co-
post-semester pre-2012 snippets, like little truncated section cuts through my thoughts.
all these ideas, all these ideas. if there is like a snapshot of me right now, for the me in 2012, 2013, and 2014 looking back, then it's:
1) negate vs posit, negative vs positive, the critique vs design mindset; at any point there's nothing but either a a) reaction to the present and a modification/change that attempts to arise out of this present, or b) a willing suspension of understanding in favor for a placed statement that wishes to be neither 'new' or 'impartial' but rather simply is stated as being, as there, as what-I-would-like-to-see, and everything else organizes itself and mobilizes itself in order to move towards that future. posit or negate, it's like there's a single continuum, and there's only hope in the former and failures in the latter.
2) it's all people, really, just people, people and their relationships, people and their relations, and people organizing around people. eventually these organizations (between people) become coagulated and calcified into concepts that claim to be free of that initial medium. (for example, the way the word 'ripple' becomes abstracted from the material condition of liquidity, viscosity, fluidity and becomes an isolated way to describe a phenomenon.)
so there's nothing but people all the way down;
3) support each other, otherwise all is for naught.
train
Two things:
One: I am suddenly reminded of: I am in the darkroom in high school, developing, and I hear mr. C and J talking about J's photograph, and J explains the meaning behind the photograph and this emotional connection he has to the photo (of his grandmother). mr. C explains that an outside viewer can't really see or feel this emotion, and I hear (all the while rocking pans of developer and stop back and forth) J then explains that he understands but that he thought it would show anyway. and I remember thinking then that I liked that, the concept of an emotion soaking into the image, oozing out into the photograph, despite all possible odds and the likely disconnect that happens when you show someone a photograph of someone/something that matters to you. but can't you see? Afterwards I leave the darkroom into the light and J's standing there quietly, looking at his photograph, trying to become an other so he can look at this anew.
Two: more and more I feel: everything is in the meat of the thing, like the actual making process, the dirtying of hands in sawdust and powder and stuff; this is where things really happen, where the productive conflict between theory and praxis exists. Either they happen in a concrete cerebral process or they happen in a concrete tangible/physical process. Here is a preemptive new year's resolution: less input and more output, to privilege writing over speech, contemplative action over conception.
postmortem postmortem
things-a-changin.
at some point I looked around and realized it was december 2010, the end of a year, and it's funny because time for me always seems stationary, the way that you grow up with people who are always in your same age, everyone's always on the same age bracket with you more or less, until one day you look back and realize that you're not in seventh grade anymore. like climbing a mountain and all of a sudden looking back at the ground which is oh-so-far away.
sometimes in studio I would catch myself looking around and think -- is this graduate school? is this this? are the tasks, the thought processes, the motions I am undergoing mature, or developed, or advanced enough to be called 'graduate'? or: where are these certain ideas? where are these discussions? (the sound of a hand slapping against a table) I want to talk more about ineffective architecture, dead architecture, unethical architecture, ethical architecture, architecture with a short lifespan, things like that; what is it like to make a building that does not function? does function? architecture for the image? what is it to have an architecture formed from usage? usage that solidifies into structure?
at one point I vocalized to E.: architecture that's impossible (not unfeasable, but impossible) is like an alien anthropology, claude levi-strauss for the martians, or more concretely like ursula k. leguin writing intelligently and carefully about the sex/gender structures of other species on other planets somewhere. which is to say: absolutely fascinating, interesting, and obviously separated from our current existence. and if there's a value to be gained in this alien anthropology, then it's maybe either a) because the pure value of imagining these situations is fun and b) because the analysis of something supposedly (literally) 'alien' to us actually doubles back and touches us again, that in reading historical fiction about some other non-existent society, we gain some other knowledge, or expound upon certain strains of thought. these narratives work as elongated thought-experiments, maybe, and we bring it back into contemporary life, absorbe the logics found in these novels into our own selves.
or maybe it's rather like sci-fi, technological sci-fi, which as a whole generates these strong mental image of 'what-the-future-is-like', and as such operates to modify and form the course of human movement and operation. what, did you dream of a future in which you could talk to someone and see their face when they were thousands of light years away? that you could fly on your magic carpet to see someone else? that hologram rooms would exist and you'd spend your entire life in them? sci-fi, or the image generated from overall sci-fi, is the mirage-like endgoal that technological progress moves towards, maybe, an image in the distant sky that you try to march towards as straight as the bird flies, but in the process you find yourself wandering around terrains, stumbling onto new building blocks, and once you get there we all realize that things are different. the networks that enable the face-to-face communication of video is not as interesting as the other repercussions of online networks: massive modifications on the level of social interactions, crowd-created software, instantaneous online communities, and so on.
and so then, in terms of architecture, what is this? are the monolithic structures of superstudio and the movement of the walking cities of archigram cut-outs that architects paste on their wall as an idealized image? 'somewhere, the architect works in his or her drab gray office, dreaming of a radical future'? is it the endpoint of a vector that points that-a-way, these radical optimistic fictions serving as long-term goals, the unachievable yearning for over-there generating all these other things in effort?
=
post-mortem, really.
brennschluss
has achieved partial brennschluss. rockets jettisoned, sir.
psshhwaaghgh.
we'll see. I hope I could have done more.
.5
tiny moment of procrastination in the midst of frantic indesigning and editing.
inspired by this guy and his FUIs - : fantasy user interfaces
it would be interesting to take a general non-techie poll of people who don't know computers very well about which of these FUIs or hacking stories seem most realistic and accurate. data about how something is perceived, etc. user interfaces are sort of grammar-like in that you learn the language of buttons and function hierarchy and etc; it strikes me that understanding the predilections of a userbase (even though it maybe influenced by fictional user interfaces in a movie) is partially necessary to understanding the set of mental rules or vocabularies that users will carry themselves to you when they sit in front of your designed screen;
...
home stretch.
cities and movies
last night in new york, 2007. when I come back you'll be in the new year, dear city.
smoky night, with sulfurous smoke really rising from sewers, being wisped away each time a car passes over it. the empire state building towering high, and taxis going especially fast riding waves of green lights down lexington ave. large buildings turned unmonumental by people and humanity, turned again monumental and overarching by fog, clouds, nature.
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Movie theatres deal in space - pure space, offering size.
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I finished Cosmopolis, by Don DeLillo. Most of the book was on the M16/M34 buses going crosstown; I think this was semi-intentional on my part, since the book chronicles a one-day journey of a stretch limo going crossbound on 47th street, from east to west. Thirteen streets south I mimic a fictional world, following DeLillo's finger-paths on maps, in parallel and not quite touching.
I'm struck how much of Fury (Salman Rushdie) I'm reminded of - powerful men angry, furious, pushing against the city, the sky bearing down, immortality realized. Cities are always rendered with such loving grace, such ethereal presence; they're larger than life and angry and out to get you. In some ways, I feel like this is an attempt of the author at trying to depict a universal city, shared and inhibited simultaneously. In practice, in reality, in experience, cities are more personal, experienced within personal spheres - cities, experienced within a singular unit of taste, feel, sound, vision. My relationship with the city is less about bumping into individuals and more about mixing in a crowd; about closed stores and fire hydrants, walking down avenues, calculating and orienting myself along this grid. This lattice of magnetism runs off-north, off-south, creating its own power structure, its own method of alignment: New York - Skewing Your Internal Compass for Centuries.
The city is a shared language without territory, internalized without ownership. I have this city, and it is not mine.
How many cities do you speak?
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Quote by Robert Smithson, heard at a talk at Performance Lab Space by Piper Marshall:
"Size determines an object, but scale determines art. A crack in the wall if viewed in terms of scale, not size, could be called the Grand Canyon. A room could be made to take on the immensity of the solar system. Scale depends on one's capacity to be conscious of the actualities of perception. When one refuses to release scale from size, one is left with an object or language that appears to be certain. For me, scale operates by uncertainty."
Robert Smithson, The Spiral Jetty, 1972
quick stuffcalendar: weekend of 22nd
The Streets of Europe
Jonathan LeVine Gallery
529 West 20th Street, 9E
Thomas Ruff
Jason Rhoades - Black Pussy
David Zwirner Gallery
525/519/533 w19th st
And Who Are You? Work from Saatchi Online
Sara Tecchia Roma Gallery
529 West 20th Street, 2nd Floor
Golan Levin - New Installations and Sculpture
Bitforms
529 west 20th street
Do Ho Suh
201 Chrystie St & chelsea
Lehmann Maupin Gallery
blurry
2:59am. Oh, these moments are precious; savor them.
of hair, cuts
This gushing review about Pinter's The Homecoming had a reference to Stein growing to resemble Picasso's portrait of her. In searching about it, I found:
"Only a few years ago when Gertrude Stein had had her hair cut short, she had always up to that time worn it as a crown on top of her head as Picasso has painted it, when she had had her hair cut, a day or so later she happened to come into a room and Picasso was several rooms away. She had a hat on but he caught sight of her through two doorways and approaching her quickly called out, Gertrude, what is it, what is it. What is what, Pablo, she said. Let me see, he said. She let him see. And my portrait, said he sternly. Then his face softening he added, mais, quand même tout 'y est, all the same it is all there."
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas
while exiting doors, a vague incoherence
stolid silences better felt as chilled air, a scene of particles, lights, and a not-so-dark sky, the chirpers up in the trees and in the subways. blinds up past orange hues, warmed cups, steam gasping its way curling, the slight humidity amplifying step clean clout clasp, close tonight, to-morning, of movement and directionality past and showed.
a collection of meaningful adjectives:
reification particlization deification, abstractisation, cross-continental-blues, swinging staccato polyrhyhmic?
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taste in my mouth of morning and limited ranges. back to you, fabric supple and appropriately two-sided, one-dimensional subliming (into three, or 2-space in 3d), the duality of young and old, morning and night, light and dark, sleeping and awake. give and take, push and pull, motives motifs lying hidden, modus operandi ulterior motif motive? ulterior motif, the vectorization of intent, will gathered into a line, elongated mathematical understandings sought.
a requirement for imperatives. walk that roof, skim the surface, the limiting reagent. move, talk, exhale, a duality, who was it, nathaniel mackey, some individuals lying high and low in the grand scheme - G.S.? fuck. forget this hierarchy, the emergent nature of interactions on a higher scale, not-so-parallel movements giving way to: marks on a floor, indentations on steps.
too bad, good morning. it's an awesome time, important questions entail such as: does the sun make a sound? how do you teach hope?