Wednesday, July 6, 2011

The setting sun of 20th century technology

Computer Installations by Sandy Smith via Triangulation Blog:



Computer Installations it's a large series of works running from 2005 into 2006 by Sandy Smith. The works all used a huge stock of redundant but working computers, gathered over the year. The series ended with an exhibition at Edinburgh's Embassy Gallery. See more;

Mauritian Sunset - 2006

"The resulting wall stretched accross the centre of the main room of the Gallery in Edinburgh, wall to wall and floor to ceiling, the rear of the computers facing the windows onto the street. A small doorway was built into the wall, only five and a half foot tall, and two foot wide. The monitors facing forwards showed flat colour, working over the wall to create a rough gradient representation of a classic sunset."






Green / Blue Horizontal - 2005

"Constructed as my final submission for The Glasgow School of Art degree show, "Green / Blue Horizontal" is the largest structure I have made to date, using everything I'd collected over the previous 8 months.
Standing at 3 metres tall, the wall curved round the far corner of the room, creating a seperate space approximately 3 by 3 metres. This space was accessable through a gap in the wall, covered by an arch of monitors. Every (about 60) monitor in the wall was turned on, each displaying a single flat colour. The monitors on the bottom half of the wall showed various hues of green, and the top half showed blue, creating a rough horizon line stretching round the wall. Inspired on - 'bliss' desktop image by Microsoft."






See the complete Computer installation series here.

Saturday, May 28, 2011

Urban Speculation in Los Angeles and Beyond

by

[Image: Photo by Iwan Baan, from No More Play: Conversations on Urban Speculation in Los Angeles and Beyond edited by Jessica Varner].

Last autumn, I had the pleasure of speaking with architects Michael Maltzan and Jessica Varner for the new book No More Play: Conversations on Urban Speculation in Los Angeles and Beyond.

[Image: Photo by Iwan Baan, from No More Play: Conversations on Urban Speculation in Los Angeles and Beyond edited by Jessica Varner].

That conversation was then included in the book itself, alongside conversations about the city with such artists, architects, and writers as Catherine Opie, Matthew Coolidge, Mirko Zardini, Edward Soja, Charles Jencks, Qingyun Ma, Sarah Whiting, James Flanigan, and Charles Waldheim. It will surprise no one to read that my interview is the least interesting of the bunch, but it's an honor even to have been invited to sit down as a blogger amidst that line-up.

[Image: Photo by Iwan Baan, from No More Play: Conversations on Urban Speculation in Los Angeles and Beyond edited by Jessica Varner].

Overall, the book represents a series of interesting decisions: it doesn't document Michael Maltzan's work—though, with several recently completed, high-profile projects, including Playa Vista Park, Maltzan could easily could have spent the book's 200+ pages discussing nothing but his own productions (in fact, Maltzan's buildings are absent from the publication).

Instead, the book instead features newly commissioned photographs of greater Los Angeles by the ubiquitous Iwan Baan; further, Michael's and Jessica's introductory texts are not about the firm's recent buildings but are about those buildings' urban context. It is about the conditions in which those buildings are spatially possible.

[Image: Photo by Iwan Baan, from No More Play: Conversations on Urban Speculation in Los Angeles and Beyond edited by Jessica Varner].

In many ways, then, the book is astonishingly extroverted. It's a book by an architecture office about the city it works in, not a book documenting that firm's work; and, as such, it serves as an impressive attempt to understand and analyze the city through themed conversations with other people, in a continuous stream of partially overlapping dialogues, instead of through ex tempore essayistic reflections by the architects or dry academic essays.

[Image: Photo by Iwan Baan, from No More Play: Conversations on Urban Speculation in Los Angeles and Beyond edited by Jessica Varner].

Iwan Baan's photos also capture the incredible diversity of spatial formats that exist in Los Angeles—including camouflaged oil rigs on residential hillsides—and the range of anthropological subtypes that support them, down to fully-clothed toy dogs and their terrycloth-clad owners.

[Image: Photo by Iwan Baan, from No More Play: Conversations on Urban Speculation in Los Angeles and Beyond edited by Jessica Varner].

In an excerpt from Maltzan's introduction to the book published today over at Places, Maltzan writes that the city's 'relentless growth has never paused long enough to coalesce into a stable identity.'
Los Angeles and the surrounding regions have grown steadily since the founding of the original pueblo, but the period immediately after World War II defined the current super-region. During this time, the economy accelerated, and Los Angeles became a national and international force. Today, innovation and development define the metropolis as the region multiplies exponentially, moment by moment, changing into an unprecedented and complex expansive field. The region continues to defy available techniques and terms in modernism's dictionary of the city.
This latter point is a major subtheme in the interviews that follow: exactly what is it that makes Los Angeles a city, not simply a 'large congregation of architecture,' in Ole Bouman's words. As Bouman warns, 'If you don’t distinguish between those two—if you think that applying urban form is the same as building a city, or even creating urban culture—then you make a very big mistake. First of all, I think it’s necessary for architectural criticism, in that sense, to find the right words for these very complicated processes, to distinguish between two processes or forms that, at first sight, appear the same, but that are, in reality, very different.'

At the end of his introductory notes, Maltzan remarks that 'we have reached a point where past vocabularies of the city and of urbanism are no longer adequate, and at this moment, the very word city no longer applies' to a place like Los Angeles.

'Perhaps it is not a city,' he suggests. Perhaps something at least temporarily indescribable has occurred here.

[Image: Photo by Iwan Baan, from No More Play: Conversations on Urban Speculation in Los Angeles and Beyond edited by Jessica Varner].

You can read Maltzan's essay in full over at Places; or I'd encourage you to pick up a copy of the book via Hatje Cantz (Amazon appears to be selling an earlier edition?), as a way of encouraging this kind of discursive engagement with the city—what Varner describes in her introduction as a set of outward-looking, nested narratives 'which then fold back onto themselves' from conversation to conversation, and will only continue to develop 'as the city advances forward.'

[Image: From No More Play: Conversations on Urban Speculation in Los Angeles and Beyond edited by Jessica Varner].

The book also comes with a small fold-out poster, one side of which you can see here.

(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Agitation, Power, Space: An Interview with Ole Bouman).

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Social Light Movement Workshop

News from the innovative design consultancy, Light Collective: The first SLM workshop is to be held in Belgium on the week of 26th September 2011. It is a collaboration between the City of Liege, LUCI and founders of the Social Light Movement; Isabelle Corten of Radiance, Elettra Bordonaro, Olsson & Linder and Light Collective. The workshop will consist of two parts. The first being a theoretical workshop where under guidance the participants will be asked to create a concept for the chosen location, to develop the idea, undertake mock-ups, liaise with residents and to finally present the proposals to the City of Liege. The second part of the workshop will be a practical demonstration; a guerrilla lighting event held on the last evening of the workshop. The workshop will be open to students from Liège but also to international participants. It will form part of the LUCI ‘City under Microscope of LUCI” event. Contact Light Collective if you are interested and please help spread the word. Looks to be a great event!