AS

(American Streets)

Ben Fry s 'est décider à regrouper les plans de rues, routes, autoroutes de tous les états américains.


Région des grands lacsMontagnes Apalache
Kansas CitySan Francisco

TO

(Troublante Objectivité)

Techniquement parfaites, humainement défaillantes.
Ces photographies de Julia Fullerton-Batten nous parle d'un environnement trop exigu pour ces adolescentes, un entre-deux douloureux, dans lequel ces corps indisposés n'ont pas encore trouvés leur place.

ZO

(Zivile Operationen)

Walter Niedermayer livre une réponse extrêmement sensible sur la manière d'animer le blanc et d'imaginer le vide.

MV

(Messa di Voce)

Planant aux confins des limites technologiques de notre epoque, Messa di Voce par Tmema (Golan Levin et Zachary Lieberman accompagnes de Joan La Barbara et Jaap Blonk) se veut tout simplement la gestualisation graphique d'un son.

PG

(Play Ground)

Featuring Bjarke, Julien, and some (cad) monkeys

CL

(Computational Landscapes)

Par Jared Tarbell sur complexification.net
cliquer dessus pour apercevoir le processus de creation.
Programmé sur processing, language de programmation simplifié pour graphic designer.

ME

(Metro Erotique)

Une nouvelle vision du metro parisien par Jam Abelanet, ex-graphiste dans la pub, reconverti a 31 ans a la photo. Meme si les photos ont ete faites dans une rame desaffectee avec photoshop a la clef, la non-reaction du public est assez typique de notre bon vieux metropolitain!

photos copyright Jam Abelanet, extrait de Fantaisies souterraines, ed. Ragage

TD

(Taikoo Dockyard)
太古船塢 - Hong Kong

View from One Island East 31st floor
(c) OL

Taikoo Dockyard Engineering Company was founded in Hong Kong by Butterfield and Swire around 1902-1905. Until the WW2, it was one of the most important place in the world for the ship construction. In the 70s, the docks moved to the west shore of Tsing Yi Island, resulting by the establishment of Swire Properties and the creation of a large private housing estate, Taikoo Shing (太古城).

plan of the former docks - 1900

Developpement of Taikoo Shing in the 80's

Taikoo Shing estate covers 3.5 hectares for 61 residential towers, with a total of 12,698 apartment flats that ranges anywhere between 54.3 m² to 114.9 m². More than 40,000 people live there, a moderately concentrated area by Hong Kong standards. The income distribution of Taikoo Shing's population makes it a typical middle class community in HK.

satellite view - 2007

It's quite interesting to know that as it is a private estate, all roads are owned by Swire Properties. In practice, public traffic is generally allowed to pass freely, but admission may be denied!



Agrandir le plan

NL

(The Naked Lunch - Le Festin Nu)


William Burroughs - The Naked Lunch 1959




David Cronenberg - The Naked Lunch 1991





Publicité contre le SIDA

LS

(Leonardo Solaas)

Voici quelques dessins puissants, où le trait évoque la géographie, la cartographie. Une vague idée d'un territoire que l'on n'appréhende pas, avec des limites incertaines. Néanmoins le dessin acquière par l'accumulation du trait ainsi que par sa forme une indépendance totale.

LB

(Le Laboratoire)

"Dans la théorie des ensembles, V représente l’univers de von Neumann et L l’univers constructible de Gödel. L’égalité ou l’inégalité de ces deux univers est un point contesté, et la position adoptée selon qu’on considère que V=L ou que V≠L en dit long sur la philosophie des mathématiques sous-jacente. Si V≠L, alors tous les ensembles de nombres ne sont pas constructibles. La levée de cette restriction permet en revanche l’inclusion de nombres allant presque au-delà des limites de l’entendement humain. Davantage qu’une simple équation mathématique, l’expression V≠L inspire la contemplation de ce que nous ne pouvons pas percevoir et peut amener à une expérience transcendante du sublime."

Voila a quoi peut s'attendre le visiteur du dimanche, se promenant rue du Bouloi, dans le 1er a Paris. A premiere vue, cela n'attire que quelques normaliens et autres chercheurs du MIT. Pourtant aux vues de l'interet que porte le design actuel pour la creation d'une nature artificielle (illustree brillament par l'expostion Second Nature de Tokujin Yoshioka au 21_21 a Tokyo), Le Laboratoire, qui se propose de reunir artistes et scientifiques en vue d'une prodution artistique, semble promis a un brillant avenir.
Mangera-t'on un jour des tomates cubiques en se sniffant un petit cafe (avis au moins de 9 ans, ne faites pas ceci chez vous)? La reponse dans la video ci-dessous.

SS

(SuperStudio)

Pour SuperStudio, c'était l'architecture qui gérait son conflit avec la ville: à travers le monument continu, elle affirmait son droit à la monumentalité, aujourd’hui dénié, pour se proposer comme une macrostructure à l'intérieur de laquelle des villes comme New York faisaient naufrage. Une architecture capable de reconstruire des récits et de grandes métaphores, comme dans les douze villes idéales, et donc capable de redonner un ordre et un sens cosmique à une métropole inexistante. Une architecture sans ville, qui distribuait ses mots d'ordre au monde des objets (Quaderna) et celui des grandes murailles territoriales. Le centre de leur recherche était donc une architecture extra-historique.

AG

(Alone in Ginza)

SR

(Sensorial Revolution)

"For the rationalist culture of the modern movement, « understanding » reality was more important than « perceiving » it, analyzing it through its elementary components, discovering its dynamic mechanisms, and never stopping at the surface. Those who did not know how to lead these in the right direction were “fooled by the senses”; they were inferior, untrustworthy, and substantially obscure perceptive instruments. They provided accessory, intuitive, superficial, and therefore substantially misleading information.

At the end of sixties an immense haste for information and stimuli to determine that which we call the Sensorial Revolution developed, and consisted in an unchecked growth of sensorial information and consequent development of all the perceptive sensitivities of man. This great informational, musical, and behavioral sensitivity is based on a new perceptive hierarchy: the senses are no longer a simple instrument that transmits inert information to reason, which only reason can then transform into organized conscience. The senses have become redefined, vibrating, cognitive instrument of reality and an element of the individual’s political formation.

The reality produced by music, fashion and social behaviors, but also by electronics and new materials, is a reality of surfaces, which imposes a knowledge of surfaces. If modern mans’ sensitivity was analytical and mechanical, that of contemporary man is synthetic, electronic and resonant.

The Sensorial Revolution displaces some of the old codes in order to introduce new Vanguard. It is rather a matter of a series of filters, additional lenses, and sonorous amplifiers that tend to revisit existence, displacing knowledge towards a world of absolute immediacy.
This is not a spontaneous, simple world; quite the contrary, it is an extremely sophisticated universe, where, however, there no longer exists a critical and ideological distance between man and the phenomena that surround him.

The perceptive ability capable of instinctively choosing useful elements of the complex stratification of informational fabric that reaches the individual through space is growing.

This new “auditory ability” that the metropolitan inhabitant is developing consists in the integrated use of all the perceptive abilities of the body: we could paradoxically say that he sees through touch, listens with the eyes, and smells with the ears. In the sense that all messages, real or virtual, that he receives imply a whole, sensorial deciphering.(…)

The eye was the illuminist symbol in the mechanical age, when a glance allowed a deep inquiry into the logic of reality’s movement, similar to that of a large clock.

The hand was Le Corbusier’s symbol that, through “Le Modulor”, gave the modern world a chance to recover a human dimension in the act of making.

The symbol of man in the pos-industrial world now is the ear, that strange, enigmatic organ, perennially open to the outside, and within which simultaneously millions of complex information bits are input, allowing us to perceive within the great soundtrack of the metropolis the light hum of the computer, a bird’s song, or the sound of the jungle.

The ear represent quit well the sensorial revolution, where “understanding” the internal mechanisms of phenomena no longer counts, rather “perceiving” the effects of these mechanisms, choosing the sounds and information, transforming into culture the gray mass of sounds present in space. (…) One single view of the world is no longer enough if there is not any sound information to act as its key: do those images come from a film, or they are real scenes from the Gulf War? Is the chase of those traffickers fiction or a scene from Bolivia?

We listen, and will understand. "

Andrea Branzi, Weak and diffuse Modernity.

BA

(BaaN à l'AA)


Iwan Baan, jeune photographe néerlandais, connu pour une technique de photo en 3d, est exposé pour la première fois à l'AA du 10 Novembre 2008 au 10 décembre 2008.

MW

(Mark Wigley)
Dean of the Columbia Architecture School in NY

"Architecture is a set of endlessly absorbing questions for our society rather than a set of clearly defined objects with particular effects. Architects are public intellectuals, crafting forms that allow others to see the world differently and perhaps to live differently. The real gift of the best architects is to produce a kind of hesitation in the routines of contemporary life, an opening in which new potentials are offered, new patterns, rhythms, moods, sensations, pleasures, connections, and perceptions. The architect's buildings are placed in the city like the books of a thoughtful novelist might be placed in a newsstand in a railway station, embedding the possibility of a rewarding detour amongst all the routines, a seemingly minor detour that might ultimately change the meaning of everything else. The architect crafts an invitation to think and act differently. "

in the Future of the Architect, Dean statement at Columbia University

Patrick Blanc, paysagiste

WC

(Wild Colors)

MC

(Mégalomanie Chinoise)

The Grand Lisboa Hotel, à MacaoDe notre envoyé spéciale à Macao...