Charneira

immigrant song

2011-12-28T18:59:00.000Z

Cover of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" by Trent Raznor and Karen O. From the "Millenium : The Girl and the Dragon Tattoo"'s soundtrack, the video uses reworked images from the movie trailer.

stay focused: distract yourself

2011-12-27T20:37:00.000Z

(post-it art by Marc Johns)

Guy Hurton explain how your mind invariably wonders off after some time of concentration and how a time-out can actually help you stay focused improving productivity. Here's a list of what you can do while at the office in order to take a break:

[1] Go take a walk.
[2] Get coffee/tea, even it’s just at the office kitchen.
[3] Go for a smoke—even though you really should quit and do…
[4] Tai chi or yoga.
[5] Go out and call someone you love.
[6] Read for a few minutes.
[7] Look at architecture publications (offices usually have these)
[8] Look on the internet for a while.
[9] Email a friend.
[10] Go “bother” a colleague and get him/her to get coffee/tea with you.
[11] Go to your local bookstore.
[12] Sit in a park.
[13] Eat lunch outside the office—not at your computer.
[14] Ride your bike for a few minutes.
[15] Daydream.
[16] Listen to some music.
[17] Wash your face and brush your teeth.
[18] Step outside and people watch.
[19] Buy a little something for your partner/loved one.
[20] Think about something besides architecture.
[21] Remember to breathe.
[22] Do some drawings on post-its.

parcours cinéma

2011-12-27T19:45:00.000Z

(guide to "Paris, je t'aime")

The Mairie de Paris website provides for a page dedicated to cinema, specifically to movies which use the city of Paris as a set or even as a character. There are pdf guides to the sites present in films like "Paris", "Paris je t'aime", or "Midnight in Paris".

Find it HERE

désert de retz

2011-12-23T22:31:00.001Z

The Désert de Retz is an Anglo-Chinois or French landscape garden - created on the edge of the forêt de Marly in the commune of Chambourcy, in north-central France. It was built at the end of the 18th century by the aristocrat François Racine de Monville on his 40-hectare (99-acre) estate. It is notable for the construction of 17 (or 20) buildings, of which only 10 still survive, referring to classical antiquity or in an exotic style. Those buildings include: a summer house (the "colonne brisée", or ruined column), in the form of the base of a shattered column from an imaginary gigantic temple, an ice house in the form of an Egyptian pyramid, an obelisk, a temple dedicated to Pan, and a (now-lost) Chinese pavilion.

via wikipedia

De l’artiste A. Claris qui signe cette feuille nous ne savons rien. Il livre pourtant une aquarelle exécutée avec une maîtrise remarquable. Le plan de cette fabrique, brillante de fantaisie et d’imagination, prévue pour un parc agrémenté de vases et de statues, indique que l’architecte propose au commanditaire : bibliothèque, cabinet, salle à manger et salon. L’élégante façade auréolée de têtes de morts ouvre ses yeux sur deux balcons-loggias d’où l’on pourrait entendre les aria de la cantatrice Louise-Rosalie Dugazon. Si les Vanité nous rappellent notre matérialité et la fulgurance de notre passage sur terre, l’histoire raconte aussi que Charon, célèbre nocher des Enfers, embarque les morts pour les faire traverser le Styx. Il a déjà quitté sa passagère et guide sa gondole vers d’autres défunts. Claris a ajouté un figurant, [lui même ?] un pécheur trop occupé pour regarder la scène.

in Paris Musées

Now, wait a minute... Was "po-mo" invented before "modernism"?! Or maybe "post-modernism" was the new "romantic"!!

new shoes

2011-09-04T12:50:00.001+01:00

Veja

Le projet Veja repose sur trois principes forts :1. Privilégier les matériaux écologiques 2. Utiliser du coton et du caoutchouc issus du commerce équitable3. Fabriquer les produits dans la dignité

That sums up the project, but what really struck me - as yet another turn in the thick plot of "conscious consumerism" (listen to Zizek, for example) - is the admission of the project's limits:

Far from perfect Veja is not a perfect project. It is open to criticism on many points. It has many limitations. Fair trade is not perfect, and so is not ecological will. There are dead ends, contradictions and changes to undergo. Veja is a test, a work in progress. A project that is constantly trying to push its own contradictions. So here are the limits.The laces are not organic cotton, for lack of volume. Veja only makes a small amount of sneakers, and therefore does not "enough" of laces.
The foam to keep the ankle is a petrol based synthetic product.
Veja sneakers contain between 30 and 40% of wild rubber. The insole contains 5%. To contain all of the technical properties in a sole (flexibility, strength, comfort), we must also use other components like synthetic rubber.
The grommets do not contain nickel, but are made of metal, whose origin is not controlled.
The recycling of sneakers is not established.
Transport to deliver to Asian and American customers is done by plane.
Veja has its sneakers and accessories made in Brazil, where the cotton and rubber is grown, more than 8000 km away from its customers.
The sneakers are a matter of over-consumption. Veja continues to improve the quality of its products and increase their lifespan.

And there is more (see limitation about cotton and tinting). It seems that we are so used to getting conned (we take for granted that any advertising can't and will not, at the end, be completely honest. And so, honesty becomes the ultimate promotion weapon.

Anyway... I just wanted to show off my new shoes!

please sir, I want some More

2011-08-31T15:05:00.000+01:00

from left to right: mies van der rohe, robert venturi, philip johnson, rem koolhaas, bjarke ingels
seen in designboom

101 Things I Didn’t Learn in Architecture School

2011-08-31T13:02:00.001+01:00

An article written by Guy Horton as part of The Indicator column in archdaily.
I've highlighted some of the most poignant to me.

9] It’s architecture, not medicine. You can take a break and no one will die.
10] Significant others are more important than architecture; they are the ones who will pull you through in the end. See 49.
12] The industry underpays. Push for what you are worth.
18] Get the biggest monitor you can.
19] Do not, however, ask for two monitors. Even though it makes you look like a bad-ass you will be expected to do twice the amount of work.
26] Understand how your office is run as a business and how they go after projects.
31] Be suspicious if your firm expects you to work long hours of overtime for no compensation. Be doubly suspicious if they justify it by saying things like, “It’s just part of the learning curve” or “We had to go through this, too.”
34] Don’t dress like an intern. See 72.
38] If your firm is outsourcing work to save money, be concerned.
39] Architecture firms can have multiple glass ceilings. Be aware of them all.
40] If a principal of a firm sees making coffee or moving boxes as beneath him/her, consider looking for another office.
45] Architects are in a service industry. They provide services to clients.

46] In proportion to their pay, architects require the most education, most training, and the most exams to become licensed professionals.
48] Embrace the business-side of architecture.
49] If you are an architect you should automatically qualify for psychotherapy and medication.
50] Most architects believe they were destined to become architects because of their early childhood experiences. They showed signs of architectural greatness at a very young age. This is a myth that reinforces an unhealthy hero complex. See 49.
53] Do not take design strategies or operations learned in studio too seriously.
56] All firms are different. Shop.
57] To save time, assume your wife is right.
60] If you are married when you go to architecture school, studio ends at 7:00.
63] If your studio instructor is a recent graduate, be alarmed.
64] Do not obsess about sustainability to the exclusion of other factors.
67] Read Rem Koolhaas, but do not obsess and fantasize about being him. Delirious New York is still relevant.
69] Keep in touch with everyone you know, especially if they aren’t in architecture.
70] In fact, make friends who are not architects.
71] Do not wear the same shoes every day, They will start to smell.
72] Make sure your jeans are up-to-date. No acid-wash. No baggy.
74] If you must read Italo Calvino, read more than just Invisible Cities.
75] Expect a period of post-traumatic stress disorder after you graduate. Do not make any important decisions during this time.
77] Architecture is fueled by fetishes—rectilinear designer eyewear, for instance.

78] When trying to decide if a theory book is good, check the bibliography first.

81] If you already have a B.Arch, consider further education in a different field. Your M.Arch. can’t make a real contribution to the field if you’re just showing off software skills.
84] Architecture firms should consider forming economic alliances similar to OPEC.
87] The eighties and postmodernism were not all bad.
89] Architect’s web pages are often out of control and take too long to load.

90] In one’s life there are a finite number of all-nighters one can pull. You probably used them all up in school.
91] Understand the contexts from which modernism arose.
92] When the economy is good architects can rely on experience to run firms, but when the economy is bad they need advanced business skills they may not possess.
93] Architecture is dependent on boom and bust cycles.
94] Good design is not necessarily the most important factor in running a successful architecture firm.
95] Branding is important.
96] In a corporate firm, those at the top are not necessarily the best but they may have been there the longest.
100] Architecture office parking lots communicate success. There should be at least a couple high-end luxury cars. If there are a lot of beaters, be wary. If all cars are beaters, don’t go in.
101] Be concerned when you are too idle at work.

-ism in hyper country

2011-08-31T01:34:00.002+01:00

The quantity of information present of the web, as well as its compartmentalization personified by wikipedia, allows for some instant cross-referencing. This is great, but something keeps creeping into my mind: Borges' tale about the map/territory relation as told by Baudrillard. I guess it is almost impossible to study urban design without stumbling at least half a dozen times across the simulacrum and hyperreality theories. It is really easy to get sucked into the thoughts of a long and interesting line of philosophers (from Plato to Frederic Jameson, Umberto Eco, Deleuze and Baudrillard himself) just like a teenager gets sucked into Nietzsche. And I must admit it is tasty food for though.

These subjects arose yet again while trying to come up with a back story for this post. At first I only wanted to divulge the work of Sergio Lopez. Not to say his work is hyperreal - it in fact departs into surrealism - but it reminded me of hyperrealism. But then I realized (no pun intended) I knew very little about this movement and so I went to wikipedia, of course.

Apparently Hyperrealism is a term used to describe an art movement and style developed in early 21st century, even though it was coined in 1973 to depict Photorealism - the genre which inspired it. Photorealism demonstrates how photography became assimilated into the art world. It is worth mentioning that realistic depictions or imagery have been around since antiquity. Artists have always tried to fool one's eye. It is interesting to note that the attempt to depict a subject in a realistic fashion continued at the same time the daguerreotype was invented and even after. However one cannot deny the implications photography had in the visual arts.

It's widely accepted that the Impressionism as a movement is inherently reactionary against the establishment of photography as a new medium. As with most inventions throughout the centuries, photography was seen as an undermining agent to the artist's reality mimicking abilities. Thus both portrait and landscape paintings seemed to lack in truth when compared to the "efficiency" and reliability" of photography [Levinson, Paul (1997) The Soft Edge; a Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution, Routledge, London and New York].

"Photography inspired Impressionists to capture the moment, not only in the fleeting lights of a landscape, but in the day-to-day lives of people", I read somewhere. This "inspiration" is not to be taken lightly as some of them, the Impressionists, actually based some of their work in original photographs.

Levinson [op. cit.] argues that photography did actually inspired artists to search for other original ways of expression. In this manner, instead of competing with the reality emulating proprerties of photography, artist turned the other way by focusing "on the one thing they could inevitably do better than the photograph – by further developing into an art form its very subjectivity in the conception of the image, the very subjectivity that photography eliminated". Better put, photography pushed painters into various exploration on the painting medium, like the colour that photography then lacked. [see also Sontag, Susan (1977) On Photography, Penguin, London]

It is with this same intention that Hyperrealism rose into being as it opposes the more litteral approach found in traditional 20th century photo-realistic paintings which insisted upon the imitation of photographic images, omitting or abstracting, by a process of sublimation, minute details so as to achieve an overall consistency - human emotion, political values, and narrative elements would all be omitted. Like Pop-Art, the artistic movement from which Photorealism originated, it had a precise, inflexible and mechanical quality to it, focusing mainly on mundane and everyday imagery.

On the contrary, Hyperrealism endows the photographic images which it uses as references with a more definitive and detailed quality by enriching it with narrative and emotive elements.

But even if hyperrealist renderings end up creating the illusion of a reality not present in the original photo - given its meticulous detail - one can not say they are surreal in nature because the illusion is a convincing depiction of (simulated) reality, or an illusion based on an simulation of reality embodied - or disembodied - in the digital photograph. In Baudrillard's words, ”the simulation of something which never really existed.”

This portrait called "Mark" was done by Charles Thomas "Chuck" Close between 1978 et 1979. Close reproduces photographic images by imitating the CMYK print in a big scale using a grid and painting each cell separately.

In stark contrast to the newer concurrent Photorealism with its continued avoidance of photographic anomalies. Hyperrealist painters at once simulate and improve upon precise photographic images to produce optically convincing visual illusions of reality, often in a social or cultural context.

Juan Francisco Casas uses the cell phone camera lo-fi photographs as references for creating images which don't conceal the anomalies present in this type of medium.

There isn't a great conclusion to all this. It just never ceases to amaze me how cyclic movements of resistance keep pushing evolution forward. I mean, sometimes it seams that art is just the hard way of doing things.

hdr's

2011-08-28T00:24:00.000+01:00

+ here

liam brezier

2011-08-06T01:15:00.001+01:00

The (big) geek in me finds this soooo awesome!! Work by Liam Brezier. I wonder what would happen if we added this to this:

Rone - Nakt

who loves po-mo?

2011-08-04T22:35:00.003+01:00

Reruns! Like them or hate them, one thing is for sure: they make you look at the details. If you have already seen a TV show a long time ago, you are more likely to leave the story in the background and focus on the details. That is when you discover how lame some of these details were and question how could you have missed it in the first place.

That is not the case here. It was not so much a detail nor a lame one for that matter. I'm talking about Miami Vice, specifically about its opening sequence. How could you miss the big hole in the Atlantis building? Well, I did. But then again, I wasn't really looking or educated. It was now in one late night while working with the TV noise in the backgroung to keep me company that I really noticed it. A building with a hole poked in it. And me thinking MVRDV/Blanca Lleó's Mirador was the first - my naivety about the primes carries on.

The Atlantis Condominium was created by Arquitectonica, an international architecture, interior design and planning corporation headquartered in Miami. Arquitectonica began in 1977 as an experimental studio founded by Bernardo Fort-Brescia, Laurinda Hope Spear, Hervin Romney, Andres Duany, and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. The later two would end up founding Duany Plater Zyberk, also in Miami, becoming a leader in the New Urbanism movement.

Foreshadowing "culturalist" aspirations, the Atlantis building is described as a "modern version of a village, but in a vertical context". It is not even curious, then, that MVRDV would years later visualize this concept again for its own hollowed out building. Even so, here it is.

Mirador building concept

Watch this small promo about Arquitectonica:

Also, check out Jan Hammer's "Crockett's Theme". It's a great example of the "instrumental New Wave", popular during the 80's that seem to be inspiring today's 80's revival - (Radio Dept, M83, Twin Shadow, Wild Nothing, etc).

on stupidity

2011-08-02T23:57:00.000+01:00

Carlo M. Cipolla is the author of a thesis on stupidity. One should read "THE BASIC LAWS OF HUMAN STUPIDITY" to understand how it works. How many stupid people surround us? If you are not stupid, than what are you? How do stupid people affect one's society?

Cultural trends now fashionable in the West favour an egalitarian approach to life. People like to think of human beings as the output of a perfectly engineered mass production machine. Geneticists and sociologists especially go out of their way to prove, with an impressive apparatus of scientific data and formulations that all men are naturally equal and if some are more equal than others, this is attributable to nurture and not to nature. I take an exception to this general view. It is my firm conviction, supported by years of observation and experimentation, that men are not equal, that some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence. Although convinced that fraction of human beings are stupid and that they are so because of genetic traits, I am not a reactionary trying to reintroduce surreptitiously class or race discrimination. I firmly believe that stupidity is an indiscriminate privilege of all human groups and is uniformly distributed according to a constant proportion.

please read more HERE

paris map

2011-07-26T00:55:00.000+01:00

"Ten years ago [sic], the photographer Paola Di Bello recomposed the Paris subway map into a collage of hundreds of small colour photographs. Each shows the spot on the locator maps one finds in every metro station where passengers place their fingerand think, “So, now I’m here.” The result is an unusual map showing Paris as a vital world. A world where major transport hubs and popular places are erased or faded by the touch of countless fingers. Di Bello’s collage is an atlas of Parisian tourism. A particular kind of atlas, in which the impersonal code of classical cartography and thousands of subjective acts are juxtaposed. Not unlike a DJ’s remix, the routes of the metro tracks are layered with the movement of the bodies that travel along them. This atlas of the Parisian subway tells of an eclectic geography, made up of daily routines, tourist sites, brief stops, corridors of flow, forgotten areas, solitary places. It is a geography, not only of spaces, but also of tempos and movements, surprisingly similar to our way of thinking about the contemporary city. Today, atlases in this mode are needed more than ever, not just as a compendium of data, but also as a representation."

in Domus 870 - May 2004.

lego paris

2011-07-14T15:43:00.000+01:00

by ACCESS agency

adieu Pandora

2011-06-06T03:33:00.002+01:00

Dédalo dis:Place: Deviations on Architectural Practice

2011-03-30T20:24:00.000+01:00

It starts tomorrow!!!

+INFO - REVISTADEDALO.COM

ORGANIZAÇÃO | PARCERIA | APOIOS INSTITUCIONAIS

PARCEIROS MEDIA

to quote / i wouldn't have said it better

2011-02-27T21:47:00.000Z

To refer to someone else in one’s own text is to recognize the authority or intellectual pertinence of another, whose ideas and concepts are introduced to serve the purposes of illustrating, arguing, and/or reinforcing a set of ideas that is either built upon—or a continuation of—the reference and possibly to reassert its validity within a potentially different context. In doing so, however, a writer or director might miss the mark by misusing and/or misinterpreting the allusion.

in Messier, V. P. - Baudrillard in The Matrix: the Hyperreal, Hollywood, and a Case for Misused References

Be Your Own PET - Blow Yr Mind

2011-02-27T20:25:00.001Z

…or how to start a revolution in 44 seconds.

shotgun rules

2011-02-26T03:23:00.000Z

a Threadless T-shirt designed by Olly Moss

logo story

2011-02-21T03:35:00.001Z

So, here I was strolling on the web, going through my temp (look at it later) bookmarks.. I got to this blog's page about some 1971 PanAm posters - which are pretty minimally cool. The author mentions the origin of these images as being courtesy of Milton Glaser Design Study Center and Archives. I had, of course, to click this link cause by now I wanted more eye candy. This is where the plot thickens: right there in the first gallery - the one for Chermayeff & Geismar - i see this corporate graphic design for what I think is "redtooth". At this point I'm confused. The caption mentions I company called Beaunit. I then founf out that Beanit is a defunct textile corporation. This gets even weirder when I google bluetooth beaunit logo and I only get 3 pages of results and nothing rather satisfying. Next I went to bluetooth's wikipedia page and also, no sign of a Beaunit mention. But there are two paragraphs telling it's story:

The word Bluetooth is an anglicised version of the Scandinavian Blåtand/Blåtann, the epithet of the tenth-century king Harald I of Denmark and parts of Norway who united dissonant Danish tribes into a single kingdom. The implication is that Bluetooth does the same with communications protocols, uniting them into one universal standard.
The Bluetooth logo is a bind rune merging the Younger Futhark runes (Hagall) and (Bjarkan), Harald's initials.

The question, then, remains. Is this a case of design separated at birth, "a knockoff, a buyout, or some designer just phoning it in and reusing something from a company that went out of business."

see also Skyekat for at different story on the same topic.

again with the pigs

2011-02-19T23:16:00.000Z

Pink Floyd - Welcome to the machine

Welcome my son, welcome to the machine.
Where have you been?
It's alright we know where you've been.
You've been in the pipeline, filling in time,
Provided with toys and 'Scouting for Boys'.
You bought a guitar to punish your ma,
And you didn't like school, and you
know you're nobody's fool,
So welcome to the machine.

Welcome my son, welcome to the machine.
What did you dream?
It's alright we told you what to dream.
You dreamed of a big star,
He played a mean guitar,
He always ate in the Steak Bar.
He loved to drive in his Jaguar.
So welcome to the Machine.

Radiohead - Fitter Happier

Fitter, happier, more productive,
comfortable,
not drinking too much,
regular exercise at the gym
(3 days a week),
getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries ,
at ease,
eating well
(no more microwave dinners and saturated fats),
a patient better driver,
a safer car
(baby smiling in back seat),
sleeping well
(no bad dreams),
no paranoia,
careful to all animals
(never washing spiders down the plughole),
keep in contact with old friends
(enjoy a drink now and then),
will frequently check credit at
(moral) bank (hole in the wall),
favors for favors,
fond but not in love,
charity standing orders,
on Sundays ring road supermarket
(no killing moths or putting boiling water on the ants),
car wash
(also on Sundays),
no longer afraid of the dark or midday shadows
nothing so ridiculously teenage and desperate,
nothing so childish - at a better pace,
slower and more calculated,
no chance of escape,
now self-employed,
concerned (but powerless),
an empowered and informed member of society
(pragmatism not idealism),
will not cry in public,
less chance of illness,
tires that grip in the wet
(shot of baby strapped in back seat),
a good memory,
still cries at a good film,
still kisses with saliva,
no longer empty and frantic
like a cat
tied to a stick,
that's driven into
frozen winter shit
(the ability to laugh at weakness),
calm,
fitter,
healthier and more productive
a pig
in a cage
on antibiotics.

mario cesariny by raquel

2011-02-13T23:51:00.008Z

/design by raquel

2019: A Future Imagined

2011-02-13T22:39:00.001Z

Anyone who knows me knows about my fascination with Blade Runner as a cinematographic, philosophical, sociological and design piece. It just keeps surprising me every time I pick it up again. If Ridley Scott was its maestro, Syd Mead was undoubtedly its most noteworthy solist. In this short, written, edited and directed by Joaquin Montalvan, Syd Mead - who was also in the Art Department of Tron or Aliens - talks about imagination, creativity and future visions today. Filmed in HD it is worth getting on DVD (or here).

404 Festival Taiwan 2010 / Official Spot

2011-02-13T04:33:00.001Z

The Festival 404, born in the city of Rosario in December 2004, is an independent non-profit organization whose main objective is to promote and spread artistic productions around the world in the field of electronic art, generating a production environment in which the authors are interrelated.

According to the organization, "the '404 Festival Taiwan 2010 / Official Spot' film investigates the genesis of a world created from information where success and failure becomes layered into an evolving urban landscape. This city is not designed through intentional desires, but rather by the proliferation of ideas and thus equating failure with success, each becomes their own thread in a tapestry of an evolving construct." This is so obvious that sometimes people forget it. It is very nicely put though. As is their manisfesto:

ERROR IS CREATION
MANIFESTO TAIWAN 2010
By Gina Valenti

We live in a system that allows mistakes only when the solutions can be found solely within it.
We live in a system to which we must abide by, except when we make art.

I've always dreamt with a world that doesn't fear to make mistakes, never about one that flaunts the fact of being right.

In a historical moment that privileges the appearance of new devices,
people have easily become used to assimilate ideas which haven't been conceived to be their own, when actually thoughts should be newer than the novelty.

Those who believe to be part of a large audience, think of technological means as the only way not to fall behind, ignoring that this behaviour is the worst way of moving forward, only delaying the invention of our next bonfire.

In error lies a combination of possibilities that avoid function. This is a quality shared with art, and its residual value consists in being unuseful, in its lack of practicity.

Error bursts onto the scene.
Objects fail on purpose, forcing us to contemplate their inherent creative nature.

The main purpose of every object is to fail, and by doing so, they turn into something more complete: the result of what we do and do not expect. It becomes a new object, with new features, that will travel through the path that maximizes it.

In a world where thinking is considered erroneous, thinking becomes a duty.
Error is creation.

You should really go to their website and check out the artists page. It is loaded with videos and other goodies. Here a sample of what you might find:

And remember: embrace the unintended consequences.

P.S. I just still haven't figured out why the slogan is spoken in Portuguese… "festival quatro zero quatro, o erro é criação, o mesmo número um sítio novo, taiwan 2010"…

Ölof

2011-02-11T18:39:00.001Z

Still hadn't seen these videos of Ölof Arnald's last year's album. Nice.

small world

2011-02-11T17:18:00.000Z

i newspaper featured in Ellen Lupton's Thinking with Type (read previous post).

Publishing 101

2011-02-11T16:57:00.004Z

I had this book in my hands today - Indie Publishing: How to Design and Produce Your Own Book. For a manual it presents itself without any condescending and actually gives good technical tips on all things publishing (layout, typography, cover design, etc) by presenting things as they are. What I mean is that it doesn't seem like one more "(insert matter) for dummies". It's quite cheap at bookdepository - at least a quarter cheapen than in the big surface book store I went to.
Its author, Ellen Lupton, is director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and curator of contemporary design at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. She is the best-selling author of Thinking with Type, D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself, and Graphic Design: The New Basics (with Jennifer Cole Phillips) - all published by Princeton Architectural Press.

Now, Miss Lupton has a wonderful website also entitled Thinking with Type which I wish I had known before I wandered into the thesis writing process. It is well worth a visit and a bookmark. GO!

I call it intertwined zig-zag

2011-02-08T04:59:00.001Z

When a lot of people do it the same way it's not copy anymore, it is STYLE!

Shmidt/Hammer/Lassen - Tian Yi Town Masterplan 2010

de Plussenburgh / Arons en Gelauff Architecten

MGD+EJV

Georg Linser and Emil Kapeller - Plattenbau in Viena 1967

nokia 6500

2011-02-07T22:37:00.000Z

GRO design has designed both the Nokia 6500 Classic as the Slide version.

If you don't remember Graham Hinde, he was the designer of Philips's Roller Radio and I have mentioned him earlier in here.

als - p3

2011-02-07T15:59:00.000Z

Gostei destes desenhos...

by ana luísa soares - residential building | projectoIII

designing in tehran - benetton

2011-02-06T03:18:00.003Z

view at Europaconcorsi

"no money no rhino"

2011-02-02T04:48:00.001Z

This public service announcement is brought to you by The Joker.

unfriendly skies

2011-01-22T19:14:00.003Z

Filmmakers have given us memorable antagonists who single-handedly level large-scale devastation. Less appreciated, however, are cinematographers' skill at evoking systematic failure through atmospheric devices: innocent anf fluffy clouds part, darken, and hell fire descends. A quick inventory of disaster film-skies reminds us that in the movies - and in real life - crisis may strike anytime.

(click on the image to see the bigger picture)

Covered are Earthquake, Iron Man, Encounters of the Third Kind, The Happening, Airport, Armageddon, Babel, Jaws, Waterworld, Wall Street, Wall-E, THX-1138, There Will Be Blood, Poseidon, Dante's Peak, Syriana, 28 Days Later, The Perfect Storm, AI Artificial Inteligence, The Constant Gardiner and Resident Evil: Extintion.

Part of the "Urban China Bootlegged for Volume by C-Lab".

bootleg |ˈboōtˌleg|
adjective [ attrib.]
(esp. of liquor, computer software, or recordings) made, distributed, or sold illegally : bootleg cassettes | bootleg whiskey.

verb (-legged, -legging) [ trans.]
make, distribute, or sell (illicit goods, esp. liquor, computer software, or recordings) illegally : [as n.] (bootlegging) domestic bootlegging was almost impossible to control | [as adj.] (bootlegged) bootlegged videos.

noun
1 an illegal musical recording, esp. one made at a concert.
2 Football a play in which the quarterback fakes a handoff and runs with the ball hidden next to his hip: he scored on a 29-yard bootleg on fourth down.

DERIVATIVES
bootlegger |ˈbutˈlɛgər| noun
ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from the smugglers' practice of concealing bottles in their boots.
in New Oxford American Dictionary

Wikipedia clears things up:

An illegally copied release is distinguished from a counterfeit. Counterfeits attempt to mimic the look of officially released product; illegally copied releases do not necessarily do so, possibly substituting cover art or creating new compilations of a group's released songs. A counterfeit is always an illegal copy but an illegal copy is not necessarily a counterfeit.

lost things

2011-01-22T18:32:00.001Z

It's a nice stop-motion video.

trees falling

2011-01-16T23:07:00.000Z

A 1910 physics book asks:”If a tree falls in a forest and no animal is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Interpretations to this philosophical riddle point to the possibility of unperceived existence, the knowledge of the unobserved world and the dissimilarity between sensation and reality. Can something exist without being perceived? Can we assume the unobserved world functions the same as the observed world? What is the diference between what something is, and how it appears? In this way, the discussion regarding observation and knowledge of reality is addressed.

“...the capacity to transcend the mere intention of giving form to an idea, to atempt to encompass the entire universe surrounding (it).”
Sanford Kwinter: Architectures of Time

china hates ______

2011-01-16T07:02:00.000Z

This is not an original story. You could say it has become a folk tale. A boy (it could be a girl but in this case it's a boy) graduates from Architecture school, goes into internship and gets payed less than he needs in order to survive in the big city. But here's where the story takes a turn. This boy, Dai Haifei, decides that he won't (since he can't) pay the (now) high rents in Beijing. He thinks that, since he spends most of his waking life at the office he only need a place to sleep and so he designs and builds a small egg-house a few meters from the office door. Of course! I sounds obvious now!

And so he did. This egg-house had an interlaced bambu structure covered juta bags filled with soil and grass seeds providing thermal isolation. It seems the little home as made a buzz all over China and around it (planet Earth). But what happened next? Now it's easy to guess. No? Of course: chinese government has ordered the little house to be demolshed.

I recall the recent demolition of Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei in Shangai also ordered by Chinese authorities. I'm starting to wonder if these mass demolition of all things creative in Chinese territory isn't just part of a destructive guerrilla marketing campaign since it does bring so much publicity (bad one?) to the red country. But no. Truth is this egg-house, as well as Weiwei's work, "exposes the desolation behind the resplendent face of our cities" and societies.

Ver também:
Sunflower Seeds 2010 by Ai Weiwei
Ai Weiwei at Albion Gallery

Conan on Åndalsnes Master Plan proposal

2011-01-14T23:29:00.000Z

Conan has recently made a joke on Jagnefält Milton's Master Plan proposal for the city of Åndalsnes in Norway by stating it already existed under the name "trailer park".

Constructivist Batman

2011-01-14T18:41:00.002Z

Here I was dwelling in ArchDaily, looking for a specific post I had seen a couple of weeks ago when Russian Constructivism hit me in the head (there is a pun here). It seems that some graduates of the University of Western Australia have been studying Soviet Constructivism "by researching, analyzing and reproducing various significant buildings from the movement". And right there, the first image that appears is Batman Return's Nygmatech facility. Well, not really, but that's the first thing that came to my mind. It was (is) actually a model of the Monument to Christopher Columbus, a building conceptualised in 1929 that looks like a 50's blender and which was quite bluntly transformed into part of the Riddler's lair. Almost all depictions of Gotham try to transcended all times and places, melding elements of Art Deco, Russian Constructivism, European and American futurism, modernism and post-modernism. So this comes as no surprise and I wasn't really the first person to realize this connection - as can anyway be proven by ArchDaily's post comments. I'm unable to understand if the commenters think the Australian guys are joking with them or even if they think that Batman Forever, a film so bad it has gone past good and back to bad again (in Enid's words), has somehow inspired Russian Constructivism itself.

2010 music listomania

2011-01-13T02:45:00.000Z

The Hype Machine has finished it ultimate list for 2010's top Artists, Albums and Songs as picked by music bloggers all over the world. Nice to see how "mainstream" you are and to discover some perls which may have slipped by during the last year.

Another source is Last.FM with its top 40 hottest new music of 2010 - a list based, as usual, on the site user's scrobbles. I like these companies. I like that they stand tall and haven't been bought by facebook, yet. Last.FM is actually owned by CBS though... but hey! Oh, about The Hype Machine: yes, it scrobbles :)

ratatat werner herzog

2011-01-12T19:26:00.000Z

Ratatat likes playing with movies. Googling on the words present at the end of Bilar and at the beggining of Drugs I found out they're an extract of Werner Herzog's Stroszek. "Was wird daraus? - Wenn der Bruno mal tot geht - Wo landen diese Sachen? Wo landen diese Instrumente?" I couldn't find the exact scene but go and see the movie.

bloodgroup

2011-01-10T23:44:00.000Z

facebook

yadah

2011-01-10T03:28:00.000Z

superbad

2011-01-08T08:14:00.000Z

Highlight of the movie: mall in credits.

closer

2011-01-08T03:03:00.001Z

Dan: Everybody wants to be happy.
Larry: Depressives don't. They want to be unhappy to confirm they're depressed. If they were happy they couldn't be depressed anymore. They'd have to go out into the world and live. Which can be depressing.

12 months of music

2011-01-08T02:52:00.000Z

teaser 2

2011-01-03T22:25:00.002Z

teaser

2010-12-29T15:05:00.000Z

social life of small public spaces

2010-12-25T15:05:00.000Z

Repost from Urban Planning Blog

about coveting

2010-12-21T15:59:00.000Z

via comme des filles

copiar não é roubar

2010-12-21T15:56:00.002Z

este post é plágio

2010-12-21T15:55:00.001Z

Doing things the same way

2010-12-21T15:54:00.000Z

Too close for comfort!
visto em Fast Company

plágio?

2010-12-21T15:52:00.000Z

Oliver Laric lançou dois documentários sobre a cópia, a interpretação e reinterpretação, o plágio, etc. Feio ou bonito, é um assunto polémico. Estes dois vídeos fizeram-me pensar. Infelizmente não consegui fazer um "embed". Mas podem ser vistos aqui: Versions 2009 e Versions 2010. É o mesmo mesmo mas diferente.

visto em today and tomorrow

Saiu um documentário que se chama "Good Copy Bad Copy" que também está muito interessante. Este explora os direitos de autor e como a prerrogativa deste se altera com o advente da internet. Nas palavras do Deto, é comercialoide mas do bom.

Existe a possibilidade de fazer o download legal através deste torrent.

descoberto em fita cola

No mesmo registo, "Steal this Film" é um documentário que lida especificamente com o Pirate Bay. Já saiu a parte 2. Nos links encontrarão ligações para torrents também.

walled world

2010-12-21T15:42:00.000Z

social scenesters

2010-12-07T01:04:00.000Z

briefcase house

2010-12-06T19:52:00.002Z

Located inside a warehouse loft of [130 square meters] with no partition, this project is a house within a house.
The design engages two architectural issues: inside/outside and S/XL. It compacts the material possessions of the subject into one oversized briefcase - so large that the subject sleeps inside of it. The residual gap outside of the Briefcase House to the limits of the warehouse loft can be considered a super wall-cavity and rendered as blackened thick wall in an architectural plan. Conversely, when the subject occupies the wall-cavity for other activities, the house can be considered a solid obstruction. This project delineates the qualification of conceptual poche by the swerve of the architectural figure-ground and the blackening of thick-wall or the private volume. Furthermore, it blurs the boundary between the definition of XL furniture and S building.

more at archinect

The concept and program have a literal story and are beautifully depicted in graphic novel fashion.

Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

2010-12-05T22:43:00.000Z

A video by Spike Jonze with scenes from his forthcomming short movie "Scenes from the Suburbs".

Children of the Arts [revised]

2010-11-15T18:10:00.002Z

By reviewing Quaron's Children of Men I couldn't help but acknowledge the long line of near future apocalyptic dystopian fiction with which we have been presented in modern times. Some of the works included in this genre are more politically oriented than others and that is true for Children of Men as for Orwell's 1984. I am including in this argument Pink Floyd's The Wall even if the later is more allegorical than dystopian.

It is easy to see the similarities between 1984's "two minutes of hate" scene - in Michael Radford's cinematographic version - and The Wall's "Run Like Hell" / "In The Flesh" scenes. Despite all the personal and introverted implications, The Wall is actually a strong satire of utopian society. As in most dystopian fictions the general idea is that by trying to create a "better" and "perfected" society - one that is agreeable to everyone - all that really happens is the stripping away of people's free thought, free will and basic humanistic expression. Take "Another Brick in the Wall" for example. The "education" described in the song seems like "thought control", a type of control where certain concepts are methodologically imprinted in the students' mind. The Establishment tries to accomplish complete conformity, a great wall where everyone is but a part of the whole.

Even with the above parallels the most Orwellian of Pink Floyd's albums is Animals, being based on Orwell's own Animal Farm. If The Wall is a semi-biographical take on Syd Barrett's life, Animals is the anti-authoritarian album par excellence.

You don't have to be Pink Floyd's greatest fan to know that they were into pigs. A pig is featured in the Animal's cover design and several inflatable pig props were used in their shows dating back to the mid-1970s. In fact, "the first Pink Floyd pig was reportedly named “Algie” and designed by Roger Waters himself for the cover of the 1977 album Animals." This cover has unquestionably gained iconographic status today.

Here lies one of the many pop culture references present in Children of Men and a critical element in one of its most complex scenes - the "Ark of the Arts" scene. According to Slavoj Žižek, "the true focus of the film is there in the background" being "crucial to leave it as a background". That's is the case of many other films of which I would highlight The Truman Show or even Blade Runner. Žižek tells us this is the opposite of what he calls "anamorphosis". In other words, if you look at the oppressive social dimension too directly it becomes invisible. It is possible to see it in an oblique way only if it remains in the background. In Children of Men, the "infertility subject is not just a pretext for the hero's inner journey from this apathetic anti-hero mode to a more active engagement". It is the other way around: the hero's fate remains the lens through which one can see the background with an increased sharpness.

In the scene mentioned above, the Battersea Power Station is combined with Tate Modern (former Bankside Power station) creating the "Ark of the Arts" - you can even see the Millenium Bridge, a pedestrian footbridge in front of Tate Modern that, in this case, leads to the Battersea. This ark is a governmental entity, a safe depository protecting important works of art from destruction. Interestingly as the car goes down the driveway into a mimesis of Tate Modern's turbine hall you can spot a wall fragment with a piece of stencil art by the UK’s most inflammatory genius, the street artist Banksy. The wall in which the stencil "once stood" has been taken out of its place in an analogy reminiscent of the graffited berlin wall. This is actually the first work of art featured in the Ark, even before any of the "classics" are shown. A mutilated David by Michaelangelo is next followed by Picasso's Guernica. Both pieces are also taken out of context - Guernica has been reduced to the dining room wallpaper. Besides the fact that Banksy's "Kissing Coppers" would then be considered something like "modern art" with all its implications one thing become clear: every one of these pieces is deprived of it's place - they thus have become somewhat meaningless.

At last, when Clive Owen's character and his cousin are discussing near a window with the view of London from Battersea one can see the Animals cover recreated as a de facto work of art. This pink pig flying between Battersea's chimneys is the first piece seen by Theo while crossing the bridge and it marks a chronological succession that begins with something created sometime in the near future, followed by today's street art (taken out of context as it will), a modern and a late modern piece. This succession comes full circle with a not yet seen perceptive of Algie the Animals pig.

Now that Lazarides owns the street Artists and is putting them on galleries one begins to question how wrong Quaron's prediction could be.

Mes Concerts à emporter favorites

2010-11-15T02:08:00.000Z

I'm From Barcelona Part1 Part2
Tegan and Sara
Phoenix
Múm
Yo La Tengo
Patrick Watson
Bloc Party
Efterklang
Likke Li and El Perro Del Mar
Bon Iver Part1 and Part2
Taraf De Haidouks
A Hawk And A Hacksaw
Beirut
Anna Terheim / Ane Brun
Architecture in Helsinki
Dirty Projectors
Surfjan Stevens
Benni Hemm Hemm
Andrew Bird
The Shins
Arcade Fire
Guillemots
The National
Au Revoir Simone
The Devine Comedy
Grizzly Bear
Thomas Dybdahl
The Spinto Band

et

Shugo Tokumaro dans les Black Xs TAS

para quem?

2010-11-11T03:22:00.000Z

"It is the dirty secret of all architecture, even the most debased: deep down all architecture, no matter how naïve and implausible, claims to make the world a better place."

(from: Content, Rem Koolhaas, p. 393) by Christoph ,anarchitecture

"there is no empathy in utopia"

2010-09-10T22:37:00.000+01:00

contour

2010-08-29T23:18:00.000+01:00

The Grasshopper Contour Tool is:

[A] definition [that] was written to speed up the process of creating a contour model while limiting the amount of waste generated during the fabrication of the physical model. An interface was developed within Grasshopper where all of the important settings can be controlled, allowing those who know little about grasshopper to still use the definition. A base surface is supplied to grasshopper, which then scales the surface, cuts the cross sections according to the contour step size, then orients the cross sections to the XY plane.

nothing to worry about

2010-08-26T04:12:00.000+01:00

This was supposed to be a long post. But I decided to shorten things up a bit and deliver some fishing canes instead of the actual fish - which basically means there will be loads of links.
This video for Peter Bjorn and John's Nothing To Worry About shows a day in the life of a very interesting guy. It was directed by Andreas Nilsson and Filip Nilsson [2]. I like the simple observation documentary style.

Whether seen as macho to a humorous fault or just so cool we can’t keep up, the dancers in Yoyogi Park have been at this for years. I’ve seen surprisingly little information on this subculture; everyone has videos and photos, but what makes these guys tick? Do they ever get young people to join? What is their official nomenclature? Will they die out? Do they care? in Japan Probe

They seem to be called “Rollers” (ローラー) [like rock n'rollers] and should not be confused with the Takenokozoku "who were active at the same time in the late ’70s/early ’80s. On the yankii side of things, but not necessarily straight up bosozoku. Came out of the big Fifties revival at the end of the ’70s. Died off later in the ’80s, but the original guys — pushing 50 in some cases — are still out there once in a while." in Japan Probe

Learn more about the modern subcultures that originated all of it:
The Rocker
The Teddy Boy
The Greaser
The Mod

berthier's door

2010-08-19T02:00:00.000+01:00

The story of how a fake door became real, no questions asked, to the city of Paris. Read in BLDGBLOG.

2006

2009 - Google Street View

Harvey Zeitgeist

2010-08-18T02:51:00.000+01:00

The logic of capital accumulation and class priviledge through hegemonic, can never control every nuance of urbanization (…). David Harvey - New Urbanismand the Communitarian Trap. In Harvard Design Magazine Nº1 (1998).

Strangely this is the same message of Zeitgeist Addendum.

Also hear and "see" David Harvey on the Crisis of Capitalism:

Geographer and sociologist, David Harvey wrote: Justice and the City (1973), The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), Social e Spaces of Hope (2000).

narrow my streets

2010-08-14T21:39:00.005+01:00

David Yoon is a photographer, "writer, designer, and urban planning geek" - he says it himself. He creates, in his blog, a what if? universe centering on Los Angeles. He envisions and visualizes how LA would look like if its streets were narrower. Hence the appropriate name: narrow streets: los angeles.

And without further ado, I present thee the concept of UCHRONIA.
In the words of Foucault "Fist there is Utopia". Borrowing from Harvey, talking about Moor's Utopia or Bacon's Atlantis, "[all] these forms of utopia can be characterized as 'Utopias of spacial form' [in opposition to 'Utopias of social process'] since the temporarily of the social process, the dialectics of social change - real history - are excluded, while social stability is assured by a fixed spacial form."
If, one considers time in the same sense as process, one would feel tempted to say that "utopias of social processes" are essentially Uchronias. But, again, Harvey explains that, in the later case, the qualities of space and place are totally ignored".
Then, Uchronia has the same sense as utopia of temporal play, because instead of suspending time in favor of space, it suspends space in favor of time. Makes sense? It does, so as one acknowledges that any social process has effects both in time and place. It should be noted that these all are to be treated as "ideal types". So, what if, in opposition to utopias of social process, we were to group utopias of spacial AND temporal play? Now, what DOES David Harvey think of this?

balls

2010-07-24T23:49:00.000+01:00

Nike Savvas
Atomic: full of love, full of wonder, 2005
Installation view at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne
polystyrene, nylon wire, paint, electric fans
dimensions variable

Rhapsody In Blue

2010-07-24T22:56:00.002+01:00

Rhapsody in Blue

motivation

2010-07-19T00:42:00.001+01:00

After inspiration comes motivation:

Great talk by Dan Pink, about what drives us, and how people are, and aren’t, motivated. Some surprising tests. Some initially counter intuitive results actually come to seem pretty obvious in hindsight, and so highlight some overlooked points about peoples perceived reward and satisfaction at work ( and in life generally). He talks about the effectiveness of using different types of rewards - Money versus the combination of challenge, freedom and purpose. Shows how using creativity is particularly relevant no matter what you do.

in Monster Munch

Made by RSA Animate. There are some interesting (animated) talks there.

bellyfull

2010-07-15T02:21:00.000+01:00

Bellyfull by A boy in static.
You can watch the original flash animation at bellyfull.tv.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc

2010-07-13T20:14:00.005+01:00

Determinismo é a teoria filosófica de que todo acontecimento (inclusive o mental) é explicado pela determinação, ou seja, por relações de causalidade.

Embora, no seu sentido mais vulgar, determinismo se refira a uma causalidade redutora (a redução de todos os fenómenos do universo, por exemplo, à mecânica ou à química), a causalidade não é necessariamente sinónimo de reducionismo. Há vários tipos de determinismo, cada um definido pelo modo como determinação e causalidade são conceptualizados. Estes são os três mais básicos segundo a Wikipédia brazilês:

Pré-determinismo: Se, como em Laplace, no teísmo e na teoria comportamental, supuséssemos que todo efeito está desde logo completamente presente na causa, chegamos a um determinismo mecanicista onde a determinação é colocada no passado, numa cadeia causal totalmente explicada pelas condições iniciais do universo.

Pós-determinismo: Se, como na teleologia, supuséssemos que toda causalidade do universo é determinada por alguma finalidade, temos um determinismo mecanicista onde a determinação é posta no futuro pela imaginação de alguma entidade exterior ao universo causal (Deus).

Co-determinismo: Se, como na teoria do caos, na teoria da emergência ou no conceito de rizoma, supuséssemos que nem todo efeito está totalmente contido na causa, isto é, que o próprio efeito pode simultaneamente interagir (causalmente) com outros efeitos, podendo inclusive acarretar um nível de realidade diferente do nível das causas anteriores (por exemplo a interacção no nível molecular formando um outro nível de realidade, a vida, ou a interação entre indivíduos formando um outro nível de realidade, a sociedade [a virtualidade]), temos um determinismo onde a determinação é colocada no presente ou na simultaneidade dos processos.

in Wikipédia (editado

Mais variedades de determinismo aqui.
Ver também causalidade, comportamentalismo, determinismo ambiental.

Portishead Rip The Knife

2010-07-11T20:48:00.000+01:00

The Rip by Portishead and NY Hotel by The Knife, respectively. Can't hear one without recalling the othe

toryanse

2010-07-07T16:19:00.000+01:00

Since we're into a Japanese music thing, what about Toryanse - a traditional children's song, the title of which literally means "Plese let me pass"? If you've been to Japan, maybe you have heard it in the road crossings:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ommgK1dPwL0&feature=player_embedded

Or from Boogiepop Phantom (it also appears in the segment "Beyond" of "Animatrix2, in 2Lost in Translation", in "Lain", etc):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZTexwjxXb0

A more surprising (or not) source that uses the Toryanse theme is the song "Akashingo" ("red light/sign") from Lucky People Center who used it in their documentary "International":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqCEE9jovTU

Here it is, sang:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2CNNthajW0

Michael Cooke arranged it as part of a symphony, for a string quartet first and then for an orchestra. It is available here under the name Symphony No.3 IV "Shadows of Japanese Children" (2005).

[It's] a four-movement work based on Japanese music. A book found in a Dallas used bookstore, Unforgettable Fire, inspired it. Atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki filled this book with drawings and stories. Many were about children turned into ash statues - their shadows burned on the ground. This very powerful book reminds us that war is not a video game. This work is dedicated to those children.
The fourth movement, "In the Fallen Sun only Shadows Remain" makes use of two more folk melodies "Hora Nero Nen Nero" & "Toryanse". The title of this movement and the first movement come from lines in the beginning of Unforgettable Fire. *

More info at THAT ANIME BLOG

Sakura Jazz

2010-07-07T15:57:00.000+01:00

I've been dwelling through Jazz for quite some time. Some months ago I came across a 1965 album called Sakura Sakura from a gentleman called Hideo Shiraki plus his Quintet and + 3 Koto Girls. In there I found a jazz version of the traditional Japanese song "Sakura Sakura", not to mention a brutal interpretation of the Blue Mitchel standard "Alone Alone and Alone" played by the great Japanese trumpet player Terumasa Hino (Shirake is a drummer). After browsing a bit through youtube I found the following videos and felt like sharing.

This one reminds me of Ghost in the Shell:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKTRnO7SV68&feature=related

Terumasa Hino live at the Blue Note Fuji Festival:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jGpPzh6JYU

Traditional version of Sakura Sakura live:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS6z82b_r5k

Also if you feel like listening to some Japanese jazz, here's the album.

I'm with stupid

2010-07-07T12:59:00.000+01:00

Moronic, foolish, senseless, brainless, mindless, idiotic, imbecile, insane, lunatic, asinine, ridiculous, ludicrous, absurd, preposterous, silly, inane, witless, half-baked, empty-headed, unintelligent, slow-witted, weak-minded; informal crazy, dumb, brain-dead, cretinous, imbecilic, doltish, thick, thickheaded, birdbrained, pea-brained, pinheaded, dopey, dim, dimwitted, halfwitted, dippy, fat-headed, blockheaded, boneheaded, lamebrained, chuckleheaded, dunderheaded, muttonheaded; daft, dumb-ass, chowderheaded, ignorant, dense, brainless, slow, dull, simple, stunned, vacuous, vapid, bovine, dozy, fat-headed, birdbrained, simpleminded, idiotic, obtuse, doltish, cretinous, soft in the head, boneheaded, wooden-headed, scatterbrained, nonsensical, unthinking, ill-advised, ill-considered, unwise, injudicious, laughable, risible, fatuous, mad, cracked, cockeyed, harebrained, nutty, batty, cuckoo, loony, loopy.

If you want to impugn someone's intelligence, the options are almost limitless. Thank god for that!

Narrative Architecture, Game and Theme Park Design

2010-07-06T18:09:00.000+01:00

Don Carson, who worked as a Senior Show Designer for Walt Disney Imagineering, has argued that game designers can learn a great deal by studying techniques of “environmental storytelling,” which Disney employs in designing amusement park attractions: “The story element is infused into the physical space a guest walks or rides through. It is the physical space that does much of the work of conveying the story the designers are trying to tell [...]. Armed only with their own knowledge of the world, and those visions collected from movies and books, the audience is ripe to be dropped into your adventure. The trick is to play on those memories and expectations to heighten the thrill of venturing into your created universe”

JENKINS, Henry - GAME DESIGN AS NARRATIVE ARCHITECTURE.

Read also: CARSON, Don - Environmental Storytelling: Creating Immersive 3D Worlds Using Lessons Learned from the Theme Park Industry.

tourist open season

2010-07-04T03:03:00.004+01:00

Visualisations from Eric Fisher detailing concentrations of tourists in cities around the world, using geotagged photos. Blue are photos taken by locals. Red by tourists. Via Information is Beautiful.

Oslo

Paris

Roma

Barcelona

Copenhaga

more after the break or on Eric Fisher's

Viena

Milano

Lisbon

Venice

London

New York

Ginsberg

2010-06-26T20:12:00.000+01:00

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!
Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is eternity! Everyman's an angel!

in Howl

Tafuri and Koolhaas

2010-06-19T17:32:00.002+01:00

see bigger

so 80's

2010-06-09T04:26:00.002+01:00

"Be wary of any prophetic end of days argument" I keep telling myself. Still, I end up attempting to discredit such hypothesis, as if I'm scared of the the possibility of those prophecies being right.

PIIQ range of Sony headphones

I was strolling back and forth through the web on the course of reading my emails when I found out that Sony has just released a new range of arty headphones called PIIQ "aimed at the youth market". Sony states that "[the] headphones draw from the collective experience of artists, skaters, street culture and all-around limit-pushers to create high-concept headphones with sound ready for the ride."

Basically, these are "headphones for skaters and kids who want to be skaters". "They claim they are full of “skater fashion” and “high-concept urban awareness,” which means Sony’s designers in Tokyo watched some MIA and Lady Gaga videos." (these words were in a website which has removed them (mmmm) and are now only available thanks to the time defying "google search" cache feature. Also, I have no idea what PIIQ stands for, or even if it stands for anything at all. Still, its website has won a Favourite Website Award.

Roller Radio - Moving Sound

The first image that came to my mind when I saw the models [I enjoy creating my self-conditioned mental correlations] was the one of my long gone (and missed) radio cassette recorder, a yellow Philips Roller Radio designed in 1981. My yellow Roller Radio was part of the Moving Sound range of products (1, 2, 3, 4, 5...), an extension of the original one designed in 1981 by Graham Hinde.

Robert Blaich who was once head of Philips design explains this mini boombox's "fit" design history in detail. Long story short: "The design was one of the first to come out of the Philips Youth Task Force, a group set up to address Philips' declining market share in younger age groups" who then preferred Japanese products.

Alexander Grünsteidl in his amazing tail of the rise and fall of industrial design adds that:

"One outcome of this quest [for form at consumer electronic corporations around the world] was the unexpectedly successful Philips Roller Radio, which stood out from the boxy, tech looking, metal finished appliances common amongst consumer electronic brands in those days. This radio was explicitly designed to appeal to the youth market. The loudspeakers were clearly separated from the main body holding the radio tuner and cassette player. The handle expressed portability. The back revealed bulges underneath which the batteries fitted. The bright colors and shiny plastic finish created a distinct youthful contemporary look and feel. As the story goes, the initial proposal was refused several times by top management, who couldn’t believe that such a radically different approach could sell beyond the required quantities to break even. The development team managed to secure initial orders in opposition to the opinions of management and production began. Against all odds, sales soon exceeded the wildest expectations."

Sports series Walkmans and My First Sony range of products

He continues by telling how Philips wasn't able to pick up from "the initial momentum they had created" giving it away to its competitor Sony which quickly created the range My First Sony (1988) and the Sony Sport series (1983). Philips Moving Sound range was created as a response to these advances by Sony.

Black squares

These were times when an "appliance platform […] retained almost the same configuration of internal components for a few years, whilst the outside was restyled on a regular basis like a dress following the fashion of the day", says Grünsteidl.

Now, the era of small black square boxes begs the question: "what role does industrial design retain?" [In Objectified the same issue is addressed at some point] Is the only way out to turn yourself into the hands of skater-boys and street-artists, to keep retelling the same stories? Because that happened before in 1981 and the result was a radio cassette player with neon colors, two huge speakers that looked like roller skate wheels, and a chunky handle promoting mobility - now that captured it neatly the essence of that decade.

dreamlands

2010-06-07T23:40:00.000+01:00

Présentée dans la grande galerie du Centre Pompidou du 5 mai au 9 août 2010, l'exposition Dreamlands développe un propos inédit : montrer comment les modèles de foires internationales, d'expositions universelles et de parcs de loisirs ont influencé la conception de la ville et de ses usages.
Démultipliant la réalité par la pratique de la copie, jouant d'une esthétique de l'accumulation et du collage souvent proche du kitsch, ces mondes clos et parallèles ont en effet inspiré les démarches artistiques, architecturales et urbanistiques au XXe siècle, au point de s'ériger en possible norme de certaines constructions contemporaines.

Cette exposition pluridisciplinaire rassemble plus de trois cents œuvres, mêlant art moderne et contemporain, architecture, films et documents issus de nombreuses collections publiques et privées. Dans une mise en espace ludique et didactique à la fois, elle propose la première lecture d'envergure de cette question et conviera à s'interroger sur la manière dont s'élabore l'imaginaire de la ville et dont les projets urbains s'en nourrissent.

Expositions universelles, parcs d'attractions contemporains, le Las Vegas des années 1950 et 1960, le Dubaï du XXIe siècle : tous ces projets ont contribué à modifier profondément notre rapport au monde et à la géographie, au temps et à l'histoire, aux notions d'original et de copie, d'art et de non-art.

Les « dreamlands » de la société des loisirs ont façonné l'imaginaire, nourri les utopies comme les créations des artistes, mais ils sont aussi devenus réalité : le pastiche, la copie, l'artificiel et le factice ont été retournés pour engendrer à leur tour l'environnement dans lequel s'inscrit la vie réelle et s'imposer comme de nouvelles normes urbaines et sociales, brouillant les frontières de l'imaginaire et celles de la réalité. Du «Pavillon de Vénus» conçu par Salvador Dalí pour la Foire internationale de New York de 1939, au «Learning from Las Vegas» (L'enseignement de Vegas) des architectes Robert Venturi et Denise Scott Brown, et au «Delirious New York » de Rem Koolhaas (qui souligne la filiation entre Manhattan et le parc d'attractions de Dreamland), les seize sections de l'exposition retracent les étapes d'une relation complexe et problématique.

mapping

2010-06-06T22:15:00.005+01:00

Cartography has been a part of mankind since its beginning having a history of up to 8.000 years. The debate about the first map relies upon the definition of map. Mapping became increasingly important as space grew in complexity. It culminated in the abstraction of the Transit Map. This topological map in the form of a schematic diagram, unlike conventional maps, is not geographically accurate illustrating a fixed distance between points, compressing those in the outer area of the system and expanding those close to the center. The abstraction of rout-maps for individual transit lines can be traced back as early as 1908, but it was George Dow who, for the first time, launched a diagrammatic representation of an entire rail transport network (in 1929), followed by Harry Beck's iconic London Underground Map in 1933.

With the advent of modernity things got even more complex as the concepts of time and space became intertwined. "Space-time compression" became a platitude in the debates on post-modernity and post-modernism. As space takes over place, and as both time and space get diluted into each other, one can begin to feel "lost in space", as Wigley noted. Time, not distance, has become the most importante criterion on determining the spacial organization of the various parts composing (post)urban landscape. Paul Virilio, who analyzed modernity's fascination with speed, has argued that modern transportation's speed is the most important factor in the current disurbanization process. Categories like time and speed undermine the geographical identity of a city. Koolhaas added to this discussion, when talking about Euralille in the "Beyond Delirious" article, that "[if] you imagine not distance as a crucial given but [the] time it takes to get somewhere then there is an irregular figure which represents the entire territory that is now less then one hour and thirty minutes from Lille" (Nesbitt, 1996: 334) (read here).

That must have been what Xiaoji Chen thought. She (re)searched into irregular or distorted maps of Paris as a way to depict one's mental map of the city, which she says "is not measured in miles". After abstraction comes the "baroque" (not a pejorative). Xiaoji made what she calls "isochronic maps" [sic] of Paris under different transportation modes. It can be seen in the car based map how "the city center expands from congestion, and the edge is denser". If you add eco-concerns to the equation you get yourself the basis to a whole lot of possible services. The video shows how the map transforms itself when time and carbon footprint go into play.

BIG and Geometry

2010-06-03T22:19:00.004+01:00

By suggestion of a friend driven by sheer curiosity I went to discover a small piece of software which comes with MAC OSX called Grapher (Applications \ Utiilities). Grapher is able to create 2D and 3D graphs from simple and complex equations. Going through the "Examples" provided you can find one called Toroid that results from the expression given above. It immediately brought to my mind the image of BIG's Danish Pavilion at Shanghai.

Is this another "one liner" by Ingels explained after its conception?

Of course Ingels has delved into geometry in the conception of his buildings some other times, even if quite inconsequently - geometrically and generatively, that is. More striking than the images created is the sense that some opportunities to re-explore geometry as a space generator are lost somewhere along the way.

Image sources:
domus
dezeen

As a side note I would like to divulge a small plug-in for Rhino aptly called Math. What it does is: it calculates smooth degree 3 curves and surfaces based on parametric equations. It comes with a fairly diverse library, complete with Moebius strips and a Klein surface. The thing is, it works with cartesian, or rectangular functions. So, because I don't know how to convert polar functions like the above, I still haven't been able to construct it in Rhino.

the end of modernism

2010-05-26T17:36:00.003+01:00

njiric+ (2001)

windmaker stewdio

2010-05-23T17:45:00.001+01:00

How's the weather in Chicago?

It is windy of course.

Made with Windmaker by Stewdio

"productive dystopia"

2010-05-19T00:40:00.005+01:00

Urbanity is a psychopath sedated on drugs and reeducated to tell the right anecdotes at the right dinner parties. All the while outside of the radar of the regeneration industries is the blood, guts, sweat, tears, people smiling, spontaneous celebrations, street car drag-racing, squirrel bashing, basement perversions, road vivisectionists and black tie swinger parties that constitute a big part of the real living city.

Darryl Chen in Tomorrow's Thoughts Today

Port Entropy

2010-05-09T00:43:00.000+01:00

Shugo Tokumaru has released his 4th full length album called Port Entropy. In it you can find Rum Hee, which was present in the EP of the same name, ant this Lahaha. They have performed Linne for blackXS Live Sound's Take Away Shows.

queima

2010-05-08T16:49:00.000+01:00

Projecto por: Carlos Foyedo, Luís Grilo e António Martins.

it ends now!!!

2010-05-06T02:56:00.003+01:00

Some lessons to be learned. I couldn't help myself, maybe I've put too many pictures here. The hell with it. But there are many more in the REWORK Flickr Set. Illustrations by Mike Rohde.

"Rework is a bestseller that will make you uncomfortable. But that's a good thing because you deserve it, we all do." -- Seth Godin in Amazon

"meetings are toxic"

"nobody like fake plastic flowers"

Pärt vs ASMZ

2010-05-04T01:59:00.002+01:00

A Silver Mt Zion - Stumble Then Rise On Some Awkward Morning

Arvo Pärt - Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten

A cook's tour in portugal

2010-05-03T02:48:00.001+01:00

Anthony Bourdain tours Portugal:

Also available, No Reservations in the Azores: Part 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.

Neil Cowley Trio

2010-04-30T02:18:00.000+01:00

I dare you to watch this video without even a single smile. Stanley Bell makes some interestingly nice family videos. This one has the Neil Cowley Trio's Degree in Intuition as soundtrack.

At a time when Neil Cowley Trio releases its third full length album, Radio Silence, I managed to get hold (FINALLY) of their first two. I knew some of the songs, from here and there. But I'm just blown away after listening to them non-stop. You can always get them through Amazon.co.uk - the trio is British so it's a lot cheaper through the uk based sites. Don't bother searching for them in Portugal. Since Fnac holds the monopoly of on-site music commerce - after Valentim de Carvalho closed its doors, the only option left is Jo-Jo's Music (CDGO). But if they don't have it on the shelves (the store is near Cedofeita) just order from the internet...

This Trio came to my knoledge when I went to a double venue inserted in Le Festival Jazz à Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris last year - some footage of THAT concert here. I went to see Andre Manoukian who played the first half. Afterwards came Neil Cowley Trio. During the presentation the host let me know that Cowley had previously worked in the keyboards of Zero7 and The Brand New Heavies. But the true surprise came afterwards. The guy kicked, jumped in his bench, banged his head and played with his eyes shut. The drummer Evan Jenkins just banged away with beats I could listen to on their own. All topped with bassist Richard Sadler shifting swiftly between bass styles.

The following on is from the latest album and it's called Box Lily:

There, Jazz you can bang your head to.

Some more videos:
Making of Radio Silence
His Nibs on Later with Jools Holland
Degree In Intution at Jazz Sous Les Pommiers via Mezzo
How Do We Catch Up on The View

patins

2010-04-28T18:01:00.000+01:00

Rollerblade session in Ermesinde on Flickr.

my old windows desktop

2010-04-26T16:38:00.000+01:00

I was going through my walpapers (I get tired of them too fast) and found an image of my old Windows desktop on my old Acer. It was kind of nice:

Marcelo Camelo - Orelha Negra - Bondage ?

2010-04-26T04:19:00.003+01:00

Clara Sverner toca Saudade de Marcelo Camelo.

Ai, ai
Vai ver é só você
Ai, ai
Vai ver é só você querer
Distante, imaginar
Caberia a quem dizer:
"Amor, eu vivo tão sozinho de saudade"

Depois de falar de Rodrigo Amarante e dos Little Joy, falo agora de outro dos membros dos Los Hermanos (passo a redundância). Marcelo Camelo é compositor, cantor, guitarrista, violonista e poeta brasileiro. É conhecido como vocalista e guitarrista da banda de rock alternativo Los Hermanos. Actualmente. lançou-se numa carreira a solo. 'Sou', o seu primeiro álbum foi lançado em 2008.
Cheguei a este artista por vias tortuosas ao fazer uma procura por Saudade, depois de ouvir a música com tal nome do projecto Orelha Negra. Não sei porquê.

Marcelo Camelo - Saudade ao vivo - Vídeo

Marcelo Camelo - Saudade (versão do álbum)

Este é o teaser Supernatural realizado por Manuel Pureza e Carlos Afonso (aka Bondage). O vídeo tem como banda sonora a versão do Saudade dos Orelha Negra assim como o início do A Cura do mesmo projecto. É um teaser para o vídeo do A Cura, também realizado por "estes senhores".

Adenda: A versão ao vivo da Saudade, interpretada e orquestrada por Marcelo Camelo e com mais qualidade está no myspace (link acima.

P.S. Já agora vejam este vídeo no qual Bondage e "Pedro Abrunhosa" apresentam a Orelha Negra, assim como o primeiro teaser Futurama.

Mais um superpost.

so you need a typeface

2010-04-26T00:53:00.001+01:00

So you need a typeface is an alternative way on how to choose fonts (or just be inspired) for a specific project, not just by browsing through the pages of FontBook. The list is (very loosely) based on the top 50 of the "Die 100 besten schriften".

by Julian Hansen

pare, escute e olhe

2010-04-22T17:19:00.001+01:00

A oposição betão armado vs. país "verde verdinho", que este filme propõe, é demagógica.
[…]
E chegamos, por aqui, a um dos impasses deste documentário escorreito em termos técnicos: submeter sempre a representação do real a uma agenda política pouco clarificada, puxando, por um lado, pela vertente da defesa ecológica e, por outro, pelo conservadorismo "antiturístico" (e anti-desenvolvimentista) das populações, mais interessadas no quotidiano imediato.
[…]
[As] soluções apontadas pautam-se pela demagogia de um ecologismo primário. O ataque à natureza, em nome de interesses inconfessáveis (do dinheiro, do betão e do asfalto), é bem mais complexo do que ressalta das redutoras boas intenções de "Pare, Escute e Olhe".

por Mário JorgeTorres in Cinecartaz

The Walkmen

2010-04-14T18:37:00.003+01:00

The Walkman - On The Water

The Walkmen - Red Moon

But the stars are cold; And the air is bright; And I see you now; You shine like the steel on my knife

Also watch:
The Walkman - The Bowery Presents: The Walkmen - In The New Year
The Walkman - The Walkmen - In The New Year (music video)
The Walkmen - Long Time Ahead of Us

rainbow

2010-04-12T05:42:00.002+01:00

Impressive work by Olga Feldman. These are called Rainbow Body. Check out her wesbsite for more ey candy goodness.
I had to post these alog with some songs from Four Tet's last album "There Is Love in You". It's amazing. Go and get it. Now!!!

Four Tet - This Unfolds

Four Tet - Angel Echoes

Four Tet - Circling

Four Tet - Sing

Nine Inch Nails

2010-04-11T20:17:00.001+01:00

NIN - Adrift and at Peace
Remembering my favourite NIN album - And All That Could Have Been (disc 2).