make something which experiences, reacts to its environment, changes, is non-stable...
... make something indeterminate, which always looks different, the shape of which cannot be predicted precisely...
... make something which cannot 'perform' without the assistance of its environment...
... make something which reacts to light and temperature changes, is subject to air currents and whose function depends on the forces of gravity...
... make something which the 'viewer' handles, with which he plays and thus animates...
... make something which lives in time and makes the 'viewer' experience time...
... articulate something natural...

Hans Haacke, Cologne, 1965

Thu, Apr 12, 2007  Permanent link
Categories: favourite_quotes

Tentative Architecture of Other Earth

Tentative Architecture of Other Earth from Xárene on Vimeo.

The wearers of Tentative Architecture are nomads. The primary determination of a nomad is to occupy and hold smooth space. Smooth space is free action in a collection of spaces that are juxtaposed but not attached, i.e. the space between points of interest (water points), or a technical example of felt versus the grided woven. A point system, or a grid, is an emblem of striated space: it belongs here, not there. War is a clash of striated space and smooth space; when the City takes over the Countryside.

Felt is a supple solid product that proceeds altogether differently, as an anti-fabric... It implies no separation of threads, no intertwining, only an entanglement of fibers... it is nevertheless smooth, and contrasts point by point with the space of fabric (it is in principle infinite, open and unlimited inevery direction; it has neither top nor bottom nor center; it does not assign fixed and mobile elements but rather distributes a continuous variatio)... Among sedentaries, clothes-fabric and tapestry-fabric tend to annex the body and exterior space, respectively, to the immobile house: fabric integrates the body and the outside into closed space. On the other hands, the weaving of the nomad indexes clothing and the house itself to the space of the outside, to the open smooth space in which the body moves. Deleuze+Guattari

Above is documentation of Tentative Architecture worn by coastline inhabitants of Other Earth. This architecture allows for ventilation by mimicking the breathing of its wearer. In one version (the version for desert inhabitants) it is powered by a bio-kinetic hand-fan; a second version uses shape memory alloys which respond to ambient temperature changes.

In collaboration with Joshua Hernandez, PhD student, Math, UCLA

Materials: Hand knitted and felted wool, shape memory alloy (Dynalloy Muscle Wire)

Mon, Jun 9, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: architecture

Nourish

Other Earth inhabitants have reached Singularity, but they have retained their human-ness within new, immortal bodies. They are literally Bodies Without Organs; bodies that do not need to eat, reproduce through sex, etc. They have lost the needs and desires of the old body in terms of constant care for health or vanity, or for survival such as UV protection and food, or for commoditized luxuries. Though they have the choice to be immortal, they are not selfish and instead use mortality in the same manner ancient tribes used castration to control their population. Death is a passage and a highly valued ritual of suicide. Reproduction is a natural question that follows and there are many possibilities to addressing it. In this particular dimension of Other Earth, reproduction has moved away from being the role taken on between a male and a female and consequently gestation and birth is also not the responsibility of the female body or any human body for that matter. This is not revolutionary taken bio-medical advances in test-tube babies, IVF, surrogates, cloning and three-parent embryos.





Above images show a coastline inhabitant nourishing her body with salt via her skin.

Wed, Apr 9, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: BwO, other_earth

Storm Front

Storm Front from Xárene on Vimeo.

This rhizomatic model is a concept of identity for Other Earth. The rhizome is a term referring to non-hierarchical systems, here becoming the foundation for Other Earth society. Any inhabitant of Other Earth is a continually dismantling organism, a body without organs, connecting with other nomadic inhabitants, creating temporary social networks at any point in space.

Just as any one citizen of Other Earth is a point for leadership, self-sufficiency, discovery and sustenance of limitless, accessible knowledge (possible from achieving Singularity), any one space of Other Earth carries equal possibility of becoming a significant space to host the organisms. Using the terms of Madeline Gins and Arakawa, Other Earth is an "Architectural Surround" where the sky is the ceiling and the broken blades of grass the ephemeral border we create with our bodies. Though the Architectural Surround pre-exists us, in our understanding, our world only comes into existence when we notice it.

Wed, Apr 9, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: other_earth, architecture

I follow her...

... though not clear where I am being led. She, however, has no doubts... plays along... treads on...

Wed, Apr 9, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: other_earth

Shifting and Evolving
Project: What happened to nature?

Adolf Loos' Ornament and Crime holds a favourite ammunition of mine in defense of immateriality:

I have therefore evolved the following maxim, and pronounce it to the world: the evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects.

How would I define what ornament is today? Ornament, a constant in decoration culture, is surprisingly a very competent shape-shifter, constantly changing form and material. For centuries ornament has been paint on the body, beads around the wrist, embroidery on a collar. It has also seen itself as reindeer and snowflakes on holiday mugs and useless objects in modern homes.

The stripping away of ornament lead to the International Style and what is essentially known as Modernism and it's further stripped down Minimalism. But all these styles are rather funny when they are defined by objects, because objects are mere ornaments. Ornamentation is giving style to a very basic necessity. When a simple stoop to rest your legs becomes the Barcelona chair, sadly, regardless of the absolute admiration and desire that I have for it, it becomes an ornamental mode of sitting. Therefore, objects that exceed providing the bare minimum in order for us to achieve a desired state, are ornament, and ultimately the crime of our materiality.

The desperate and depressing question of What Happened to Nature becomes irrelevant if our culture evolves to eliminate ornament and unnecessary objects. We must shift our perception of what we need to create for survival to what is already there for us to survive on. Learning to live with our natural environment—as opposed to live off of it—is where our focus should be.

The greater evolution of our kind is a paradigm shift from what we perceive space and architecture to be, to what it can be—or actually in the sense I intend to use it, to what it can 'not be'. There is no need to build solid, oversized ornaments for our egos. There is no need for our mortal beings to leave a disastrously lasting mark for posterity. If we look at nature, everything is made of its environment and goes back to its environment after its life-cycle. Everything is self-sufficient or hyper-efficient in the use of its environment.

To move towards that same intrinsic understanding as other life-forms in nature, means we need to move towards immateriality and the acceptance of being a part of nature. We need to accept that we are in possession of lost qualities that make it possible for us to survive without the materials we make and build around ourselves. We need to accept that architecture should not define space, but is space and that space can be made of immaterials. This is as much a mental re-conditioning as well as physical. It is not achievable immediately and it will not be realized unless we have the guts to let go and start from somewhere. That is the ultimate evolution of our species... to return to nature.

A good book to make us think about our relationship with our environment and to put us back in touch with the reality of our horribly excessive materialist lives is Janine Benyus' Biomimmicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. Here is her talk at TED.

Tue, Dec 4, 2007  Permanent link
Categories: utopian, nature, biomimmicry
Sent to project: What happened to nature?

NASA Contest - The Moon: Back to the Future
Project: Design Media Arts at UCLA

Tue, Nov 13, 2007  Permanent link

Sent to project: Design Media Arts at UCLA

NoZone X

Visualization by Jennifer Daniel
(Created for NoZone X, Published by Princeton Architectual Press. Edited by Nicholas Blechman)

Tue, Sep 4, 2007  Permanent link

Art on the International Space Station

Contact Omar Rafael Carreño for more information.
orcarrenor@yahoo.com

The press release is in French. I ran it through Altavista Babelfish for crappy English:

EXPANSIONISME - MANIFESTE 4

Paris, 2004 – Caracas, 2007

After the II World war, the compass of the art of avant-garde pointed towards Uruguay and Argentina. After the contribution of Pettoruti to the abstract art, Arden Quin, Kosice, Lozza... create Madi in Buenos Aires, in 1946. And Madi is converted into one of the most important movements, and most active, with a great creative dynamism. Perceptisme (1947) and Expansionisme (1951) are the consequence of Madi. When in 1945 Arden Quin said that "architecture must be mobile", it went beyond Tatlin and from Constructivistes Russian. We are in the course of approach of a new design of architecture in space. Like important sphere of activity to support the development of the ideas of avant-garde, we think especially of the orbiting stations of type ISS (International Space Station) like that which was launched in 1998 and weighs 470 tons. It will be finished in 2010. We think that art cannot continue any more to be excluded from this mini-city in space. Art must always continue its expansion, just as the Universe, and accompany the man there. Expansionisme was centered on transformable work, and especially on the preparation of the theoretical bases of works of the future making profitable the magnetic fields and the gravitation like geometrical property of l`Univers, to be able to work with the curve of the space time and even with the vacuum which, according to astrophysicists', is full with energy. New painting, the new sculpture, new architecture will be also in external space. For the art of avant-garde the workshop will be a memory of the past. The Impressionists were right: it was necessary to leave the workshop. We think in the same way but of another scale: it is necessary to leave the Earth, which implies that our way will be very long and difficult. In the field of creation the computer will have an important role, but it will not substitute the creative act which it could even asphyxiate. What we outline it is a new humanism, which requires that we rely on the human being more and that we profit owing to the fact that our memory can record up to thousand billions of units of information. We must be optimistic if we compare the million bytes (unit of data processing) which has thecubic one of a computer, with the twenty millet million which the same volume of our brain contains. When we was in disagreement (and we it are always) with the "multiples" (Proclamation 2, 1967) it was because we had understood that work single and easy to handle is that which more wakes up the need and the desire to create at the spectator. Time does not stop. Far from fearing technology and science, we consider that they are an essential part of the human creativity. We must approach all that supports it.

Wed, Jul 25, 2007  Permanent link

NASA challenges open until 2010

NASA Centennial Challenges

Via The Independent

Wed, Jul 18, 2007  Permanent link
Categories: NASA