“Place: The Networking of Public Space” by Kazys Varnelis and Anne Friedberg
Posted: March 26, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: culture, kazys varnelis, notes, technology, thesis, urbanism after mass media Leave a commentNotes on reading
“We gather at the communal watering hole as we always did; only now we don’t reach out to those around us. Instead, we communicate with far-flung souls using means that would be indistinguishable from magic for all but our most recent ancestors.”
“The street becomes a dwelling for the flaneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls …. The wails are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; news–stands are his libraries and the terraces of cafes are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done.” –W.B.
“Cultural critics observed that such detachment increased during the twentieth century as people fled decaying cities to suburbs. Public space became increasingly privatized and virtualized, with networks of individuals being replaced by television broadcast networks, and individuals becoming less and less citizens and more and more consumers.”
“In Japan, Mizuko Ito observes, the home is too family oriented and too crowded to accomodate friends, so teens resort to their mobile phones, or ketai, to text their close friends, maintaining silent conversations the entire time they are away from their friends. Ketai, Kenichi Fujimoto writes, are “territory machines” capable of redefining the notion of public space, transforming a subway train seat, a sidewalk, a street corner into the user’s “own room and personal paradise.””
“Just as the flaneur served as a stand–in for broader cultural shifts in modernity, so, too, might the Japanese teenager indicate the symptomatic conditions of early twenty-first–century cultural life, demonstrating how we inhabit localized time and space as well as telematic worlds in which we can be copresent with others at a distance.”
Posted: March 16, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: eyal weizman, quotes, thesis, urbanism after mass media Leave a comment
“Yes, the Wall is an archive in these two senses of the term: it’s an archive of all movements or flows across it, and its own movement (its constant transforming path) is an archive of the formative force :fields surrounding it. Because the Wall is one of the objects that registers its environment, environmental force:field – political environment – it can read this in a forensic sense. So, you can see the politics in things, politics as it is articulated in the relationship between processes, agents, etc. across the territory.
Consequently, if we dare to look at politics as a material politics, then architectural methodology is useful to analyse it. Politics can’t, of course, simply be reduced to it; but it is incredibly useful to take it seriously, in terms of that kind of forensic relation.”
– Eyal Weizman, speaking on his book, “Hollow Land”
Posted: March 16, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: eyal weizman, quotes, thesis, urbanism after mass media Leave a comment
“The wall is initially a media space. Walls really do not stop flows. They modulate flows across them – differentiating them: money, people, electricity, sewage, water … it’s a system of filters and modulations. And the act of crossing is also always registration, recording, etc. Ultimately, if you want to cross the wall, if you’re determined to cross it, you can; there may be a delay but it can be crossed.”
– Eyal Weizman, speaking of his book, “Hollow Land”
Urbanism After Mass Media – March 16
Posted: March 15, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: anthropocene, notes, thesis, urbanism after mass media Leave a commentTalk with Etienne
Overview of the anthropocene
How do we define a new era if the geologic stratification has yet to occur?
When can we say the anthropocene began? 1784 [invention of steam engine], beginning of agriculture, or end of second World War [use of atomic bomb], 1945 [the great acceleration]
Seth Dennison lecture on TCAUP Lectures
E.T. – Mineralization, biology and geology cannot be separated
Mineralization – dragging minerals from below the earth, bringing them to the surface, and making “things”
Manuel de Landa – the arms race of mineralization
The City Limit
Referencing Timothy Mitchell’s text
How do we know if we are inside or outside the city?
Metabolism – in the most literal sense
Alfred Latka [sp?] “Fire and Memory” [book], any energy production that is beyond the 1:1 ration can be called ‘culture’
That which is unnatural is anything that exceeds the metabolic
Workingman’s Death [movie clip]
Sulfur extraction out of edge of volcano
Extraction tourism = the city in reverse
The path, wooden container, and processes [from movie clip] are the only infrastructure needed
contingent obligations vs. logical necessities [de Landa]
May 1 1886 [May Day] national general strike for eight hour work day
Neo-Industrial
post-industrial, what does that mean?
“How are histories inscribed in spatial products? And how can we make the object ‘speak’ them? […] this meaning of architecture is a tuning in to a complicated reciprocal relationship between forces and forms.” – Eyal Weizman, Political Plastic
Aesthetics of the anthropocene in the neo-industrial context [E.T. Research]
“The Climate of History” [book], disproportionate cause of pollution, while environmental effects are leveled globally.
What is the city but a bunch of things which have been extracted?
Unequal exposure to environmental risks and benefits [ref. Inundation Jakarta]
Make distinction between “urban” and “city,” Everything is urban. [M.C.]
Trying to understand scale, magnitude [Kant],
When we become the ‘mountain’ [scale beyond our understanding]…what is our experience of scale when it is embedded in our everyday objects
How does the body embed itself back into the environment?
How is the body habituated to space, how do we become comfortable at a particular scale? [E.T.]
Scale is dispersed in commodities [E.T.]
Anonymous as the modern-day communard
THE INTERNET IS NOT KILLING THE METROPOLIS
Do cell phones dream of civil war? [essay]
Posted: February 28, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: grid, new york city, speed levitch, urbanism, urbanism after mass media Leave a comment
Speed Levitch, The New York City “Grid Plan”
Posted: February 18, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: film, Man Ray, thesis, urbanism after mass media, video Leave a comment
Le Retour A La Raison, by Man Ray, 1923
Posted: February 18, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Dziga Vertov, film, urbanism after mass media Leave a comment
Dziga Vertov – Man With a Movie Camera, 1929
Posted: February 8, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Paul Virilio, Speed, urbanism after mass media Leave a comment
“Everything in…warfare becomes a question of time won by man over the fatal projectiles toward which his path throws him. Speed is Time saved in the most absolute sense of the word, since it becomes human Time directly torn from Death…”
– Paul Virilio, Speed
Posted: January 20, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: berlin, cities, silent film, urbanism, urbanism after mass media, video Leave a comment
“Berlin: Symphony of a Great City” from 1927
If you have 62 minutes to spare, ‘tis a great silent film, artifact, and historical object showing how the proliferation of a mechanized society began many decades ago.
Posted: January 7, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: architecture, history, quotes, thesis, urbanism after mass media, victor hugo Leave a comment
Nevertheless, when the sun of the Middle Ages is completely set, when the Gothic genius is forever extinct upon the horizon, architecture grows dim, loses its color, becomes more and more effaced. The printed book, the gnawing worm of the edifice, sucks and devours it. It becomes bare, denuded of its foliage, and grows visibly emaciated. It is petty, it is poor, it is nothing. It no longer expresses anything, not even the memory of the art of another time. Reduced to itself, abandoned by the other arts,
because human thought is abandoning it, it summons bunglers in place of artists. Glass replaces the painted windows. The stone-cutter succeeds the sculptor. Farewell all sap, all originality, all life, all intelligence.
Victor Hugo, from Hunchback of Notre Dame
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