conferences, and other events that examine the past, present, and future of architectural periodicals. Incited in large part by the transformations wrought by new digital and social media in both architecture and publishing, these events reflect a desire among their participants to shape the materiality of architectural discourse – and even to frame the creation of discursive space as a form of architectural design itself. It is often hoped that the creation of new forms of “little” or “subversive” publications will result in the production not only of a designed object or process, but also of new discursive (counter)publics.

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Microscopes, Woodworms, Overhead Projectors, the Stasi Archive, and Ein Perfektes Paar

Sep 26, ’11 11:39 PM

I managed to squeeze all of the following into a two-hour between-meeting window last Friday afternoon. I don’t recommend breezing through as I did; but when two hours is all you got, you make the most of it!

And Another Thing @ the James Gallery, CUNY Grad Center

“A paradigm shift away from subject-object relations towards the consideration of humans as no more or less important than any other object is taking place. So posits “And Another Thing,” the James Gallery exhibition that takes its inspiration from the philosophy of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology. Here objects are given their own place. As opposed to deriving their meaning from a proximity to humans, this exhibition presents them as specific, self-contained and non-reducible.”

My favorite pieces involved sound and movement:

via cleopatra's: http://bit.ly/r2y0FH

Ruslan Trusewych’s this is the way the world is: oscillating fans aimed at a cluster of nightlights. Had I been permitted to take photos, I would’ve shot the ceiling, where the lights’ electrical cords heap upon one another in a seemingly desperate attempt to reach the power supply.

 

 

via CUNY Center for the Humanities: http://bit.ly/pesfOY

Zimoun’s 25 woodworms, wood, microphone, sound system: the auditory index of internal processes we can’t see — invisible worms consuming wood.

 

 

 

 

 

via ArtDaily: http://bit.ly/mVVOMf

Tom Kotik’s Rational Impulse: two nested sound-proofed boxes encasing — and silencing — a blaring stereo; lifting the lid releases the cacophony.

 

 

 

 

What Matters Now? Proposals for a New Front Page @ Aperture Foundation

Via Aperture:

There is no longer a “front page” to act as a societal filter through which, we can learn about important events and trends. Even the role that the physical café once played in our communities—the place we went to discuss and digest what’s going on around us — has become fragmented across a myriad of virtual spaces. Where should we turn for our information? How can we function as a society with so few common reference points? How can we intelligently sort through all the images and information available to us?….

The exhibition What Matters Now? Proposals for a New Front Page will combine the crowd sourcing of images and ideas with the curatorial engagement of six experienced individuals, each hosting a table and a conversation within the space, where on corresponding walls each group will present its proposals for the contents of a ‘New Front Page’. Hosts include a variety of visual image specialists: Wafaa Bilal, Melissa Harris, Stephen Mayes, Joel Meyerowitz, Fred Ritchin (who conceptualized this project) and Deborah Willis. As the exhibition opens, each of the hosts will have a designated space, but the walls will be empty. Progressively throughout the first two weeks of the “exhibition,” the walls will be filled in whatever manner each table decides.

 

Tris Vonna-Michell @ Metro Pictures

I saw Vonna-Michell a the X-Initiative two years ago and loved his work. The new show continues to investigate materialities of memory. Via Metro Pictures:

…Tris Vonna-Michell exhibits a new sound edit combining hahn/huhn (2003-ongoing) and Leipzig Calendar Works (2005-ongoing), which recalls the peaceful 1989 demonstration of East German citizens at the Ministry for State Security, or Stasi, district headquarters in Leipzig. Merging this with descriptions of a feverish initiative to destroy incriminating documents before citizens stormed the agency’s Berlin headquarters, Vonna-Michell’s chronicle becomes a patchwork account of the months leading up to German reunification. Here, signals and pulses, repetition and overlay are edited in the recording to correspond to the slide sequences he displays on anachronistic projectors. As Vonna-Michell seems to earnestly meander through his monologue he alludes to the crafted structure of the very story he is telling, and suddenly the credibility of the words he speaks and the images he presents are cast into fiction. Vonna-Michell develops his narratives over extended periods of time, altering and adding to them to make each of their iterations unique.

via Metro Pictures

via me

 

Jennie C. Jones’s Absorb/Diffuse @ The Kitchen

Via The Kitchen:

Jennie C. Jones re-contextualizes the material output of sound recording in order to explore how we listen and how sound operates physically and metaphorically.  This new show centers on a sound score in three movements, titled From the Low, which is a digital “re-composition” from appropriated samples that operate in the psychological and emotional territory of ‘dark notes’, ‘deep chords’, and low frequency. Accompanying this sound score is a new series of ”Acoustic Paintings” made with soundproofing materials (also known as absorbers and diffusers) typically used in audio engineering and studio recording. In transforming the resources and products connected to both the industry and act of listening, Jones’s work layers the formal languages of Modernism — abstraction and minimalism — over the conceptual and technical strategies of avant-garde jazz to extend and complicate these parallel legacies of experimentation.

 

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Otherworldly & Untimely

Aug 16, ’11 3:06 AM

Amy Bennett

I’m belatedly posting photos from “Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities,” which Jess Blaustein and I saw (and loved!) together at the Museum of Art and Design last month. The show was right up both of our (unheimlich) alleys. Jess did some amazing work on dollhouses in her dissertation (which I actually read), and she and I bonded ten years ago at Penn over our shared interest in heterotopias.

Lori Nix, Violin Repair Shop

Charles Matton, Rhinoceros: Homage to Eugene Ionesco

I’m posting here primarily so I can remember the show. My crappy iphone photos certainly don’t do justice to the work; there are much better photos on MAD’s website.

Adolf Konrad, packing list, December 16, 1963Earlier that afternoon we saw the “Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art” show at the Morgan Library. I had worked with the curator, Liza Kirwin, last summer on my “Notes, Lists, and Everyday Inscriptions” special issue of The New Everyday. It was great, finally, to see in-person all the artefacts reproduced in the exhibition’s lovely Princeton Architectural Press catalog — but we got the sense that the didactic material in the gallery was a little screwy. Some of the wall texts seems misplaced or redundant.

Charles McGrath wrote in his Times review of the show: “The more you study the Morgan exhibition, the more you realize that lists are everywhere, and that list making is an essential human activity — a way not just of keeping track but also of imposing order on what would otherwise be chaos.” That seems pretty obvious to me. What’s not obvious about the lists on display here — what distinguishes them from the to-do’s I sketch out on napkins and scrap paper — is the fact that these are the enumerations of creative, designerly minds. These are lists of things that typically defy itemization, of concepts spanning a jarring array of rhetorical registers and ontological categories. These are enumerations of a different form and function. Here, aesthetics — what one might regard as “excess” in a form as utilitarian as the list — serves a communicative, a rhetorical, purpose.

In “The Memo and Modernity” John Guillory suggests that, “[i]n our epoch, large numbers of people write, are even compelled to write, but they do not for the most part write poems or scientific papers; they fill out forms, compose memos or reports, send interoffice emails” or make lists. “This writing is informational, and it has the same generic specificity as any other kind of writing.” Kirwin is exploring this generic specificity of the list — and in so doing, she helps to address Guillory’s final question: “why writing has remained the indispensable ‘art of transmission’ in the era of technologically mediated information.”

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