calebwaldorf.net

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster - Parc Central (2006)

caleb waldorf — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:15:20 -0400

A collection of 11 short poetic psycho-geographic portraits of cities and spaces from artist Dominique Gonzelez-Foerster, who's cinematic 2007 solo show at Musée dArt moderne de la Ville de Paris http://www.e-flux.com/shows/view/4008 will be supplemented in 2008 by the Unilever commission for the Turbine Hall of London's Tate Modern (joining Carsten Holler's slides, Olafur Eliason's sun, and Doris Salcedo's crack amongst many other prestigious past projects).

Ranging from the revisiting of a scene of Ming-Liang Tsai's 'Vive l'Amour' through the eyes of its protagonist, to a ticker-tape parade in Buenos Aires, from a reflection on the filmic qualities of Brasilia,to an observation of the observers of the 1999 eclipse in Paris. All soundtracked by a sensitive balance of field-recordings and carefully chosen delicate music.

A review of the work Riyo, included on DVD here.

This collection of films from cities across the globe provides further evidence of Gonzalez-Foerster's unmistakable sense of urban ambience and tropical melancholia. In a conversation between the artist and Jacques Ranciere published in Art Press, the philosopher, reflecting on the dialogue between East and West in her work, observes, "What is interesting is what they over there have done with what they borrowed from us here. You don't get that here, maybe because we have the idea that there are no more journeys left." That may be the case, but after seeing Gonzalez-Foerster's films I want to go places: Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, Taipei, and of course Japan, though I'm not sure if her Japan really exists or whether it's a semiotic fantasy after Roland Barthes.
- Daniel Birnbaum, Artforum, 2006

"Parc Central" est composé de 11 films qui offrent un voyage visuel, sonore et poétique à travers 11 villes traversées par l'artiste. Fascinée par la ville, l'espace et l'urbanisme, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster développe depuis plusieurs années le concept de "modernité tropicale", à partir de la cohabitation et de la confrontation entre architecture et végétation. C'est autour de cette recherche qu'elle a conçue "Parc Central"
- MK2 DVD description

Available at KaraGarga.

Originally from ART TORRENTS by noreply@blogger.com (Art Torrents) reBlogged by caleb waldorf on Jul 3, 2008, 10:42AM

[Untitled]

caleb waldorf — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:14:16 -0400

»Ghost«, 2007 by Kader Attia.

Originally from VVORK by mail reBlogged by caleb waldorf on Jul 3, 2008, 2:35PM

Agent of Change

caleb waldorf — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:31:28 -0400

Geoff Shearcroft, of The Agents of Change, will be coming round tomorrow at 11:30am to speak at the Storefront for Art and Architecture's Pop Up branch here in London.
Aside from holding down the fort for Geoffs everywhere, Shearcroft and I were actually guests on the same radio show a few years ago, but this will be the first time we've met in person. I first found Shearcroft's work – and, thus, The Agents of Change – through the book Fantasy Architecture: 1500-2036. There, the image of a mouse with a suburban house growing out of its back, as if grafted there or even cloned, was a glimpse of what Shearcroft called, in a 2001 paper for the Royal College of Art, "the new biology of architecture."

[Image: "Grow Your Own" by Geoff Shearcroft].

The Agents of Change themselves have a huge array of noteworthy projects – including the awesome Monsanto New Garden City, in which it's asked: what would happen if global agri-business giant Monsanto were to purchase the London borough of Hackney, turning it into an Agricultural Action Zone (AAZ)?
"Costly infrastructural components are replaced with a self-sufficient ecology of grass roads, localised rainwater collection, organic solar films and biological compost systems," the architects suggest. The economically depressed borough would present "new growing opportunities," thus "liberating the ground's agricultural potential."
Then there's the project known as Roof Divercity in which all the roofs of Croydon are activated as new social, economic, and agricultural spaces for the borough's residents.

[Images: Roof Divercity by The Agents of Change].

The AOC's proposal for the recent Birnbeck Island competition is also fantastic, involving a very colorful village and a kind of artificially amplified mountain form on a pier in the west of England.

[Images: From the Birnbeck Island and Birnbeck Village proposals by The Agents of Change].

Meanwhile, more germane for this year's London Festival of Architecture, The Agents of Change also designed The Lift, which they describe as "a new Parliament."

[Image: The Lift by The Agents of Change].

In any case, I could go on and on, uploading images of their work all day.
Shearcroft will be speaking at the Pop Up Storefront tomorrow at 11:30am – so come by to hear what he has to say.

Originally from BLDGBLOG by noreply@blogger.com (Geoff Manaugh) reBlogged by caleb waldorf on Jul 3, 2008, 5:36AM

Art as Intervention: A Roundtable

caleb waldorf — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:28:23 -0400

“…Brooke Singer: The work I do is also about creating opportunities/platforms to learn, reflect, discuss, and—ultimately—act upon some of the most urgent issues of our time.

For example, a current project of mine, Superfund365, A Site-A-Day, is an online data-visualization application with an accompanying RSS-feed and e-mail alert system (www.superfund365.org) that visits one toxic site active in the Superfund program run by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) each day for a year. In the end, the online archive will consist of 365 visualizations of some of the worst toxic sites in the U.S., roughly a quarter of the total number on the Superfund’s National Priorities List (NPL). Along the way, I am writing an e-mail update with highlights and conducting video interviews…” From Art as Intervention: A Roundtable, NYFA Current.

Originally from Networked_Performance by jo reBlogged by caleb waldorf on Jul 3, 2008, 8:16AM

Sedgwick: Touching Feeling

caleb waldorf — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:31:25 -0400

This is a proposal for a reading group focused on Eve Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003). Eve Sedgwick is often credited with birthing queer theory as a field of study. Touching Feeling is her most recent book, and is comprised of essays spanning ten years. Major areas of focus include performativity and performance, spatial dynamics/metaphors, texture and affect, and what she calls “techniques for nondualistic thought and pedagogy.”

The class would not be “taught.” Rather, it would be a loosely facilitated discussion/close reading group. Ideally, this discussion/reading would take place in three 2 - 3 hour installments. Participants should come to the first session having read a certain amount that we will determine as a group on The Public School list.

About Touching Feeling Wayne Koestenbaum has written: “Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s gift is to electrify intellectual communities by reminding them that ‘thought’ has a temperature, a texture, and an erotics.”

from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve_Kosofsky_Sedgwick

Originally from The Public School by sarahkessler reBlogged by caleb waldorf on Jun 15, 2008, 11:35PM

The Public School Committee Meeting 04

caleb waldorf — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:31:21 -0400

New on committee! Caleb Waldorf
Thank you, John Houck

[ read meeting notes here ]

Originally from The Public School by D.A.N. reBlogged by caleb waldorf on Jun 16, 2008, 9:42AM

Iraqi Terrorist Brokered Algeria, Osama Deal

caleb waldorf — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 02:51:40 -0400

It's not all that surprising that Algeria's jihadists were energized after they linked up with Al-Qaeda. After all, Osama & Co. had supplied funds and training to militants all over the world. What's eye-opening is that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia -- a group largely thought to be Iraqi home-grown and only loosely connected with the main Al Qaeda outfit -- brokered the deal between Algeria's radicals and Osama. The New York Times reports:

Then the leader of the [Algerian] group… Abdelmalek Droukdal, sent a secret message to Iraq in the fall of 2004. The recipient was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and the two men on opposite ends of the Arab world engaged in what one firsthand observer describes as a corporate merger.

Today, as Islamist violence wanes in some parts of the world, the Algerian militants — renamed Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb — have grown into one of the most potent Osama bin Laden affiliates, reinvigorated with fresh recruits and a zeal for Western targets.

A lot of folks -- including, um, me -- scoffed when the White House insisted that "Al Qaeda core and Al Qaeda in Iraq are [not] two separate things." But if this Times story is accurate, the two were much closer than we realized. Because of Zarqawi's deal-making, "Al Qaeda’s North Africa offshoot is now running small training camps for militants from Morocco, Tunisia and as far away as Nigeria... just as the Qaeda leadership has been able to reconstitute itself in Pakistan’s ungoverned tribal areas, The State Department in April categorized the tribal areas and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb as the two top hot spots in its annual report on global terrorism."

alex munt interview

caleb waldorf — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 02:48:35 -0400

I first encountered the writing of Alex Munt while doing research for a post on David Lynch last summer. While googling various ephemera related to Lynch's recent work I came across the article Inland Empire: The Cinema in Trouble?, which stopped me dead in my tracks. This text, which Munt penned for Flow TV, is indicative of his dynamic reading of cinema and related analysis of emerging methods of production and distribution. Alex is a Lecturer in the Media Department at Macquarie University (in Australia) and his focus is on digital low-budget cinema and new directions in screenwriting and feature filmmaking. Alex and I have been emailing back and forth for the last several weeks and the transcript that follows provides a fascinating window into his research.

One of the most recognizable characteristics of your writing about film is that you spend quite a bit of time "off the screen" addressing new means of distribution (i.e. YouTube) and production techniques (i.e. pro-am gear). A binary that turns up in your Feature Film: A ‘You Tube Narrative Model’? article is the divide between 'Elite Digital' and 'Democratic Digital'. Could you discuss the difference between these paradigms and speculate as to what commercial cinema can learn from YouTube?

In terms of staying ‘off the screen’ (at least part of the time) – I think it is important space to occupy, in order to think about ‘the digital’. The digital is a quantity that needs to be situated for each particular medium. For the cinema, there has been two main digital forces – and in opposite directions. That is, the evolution of high-end digital visual effects (as CGI) in Hollywood and the experiments in digital low-budget cinema, since the mid 1990s. (This is not a new idea in itself, one noted by Lev Manovich, who uses the term ‘Digital Realism’ to situate the work of the Dogme95 brethren, and their ‘lo-fi’ approach to digital feature filmmaking). In each case, via altogether different digital production and post-production pathways, we arrive at the long-form narrative feature film. So the digital, for the cinema, is less a revolution, and more of a remediation, or mutation, often subtle – so we need to pay particular attention to what’s going on with the scripts, behind the camera, with the crews and digital kit and then in the edit suite. Hollywood CGI is not a big part of my own research, but there is a lot of interesting work here. Shilo McClean in her book Digital Storytelling argues that digital visual effects (she calls DVFx) far from being extraneous - are actually having a decisive impact on Hollywood narration, scripts, story and style, for CGI Hollywood cinema. And by the same token, for new low-budget cinema – I see the digital as a real catalyst for a reconsideration, and opportunity for innovation, in narrative, film form and aesthetics of the moving image. In this domain, transformations are evident in film-practice: from ‘open’ scriptwriting, to the use of micro-crews and the shift to HD digital cinematography and affordable digital colour-grading, with software like After Effects. I’ve referred to this digital as ‘democratic’ since as film-practice, it is relatively accessible. And what I think is new here, is the evolution of the digital aesthetic for the moving image, at the low-budget end. In the first Dogme wave, the digital aesthetic got harnessed to a polemical, and rather limiting, single aesthetic dictated by the Dogme95 manifesto, and realised as grainy, shaky cinematography cut to abrupt editing patterns, with minor post production treatment. However, in the current wave of micro/low-budget, small-scale digital cinema, since around 2000, ‘the digital’ is given more room to move. For example, iconic directors like Kiarostami and Lynch both rework their distinctive brand of cinema, the Indie movment goes digital – with Mumblecorps in the US or WarpX in the UK, together with the impact of a wider digital culture on cinema - Web 2.0, social-networking and of course the video explosion, synonymous with YouTube. And for me, this is all really exciting stuff.

ALEXEY TITARENKO | PHOTOGRAPHY

caleb waldorf — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:20:24 -0400

via http://www.alexeytitarenko.com/city4.html

Originally from FFFFOUND! / EVERYONE by situationista reBlogged by caleb waldorf on Jun 30, 2008, 12:13PM

Best political sign

caleb waldorf — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:20:20 -0400

Voting for The UnConvention's My Yard Our Message project starts tomorrow. Top vote-getters -- like Paul Wenzel's, above? -- will be produced and distributed near the Republican National Convention site during the nominating convention. Anyone can vote anytime throughout July.

Originally from Eyeteeth: A journal of incisive ideas. by Paul Schmelzer reBlogged by caleb waldorf

Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted): Why We Need More Field Biology Courses

caleb waldorf — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:15:17 -0400

via http://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/2008/03/why_we_need_more_field_biology.php

Originally from FFFFOUND! / EVERYONE by tylermadsen reBlogged by caleb waldorf on Jun 30, 2008, 5:44PM

[Untitled]

caleb waldorf — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:52:25 -0400

Weng'an, Guizhou, China - Thousands of outraged villagers surrounded and torched, local police stations and Communist Party offices Saturday. The incidents were following the alleged murder and cover up of a 15-year-old girl and her uncle. Rioters also overturned and set fire to 20 cars, many of which were police or government vehicles. Many who participated in the violence were teenagers, and may have been classmates with the young girl.

The teen's body was found in a river, after, according to police, she took her own life by jumping off a bridge. Locals claim she was raped and murdered by the son of a senior police official. Her uncle, a high school teacher, was beaten to death by police after he demanded they investigate his niece's death and perform an autopsy.

Originally from by noreply@blogger.com (Bombs and Shields) reBlogged by caleb waldorf on Jun 29, 2008, 5:14PM

Baghdad's Teetering Floors

caleb waldorf — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:52:21 -0400

[Image: A U.S. Army soldier secures a checkpoint at the wall that separates southern Sadr City from the north, in Baghdad / AP photo, Baghdad's walls keep peace but feel like prison, 2008.]

If anyone knows where to find a complete map – or, as complete as possible – of all the security walls and separation barriers that have been (and are) being devised within Baghdad by American forces, I’d love to see it. I have found a few maps of some separate districts, but it seems like there must be a project out there tracking this more comprehensively.
Anyway, I say this because a recent article for USA Today reports on another wall that began construction just a couple of weeks ago around the neighborhood of Hurriyah. “The new wall ties into two existing walls to prevent Shiite extremists from coming and going at will — and presumably from smuggling in arms,” we are told.
Just a few days after construction was underway, however, a truck bomb exploded killing 68 people there. So, again, I scratch my head, and ask – do the walls prevent violence, or just seem to trigger it?

[Image: The Baghdad Table, by Edra Tarazi.]

In addition to the 3-mile-long wall in Azamiyah, a wall in Amariyah, and the new one in Sadr City, the article mentions the district of Doura, which apparently “has so many walls and observation towers that some parts resemble a maze.”

Nowadays there's hardly a street in Baghdad without a wall — or a cheaper substitute like barbed wire, palm tree trunks, mounds of dirt or piles of rocks. They're even used to control pedestrian and vehicular traffic in risky areas. – USA Today

There isn’t much else in the article you probably don’t already know, for instance how the walls “block access to schools, mosques, churches, hotels, homes, markets and even entire neighborhoods — almost anything that could be attacked,” the reporter suggests. They “also lead to gridlock, rising prices for food and homes, and complaints about living in what feels like a prison.”
NPR covered the devastating challenges the barriers pose for local economies last week.

[Image: Labyrinth, the game.]

Baghdad is starting to remind me a lot of that old wooden board game Labyrinth, I think it was called, or, maybe it was Tilt-A-World. The one you angled two wooden platforms back and forth with rotating knobs to maneuver a little steel marble through a maze of walls without dropping it into a hole. Ultimately, it was a game of delicate touch, floor balance, and tactical wall hugging. Advancing the marble required a strategy of resting it in a sequence of corners, or hold-outs, until you were ready to carefully slope the board again and make a run rolling the it along a fragmented edge hoping to reach another little bunker to pause once more.
It was a labyrinth of baby steps and well timed wall crawls, and playing it was a test of nerves since it took a steady hand to ever so gently pitch the platforms together in a combined direction that would roll the marble precisely where you wanted it to go. I imagine it like trying to diffuse an IED with your bare hands. One faulty overturn or misadjustment, and you were dead.

But, it’s almost as if Baghdad has been turned into a mortal-sized version of this game since everyone and everything in the city now moves according to a system of blast walls, security barricades, revolving iron gates, military checkpoints, bunkers, IEDs, car bombs, etc. Perhaps, in this case, the American and Iraqi forces have their hands on one of the dials, while the sectarian militia groups collectively have their hands on the other. Wrestling for control of the city, Baghdad is in a constant state of imbalance and instability, subject to ceaseless shifts of power, while its civilians teeter on the edges of sudden death much like the innocent steel marble whose slippery fate rests in the hands of the war lords.
But, don't you think it will take more than the weight of all these walls to bring balance to Baghdad's teetering floors?

(Thanks to Mike for the link!)

Originally from Subtopia by noreply@blogger.com (Bryan Finoki) reBlogged by caleb waldorf on Jun 29, 2008, 2:33PM

The Google Way of Science

caleb waldorf — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 14:01:18 -0400

There's a dawning sense that extremely large databases of information, starting in the petabyte level, could change how we learn things. The traditional way of doing science entails constructing a hypothesis to match observed data or to solicit new data. Here's a bunch of observations; what theory explains the data sufficiently so that we can predict the next observation?

It may turn out that tremendously large volumes of data are sufficient to skip the theory part in order to make a predicted observation. Google was one of the first to notice this. For instance, take Google's spell checker. When you misspell a word when googling, Google suggests the proper spelling. How does it know this? How does it predict the correctly spelled word? It is not because it has a theory of good spelling, or has mastered spelling rules. In fact Google knows nothing about spelling rules at all.

Instead Google operates a very large dataset of observations which show that for any given spelling of a word, x number of people say "yes" when asked if they meant to spell word "y." Google's spelling engine consists entirely of these datapoints, rather than any notion of what correct English spelling is. That is why the same system can correct spelling in any language.

In fact, Google uses the same philosophy of learning via massive data for their translation programs. They can translate from English to French, or German to Chinese by matching up huge datasets of humanly translated material. For instance, Google trained their French/English translation engine by feeding it Canadian documents which are often released in both English and French versions. The Googlers have no theory of language, especially of French, no AI translator. Instead they have zillions of datapoints which in aggregate link "this to that" from one language to another.

Top 10 Strangest Anti-Terrorism Patents

caleb waldorf — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 15:31:21 -0400

Technology has always played a big role in fighting terrorism. Some inventions are truly useful and will undoubtedly save lives, whereas others are so bizarre that one wonders how in the world they got patented. This list is about the latter: Behold the Top 10 Strangest Anti-Terrorism Patents!

(Note: yes, most of these patents cite fighting terrorism as raison d'être)

Anti-Terrorist Truck

U.S. Patent 4667565, Rapid response patrol and antiterrorist vehicle by Reg. A. Anderson. Issued May 26, 1987.

Problem: Terrorists can pop up at any time, leaving local authorities totally defenseless against their raging attacks.

Solution: When terrorists walk past this non-descript truck parked quietly on the street, its roof pops out to reveal a machine gun turret! If that doesn't strike fear into the heart of Jihadis, well ... then we can still mow 'em down!

Bonus: Also great for battling zombies.

Face Protector Against Poisonous Gas

U.S. Patent 7107990, Portable face protector for protecting human being from poisonous gas and securing visibility by Kuk-Bin Lee. Issued Aug 30, 2004.

Problem: Terrorists may use poisonous gas to terrorize civilians, and gas masks are not very attractive looking.

Solution: A portable face protector (10), probably inspired by Robin's mask, and a piece of cloth (22) to cover the mouth and nose.

Music (& film) posters by Tadanori Yokoo

caleb waldorf — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:33:45 -0400

Tadanori Yokoo, one of Japan’s most prolific and internationally recognized graphic designers, has created a number of psychedelic posters for notable musicians.

Earth, Wind & Fire, 1976 [Enlarge]

Santana - Lotus, 1974 [Enlarge]

The Beatles, 1972 [Enlarge]

Emerson, Lake & Palmer concert poster, 1972 [Enlarge]

Tangerine Dream, 1976 [Enlarge]

Beatles - Star Club, 1977 [Enlarge]

Cochin Moon, 1978 [Enlarge]

Holst - The Planets, 1979 [Enlarge]

Andrew Bush's "66 Drives" photographs

caleb waldorf — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:33:41 -0400

From 1989 to 1997 Andrew Bush took photos of people driving in Southern California.

Caption for above photo: Man driving west at 23 mph down a yet-to-be-named dirt road, around lunchtime, during a construction boom in Las Vegas in June of 1989 Link

Originally from Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder reBlogged by caleb waldorf on Jun 24, 2008, 10:19AM

Why the new wiretapping law is a lot worse than you think.

caleb waldorf — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:12:36 -0400

Sometime today, the Senate is likely to approve the most comprehensive overhaul of American surveillance law since the Watergate era. Unless you're a government lawyer, a legal scholar, a masochist, or an insomniac, chances are you haven't read the 114-page bill. Don't beat yourself up: Neither have most of the 293 House members who voted for it last week. Ditto the mainstream press, who seem to have relied chiefly on summaries provided by the same lawmakers who hadn't read it.

[more ...]

Originally from Slate Magazine by Patrick Radden Keefe reBlogged by caleb waldorf on Jun 25, 2008, 4:12PM

[Untitled]

caleb waldorf — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:12:33 -0400

Paris, France - Detained immigrants burned down two buildings at the Vincennes detention center, after the death of a 41-year-old Tunisian migrant Saturday. 14 Migrants were able to escape during the chaos.

Guards claim that the migrant who died had a heart attack while he was alone in his cell, but authorities have promised to investigate the matter following the uprising. 20 Migrants were hospitalized for smoke inhalation following the fire but none of the cases were reported to be serious.

Detainees at the center, most of whom are of African origin and many of whom have fled former French and other European colonies, are not accused of committing any criminal offenses but are only being held for lacking EU documents.

The Vincennes center was the largest in the country. There is no word yet as to whether not not it with be rebuilt.

Originally from by noreply@blogger.com (Bombs and Shields) reBlogged by caleb waldorf on Jun 25, 2008, 8:53AM

PHotoEspaña: Committed Places, Topography and the Present

caleb waldorf — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:17:17 -0400

I found this edition of the PHotoEspaña festival amazingly good. One of the most thought-provoking shows, Committed Places, Topography and the Present, displays the work of ten photographers who use the genre of topography photography as a medium to go beyond the representation of physical places and reflect on a series of social, historical or political issue. These photographers know how to work their public: first you grab their attention with a spectacular or intriguing image then you tell them the story that lurks behind the print. Some of the participating artists were familiar to me (Geert Goiris , Walter Niedermayr and Taryn Simon) but i discovered other photographers worth a mention and some praise:

Beate Gütschow, S #22

The show opens with Beate Gütschow's puzzling B&W S series (the S is short for Stadt, or "city"). What looks like vaguely familiar, yet slightly post-apocalyptic, urban spaces are in fact digital assemblages of details from the artist's archive of images of buildings, people, and concrete structures seen in Chicago, Los Angeles, Sarajevo, Kyoto and other urban environments.

The depressing urbanscapes are inhabited by small human figures who are actually the only element we recognize: they are mostly tourists, homeless people or drug addicts.

Surrealism and Situtationnism

caleb waldorf — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:49:28 -0400

Surréalistes et situationnistes, vies parallèles
"Histoire et documents"
Jérôme Duwa. Préface de Christophe Bourseiller
Editions Dilecta : Paris 2008
237 pp.

André Breton and Guy Debord never met. It seems indeed that both were mutually exclusive, so to speak.in the sense that Breton and surrealism were said to belong to the past, which World War II had just erased, so that everything had to start from scratch again. But such ahasty judgment on surrealism has to be reconsidered in a spirit which refuses to settle old scores. Was the reason, then, a fundamental divergence or a profound, secret likeness hidden behind superficial rivalry? A detailed history of the up and down relationships between the Paris and Brussels surrealists on the one hand, and Guy Debord and the Situationnists on the other, remained to be written so as to understand one of the mainsprings of the construction of the Situationnist identity. This essay, which includes an anthology of declarations and pamphlets,a dozen illustrations and texts by Jean-Louis Bédouin, André Breton, Claude Courtot, Adrien Dax, Guy Debord, Tom Gutt, Simon Hantaï, Gérard Legrand, Marcel Mariën, Benjamin Péret, José Pierre, Jean Schuster, Jan Strijbosch, Raoul Vaneigem and Joseph Wolman, helps follow the tumultuous course of those parallel lives.

Originally from 20th Century Avant-garde by noreply@blogger.com (Co) reBlogged by caleb waldorf on Jun 2, 2008, 2:38AM

Mobilizing Architecture for Film and War

caleb waldorf — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:48:24 -0400

Title card from The Lion Has Wings (Source: Criterion Collection)

In 1939, while working on the wildly popular fantasy epic The Thief of Bagdad, émigré producer Alexander Korda, along with Michael Powell (one-half of the estimable directing team of Powell and Pressburger), Brian Desmond Hurst and Adrian Brunel, directed a propaganda film called The Lion Has Wings. The film contained an unlikely mix of G.P.O. Film Unit documentary footage, maudlin storytelling, and anti-German sentiment. The story revolved around an R.A.F. Bomber Command pilot (played by Ralph Richardson), who is called into service and undertakes a (supposedly) dangerous mission against German shipping on the Kiel canal. The film even ends with a squadron of Spitfires thwarting a Luftwaffe raid, an eerie premonition of the Battle of Britain, which was still months away.

Advertisement for Coates' Lawn Road Flats (Source)

The Lion Has Wings serves to promote the R.A.F.'s prowess and to reassure the public about England's military preparedness. Yet the film is remarkable as it was created in an incredible climate of collaboration between architects and filmmakers. This is not surprising as it was Korda, after all, who produced the screen adaptation of H.G. Wells's Things to Come in 1936 (which like, The Thief of Bagdad, was directed by William Cameron Menzies) and who hired László Moholy-Nagy to create the special effects for the film. Korda and Wells were also friends with other Bauhaus alumni, most notably Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius, who were residing in London at the time, both leaving for the United States shortly thereafter. Their haunt was Welles Coates' Lawn Road Flats, a constructivist fantasy of a building that would be the temporary offices for Breuer, Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, as well as for M.A.R.S. members Maxwell Fry and Morton Shand.

Propaganda in The Lion Has Wings has an architectural bent. In fact, one could very well say that it is an instance where architectural modernism is mobilized for war. This is evident in the opening moments of the film. Following images of bucolic English countrysides and busy cities, narrator E.V.H. Emmett describes England's achievement in creating clean, well-lighted, sanitary, and (sometimes) leisurely environments. During this narrative (which sounds like a laundry-list of Athens Charter principles), audiences would then see current examples of English architecture. Touted as pinnacles of English rationalism, these images serve to show that it is Britain, and not Germany, who is the world leader in creating hygienic spaces.

Images of Maxwell Fry's and Elizabeth Denby's Kensal House, from The Lion Has Wings (1939)(Source: Criterion Collection)

Two buildings share the limelight in the opening moments of The Lion Has Wings. The first is Maxwell Fry's and Elizabeth Denby's Kensal House. Built in 1937, Kensal House was one of the first attempts for re-housing urban slum dwellers under the strictures of the 1930 Greenwood Act. The Lion Has Wings features different views of the project. In an aerial shot, the buildings signature curved facade is clearly visible. In another, the clean, flat white walls shine brilliantly in sunlight.

Collage of Boots Factory Buildings by Owen Williams (Source)

The other is Canadian Owen Williams's Boots D10 "Wets" Factory, a building known by its large reinforced concrete spans and commodious lighting. The building is shown in The Lion Has Wings as an example of new factories that would increase worker productivity while keeping clean and healthy environments.

Williams' Boots D10 "Wets" Factory, from The Lion Has Wings (1939) (Source: Criterion Collection)

The use of modern architecture as a propagandistic tool in Britain is not new, however. An article about Berthold Lubetkin's Finsbury Health Centre in an 1930 issue of The Architectural Review contains a cartoon by Gordon Cullen that anticipates much of the tenor in The Lion Has Wings. This cartoon affirms how Lubetkin's building,

[I]s an open type of planning (the whole of the building being open to air and sunlight) as opposed to the old-fashioned idea of fitting as much accommodation on the site as possible by creating courts and unventilated areas ... by means of the general lay-out, as well as by the profusion of glass areas, a very light and airy effect is obtained, in opposition to the usual rather grim and sordid character of buildings of the same description.[1]

The cartoon shows Lubetkin's clinic, clean, spacious, symmetrical, alongside a cramped, dank non-modernist hospital. Whereas statements like "Dignity at the Expense of Health" and "Bad Stale Air!" grace the latter building, for the Finsbury Heath Centre, Cullen uses claims like "Open Courts, No Overshadowing, Proper Cross-Ventilation" and "Good Outlook to All Rooms -- No Shut-In Feeling" to give the reader a sense of just how advanced the building was.

Cartoon by Gordon Cullen showing Lubetkin's Finsbury Health Centre, from a 1930 issue of The Architectural Review (Source: Gruffudd, 2001)

The Finsbury Health Centre was also featured in of a series of wartime propaganda posters designed by Abraham Games. Titled "Your Britain -- Fight For it Now", the series shows many of the pastoral scenes from the opening moments of The Lion Has Wings. And like the film, the poster depicting the Finsbury Health Centre shows how modern architecture can be mobilized for social and political purposes. As geographer Pyrs Gruffuud writes, Games's image of Lubetkin's building

[S]howed the façade of the Finsbury Health Centre in vibrant colour. Behind that façade, however, lurked the devastation of an inner urban slum corner (labeled 'disease' and 'neglect') in which a boy suffering from rickets played with a toy boat. It promised a modern Britain rebuilt on hygenic foundations but was, ironically, banned by Prime Minister Churchill as being a disgraceful libel on pre-war conditions in British cities.[2]

Although not libelous in the same sense as Games's poster, the depiction of architectural modernism in The Lion Has Wings serves another purpose: to condemn the urban conditions in Germany. With images culled from Leni Riefensthal's Triumph des Willens (1935), it is not too tenuous to suggest that Korda, et al. are claiming that it was the unhygienic, crowded conditions of German urban centers that allowed Hitler to come to power.

Abraham Games, "Your Britain -- Fight For It Now" (Source: Gruffudd, 2001)

On the other hand, one must pay attention to the pedigree of architecture in The Lion Has Wings. To emphasize the primacy of architectural modernism in England, the directors opt to show buildings by English-speaking architects. There are no Berthold Lubetkins, no Serge Chermayeffs, no Erich Mendelsohns in The Lion Has Wings.

[1] Pyrs Gruffudd, "'Science and the Stuff of Life': Modernist Health Centres in 1930s London", Journal of Historical Geography, 27, 3 (2001), p. 408.

[2] Ibid., p. 412.

(Note: a pristine new version of The Lion Has Wings is available in the new 2-Disc edition of The Thief of Bagdad, from The Criterion Collection)

Originally from a456 by noreply@blogger.com (enrique) reBlogged by caleb waldorf on Jun 18, 2008, 5:27PM

Fuck your way to the revolution

caleb waldorf — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 01:47:51 -0400

Originally from Click opera

I was a Little Red Schoolbook kid. At the age of eleven I read an article in the London Times about this revolutionary and shocking guide for children and begged my parents to get me a copy. Fashionably permissive, they agreed, and with true egalitarianism ordered a second copy for my brother. When I got sent off to boarding school in Scotland the manual was in my luggage. It didn’t last long; housemaster Quack Mendl (once a famous cricketer) recognised the Schoolbook as a work of subversive literature. He confiscated it, and I never saw my copy again. It stayed with me, though; in 1998 I named an album after it.

The story of the Little Red Schoolbook — told by Jolyon Jenkins in this week’s In Living Memory on BBC Radio 4, available online for another five days, and also in a downloadable Australian documentary made in 2006, The Book That Shook the World — is a dark tale of institutional paranoia, control freakery, authoritarian skulduggery and mistrust. It’s a tale of conservatism at its worst.

What was it about the Little Red Schoolbook that caused all the hullaballoo? Well, quite a lot, actually. The book, written by two Danish educators, Soren Hansen and Jesper Jenson, talked about sex, drugs, rights, agitation, peaceful protest, abortion. It told kids how to get their way with the “paper tigers” who controlled their lives in the classroom and at home by organising collectively. It said that homosexuality and heterosexuality were equally valid options, and it said that nothing sexual was wrong if it didn’t hurt anyone. It appealed to me because it was the first book I’d read which treated me, a child, as a responsible citizen able to act politically in the world. Its attitudes seemed as modern and as rational as Danish furniture. The book’s tone was one of calm sanity, but the reaction to it was a kind of insanity — an object lesson in how the authorities think, and why you shouldn’t trust them.

Government rules it's legal for government to spy on those not in government

caleb waldorf — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 01:47:46 -0400

Assholes. The whole lot. Mike Masnick reports on the American congress' failure to not only penalize telco giants who allowed warrantless spying on American citizens, but to provide retroactive immunity for any previous crimes. A few hundred corrupt, pissloaf schemers have just made it totally legal for the government to spy on you without any oversight whatsoever.

However, under this new law, Congress has basically given the President (who ordered the wiretaps in the first place, and doesn't want these trials to go forward since they may reveal that he broke the law too) "get out of jail free" cards he can hand to each telco, saying that since he told them that the wiretaps were legal, the lawsuits no longer can proceed. Basically, this puts the President above the law, lets him avoid trials that might prove that his activities broke the law and to reward telcos who broke the law at his command.

Our Congress Has Failed Us: Gives In On Telecom Immunity [Techdirt]

Originally from Boing Boing Gadgets by Joel Johnson reBlogged by caleb waldorf

Inside 61, 600 sq. ft.

caleb waldorf — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 03:33:42 -0400

So, about 70 people made it out today to protest Blackwater's new border facility in Otay Mesa, Ca., an old warehouse that's been converted into a shooting range and training grounds. Currently, it's been configured to mimic a small ship in order to prep the Navy with better counterterrorist tactics. NBC was there and produced this quick video with a special peak inside. Check it out.

On that note, here is an extract from a forthcoming collaboration Angela (archive: s0metim3s) and I have been working on that seems appropriate for the moment.

"[Preemption] ... Around 1,000 square miles of the Californian desert is given over to modeling the warzones of the Middle East. Here, as with other police/military training environments, they tackle calamity in an amusement park of unrest, insurgency and its abatement, architectures both elaborate and artful, designed solely for the purposes of being conquered and reconquered. As the accessories of the doctrine of preemption, these spaces are accompanied by a growing number of university research laboratories which engineer preliminary superstructures suspended in conjectural disaster, or simulate emergency landings and training flight paths under fake duress, or teach of non-linear dynamics and Deleuzo-Guattarian war machines. These arcade-labs of war prepare for conflict under the principle of continuous adaption, train flexible military units moving not only to protect boundary lines but through terrains marked by the threat of catastrophe. These are instructional handbooks of preemption made manifest as simulated cities, malls and oilfields, aiming to transform soldiers from grunts to self-managed risk-assessors, to move the border with them through chaotic environments. Seeking to relocate warfare within the paradoxical condition of preempting the emergence of the unpredictable they, as with recognition technologies, are elaborately armed and lethal signals of failure."

[Previous coverage of Blackwater here, here, here, uh... here, and here... oh and here, too.]

Originally from Subtopia by noreply@blogger.com (Bryan Finoki) reBlogged by caleb waldorf on Jun 11, 2008, 9:17PM

Sabotage manual from 1944 advises acting like an average 2008 manager

caleb waldorf — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:04:26 -0400

David "Everything is Miscellaneous" Weinberger sez, "Here's a PDF of a 1944 'Simple Sabotage Field Manual' from the US Strategic Services, explaining how to train people to sabotage their workplace. Full of useful suggestions, from the practical to the, um, less so (e.g., bring a bag of mo[n]ths into a theater showing propaganda films). It also recommends doing things through channels, making speeches, and referring matters to committee as techniques of sabotage (cf. page 28). I got this link from a presentation by two CIA folks at the Enterprise 2.0 conference."

(1) Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
(2) Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of per sonal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate “patriotic” comments.
(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.
(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
(5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
(6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
(7) Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
(8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision — raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the juris diction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.

PDF Link(Thanks, David!)

How To: Visit a Secret Nuclear Bunker

caleb waldorf — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:04:23 -0400

The first rule of Site R is: You do not talk about Site R. Or, as the security guidance about the Pentagon’s nuclear war bunker (AKA Raven Rock Mountain Complex, or RRMC), states: “Avoid conversations about RRMC with unauthorized personnel.” The other two rules of Site R are: “Do not confirm or deny information about RRMC to reporters or radio stations,” and “Do not post RRMC information on Internet web pages.”

We might suggest a fourth rule: do not send information about RRMC to reporters working on a travelogue about nuclear weapons.

In our book released this week, A Nuclear Family Vacation: Travels in the World of Atomic Weaponry, we start off in the American southwest and travel all the way to Iran in search of a better understanding of nuclear weapons and warfare. In an itinerary that includes underground missile alert facilities, uranium plants and remote Pacific outposts, we try to answer the question: What is the current nuclear strategy, and does it make any sense?

Nuclear bunkers, a Cold War holdover, embody many of the contradictions in today’s nuclear policy. First built as a way to shield top leaders from atomic fallout, they quickly became obsolete with the advent of thermonuclear weapons and precise, long-range missiles. Some, like the congressional bunker at the opulent Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, have closed their doors; others, like Cheyenne Mountain, have teetered on the brink of shutdown.

But our interest in Site R was piqued by an announcement that was posted in 2006 on the website of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), the Pentagon’s nonproliferation agency:

Kucinich: Impeaching Bush

caleb waldorf — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:04:19 -0400

Kucinich on articles of impeachment of Bush:

Originally from Informed Comment by noreply@blogger.com (Juan Cole) reBlogged by caleb waldorf on Jun 10, 2008, 9:35PM

Book Review - The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock

caleb waldorf — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:04:15 -0400

The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock, by Steven Jacobs (available on Amazon USA and UK.)

010 publishers write: In the films of Alfred Hitchcock, architecture plays an important role. Having worked as a set designer in the early 1920s, Hitchcock remained intensely concerned with the art direction of his films. In addition, the 'master of suspense' made some remarkable single-set films, such as Rope and Rear Window, that explicitly deal with the way the confines of the set relate to those of the architecture on screen. Spaces of confinement also turn up in the 'Gothic plot' of films in which the house is presented as an uncanny labyrinth and a trap. Furthermore, it became a Hitchcock hallmark to use famous monuments as the location for a climactic scene. Last but not least, Hitchcock used architectural motifs such as stairs and windows, which are closely connected to Hitchcockian narrative structures (suspense) or typical Hitchcock themes (voyeurism). Apart from dealing with these issues extensively, Steven Jacobs discusses at length a series of domestic buildings with the help of a number of reconstructed floor plans especially made for this publication.