Di Genova

Originally uploaded by wacky doodler.

Came across these nice drawings by Nicolas Di Genova on flickr a while back. So on this grey and rainy wednesday I would recommend you to spend 15 minutes looking at his gorgeously detailed drawings - Either on his own website mediumphobic or in this photo set on flickr.

As an extra bonus here's a picture of the moons shadow on northerne Africa during the eclipse last week - via RobotWisdom.


Happy wednesday.

Sushi of Love

I went an saw "Drawing Restraint 9" yesterday, the latest movie by Mathew Barney, also starring his wife Björk and the entire crew of a Japanese whaling factory ship... Didn't see any of his "Cremaster" movies, but this was mind blowing... right from the beginning: You see some kind of stone up close, while the camera slowly zooms out, you see that it is an eye of a statue or something. As it zooms out further, you realise it can't be an eye - it's just something lying on a table... but just when you realise it can't be an eye, it sheds a tear...


Here Matthew and Björk are cutting each other into sushi of love and so transforming themselves into whales?!? Or something... :

Tennis

progression 2
Originally uploaded by Presley*.

This picture is from a quite wonderful photoset - a sequence - by Presley*. Showing the decay of tennisballs over time... who would have thought they could look so nice...

They remind me of this picture, of what is possibly the worlds oldest map, a cylcon (conical-cylindrical stone) from Australia, 20-30.000 bc, and perhaps depicting the river Darling and tributaries:



Could Presley's decayed tennisballs be read in a similar way. As maps of the time and place passed, of the space which has marked them over time...

.

Happy Fluxus Sunday

In case you should choose to spend a grey and rainy spring sunday at home watching movies... enjoying your snack of choice... In that case allow me to direct you to UbuWeb, their film section in general and their spanking new collection of 37 Short Fluxus Films(1962-1970) in particular.

"... 37 short films ranging from 10 seconds to 10 minutes in length. These films (some of which were meant to be screened as continuous loops) were shown as part of the events and happenings of the New York avant-garde. Made by the artists listed above, they celebrate the ephemeral humor of the Fluxus movement.Films by Nam June Paik, Dick Higgins, George Maciunas, Chieko Shiomi, John Cavanaugh, James Riddle, Yoko Ono, George Brecht, Robert Watts, Pieter Vanderbiek, Joe Jones, Eric Anderson, Jeff Perkins, Wolf Vostell, Albert Fine, George Landow, Paul Sharits, John Cale, Peter Kennedy, Mike Parr, Ben Vautier."

It's free and it's legal. So start downloading right now. Sundays of entertainment.

On AdamintheWorld.blgspt.com every sunday is christmas.

Conspiracy

Today I saw the movie 9/11 revisited. It supports the claims that the official explanation of the collapse of the towers are completely inadequate. And it hints at implications of the more (only?!) plausible explanation. Watch it. It's seems interesting and relevant... but also to good/bad to be true. Certainly not boring.

LINK

I, on the other hand have my own theory... dug out of an old Donald Duck magazine... how couold they have known, years before. Disney? Well, he's conveniently dead... to good/bad to be true you say....hmmmm...




UPDATE!!

An anonymous (...hmmm .... yes - I am suspicious too... ) comment to this post has revealed this picture:




Coincidence? I don't think so! This smells of... something....


.

Svæv

Danish online poetry magazine Afsnit P have today opened the online exhibition Svevedikt (floatpoem) by Norwegian poet Ottar Ormstadt. Obviously most fun if you can read scandiwanian of some kind... but still... it's very visual poetry...

LINK

Tactile Balls

Yes, yes, I know what you're thinking ... and I'm thinking it too. But to begin with all I'm talking about is this project:



Distance tactile ball - 2 tracking balls connected via radio tranceivers, push one and the other one repeats the movement in realtime. Enabling people to do longdistance physical communication.
I'm sure this is technically difficult to achieve for one lonesome design student. But it's not really interesting either, too banal imho, not getting to the core of things.

Here's another attempt - connected by mobile phones, through these devices a grandmother in Chicago can hug her grandchild in Alaska.



Slightly more advanced... but still... (not to mention the fact that this concept should make sense to both a 75 and a 2 year old). And it's even thought up by people at MIT.

Then where is the real things happening? I'll tell you: In the field known by the technical term "Dildonics". From a reliable source I've been told that the only people doing serious non-commercial research in this are, surprise, the Germans. But I'm sure that is nothing compared to what the porn industry is pushing into it.... unfortunately, with their limited imagination, they don't seem to have gotten much further than this:



But don't despair - Dildonics has got it's future in front of it. Domain name phishing is happening and the opensource community is on to it as well. Just wait. The future is coming. I'm sure. And I'll be there, waiting, to use their filthy technology for something that really matters (yes, the rumors are true - there are other things in life than sex).

Kowloon Walled City II

I've written about this place before before and it deserves an update.

On the forum of the SkyscraperPage, there is a thread which I belive must be the biggest collection of info and pictures of Kowloon Walled city on the net.

LINK

Shelter

From the Shelter Series by Anthony Goicolea.

"The composed wooded scenes depicted in many of the photos are bisected into two halves and are often times seen as a cross-section of themselves." ... hmmm, interesting...

via (I think, but it's old): pruned

Miracle of Birth

Full title of this sculpture: Monument to Pro-Life: The birth of Sean Preston... so, to get all this straight - This is a sculpture of Britney spears giving birth on a bear rug... and it's not a joke, but a serious pro-life, anti abortion, statement... wow... by artist Daniel Edwards.

Read all about it! ...(and more pictures too)

Via Beautiful Destruction


...ok, I'll go and do something sensible now...hmmm....


UPDATE: After having been brought to the worlds attention here on Adam in the World, the more mainstream media have now picked up the story... fx BBC and CNN .... BUT does this mean that what we've all been waiting for might soon appear - the picture from BEHIND!??

Flowers II

A modest flower for a very simple girl soon...
Originally uploaded by thiooof.

What a body! Whish I could make mechanics as complex and beautiful as this. Pic taken by Thioof - I've shown a bit of his stuff before.

La Famiglia Anandamide

My uncle H. Pigeon in a tOpical moment...
Originally uploaded by Anandamide.

A family album of a most unusual family. Fx. Anandamide's great great grandfather was one of the police officers responsible for the arrest of Pinnochio.

And don't miss his drawings either.

Sound Doctor

Swarm - a sound installation by Dr. Nigel Helyer. He seem to be making a whole lot of very delicious projects.

Oh, and I've put up a new link too - to fabulist, another one of them blogs that gathers all the best finds of the net... just like mine ... I've found a few interesting things there.

Aaand I'm doing my final project at the moment. An extra bit of excitement in an otherwise dull and grey period. Got some stuff from that on flickr

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