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There's so much more i'd like to write regarding the PHotoEspaña festival which runs in Madrid until July 28. Time has come to cover other exhibitions and artistic events i've visited more recently. However, i can't turn the page without mentioning this little fellow playing as ghetto policeman. Almost every mainstream Spanish newspaper selected this image among those offered by the press kit to illustrate their coverage of the festival.
The portrait was made by Henryk Ross, a Polish Jewish photographer who was employed by the Department of Statistics for the Jewish Council within the Lodz ghetto during the Holocaust. Ross documented everyday life in the ghetto while staying officially in the good graces of the German occupier. Before the closure of the ghetto in 1944, Ross buried his negatives in the hope to leave a record of the martyrdom. |
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The Gustav Zander's institute in Stockholm, founded in the late nineteenth century, featured 27 of the physician's custom-built machines.
Via Hugo Strikes Back! and boingboing. More images and information in Cabinet Magazine. |
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The Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo in Sevilla is currently running an exhibition dedicated to Ant Farm, a group of experimental architects and critical artists active mostly in the '70s. The exhibition includes videos, models, original drawings, inflatables and all the quiet you can expect in a cultural center located inside a stunning monastry on the bank of the Guadalquivir River, the Monasterio de la Cartuja de Santa María de Las Cuevas.
Founded in San Francisco in 1969 Ant Farm could be regarded today as a very effective mix between Archigram, the Rolling Stones and The Yes Men. Ant Farm embraced the latest technologies at the same time as they hit American culture on the head with their social and political comments and their highly critical (up to being in some cases destructive) approach to mass media. Their projects do not stop at the work of art itself, they also encompass the mass media rendering of that work of art. All i knew about them was their rusty Cadillac Ranch installation which i do not like very much but the rest of their practice impressed me beyond words. I can't think of any artistic group playing a similarly brilliant, innovative and multidisciplinary work today. Here's a shortcut to their works:
Ant Farm deployed their conceptual world through videos, manifestos, spectacular performances and installations until 1978, when they disbanded following a studio fire. Most of the slide and video documentation was saved, but very little else survived.
Ant Farm started their career as evangelists of inflatable structures. Cheap and easy to assemble, they challenged the American consumerism culture and fitted perfectly a nomadic, communal lifestyle, in total contrast with the Brutalist architecture prevalent in the United States during the 1960s.
In 1971, they took the road abroad their Media Van, a customised Chevrolet van turned into a mobile studio to share information and images with the public while they toured the country to give talks and organize public happenings. The van not only transported the material necessary to build their ICE 9 inflatables but its motor was also used to generate the energy indispensable to blow up the structure.
In 1972 the group built in Texas the House of the Century, a ferro-cement weekend residence with organic shapes that remind the inflatable structure that Ant Farm had realized a few years earlier, in particular their ICE 9 prototype.
Video showing what the House was like before its decay: The Dolphin Embassy was a never realized sea station in Australia which engaged with interspecies communication using the new video technologies. The structure would sail with the help of a solar mechanism.
In 1974, Ant Farm created their most famous pieces in Amarillo, Texas, Cadillac Ranch. They half-buried a row of used and junk Cadillac automobiles dating from 1949 to 1963, nose-first in the ground, at an angle corresponding to that of the Great Pyramid of Giza. To add to the outrage done to the iconic vehicle, the public is very welcome to graffiti the cars.
The installation was originally located in a wheat field, but was later moved 3 kilometers to the west, to a cow pasture in order to place it further from the limits of the growing city.
A year later Ant Farm staged the performance Media Burn. Dressed as astronauts, they drove at full speed a 1959 Cadillac into a wall of burning television sets. Media Burn critiqued American ideals of heroics and technological superiority, and offered an affront to the television media who were the only one invited to attend the event. Their video of the performance is styled after news coverage of a space launch, including melodramatic pre-stunt interviews with the artists and a speech by "JFK" (impersonated by Doug Hall).
Short video and a 26 minute one. Media Burn was not their first attack of the media, in 1972 they collaborated with the video collective Raindance to launch the guerrilla Top Value Television (TVTV) to provide alternative coverage of the political conventions of that year.
Let's close the post with The Eternal Frame, a 1975 reenactment of the John F. Kennedy assassination. Part of it plays on America's obsession with the media, but the video demonstrates also that the sacred images of the assassination cannot be mocked. The work can be read as a commentary on the pervasive media culture in America, as it explores how the Kennedy assassination itself became a new type of media event. Video: More images. The exhibition of Ant Farm's work is on view at the CAAC in Sevilla, Spain, until June 8, 2008. Actar has just released Ant Farm - Living Archive 7. Felicity D. Scott has collected archival material to illustrate the early trajectory of the collective, including its architecture, inflatables, performance, multimedia, and video work. |
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Found on the flickr sets for unofficial 'favorite photos' of the staff of the Otis Historical Archives of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, in Washington DC: set 1, 2 and 3.
See also: Four x-ray views of footbinding, ca. 1948
On the homepage: Masks worn during experiments with Plague. Philippines, probably around 1912. Via morbid anatomy. |
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Was taken last week at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies at La Jolla, California which Kati London and I visited courtesy of Lev Manovich and Jeremy Douglass. The institute was built by architect Louis Kahn as two symmetric concrete buildings with a thin stream of water flowing in the middle of a courtyard that separates the two. Too bad my images don't do justice to this amazing building.
I find it hard to believe that no one has ever shot a movie there. Elio Petri would have done something amazing with this set. Anyway, any solemn thought and sense of beauty we might have been filled with vanished half an hour after when we met with Mary Flanagan's Giant Joystick which is on view until March 17 in the art gallery in the Calit2 building at UCSD.
Extremely fun and physically exhausting. |
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I'm just back from the IxDA Interaction 08 conference organized by the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia. My favourite talk was Strategic Boredom by Molly or how two visionaries from the '50s and '60s could teach us something about introducing boredom into interaction.
When i realized that Molly posted most of her talk on her new blog Conceptual Device, i thought i could just add it to my del.icio.us links but then it would be lost for most of my readers. So i'm going to let you read the intro on her site and take over with what i wrote down during her talk, from the moment when she focused on Gordon Pask and Cedric Price. Not sure it makes much sense but it does make me happy. This blog was born out of a need to archive what could serve my own enlightenment after all. Martin Heidegger studied boredom in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics as part of his continual exploration of existence. At some point he suggested an interesting strategy when facing boredom: "not to resist straightaway but to let resonate... only by not being opposed to it, but letting it approach us and tell us what it wants, what is going on with it." The idea of exploring boredom took an interesting turn with cybernetics, Louis Kauffman, President of the American Society for Cybernetics, defines cybernetics as "the study of systems and processes that interact with themselves and produce themselves from themselves". There is first order cybernetics (not much interaction here) and second order cybernetics (an organism or social system is an agent in its own right, interacting with another agent, the observer.) Gordon Pask was interested in Second Order Cybernetic. Pask had a PHD in psychology and was particularly interested in learning and conversations.
In 1953, Pask created the Musicolour machine. The machine was inspired by the concept of synesthesia and aimed at exploring what happens when music and light interact with each other. He's the only one nor the first to work on such idea but what makes the Musicolour interesting is that Pask introduced the notion of boredom in the equation. The work held a "conversation" with the performer. The musician would respond to visual queues, the machine in turn would build an understanding of what the musician was playing, and, when it detects that the musician is repeating a same sequence too often, the system would "get bored" and challenge the musician to find new ways to re-engage the system. The idea of building upon boredom reappears with Cedric Price's Generator. Just like Archigram, Price didn't build much but his radical ideas had a huge influence on contemporary architecture. At the core of Price's practice was the belief that new technology could enable the public to gain control over their environment, resulting in a building which could be responsive to visitors' needs and the many activities intended to take place there. The Fun Palace, probably his most influential projects, was never realized but it nevertheless inspired the Centre Georges Pompidou that Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano built ten years later in Paris. Price became also famous for his project of a mobile university on rails, the Potteries Thinkbelt (1965). He proposed the conversion of declining industrial zone into a huge High Tech think-tank, with mobile classrooms and laboratories mounted on the rail lines, moving from place to place, from housing to library to factory to computer center.
Price was not interested in formalism but in conditions that would change people behaviour through their interaction with architecture. The idea reappears in Price's Generator (1976-79, not built). This series of cubes, screens, walkways and catwalks could be moved around by a mobile crane on the site to meet visitors' needs and desires. Price's collaborator John Frazer, proposed that the cubes be outfitted with sensors that would report on the use of the components. If the pieces of Generator weren't moved enough, they would grow bored and design their own layouts, which in turn would be handed off to the mobile crane operator to put into place.
In defining architecture, you don't necessarily define the consumption of it. All the designs we did for Generator [Florida, 1966] were written as menus, and then we would draw the menu, and because I like bacon and eggs for breakfast, it was all related to that bit of bacon and that bit of egg. They were all drawn, however cartoon-like, in the same order - not in the order the chef or cook would arrange them on your plate, but in the order in which the consumer would eat them. And that is related to the consumption or usefulness of architecture, not to the dispenser of it. Generator would also have the task to surprise its users. In collaboration with programmer-architects John and Julia Frazer, he imagined that each element of Generator would become "intelligent" by being outfitted with a microchip. The sensors would interact with four computer programs that performed a variety of tasks, including keeping inventory, aiding Generator's users to design different layouts, and most powerfully and importantly, getting bored. The boredom routine would run if people did not request changes of Generator frequently enough, or if the parts were not aptly used. It would draw up new plans for Generator, which would be handed off to the social elements of the project.
In the correspondence between Price and his system research consultants Julia & John Frazer, Molly encountered this thought-provoking sentence: "If you kick a system the very least you would expect is for them to kick you back." What interested Price was not to design the perfectly controlled system but to create a Generator which would make things that neither the architect nor the users expect, a system that gets involved and plays an active role once it gets bored. That was his idea of interaction: a troublesome system that bites back, that engages in a conversation and do things you wouldn't have thought about, no matter how carefully you have devised that system. Previously: Paskian Environments. |
