Material Concerns

Extensive housing blog :
http://www.google.com/notebook/public/04552762255219171803/BDRJ6SgoQ6eXZotEj?hl=ru

Experiential Section

Shadow Installations

http://monoblepsia.blogspot.com/2009/02/incredible-shadow-installations.html


Kumi Yamashita

Tim Noble and Sue Webster

Abundance

Text Rain

Design Idea - Collective Participation and Event

Design Proposal:
Design a perforated shading device in a public space in Toronto. Record the movement of the people who pause to use the device and animate the space. Film their shadows intermingling with the light filtered through the shading device against a hard surface incorporated within the design of the device.

Event Preparation:
Edit the filming of the human shadow and light recordings. Install shading device in school for final review and project the new choreographed sequence back onto the hard surface of the device.

Project goals:
1. Craft a shading/light filtering device to be installed in a public space.
2. Use the movement of many people as well as daylight to record the animation of a public space.
3. Investigate the intermingling (communication) between light and shadow against the materials chosen and start to understand   how these elements work together.
4. Attempt to instill a sense of atmosphere through the careful editing and choreographing of the recordings
5. Create a performance/event out of the collective participation of many people in a public space, without being too prescriptive about their activities or movement.

Missing factors: Incorporation of sound.
Could be facilitated by:
the oscillations of the shading device with the wind.
the conversations of the people using the space
using music/sound to draw people towards the device in the public space.

Reinventing Identity and Public Image

the part of the environment that lay beyond a person's own threshold and outside his own possessions, but to which, however, that person had recognized claim of usage---not to produce commodities but to provide for the substance of kin. Neither wilderness nor home is commons, but that part of the environment for which customary law exacts specific forms of community respect. (Illich 1982:18)

In cities of increasingly circumscribed social, racial, or economic enclaves, the maiden has come to both symbolize and provide neutral territory, a ground where people can gather on a common plane. It is a place that offers freedom from obligation. This ability to accommodate a diverse range of social and political structures makes the maiden an extremely significant space in the city. It is a place where people can touch the spirit of commonness (Mathur 199:215)

The Architecture of an Identity Crisis

Yabani R2 restaurant (photo credit: bernardkhoury.com)

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2008/07/the_architectur.php

Vincent Descombes's definition of the notion of 'rhetorical country'

Where is the character at home? The question bears less on a geographical territory than a rhetorical territory (rhetorical in the classical sense, as defined by the rhetorical acts: plea, accusation, eulogy, censure, recommendation,warning and so on). The character is at home when he is at east in the rhetoric of the people with whom he shares life. The sign of being at home is the ability to make oneself understood without too much difficulty, and to follow the reasoning of others without any need for long explanations. The rhetorical country of a character ends where his interlocutors no longer understand the reasons he gives for his deeds and actions, the criticisms he makes or the enthusiasms he displays. A disturbance of rhetorical communication marks the crossing of a frontier, which should of course be envisaged as a border zone, a marchland, rather than a clearly drawn line. (p.179)

In the world of supermodernity people are always, and never, at home: the frontier zones of 'marchlands' are no longer open on to totally foreign worlds. Supermodernity finds its full expression in non-places, therefore supermodernity cannot aspire to the same ambition as modernity. The spectator of modernity sees the interweaving of old and new, the spectator of supermodernity makes the old (history, exoticsim, local particularity) into a specific spectacle.(advertisement) These spectacles play no part in any synthesis, they simply bear witness, during a journey, to the coexistence of distinct individualities, perceived as equivalent and unconnected.

(Auge p.20)

Bibliography - 08.10.09

Auge, Mark. 1995. From Places to Non Places, in non places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity p.75-120. New York and London: Verso

Borden, Iain, & Kerr, Joe, & Pivaro, Alicia, & Rendell, Jane. 1996. Strangely Familiar: Narratives of Architecture in the City. London: Routledge

Brenner, Neil, and Keil, Roger. 2006 The Global Cities Reader. New York: Routledge

Easterling, Kelley. 2005. Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press

Hayden, Dolores. 1997. The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press

Ibelings, Hans. 2002. Supermodernism: Architecture in the Age of Globalization. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers

Illich, Ivan. 1980. The Tools of Conviviality . New York: Harper and Row

Mathur, A. 1999. ''Neither Wilderness, Nor Home: The Indian Maiden,'' In James Corner, ed., Recovering Landscapes. New York: Princeton Architecture Press, 205-219.

Oakley, David. 1970 The Phenomenon of Architecture in Cultures of Change. Toronto: Pergamon Press

Rykwert, Joseph (2002).The Seduction of Place: The History and Future of the City. New York: Vintage Books

Sarkis, Hashim. 2006. Two Squares. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press

Shane, David Grahame. 2005. Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, Urban Design, and City Theory. Chischester, West Sussex: Wiley-Academy

Zeisel, John. 1975. Sociology and Architectural Design. New York: Russell Sage Foundation

Altermodern Manifesto

'Altermodernism' - Planetary negotiations/discussions between cultures

A new modernity is emerging, reconfiguring to an age of globalizaton. Understood in its economic, political and cultural aspects.

Increased communication, travel and migration are affecting the way we live. Our daily lives consist of journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe.

Multiculturalism and identity is being is being overtaken by creolization. Artists are now starting from a globalized state of culture.

This new universalism is based on translations, subtitling and generalized dubbing. Today's art explores the bonds that text and image, time and space weave between themselves.

''What matters today is to translate values of cultural groups and to connect them to the world network. This 'reloading' process of modernism according to 21 century issues could be called 'altermodernism' a movement connected to the creolization of cultures and the fight for autonomy, but also the possibility of producing singularities in a more and more standardized world.''

http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/altermodern/manifesto.shtm

Statement of Interest

In our current world climate, capitalism and globalization are shaping contemporary cities where the prevailing social, political and economic structures have profit-maximization as a core value. In an increasingly uniform and standardized world, the increasing numbers of contemporary travelers are bombarded with signs and images which are constantly repeated across cities. Individual cultures seem to be at a threat of becoming extinct as ways of living, eating and communicating become universal, making it increasingly difficult to preserve cultural diversity.

At the fourth Tate Triennial at the Tate Britain curator Nicholas Bourriaud introduces the idea that was that post-modernism (in terms of explorations into origins and identities) is dead, and that we are entering a phase of 'altermodernism'; a reaction against the standardization and commercialism that is linked to globalization. This reaction is formed out of discussions between different cultures which exist in a globalized state. Instead of being initiated by a single culture, these conversations and could be interpreted as the translations of cultural values and the formation of cultural hybrids in the contemporary city.

I wish to explore and expand upon the idea of cultural hybrids, using charged, contemporary cities as a place of research. I would be looking to create narratives, landmarks and monuments in urban environments which may currently be overlooked in the city, but which I feel deserve a place in the history as locations of diversity and cultural richness. These interventions would hopefully establish a dialogue between cultures, as well as give a 'power of place' to neglected areas which deserve to be identified and remembered.

I will be looking at Beirut as an extreme example of a culturally charged city, particularly Martyr’s Square, the main public square in the centre of the city. I will also be examining Toronto’s Kensington Market as a cross-road between many ethnicities existing in the city’s cultural make-up. These places offer a facility to focus my research; however, the nature of the topic and the ideas generated is defined by a global scale.