Projecting ideas

I stumbled on Martin Firrell’s (http://www.martinfirrell.com) work today whilst looking through an old copy of Creative Review and it seemed to strike a few similarities to what I have been thinking about recently and also our Sheffield provisional construction.

His work appears projected, printed or placed in urban environments as public art. The work is predominantely carefully composed captions or statements that he sees as ‘life-affirming interventionist pieces’ which cover topics from climate change to the Iraq war. The obvious similarity with our sheffield cinema is the media and technique of getting the messages into public space. It is an idea that has been tested before in more permanent ways and with varying levels of design and success such as the new poems around large Sheffield buildings in super size font and fragmented verse on apartment balconies and ironmongery. Firrell himself said in the interview from 3 years ago that his dream job would be to work with the manhole covers for london sewers which shows a move to these more permanent creations and away from transient installations that fade in and out.

However the idea of permanent installations interests me less aspart of the excitement of our sheffield cinema was the uncertainty of how long we would be able to work in a place and how many people would see it in that time. This made the process as well as the product into an engaging exercise and it was due to our impulsive arrangements and decisions. It could also be argued that what we were doing became more visible to people as it was never constant and had to searched for, dug out and found.

“I put a picture up on a wall. Then I forget there is a wall. I no longer know what is behind this wall…I also forget the picture, I no longer look at it, I no longer know how to look at it…Pictures efface walls. But walls kill pictures. So we need continually to be changing, either the wall or the picture, to be forever putting other pictures up on the walls, or else constantly moving the picture from one wall to another.” Georges Perec, Species of spaces and other pieces

“Art has a tremendous power to charge architecture and change our understanding of space, but that is usually limited in the way that people relate to art in their own homes. In a gallery context shows open and close and the art changes, and our understating of the space transforms along with it. At home, on the other hand, most people don’t change their art.”
John Pawson, Themes and Projects

Interpendent Supercomputing

I was reading an article in the paper during the week about a new superduper computer that The University of Edinburgh has recently finished and how shiny and powerful it is and how it ranks internationally to other machines (apparently it comes 17th in the world). The article also talked about the possible uses of such a machine and what new modelling could be achieved which led me to look up a website mentioned (www.top500.org incredibly geeky let me tell you)

Here there were all kinds of ideas about how you can make your own supercomputer with off the shelf products like Playstations if only you had them time. Also mentioned was the truly interdependent method that was used to crack the humane genome where thousands of people registered their computers on-line and downloaded a bit of software that allowed the Cambridge University people to access their machine and use it as part of a massive network of computers simultaneously. This allowed them to get massive amounts of processing power to work for them just by using the internet.

Apparently a similar but illegal technique is used by the Russian mafia to make money from online companies. They harness innocent computers in the same way but without permission by use of Trojan viruses that are stealth downloads from ‘dodgy’ sites. They then use their new multi-nodal supercomputer to hack a company website or repeatedly log on and off to make it crash and then demand a pay-off to make them stop. Allegedly this was down to online betting companies over the World Cup period.

All this seems so similar to Douglas Adams’ vision of a computer so complex that even people were part of its analytical process as life itself was the subject of the calculation. So not a huge amount to do with buildings, architecture, urban space or even mapping really, but very interdependent nonetheless.

Futureworld (1976)

I would say that i saw this over the Christmas break by chance, but truth be told i saw it ages ago and something reminded me of it, maybe blade runner’s recent re-release. Anyway, the film is set in the dizzying year of 2002 and is about a new form of holiday entertainment where you go to a resort and live a week with robots doing whatever you want. This scene shows how they pick what theme you will have for your holiday by ‘looking directly into your brain’!-queue amusing machinery with flashing lights and 70’s special effects. The predecessor to this film, ‘Westworld’ 1973 was the first film to use computer digitised images in a feature film to show the view of one of the robots.

Some of the ideas of reality and control over personal and collective experience which are used in this film are shared and represented by many other productions such as ‘Blade Runner’, ‘2001′, ‘1984′, ‘Total Recall’ etc. It could be said that the ideas in many sci-fi films of recent times can be boiled down to the basic human concern of man vs machine and the philosophical question of what conscious thought is.

Another theme that occurred to me watching this clip is the way it has been created. The mediation of an idea or process from one place through a system of different technologies and onto endless other iterative uses and places could be likened to that of a mapping of a place, or an architectural drawing.

The script was written, actors assembled and acted, the director directed and then edited, the film was released and the audience watched, it was then shown again and again on television as more people watched, someone videoed the TV and then posted it on you-tube, more people watched, I post it here and then on it goes from there.

Each time it changes a little as the process or technology it is going through distorts it, like an engineer would when commenting on the reality of an architects sketch, or a planning committee might to a submission.

This treads into the area i am interested in exploring this year with the idea of the mediated public realm and whether there really is anything public about it any more. I am concerned with the way we experience space and the mechanisms that hinder our relationships with reality. This could be blamed generally on the capitalist society that has evolved and its omnipresence in our lives with ideas ranging from 2d advertising and branding through to the way we think and work.

The interdependence of people in their everyday lives whether it be an act of shopping, working or relaxing means that there really is no idea of personal experience anymore either. Even the idea of you as a person is effected by the clothes you wear, where you are from, who you know, what you do for work. It would be interesting to investigate if there was a way of breaking down some of these barriers to work on a more basic level where the interdependence is simplified so the public as individuals can regain their often mentioned ‘realm’.

Maybe a starting point could be to implement devices that filmmakers use to create a timeline that tells the story the way they want it told. Examples like Tarrentino jumbling chronology and ‘Memento’ playing sections backwards could be rethought as architectural interventions, preliminary constructions in urban space.

“the poetic act has no past, at least no recent past, in which its preparation and appearance could be followed” Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Cycling NY with David Byrne!

City of Glass: Adapting and re-authoring

Having not read either the original Paul Auster trilogy, of which City of Glass was the first, or this graphic novel adaptation which I found, I am unsure which to start with. It seems natural to start with the pure words and powerful narrative which the novel is described as so you can then form your own images and characters from what the author has given you for clues, and thus you pay attention to every detail to further describe the sketches in your mind. But what if you began with the graphic novel, the adaptation. What would differ in the experience and can you compare one to the other as ‘better’ or ‘worse’.

This in essence is the question that has troubled lovers of the written word since the Daguerreotype and Calotype processes were invented to create frozen images of life with the camera. The now commonplace discussion after a film adaptation of a book is released is does the experience compare, does it live up to the book, are the actors and director doing the original work justice? How relevant are these questions though as they are fundamentally different products, albeit about the same thing.

The world we are living in today is an image saturated envrionment. Images catch the eye and are more easliy remembered than advertising copy, even when spoken or sung. This of course leads to an industry striving to create the most unique, memorable images or scenes for mixed media campaigns and these creations pour out into our lives as we pass around, through, under and above them. These images become the spaces we inhabit, they are the shouty shouty man ranting about ‘cillit BANG’ which defens our domestic home; they are kate moss lounging along the gable end of our terrace.

But has this saturation become such that we except it and see it as normal now, we have lived with it for long enough for it to become uninteresting, we expect it and thus cease to notice it. Just as the Perec quote from the previous blog highlighted the idea of the permanent adornment of walls as an invisible exercise, especially in the domestic space, so the advertising world are stuggling to make the impact they had maybe 20 or 30 years ago when the density of all this was much lower.

Can we then move on to think about what this means for the narrative, the use of words and writing to describe space more emotively. The graphic novel adaptation of Auster’s book is certainly a work of great skill and design, but can it ever have the same impact to people who live with images of every concievable kind all around them demanding attention and of which they take no notice. Do we now not need a different approach to space so we can understand it and allow us to see and use it as it really is.

“This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page. To describe space; to name it, to trace it, like those portolano-makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbours, the names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of text. Is the aleph, that place in Borges from which the entire world is visible simultaneously, anything other than an alphabet?” Georges Perec, Species of spaces and other pieces

Copyshop (2001)

This is a brilliantly realised film that was made by making over 18,000 photocopies of the filmed footage to create the xeroxed effect. The subject matter is a very simple idea but worked through with admirable vigour and style which earned an oscar nomination. Similar to ideas Michel Gondry likes to dabble in with his music videos and films about mental disintergration and mania but also visual tricks and surreal imagery.

the British Centre: project primer

a British archival superstructure lightly touches the Roman soil

‘It is well established…that nowadays we prefer the replica to the original. We prefer the reproduction of the work of art to the work of art itself…when such discoveries were first made…it was like the discovery that masturbation with pornographic material is more fun than sex. Quelle horreur!’

‘permit me to cite one of my fellow-countrymen, “All that was once directly lived”, he wrote, “has become mere representation.”…he intended it, astonishingly, as criticism not praise. I would prefer to advance his thought in the following way. Once there was only the world, directly lived. Now there is the re-presentation of the world. It is not a substitute for the plain primitive world, but an enhancement and enrichment…This is where we live today. Is this our loss? No, it is our conquest, our victory. We must demand the replica, since the reality, the truth, the authenticity of the replica is the one we can possess, colonise, reorder, find jouissance in’

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a manifesto: creative architecture

In Julian Barnes’ novel England England, the billionaire Jack Pitman hires advisers to consult with him about his massive project to create a luxury leisure experience on the Isle of Wight which recreates the essence of England. The theory of the consumption of replica over original is an extension of the argument for museums being a transformed format. They are no longer the national collection for preservation and re-presentation of cultural artefacts, it is a global entity of

The illustration shows a potential hyper rational advancement of this argument to the stage that we remove the original from the city to the safe confines of a massive archive in the air above. The new super-museum is a repository for a nations culture, much like the national archives are the singular place to find documents on governmental activities. The new layer of cultural sediment follows the Roman method of building upon the ruins and foundations of the last city thereby assimilating the material and elevating the living level upwards over the centuries of development. This new layer creates a final ceiling to this idea though, removing historic elements from the urban leaving it as the live laboratory for the invention and speculation over replica and experiential culture.

The shift in thinking about preservation from retrospective to prospective is afforded by this removal of all historic artefacts, leaving only the architecture which is a fixed fitting of culture, a hard furnishing. This shift is made possible by the realisation that preservation is an invention of our industrial revolution, and like all inventions it has a period of relevance before it must either evolve or be replaced. The ‘very fabric of society’ which may proclaimed to be under threat is in fact non-existent in the exclaimant’s definition, society is no longer interested or revolves around originality. To copy is now more relevant than mere influence or re-interpretation. What began with the love affair in the aesthetic of the machine and its process of reproduction, has now evolved into an expanding global scale where the action of influence and copy occurs at the rate of  conversational exchange.

In this current situation then, the idea of authorship is highly contentious. How do we determine the ‘rights’ to an idea, concept or even argument. Academic protocol calls for reference to prevent fraud but also to guide the reader to tangential or parallel arguments. In the creative industries, where the idea and knowledge that a person or collective possess is as valuable as the tangible products they produce, there is a system of defining Intellectual Property. Increasingly though we are seeing the replica preferred over the original as the users demand and can gain access to ‘protected’ products. The creation of interfaces that promote access over ownership are an acknowledgement that we are no longer interested in originality, merely the variety and complexity of numerous inputs. Also, this scenario means that those who produce and share are subject to a public rating or relevance. Here those with the precedented success or respect of society will prosper along with the quick rise of fashion or fad. It is this which the creative industry of Britain needs to acknowledge if it is to define suitable authorship protocol on an international level.

‘time is a problem,’ Jerry began. “you are only as old as you feel,” they say. Correction. You are as old, and exactly old, as you are. True of individuals, relationships, societies, nations. So England comes to me, and what do I say to her? I say, “Listen baby, face facts. We’re in the third millennium and your tits have dropped. The solution is not a push-up bra.”

‘We are no longer mega. Why do some people find that so hard to admit? The spinning jenny is in a museum, the oil is drying up. Other people makes things cheaper. Sometimes we are ahead of the game, sometimes behind. But what we do have, what we shall always have, is what others don’t: an accumulation of time…It’s a question of placing the product correctly, that’s all.’

‘England is a nation of great age, great history, great accumulated wisdom. Social and cultural history-stacks of it, reams of it-eminently marketable. If I may coin a phrase, We are already what others may hope to become. We are the new pioneers. We must sell our past to other nations as their future!

the market need

to see relevant models for this post click here

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“not only is shopping melting into everything, but everything is melting into shopping…shopping has methodically encroached on a widening spectrum of territories so that it is now, arguably, the defining activity of public life”1

When in Rome, we were all assigned a public space at random which gave me the Piazza di Trevi as a site of focus, the space in which the famous Baroque Trevi Fountain stands. Giovanni Battista Nolli drew his map of the city for the Pope in 1748, around the time Salvi was in the final stages of constructing the Trevi Fountain. The Piranesi etchings of this period (far left) and later ones showing it completed demonstrate the cart selling beginnings of the fringe retail activity that the piazza now exhibits with a surround of retail units such as United Colours of Bennetton and Gelaterias.

My updated version of the map uses the same graphical principles of civic space shown in white. So the retail units and shopping arcade of the Galleria Piazza Colonna are examples of the new civic typologies that evolved over the past few centuries. In addition to this massive growth of the presence of shopping in the city, the government of Italy and the Roman mayor’s office seek to increase tourism and streamline the capital’s infrastructure to allow tours to flow through the sights of the city more efficiently.2 Technologies that are the evolutionary descendent of space syntax3 have been developed and are used by huge corporations like Wall-Mart to model statistics to create a numerical image of the city which they can use to predict future trends and sites for new retail zones.4 It can only be a matter of time before this is applied to Rome as a study of tourist flows for economic gain, and the city becomes a giant theme park where the perimeter boundary is unknown but the rides are unique.

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1: Sze Tsung Leong, And then there was shopping, The Harvard Design School Project on the City 2: Guide to Shopping, p129
2: Sebastiano Brandolini, Rome New Architecture, Skira, 2008, p12
3: A theory of urban planning and design created by Bill Hillier and colleagues which uses axis of movement to predict and design hierarchies of human behaviour in the city
4: Sze Tsung Leong, Ulterior Spaces, The Harvard Design School Project on the City 2: Guide to Shopping, p765

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“[shopping} why has it become such a basic aspect of our existence? Because it is synonymous with perhaps the most significant and fundamental development to give form to modern life: the unfettered growth and acceptance of the market economy as the dominant global standard”1

Crystal Palace
Crystal Palace was designed to house the ‘Exhibition and Industry of All Nations’ in 1851 and it became a pivotal moment in the history of public spectacle, mass gathering, tourism, and trade. As a vehicle to demostrate the creativity and industrial power of the nations of the world it was the first of its kind. It was unparalleled as an event, and provided a new architectural format capable of absorbing unprecedented urban congestion. During the 6 months of the term of the exhibition, 6.1 million persons arrived in London, 65 percent more than in the preceding year, and foreign visitors to the city increased by 275 percent.2

As a result of its acclaim it sparked the invention of the department store, a progression which was commented on by historian John McKean when he said…

“this sense of the voyeur in a transformed nature moves directly from the Crystal Palace to the department store, where the exhibition’s prohibition ‘no price labels allowed’ has been thrown off. Thus its immediate progeny are those exhibitions where the goods may be devoured not just by the eyes but by the wallets too.”3

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The Next Big Thing
Recent events have shown shopping to be one of the most unstable activities despite its scale of operation. Its reliance on external factors like national economy means it has to keep up with society, which is one of the reasons it has to constantly keep shifting and reinventing itself. The diagram on the left demonstrates this idea as it traces the new forms of retail and their ever expanding scale in the city.

“the Next Big Thing is the recurring promise of a new typology that will deliver greater profits and higher consumer satisfaction” 4

So instead of going against this irrefutable social condition and despite recent dips in the retail industry, my project looks to take advantage of the market economy. Over the past decade, Britain’s creative sector has grown at twice the rate of the economy as a whole. “The creative industries must move from the margins to the mainstream of economic and policy thinking, as we look to create the jobs of the future”.5 Taking the precedent we set with the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the inventive skill demonstrated by its design, can we provide a scenario for the trade of British exports in the international market, a sector which the government is so keen to push our prestigious creative industry out into.

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1: Sze Tsung Leong, And then there was shopping, The Harvard Design School Project on the City 2: Guide to Shopping, p129
2: Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London, Cambridge, Belknap Press, 1978, p457-60
3: John McKean, Crystal Palace: Joseph Paxton and Charles Fox, London, Phaidon Press, 1994, p32
4: Harvard Guide, p527
5: DCMS, Creative Britain: New talents for the new economy, 2008, p8

British Creative Economy: infrastructure diagram

client mapping

The project works with the existing frameworks of British presence in Rome. The historic significance of the three entities; the British Embassy (designed by Basil Spence), the British School at Rome (designed by Edward Lutyens) and the British Council (an enigmatic promotional and commerical operation) can be seen in the drawings above which chart the progression of foreign institutes in the city of Rome, originally for academic purposes but increasingly for diplomatic and commercial operations.

Imagine Coney: curating world culture

to see more information on this competition please visit the Imgaine Coney website here

Piazza Trevi: interventions

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transcribing piazza rituals

“people do not let themselves be manipulated the way spaces are. There are ceremonies that determine space… the ceremonies, or rather these rituals (after all, a ritual is a formalised event in the same way that architecture is a formailsed space) determine spaces. They regulate these spaces.”  B. Tschumi

gestures and translation

“the extraordinary animation is what strikes one at first, the vigorous ant-hill life of the natives. Streets, squares, market-places teem with people, noisy, elated, gay, energetic, busy people…everything is displayed everywhere, in
dramatic and artistic disorder…the noise is usually deafening. People chat, whistle, swear, sing, curse, cry, howl, weep, call to each other and shout, carrying on elaborate discussions or delicate negotiations… it is a gay and
happy noise, magnifyed by the stone walls, the absence of greenery, the narrowness of the street. It goes on from dawn to the small hours of the night…”
Luigi Barzini, The Italians

World of Adveritising

This is a piece of work that aims to broadly map the processes and parties involved in the creation of what we see on billboard sites and all advertising. It is based on research from talking to people in the industry in general but also trying to focus on the sheffield area. It will be developed and worked into. The format of a geographical language for the diagram may have to be altered to describe the obviously complex issues that i am trying to describe.

advertmap.pdf