Errata
Where it says snow
read teeth-marks of a virgin
Where it says knife read
you passed through my bones
like a police-whistle
Where it says table read horse
Where it says horse read my migrant's bundle
Apples are to remain apples
Each time a hat appears
think of Isaac Newton
reading the Old Testament
Remove all periods
They are scars made by words
I couldn't bring myself to say
Put a finger over each sunrise
it will blind you otherwise
That damn ant is still stirring
Will there be time left to list
all errors to replace
all hands guns owls plates
all cigars ponds woods and reach
that beer-bottle my greatest mistake
the word I allowed to be written
when I should have shouted
her name
Malcolm McCullough once said that he liked to recreationally reprogram his thermostat. I wonder whether he knows that he has this in common with the Swiss architect Philippe Rahm, who told an audience at Princeton last week, "When you create a space, you create a climate." His architecture is environmental in a literal sense: he creates ecosystems and climates: by changing variables like temperature, UV light and oxygen, he experiments with new types of spaces that might be recreated. As the cell phones rang both of the organizer and himself (!), Rahm described the invisible environments that he creates within his spaces -- spaces in which he seeks to "invent a new geography" by the climates he creates.
The Hormonorium, the Swiss Pavilion in the 2002 Venice Biennale, manipulated levels of UV light and oxygen in the room in order to shift hormonal levels within its visitors, making them feel less fatigued and more stimulated. 528 fluorescent tubes under clear plexiglass construct the floor, and illuminate so brightly, they make the boundaries of the room disappear. The flooding of UV light creates a decrease in melatonin level, waking up and turning on the visitors. Bringing the oxygen level down to that usually found at 3000 meters stimulates the production of a hormone that increases red blood cell count and improving physical capability. The room changes the physiology of its participants.
Rahm noted how writers like Jules Verne noted how the invention of streetlighting completely changed the experience of night and day. Diurnisme reverses this effect, shifting time by recreating the night during the day, with its many yellow-orange lamps. The effect works on melatonin production, which operates on the blue and red wavelengths of the eye but not the yellow. The room played 18 Diurnes, composed by Rahm as an inversion to nocturnes. (See Régine's review of Diurnisme on We Make Money Not Art)
© photo Adam Rzepka, Centre Pompidou
In the discussion after his lecture (and at dinner later that evening), several people pointed out the juxtaposition between the visuality of Rahm's very composed images and the experiences they all try to evoke: the images fall flat. And yet, Dean Stan Allen noted how aware he had become of the air-conditioning blowing across the room in the course of his lecture. Perhaps the images don't so much illustrate but evoke.
What if our considerations of smart homes began to work more like this? Granted, Rahm's work is best suited in the closed environment of a gallery: here, it achieves a distance. It would become less punchy and more boring if it were simply made into a building. Nonetheless, I'd rather see smart homes think of shifting the conditions of the environment in order to affect their inhabitants, rather than the <i>Mon Oncle</i>-esque version we see today...
Yesterday, I was at the National Air & Space Museum in Washington DC (both the lovely, huge Dulles hangar and the nostalgically tatty one on the Mall), where the second Apollo Lunar Module is displayed.
... which brings us to two projects by Archigram, the Cushicle and the Fully Applianced House (for which I'm not finding a picture):
"The autonomous Cushicle unit could develop to become part of a more widespread urban system of personalized enclosures," stated Archigram 8's editorial. As was pointed out in class, it's not unlike the iPod, not unlike what Michael Bull said recently in an interview with Wired:
The iPod is a Sherpa -- it has all the things that you want...The iPod allows people to control their environment, more so than any other technology. In a world where we have little sense of control over our everyday lives, it can be very satisfying to control how you interact with your environment... IPod users, mobile phone users, are people who are always in another space. They warm up these alienated spaces with their own pleasure. But what we're really seeing is an increasing denial of shared space.
Another classmate talked about the vulnerability of these membranes. I'd like to imagine that maybe they could protect themselves. Consider this captivating project by Joshua Allen Harris: animals made of plastic bags and tied to the subway grates. They spring to life when the subway runs under the street. (via Boing Boing and Wooster Collective):
Ralph Rapson passed away this weekend at the age of 93. He left a 70 year legacy as an architect. Rapson studied at Michigan and Cranbrook (under Eliel Saarinen), went on to teach at the New Bauhaus at the Institute of Design in Chicago, and enjoyed a 30 tenure as dean of the University of Minnesota school of architecture. His buildings included embassies in Scandinavia and a variety of iconic buildings in Minneapolis. His work shares a similar legacy to that of Paul Rudolph and Kevin Roche--monolithic, 1950s-70s era buildings that have fallen out of favor but were still important. In Minneapolis, he designed the Cedar-Riverside housing complex (1973), the solid Rarig fine arts center on the University of Minnesota campus, and the newly demolished Guthrie Theater.
I have a long, personal relationship to the Guthrie. I worked there as an usher between 1988 and 1993, around the time the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden opened (it's now celebrating its 20th birthday). In a renovation for its 25th anniversary in 1988, the Guthrie had already lost many of Rapson's original touches, particularly to the facade-- the original facade is above. Still, the theater interior felt much like what the sketch above belies. I can still tell you that it seated 1441 people, that the colored seats made the house look full when it wasn't, and that nobody was more than 50-odd feet from the stage.
At Christmas a year ago, I went to the Walker Art Center, and both gasped and cried when I saw a backhoe through Rapson's original Guthrie. I still wonder why it had to be knocked down, why it couldn't be preserved. It was a special place and while I love the Jean Nouvel-designed building as well, it's sad to see Rapson's major work disappear.
He was active up until the end of his life -- in an Archinect discussion, someone pointed out that he was in the office on Friday, the very day he died. As Rapson said in an interview with the Minneapolis Star Tribune two years ago, "My attitude is well, why not just go on living doing the things I enjoy and live as fully as I can? Who knows what's going to happen? I hope I'm working right up to the last day, It ain't work - it's fun!" he said.
It struck me I've not posted the talk I gave at IxDA's Interaction 08 conference, titled Strategic Boredom. Some of what I had to say I'd published in an earlier blog post. Here, you can see the video.
- Archers of Loaf, "Web in Front." Circa late 1994, Spiro and I drove around listening to this, and I've always loved the lines "There's a chance that things could get weird/Yeah it's a possibility."
- Love of Diagrams, "The Pyramid." Thanks to the fabulous Princeton station, WPRB, I am not a total musical outcast. This Australian band knocked my socks off this fall.
- Polara, "Letter Bomb." Another 1994ish era album from a Minneapolis band. I used to buy cappuccino from one of the members.
- Radiohead, "Headmaster Ritual." In November, Radiohead covered two songs as a part of their webcast. Though I'm not a huge Radiohead fan, this cover blew me away because of its tightness and fidelity to the original, down to detail.
- Radiohead, "Ceremony." One of my dearest, most favorite Joy Division/New Order songs -- I love covers of it (the one by Galaxie 500 comes to mind). This is from the aforementioned webcast.
- Look Blue Go Purple, "In Your Favour." Look Blue Go Purple is a nearly-forgotten New Zealand all-girl band that played around 1987 or so. A friend who worked at Flying Nun sent this to me a few years ago and I still listen to it several times a week.
- Confetti, "Corduroy." This is a cover of the Wedding Present's song on their album Dalliance (which incidentally was produced by Steve Albini and recorded in Minnesota in 1991). This cover haunts, the original stings.
- Peter Murphy, "Cuts You Up." This just seemed to fit.
- Of Montreal, "Forecast Fascist Future (IQU remix)." Last year, I became aware of this song when Mark Gage used it in his entry for the PS 1 competition.
- Baby Flamehead, "Amy." One of the very first bands I interviewed, Baby Flamehead hailed from Philadelphia. My friendship with my best friend, Jenn, was clinched in Montpellier, France, thanks to this song. We stood in the Place de la Comédie and sang and danced to it -- Jenn is from Philly and thus knew who they were.
On Saturday March 9 at 11:30, I am moderating a panel called "Meet the Architects" -- one of the few panels that I can think of that's ever happened at the festival that deals with architecture not as a metaphor but as the actual practice. It's an idea that emerged out of a conversation Bryan Boyer started with Hugh Forrest, the conference director, a year ago, and that continued between me, Bryan, and Enrique Ramirez. The official description goes:
A new kind of digital practice has emerged. We see it in our buildings and our cities: new architectural interfaces, new communities, new ways of thinking about the physical world around us. In "Meet the Architects," we'll take on these ripples in physical architecture and urbanism. This panel tracks new directions in architecture culture at the intersection of digital, film and urban environments; architecture zines, blogs and communities; and architectural and urban research.The panelists are an excellent bunch. We've brought together Bryan Boyer, who will soon graduate with his master's in architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, John Szot, technical director of Brooklyn Digital Foundry, Mimi Zeiger, publisher of Loud Paper and an established architecture critic, and Enrique Ramirez, my classmate, a senior editor at Archinect and the figure behind Aggregat456.
As the panel approaches, I'll be posting information related to the conversation we have (images, recommended books and websites). If you're in Austin, do come. We'd love to see you.
The area to which remaining forces will withdraw after losing the key battle is called a national redoubt. It has a particular distinction in World War II: National Redoubt is the idea that, in the final days of the war, Germany might withdraw to Bavaria and its surrounding alpine areas, where their forces would hold out for a final stand. Although criticized by Churchill, Eisenhower believed a March 1945 Allied intelligence report that supported the idea of the National Redoubt and directed troops toward the southwest. It was a credible idea, write Keith Mallory and Arvit Ottar in their 1973 Architecture of War, given the "German obsession with bomb-proof construction." [1: p. 265]
Yet it was a bluff. In reality, the National Redoubt conceived by the British was a "Propaganda Wall" of Goebbels' devising, not a real Alpine fortress. As a result of the bluff, the Russians beat the English and Americans to Berlin, the ramifications of which would eventually divide the city and the country for decades. But at the same time, the concept of this fortress wasn't imaginary, either. Just 160 km from Berlin in the Harz Mountains, the National Socialists planned a central facility of tunnels and underground factories to produce liquid oxygen, jet engines, synthetic oil, and missiles.
In the earlier days of World War II, the Westwall (or Siegfried Line) also served as a propaganda wall. Its dragon teeth--anti-tank barriers--extended along the Swiss, French, Dutch, Belgian and German borders, north of Aachen and toward the Ruhrgebiet, south along the Rhine to Basel. The Nazis published maps in the late 1930s, showing a thick line of army defense, supported by additional air reinforcement as far east as Düsseldorf and Koblenz.
Write Mallory and Ottar, "The actual West Wall as planned and built... though brilliant in its design, had nothing of the strength painted by Goebbels. The huge difference between the propaganda wall and the real West Wall is best described by the fact that General von Rundstedt simply 'laughed' when he saw it." [1: p. 115] Where Nazi propaganda suggested the Westwall extended 10 to 25 km, it was merely a skinny line.
The bluff performed by the West Wall staved off a French attack under Marshall Pétain in 1944. It dissuaded Eisenhower from attacking, instead causing him to first seek reinforcements. Both results may have extended the war into 1945 -- unnecessarily, say many, write Mallory and Ottmar.
In both cases, Germany's strategy was to make itself look fortified. In reality, it adopted a dynamic propaganda machine to maximize its resources. The Westwall as propaganda was a mobile machine, deployed through publication. The Allies believed in the appearance of the massive stasis, believed that what was on the surface penetrated much further beyond. The bluff allowed Germany to create the illusion of insurmountability out of a laughable--lächerliche--line. The bluff is the quintessential force of mobility.
[1] Mallory, Keith, and Arvid Ottar, The Architecture of War, New York: Pantheon Books, 1973, 108-123 and 238-265. These pieces have informed the content about the Westwall and the National Redoubt.
[2] Thanks to the Old Hickory 30th's pictures of the Siegfried Line and the Watch on the Rhine.
[3] A mildly embarrassing debt to Wikipedia for its national redoubt discussion and its Siegfried Line imagery.
Boredom is a provocation. But what kind of provocation is it?
It is not the existential state of eternal ennui or depression-- if it were, it would act like the dejected robot Marvin in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It means more than just the impetus for change. The Morrisseys and of the world capture the drudgery of it. Here's what Siegfried Kracauer wrote about it in "Boredom:"
But although one wants to do nothing, things are done to one: the world makes sure that one does not find oneself. And even if one perhaps isn't interested in it, the world itself is much too interested for one to find the peace and quiet necessary to be as thoroughly bored with the world as it ultimately deserves.
Boredom's definitions over the last 2000 years include acedia, dejection, depression, sloth, laziness, immobility. We characterize it in the same manner as melancholia, tristesse, ennui, annoyance and wearisomeness. La Rochfoucauld wrote, "l'extrême ennui sert à nous désennuyer" (extreme boredom serves to distract from boredom). Séan Healy notes the paradox, asking, "How could an extreme form of something distract one form a lesser form of the same affliction?" In English, Byron first noted bores (someone suffering from ennui) in Don Juan, where he wrote, "Society is now one polished horde, Formed of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored." Charles Dickens invoked boredom in his 1852 novel Bleak House, after which Healy distinguishes British boredom from the continental form: sullen and private as opposed to continental boredom's virulence and destruction.
It has its own typology: situative boredom (waiting for someone or taking a train), the boredom of satiety (too much of the same thing), existential boredom and creative boredom (in which someone is forced to do something new or different). Situative boredom, the momentary ennui presented by a certain state of things, can be shaken off by action. Lars Svendsen writes, "To the extent that there is a clear form of expression for profound boredom, it is via behaviour that is radical and breaks new ground, negatively indicating boredom as its prerequisite." He notes the example of Alberto Moravia's novel, La Noia, in which the narrator's father's boredom "that does not require anything else to be assuaged than new, unusual experiences."
Søren Kierkegaard, tongue firmly-in-cheek in that very Danish way, analyzed the genesis of boredom and its effect throughout history. He presupposes boredom as the root of all evil, "ruinous" for man: "The effect that boredom exercises is altogether magical, except that it is not one of attraction but of repulsion." The impetus to build grows out of this boredom: humanity grows so bored, it builds a boring tower.
We can trace this from the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, so Eve was created. From that time boredom entered the world and grew in exact proportion to the growth of population. Adam was bored alone, then Adam and Eve were bored in union, then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille, then the population increased and the peoples were bored en masse. To divert themselves they conceived the idea of building a tower so high it reached the sky. The very idea is as boring as the tower was high, and a terrible proof of how boredom had gained the upper hand. Then the nations scattered over the earth, just as people now travel abroad, but they continued to be bored. And think of the consequences of this boredom! Man stood high and fell low, first with Eve and then the Tower of Babel. Yet what was it that stayed the fall of Rome? It was panis and circenses.
Martin Heidegger continues along the path of Kierkegaard's existential dissection of boredom. He studies boredom in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics as part of his continual exploration of Dasein (existence). He directly relates boredom to the passage of time, for in German, the word for boredom is Langeweil, literally "to have long time." Heidegger derives his consideration of it from the notion of a "profound boredom;" its relation to time is key. Boredom leads to time, time leads to boredom. Within such a frame, boredom is the "fundamental attunement" and at that, an objective and subjective hybrid. It is a tricky concept since "we do not understand boredom in its essence," writes Heidegger, perhaps because it has never become essential to us. "Perhaps that very boredom which often merely flashes past us, as it were, is more essential than that boredom with which we are explicitly concerned whenever this or that particular thing bores us by making us feel ill at ease." He suggests not going out of one's way to make oneself bored, but rather learn "not to resist straightaway but to let resonate... only by not being opposed to it, but letting it approach us and tell us what it wants, what is going on with it."
Boredom is not only time's passage but an ideological reception. It converges with conceptual art in Brian O'Doherty's 1967 Object and Idea in his characterization of "high-boredom and low-boredom art." High-boredom art relies heavily on exhaustible optical effect, such as with op and Pop art. Low boredom art, the realm of artists like Donald Judd and Robert Smithson, does not force itself onto viewers and outside of the gallery. In fact, the sculptor and critic (a.k.a sculptor Patrick Ireland) writes, "It tends to fade into the environment with a modesty so extreme that it is hard not to read it as ostentatious." Though he notes that the distinctions of boredom may sound arbitrary, they are useful because they uncover some of the main concerns in art of the sixties, "to the ironies they conceal, to the techniques which they are executed ... and to the 'mimicking' of the machine, which in the last few years has constituted a new orthodoxy of unfreedom and freedom." Computers don't help, either, for machines reduce the role of chance as a "built-in variable to the most sophisticated--and literally most stupid--of machines, the computer."
It is, however, a provocation. It needn't just be the state of things changing. Cyberneticist Gordon Pask invoked boredom routines when he created the Musicolour Machine in 1953. It was a machine that accompanied live music with improvised light shows. When the musicians became too repetitive, the machine would get bored and stop responding, requiring the musicians to change what they were doing in order to reengage the Musicolour Machine. (Would that I had a copy of Cybernetic Serendipity at my disposal: I would post some of the images of it.)
The idea reappears in Cedric Price's Generator (1976-79, not built). This series of cubes, walkways and catwalks could be moved around by a mobile crane on the site. Price's collaborator John Frazer, proposed that the cubes be outfitted with sensors that would report on the use of the components. If the pieces of Generator weren't moved enough, they would grow bored and design their own layouts, which in turn would be handed off to the mobile crane operator to put into place.
The very least you would expect of a system, wrote John Frazer, is that if you kick it, it should kick back. In Generator, Frazer found the germ of an idea that would shift his concepts of computer-aided design toward one where the computer took an active, not a passive role. Here, boredom serves a challenge to use systems differently, to try something different. He was so committed to the sensors and boredom routines of Generator that he continued to pursue aspects of the project in 1989, 1995 and ultimately shortly before Price's death in 2003.Anne Galloway writes in favour of boredom, in terms of it being a slow space for contemplation, against commodification. There is a panoply of possibility for boredom, too, as a button pushing, frustrating, provocation: an itchiness.
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