video - 'Whistling Past the Graveyard'

Alejandro Almanza Pereda
Whistling past the graveyard 2011 Video 8.31
Rove Gallery, Hoxton Square, London
13 May - 11 Jan 2011

A few things to note:
1. Torch's eye view - space in darkness is unfolded by the movement of a torch in hand of a person with unknown identity.
2. Story-telling by the trajectory of the torch for the constructed artefacts in the sequence.
3. Traces of the objects that tell the story of the unknown owner - lit, touched and rejected.
4. Spatial narrative manipulated by the intensity between the pitch black and the sound of heavy breathing - between the torch-scape and the sound-scape
5. 'Travelling across the US and Mexican border brought Almanza Pereda to explore a variety of situations of intense contrast and sensibility. One may describe such an apporach as an exploration of the safe and secure as opposed to the dangerous and unmasked through the use of precarious experimental assemblages with a poetic narrative.'

Story-telling II

Bologna - Pattern of the Gothic structutre, gradual progression of the scale

Morandi
- preparatory work in different medium becoming automous work upto smallest details / Relationship between Natura Morta & Paessaggio
- story-making of Museo Morandi interwoven with the life of Morandi in his home
- light and shadow creating a pattern that dissovles and distinguishes
- contours erased and emerging

Wayne Thieband
- extraordinary story of ordinary things
- unfamiliarise the everyday pieces
- beauty of banal things through decontextualisation using colours and textures

Venice
- tourism affecting urban experience, journey and design
- venetian legends and Ghost stories

Siena
- theatrical setting of the piazza with the slope and focal point, leading to the vertical tower, surrounded by the backdrop of local shops, alleys of in-between
- story of Palio, an anual event read and drawn in tourist guides, postcards that continuously affects the majority of the days when the Palio is absent
- museo de Piazza Campo, interweaving a spatial narrative through the contemporary insertion of bridges and slabs into the interlocking old brick arches
- why do we walk 505 steps of the tower? the appreciation of the varying heights providing changing perception of the scenery and roofscape
- relationshp between the height and the perception of angles, details, ranges, patterns similar to that between scale of and distance to notes.

Milan
- museo del Novecento: circulation of 20th century art, Art Povera, Informel, Archivism, Futurism, Kinetic Art, Conceptual art
- urban/architecture 1960-70 Italy to note

Story-telling

dismantling a linear design process with re-constructed temporal dimensions
strategies - blurbing
tactics - fold-in, cut-out, 'entertaining template'(pixar)
further study - narration, fiction script, scripting
case study. memento (story-telling by notes) other space odysseys
pilot study. four seasons, fun palace

Concept-engineering

Kodwo Eshun is a self-professed ‘concept engineer'and known for his ‘fast-forward’ theories on electronic music and its interface with art, science fiction, technology and machine culture. His debut book More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction was published in 1998, and his writings appear frequently in The Wire, The Face, i-D, Spin, Arena and The Guardian.
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/sampleculture.htm

intensive thinking

search what kind of landscape of thoughts, interpretations, or practices is in place around the term, 'intensive thinking':

first encounter: http://intensivethinking.blogspot.com/

'...favouring what Eshun (following Deleuze and Guattari) calls “concept-engineering”, rather than “theory”...'

lateral thinking I:
knoweldge production - market against capitalism/designprocess/designresearch/note-making/small businesses/networks of small institutions

lateral thinking II
as a text: deterritorialisation of a text by n. characteristics/operations - (such as small/plural/bottom-up/market exchange)
as a drawing: deterritorialisation of a drawing by n. characteristics/operations
as a use: deterritorialisation of use by n. characteristics/operations

text - drawing - use : from language-base to material-base?

manual as it is instant and immediate, but evolving a framework, while proliferating variables.

short, quick, simultaneous - 'Hooked on Speed'

the now-seems-to-be-obsolate notion of the 'Pecha Kucah' is still valid?

I read an article about the network of lectures done in ad-hoc universities (or 'the university of streets') of downtown Montreal from the Mirror in February. The rule is truly Pecha Kucah - comprising of a 20 slides to be presented in 20 seconds. The audience (students) do not need to worry about not being able to grasp the core of a lecture as 'many' are in a line, awaiting 20 seconds for their own presentation....

so we are still 'hooked on speed':

'Pecha Kucha is a fast-paced international poetry slam for architects. And it's good.
On a recent Wednesday evening, Boulevard Saint-Laurent, the sometimes seamy spine of Montreal nightlife, was hopping—from the comedy festival Juste Pour Rire to the strip joint Café Cleopatre. But incredibly, the biggest crowd on the boulevard was watching architecture. Inside the Société des Arts Technologiques, a bare-bones art and performance space, more than 500 people had gathered for the latest installment in a global phenomenon known as Pecha Kucha (a Japanese expression meaning “chitchat”). For three hours, architects, artists, and graphic designers presented work according to the Pecha Kucha rules: Each was allowed to show 20 slides for 20 seconds each—no more, no less—while speaking into a microphone. Audience members, mostly in their 20s, socialized over beer and wine while viewing the presentations on large screens....'

The idea, according to Mark Dytham, who five years ago co-founded Pecha Kucha with Astrid Klein, his partner in the Tokyo architecture firm Klein Dytham, is to get architects to show their work without putting the audience to sleep. “Normally you give an architect a slide projector, and you’re sitting there for hours,” Dytham says. Which is why architecture lectures are deadly dull, and why Pecha Kucha has spread from Tokyo to more than 130 cities worldwide—it’s hard to think of another attraction that would work in places as diverse as Tel Aviv, Tijuana, and Trieste. Indeed, there are now so many Pecha Kucha nights that a traveler could check the calendar at pecha-kucha.org and plan an entire trip around them—in a single week in August, it would have been possible to attend Pecha Kuchas in Stockholm; Auckland; Bandung, Indonesia; Kampala, Uganda; and Portland, Oregon....'

http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/28679/hooked-on-speed/

...and the dullness to be overcome in the architectural discipline - this reminds of the fiction writing taken on board in the realm of writing of architecture. or 'the Fun Palace' by Cedric Price - a delight in movement, in changes'.

simultaneity of zooming-in & zooming-out

Jocelyn Philibert


'The raw light of the flash' can be a way to talk about particulars without losing the perception of a whole. The atmosphere comes from the dynamic relations between them.

'Through his works, Jocelyn Philibert attempts to question the notion of reality by confusing up reality and representation. Such as a painter and his color palette, the artist will create an image from a hundred of pictures of a real subject. This representation, however, will leave the spectator in a state of uncertainty and make him or her fall into a universe situated between fiction and reality. The nocturne atmosphere, the effects of perspective and depth and the raw light of the flash contribute to create a mysterious and strange mood. Everything seems both real and unreal, natural and artificial.'
http://www.galeriesas.com/spip.php?rubrique13

catalysts & catalysis

Cybernetics Committee of The Fun Palace, Cybernetics Report, 1965

Manuel De Landa, Material Evolvability and Variablity - Catalysis, The Architectural Variation edited by Lars Spuybroek, p14.

writing by searching (or surfing)

I. Picked this up from the CCA bookstore:
On Growth and Form by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, 1945

this led to:
On Growth and Form - Organic Architecture and Beyond
edited by Philip Beesley & Sarah Bonnemaison 2008
7 Why Rebisit D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's On Growth and Form?

54 The Forces of Matter by Hadas A. Steiner-
has C.P.'s "precise time factor into the process of enclosure"
(Works II, London:AA 1984).
'the possibility of sudden and dramatic collape' of the bubble's structural properties. (Adrian George, Cover of Architectural Design October 1970) p59

100 Naturalization, in Circles: Architecture, Science, Architecture by Reinhold Martin >
further reading - Christopher Aleander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form 1964.

For fun: Alexander C. and P. Eisenman, @Contrasting Concepts of Harmoney in Architecture" 1982, Lotus International 40 1983, 60-68

Then to Philip Beesley
Kinetic Architectures & Geotextile installations by Philip Beesley 2007
Hylozoic Ground- liminal responsive architecture, Philip Beesley 2010

II. Searching with the key words, Tracing:
Lines - a brief history by Tim Ingold 2007
1. Language, music and notation
2. Traces, threads and surfaces
3. up, across and along
4. The genealogical line
5. Drawing, writing and calligraphy
6. How the line became straight

notes on the Intensity

Intense
Intensely
Intensive
Intensity
Intensity mapping
Intensities
Intensify
Intensifier
Intensified
Intensification
Intensive thinking

book - The Architecture of Variation

edited by Lars Spuybroek

consists of three parts:
Essays on Uniformity and Variety
Figure-Configuration Taxonomies
Textile Catalog Houses

lecture - Citizenship by Design

Kadambari Baxi discusses the passport, a travel document whose design is often taken for granted, and presents excerpts from her recent project Citizenship By Design (in collaboration with Irene Cheng). The project investigates the design of international passports, identification technologies and travel regulations to raise critical questions about the contemporary nature of citizenship. These official objects, bureaucratic procedures and personal documents function at a paradoxical intersection of nation “branding,” security technologies, individual identities, and dispersed communities.

http://www.cca.qc.ca/en/education-events/1221-expert-in-the-galleries-citizenship-by-design

script evolving from the archives

script as a base narrative

colour coded archives

differentiation by notes

work in progress before note-posting changes the perception of a noticeboard, a wall, a corner, a window, a shelf and a table.

Research on the Fun Palace of Cedric Price in progress
one month research residence
- February, Canadian Centre for Architecture,Montreal

design by story-telling: Other Space Odysseys

Other Space Odysseys:
Greg Lynn, Michael Maltzan, Alessandro Poli
accompanies the 2010 CCA exhibition of the same name.
illustrated interviews with architects Greg Lynn and Michael Maltzan.

the original text Nearing the Moon to the Earth,
a fictional interview between astronaut Buzz Aldrin and Zeno,
a Tuscan farmer and frequent subject of Poli’s research
(Alessandro Poli)

youtube - Manuel Delanda

Deleuze and the use of the Genetic Algorithim in Architecture,
Columbia lecture from YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50-d_J0hKz0&feature=related

More to look up
- his interpretation on Deleuze's assembly theory
- three reasooning styles: 'population thinking', 'intensive thinking' and finally 'topological thinking'

book - Iannis Xenakis

Iannis Xenakis
Composer, Architect, Visionary
THE DRAWING CENTER

Check Youtube - Iannis Xenakis, Metastasis

Also Ligeti Atmospheres

talk - on exprimental writing

CCA (the Canadian Centre for Architecture)event
http://www.cca.qc.ca/en/education-events/1237-on-experimental-writing

extracted from the web:
about different approaches to writing about architecture, ...borrowing from the logic of other genres and forms like narratives, short stories, novels, science-fiction, journalism, poetry, tourist guides, ethnographic descriptions and others.

new forms that can introduce a varied panorama and allow for unexpected perspectives on a specific topic....new understandings with a mix of real and imaginative ‘facts’
that add an emotional character. ...The traditional reading of a city or a building is brought new layers
such as atmosphere, objectivity, and fantasy.

My notes:
- Is it only about 'writing'?
as the introduction of 'active user' of Roland Barthes affected the way of writing, this 'fictional writing' into architectural criticism may imply a new attitude in design?
- Beatriz Colomina, 'we need to learn from a fiction' or Tafuri's Utopian fantasy
I asked the speakers if:
we are witnessing the evoution of a profession, a cross-over across a critic, curator, publisher, an artist,activitst, design researcher breeding a new species by moving to more a creative side such as fiction-writing as a writing of architecture.
And as there was a shift from an author to a reader, when Barthes posed an active reader, there may be a shift from an architect/creator to an architectral reader/critic?
Pedro agreed that such an evolution is now happening as the speakers show, and it is a much harder job than imagined, which I agree to. But he said it's only the matter of architecural writing - not architects' job. But as the notion of active reader changed the reaml of writing, I believe the fictional writing will affect the architectural practices.

It reminded me of the moment when Peter Eisenman declared that current designers/students of a certain trend) they do not care a grammar any more but only a rhetoric in one of the AA lectures. Maybe the context may be different but the implication on the 'rhetoric' can be a cross-path.