These are some speculations that have been bouncing around in my head for some time, particularly with reference to architecture — the discipline I practice — but perhaps having wider implications: Ever since the early stages of the modernist movement (since the second half of the 19th century) artistic innovation has been underpinned by the idea of the avant-garde.

The avant-garde are (to use a term from Thomas Kuhn) paradigm shifters. Their work consists of two facets that operate simultaneously. One is a deep critique of current paradigms of cultural production. And the other is production of artistic work that demonstrates a new paradigm and a new set of possibilities. One cannot privilege either of these facets saying it is primary, and the other derives from it - the relationship between the two is far more complex. However the two always go together. Gradually the works of the avant-garde become accepted and are mainstreamed. But this mainstreaming is subject to displacement by the next generation of the avant-garde. This continuous thread of displacement forms modernism’s alignment with progress and history.

As has been pointed out by Goldhaber, Davenport and others, we are now in an attention economy. If we are in the information age, the one thing that information consumes is attention, and consequently attention becomes a scarce resource. As an economy is substantively affected by those resources that are scarce and important, our lives are now being affected by the quest for attention.

The scarcity of attention is exacerbated by the changing nature of alienation (as defined by Baudrillard). Alienation was earlier characterized by distance — a separation from the normal routines of life. But it is now characterized by an overwhelming proximity to everything. The construction of sheltered spaces for reflection, which were provided by the regular routines of life, are now difficult to come by, and require substantive and sustained effort that few are willing to devote effort to in an attention starved world. Deprived of space for reflection, we face the challenge of being “reduced to pure screen: a switching centre for the networks of influence”.

The twin problems of attention and alienation have created a rupture in the avant-garde. The facet of critique, which requires rigorous attention, does not now receive sufficient consideration. The facet of artistic production receives far greater attention, but tends to be read superficially, focusing on the work’s apparent visuality.

Two major modes of capturing attention are scale and novelty.

Scale involves achieving a size that is difficult to ignore. It is seen in the increasing scale of real estate projects, the wave of corporate consolidation through mergers and acquisitions, and the leveraging of technology to achieve self-referential size (as seen in the global financial services sector).

The impulse to novelty centres on displacing us from the anesthetizing influence of habit, and making us see and notice things.

The avant-garde are now recast as a resource to be mined for the production of novelty. Their work is taken, detached from its critical foundations, and presented for its apparent visual novelty. So one sees architects such as Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid, whose statements early in their careers aligned with an avant-garde identity of iconoclastic rebels, and whose work is now being utilized as vehicles of mainstream branding.

It could be argued that this detachment from critical foundations is a normal process of mainstreaming the avant-garde. However the speed with which it now occurs is significant. In an earlier generation, the first step in mainstreaming the avant-garde occurred through a set of “enlightened” patrons, whose idealism could be aligned with the cultural critique of the avant-garde. For example, if Jawaharlal Nehru hired Le Corbusier to design the new Indian city of Chandigarh, it was because Nehru’s vision of modernism for his newly independent nation could be aligned to Corbusier’s critique of traditional urbanism and the potential he saw in new city forms.

But it is rare to find patrons with this idealism today. The patron of today tends to have motives that are largely commercial rather than idealistic, whose primary request to the artist is “make me noticeable on the global stage”. The resultant quest for novelty makes the disruption between the critique and production of the avant-garde occur with a speed and vehemence that threatens the very status of the avant-garde.

In an earlier era, the engagement of an iconic star avant-garde artist was substantively affected by an ideological alignment with the artist’s ideology. But now the iconic status of the artist, together with the novelty of the work, have become ends in themselves. We are reminded of Daniel Boorstin’s prescient definition that the celebrity in this world of pure image making is to be “a person well known for his well-knownness”.

The impulse to novelty has rapidly diminishing returns, and one struggles to keep balance on an accelerating treadmill of visual stimulation.

Modernist art has centralized the notions of creativity and innovation because it seeks to align with history. Without seeking to either diminish or sideline creativity and innovation, we now must simultaneously seek to align art with timelessness through a quest for authenticity.

Prem

Brian Holmes wrote:

On 01/10/2012 02:39 AM, Prem Chandavarkar wrote:

Modernist art has centralized the notions of creativity and innovation because it seeks to align with history. Without seeking to either diminish or sideline creativity and innovation, we now must simultaneously seek to align art with timelessness through a quest for authenticity.

The dissolution of the avant-garde through media-flashes of innovation and monuments of overwhelming scale is certain. But I wonder if timelessness can be thought, not through any reference to eternity but with the Benjaminian category of Jetztzeit — that is, “now-time”?

I am sure everyone remembers WB’s famous declaration from the Theses on History: “‘History is the object of a construction, whose site is not that of homogeneous and empty time, but one filled with now-time.”

There is currently a rare and excellent article about art in the Arab Spring on the opinion pages of Al Jazeera. The author, Daanish Faruqi, comments on what appears to be a quite spectacular exhibition by Cai Guo-Quiang at the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha. With the “biggest ever” daylight fireworks show composing the central artistic statement, this seems to have exactly those characteristics of scale and innovation you are talking about, Prem. Surely we will all forget this almost instantly!

Faruqi picks up on Hamid Dabashi’s critique of this exhibition for its lack of relevance to the present, and though he doesn’t bother with Walter Benjamin he does offer an insight into where the intensities of the present currently gather:

“Art’s role, as Dabashi correctly describes, is to imagine the emancipatory politics of our impossibilities. To imagine is not to chronicle in minute detail. The artists of the Arab Spring are tasked with simply igniting a spark, of reinjecting the radical imagination into Arab society, through envisioning the utopian possibility of hope and a better life, undergirded by the basic dignity of the Arab people as non-negotiable and sacrosanct.”

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/01/20121612493122450.html

I think the text is really good, check it out. Maybe an actual building full of now-time is currently impossible. Maybe this is a moment for architects who do not build? Who work instead with the grassroots transformation of spaces that have been frozen by capital?

warmly, Brian

Keith Hart wrote:

Very interesting, Prem, thanks. I think of time as both linear and timeless. I have an icon of this idea which I call the T-bar. The crossbar constructs tense as a line from past through present to future. The upright is timeless, the present conceived of as rooted in a continuous past. The two axes intersect in the present which is therefore inevitably both — a movement of difference and always the same. I realise that this does not account for cyclical theories of time, but I think it says a lot about the modern world.

Keith

John Hopkins wrote:

Brian Holmes wrote:

I think the text is really good, check it out. Maybe an actual building full of now-time is currently impossible. Maybe this is a moment for architects who do not build? Who work instead with the grassroots transformation of spaces that have been frozen by capital?

now-time arises in the Self, deeply sourced in incarnate being: be here now. When one or when many are reaching into this source simultaneously, life will richly arise (Rilke’s ‘Ninth Elegy’ “Superabundant being wells up in my heart.”)

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” (also Rilke)

A building as a seemingly static and closed protocol is perhaps not the right metaphor to frame now-time, it would be better to place it in the breath which is a dynamic union of opposites. Dynamism is crucial to being in the moment, following ones own breath is of course a recognized (yogic) path for ‘finding’ the now. The finding of collective breath is accessed through the chanting and singing in the squares and brings the now into the body through the in- and ex-piration.

Better to eat frozen Italian gelato that worry about frozen capital…
Attention to capital allows it to persist.

thanks, Brian…

jh

Our everyday lives are increasingly shaped by digital media technologies, from smart cards and intelligent GPS systems to social media and smartphones. How can we use digital media technologies to make our cities more social, rather than just more hi-tech?

This international conference brings together key thinkers and doers working in the fields of new media and urbanism. Keynote speakers such as Usman Haque, Natalie Jeremijenko will speak about the promises and challenges in this newly emerging and highly interdisciplinary field of urban design. The keynotes will be accompanied by presentations of ‘best practices’ from various disciplines, such as architecture, art, design, and policy.

Join us in February 2012 at Amsterdam’s Westergasfabriek to explore how urban designers, interface developers, app builders, policy makers, housing coorations, artists, scientists and others can use digital technologies to organise citizen engagement, and to contribute to our social cities of tomorrow.

Who should attend Social Cities of Tomorrow?

• Architects and urban planners interested in the ways digital media technologies shape city life, and how this translates to urban design.
• Housing cooperations and real estate developers interested in new ways to engage citizens in the co-creation of their living conditions.
• Artists, designers and media creatives who make work for physical environments and the urban public sphere.
• Policy makers and local government interested in the potential of digital media technologies for urban issues.
• Community organisers and social innovators who want to learn more about how digital media and collaborative principles from e-culture can be used for citizen engagement.

Call for projects (17 February 2012)

The conference programme will feature around ten project presentations: urban design interventions, projects by housing corporations, media artists, citizen initiatives, technology companies, or others. If you’re interested in proposing your project for a presentation during the international conference on 17 February 2012, go to Call for Projects. The deadline for submission is 15 December 2011, 17:00 CET

Workshop (14 − 16 February 2012)

A preconference workshop will be held at ARCAM, Amsterdam for a select, interdisciplinary group of designers, programmers and digital creatives. The aim of this experimental workshop is to bring together local stakeholder organisations, and participants from various professional and national backgrounds to collaborate in real-world social design challenges. All those interested in participating should visit the Workshop section of this website.

In 2011, Gramazio & Kohler and Raffaello D’Andrea started to develop a pioneering approach on dynamic material formation and machine behaviour.

Belonging to the generation of young architects aiming at using the full potential of digital design and fabrication, Gramazio & Kohler joined with Raffaello D’Andrea whose work addresses ground-breaking autonomous systems design and algorithms.

Together, they started to explore the possibilities of a revolutionary assembly apparatus and reveal with their collaboration unseen spatial and structural articulations based on the innovation of Flight Assembled Architecture.

Conceived as an architectural structure at a scale of a 600 m high “vertical village”, the installation addresses radical new ways of thinking and materializing architecture as a physical process of dynamic formation.

Gramazio & Kohler and Raffaello D’Andrea developed a powerful expression of cutting-edge innovation that uses a multitude of mobile agents working in parallel and acting together as scalable production means.

Those are programmed to interact, lift, transport and assemble small modules in order to erect a building structure that synthesizes a rigorous architectural approach by Gramazio & Kohler and a visionary autonomous system design by Raffaello D’Andrea.

The FRAC Centre chose to associate with their approach. The aim was to initiate a unique installation and be able to include the result in its collection of experimental architecture.

Moreover, this is the first collaborative project by Gramazio & Kohler and Raffaello D’Andrea and will be exclusively exhibited at the FRAC Centre, Orléans.

Following an initial phase lasting several days and dedicated to the assembly by flying machines of a model standing 6 m high and 3,5 m in diameter – made up of 1500 prefabricated polystyrene foam modules – the exhibition will feature a “megastructure” in its completed form, along with a film documenting the airborne assembly and all aspects of the exhibition.

Additional lecture by Gramazio & Kohler on their architectural works, organized by the Centre culturel suisse in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Centre Pompidou, December 2, 2011, 7 pm.

An exhibition catalogue (English/French bilingual), Flight Assembled Architecture by Gramazio & Kohler and Raffaello D’Andrea, FRAC Centre coll., will be published by HYX, Orléans in February 2012.

BodyControlled is a new exhibition and performance series at Lab for Electronic Arts and Performance - LEAP presenting artists who are dedicated to performance art and have explored in their work the medium of sound in electronic as well as other expressive art forms.

The first event of the BodyControlled series focuses on the theme of other spaces. The works on display will both intertwine with LEAP’s existing architecture and generate other virtual spaces. These areas are either completely synthetically generated, reflecting directly the current environment to a new sonic framework or condense an existing space into specific digital imagery. The opening will be concluded with a 12-hour performance by Robert Henke.

Access (by Marie Sester) is a public art installation that applies web and surveillance technologies, allowing web users to track individuals in public spaces with a unique robotic spotlight and acoustic beam system, without people wearing any gear, exploring the ambiguities among surveillance, control, visibility and celebrity.

Architecture of Fear explores how feelings of fear pervade daily life in the contemporary media society. The cause of fear seems interchangeable and constantly fluctuating. Shifting from one thing to the next, often relating to invisible or indirect phenomena’s (terrorism, viral diseases, pollution, financial crisis), anything has the ability to become a potential threat. Rather than an immediate emotional strategy for survival fear is becoming a constant low level feeling in the background that gives rise to a new global infrastructure based on security, prevention and risk-management.

Architecture of Fear brings together a selection of international artists and designers that reflect in different ways on the society of fear, ranging from registration and critical research, to exploring its emotional, social and spatial mechanisms.

With Bureau D’Etudes, De Geuzen, Floris Douma, Laurent Grasso, Ilkka Halso, Susanna Hertrich, Charlotte Lybeer, Jill Magid, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Tracey Moffatt, Trevor Paglen, Marie Sester, Kin Wah Tsang and Els Vanden Meersch.

The title, Exquisite Zone, references the 1920-30s surrealist drawing game called ‘Exquisite Corpse’, in which each collaborator adds to a collective composition.

Exquisite Zone invites nightly participants to use their smart phones to make digital marks in public space. “The idea is simple, but we’ve never seen it done real time with mobile devices, such as phones.” [See Cell Tagging by Brooke Knight] Many people can add to the ‘collaborative public drawing’. Each time they move their finger over the phone canvas, a colored line will be drawn on their phone and on the wall. Although a participant’s phone displays only their individual canvas, Exquisite Zone projects the collective canvas on an architectural structure.

The concept was developed in a 2010 Baltan Labs workshop.

A Video/Audio Performance presented on the 400 sqm facade.Beyond being an artwork, the installation is an urban experience, combining science and art and making the city’s acoustic memory visible and tangible through architecture. It is an experiment with new techniques in the old part of the city.

The installation process started with the field sound recordings of Istiklal Street (arguably the most crowded street in Europe), which were then digitally processed and transformed into a parametric architectural structure. Recordings from three different time slices were superimposed and the frequency / decibel data translated into spreadsheets and then into a 3D surface in a coordinate system. The location data applied to X, the decibel became the Z and the frequency value turned into Y value to achieve a complete 3D picture of the recorded sound. A visual performance was projected on the structure, accompanied by a generatively designed contemporary aesthetic visuals consisting of input data from particularly chosen sounds synchronized to the movement of graphics re-shaping and transforming the structure’s perception on which they were projected. The structure in turn influenced and transformed the projections as well.

Coinciding with the opening of the 12th Istanbul Biennial, the performance was realized consecutively for two evenings, drawings hundreds of spectators who happened to walk by the YKKSY building in the hub of the city. As an example of a work of art in public space, this installation is a testament to the collective memory of the people who experience Istanbul and a contemporary twist on the historic public space that has been the grounds of many cultures, ranging from the Byzantine, Ottoman civilizations to contemporary Turkey. Though the recording is of the current Istiklal Street, the sounds carry among many the people’s voices, the church bells, the call to prayer of the mosques, the street musicians, the chimes of the popular tram on this otherwise pedestrian walkway; hence these sounds reflect the past as well as the present time. The final sounds of the city may not allow clear deciphering of the exact time of the day or the particulars of life and heritage on this street, but it allows a spatial and audiovisual experience. It provides a new perspective, a new understanding and a new challenge to viewers.

The historic building which houses the Yapı Kredi Cultural Center (which is itself a part of the collective memory of the Turkish people), is viewed as a vibrant and augmented structure boding well for the changing dynamics of the city as well as the institution itself.

The experimentation and processing phases of the installation are displayed in the exhibition hall in the first floor of the YKKSY building. The exhibition focuses on interactions between space, sound, video and light by asking the question of how to translate the logic of media into architecture. Along with discussions on the subject, an answer to the question is presented with three new augmented structures. And in the room built in the center of the exhibition hall, the video of the performance is presented in loop. Visitors are welcome to experience it until November 30, 2011.

*Image above:

Artist-Architect: Refik Anadol-Alper Derinboğaz
Yapı Kredi Cultural Center, Istiklal Cad. No. 161
Beyoglu, Istanbul, Turkey
Photographed by/ date: Refik Anadol, 20 Sept. 2011

The objective of this competition is to uncover new public realm art, architectural and environmental approaches to riverscapes at two scales: regional and intimate. Each designer/artist/team will produce an overall strategy for connecting and relating the four defined sites (and those between) while paying attention to the unique and individual characteristics of each community through site specific work. At its core, the competition asks three main questions of its designers/artists/teams:

• What models from Hamburg could be applied to our region to assist us in envisioning inventive and progressive solutions to ongoing issues common to post-industrial cities?
• How can we utilize the river as the catalyst for awareness, change and growth within a region considering the following areas: economy, politics, environment, community, agriculture, transportation, public space, art, recreation, mapping, graphics?
• How can small-scale, local river art/environmental installations have a lasting effect on a community and its collective visions of the future?

We have identified four primary issues that face both of our regions:

• Environment
• Diversity and Connection
• Creative Economies
• Collective History and Education

Each submission must identify and utilize at least one of these frames for their entry.

Entrants will design and present an approach to addressing this (above selected) issue using art, science, planning or other inventive means first at a regional scale. Then, focusing on one site (of your choice), designers/artists/teams will design a small-scale artistic/architectural/scientific installation to be placed along the river addressing the topic of choice and site specific issues.

Site committees have been formed for each location to provide a specific site criteria, provide additional information and Question/Answer period and to represent their community as judges on the competition. These committees are made up of a cross-section of members of the community from citizens to planners to organizers.

Deadline: December 10, 2011

Eligibility:

Experimental Honors Planning Design Award: This $2,000 competition is open to designers/artists/teams internationally.

Design-Build Awards: open to designers/artists/teams from the northeast region of the USA: CT, MA, NH, VT, ME, NY, NJ, RI. Four $7,500 awards.

Contact: Thom Long
tlong [at] hampshire.edu
Phone: 001 413 559 5376

Five Colleges Inc.
893 West Street
Amherst MA 01002
USA

“Accepting architecture as cultural production, its performative dimension must also contribute to a critical role, that is, to architecture’s capacity to produce commentary regarding the ongoing transformations of culture and society. In this sense, the notion of architectural performance implied here feeds directly upon the tradition of performance art.” — Pedro Gadanho, “Architecture as performance”, revista Dédalo N°2, Porto, 2007

“The main achievement of contemporary city planning is to have made people blind to the possibility of what we call unitary urbanism, namely a living critique of this manipulation of cities and their inhabitants, a critique fueled by all the tensions of everyday life. A living critique means setting up bases for an experimental life where people can come together to create their own lives on terrains equipped to their ends.” — Raoul Vaneigem, Attila Kotanyi, “Basic program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism”, revue Internationale Situationniste N°6, Paris, 1961

In the last decade, ephemeral architecture practices of numerous architects and artists collectives have been developing as a critical answer to the results of growing mobility in the recent neo-liberal context, using various performative tactics for “activation” of the local potentialities for social change. The most interesting ephemeral architecture projects are fast-statement critical practices, collective actions towards the creation of temporary places for encounters in an ever-changing urban environment.

But, because these actions have to be strongly connected to longer-term local actions, they have to be transitory phases that call for a social transformation, for a next step. And in that sense, this is very performative. And this is where the performative action becomes a radical social gesture that goes far beyond the production of an aesthetic object. These 3 days of conferences and performances will give the opportunity to architects, urban theorists, performance artists, philosophers and activists to root the origins of contemporary performance architecture and to extend its potentialities regarding future art/urban strategies.

But the conference will also be an activation step for MyCityLab Brussels, an ephemeral performance that call for longer-term actions in the Brussels MIDI neighbourhood, this key platform of mobility in Europe. For that reason a one-week workshop will bring architects, artists, urban theorists, performers and volunteers to activate this camp-conference.