Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson created this book of his own home using laser cut paper.




via - Your Daily Awesome

Community Topographies

Christian Marc Schmidt
Community Topographies
Web Application (Processing)
2007

Launch Community Topographies

Branded communities are the latest chapter in the narrative of the ideal or utopian city. They are also the outcome of a changing relationship between identity and community. Community is a reflexive concept: just as identity is a product of community, communities are a product of identity. Supported by the changing role of location, we are more enabled (and therefore perhaps more inclined) to choose our communities from the standpoint of how they might complement or contribute to our sense of self.

Identity goes beyond brand: the character of a community is largely determined by its plan. This visualization of 12 new communities around the world seeks to address the question: How is identity expressed in the design of the branded communities appearing in or adjacent to cities around the world?

via - rhizome.org

Which Chicago do you come from?

I discovered this project by way of discovering the new (very new and apparently a little glitchy) service Platial. I'm not sure exactly how it differs from other mapping services. Google maps now has a "My Maps" feature but perhaps they're not searchable in quite the same way. I'm open to enlightenment if any of you are familiar with either service.

Mapping thought.

I suppose that Megan and Murray McMillan are really mapping their process rather than their thoughts, but in such a way that is distinctly subjective. The careful cutting, cropping, layering, and labeling reveals a thousand tiny decisions and indecisions that ultimately lead to their installations and videos. This is a great example of documentation as art object itself, rather than simply support materials. It reminds me of Matta-Clark's photo documents of his ephemeral or hazardous cutting projects that locate us within the work but destabilize the architecture to suggest (to me) his thoughts on deconstruction and relation between spaces and materials.

Here's a couple of audio clips of an interview with Megan and Murray McMillan about their work and their collaboration.

Symposium Monday, April 23

Alfred Watkins and British Imagination of Landscape
Symposium, 23rd April 2007, 2-5 pm, DFA 2.204, University of Texas at Austin

Alfred Watkins (1855-1935) made several inventions in photography and was himself an accomplished photographer whose books are extensively illustrated by his own works. He will always be remembered, however, for his contributions to the understanding of British prehistory. These contributions have never met with any academic approval or endorsement, but their extraordinary popularity with a non-professional audience (people who are not archaeologists) has proved to be impossible for the academics to disentangle themselves from. While the main area of contestation has been Britain, Watkins’ conclusions have implications for our understanding or imagining of landscapes elsewhere in the world, including Peru.

In 1921 Watkins perceived that ancient prehistoric Britain had been criss-crossed by a system of straight trackways that were aligned on prehistoric monuments such as standing stones, stone circles, and ancient earthworks. He called these alignments ‘ley-lines’. He published four books explaining his discovery, of which The Old Straight Track (1925) has become the most famous. Ignored at the outset by the ‘professional’ archaeologist O.G. S. Crawford, Watkins’ ideas have never been accepted by the archeological establishment. Yet he could point to plentiful evidence on maps, or shown in his own photographs, or demonstrated in sketches, that suggested the justice of his views. After a period of post-war abeyance, his trackway alignments powerfully re-emerged in the 1970s, gleefully seized upon and transmuted by the popular activities of enthusiasts into the form of ‘lines of earth-energy’ with mysterious impacts on life, sometimes with a UFO or magical connection.

The symposium will examine several matters with respect to Watkins, who has up until this point been the subject of relatively little scholarly interest. His photographs and their impact on the imagination of fiction-writers will be discussed, as will his vexed relations with the British archeological establishment, and his impact on land art.

Larger questions implicated here include science and folklore, science and fiction/art, the popular versus the academic, the nature of landscape, mapping and photography, and the intermedia character of imagination.

Participating scholars:
Professor Stephen Daniels, cultural geographer, University of Nottingham
Dr. Adam Stout, archaeologist, University of Wales Lampeter
Dr. Michael Charlesworth, art historian, University of Texas at Austin

Pathogeographies

More shameless self-promotion... Saturday, April 14 at Commerce Street Artists Warehouse I'm contributing to a show called Goin' Mobile curated by Kimberly Aubuchon of San Antonio's Unit B Gallery. Mine uses satellite photographs and architectural models as a starting point to craft a tangled, disoriented highway system floating in space. From the press release...

Goin’ Mobile ventures in every direction to guide the viewer on a trip to those familiar and unknown places along our traveled and explored routes. Paying special attention to the driver’s seat view of landscapes in our daily and worldly travels; Goin’ Moblie is a memoir to places we expect to know.

I can't wait to participate in another show, Pathogeographies, this summer put on by the multi-talented collective, Feel Tank Chicago. They've created a blog with teaser pics and artist bios and all of the projects sound great.

How Cool Is This?!

Since I haven't actually read this book, I'm really just sharing my blind enthusiasm for this discovery. The Playbook, by Alex S. MacLean is chock full o' aerial photographs of amusement parks! The disorienting angle on environments that are disorienting to begin with opens it up to a host of new readings: biology, machinery or circuitry, and abstract painting. In this case, as details fall in and out of recognition, the overhead view fluctuates between the authority of the God's eye-view (the plan view), and something completely place-less and wildly strange. The radical cropping, like the fragmentation of the kaleidoscopic-city artists, contributes to the disorientation.