Posts Tagged ‘espace heureux’
TORUS: conceptualizing my installation for Burning Man 2010
March 24th, 2010 germinating ideasTags: ambiance, architexture, body, city, espace heureux, experimental circus, kinetic, maze, noise, play, utopia
Torus is a bouncing castle, an inflatable tunnel, a crawl space to rest and socialize, and a novel. After enjoying the buoyant properties of the platform at the center of the structure, revelers enter the darkly glowing, semi-translucent tunnel that circles the ring. Comfortably wide, and yet not large enough to allow you to stand up straight, the tunnel is a tautological maze that amusingly, gently disorients. Its elastic, squeaky walls have the consistency of a balloon and make for interesting reclining, lounging, splaying and contortion of limbs. Strangers meet as they crawl or wiggle through the tunnel: talk, experimentally intertwine, explore the space together. A system of fans keeps the air of the labyrinth adequately fresh and oxygenated.
The secret of Torus is in the speakers embedded in its walls: the tunnel is divided into four quadrants. Each quadrant broadcasts a section of a short novel narrated by the novel’s protagonist. Like in one of Borges’ fantastical stories, the novel has neither beginning nor end – it is literally a circle!
The torus itself is a geometrical object with fascinating psychological properties…sound travels elliptically through it, allowing visitors to experience the ambiance rather than the letter of the novel.
Inflatacookbook: 1970s alternative media/architecture collective Ant Farm’s instruction manual on how to create weirdly inhabitable inflatable structures
March 23rd, 2010 germinating ideasTags: body, city, espace heureux, experimental circus, immersion, play, space, utopia, visceral
In the late 60′s and 70′s, the San Francisco hippie art and architecture collective known as Ant Farm were creating buildings out of giant inflatable plastic bags. Their 1969 work, 50×50′ Pillow for the Whole Earth Catalog led to the commission to build the medical tent–or as Ant Farmer Chip Lord called it, “the Bad Trip Pavilion”–at Altamont.
Ant Farm also created uncannily prescient work about things like the all-consuming, TV-driven, pop media culture and the American fetishization of cars. [They're the ones who buried that row of Cadillacs nosefirst in the Texas desert.]
from Make Magazine:
“I had the pleasure of meeting and becoming friends with Ant Farm co-founder Doug Michels in the early ’90s. He was as delightfully crazy as ever, drawing up designs for spheres of water floating through space filled with dolphins, a Japanese sex theme park, a giant couch, called the National Sofa, in the park across from the White House, where people could come and interact with the First Family via the National TV set. This was definitely not a guy who liked to paint inside the lines. Sadly, Doug died in a freak climbing accident in 2003.”
Ant Farm’s “Inflatacookbook”
Dream World I: unusual feasts
March 1st, 2010 germinating ideasTags: dream, espace heureux
I’ve decided to sprinkle this blog with recollections from my dreams: you never know when an idea might felicitously insert itself. After a few memorable dreams featuring labyrinthine space stations, magical cats, rapid aging, giant cattle with no skin, day-glow animals, a never ending forest etc…it seems a shame to let these things slip by without a word. Last night was pretty epic: I was invited to a party given by members of a special mafia that trafficked in human urine. How this had made them rich was mysterious, but the thing that struck me when I entered the restaurant was that a room with a long low table and heavy red drapes had been set aside for the offspring. And all these children were little girls, very be-ribbonned and cream-puff, velvet and taffeta dresses, their yummy hair giving off a soft burnished glow. In front of each one was a fluted cup of multicolored blown glass, heaped with melting fruit and gelatin. Despite the splendor they looked uncomfortable.
I surprised myself by making this video this afternoon but maybe it wasn’t a non-sequiture after all: it describes exactly what that particular dream sequence felt like.
Sonic and Synesthesia: archaic utopia and toy emotion
February 18th, 2010 researchTags: body, cyborg, espace heureux, experimental circus, immersion, kinetic, maze, music, play, utopia
As a child, I spent hours with my Sega Genesis or (Sega Megadrive, as it was marketed in Europe) developing digital motor reflexes meant to ensure my survival in a colorful 8-bit world. Rolling up in a little ball to zoom through transparent tubes or accelerate and fall in not-quite-Earth-gravity parabolas became second nature. Sonic introduced me to the delights of a sacharine electronic soundtrack that made the hard primary colors of Sonic world’s shimmer and subliminally controlled my minute pushing and pulling of the tiny joystick. Sonic is a masterpiece in synesthetic design: visual, aural and kinetic mesh together to create a re-embodied experience, more akin to telepresence than manipulating an avatar.
Apparently, other fans who still have dreams of pinballing through Sonic levels and have developped an automatic jump and bounce response to hearing repetitive synth melodies have posted these walkthroughs of Sonic 1 and 2…a nostalgic flashback to an archaic utopia.
The Playground as Art Practice: Kinesthetic Art II
January 28th, 2010 referencesTags: architexture, body, espace heureux, experimental circus, kinetic, play, space
note how the documentation is edited to techno! The correlation with dance culture is a phenomenological one.
Radiotopia: Imaginative Use of the Ionosphere
November 18th, 2009 researchTags: ambiance, espace heureux, haunted space, immersion, machine, music, play, space, time, utopia
Using Benedict Anderson’s concept of imagined communities as virtual loci that gather individuals into a common cultural space,Susan Douglas (Listening In) reads radio in terms of its capacity, as a social practice, to uniquely constitute (American) subjectivity. Radio’s most obvious affordance is that it allows people separated in space to listen simultaneously, “to experience that very moment of (their) lives in exactly the same way” (p.24). Douglas argues the new medium gave rise to an unprecedented kind of intersubjective intimacy – a linking of inner worlds that occurred not through a meeting of the minds (radio listeners remain anonymous to each other) but by sharing a common (cultural, technological) platform for fantasy.
Radio listeners are bonded by a specific practice of self: as thousands tune in to the same Top 40 song, they cross over together and for a moment into a temporality different from their distracted, fragmented present and experience time as a (musical) signature, as an embodied flow. For the duration of a song, radio holds out the possibility to a fragmented collectivity to perceive themselves as a unique, flavorful being – the kind of communion achieved is not one that can gather a community (radio listeners are experiencing themselves, very closely, rather than experiencing others) but that produces similar and separated subjectivities. Radio-listening Americans live apart but dream together.
Here Douglas’ concept of “dimensional” listening, as radio’s purported affordance that encourages listeners to generate their own powerful imagery to compensate for the absence of a visual world, enters into play. If other media like cinema, where worlds are “given” to the audience for consumption, constitute a vault of imaginary material, then radio trains the subject in the practice of a specific type of imagination, setting up the scaffolding for an inner space that we can freely populate. To “develop an ear for radio” means to gain access to “a repertoire of listening styles and emotional responses”, to be attuned to different inner worlds that we can switch on or off (in this sense, prefiguring the advent of portable music players as mood-regulating devices). In the 20s before regular programming this might mean tuning in to imagine a ionospheric topology projected from the disparate stations the ham could reel in; in the 30s it could mean regularly conjuring the presence of an entire cast of fictional characters from a soap drama. Douglas argues that in exploring the “spaces” of sound – by promenading our consciousness through the rippling folds of rhythm or timbre in music, by stalking the unfolding story of a voice – we are really spelunking in our own depths.
The term “training” characterizes the kind of self-building radio enables in the sense that listeners (according to Douglas) become emotionally attached to broadcast material, especially if they hear it repeatedly: “the more we listen to certain kinds of music, the more we learn to like it.” (p. 32) – in a quite neurological way, Top 40 songs imprint themselves on our mind, giving shape to our subjectivity. This emotional sculpting modifies the listener’s sense of time in significant ways. Radio creates privileged temporal moments for the listener, a more intense experience of the present that accompanies the listener’s exploration of their inner space. Over the course of a life, these privileged moments call to and ricochet off one another – mental states or moods jump across one’s temporality, seeding the self with fragments of past incarnations, reliquary fantasies. Douglas emphasizes that radio almost from the beginning was marked by nostalgia, by the longing for a disappeared moment that a broadcast song could briefly bring back into the present. In this sense dimensional listening is not dissociable from another term Douglas uses, “associational” listening, or the forging of correspondences between the flow of our lives and the soundtrack that accompanies it, meaning that daily routines – e.g. doing laundry while listening to a jazz tune on the radio – are dyed with the color of a sound that can make an initially undifferentiated slice of everydayness remarkable. This quality in radio emerges from its difference from the gramophone as a listening practice – the fact that radio temporally mapped out a listener’s day (starting with regular programming) with scheduled sound. As manufactured sound and especially music became ambient (as consequence of ubiquity) they started exercising an unprecedented level of influence on people’s lives.
Douglas also investigates the fascinating history of the beginnings of radio and the social significance accorded the new technology at its inception, particularly around the relationship between radio and a collective desire for the existence of a tangible spiritual dimension, a longing for the unchartered and unknown that characterized both radio’s marketing as a mechanical “medium” (a notion that interestingly recontextualizes media in terms of spiritism) and the practice of DXing. Radio uncannily symbolized, more than the phonograph which was an inscription device, the utopian possibilities of technology as interface between different ontological realms, as a transducer that could allow for communication between what was previously considered incommensurable: the living and the dead, humanity and the extraterrestrial, invisible world of the airwaves, two individuals separated by vast distances. Douglas points out that in endowing radio with this mystique Americans were engaging in a search for meaningful connection, a sense of existential and communal belonging that, at least in the collective Western imaginary, had been lost in the turn to mechanized, serialized, fragmented modern life. DXers, poetically dubbed “distance fiends”, developed a form of radio practice that engaged the technology not only as a commodity fetish but also as, literally, a medium, a means of accessing different possibilities of signification through the exploratory use of the technology’s affordances. Before the more commoditized modes of dimensional and associational listening, tuning in to the radio was also a game played across the virtual landscape of the airwaves as DXers would fish for the disembodied voices that stood in for real-world localities.
Douglas’ discussion of DXing as a poetic practice weaves into her general investigation of radio not only as a locus for a cultural imaginary but as a technology that crucially enables imagination – which raises questions as to how other sound technologies have been and might be imaginatively used. If the commodity-use of the record, the tape, the MP3 player have trained us to meaningfully experience sound in certain ways that have constituted our subjectivities according to certain common cultural (capitalist) patterns, then what other cultures (and other subjectivities) with potential to challenge or re-organize capitalism emerge as a result of exploratory, imaginative use? Radio leads us into a consideration of contemporary countercultural (but also massively embraced!) practices around sound technology, namely DJ and remix culture…
The Most A-Maze-ing Hypertext is not Electronic: House of Leaves, Dictionary of the Khazars, Derrida’s Glas
October 7th, 2009 germinating ideas, referencesTags: archive, database, espace heureux, mapping, maze, play, utopia
First Passage: The Religion of Flowers. In Phenomenology of the Spirit…. “And then the nightmares begin”. Exploration Z…”Even the hallways you’ve walked a hundred times will feel longer, much longer, and the shadows, any shadow at all, will seem deeper, much deeper”. They could read other people’s dreams, live and make themselves at home in them, and through the dreams hunt the game that was their prey – a human, an object or an animal.
Daydreaming: “the shadow is then a rich and splendid being”
August 28th, 2009 referencesTags: amnesia, daydreaming, espace heureux, experiment, haunted space, maze, play, time, utopia
To precipitate the player into a daydreaming state – the goal of an immersive envitonment?
Bachelard, Poetics of Daydreaming: “daydreaming allows us to know language uncensored. In solitary daydreaming, we can say everything to ourselves. We still have a clear enough conscience to be certain that what we say to ourselves is for us and for us alone…To understand ourselves doubly as real and idealized beings we must listen to our daydreaming. We believe that our daydreaming can be the best school for a “psychology of the depths“.
“In our hours of happiness, our daydreaming nourrishes itself; it self-sustains the way life self-sustains.”
On alchemy: “The exaltation found in the names of substances is a preamble to experiments on certain “exalted” substances”.
un jadis a jamais disparu: a once upon a time forever dissapeared
l’ombre est alors un etre riche: the shadow is then a rich and splendid being
On loneliness and the condtional tense: “I am alone, therefore I dream of the being who healed my loneliness, who would have healed my loneliness”.
“What do we know about the other if we don’t imagine him/her?”
PHOTOPIA : a happy, haunted space: where we would be: punctum
July 31st, 2009 referencesTags: ambiance, derive, espace heureux, haunted space, indexicality, photopia, punctum, space, utopia
. Gk, comb. form of phôs (gen. phōtós), light.
Architexture
July 31st, 2009 referencesTags: ambiance, architecture, architexture, derive, espace heureux, haunted space, photopia, utopia
INANIMATA as interactive devices: THINGS THAT BECKON
July 8th, 2009 germinating ideasTags: ambiance, architexture, body, database, derive, espace heureux, experimental circus, haptic, inanimata, interactive, machine, material, play, uncanny, visceral
pull that rope if you see liquid in a pan, tilt that pan if it’s labelled “SQUEEZE ME”, squeeze it if you want to touch, TOUCH and the SCREEN comes to life, the ROOM lights up with MUSIC, WHISPERS, INVECTIVES establishing a physiological sentier (un sentier pour SENTIR), path to the eyes and the ears _ plugging into a mind, minds into the DATABASE OF IMAGES…It’s not work, it has nothing to do with freedom of choice, it’s VISCERAL, COMPULSIVE PLAY
YOU JUST CAN’T HELP YOURSELF SO WHY RESIST?
eatmeeatmeeat me eat me eat me eat me eat me eat me eat me there is much to be said about a form of aesthetic engagement that like famously cinema engulfs you, seduces you, gives you no choice in the matter and yet requires much much deliberate action on your part 
it tricks you into PUTTING A WHOLE FLOATING MECHANISM IN MOTION, SENSORIAL FRUIT HANGING FROM THE DATABASE!
Topo-analyse and happy space
June 24th, 2009 researchTags: ambiance, derive, espace heureux, space, time
Matisse, "red studio" : home as a hall of images
commentary and excerpts from: Gaston Bachelard, “The Poetics of Space”
On the possible phenomenological interchangeability of lived space and lived time – “living” as temporal endurance in space/of space, equally meaning the spatialization, actualization of temporality. The present is always a spatial configuration:
We sometimes believe we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a sequence of fixations in those spaces that offer our being stability _ a being who refuses to pass, to flow away, to run out and who, even when looking for lost time in the past, wishes to “suspend” time’s flight. In those thousands honeycomb cavities, space lends itself out as compressed time. That is the purpose of space.
How imagination uses space as a template for the building of being, in order to create a home out of one’s own mental processes:
We will see our imagination build “walls” with impalpable shadows, confort itself with illusions of protection – or, vice versa, tremble behind thick walls and doubt the solidity of a fortress.
On TOPOPHILIA / TOPO-ANALYSIS:
“we want to examine very simple images, the images of the spaces of happiness/fortunate spaces”, éspaces heureux. Fortunate/happy: the joy emerging from happenstance, from the present. In french, fortunate and happy are one concept: heureux.
On IMAGES and their resistance to psychoanalytic explanation, origination:
“The life of the image is all in its lightning brillance, in the fact that an image is the superseding of all sensible data.” _ “It is inversely not in causality but in the concept of resonance or impact that we think we find the true measure of a poetic image”
Victor Hugo's "haunted house" on the island of Guernsey...
“l’inconscient séjourne.” The unconscious remains in places.
Space: the site of “imaginary” action (rèverie). “On oriente l’onirisme, on ne l’accomplit pas” / We can orient oniric states, not accomplish them.
