listening to the history of listening

yesterday sarah mosca and i went on a mission to teufelsberg in berlin - to the old NSA listening station. a proper structure for sound/listening in the public realm.





and oh my god, it was fucking amazing.



we had a string of excellent luck: the weather was great, we found our way ok, dodged fences, security and ticket inspectors.



we were like two of the famous five off on ad adventure. we even had a packed lunch - a thoroughly modern version of 'slices of ham and lashings of ginger beer'.



the station was unbelievable - visually and acoustically.



sarah and i did an impromptu quasi-performance of sorts, fucking around with the zany acousitcs of the listening dome - something that both blixa bargeld and alice hui-sheng chang would have been proud of.



i then tried to squeeze in a quick listening project of the lift shaft before die sicherheit arrived. fingers crossed i can go back soonish.

here's wikipedia's history of the place, just to put it into perspective.

venezia baby! 2010

i've just popped down to the adriatic for a couple of days to absorb as much sun, saltwater, blue sky and 'la dolce vita' as i can before i return to my second winter of the year in germany.

i can tell you that it suits me to a tea here. the coffee, the chillaxed pace, the sun/water combo. even the madness of venice isn't bothering me like it did last time and it's so nice to hang out on the vaporetti again.

i came to check out the architecture biennale (last time i was here for the art biennale) and i kind of cheated 'cos i pretty much followed rory hyde's suggestions with a few added extras of my own and it was actually perfect.

i'm lucky that i'm not an architect, so whilst i have a level of critique and certainly believe that architecture needs to be political and has an undeniable relationship to people (ie, without people, architecture is dysfunctional), but i haven't formal training, so i can be more easily pleased than when i go to the art biennale. i can also 'skim' things a little easier.

it was also super-nice to have a working camera. last time i was in town, my camera had just broken. boo.


rory's suggestions are here

and it was an excellent itinerary. i had slightly different highlights, but still massive thumbs up to mr hyde. thanks rory!

here are my thumbs up:


japan - form is great, politics is satisfyingly present and videos are excellent - i watched all 3.




australia - they managed to make the cox disaster into a great space, it's immersive, interactive and the floodslicer movie is a great clip of the best of oz architects, which i also watched all the way through. i also bought a t-shirt (sucker).




OAM preservation - it really was great. the photo index, the alternate history, the not-so-slick look relief.
the selgascano flexible corner space was also an excellent antidote to all the furrowed brow gloss.




hans ulrich obrist the ubiquitous - his interviews really were great - especially as they were still very 'current' - undertaken within the last few weeks. sadly, no where near enough time to watch them all.

janet cardiff - motet for 40 voices. in the round, multi-directional sound sculpture. nice to see sound relating to architecture gets a super-small look-in.





transsolar+tetsuo kondo - cloud room. it wasn't as claustrophoic as the gormley white light, so was actually really engaging. it also managed to create a rene magritte-style space, probably by accident, which i loved.




the OE (olafur eliasson) water whip - wet to the previous smoke, it uses water, light and motors to articulate space with trajectory.



studio mumbai - not on its own, but as a follow-up to the 1:1 architecture exhibit at v&a.


oh, and venice itself. it's pretty fuckin' spectacular.




my gripes:

wim wenders's film - interesting idea, but could have been halved - and if i saw one more person close their eyes and 'drink in' the building, i was going to vomit on the carpet.

the aalto exhibit in finlandia was extra disappointing. i was hoping that would be super-rad.


still a lot of usual architecture presentations that don't necessarily deal with real people, or the nature of public life or even have guts.


and obviously, this isn't based on a comprehensive study of the biennale: just a snapshot.


tomorrow, i think i might go to the beach. laters!

sound appropriating space

last night i was an interesting night for thinking about the use of sound to appropriate space.

it started with a series of performances for listening spaces, as part of the sound art program at ars electronica. of course i missed the first set trying to find something to eat without meat in it. which i'm still cross about - it included a perfomance of luigi nono's la fabrica illuminata, which i only just heard about last week (thanks huw!).

but, after that i saw/experienced some brilliant works - two by arvo pärt that took place in a room where there is a water-based sound-wave visualisation work. both works, at either end of a long warehouse space, influenced the play of light onto a wall from the shimmering water. the light and water articulated the acoustic resonance of the music in terms of the space - it was perfect. for the first work i watched the performers and the space, for the second, just the space.

after that, we all went outside to listen to another work, in the 'public' space. it was amazing and shocking for me to see immediately that being 'outside' in 'public', all prior codes of music listening etiquette went out the window. people were walking around, drinking beer and eating, i was tweeting about it, people were talking, facing all kinds of directions and there was hardly any 'attention'. there was no 'performer' as such, although the context was still within the frame of this series of sound perfomances.

i always knew that the place of the stage/frame and black box/white box was to bring people to attention, but i had never seen it contrasted and enacted so quickly. it was amazing.

next, we were in the sound space - part of the tabakfabrik that has been singled out as an amazing resonant space and within which a lot of minimal sound works have been played over the last few days - because of the amazing acoustics and reverb. rubert huber with franz hautzinger played a sound field, which i mainly experienced by lying on my back and staring up at the ceiling, letting the composition envelope me.

i noticed how people listening throughout these performances, and it was interesting to note the dynamics in this last spatial work. the traditional dynamic between performer/audience was rendered useless by the end and again, it was about the work and how it was experienced.

it started off with a stack of people facing the centre, where the instruments were. after half way (during which i had been lying down the whole time), i noticed that people who couldn't "not-watch" had left, and the rest had found positions lying down on the floor, propped up against the wall, relaxing into their chairs and assuming positions more conducive to a non-visual attention.

right up my alley.

in fact, people were so relaxed that the last 5 minutes of a performance included a new bass-line: from a snoring member of the audience, which reverbed throughout the building. me and a couple of peeps almost wet ourselves repressing our laughter.

then, as a compliment, or adjunct to that on the way home, i was walking home through the empty streets of linz when a pair of drunks came walking down the hill, singing. i could hear them from about 500 metres away and it was such a beautiful sight - arm in arm, walking and singing some english pop song together. as we got closer, they didn't even stop singing - we just waved at each other and they carried on belting out this tune, which carried through the whole city. i could hear them for about 500m after we passed too - i giggled my arse off the whole time.

i loved it! they were using the empty city as a perfect acoustic stage, again not for the audience/performance dynamic but for the work itself.

image thanks to rubra from flickr. i will upload my pics a bit later

boomtown rats

when i was in dubai a few years ago, i had an amazing time - such a mind-opener for me. the excess and excessive development was fascinating. and the polarity between rich and poor, ruling minority and voiceless majority was powerful.

on the way to visit the sharjah biennale, my friend and i drove past some of the labour camps and the workers walking home in 50º heat (no public transport there, darling). their accommodation was abysmal - fibro, prefab saunas dumped in the desert. you could see from the number of coveralls hanging on the rails how many people were crammed in.

it was desolate.

i was super sad and angry to read this article on al-jazeera english that speaks of the decreasing conditions for these people in the financial crumble. the rich developer skips out, no problem, of course.

http://english.aljazeera.net//news/middleeast/2010/07/201072885146573166.html

it's all very well to speak of the amazing creative output of dubai architecture and the boom of the architects' playground, but it disgusts me to see an industry treating their labour workers as 'collateral damage'.

policy that protects the most vulnerable in any system is exactly for this purpose - not to spoil the fun and excitement of business risk and entrepreneurship. but to account for the reality of life when shit hits the fan and the oxygen masks drop down.

geek week 11

you're probably already sick of hearing about the ins and outs of the geek in residence, but i've only got 3 more weeks to go, so you'll just have to suffer.

lucky for you, this week was a quiet week - it's been all about the archive.

i have had the awesome help and conspiring company of cherie, the super-rad intern here and together we've been plugging away at transferring content.

there is a massive archive of information currently on the gallery's site that we need to transfer and sometimes it's all about copy and paste. setting up a migration tool was going to be too intense and too much of a time constraint.

as it turns out, working through the archive of the old site has been an amazing opportunity for me to understand the organisation and its history. i feel like the essence of a gallery or similar organisation can really be reflected through its living archive. our aim from the beginning has been to bring that surface.

i have learned some of the best ways to approach digital archiving and preserve links and integrity for this small organisation, which is really about self-containment. i can't imagine the archiving nightmare of a more complex site, with e-commerce, etc.

digital archiving is a massive deal that places like the national library, educational libraries and the australia council are all over. archiving for media art is a massive can of worms and it's one that westspace will benefit from in the future - there is an extensive archive of documentation and digital publications (CD-ROMs) that is going to be a whole project in and of itself.

long after i'm gone :)

bitchin' stitchin'

this pic doesn't really give you an idea of how awesome it is, but there's an absolutely brilliant show at seventh gallery right now, by georgina cue. two massive three-dimensional tapestries that are interior dioramas/theatre sets.

there's something a little bit agatha christie's mousetrap/cluedo about them - all mysterious, dark and broody colours and set at an angle so as you walk in, you look into the depth of another room.

bewdiful.

listening and silence in the built environment

if you're in melbourne on thursday night, and feel like participating in some discussion about sound, listening, silence, contemplation, architecture, the built environment, philosophy and quietitude, you're in luck.

i'll be giving a lecture as part of the architecture + philosophy series,

covering ideas about listening/silence and the forms of acoustic spaces which facilitate them, i'll focus on the grotto, the cloister, the autobahn and the headphone as a bit of a progression of those spaces.

i may also quote some adorno, some john cage and even wikipedia. just to keep it real.

and i'll also be speaking about some of the work that i've done which relates to a lot of these ideas.

starting at 6:30 pm, it is held at RMIT and will be an interesting night with some thought-provoking discussion. which usually comes from the audience :D

deets:
Thursday May 27, 2010
18:30
RMIT Building 8, Level 11, Room 68 (8.11.68).
Entrances are on Swanston and Bowen Sts, between Franklin and La Trobe Sts.

No need to RSVP, just turn up.

death, silence, performance and architecture

For some absurd reason, i'm reading Michel Foucault's Spectacle of the Scaffold.

Morbidity by the French philosopher seemed a fitting chaser to the sexual introspection and feminist meanderings of Erica Jong's Fear of Flying. Suffice to say, i'm having some weird dreams at the moment.

Anyway, Foucault speaks about the public changes of death-as-punishment and they appear to coincide with political changes of modern democracy. It seems that one man, one vote, also inspired the idea of one man, one death - that the punishment of torture by a thousand deaths (first drawn and quartered, flayed, then dragged along behind a horse and cart before being burnt at the stake and ashes scattered to the wind, etc) was barbaric (!) and not fitting a system that sought equality and civilisation. He describes the history of penal changes in which punishment is gradually separated from a corporal act into that of the soul (or at least the mind) - a concept which is well-known by the legal peeps, but i found it disturbingly fascinating.

All of this has got me thinking again about death.

Death as the ultimate silence - a true absence of sound.

Death as a political consideration - one necessarily built into the public system of governance, law and order and infrastructure. In terms of death-as-punishment, it is the absolute removal of a citizen's place in society: the removal of one voice. And such a lack of voice is in fact the only silence in the public realm. It is primarily an undesirable one. Not this utopian, desired, i-just-need-some-peace-and-quiet silence, but the true absence of sound.

Death as an act to be performed- that the performance associated with capital punishment - in all its forms across the centuries - have been a performance of creating death and silence.

Architecture of death - the gallows, the guillotine, the dungeon and the death row prison ward - all architectural types for the creation of silence. Foucault speaks of the ever-lengthening distance between The Executioner and the prisoner - no longer does he even touch the body, but now presses a button. Has the designer who is charged with the task of designing these spaces begun to take on these roles?

These are just a few loose ideas, but something which has been an unexpected aside to my research into sound/listening/silence in public.

I know you think it's too morbid a subject for a Sunday morning, but how's this for timing:

- Yesterday was the Melbourne Zombie Shuffle
- Daniel Mudie Cunningham resurrected his Funeral Songs blog and
- Elvis Richardson and Claire Lambe have opened a new space called Death be Kind which opens on 29 June with The Memorial.

the city of sound

tom gould just condensed years of art, architecture, psychoacoustics and cultural studies theory, right there.

OE

i just got back from a roaring trip to sydney and brisbane. sucking in as much art catch-up as i possibly could in two days for each city. easier said than done.

olafur eliasson at the MCA was a massive drawcard and, thanks to sydney's terrible public transport, and my awful time management skills in the face of such chaos, i didn't get to the gallery until friday morning.

funnily enough, it was exactly the kind of exhibition i expected it to be. usually i like surprises in my blockbusters, but there was something extraordinarily comforting about this sense of familiarity.




the mirrored window extension as you first walk in, with its tunnel of one thousand reflections, was perfect for the vista over circular quay and his spectral mirrored architectonic passageway into some of the main galleries was just beautiful. that colour reflective acrylic is an amazing material that seems to be made for OE and his light/colour spectrum schtick.

on either side of the entranceway were two moving light-based works, both reminiscent of film history (especially hitchcock) - one created spaces using the angles of 7 massive quartz light cans and the other used the combination of filter and refraction to create a revolving light/colour installation.

i have seen the lego room before, so didn't participate, but i wasn't surprised to see it filled with teenage boys, building their koolhaasian architectural monuments to the phallus. it was so cliche, that it took the glee out of it for me. although i was pleased to see the one asian boy building a great wall-esque extension - going for span rather than height. interesting ethnographic studies in that room abound!

bracketing the lego room were two spaces that investigated pure colour and light. the circular reflection cylinder was dreamy - on a slow time-loop which graded the colour from one end of the spectrum to the other, slowly moving through from violet to red and every shade in between. as i overheard, at no time, were you ever a witness to a single pure colour - always moving from one to the next.



the other colour-light room was all pure colour. yellow (which, strangely, is the single colour i have always associated with OE. probably because of his sun work, but maybe even before that..). whilst loads of visitors were all freaked out by the purple compensation sensation, i enjoyed the strangely flattened depth of field. it was beautiful to just watch the human form in an altered palette - all nostalgic and dreamlike. i could have actually stayed in that room for a really long time, but sadly i had time constraints.

tracking back through the gallery, past the entrance to the southern wing i flicked past the photos of geological colour samples. i kind of found it boring, although it certainly put his practice in to context. and i went straight into the model and print room, where i fell in love with his 3-part colour wheel/palette prints. they were embossed and layed over each other so that the colours were in a wheel, created by an overlapping triptych of prints - with a perfect triangle of space in the middle. oookkkaayyy, so it does sound pretty simple, but my colour/shape/math geek self went a little weak at the knees.

which was backed up by the part of the show that made me go quite silly with love. i call it the tessellation station.

the first room was lined with his moss wall. by this stage of the show, it was whitey-yellow, all the chlorophyl having been drained out of it. in fact, it reminded me of how the great barrier reef is going to look in the not-too-distant-future, will all the coral being bleached out of existence by the lack of ozone.




in that room was the coolest kaleidescope object - aluminium cones joined together to create a myriad of facets and reflections that produced such simple, but beautiful shapes of reflections. these were visible either through being inside the space and looking out through the cones, or from the outside, looking into the cones. even the structure itself, with its quasi-industrial connections and materials. and, at the same time, the whole thing reminded me of something out of Dragonball Z. or something like that.

the final space was the water-room, which was preceeded by an earthenware brick corridor, floor to ceiling, which modulated temperature, insulated the space and acoustically deadened it. although most treated it as an interstitial space, i loved that in and of itself.

so much so that i forgot to go back into the cloud room. d'oh! if you're going to the show in the next 4 weeks, don't do that. go all the way to the end and into the cloud room. especially if you don't have the chance to go back. like i don't. boo!

anyway, the OE show is fantastic. i was a little concerned that the show might end up being an extension of ego and i would end up hating mr eliasson, or at least feel slimey afterwards. not so - its timbre is so perfectly weighted that i could go back again and again and again.

bravo!


image credits: all pinched from the mca site.

the cone of silence: electrofringe

As you may have been aware, The Cone of Silence was invited to be part of the Electrofringe Festival the weekend before last in Newcastle, as a direct challenge to the extensive program of noise production and sound art. Somaya and Daniel - directors of the Festival were interested in the antithetical nature of this (non) sound piece as a vital aspect of any discourse about sound, art and public space. And from a sound-geek person's point of view, i was more than interested in attending :D

‘The Cone’ as it became affectionately known as, made regular appearances throughout the city of Newcastle, ‘soundproofing’ it, or at least bringing back some silence to parts of public life:

- Civic Park and the Fountain
- Newcastle Library
- Darby Street (the café/counterculture ‘precinct’ of Newcastle)
- Train between Civic Station and Newcastle Station
- The TINA ‘Zine Fair
- Regular trips down the main thoroughfare – King St, between the Festival club on the hill and Octopod, near Civic Park.

In the evenings, ‘The Cone’ rested at the Festival Club, allowing people to interact with it as a static object or climb in it during gigs. And maybe to give me a bit of a rest. It weighs 10kgs you know...











There was a range of interactions with the Cone of Silence as a feature of public life during the Festival:
- A lot of wry smiles of appreciation from passersby and ‘zine fair visitors
- Rapping on the outside from a group of drunk bogans on the Friday night and the obligatory intense questioning and quasi-harassment
- Intrigue from the Police (but ultimate nonchalance – due to the festival being on)
- No engagement whatsoever on the train (which was interesting in and of itself)
- Trying the piece on by a few brave peeps.
- Being asked if the piece was an ATM (based on a TV Commercial?)
- A loud and cheery “Hi Cone of Silence!!” yelled from a car on Darby St, by a local who had been given flyers two days previously. I was almost a local then.
- And inntense conversation about the codes of silence in Fijian spiritual practice with a woman who had just returned from a silent retreat there. She tried the piece on and wanted lots of photos.

and generally a good feeling about the work.

In terms of art in the public space, the level of interaction with art - certainly facilitated by the parameters of a well-know festival – were encouraging and enlightening.

Each of these reactions, whether it was to the object itself, to the nostalgic Get Smart reference, to the idea of having some ‘space’, or to the intrusion of mobile architecture certainly echoed the sentiments many have with the much-smaller and less-conspicuous versions of acoustic private space: headphones - which is what i was kinda hoping for.

There's more to say about my experience at Electrofringe, but this is just a little taste of the actual work.








Obvious big thanks goes to Somaya and Daniel for their awesome support, courage, organisation and openness as festival directors.

Extra big thanks to Max Milne and Victoria Bennett for their added awesome photo stylee skills.

site-writing

i'm a whole week behind on posting about this, but it's always better late than never, right?*



last friday, as part of the architecture + philosophy series, design research institute and the urban interior research group from RMIT, jane rendell - writer, architectural designer, art critic and historian from the bartlett (ucl) in london- gave a presentation: to and fro: site writing.

she spoke about the role of writing in terms of art/architecture, the role of critique, the influence of ego and the id on critical architecture and the inevitable interstitial space between public and private.

i left the lecture almost bursting with ideas. in fact, i almost left myself a voicemail message as a reminder of all the cool stuff i had heard. i kind of wish i did because, 7 days later, all i can remember is the feeling and a faint connection to the notes i took.

she does have a new book coming out soon - site-writing, in which the process of critique and writing has been developed into a more formal process-based work, in which the various forms of language about site and experience are interspersed, a collage of sorts, even.

and as interesting as that is, a point of discussion which we had included the importance of purely functional writing and/or critique. where the traditional roles of object and outcome remain separated and the writer takes on the role of designer - responding to a brief: to articulate the nuance and visual code of an artist/architect/performer's work

there were a couple of key points, which i thought were particularly interesting.

1. immersive critique - whereby the writer responds to the work, not as a detached observer, or dissociated object, but from within the space. it reminded me about andrea fraser's 'little frank and his carp' - the video work she did where she responded to the guggenheim by literally following the directives of the audio guide - rubbing herself on the smooth walls, etc.

2. repression presents itself through repetition. i thought this was a particularly interesting concept. coming from a 'history never repeats' aspect, but i guess from an aesthetic position, it's something i'd be interested in researching some more.

3. the relationship of feminist theory and psychoanalysis to architecture. luce irigray is prime example, but i love being part of a discussion where the concept of design acknowledges gender politics and sexual identity. goodness abound.


i'm hoping that her presentation/paper will be uploaded to the arch+phil site soon, because i need a refresher course, but in the mean time, here is link to her presentation for one day sculpture in nz.

and some pics of my notes. you know, writing as image and back again [click to enlarge].














*except having your period. then it's always better never.

phew!

well, the cone of silence is in. or up. or on. or whichever preposition is most appropriate for the work, really.

i was sleep-deprived, strung out and starving at the opening, so if you came and i ignored you, or looked at you funny, please forgive me, it was a night of little dramas.

but it was also a pretty successful night.

success. that's a word i've never used with a work before, but there, i said it. it feels pretty good to say that, actually.
maybe that makes me a bit of a wanker. *shrug*

loads of people were into the work - in every sense of the term - people were queuing up to get in and have a go. and most people had a pretty positive experience of it too, which is always ace.

it's at first site gallery (on swanston st in melbourne) until the 26th september, so feel free to pop in and get cosy. i'll be there on the 24th and 26th september, so do pop by and say hey.

today i make a commitment to the future we design together.

initially this was going to be a post about the state of design festival, a project that i planned and one organised by those fabulous ladies over at architecture + philosophy. it was going to be about the future of acoustic spaces, one of choice and the generation which has a commitment to choice.

but instead it's going to be about backing out of a commitment in order to preserve ones integrity. about not designing for the sake of an opportunity, but having the restraint to remain authentic to a level of quality and/or clarity of message.


you're all sick of hearing about my research into sound in the public space, but when i was working towards project for this final semester, i checked out to see what the state of design and their fantastic cultural program were doing, remembering that their theme was 'sampling for the future' - what an awesome partnership: sampling, sound, choice, the future, architecture/design and public space.





i got in contact with the peeps at SoD and it was all very exciting - a last-minute inclusion, but one which could still happen in the 6-week turnaround. sometimes, when the timing is right, everything just flows and you can pull off a project in record time.


this was not one of those times.


as soon as we locked it in, everything just ground to a halt: suppliers were out of stock, samples couldn't be shipped and, more importantly, i just couldn't unlock any money from anywhere and i was fast running out of time to find some. [granted, it's not my field of expertise and i'm sure if it was i would know exactly where to find some, but hey - i is what i is].

i started to be anxious all the time - losing sleep about where i was going to find the money for this, how could i source that from overseas to save time, how could i work the timing around work and i needed to brief the volunteers. the list of things to do kept getting longer and longer. and i wasn't kicking any goals. as each day towards the deadline kept ticking over, the project was getting less and less finished. it was going to be a really crap install, the way this was going.

and, more importantly, i was miserable about it.

i had no faith in the work, i was barely talking about it - i sure as hell wasn't promoting it anywhere until i had a level of satisfaction about it and i was losing any kind of perspective, commitment and aesthetic judgment, fast. i was hemorrhaging.

so, whilst at the ballet with my mum, after barely noticing the first act, i decided that i needed to pull out of the project. i needed to risk disappointing a few, in order to salvage the best parts of the idea. to not present a half-baked design which would benefit, delight or inspire no one. i made a commitment to the future i designed. just not together. and just not right now.

i can't tell you how much lighter i felt. it was instant. and i suddenly had room in my head (and excitement in my heart) for the other projects i was working on. i suddenly had some clarity about works that really did have enough time. and enough money. and i knew that i had reached some kind of milestone - some weird internal rite of passage, where i had said 'no' to a great opportunity, for the sake of my work. it seemed almost old-fashioned (you young whippersnapper, you).

unsurprisingly, i had a whole swag of support for this lack of commitment. LI, NT, DR and GJ were all stellar. and of course my mum was delighted. not just because i paid attention to the second half of the ballet, but nothing worries a mother more than seeing a furrow tattooed into her child's brow.


so, today i make a commitment to the future we design together. by pulling out of projects, in the interest of my own integrity.
and in doing so, i commit to the value of that design and of that future.

baking architecture

I've been working on one of the baking architecture projects for this year's state of design festival*- the one between jill's restaurant and hassell. It has actually been a fantastic merger of my many loves: sculpture, food, architecture and family. The crew at jill's have been an extended family to me for a while, and my mum happens to be the sous chef there. So when she told me about the project, that she'd be partnered with hassell and was a little nervous, i jumped at the chance to get involved.

And, as it turns out, my skills have been quite useful. i've been able to translate between the lanugage of architecture and food, on both sides of the form/taste divide. And the collaboartion itself has been an amazing experience. The idea of combining both these practices is genius.

In terms of 'practice', there have been a surprising number of similarities (as well as some of the obvious differences). On a basic structure, they have very similar hierarchical dynamics - head chef/principal architect, sous chef/senior designer, model maker/dishpig. on this project, it has also been inspiring (and a little bit scary) to see that both of the 'seniors' are women and have a similar type of engagement with the project. it's all about ideas and throwing in possibilities and thinking big.

and then you have the designer/artist/model makers reeling them in to focus on the project, discussing the practicalities, making the work, rearranging the pieces. it has been fascinating to watch unfold.


in terms of the materials, the work really does sit firmly in the middle of architecture and food. the duration of the exhibition is 10 days. which, for architecture is like the blink of an eye. for food, it's like eternity. and so, the forms are essentially a big compromise and a stretch for both sides to think a little further afield.

the architects have been liberated by the lack of building codes and planning infrastructure durge - allowed to play with texture and colour and wobbliness and smell. [since when did you judge a building on its smell]. materials are tested with our tongues and our noses and if a bit breaks, they get to pop it in their mouth.

whereas the chefs have been focused by the intensity of the timeframe - it has been a great challenge to find foodstuffs that will last the time but still reflect a prescribed form. instead of tasting the work, to see if it works, it is about shape and image - the structure and 'behaviour' of food. it is about combining flavours that might ordinarily be awful, but work because, when it sets, best reflect that alcove and overhanging floorplate. or something along those lines.

from where i've been sitting, it has been a great project of problem solving goodness. and i have the fortune of being relatively objective in the whole process - not my building, not my 'cake'. i get to work with some of the decorative elements, to be a studio assistant again and to work with some of the most amazingly talented creative types in Victoria.

I'm looking forward to (and a bit nervous of) seeing all the entries, which are unveiled on the Festival opening night at the AIA - Architects Institute of Australia - on the 15th July and pretty chuffed at the good times had by all.


*especially as i was supposed to have a work of my own in the festival, but had to pull out for reasons i won't go into yet.

architecture love fest!!

how awesome is this cheesy 80s rap edu-vid on architecture!! i'm in love!! (thanks to design tavern for this one..)

"1.2.3! When you look at a building reaching up to the sky there’s a lot more to building it than meets the eye!
ITS AR!..CHITECTURE! ITS ARCHITECTURE!"




i'd even go so far as to say it was better than the hadron collider rap kickin' around prior to the start of this parallel universe...




BTW, if you're into big deals, like the end of the known universe and architecture competitions, the shortlist for the melbourne uni architecture faculty competition has been posted.

and there was all this talk of zaha hadid... pfft!

some interesting finalists. and a few same-old-same-olds.
i'm cheerin' for DS+R.

sound on demand

the other night i went to the MSO performance, to the new world. it was a freebie through the test-drive the arts program (ace program, by the way).

and whilst i was being swept away by dvorák, i was thinking about the experience of music and composed sound. that all-encompasing, performative artistic expression which is seen 'out' - in public. i don't know a lot about the history of music, but i can imagine that prior to, say the 17th Century, music was not an altogether "accessible" experience. at least not in a dedicated space. you would probably hear chamber music during the dances and (depending on your station in life) perhaps an orchestra once every 6 months, or a year. maybe not even as much as that.



fast track 400 years (not all that long really, in the history of 'civilisation') and now, we're all walking around with own private soundtracks all the time. even if we're not rockin' the latest 32G iPod touch, we've got car stereos, walkmans, mp3 players, turntables, ghetto blasters, transistor radios, etc. all 'dedicated spaces' for hearing an all-encompassing sound. my friend from apple calls it 'on-demand'.


perhaps it is just me, with a slightly warped focus on sound in public at the moment, but i think this is amazing.
given that i'm now listening to a nick cave and the bad seeds slam their way through 'i'm on fire' at about 8, it's pretty incredible to imagine that my 17th century compatriot might only ever listen to music that loud once a year. no wonder symphonies had such a profound effect on people. and that the cultural significance of a song lasted so long (see faris' interesting article on latency with regards to that)



i'm about to start some research on threshold shifts, but given what we hear now, given that we carry 100 db around in our pockets on a daily basis, plus we have to deal with cars, HVAC systems, trains, buses and much larger populations, it's pretty astounding how quickly we have adapted to that level of sound (or noise, depending on which side of the fence you sit on).

unsurprising really, that our 'dedicated spaces' for listening to (electronically) amplified music have become an architectural/design category in their own rights: up there with the MRC, the sydney opera house and carnegie hall.

expect more in this in the future...


images: turntable by josh sandler
mso by tengtan

attention architects

if there are any architects who have had to good sense to buy a ticket to the saturday workshop at the parallax conference with slavoj zizek (in melbourne next weekend), but who sadly can't make it and need to find a replacement 'delegate' - i'm happy to step up :)

conference hell

some people i know groan about all the conferences they have to attend - dull, boring, uninspiring, yaddah, yaddah, yaddah. seems i've been pretty lucky, really - i mostly get to attend the fun ones like interesting, interesting south and IS II. plus i regularly go to presentation nights like drink + think, process, pecha kucha (of which the next melbourne one is gonna be ace!!). so i guess all of that kinda makes me a bit of a sad case.

all of which will explain why i'm in conference hell at the moment - there are a couple of ace conferences that i really, really want to go to, and i can't. in fact, they're so close, it's driving me nuts. i booked my flights to go to the artspace 'spaces of art' conference ages ago. kept running out of time to call up my registration and finally, when i did so, seems that the conference has sold out! aaargh!!! i'm hoping that all the slack VIPs decide to not turn up so i can still get a spot, but right now, i'm annoyed. mostly at myself.

then, this morning, as i was catching up on my podcasts by the architects, i heard about the parallax conference with the AIA where slavoj žižek is speaking! (not to mention a swag of other cool archi-peeps, like geoff from BLDGBLG) and in melbourne! i was so excited that i texted my friend at 8am to tell her about it. argh!! jump online, check out ticket prices. double-aargh!!

given that it's a professional conference, it's little wonder that it's professional prices, but forgive me while i cry into my meagre installation-artist-who-happens-to-love-architecture budget. sucks bad.

thank god for twitter, podcasts and video footage. hopefully everyone in both conferences will be smart enough (and business-minded enough) to be feeding back as i'll be techno-stalking as much as possible. heh.

art is for humans too

on sunday night we went to the palais de tokyo. it's a super cool contemporary art gallery with a super cool shop and librairie, bar and restaurant. it's also open until midnight, has a cool photoautomat (one of those old school photo machines) and excellent architecture: palatial on the outside, industrial on the inside.

we got in for free because it was late and hardly any exhibitions on, but even if all the main shows were on, i would have only paid €1, 'cos i'm an art student. i love a gallery that honours artists and students.

and being open until midnight, a fair few of the local homeless stay downstairs, sit and play cards in the warmth, use the toilets to brush their teeth. being open until midnight, it means that they only have to bare the brunt of the wind off elements for a few hours, until the next round of places opens at 6am (like mcdonalds and some of the stations nearby). and the beautiful architecture also allows them to have beds underneath huge awnings with the most amazing view of paris and the eiffel tower.

see, art saves lives.

image credit: meteorry from flickr.