Spook

If reading the post below is to much for you, here's something more suited to your weekend hangovers, a nice little hartbreaking movie about a ghost girl who finds a teddy bear: Spook

Via Wurzeltod

And here's just another little, but hilarious, one from the filmschool in Vancouver: Jameel

Enjoy.

More Eggs - Now Bigger

In between reading all I can find about situationists, I do take a little time to actually work on my project. This is a sneakpreview of my Travel Companion™. So far it's a plaster "egg", the size of a small dog. On the basis of this I'm gonna make it as a shell of wax, the same basic principle as THIS.
It's to be carried along on a route through the city, registering this walk, this route, in the deformations and imprints it'll get by the way it's carried and the surfaces it's pressed against. Where my first attempt created frozen moments, this one should be better suited at recording the actual movement over time.

Any questions (i doubt it - this all makes so perfect sense)?

Life around a dead red door

Life around a dead red door
Originally uploaded by thiooof.

Click this, and then the next three photos. They are really something.

Quote of the day (and not particularly connected to the above):
"Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive"

Let's make a new competition: Who said this? Was he a man or a woman? Did he look like Santa Claus or not? And what was his favorite color?
Prizes will be as elusive as ever, this time you can win a warm smile and a long nose (as we say in Denmark).

Fin de Copenhague

As you might know I've been studying the urbanist ideas of the International Situationists. Two books they, more specifically Guy Debord and Asger Jorn, really seemed like something special. They "Fin de Copenhague" and "Memoire". The first one describes Jorns youth in Denmark and Copenhagen. The second Guy Debords in France and Paris. Each printed in just 200 examples of which most have been lost. Making the books rather priceless. Luckily they were printed in Denmark, so now I've ordered them at the royal library. I can only read them there. But I'm so thrilled about going there tomorrow, sit there and touch these original masterpieces. And see and feel for myself what the concept of detournement is really about.



This is from "Fin de Copenhague". I think it's amazing how cool and modern it looks. It was made in just 24 hours, and the story of the books creation is really interesting. You can read about it in this very nice essay.

Happy Monday

I think we need a nice picture to start the week. This is from Hamburg.

Prunes & Landscapes

Pruned is a blog I found a few days ago focusing on landscape architecture. And it's the nicest architectural blog I've come across so far. It's some quite cool and rather different examples he writes about. For instance this one about a Japanese stadium turned into a small city. Or this one with the most beautiful drawing of the mississippi rivers geological development. He even has a sense of humor :)

So, now you know - that's a good place to go in emergency situations when there's nothing of interest here. It'll be added to the links section.

Hasta la Victoria Siempre - Økseskaft

I have a very ambiguous relationship to Cuba - on the one hand I have a great passion for the music and have been wanting to go there for many years. On the other hand it has dawned on me what tremendous asshole Fidel is and what a cruel dictatorship he is running.



Recently a friend of mine brought to my attention the Cuban installation artists Los Carpinteros (The carpenters). Their stuff is really nice, beautiful, on the border between art, design and architecture. But I can't help wondering how artists like that can work under strict censorship from the state. Is what we see just a faint shadow of what they would produce under other circumstances. There is however a lot of bridges, crumblings walls, even some watchtowers among their drawings and installations. And then, there's this drawing, Floatable Pool.



I believe it must be inspired by Rem Koolhaas' swimming pool, described in Delirious New York, powered by Soviet dissidents and constructed to escape to New York. With the cruel twist to the story that, for some reason which I don't remember at the moment, New York is not so alluring when they finally arrive. So they turn the pool around and head back.



Enjoy the weekend.

Situations

Ok, I'm back. Have troubles with the net in my house at the mo (perhaps something to do with not paying) and spend the weekend celebrating my birthday... and felt more like reading, real, oldfashioned books than surfing aimlessly on the net.

First book I read: "Det uperfekte menneske" ("the Unperfect Human"... oops that's "the Imperfect Human" to be completely correct) - brand new autobiography of Jørgen Leth, which caused such scandal that he can no longer be Danish consul in Haiti and no longer comment Tour de France for Danish TV2. Those bastards.

Second Book: "Theory of the Dérive and other situationist writings on the city". And I tell you- those situationists were some funny and thought-provoking fella's:

"Psychogeographical Game of the Week

Depending on what you are after, choose an area, a more or less populous city, a more or less lively street. Build a house. Furnish it. Make the most of its decoration and surroundings. Choose the season and the time. Gather together the right people, the best records and drinks. Lighting and conversation must, of course, be appropriate, along with the weather and your memories.

If your calculations are correct, you should find the outcome satisfying. (Please inform the editors of the results.)"

Situationists International Online is a collection of pretty much all their writings. And this link will take you straight to the Theory of the Dérive.

UPDATE: As a special service to my Danish readers here's a collection of Situationist texts in Danish - Situationistisk Arkiv på Det Fri Universitet.

Travel Companion

As promised, here is the finished prototype no. 1 of my Travelcompanion:

The core is a skeleton of wood. Just to give some basic structure for its way to move.


Around this a layer of wool, tightly packed with a felting needle.


Then a more fluffy layer of wool to allow manipulation of the surface.


The outside layer is a skin of wax. It gets softer and sticky with heat and hard when it's cold.


The last "layer" it needs, which I've just started working on, is a number of mechanical instruments or tools, that will attach themselves to the wax surface and support different sub-programs. This can be help carrying it, protect fragile imprints, heat it, make signs and traces in it, etc. These can be taken on and off so the Travelcompanion can be modified for specific tasks/walks.

When it's brought along walking through the city it will take shape and impressions from the way it's carried and surfaces it's pressed against or dropped onto. Thus the first purpose of it is to as a registrant the walk.
The second (or perhaps this is in fact the first) purpose is as a medium through which I will start seeing the well known city with new eyes. In other words, help defamiliarize the city as discussed in my posts on the term ostranenie, here and here. And quite possibly, people who see me walking around, carrying this strange object, will also have an experience of defamiliarization. Let's see what will happen.

Do You Need A Hand...

My friend Jens showed me this link today: e-Cuerpos, online retailer of quality, human bodyparts, originating from lovely places like Columbia, Uzbequistan and the more undefined east Asia, as well as Canada, Spain, etc...

"E-Cuerpos ... will always sell human bodies and limbs, discreetly and preserving the privacy of its clients. Scientists, collaborators and human body enthusiasts will always find in E-Cuerpos a serious, dedicated and socially responsible supplier."

Now, what I would like to know is, firstly - what exactly is a "human body enthusiast", and secondly - is this a joke?!? We've been discussing this, but don't feel sure about anything, what do you think?

UPDATE: My friend Libo, who is a very wise man, belives it's fake. He tried to buy a pair of blue eyes (a childhood dream for that poor italian boy) and it was impossible... so...

Oh, City of Dreams...

Came back from Venice last night. Feels like I was there for a week, though it was only 3,5 days. That city is so amazing, incredible, unique... I'm in lack of words... You can expect a couple of posts the next few weeks about my mind-boggling experiences there. Meanwhile an appetizer can be seen HERE - the photos I've uploaded so far.

Ubu

... and if you miss me or just get bored while I'm gone, don't despair, for here is a somewhere for you to explore in the meantime:

UbuWeb have wonderful things stashed for anyone to watch, hear, read and/or download. They have several categories, fx:

Film - you could for instance start with Un Chien Andalou by Bunuel, or this absurd german 80'ies reggae pop with Joseph Beuys. They recommend you download rather than watch online.

Sound, yes it's true, free mp3s, imagine - I find Giacomo Ballas stuff, fx. Discussione sul futurismo di due critici sudanesi, real funny. But there's also John Cage, Burroughs and lots more.

Ok, that should keep you occupied then. See you.

... Here I Come

A sneak preview of the Travelcompanion™, that's all you gonna get for now and then I'm off to Venice, oh yes :) Pretty exited about going back there. And also to just be in Italy in general and all the benefits that comes with it... like the food... and the drinks... hehe... Gonna bring a few things back from there: 2.5 kg of sweet, sweet tomatos and a bottle of pure alchochol for making limoncello and snaps.

Wooohoooooooo....

Classicist Grafitti

Here's a quick one while working late and since I'm gonna be gone for a long, long weekend. Closing in (out) on a more urban scale:

Ellen Harvey have been out joining the fun on the graffiti-covered walls of New York - in the style of miniature classical landscape painting. She's placing them only on existing graffiti, calling it New York Beautification Project - which makes me wonder if she is one of those rare and elusive reactionary activists.




For people who might come by New York, or already be there, she's even mapped them. So there's a chance to get some fresh air.

And now I'll be off to sweet dreams with a good conscience since, going to and from this post, I managed to finish the first prototype of my "travel companion" - yippiyahu. Pictures can be expected later.

Flowers & Robots

This link will take you to some of the most beautiful animations I've seen on the net. Mixing real film and computer animation they display a world of very intriguing lifeforms - thus fitting nicely with todays theme :)
Click "projects". I think my favorite is the top one -"sixes last" - but they're all good.

via Blue Tea

World of Bodies

Lately I've been looking into an old facination of mine: Bodies. It's time for me to make a new one. A travelling companion whom I can bring along on walks through the city. So, today I have to very nice, and rather different, examples of bodies for you:

Firstly Patricia Piccinini who makes rather disturbing sculptures of some of the creatures she imagines genetic technology will bring us, some time in the bright future.




Secondly: Cloaca by Wim Delvoye - a mechanical version of the human digestive system. Well, it does probably lack some of the original finesse - like getting energy out of the food. But the end result is supposedly exactly the same. Shit.



Bon appetit :)

Datafountain

Sweet Dubi send me this:

"In the morning paper, I can read the weather report as well as the stock quotes. But when I look out of my window I only get a weather update and no stock exchange info. Could someone please fix this bug in my environmental system? Thanks."

DATAFOUNTAIN

Googlezon

Goodmorning everyone. I'm a big fan of google and all their innovative side projects, gmail, google earth and -maps, blogger, etc... Yesterday there were even rumours that they are to release a Google Office today and thereby start the battle with Microsoft for real.

As much as I love Google I can easily see certain problematic sides of fx personalized advertisements and their general allknowingness. Some people actually do an effort to stay out of Googles search engines - the socalled unGoogleables.

But to really get your paranoia running today I suggest you watch this nice little film: epic 2014, 8 minutes long and rather interesting.

Venezia

ghostly venice2
Originally uploaded by froupster.

Back from sailing, but on my way soon again. Saturday I will be off for just another little globetrotting weekend-trip. To Venice :D

So here's a nice photo from the talented flickr-photographer froupster. Click it.

Mirror Mask

Dave Mckean is one of my absolutely favorite comicbook artist. He's been doing short movies for many years, which I have only seen stillpictures of. But now his first feature film is coming up, Mirror Mask, written in collaboration with Neil Gaiman and produced on a low budget with a small crew of 15 freshly graduated animators. Damn I hop this will come to Denmark. Otherwise I'll simply have to get the dvd. By the looks of it I'm already drooling with expectation.

On a sidenote - I'll be going sailing this weekend. Going with my dad from Vedbæk, near Copenhagen to Als in southern Jutland. That'll add up to about 30 hours of sailing in relatively cold and rainy weather. I'll bring my camera, so expect to see amazing photos of real men taking their turns with mother nature. Coming up next week :)

Stupid Utopias

Utopian ideas should always fill one with deep suspicion. A clear vision obscures other possibilities. In the essay I found today, Jeremy Adam Smith brings to attention the violence inherent in any utopia. Very literally exemplified in his description of the book "Utopia" by Thomas More:

"The violence of More's historical period is never far from the surface of More's island Utopia, where a single act of adultery is punishable by slavery and serial adulterers are punished with death. If More's narrator had looked past the happy smiling faces of Utopia, what fear and violence might he have seen?"

"The Ten Stupidest Utopias" is a very interesting little essay, going from Platos "Republic", over Elisabeth Nietzches Nueva Germania, Le Corbusiers Radiant City, Constants New Babylon, ending with the internet. Read, read.

Visible Humans

Today I've really dug up something for for the young readers who hunger for action, blood and nude people. The visible human project has it all.





Very basically they've taken a (nude) dead body, frozen it and cut it in very, very thin slices. Finally all the slices have been scanned, opening up numerous new possibilities for visualizing the human body. For instance this movie.



For more pictures from the project there's the facinating site with the interesting full name "Introduction to Introduction to Cross-Sectional Anatomy" from Harvard University.

And have a nice day : )

Lovely little movies

The intriguing mrs. Suzanne of Wurzeltod has recently posted a lovely collection of links to little bizarre movies. And I'm not gonna cheat you of those.

Here's my favorites amongst them:

Strindberg & Helium - 4 episodes about the famous Swedish writer and his lesser known friend - Helium the pink balloon.

The Hole - A very pro animation about what can happen if you eat to many little coloured pills. I think.

The Cat With Hands - woohoooo, clasically scaaary...


Enjoy.

Faces of Death

I found a real piece of online quality: an online gallery of princeton universitys Collection of deathmasks. Strange to look into these tired, bony faces. Frozen moments - not of living body, but of a dead and decaying one. And even though they are casts of empty shells they seem to convey so much emotion, having caught the charaters in a most intimate situation - their own deathbed.


The deathmask of Jonathan Swift

Also highly useful is the Web Gallery of Art which I refound looking for this particular picture: The Death of Marat by David. I always liked it very much.



And here is his actual deathmask.



And have a merry sunday.

Ostranenie part II

A nice essay about Japan, formalism the concept of ostranenie, estrangement - as described in this post. Makes the familiar unfamiliar, to prolong the process of perception and is thus a tool to take posession of the place/space in new ways.

Here it is: "Cute Formalism"

Granddaddy & Jed

Here's a little treat for you - the music video for the song "Jed's Other Poem
(Beautiful Ground)" by the band Granddaddy.
"So, what's so special 'bout this video" you ask yourself. Well, I'll tell you: It's programmed in Applesoft II on a 1979 Apple ][+ with 48K of RAM. Pretty cool, eh. And apart from that it's a pretty nice song and a real nice video...

"Jeddy-3 the humanoid was assembled in the kitchen out of spare parts. Before Jed's system died he wrote poetry. This is one of his poems."

Enjoy

Songlines

As I've told about before the overlying theme of the projects this year is the city seen as duration (over time) rather than as a geographical area. This made me think about a book called "urban songlines", I strongly recommend the first chapter to all Danish Speakers, which in turn made me read "The Songlines" by Bruce Chatwin - one of the best books I've ever read. It's about the nomadic nature of man in general and the way the australian aborigines map the land in particular.



The land is sung. First time by the ancestors, who created the songs and the land by walking through it. Before it was sung it did not exist. Unsung land is dead land. And as the songs describe routs, criss-crossing the entire continent, land is not experienced as twodimensional area. It is seen as a web. Words for "land" are the same as the words for "line".

Inspired by this I went on my own little walkabout through Copenhagen last thursday. Starting 16.30 I travelled through the city and suburbs untill 8 next morning, getting 2,5 hours of sleep in a hidden corner of the harbour late at night. The criteria for my route was my own curiosity, moving away from boredom and towards places unknown.

To register the trip I brought a notebook and some small plates of wax to make prints of places where my own ephemeral being in the space at the time had been significant in some way. I specifically did not bring a camera - to maintain the images and memories only in my mind, helped by the wax prints.



T hese photos of the wax, was taken while they were placed on a light table. See the rest HERE. I'm gonna put some more as soon as I have photoshop reinstalled. Also of the casts I'm making from them now... so, stay tuned.

Ostranenie

I've learned a wonderful term today - ostranenie. It's russian. Translated to english it becomes estranging and Danish (very funny translation) it's underliggørelse (more like weirdning, lol).

"This Russian term of literary analysis refers to the experience of having the familiar and commonplace made strange or alien. Such a process of estranging those experiences which are ordinarily taken for granted, challenges the perceiver to re-engage their significance and perhaps discover new or unexpected meanings."

This term will include a lot of the art, film and books that I find most interesting and entertaining - Duchamp, Jeunet (Delicatessen, Amelie...), Vonnegut and Kafka... A fascination I've untill now explained, calling it "reality with a twist".
This ostranenie-thing seem to be a very powerfull tool for any kind of artistic practice.

"One of the interesting corollaries of Shklovskii's idea is that of the invisibility of the commonplace: "they do not appear in cognition." Familiarity breeds a particular form of contempt in his mind. It is the contempt of not seeing ... Common perception, it might be inferred, is a kind of blindness. It is the poet's or the artist's role to open eyes."

So, it has everything to do with perception and memory - mmmm... iiinterresting...

Read all about it

Cultural Revolution

Here's a fast little update, just 'cause I'm sort of in a hurry but have a bad conscience for not updating for several days ;)

The site of the day contains images from 2 photoalbums bought at a fleamarket in Beijing. "The albums are amazing artifacts of a time and place that most Westerners have no connection to". Old pictures are always nice, but these offer an inside view of the cultural revolution - a rather terrible point in history, where Mao did what he could to erase all traces of knowledge from the past, history and traditions. Quite interesting to get a different view of this if you ask me.

Scrapbook of the Revolution

from money not art

Cylcons & Other Delights

During a little bit of project-relevant research on the net i have I've come across a very nice place on the net, from which you will now all benefit. It is "THE SCHØYEN COLLECTION, a checklist of 650 manuscripts spanning 5000 years" - infact it spans much further.

Below you see the item that led me there. If it indeed is a map, it is quite possibly the oldest in the world. It is a so called cylcon, depicting river Darling with tributaries Warrego and Culgao, New South Wales, Australia, 20,000-3000 BC.



The collection has pictures of such categories as: History, Weights & Measures, Architecture And lets not forget Middle Scots Languages.
Link can from now be found in the fancy and rapidly expanding links section to your left (filed under "image banks & other libraries".

Deleuze with a capital B

Ok - I've just been reading some Deleuze (& Guattari, but who cares about him). Not that I haven't tried it before, but I just thought I'd give it a little go, since it was sweet Dubi who'd put out a link and it was an interesting subject. But, and I know, based on earlier experience, I should have known, what load of complete bullshit!

"The appearance of a central power is thus a function of a threshold or degree beyond which what is conjured away ceases to be so and arrives." - what is this, don't he know grammer, are they on acid... numerous questions like that pops up... and this was even just the 2. sentence..

"Both the melodic line of the towns and the harmonic cross-sections of the States are necessary to effect the striation of space." - mhmm, ok... Just a few questions to clarify here, fx: Why are towns melodic and states harmonic. What on earth is "striation" supposed to mean. Is he stoned...

All in all - what a load of French bellybuttonpicking academic masturbation....whhheeeeuuw (sorry 'bout that).

As my brothers professor so wisely said:"Read it and if you don't understand it, read it again. If you still don't understand, read it one more time. And if you still don't understand - then it's probably because it's incomprehensible" - Oh yes, smart guy good old Niels Viggo Steensgaard.

Flowcharts & Diagrams

Here's just a fast little goodnight-link for the faith readers who return again and again in the hope something new has shown up.... well, tonight you are lucky:

Flowcharts & Diagrams (now, if that doesn't sound entertaining...)

Goodnight

XAP

First real day of school yesterday, one new teacher, quite a few new classmates and a new project. So far it all looks really promising.

Taken from this years program of the XAP studio:
"We are ... no longer tied to the same geographical locality. Private cars and efficient public transport makes it possible that we no longer have our home, our work and spend our free time in the same place (same city). The city as a phenomenon as well as the hierachical division between city suburb and landscape is being dissolved and replaced by an urbanity who's range is measured and defined by the radius of action of the individual.
...
The general discussion of the year is the connection between and the consequence of an architecture and urbanity understood as a duration over time rather than a physical/geographical extent"

So, we're gonna deal with the exiting fact that historical city centres are loosing importance as people has become more mobile. The city is no longer the large village it used to be, where you lived and worked in the same neighbourhood as your friends and family.
Rather than defining oneself through a geographical area, you create and constantly evolve a web of particular places, physical and virtual, and the routes and connections between them. Thus time comes into play - time from place to place, time of day when you go where, to work, on the net, time of year...

I'm really looking forward to work with time, a really difficult subject imho, and very relevant. If any of you dear readers have some suggestions for litterature or websites that might be interesting in this context, please don't hesitate to put them in a comment.

Pictures Galore

One of the new sections in the sidebar I've called "image banks & other libraries". This is where I'm gonna put links to digitized litterature and other texts. And images in high resolution.

The latest link I've added will take you directly to "a collection of 30,000 digitized images from books, magazines and newspapers as well as original photographs, prints and postcards, mostly created before 1923" - oh yeah. I found it at wurzeltod, where the intriguing miss Suzanne recides. It is the New York Public Library Online Picture Collection.

And as a special extra bonus, only today, I will, ruthlessly handpicked from Suzanne most recent update, pass this on to you: Japanese Girls

Jurassic Technology

On a study tour 3 years ago to L.A. one of the most both interesting and fun places we went to was the Museum of Jurassic Technology. A wonderfully eccentric and eclectic institution with the most amazing things on display. Most of their exibitions would be filed under the term "lie", but, as so many things in this world, some of the most outrageous claims are in fact true. A truly mindprovocing museum, an exhibition of parallel realities... some of them even real.

So, ladiiiies and gentlemen... Museum of Jurassic Technology (whatever "jurassic technology" is supposed to mean!?).

Ruins and Elephants

Photograph copyright Shaun O'Boyle

I'd like to turn your attention to one of the links I've added to the fancy new left sidebar - the Modern Ruins. An amazing collection of photographic essay's by architect and photographer Shaun O'boyle...

"Ruins capture the imagination with their ability to tell stories, the rich language of architecture opens a window to the past, a poetry of architectural spaces, structures and found objects capture past events and offers them to the keen observer."

I might add that ruins might tell their tale not as much by what is there as by what is not. The ruin itself can only give hints, the stories act through what is missing. It's all the things that not there which leaves space for the imagination to take posession of the place, and thus the stories play. A game with the minds wish to make a whole picture.

My favorite essay is the Boatyard (the elephants graveyeard) . It was beyond my imagination that such a fantastic place existed. I'm not sure, but I believe this boatyard is around New Orleans... so it might not be very around anymore. Lets hope for the best. Especially for the part of the city that wasn't in ruins before.




Photograph copyright Shaun O'Boyle

New Features

As returning visitors should allready have noticed I have been fiddling around a bit to improve YOUR blog experience. And attract more young readers.

The changes, in the sidebar, includes, from the top:

°To increase the general feeling of drama on the blog "Previous Posts" is now called "Recent Headlines" .

°Even more action, pictures, things that move - a flickr-badge, giving glimpses and fast, direct acces to my fotos there.

°Finally for the more mature reader, the long ago promised and equally long awaited new improved links section(s). Yes, we have now no less than 4 (four) different categories of links. These will be changed tweaked and expanded in the future to greatly enhance adam in the world as your main portal to the world wide web. Now, go explore.

More info might follow later.

Comments and advice, as well as suggestions for links, will be very happily received.

Buttermovie 1

AS A SPECIAL TREAT FOR YOU - THIS IS BUTTERMOVIE 1, BY KASPARS.

micro films

Goodverysundaymorning and puha what a party yesterday... meaning this is the most sunday I've felt in a long time.

And what is a nicer activity on a sunday than watching movies... luckily for us the good people over at money not art have found some really nice ones for us. The wonderful micro films of Akinori Oishi. They are so nice I wanna do some myself. Simple and yet very intriguing and quite surrealistic. And funny. Really inspiring.



So, lean back, drink coke with ice, and enjoy todays feature: Linky linky.

The Amazing Butter Experience

This is one of the projects that was made during our "curious suitcase incident" workshop at easa two weeks back. The Amazing Butter Experience was made by one of our most hardworking and talented participants, Kaspars Endols of Latvia. One of the few to really understand what we were talking about. Especially the part about experimenting rather than just illustrating preconcieved ideas. Experiment can be a very frustrating working method for an architect - to work on something without having a clear idea of the end result. But this way can really open up the world for you and take you beyond your own imagination.

After 8 days of hardcore experiments with butter Kaspars had created beautifull pictures and short animations discussing the ephemeral nature of memories in a very poetic way and creating wonderful colors, shapes, structures and textures as he went along. And a bit of smoke too.









See more of the pics HERE

goodmorning world

Today I've been up a bit earlier than usual, spending the time looking through and editing the absurd amount of pictures and other stuff produced during our workshop at easa.
While doing this I'm miraculously also able to squeeze in a bit of web surfing, and guess what I found over at money-not-art!! An architectural blog, woohooo.... it looks really nice. So here's the link of the day:

A Daily Dose of Architecture

Enjoy...

Ok, let's try one more time...

Here I am, back and fresh from a long summer pause, ready to start blogging again. So let's see how it goes.

Lots have happened since my last post - and first af all I think I owe old readers to tell that my girlfriend passed and is now a real architect. She even got a job. And she's even still my girlfriend, hehe. And I even managed to finish mu own (not final) project.

The past two weeks I've spend at EASA - 450 students of arch. from 35-40 european (+ a few other) countries, gathered in Bergün in the swiss alps. Oh jeez, it gets cold up in them mountains when the sun goes down. Well, at least we got out of there before all the roads and bridges started to get rained away. And the workshop the Curious Suitcase Incident, was quite a succes. 14 participants from 11 countries generating around 3 Gb (have no idea how and what, got a lt of seeing through and editing to do) digital material in 8,5 days.

Read all about it in "THE FOLLOWING POSTS" where I'll return with lots of pics, links and stuff to read - this was just me sort of sneaking unnoticed back in through the back door.

love

A

HELL

Since I'm stuck, working like crazy on my girlfriends final project, due friday - there'll be NO UPDATES untill saturday....

We have just reached the point where prayers might come in handy, so if there's any believers reading this, please include us in yours ... for atheists - if you could just cross your fingers it would be much appreciated.

Thank you

Hurraaaaaaaa

It's my brothers birthday today, imagine - 26, not bad for a little boy his age...

TILLYKKE Frede, hip hip hurra for dig. Weather is not to bad today and although you coul've done better, you've generally been a good boy this past year of yours :D



That's him - ain't he pretty....

You can all congratulate him now ...

New fishies

Have you seen - I got some new linkfish... they swim and swim. I think I'll still have to change them a bit, but who knows when I'll get around to that. So, why are they there, you ask yourself. Well, to be honest - that's what the young people want. Action. As a blogger one simply has to stay on the beat at all times... Furthermore - it's because I'm planning a new improved and enlarged links-section... but, who knows when I'll... in few days, okay...

Gogol Bordello

If there's anybody whos idea of a good party includes a bottle of slivovitza in one hand and some very loud crazy balkan gipsy music in the other hand and a bunch of very drunk Croatian girls jumping around - THEN I strongly suggest this New Yorker "gipsy punk" band Gogol Bordello ... I saw them quite a few years ago on the Roskilde festival and, surprise, surprise it was an awesome concert...



They have some tracks available for FREE downloading HERE... mp3

And they have some tracks available for listening (and download if you know how) HERE and HERE. I especially recommend "Passport" and "A Bordello Kind Of Guy"

Kowloon Walled City

I think we need a picture...click to enlarge



This is a facade of Kowloon Walled city in Hong Kong, 35.000 people living on 100x200 m. Demolished ten years ago. Amazing place. LINK

Transhuman

Two years back or so, I bumped in to the term "Transhuman" for the first time, it happened at the site of Natasha Vita More (that name, lol) Here's a quote from her site that sums up what it's all about:

"Consider a body that features:

A Sensorial Mix
Assured Performance
Motion in Concert with Physique
Seamless Fusion of Body and Technology
Equilibrium of Logic and Passion

— It's the choice of a future generation."

Even though these transhumanists believe in things like aliens, people returning from the future (there ARE several known examples) and cryonic life extension, they are full of good ideas, and intriguing thoughts about possible futures. And they are not without humor "I have a deep nostalgia for the future." - FM-2030 (again, what a name)

The reason I thought of it now, is that I just came across a quite interesting article about a guy who got a magnetic piercing in his finger - giving him the ability to "sense" electromagnetic fields! LINK

Hahaaa - it worked

My secret plan is already working... I've had 11 visitors coming through the blogger bar since my last post, in these very moments I'm experiencing a veritable flood of visitors and you, my dear reader is one of them.

WELCOME :)

You might wonder why you got here when you clicked "next blog" - if you read the previous post you'll know. Hahaa - I'm a genious.... it's all about frequency....

udate: and it goes on and on, I belive we can now safely talk about a tsunami of visitors. They're coming from India, Spain, Singapore, U.S of A, Japan, England....

a secret plan

Ok everybody - I have a secret plan, so, shhhhh... ;)

Two times since I installed statcounter I've noticed a massive wave of visitors coming from the blogger-bar (the one at the top of the page with a button saying "next page")... and It seem to have happened when I've posted three times in one day... so, this was post number two... later I'll update again, and then we'll see, hehe... don't tell anyone.

Buy a robot NOW

Today we're just gonna have fun.... Nooo highbrowed pseudo intelligent artyfarty stuff. No, no. Just a few nice advertisements that involves ROBOTS!

Paper

Citroën boogie

Citroën boogie part II

and finally - this is not an ad. This is just a refurbished cooper mini, wooow, believe it or not hehe... LINK

A pair of Danes in suits

We got a very positive email from the EASA-organizers the other day regarding our workshop, so I'm more than optimistic. I will however not reveal anything about the project yet, though I know you're all just about to burst with exitement.

For now you'll simply have to do with a couple of projects that we've come to have some similarities with, in the sense that we're also gonna be two Danes wearing suits and bringing some luggage, containing alternative realities, with us.


Danish artists Nielsen and Rasmussen decides shortly after the american invasion, to bring democracy to Iraq.

"...Nielsen & Rasmussen decides to transform The Democracy to a smaller, portable aluminium flight container, thereby adapting the utopian, universal space of The Democracy to the conditions of the particular."




This is not just a mocking satire - it is carried by a sensere concern and it brings them in contact with people, discussions and events. All very relevant and interesting. LINK




The ID-sniper rifle designed by Jakob S. Boeskov, is cabable of shooting a microchip, tracable by sattelite, into fx people at a demonstrotion. As a representative of fictive weapons company Empire North, he went to the Cina Police 2002 weapons exhibition in beijing. Bringing along just a suit and some renderings - the only place the rifle actually existed. LINK




"Danes fo Bush", also by Jakob S. Boeskov and Mads Cortzen, is a bit more light hearted. They went on a tour through the U.S. during the elction campaign - pretending to represent the organisation "Danes fo Bush". Although basically just a satirical hoax, this really got peoples emotions running wild. LINK

What they all have in common, also with our workshop, on a more interesting level, is the method - by putting on suits and carrying certain props, they build up an alternative reality around them, through which they can explore and interfere with "the game" from within.

The Curious Suitcase Incident

This weekend I have been busy, together with Mikkel, finishing our proposal for a workshop, which will, hopefully, take place at EASA - European Architecture Student Assembly - this summer in Bergün in Schwitzerland. It will be called:

The Curious Suitcase Incident
- realities in transition

The work will be based on the contents of three suitcases. This the participants must use to construct three narratives and from these, three spacial models. More about this later when/if it has been accepted by the organizers.

In the meantime you can enjoy this site, The Tulse Luper Suitcases, a project by Peter Greenaway, which Mikkel came across while researching. This is also about constructing realities from suitcase contents (he bloody stole our idea). Note that soundtrack and pictures on the frontpage is changes everytime you open it.

COMPETITION

ATTENTION ... The traditional spring competition is running at full steam, BUT you still have time to participate. There has been some confusion as to what the competition actually was. It's very simple - just give a short explanation of THIS diagram and post it in the comments HERE.

Since it's a traditional spring competition the deadline for answering is: when summer begins (here in Denmark, so you have some time yet).

Happy explaining.

Wurzeltod

I think it's about time I advertise this relly nice, eccentric and eclectic arty farty site - wurzeltod.ch, homepage of the adorable Suzanne... lots of good stuff to see, read and be passed on to there. And it's even got it's own forum of psychic blah - good source for interesting and funny stuff on the web and in the outer world... I strongly recommend it :)

Of special interst to all easians I should mention that the forums also include the section swiss myths.

Conclave Obscurum

Were you also dissapointed that the papal election were done with so fast - mere two days gathering of the conclave before the black smoke miraculously turned white... yes, I could have wished that bunch of elderly magicians be locked up in a room for longer. And who did they choose then? None other than the chief of the noble institution which untill 1910 had been known by the name of the inquisition!

So why did they choose such a reactionary as the panzer cardinal. Well, he was apparently a compromise. He satisfied the conservative hardliners of the church by being an immensely conservative hardliner himself. And the more liberal can live with him too because at 78 he can not be expected to hang around for too many years. What excellent qualifications.

To entertain you in the meantime here is a really well made russian flash site: Conclave Obscurum with lots of very nice little movies... hope you can find your way around there...

Idiots

As my mother allways says when moments of unrecognized genious hits her: "we're sourrounded by idiots". And while that is true, there are different degrees of idiocy. From plain dumb (which will apply to any of us now and then ) to scaringly mindless and ignorant...

To the second group I will include all the young men and women with more hair than brains, namely neo nazis. But as we all know nothing comes out of nothing, except the fluffy stuff we find in our bellybuttons, and nazis too were once neglected children who peed in bed and had wellmeaning but brutal parents. As they grow up they find themselves in a confusing world, members of just one minority group amongst thousands, all with special needs and problems integrating with regular society - as this informative video tells us!

Crossbreed

I posted some back in november . But now I've uploaded more and in high resolution. Of my crossbreed project...



So here you have a direct link to the slideshow on my flickr account.

Flowers and Puppets

Here comes your daily link from us.... a real nice music video. The talented young artist is Emelie Simon (never heard of her), the song is "Floweres" and the animations are very very nice - a weird and scary version of "Nightmare Before Christmas".

CLICK HERE

CybOrgasMatrix

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Fish

Ladies and Gentlemen, we present to you, for the first time on adamintheworld.blogspot.com - theeeeee FISH DI-A-GRRAAAAAAAaaamm, or in same words - fish diagram

Which will form the basis of the traditional spring competition with big, priceless and amazing prizes - if somebody please could explain me what it's all about. And please keep it short.

You can now explain in the comments section....thank you

Edit: Woooo ... it contains references to Fucoult! hadn't seen that, I thought it was something religious...oh well

The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript

"New analysis of a famously cryptic medieval document suggests that it contains nothing but gibberish"



Through the forums at this wonderful site I came across an article about a mysterious medieval cipher manuscript. I've taken the liberty to rewrite the beginning to give you a general idea of the problems and interests at hand:

"In 1912 Wilfrid Voynich made the find of a lifetime: a manuscript some 230 pages long, written in an unusual script and richly illustrated with bizarre images of plants, heavenly spheres and bathing women. Voynich immediately recognized its importance.

During the 1600s, at least two scholars tried to decipher the manuscript, and then it disappeared for nearly 250 years until Voynich unearthed it.

But despite 90 years of effort by some of the world's best code breakers, no one has been able to decipher the script.

The failure of the code-breaking attempts has raised the suspicion that there may not be any message at all, and the manuscript may simply be an elaborate hoax."


I find this both entertaining and interesting. Particularly the conclusion: That the reason we have not cracked the code is because it does not exist - AHAa!! Brilliant. It might even be right.

Also this part is brilliant:

"Most people who have studied it agreed that the text was too complex to be a hoax. I found, however, that this assessment was based on opinion rather than firm evidence. There is no body of expertise on how to mimic a long medieval ciphertext, because there are hardly any examples of such texts, let alone hoaxes of this genre."

From this I will conclude that the reading of medieval ciphertexts is a highly difficult matter to move about in. And quite amusing. Hours of fun. So, dear reader, there's just one thing to it - go explore...

Fun with Letters and Sounds

Here's a little link to a real, vaskeægte, online sound installation, tadaaa, where you by playing with various letters can make music!!
And in contrast to other projects like this which I've tried - it actually sounds quite nice. And the flash animation looks quite nice to. So go get it...

Linkydinkylink

Milking

The moment when the milking suddenly filled them both with a certain erotic pleasure.

The Amazing Suitcase Camera

Here is an old project of mine that caused me many sorrows and never really came to a satisfying conclusion. But least I got some very nice pictures out of it... and the basic idea still holds a lot of potential...hmmm...



It was an idea of having a flexible/movable pictureplane. So while the viewpoint, the lense of the camera is fixed, you can still see the motif from different angles so to speak. And instead of having just the motif moving about, the movement and change over time is created by the pictureplane moving inside the camera. And caught in one still picture.



This is me with the camera working on site in New York. Those pictures didn't come out very well though. The picture you see here is from a studiosession working with a 1:50 model of the site, some very powerfull photolamps and a 1600 iso film.

For more pictures click HERE

Osijek revisited

Some might remember this post from november about the heap of abandoned toys I came across in Osijek in Croatia. Well, just uploaded some more pictures of that to my (brand new) flickr (pro) account, see the slideshow here.



(btw flickr just lowered the price for a pro account more : 2 Gb upload per month for 24$ a year - that's pretty cheap imo)