Millennium People

behind schedule

2010-09-29T10:26:00.002+01:00

Millennium People is not dead, its just resting.

We're running behind schedule with the relaunch, 29 days to be precise, but let me give you a quick update:

MP is moving to a brand new (physical) location – leaving behind Blogger HQ (Moffat Airbase, CA) and setting up shop on our own British servers.
It is getting a complete re-design and overhaul as part of its metamorphosis into a collective – as is fitting for Britain's premier think-tank pertaining to all aspects of the New Millennium.

Accordingly, the info@ address is no longer active – but it will be up and running again sometime next week with the re-launch.

Obviously we will make a song and dance all over the web, with tweets, fb updates, etc, etc.

Keep all sets tuned to this station.

rendering speculations

2010-07-17T12:28:00.005+01:00

Temporary intermission in the hiatus, just to let you all know that there are big changes in the works here - I can't wait to share all the exciting things that are going down in London this summer...

Just as an addendum - find below the link to a recent article I wrote for the Architectural Review about the AA's Rendering Speculations symposium held in April. The AR have also just launched their new site, which is pretty amazing in all truth... check it out:

architectural-review.com

crisis

2010-07-03T08:30:00.001+01:00

Change of plans. MP is off until September 1. This is due to a problem with the change of servers and databases associated with the implementation of MP2.0 (which, we remind you, will be a paradigm shift).

The current site will still be available during this period, and the posts that were due to appear will be back-dated once we return.

Sorry about all this, we're upset too.

MP.

fistful of links

2010-06-28T08:30:00.002+01:00

Screen print via Nakatomi Inc.

Gulf of Mexico: go in crude, come out refined. Some news.

London is full of weird historical kickbacks – perhaps the weirdest is the 100th Livery Company, a guard group from the old City formed in medieval times to regulate the guilds. They have now been re-named the Information Technologists Company, but if you think this means they've abandoned the silly metal hats, tights and big wooden sticks then you're wrong...

You know, MP is way more popular in the States than it here in its hometown. I attribute this to the time-honoured lust that yanks have for poms. Segue: Date British Guys (.com); 1960's posters have been discovered in an abandoned Nottinghill Gate tube tunnel; Take me there Boris: the mayor of London as a cab driver. Moving on to Britain (also known as Greater London), Prince Charles blames the world's ills on Galileo and 'soulless consumerism'. the UK tightens its recession belts, and prepares to make penny-pinching £5-note dispensing ATMs.

The ConDems are really screwing British architects: the Sesquipedalist eloquently explains why (bloody fools). A map of the London Underground in real-time. Ace. Related, a geography of London formed by the number of tweets from each part of the city. Also maps:

Historypin is a like a digital time machine that allows people to view and share their personal history in a totally new way. It uses Google Maps and Street View technology and hopes to become the largest user-generated archive of the world's historical images and stories. Historypin asks the public to dig out, upload and pin their own old photos, as well as the stories behind them, onto the Historypin map. Uniquely, Historypin lets you layer old images onto modern Street View scenes, giving a series of peaks into the past.

America: Restrepo, a documentary about fighting the war in Afghanistan; Still on Afghanistan: a recent mineral deposit find could completely change the game; Marshall McLuhan playing cards; MJ killed for his money, says whacko sister. I'm just not sure that corporate education is a good thing: the Wal-Mart university. iPreach: ipad used to spread the Word; salt flat racers made from the cowls of WW2 fighter planes.

The world: A closer look at sink holes; the silo home; hilarious tattoo mistakes: Loltatz; Chairs prefer gym socks; Two really nice photographers: untitled, and Andrew Moore. One more for good luck (a bit more pop). A fictitious brand created to campaign for industrial architecture in a post-industrial era: Cityfix.

There's been a trend to bend (apparently sexily) in Facebook photos of late, now there's a tumblr devoted to: The awkward lean. Japanese spacecraft deploys first ever solar sail. Still space, "We treat each other with respect and we have a great working relationship. Personal relationships are not ... an issue," says astronaut team-leader, when asked about what its like in the 100 mile club. Humourless response, but who can blame him? The man's name is Poindexter.

A five-step simple plan for everyone and everything; algae-powered flight; Jaguars are obsessed by Calvin Klein cologne; probably the coolest table in existence. Word on the street is that more and more women in their 30's are freezing their eggs, still waiting for "Mr. Right". I don't quite understand who Mr. Right is, but I can only assume he is symbolic for some sort of Cargo Cult. China gets their own native-script URLs. This. Is. Hot. How to beat Super Mario in 11 minutes; Save the Kittens; turn out whale faeces absorb CO2. Clingfilm (or, if you prefer, ceran wrap) architecture (must see!)

Finally, some videos:

1. Perhaps the best thing I've seen this year... via l'Histoire de l'Oeil. (if it gives you an ad, just click the cross to close it).

2. Cleese on Extremism.

3. The most awkward personal transporter I've ever seen...

4. Classroom Mario.

aa, eh?

2010-06-27T10:10:00.002+01:00

Millennium People's prolonged silence these past few weeks is the result of preparations for the AA Projects Review, which opened with a champagne-fueled party that spilled out of the school and into the green shadows of Bedford Square.

I haven't had time yet to see the whole show, although there were several units that looked quite interesting. MP will be reporting on the content some time next week, with the aim of trying to describe how the school is expressing contemporary trends in architecture.

There's several other surprises coming up in the next couple of weeks – the least interesting of which will be a fat fistful of fresh links first thing Monday (given that's at the bottom of the list, you can imagine that the other stuff is going to be pretty alright). Without giving too much away: Millennium People's new printhouse (Speculative Publications) will be launching its first title in a pilot run of 50; MP will be celebrating its first birthday with a fresh new site; and I will be travelling to the most remote part of Britain for a week to report on the possibility of isolation in the modern world.

Ace.

post net art and the new now

2010-06-09T08:30:00.005+01:00

Screenshot from Ian Andrew's 2002 net.art piece: Ether-1.

I know Millennium People has been quiet recently. But the summer is coming, and a bold prospect of speculation awaits us. In the meantime, a finally-finished draft:

'The New Now' is the term used in this blog's tagline. It's really just another way of saying 'spirit of the times' or 'zeitgeist' – which were not used for these reasons: the former puts one in mind of la belle epoque, and the latter smells a bit too much like Nazis and 9/11 conspiracies. The core business of this blog is the attempt to describe, if only in a lateral or fragmentary sense, the conditions that make life in the second decade of the third millennium the swell trip that it is. It pursues several fields: global and local economic trends; our changing relationship to technology (in particular the Internet); the city (as a psychogeographical, historical and political arena) – all primarily through the lens of architecture and the built environment. Except of course where that lens fails to describe anything of relevance, which is more frequently than you might think.

"Net art is seen as an archaeology of the future, drawing on the past (especially of modernism) and producing a complex interaction of unrealized past potential and Utopian futures..."
Julian Stallabrass

"Hype around Net-based art began in the early 1990s, before the Internet had become a commodity. It developed in skeptical parallel to the rise and decline of the new economy. In 1997, documenta X featured Net art. Around the same time, major museums in the US started online art commissions or virtual showcases. The first (and last) retrospective exhibition, “netconditon,” was held in 1999. Several books published in the first years of the new millennium give overviews of the practice and theory of this art. But since then, this particular chapter of art history appears to have closed. The final indication that Net-based art was not to become another genre in the contemporary art canon was perhaps the discontinuance of the “Net vision” category in the Prix Ars Electronica 2007."

So begins Net Pioneers 1.0, a book about contextualising early Internet art. I'm fascinated by Net Art – which is produced specifically for the medium of the Web – such that remains, like Blue Hyacinth or Seattle Drift. And while this book dates the death of Net Art to 1999, I think it is clear that art that can only be experienced through the Internet is flourishing. We are using information today in such remarkable ways, here are just three of my favourite examples of what I would call Post-Net Art (Po-NeAr?):

1. Solar Beat: an ambient music artwork that composes a score by assigning each planet a note and then having that note sound when the planet passes a datum. Art thanks to flash (oh what will happen when Flash finally dies?)

2.Moonbell: developed by the Japanese space agency JAXA this is a violent piano piece generated by the scans returned from Selene (one of Japan's orbiters that recently crashed into the moon). You are hearing a translation of the moon's surface into music.

3.Three Frames: surely the Internet's greatest .gif (sic) is the addition of time to mediums that were otherwise atemporal. Three Frames is not the only, but one of the best, examples of a blog dedicated to expressing minute slices of time in otherwise still images.

fistful of links

2010-05-27T13:25:00.000+01:00

I'm in the labs waiting for some images to render (more on that later in the year), so while the computer plugs away at it: some news.

London: the image above maps the city by geo-tagged flickr photos – I'm kind of surprised the rapidly gentrifying East isn't darker. Check out the Geotaggers' World Atlas (must see!). Related, the Londonist has mapped city institutions that broadcast on Twitter. Slight diversion - did you know twitter.co.uk is an English nationalist site? Tweets precipitated into cuckoo clocks (also, tweets converted into bone structure). Back to geotagged photo maps: Europe. Back to London: Boris Johnson, mayor thereof, is scrapping the Western Congestion zone. WTF dude? Chelsea is where most of the cars are at, no? Also on Boris' to-do list, city-wide free wifi by 2012 - from the unimaginatively named company The Cloud.

Herzog + De Meuron have turned a car park into an art form (1111 Lincoln Road, Miami). But is it really Post-Ballardian? Related, Into The Loop's mixed-use car park/metro station. Still re-using urban structures – the Lords of Raisintown: skateboarders that clean out the pools of re-possessed homes in order to skate in them. Police and real-estate agents are cool with this, since it keeps the pools clean and the property supervised. BLDG BLOG on rogue factories.

I wrote yesterday about Renzo - MP tip-off (I wish you would all send in more, frankly) from an Italian reader – for $11 you can 'be Renzo Piano', its an ipad app... OMA have made a new map of Europe – Eneropa! It's been wrapped up by all the regular dudes, Supercolossal + Infranet and whatever, but the best images are by far Club Construct.

Image source and location unknown...

Dross: inside Hitler's bunker (LIFE have some great galleries); The Ghastlycrumb Tinies, a children's book; startup quotes (Twitter founder: "Investors are employees you can never hire. We made sure to pick investors that thought like us."); crazy tunnels in Russia's only private metro; Turkish bees make beautiful nests from flowers; Notes from Chris (must-read!); in relation to my screen bit, the Nintendo DS as building; why I don't go to festivals; Sean Connery in a thong; steal this idea; Japanese neon light fights (real gorey, with blood and shit, prob NSFW); minigolf meets publicity: advertput; a mad hail storm in the states...

Finally,

symposiums at home and away

2010-05-26T19:31:00.004+01:00

I'm not going to write one of those falsely self-deprecating – yet secretly/overtly proud – notices on the wonderful things I have been up to recently (viz: "here is a bit of shameless self-promotion *school-girl giggling*"), I am simply going to say the following:

1. I was involved in a very brief panel conversation at the end of a fascinating two-day conference held at the AA called Architecture's Pasts. It is available here online. Speakers included Jeff Kipnis, Mark Cousins, Adrian Forty, Brian Hatton, Reinhold Martin, and Brett Steele (and many more).

2. I have a review of another AA symposium Rendering Speculations published in June's Architectural Review. I've seen the issue, and there's some particularly good pieces in there – including one on H+DeM's Miami 1111 building/car park and some good visual porn from the Milan design fair.

The image above is purely gratuitous.

piano lessons

2010-05-26T18:32:00.008+01:00

"Architecture is a dangerous profession. If we are wrong, we are wrong for a long, long time." So saying Renzo Piano began his short speech to a small audience gathered in the central courtyard of his first UK building (and the most colourful, by percentage of facade, ever built in London): Central St. Giles.

Personally, while I find his eye for detailing impeccable, I am not a fan of his work in general. Although he expresses himself with a frank charm, I find his approach to architecture strangely... archaic. His description of how the building came to be – starting with the destruction of an old Ministry of Defence brick fortress, followed by nine years of searching for the right way to create 'an urban meeting place' – was part architect-as-master-builder, part architect-as-social-engineer.

"London has a texture that is medieval, no two facades point in the same direction." he argued, describing the condition of the city. "It has a magic feeling. It is made of piazzas and streets and passages... it is always mixed in its use." I definitely agree London is medieval, but I've never stumbled into one of its piazzas. It is a grubby and run-down city, a city that takes time to learn to love, with none of the allure (or homogeneity) of Rome or Paris. The only people I've ever heard use the word "magic" in London are Spanish tourists describing the hit musical 'Mama-Mia: the songs of Abba'.

"I think the city is a place of surprise." Piano continued. There was something terribly trite about this Italian, who "wanted to tell the truth, and be completely honest" about the building. The corporate sterility of the courtyard and the transplanted oak jarred with this old-world charisma and sincerity about materiality. "Every building must bear the mark of the hand"... It didn't help the talk was called 'Piano Lessons'. Jeez. Talk about Cheese Louise.

"Architecture is the art of making shelter. But it also the art of answering desires and dreams." Cue whoosing wind and wind chimes. Then he suddenly changed pitch, and the smile fell from his face. "I want to confess everything. Some people think you begin with the idea. But there is always something missing from a project. I don't mean I am a perfectionist, I am talking about the real struggle. We want to be good, but this takes a lot of energy. We [architects] must be stubborn. But we must also be right, so we must be good listeners... I don't think schools really teach you that. Maybe the parents, but mostly we learn this in life. You must fight –" he gestured to the developers sitting in the front row "but we're not really fighting, we are struggling" The project team smiled knowingly at each other. "This is what I call the responsibility of the architect... No one can be so arrogant as to know exactly what to do in this job, you must struggle." He broke off to look at a large printed render mounted on card "This is the problem with scale and proportion. Many people know how to make these horrible renders, that always lie! They can make perfect models, but if they are not careful they will end up with buildings that are just large models."

He closed with a metaphor: "Being an architect is like conquering the wild west. First you must get a caravan, and then there is a big river, and then the horse gets tired, and then you are attacked by Indians... And then you make it there in the end. And you think, sometimes those Indians look bad, but they're really good guys." The audience sat bemuzed, thoroughly puzzled by this last remark.

[in]decisive

2010-05-23T10:58:00.004+01:00

When Millennium People becomes a collective (around its first birthday in July) it may or may not adopt the title of Think Tank. In order to justify such a term MP has to start having an influence. Here's a suggestion: no one should use square and round brackets to name projects anymore. That era is over.

The practise of hid[in]g words within words began sometime around the beginning of last decade, popularised perhaps by the increasing use of code (in particular Java and Python) to script architectural forms. For those of you unfamiliar with this as a design tool, the idea is basically to write a small computer programme that defines certain parameters (this might be about the shape, or the limits or the function) of a particular element (say, a facade). You then use this little programme (a script) to generate your architectural solution, or a million architectural solutions. I can only imagine that it was the syntax of these scripts, which often involve defining commands through (round) or [square] brackets that led teachers and students to apply it to their design titles.

For example, the 2005 student book produced by UNSW's Faculty of the Built Environment (located within a bright terracotta building) was "Re[a]d Centre". You see what they did there? This is banal, but fairly innocuous. Versions that really irritate me tend to suggest another meaning through the inclusion of the brackets: "[Re]thinking Architecture", "[De]sign ", "Mor[e]ph", "Tran[s]tasis", and so on. This format ranks up there in the idiocy charts with unneccessary triple slashes /// and NASA's weird acronyms ('CUM BLOW' = cumulative booster lift-off weight).

Back to the [], the problem stems from the basic indecision of this naming. Rather than making me think the authors are innovative or cutting-edge, it just makes me think they can't make up their minds. You are either reading architecture or you're re-reading it. You can't do both simultaneously.

Remember your first e-mail address? If you're like me it was probably something ridiculous like 'self_inspired' or 'groovy_gurl350'. The novelty of the e-mail address made this kind of acceptable. It was a pseudonym and never meant to be associated directly with the user. The Internet was a place of anonymity back then. Nowadays the trend has generally been away from yahoo and hotmail towards gmail, with straightforward and serious formatting: name.surname@gmail.com. The same is true of this naming technique. We're a bit more grown up now, and it's time to move away from these childish appellations.

P[ass] it on.

the end of the world

2010-05-18T15:10:00.004+01:00

Just a quick notification: the Architecture Association's Intermediate Seven unit, run by Kate Davies and Liam Young, and titled 'The end of the world, and other bedtime stories' has just released its first publication for this academic year (a second is forthcoming). It's not expensive and is available from the AA Bookstore. If you want to keep your fingers on the pulse, this is one to watch. Also good for aspiring anarchists, the millennial avant-garde, and anyone looking to buy a gift for the man that has it all...

This year the unit went to Iceland to study the end of the world. If you missed Millennium People's coverage, it was intense and ace.

fistful of links

2010-05-18T08:30:00.001+01:00

Latitude of Silence by You LI.

Sixpence an adventure and he'll take you home again: some news.

Every week I wrap up the world on the web, this week it's the web in the world that has got me in a tizzy.

Some ideas about surfing is a new zine by the young artist Joel Colover (available here as a pdf download) exploring the act of web-browsing as a type of Situationist derive – or passive drift. It is a nice return to the 90's zine aesthetic, featuring bold text and xeroxed sketches.

"Tab based browsing is surfing different waves at the same time. All the time. On the Internet we surf the currents left by other users. Old lost content and new data supply us with the momentum we need... The Internet is not a world, it is a city the size of a universe. It can be split into different quarters, not just based on content, but also on presentation, design, architecture of the pages. This is what the invisible walls are made of."

+++++

The Facebook/privacy debate continues. I can't say I'm too happy about Google's monopoly of the Web, especially when it turns out they were using Street View to capture information from people's wireless networks. That said, they are still miles better than Facebook – the "obnoxious drunk girl at the party/Internet". Related, the US still using a mercenary spy ring. Related, Cold War Paranoia. Maybe related, computers have replaced all your friends. The original lightweight portable telephone: $1499. (Wow, old technology is so attractively crap).

Left: Eventual Ghost. Net neutrality looks like its going to be a thing of the past real quick; Also things of the past: "Future Days" a book by Asimov describing turn of the twentieth century visions for the future. I actually own this book, it is a pleasure. Also books: OMA are exhibiting all of their books at the AA. Hear what the Sesquipedalist has to say about it. Also OMA: old Coney Island postcards.

Inevitable ending, when print meets the net: the 48hr magazine project. Same subject: the magazine of tomorrow (developed by Millennial Wunderkinds Berg London). If you don't know Berg, like, really, do yourself a favour and check that shit pronto: touch, here and there, olinda, the schooloscope (to mention just a few of their amazing projects); The Internet approaches its address limit. I think we should start erasing the weak and old websites to make more space. Controversial. What Google fears most; the continuity of inter-connecting relationships; cloud computing goes mainstream (WATCH OUT FOR THIS ONE). Our one hope for the future of the web (not to be over-dramatic): the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative. This is the opposite of the Patriot Act of the Internet: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Does anyone else feel like the present stumbled into Blade Runner? On a lighter note, the real is now irrelevant: Banksy returns in digital form. A tip off for MP: Geocitiesizer, make any website look like it was designed by a 13yo in 1996.

Dross: I love unhappy hipsters; big babies at the Shanghai expo; Universal Corrective World Map; Britain is being run by a coalition, in case you didn't hear. It's like the Uk has got two gay dads – Conservative/Liberal Democrat agreement; some of the world's oldest colour photos; 40 mind-blowing hubble pics; dope NASA images; oh, and I remember where all the fistfuls are to be found thanks to Instapaper.

Finally,

A day at Walmart, via Club Construct.

Christianese via Sociological Images.

screens

2010-05-14T08:30:00.003+01:00

By the time you read this, I will already be on my bike. Ah, automatic scheduling.

Just a quick (hopefully not too banal) observation on the development of the computer screen: I have often had teachers and employers (admittedly less with every passing year) that have had trouble 'reading' screens. Print that shit out, they say. And I say, fine, it's your time and money. As long as that is the case, otherwise I kick up a stink.

I've always maintained that the reason these people have been unable to read computer screens ("Jesus, Jack, stop whirling around for a minute and just stay still!") is because they are misunderstanding the purpose of the screen. A cinema or even a photograph is just a flat surface onto which an image has been projected. It remains clearly limited by the frame, we are not supposed to think there is anything outside it. Indeed, the joy of cinema can only come when one forgets the intense action that surrounds every minute action.

Not so with the map. When we look in an A-Z we are looking at some enormous, perfect, map of the entire world. It happens to be arbitrarily cut up into frames, through which we look at a portion. With the map there is a space beyond that of the edges, a map-reality we can peer into. The computer screen operates the same way, as a membrane separating us from some other, virtual, reality. My generation sees the membrane as wholly arbitrary because we believe in the reality of the image within. In other words, we believe it has space.

The confusion of reading a membrane like a flat surface means the image appears inconsistent, blurry and dizzying. Every moment it composes itself it changes again. So when Gramps struggles with your flash Japanese DS game, riddle it out to him in these terms.

+++++

This is just a paraphrased version of an opening paragraph to a veerry long piece I'm working on at the moment about the meaning of the architectural render. Watch this space. At least the movie is pretty cool, no?

strangers on the web

2010-05-12T14:43:00.001+01:00

A tip-off sent into MP, originally from I-Am-Bored.

gallery-as-internet

2010-05-12T12:46:00.004+01:00

Last night I spoke at the Whitechapel for Love Art London on the subject of Robbrecht+Daem's Whitechapel Gallery extension and renovation. Perhaps the only downside was the fact that I delivered my bit, then had to repeat it twice more over a three hour period. During the second iteration a piece of sonic sculpture started singing next to me, and just before the third an old architect came and asked me some really intense questions, which threw/bored me. Unlike wine, but very much like humous, the subject did not improve with ageing. Here is the kernel of what I said:

There is almost perpetual conflict between the artist and the architect, though most of this can be put down to envy on the part of the architect. Never is this more true than when the architect is commissioned to design an art gallery. The temptation for the architect is to simply construct such a fantastic piece of sculpture than the building itself becomes art, and everything within it becomes somehow secondary to its housing. I'm thinking of Bilbao.

If the opportunity to really get in there and make a statement is non-existent, then the architect will prefer to design an art museum rather than a gallery. The contents of a museum are depoliticised, making the art safe for public consumption – and certainly no threat to the architecture. There is a feeble excuse sometimes given: since the word museum pertains to the muses, and therefore art is the product of divine inspiration, the proper place for art is in a temple. Hence the fact that most art galleries built up until the end of the 19th century were Neo-Classical, with steps running up to a large plinth and imposing collonnade. I'm thinking of the British Museum, the Tate, etc. While quite formal, at least everyone knew their place. The destruction of formal distinctions between art and architecture is what leads to the collapse of one onto the other. I'm thinking of Anish Kapoor's monstrosity for the London Olympics.

The Whitechapel is a heritage listed building. So is/was the adjacent 'Whitechapel Free and Public Library' which was bought by the gallery in 2001, with a view to expanding the relatively small exhibition space. Because the whole structure sits on top of Aldgate East tube, there wasn't that much room for architectural intervention. What remained for Robbrecht and Daem was principally a question of circulation.

The firm compared their proposal to a type of Art Internet: rather than the traditional sequence of lineally organised galleries, with coherently collated art, here the viewer can choose their own trajectory (backtracking, sidestepping and allowing intuition to guide them from one room to the next). Boredom was a big factor, the idea that someone could just pop in, have a coffee, do a quick swing into one, but not necessarily all, rooms and then whip out again.

I was pretty horrified by the analogy. If the Whitechapel acts, or is supposed to act, like the Internet – why on earth would I go it? If we look to print media, the newspapers and publications that are surviving and thriving (the Guardian, for example) are doing so by providing good critique, not simply news (which is omnipresent). If the art gallery fails to add anything to the experience a user might otherwise have clicking through their site, what is the difference? Why not virtualise the institution? I have to say I've been a couple of times since the Whitechapel reopened and I've found it each time pretty tame, maybe digitisation is the answer, an easier way to radicalise the art experience?

fistful of links

2010-05-10T08:30:00.004+01:00

Top: the oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, shortly before it sunk. Bottom: visualisation showing the resuming of air traffic across Europe in the wake of the Volcano. Airspace Rebooted (related: Flightradar24 where you can see all flights in Europe in real-time).

When it rains it pours: some news.

What seems to be going on in the world? Volcanoes, oil spills, the economic bankruptcy of most of Europe, and now Britain has a hung parliament. It's like we're copping it from all angles (which is exactly what she said). Luckily the Royal Guards are still able to instil some sense of normality. Oh, wait, they're busy marching in Red Square to celebrate conquest of the Nazis...

Related, as a kind of cultural exchange programme: Lenin in London. Same theme: Verso's Marxism conference. It's coming back into fashion again, that old Marxism. Yes sir, Marx my words, it has yet to make its full Marx. Dad jokes. Of course, the popular conception that ex-KGB lurk around every Moscow street corner couldn't be farther from the truth. Possibly related, Orwell on the principles of Newspeak. Back to London, but on a sombre note: Ghost Bikes. I've seen two people die as a result of bike accidents since I arrived in London a year ago, and I see a new ghost bike every few weeks. If you cycle in the city, do take care. Last thing on the capital: "London's Poor now no different from slaves"...

Let's hop on over to the oil rig shindig: a professional engineer in the field explains how monumentally fucked up all that shit is, in a no doubt hastily named article: mother of all gushers. Related, workers describe the methane explosion. Apocalyptic scenario? Who knows. But I'll invoke the imagery of the sky before Katrina as a visual metaphor for the global condition. A political metaphor might be Kanellos, the Greek protest dog.

Let's keep it a bit positive shall we? I'm not bothered by the oil escaping, since we've now got a petrol producing bug. When you factor in declining fuel reserves and Icelandic tectonic activity (not to mention the fact that vacationing is now a human right, according to the UN) then it seems like the future in travel is airships. Ace. Here's MPs proposal.

To technology: the first ever non-latin web addresses have gone live (although it still displays in most browsers as a bunch of x--n, wgbii, characters). The reasoning behind creating non-english URLs was that otherwise the Internet was likely to split into multiple Internets (can you even imagine multiple Internets?), although I would have thought that it makes the web less unified, not more. A convincing ipad rival has been released, which of course now justifies the ipad's right to existence. Nice one, idiots. That said, what if I had bought apple stock instead of an apple product? Still Mac, Steve Jobs' thoughts on flash. My own: phase out that shit - I gots one acronym, one number for you buddy: HTML 5. It can do everything flash can do, and it's native to the browser. Sorry Adobe, but I still love your Creative Suite. Related, obsolete technology.

Few kickshaws for you: a cream designed to grow long lashes can permanently change eye colour (Brooke Shields is the product's figureface); DAYTUM, in case you didn't already have enough information about yourself. Comes from Nicholas Feltron, whose Annual Reports always cause such a stir; BLDGBLOG's theatre for one; radioactive toothpaste; 4,000 year old lentils grown from seeds; National Geographic got a Tumblr; BIG's Shanghai Pavilion (also check out Heatherwick's). Still China: the fantastically multifunctional Chinese army shovel. Those guys, what will they think of next?

They can't tell us though, Millennium People is blocked in China.

Finally,

"deaths"

2010-05-08T14:49:00.000+01:00

Via the magnificent Flowing Data.

one new change

2010-05-01T18:14:00.003+01:00

As I mentioned some time ago, I arrived in London in February 2009 expecting to work on Jean Nouvel's One New Change project. For reasons that are still too emotional to go into in any depth, I was not employed. It grieves me further that in spite of the absence of my creative input the building is nonetheless approaching completion. My only consolation is that the glass is pretty ugly (more here on Flickr).

The building caused quite a lot of controversy when the valiant Prince of Darkness decided he didn't like it and was going to have it canned. This was shortly after his fiddling with the Rogers re-development over at Chelsea Barracks. Those same Qatari developers have their fingers in every pie and they are also responsible for the Renzo Piano monstrosity currently under construction near London Bridge. The core alone is the width of a 20 storey building.

Dark times lie on the horizon for London (literally, as the massive structure will be able to cast a shadow over all of Borough Market).

Shard (right) under construction.

hermitage mooring

2010-04-29T08:30:00.001+01:00

The Hermitage Mooring development is a beautifully executed architectural project. But it is also a proposition for the re-evaluation of the metropolitan citizen’s relationship to landscape. Perhaps most of all, it is a bold political statement – the result of a very personal struggle by its founders to demonstrate the possibility of individual will against established authority.

Located just below Tower Bridge, and completed less than a year ago, the development consists of twenty moorings (primarily for historic boats) attached to an elegant central pontoon that houses the community room and other common amenities. The whole structure is then connected back to the Wapping shoreline by an articulated walkway.

‘Coming home at night’ Anna, the project architect, told me ‘I sometimes feel like I am stepping into a void landscape, neither urban nor rural.’ I met Anna and her partner David several weeks ago outside Bar Italia in Soho, where they were wrapping up the celebrations for their 17th anniversary. We got talking over an article on the new American Embassy at Nine Elms, and sooner or later the fact that I studied architecture came up.

Now I sat on the foredeck of their converted barge sipping coffee and talking to Anna. ‘It is a tight-knit community,’ she said, adding quickly, ‘but it is not a gated community. The goal was never to build a second Chelsea.’ Behind her the river stretched away, past the Tower of London, Monument and St.Paul’s until it became confused with the urban fabric at Cannon Street. ‘The mooring is run as a co-operative society – when a new member moves in they “loan” a sum of money to the co-op, and if they decide to leave that sum (plus inflation) is returned to them.’ The elimination of profit is a core foundation of the project. ‘We could have made millions if we had made it all residential, but it’s not about material gain…’ Anna paused. ‘You mentioned the spirit of the times, well I think that people are beginning to realise again that a devotion to money is ultimately unfulfilling.’ It is no doubt a perennial realisation, perhaps precipitated by the obvious absurdity of our economic systems.

‘It is a community for the people living here, but also for Wapping, London, and the world.’ In one of the guest berths a Canadian South-African man was taking a small Chinese junk on a world trip, accompanied by Hannah the Swedish Australian. The mooring has received delegates from Estonia, and attracted interest from Japan (where I understand floating communities are quite popular).

Anna and David have been living on the water since ’97, first Regent’s Canal and then in Southwark near St. Sabier’s dock (the alleged location of Fagan’s den of pickpockets). I just realised that their son Finn (proud owner of an African Millipede) must have grown up his entire life on a barge. I can hardly imagine his perspective on the city, driven to school each morning by speedboat.

The idea for a social democracy on the Thames was the product of dinner party banter. I expressed some surprise at this – my intricate plans and elaborate schemes conceived at table are almost always exposed as pipedreams in the grey light of the morning after. ‘This was a group of people who made things happen’ Anna told me. As evidence of this fact, another time they had speculated about a cinema-barge. So was born the London Floating Film Festival.

When faced with an unjust eviction from their previous moorings the group began to talk to the owner of an old commercial pier near St Saviours Dock. The aging waterman was quite enthusiastic about the project. He had been disillusioned for some time with the Port of London Authority’s attitude towards the river, and upset by the disrespect shown by the likes of the clipper service. ‘You used to be able to cross the London Pool by walking across the barges. But nowadays the history of the watermen is being forgotten...’ [This is the subject of a new film released last Friday at the East End Film Festival entitled “Rime of the modern mariner”].

This was five years ago, and it has been a long and arduous battle for that group to realise the project. A clumsy block of luxury apartments borders the river at that point and several of the residents found it impossible that such a radical community could exist. They made fantastical claims, that it would become overrun by “water-gypsies” who would cook their meals on open fires and hang out their washing in the park. A classic example of too much Dickens in the upper bourgeoisie. Certainly the story of Knut would be more appropriate – they should know that not even kings can stop the changing of the tides. Now even the PLA occasionally moor there.

The near seven metre tidal variation on the Thames produces great changes in the relationship of the pontoon to the bank. At high water it seems practically an extension of the adjacent park, a delicate urban finger testing the waters of this newfound landscape. At low water the effect is quite different, two storeys of brick wall are exposed, practically hiding the jumble of flat-bottomed boats. Every hour brings with it a new relationship to the city.

Anna shows me round the central pontoon. On it is a long building containing a community room, porch, and an amenities block with kitchen and office. Behind one door is a half-finished birch panelled room. ‘This is one of my favourite spaces’ she gestures to the block of sun coming through the high skylight ‘when we get a bit more money it will be the sauna.’ It is here that the skill of the architect becomes most apparent. For what is a very simple building the control and quality of the detailing is astoundingly high. The spaces are often hired out for functions, dinners, art installations & film screenings. All the profit goes to the co-op, which is also a charity dedicated to promoting the history of the Thames. It is not uncommon for groups of schoolchildren to tour the historic boats.

At one point David said ‘the project is really about self-determinism. It’s a very political project.’ The poor remain oppressed by authority because of their lack of education. As Adorno puts it, they remain oppressed precisely because they are unaware of their own oppression. It is only with that knowledge that the possibility of individuality becomes possible. With comparatively little money this small group have challenged, in all senses, orthodox views on the role of the river in city. Further, they have challenged what they believe to be the kernel of urban living: the complete concentration on self. ‘The city citizen is concerned only with the individual and never the other. Being part of a co-op changes that – you become an agent, in a very literal sense, for the other. And rather than losing your individuality you grow in yourself, while being a representative of a collective.’ Anna is a very frank woman, and one gets the impression from her stories that she spent a large portion of her life avoiding conflict. Just before I left she said proudly ‘I used to be very unaware of what it was we were doing, but I really feel we have accomplished something here.’

Find out more about them on their site: http://www.hcmoorings.org/

See more images on MP's Flickr.

comestible catastrophes

2010-04-25T08:30:00.004+01:00

Images via Yofavo

After getting a tan yesterday I awake to find the world capped under tupperware. And the rain comes down. London in spring I suppose: some Sunday ruminations...

A few months ago Geoff Manaugh (BLDG BLOG) tweeted about a 1919 disaster, the "Boston Molassacre". A large molasses storage tank burst, and a wave of treacle roared through the streets (apparently at over 50km/h) killing 21 and injuring 150. Wiki notes: "The event has entered local folklore, and residents claim that on hot summer days, the area still smells of molasses."

This put me on to the London Beer Flood of 1814. The whole strange tale begins with a party organised by Meux's Brewery (owned by the first Baronet Sir Meux, whose name is inexplicably pronounced 'myooks'), located on the junction between Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. The occasion was a grand dinner to celebrate the construction of a giant vat capable of holding 600,000 litres of the popular beer stout porter (now known simply as stout). It was allegedly two storeys high and had a diameter of 20 yards. 200 hundred people dined within it.

Subsequently it was filled to capacity and the full pressure of the porter put upon its 29 iron hoops. Shortly after a workman noticed a small crack in one of the hoops, but seeing as they each weighed more than 200kg, he thought nothing of it. At around 6pm the same day the vat burst, creating an explosion reportedly heard five miles away. The immense pressure from the first vat toppled the second, the weight of which fell through to the floor below. A chain reaction ensued, 1.4 million litres of beer tore through the building's facade.

At that time Tottenham Court Road was the boundary of the St. Giles Rookery, and the building was surrounded by low housing of a poor construction. Several of the buildings could not stand the force of the wall of porter and collapsed. Eight people are recorded to have died, drowning in basements, crushed by debris or subsequent alcohol poisoning.

Rescue efforts were greatly slowed by the drunken masses scooping the beer directly from the cobbles. An apocryphal story has it that as beer-soaked victims were rushed to hospital the smell of beer led patients on other wards to believe beer was being served for all patients except them. Not accepting this apparent injustice they started a riot, which increased the number of wounded.

After an investigation the courts ruled that the event had been an act of God, and that no one was responsible. The beer company continued on that site until the 20's when it was demolished and the Dominion Theatre constructed in its place. I would frankly quite like to see a tsunami of beer crush the home of the Queen Musical.

cheer up (and get on with it), it’s archigram!

2010-04-22T09:38:00.008+01:00

Peter Cook, taken by Matt Jones (of Berg London) at that recent Westminster Archigram shindig.

While I was drinking downstairs Matt got right at the action (definitely check out what he has to say about the legacy of archigram).

sign of the times

2010-04-20T21:33:00.000+01:00

Two things are coming back: poster design + 80's graphics. Spread the word.

fistful of links

2010-04-20T13:02:00.003+01:00

Beach near Trouville, 1865 by Gustave Courbet (via the humm of mystery)

Let me make this quick: some news.

Following up on the Archigram vibe: Cedric Price's Fun Palace at the CAA; Millennium People did a post on the project some time back, linking it with a Barbican exhibit and a pamphlet on forgotten spaces in the Lea Valley. Also architecture: the new Rennie Mackintosh site; a James Bond villain pool in your house (plus its eco-friendly). Still design, for all of you trapped in Milan + the helpful "so you need a typeface" infographic.

NY is all wringing their hands over a doorman strike? Man, we've got volcanoes in Europe, grow some. More evidence of weird stuff going on across the pond: teabaggers get preferential treatment from the police. In case you don't know who these nutjobs are, have a look here, here and here. For those of you a bit out of the loop, you might want to have a look at the other meaning of teabagging (urban dictionary, NSFW). Yep, its an unfortunate name for a political movement.

Still America, "boy stabs mom to stop her drink-driving"; the history of concealed weapons laws (over at Sociological Images). But seriously, The States are not that bad, viz: LA and NY at night; the destruction of Texas Stadium (must see); Lebbeus on the London 8... (related: an archigram-like pavilion for the park). We only needed a re-think of the American Dream.

Enough of them wide open lands. Closer to home, the girl shot in the chicken shop on the corner of Falkirk and Hoxton street has now died. What a pointless crime.

Apes found to suffer self-doubt; also animal, the Scottish Highland Tiger; a city of animals: the Illustrated London News goes digital; related, "Embrace the Endless City" (Owen Hatherley); not related, twin lens pencil sharpener; Venn diagrams about Venn diagrams; amazing images of icebergs. Some blogs out there: Landscape Suicide; circumnavigating a game world in 8 hours; Spillway on a low tunnel entry that catches at least one truck a week; the Shanghai Expo (Heatherwick's is dope); XYM, a temporary archive of artistic work and writing.

Finally (I had wanted to make this a short one), how to translate Cockney (requires knowledge of Jamaican patois):

archigram archives

2010-04-20T11:33:00.004+01:00

If you want to talk about being on the pulse, then this has to take the cake: within three hours of the site-launch, Max Rosin-Melser (MP Australia) sent me an e-mail asking if I had seen Westminster's Archigram Archive project. Perhaps being in completely the wrong time zone put him ahead of the wave, but he even beat BLDG BLOG (who detail the contents and importance of the Archive more thoroughly than I intend to).

He also beat the official launch party, which I went to last night (lots of sweet prosecco = headache). All the team were there, with a hook-up to Web and Crompton in NY (something about volcanoes) + London's archi cool dudes. And to my great surprise I also saw an old lecturer of mine, the architectural theorist and historian Charles Rice (of UTS renown, although I know him from the end of his UNSW stint). Small world.

prometheus unbound

2010-04-18T20:30:00.004+01:00

Ragnar Th. Sigurdsson in Iceland (via) - compare with my own shot (from last December)

Above me the full glory of the Northern Lights was spread across the night sky, a magnificent slow-moving dance of green haze. “I think this is a life-changing phenomenon,” I said. “It’s the tipping point in my understanding. When I moved from Australia to Europe I had to accustom myself to a completely unfamiliar sky, strange new patterns of celestial and solar arrangements, but it is only now, now! Here! That I really comprehend the full significance of what it means to stand on the surface of a spherical body moving through space!” There was an uncomfortable pause, then Borja looked up from adjusting his tripod “Man, it just looks like a slow Mac screensaver.”

And he was right. It was maybe even less impressive than a Mac screensaver. But I learnt something in Iceland, amidst the violent geysers and tectonic rifts, and that was that our planet is completely indifferent to us.

It may seem naïve, to say the least, but if you really look into the mentality behind the world’s response to the volcano you find… indignation. It is, however, indignation without object, since no one is actually to blame. American news invariably takes the ‘authorities failing to act’ + ‘massive financial losses’ double spin, while the BBC is perhaps a little more stoic about it all.

I was under the impression, living in a large city, that nature had been vanquished some time ago – living on only in massive agricultural complexes, or at the motorway verge. We conquered the world, and now we find it irreverent to our trans-Atlantic and European air transport, and all the brouhaha that ensues. This is frankly pretty irritating, made worse by our complete lack of control in the situation.

If you are one of the many trapped by the volcano (not literally) my only words of solace would be to remember that whatever dubious evidence remains for a god indicates clearly that it is not a personal or loving deity, but a watchmaker who left to go down the pub ages ago. The best you can do in the face of such divine indifference is to brave it with as much stoicism as possible.

Or you can follow me and the demiurge to the Black Dog, which is where I’m off now: get with the times Peeps.

the sun

2010-04-18T08:30:00.001+01:00

No fistful of links this week (not for lack of links, but lack of man-hours).

Please accept, as MP's apology, this video of the sun (original link here). It comes from part of a series of three by Nasa's First Light project, showing some pretty awesome solar activity.

carbon

2010-04-16T17:30:00.003+01:00

Via information is beautiful.

In case you missed Millennium People's trip to Iceland last December and you want the inside story on the nation:

Iceland #1: images of this beautiful and violent landscape
Iceland #2: power (geothermal and
Iceland #3: growth (agriculture under sodium lamps)
Iceland #4: fishing (trip to the arctic circle)

master of all i survey

2010-04-15T17:15:00.003+01:00

Shanghai, by Harry Kaufman

After the jump is a response to Mark Cousins' recent lecture series entitled 'the neighbour'...

“All knowledge of relations connecting or opposing beings to one another implies an understanding of the fact that these beings and relations exist… Every relation with a particular being assumes an intimacy with, or forgetting of, being. Moreover, how can the relation to a being be anything initially but the understanding of it as a being– the fact of freely letting it be as a being? To relate to beings as beings means to let beings be, to understand them as independent of the perception that discovers and grasps them.”
Emmanuel Levinas.

In French there are two terms that might be used to translate the English neighbour: le prochain (used interchangeably with the Italian prossimo) and le voisin. While the former was the subject of Mark Cousins’ recent lecture series, I want to develop an argument pertaining to the latter.

Prochain means ‘the next’ or ‘the near’, and is a description of physical relations between subjects. Voisin might initially be easily confused with prochain, since its Latin origin (vicinus) refers to ‘a collection of buildings that is found around a given point’. The temptation is to therefore classify voisin as a spatial relation, like prochain, between an individual and their vicinity.
But in only describing physical relationships, the prochain leaves open the question of the origins of those subjects. The employment of voisin, on the other hand, proposes an entire cosmogonic model, including the metaphysical assertion that there is a world in existence and it is capable of being known.

The justification of voisin as a statement of global apprehension would seem to rely on a common root with voir (to see). However voir stems from videre, not from vicinus. It is only in their shared Proto-Indo-European root vit (also wit and weyd) that the similarity becomes clear. Accordingly, savoir is not only to have knowledge of something, it is to recognise (acknowledge) it by sight. A single word that summarises well the connection between ‘to see’, to know’ and ‘to be present’ is the English descendent of vit: witness.

That this meaning of ‘seeing’ or ‘knowing’ is retained in voisin is demonstrated by Montaigne’s employment of voisin as “ce qui présente un trait de ressemblance, un caractère d'analogie” [he who presents a trait of resemblance, an analogous characteristic]. In other words, the neighbour is someone who is seen, known, and recognised and not simply in physical proximity.

This rather long explanation of why voisin means ‘he who I see, who I know’ and not only ‘he who is next to me’ is a preamble to introducing the neighbour as manifestation of the other. It should be pointed out that the presence of architecture in our assessment of the neighbour is purely coincidental. When describing either the ‘vicinity’ or the ‘proximity’ our own dwelling is not excluded. We do not partition our own property from the property of our neighbour otherwise we would have no way to indicate territory of an ambiguous or collective nature (for example, common amenities or the public realm). When we employ these terms we are describing a limited field that we have knowledge of, irrespective of the ownership of the objects and subjects within it.

Lacan writes on the development of babies during the Mirror Stage. He notes that at the moment of self-recognition the infant, far from exhausting its interest in its own image, engages in an exchange of movement designed to possess its image. Even before the formation of the linguistic ego the ultimate will of the self is to control everything within sight. Lacan goes on to argue that our fundamental frustration with the world is that, put simply, “it doesn’t do what I want it to do”.

When Levinas’ explains our response to confrontation with another being he calls it ‘the intimacy or forgetting of being’. Foremost, he says, is the necessity for us to freely allow the other to be, ‘as independent of the perception that discovers and grasps them’.

For the anonymous metropolitan this condition becomes almost impossible. His neighbour is the being that is near him, seen by him, but not controlled by him. Finding himself in the position of constant confrontation with others, even the decision to ignore the neighbour is a type of acknowledgement. If by accident he meets his neighbour’s eyes he becomes morally obliged to them, their sameness infringes his individuality and their otherness only reminds him of his fundamental struggle with an uncontrollable world. In short, for the metropolitan citizen the neighbour is the single greatest source of metaphysical stress.

The inescapability of what might be termed the metropolitan other arouses within the citizen a desire for solitude. As Heidegger puts it: “The quiet heart of the clearing is the place of stillness from which alone the possibility of the belonging together of Being and thinking, that is, presence and apprehending, can arise at all.”

The drive towards isolation from our urban neighbour is founded in ontological and egotistic thoughts: I must be the master of all I survey.

fistful of links

2010-04-15T08:30:00.002+01:00

Lake Reflection by C.D. Sessums

Millennium People, I'm talking to you. This is how we make it happen: some news.

Several months ago I wrote about Iceland (saga style) after a trip there. At the national soil institute I remember staring at a massive volcano on the horizon and asking if it was dormant. "Far from it" the friendly scientist had replied "its long overdue for a really impressive explosion!"

That has happened.

Signs of the times: You can now direct an ad campaign from your desktop with Google TV ads – makes sense really. TV killed the radio, and now TV itself is being killed by the Internet. But does Google have too many moving parts? Cuba starts down the slippery slope to capitalism... Pulitzer won by online journalism - final proof (no pun) that print is no longer relevant in a digital world. Quite sad really. Yes indeed, the future is coming at us thick and fast (that's what she said); related, something that's done the rounds several times, from waaay back in 1995, we discover why the Internet will fail.

"Polar Night", by Gronsky.

Signs you're behind the times: 3 years ago some friends in Sydney asked me if I wanted to come to Earth Hour. I said no, it would never take off.The Vatican tries to justify linking paedophilia with homosexuality. Idiots. That's like saying a beard is the same thing as a scarf. Beard scarf. Catholic related, three-person IVF: its like there's a party in my egg and everyone's invited. Parent related, sob story / what constitutes a mother?

source unknown

Lightning makes mushrooms grow, apparently. Also the case in East London. Unrelated, what's going on inside your body? Eventual Ghost tells rock stars to pull their goddamn heads in. Related, inside the biggest fact-checking conference in the world; (Where else but Germany?); Its lonely in the modern world: Unhappy Hipsters. Very similar, but serious: ArchNow (a new one of those daily architecture sites); Street View time-lapse: an inevitable project; Project Daedalus (sci-fi art, kind of); Kodak Moments: image library of the last several decades (in colour). Related, Nevada Test Site Oral History; Early digital art; cheating is hurting China's reputation; Amazing images of old New York; also NY: Easter shootings in Times Square.

Finally, in the words of a great man: "let's add a layer of awesomeness!"

PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN.
Uploaded by onemoreprod. - Watch original web videos.

2010-04-10T15:09:00.004+01:00

fistful of links

2010-03-30T08:30:00.000+01:00

Image by Andrew Moore, via the Cosmo-Inspiro Cloud.

Shuffle over and let me drive for a moment: some news.

The internet is a crazy place: a site called "God hates fags" offers the following wisdom: "There are multiple levels of Gay Music. Some bands are what we like to call Gateway Bands. They lure children in with Pop Grooves and Salacious Melodies leaving them wanting more. They’ll move on to more dangerous bands and the next thing you know you’ve got a homosexual for a child." Totally makes sense. Gateway Singer Ricky Martin comes out. Not gay: science; Cern finally gets their shit on; the opposite of gay: the giant sperm race.

Golden Gate, via BLDGBLOG.

Moving on: Liam Young, (Tomorrow's Thoughts Today) just got back from the future (aka South by Southwest). Turns out they treat bloggers a bit differently over there (like, check that shit!); Also tech: a rare article in praise of the iPad; how to recycle a jumbo-jet; mood-pencils; town battered by raining fish; Isn't it wonderful to think that at some point in time this actually happened? Yeah. I guess. Honda concept; use spades, not ships; the banksy/robbo war continues... Leo DiCaprio (he'll always be Jack to me) does the VO on Imax's new 3D Hubble film. How to name your futuristic theory...

In architecture, SANAA has won the Pritzker... (notwithstanding mediocre projects like the Serpentine or New Museum); Sell outs, if you ask me, I can't tell the difference between Art & Art Snacks. Related: "NY, just as I pixeled it". Also, 26 Gigapixel Paris. Lego House; Solar Furnace.

Finally, several awesome films:

1.Flying pants, via WTF Japan, Seriously:

2.The best ending to Judge Judy ever (via csessums)...

3.And last, but not least: an Academy Award-winning trailer [catchphrase!]:

Peace and Love Millennium Peeps.

the origins of my short attention span

2010-03-29T09:05:00.004+01:00

I got my tea from the bar and shuffled over to the sofa near the window "Oh yeah, I remember Messenger" Bella said, in answer to my question "the thing I really hated about it was how everyone tried to talk to you at once. I could only have one conversation at a time, so I would block all the other contacts I wasn't talking to."

That's funny, I thought. Isn't multiple and simultaneous conversation the whole purpose of using a chat program? It started a train of thought that lead me to one conclusion: the origins of my digital multitasking was Messenger. In the days when my net connection was still only 2kb/s the idea of browsing was an impossibility. In any case, I'm not sure there was anything much to browse. The net was for e-mail and chatrooms... you remember, like, before the peodos got there?

Not only can we no longer concentrate on one thing for any appreciable period of time, but we can neither concentrate on one person – by spreading our attention across multiple discussions we fail to achieve any depth of communication with any of them.

Millennium People out.

informal hiatus

2010-03-27T08:30:00.004Z

One of Armstrong + Millers' RAF pilot sketches. See also for real, yo.

Yeah, I took a three-week hiatus and I didn’t tell you. What are you, like, my mum or something? I don’t owe you anything. Now, back to the high-quality free content you’ve come to respect & expect:

The next three weeks are going to be mostly London oriented, with a few techie/future pieces thrown into the mix – I’m going to be talking to an architect and her partner about building communities on the Thames; telling you what’s on and what's what in town; describing what its like to walk the buried river Fleet; exploring some of the City’s hidden gems and forgotten spaces… I’ll be speculating about some emerging trends in the online world and I’m also expecting a state of the nation address from Eleanor Dodman – Millennium People’s new political editor. Yeah, look at us, a political editor, like we’re the fucking BBC or some shit.

As though this isn’t enough, I’ll be cramming in several juicy fistfuls, starting next Tuesday. Word on the street is that a brand new Millennium People is in beta (MP2.0) – should be fully up and running by summer. Part of that is recruiting regular contributors, if you'd like to tell us what you’re up to, or submit a guest post then drop a line to info@millenniumpeople.co.uk we’d love to hear from you.

Word.

baby with the bathwater

2010-03-05T08:30:00.006Z

Left vs. Right, via Information is Beautiful.

"I pity you politicians" a noted novelist remarked last night, turning to Boris Johnson – mayor of London. The response from the Question Time studio was an odd, humourless laughter. This audience, chosen as an indicative cross-section of the nation, were divided on many a subject, but on one thing they all agreed: the state of British politics is unsustainable. Like Psalms, politicians move from strength to strength – finding ever more ingenious ways to mud-sling and expose and scandalise. The QT yardstick of Britain (aka the Vox Populaire) seems to be growing tired of the complete lack of policy presented by anyone.

What Britain needs is an Obama (albeit perhaps one with a sharper tongue). Watch this space for more news on this apparent apogee of political discontent.

fistful of links

2010-03-02T08:30:00.001Z

Alone, by Mark Weaver.

How Millennial are you? Unsettlingly, Millennium People is only 89% New Millennium. We say 11% of the test is out of date. Still Millennium: The Long Now, Rosetta Disk and LongPlayer (the 1000 year long song). Not Millennium, 25 nostalgic images. Different Millennium, a line of burning torches lighting all of Hadrian's wall; a futuristic short film doing the rounds (weak plot, strong images).

Signs of the times: Information is a verb (photography and that); a timeline movie of the contruction of the International Space Station (ISS); when will Facebook get its Mario? Also, how much data Americans consume in a day; Twitter on your car radio (en francais); does web 3.0 exist yet? MP says no. The Memory Marathon.

Battle Popes, 2007 by Jamie Adams.

Class statement: how the web is creating a new wave of consumers. Related, the working class of the knowledge economy. Microsoft sucks. Look at who use it. The submerged ice lake forests of Russia, also water, the bike that filters your drinking water as you ride. Images of London in the 1960's - Images of London today (I really like this photostream) - what I'm really getting at is London, now and then; things got weird. Art: Ali Bosworth. The new US embassy is causing a stink; moving a whole town in Sweden; a post-secret variant + angry science letters from 3rd graders. Light photography using fireworks; an amazing Russian singer (via an old friend of MP).

Finally, the world's most generic news report:

redefining the landscape

2010-02-26T08:30:00.000Z

Chris 'Blane' Rowat from Parkour Generations.

Guest post by Shaelena Morley

Somewhere there is a toe tapping to music on the tube, a ballerina is practicing her port de bras, a child is testing gravity in an effort to jump the highest off the swing set. There is grace and fluidity to the simplest of movements. And in these movements a fascination takes root when we take that first step as infants and begin to understand our body in relation to the space around us.
With adjectives such as bustling and fast-paced, the city, like the body, can be described through movement. Listen closely and you can almost hear her thrum as her individual components move about in the daily grind. Ironically, with traffic and people and queuing, the individual components (that’d be us city-folk) are rarely moving freely so much as constantly bumping into one another in a sometimes maddening staccato rhythm. We’ve all this energy and nowhere to go, and somewhere along the way we lose that spatial connection with the city.

And yet the “we” I refer to doesn’t apply to all city dwellers. A community dedicated to movement has been developing slowly over the years and more recently is coming to the forefront and establishing itself as its own culture. What began as le methode naturelle in France at the turn of the 20th century, a kind of physical training emphasising both body and mind, has evolved into l’art du déplacement more commonly known as parkour. Where the spatial connection of the city is lost, in parkour it is found by providing a new vantage point for engaging with the urban environment. For a parkour practioner, known as traceurs, the name of the game is efficiency of movement and continual engagement with the present and its surroundings. In moving from point A to point B in the city, the traceurs knows no obstacle, only the straight line in plan, the undulating line in section. Leap over the wall, onto the next, under the rail and over the path only to land with cat-like precision on the rail’s edge and drop almost silently to the ground far below. L’art du déplacement is executed with astounding agility (and certainly with more grace than I can muster).

I recently had the privilege of witnessing the discipline in action when I attended a “jam” in Southwark hosted by Parkour Generations for research. What became immediately apparent to me was the fact that this is very much a community. The morning began as an outdoor training session teaching very particular skills, but as the day wore on little by little people trickled into the abandoned estate from all directions for what would turn into an afternoon jam. With varied skill levels and virtually every demographic you can imagine, parkour veterans and newcomers alike practiced their skills, learning from and teaching to each other despite frigid temperatures and calloused hands.

Physical intensity is inherent in parkour and the nimble movement receives well-deserved attention. More than once I’ve heard parkour referred to as, “the jumping guys.” But with physical tribulation there lies mental trial, brain the foil of brawn. It is the mental discipline – the preparation, the focus, and the incredible awareness of the body and its surroundings, which is most impressive and likely the bigger challenge. It is with complete awareness that the mind can redefine its surroundings and the body can run free. And what does London look like through this new set of eyes? Why, like a psychogeographic playground, my good Millennium People. Suddenly the scale of the city revolves around the scale of the body - the grip of the hand, the breadth of the foot; distances are measured in human strides. And in continual oscillation from earth to building to wall to earth again, London is flat no more. She is a new landscape.

Here’s to new freedoms.

shooting the messenger

2010-02-25T16:12:00.006Z

Lea Towers proposal, Stratford: Richard Rogers. Via SkyscraperCity

This short post owes much to a class discussion had this morning with Mark Cousins...

There is a temptation, when gazing up at the monstrosities of contemporary "post-architecture" (in the words of Sinclair), to let blame fall at the feet of the architect. Starting in earnest from perhaps the post-war period onwards, architects have been branded as cack-handed dreamers – belonging to a hopeless profession that is neither pragmatic nor artistic yet claims to be both. Their overpriced megalomanic schemes, fundamentally flawed at even the level of basic services and waterproofing, inflict upon every generation new social problems at ever-increasing scales. And yet it is rarely remarked that it is not architects that choose their site, their scale or their budgets.

Architects, and what is called architecture, is largely defined by the fulcrum of urban-planning and capitalist development. Neither of these forces is any less naive than the architect. Architecture's rise as a saleable commodity can be attributed, at least in part, to the transformation of the patron into the client. The patron, unlike the client, has no fiscal objectives in commissioning a project. In saying this I am perhaps extending my thoughts on Specular Architecture, which is both specular in a visual and iconic sense as well as being founded on financial speculation. Read: Zaha.

The scale of architecture responds to the scale of capital. And since a modern market economy demands constant growth, the scale can only increase. Larger and larger sites, larger and larger sums, larger and larger profits. I'm no apologist, but I think it is quite clear that architects, like any service profession, will rise to the expectations of whoever is footing the bill and giving the orders.

iain sinclair on nostalgia & forgetting

2010-02-23T22:26:00.008Z

Olympic Park Cranes – Hackney, by Sam Cadby.

“Architect’s are very interesting because they’re on the brink of obsolescence…”

So saying, Iain Sinclair – psychogeographer, author, and self-nominated figure for the perpetuation of East London’s history – grouped architects with similarly defunct notions like ‘the spirit of place’, industry, integrity, common sense, community, etc, etc, etc. In short, everything that was once good and noble and is now rotten to its core. Boo, hiss, down with the modern world.

While I think the man is right about architects (I will elaborate presently), I am suspicious of anyone who would dissimulate a wild nostalgia (in which he seems veritably marinated) as a “fear of forgetting”. Certainly there is a fine line between wishing to engage meaningfully with the past and simply invoking history as a means to bombast an audience about the piteous state of the present. For me, this really distinguishes him from the other great psychogeographical author of our time, Will Self. Unlike Sinclair, Self is no moral pedagogue…

Sinclair’s subject was East London, its history, its architecture – a rose-tinted people fighting the good fight against the idiot developers and villainous politicians. In black and white terms he outlined the clear superiority of the city “as a human entity, as an organic entity” over the “post-architecture” imposed on the East by the coming Olympic-scale fuck-up. While I found his tone vaguely self-righteous, I nonetheless found his content interesting and his arguments extremely convincing (in several cases indisputable).

Readers from outside of London may not be aware of the Olympic situation, in a nutshell: the site is a vast tract of ex heavy-industrial land falling between Stratford and Hackney Wick (think fairly far east), towards the lower end of the Lea Valley (a rambling and beautiful wildlife park composed of marshes and canals). As Sinclair noted, it has always been thought of as an ‘edge’ of London – and it is psychologically disturbing to now realise that Stratford’s development will turn the nature reserve into an island, besieged by an ocean of urban nightmare.

The site beforehand, subject of the pamphlet referred to in this post on Cedric Price, was littered with industrial ruins, leftovers from a time when London still manufactured on any appreciable scale. What I did not know is that over 12,000t of radioactive material has been retrieved and re-buried at the site (evidence of a business that made glow-in-the-dark watch dials during the 60’s).

Like all Olympic games there has been scandal: £40million of “missing” funds, cost (and corner) cutting measures abound– the UK is in full recession mode after all. And yet the ridiculous promise of the developers is that they are attempting to give back a park to the public realm. This debased simulation of the wild beauty that existed before is indicative of modern ‘regeneration’ methods (e.g. an artistic drinking-hole is demolished to make way for an art-themed hotel, as at Old Street).
It would be hard to overstate either the incompetence of the architects or the stupidity of the clients involved in this venture. I’m not even going to touch that sensitive subject in this post, but simply let history validate my words. Sinclair could not find words to describe the process by which the client approaches an architect in the same way they would a hairdresser or a plastic surgeon, saying, “yeah, I like it, but I want a bit more of a curve over here – hey presto!”

Two final points, I had intended to write a short post, but the subject really fires me up:

was recently told that a town hall in Stratford was demolished in order to make way for a Tesco’s supermarket. I am now shocked to discover from Sinclair that there is a plan to extend the site to include apartments – residential zoning as an appendage to commerce: the possibility of perpetually living inside a mall. What then, mused Sinclair, is to stop all of Hackney from becoming an inner suburb of a supermarket?

the architect, that figure in decline, no longer has any control over the built environment, then what is his domain? This observation is not at all unique to Sinclair, and it is obvious that the profession is approaching a critical turning point. I would argue what we have to salvage is an architectural mode of thinking, a way of looking laterally at problems (the solutions to which often do not include buildings). The role of this coming generation of architects is to convincingly establish their dominance as the only and supreme profession of holistic thinkers… or else face professional extinction.

fistful of links

2010-02-23T08:30:00.001Z

View From My Window, via olya.ivanova on Flickr.

A fine fingerful more like: some news.

Hydrogen cabs for London; the world's biggest dog. Beautiful drawings inspired by life in a Japanese-American interment camp (Roger Shimomura); Manhattan as the storm approaches... Bolus, a tumblr. Koolhaas, a houselife and a good review thereof; Awesome tapes from Africa (as it sounds); Territory of the Senses... the work of BERG London.

Like I said, a short one this week...

Finally, Sky via Philip Bloom on Vimeo:

fistful of links (20th)

2010-02-16T08:30:00.003Z

California on fire, via Flickr.

A soft roll of links into the gym mat that is our lives: some news.

That's how Fistful started, 20 editions ago (August 09), and it has become over time the bread and butter of MP – weekly hits are never so strong as on a Tuesday... There's a set format to the F-O-L in case you hadn't noticed: cool image: whack phrase: some news: some links: and finally, a badass video. Here are some leaders from the last 20 fistfuls:

A nice cup of tea and a sit down: some news; The locus of links that leads straight to our hearts: some news; Slicing it up and dishing it out – the 'net, just like yo'mama used to make: some news; The loose links in the ghetto gold that keeps us real: some news; An iron fistful of the weekist links: some news. And so on and so forth... Although sadly to say I've long since abandoned the time-consuming witty banter of earlier Fistfuls and now simply list those links: some news.

Word of the day with Wordsmith; need shit shipped to space privately? Visitors to the Burj Dubai stuck at 124th floor... Ballardian-inspired nightmare? The problems of long-term digital data storage; the beautiful cave photography of Christopher Colville via But Does It Float?

Did Alexander the Great fight with yeti? Or was it more likely to be the Neanderthals of central Asia? If you like jogging and phallic structures this is for you. 70's graphic design of Jeremy Pettis; photo-comic web-phenomenon Something Softer; a powerful idea; printeresting, veerry printeresting... oh, great, this guy worked out the problem with the world and thoughtfully printed it on a t-shirt for us all...

The Demotivating Times; crazy crazy photoshop; tactile maps and geographies (as mentioned by Kate Davies); Johansson is all over the net right now (almost as popular as chatroulette - but minus the male exposure) trust Colt+Rane to put up a good compilation; National Geographic photo of the day... you know, nature and shit... flights of fancy at A456; solar eclipse image; sex without a backbone; crushed planes; BLDG BLOG on the Long River (amazing photos), related: as the bubble bursts. Not related, Hamas kills mickey mouse. Not related, new images of 9/11. Turns out what conspiracy theorists called 'remote control choppers' designed to fly the two planes into the towers were... news helicopters. Surprised? Me neither. The Bird Book; photos of moth trails; Space Shuttle concepts, related, STS-131 at sunset...

Second to last (via Cessums):

And finally, a spot of Carl Sagan with my dawg Hawking on backing vocals...

v-day

2010-02-14T08:30:00.000Z

I don't believe in Valentine's Day + I'm not single = no hypocrisy on my part.

flattr

2010-02-10T08:30:00.004Z

We first got the Internet in our house in about 1996 – a 2kb/s dial-up. By the late 90's it became evident to me that what had essentially been simply e-mail (at 2kb even browsing for text information just wasn't time efficient) was evolving. The public gaze had turned to Silicon Valley and the Dot Com boom, with an expectation that what was going on there was going to revolutionise... something. Oddly, even though people began to speak openly about the Internet Revolution (also Digital Revolution) and already refer to it in its historical context next to the Industrial Revolution, what this so-called revolution was overturning remained obscure and indeterminate.

The Dot Com Bubble can be largely attributed to the failure of these web companies to find a convincing way to make money from the Internet – the sentiment that "everything on the Internet should be free" had already taken deep roots. The Internet failed to fit into a market-based capitalist system because the fundamental basis of producing valuable information for free was economically nonsensical. And yet it exists. Further, today you can't stop people from doing it – as I am right now in this blog post.

So for several years the struggle to find a way to make money from the web continued, culminating in web2.0 and an acceptance that the only way to make money was from advertising. Simultaneously to this was a sharp rise in Internet piracy as peer-to-peer filesharing networks (napster, kazaa + limewire will always hold a special place in my heart) began to become endemic. But the direct sharing of files had its problems, it relied on parties being connected directly to each other for as long as the download took to complete, which could be quite a while back then. In the early 2000's the other major problem was the great inequality in Internet speeds – my own connection had barely gone up (~25kb/s) while those in the States and Japan had greatly improved.

The invention of large online storage hosts (rapidshare, megaupload, etc) largely solved these problems. However, I feel it was the torrent that really revolutionised peer-to-peer sharing (a torrent works by dividing a file into, say, 1000 pieces and then allowing a user to download multiple pieces from multiple users, effectively multiplying the speed of the download, and removing a dependence on the downloader of remaining connected to a stable uploader).

Flattr comes from the creators of the infamous Pirate Bay (one of the largest torrent sites) and I think its power to shape the future of the web (either directly, or through copy-cat and subsequent developments of the idea) is obvious. With all this talk about the death of the newspaper, I wonder if the fate of the print-media isn't going to be some sort of Flattr future, where content producers are equalised, where a good blogger can earn as much as a NYT writer...

There's a speculation on the new now for you.

fistful of links

2010-02-09T22:50:00.002Z

Photo by Rob Hann.

I'm behind on my posts: some news.

A fast and furious fistful this week, in preparation for next Tuesday, which will be the 20th week of Fistful of Links (coinciding roughly with the 8th month marker of this blog's humble origins). Google Zurich's courteous bathroom instructions. Also Google, the End of the Road (a streetview-inspired blog). Still roads, even ET knows you shouldn't drink and drive; Moving a house in Chile with oxen because the land it was built on is haunted; Getting over oil one town at a time (a la grassroots). I would love to hear some real examples. 365 ampersands (as it sounds), also nominal 299 children. Also children, an idea to pack students in shipping containers & the controversy of Rio's sexy seven year-old.

The art of Alex Gross, Marquis, Ori Gersht. Not related: Nazi Gold. Re-designing the boarding card; Paul Rudolph drawings; Create your own motivational posters, and an analysis of what they all mean. Just in case the interweb was getting all too predictable: a blog for tribal african turn of the century photography. Also, Angry People in Local Newspapers.

London's new freesheet (or free-shit). It should go down well with the building based on a flip-bin (I also find it ironic that an East London art pub will be demolished to make way for an art-themed hotel). The Bear Chair. A new blog about mis-reading architecture: deepthroatdiary (safe for work). If you're a geek what you going to do with 5 iphones? A short film collaboration between Dali and Disney. Wigs for children: Baby Bangs. No final film this week.

the state of the union, by peter eisenman

2010-02-06T08:30:00.003Z

Galicia City of Culture model, Eisenman Architects.

“When I was a boy I used to buy my clothes at Brooks Brothers on Madison Avenue. Not especially because it was Brooks Brothers, but because if you wanted the best clothes in New York, everyone knew they were to be found on Madison. But the genius loci of Madison Avenue has been destroyed: I can now buy Brooks Brothers in any place, in Newark Airport, in Macau, and so on…”

Eisenman, who spoke at the AA on Friday, made a convincing argument for the non-existence of place, or as he put it “the dissolution of the Hegelian dialectic of Zeitgeist versus Genius Loci” through the destruction of the latter by capital. And in this sense he essentially prolonged the arguments of Fukuyama’s Death of History (and to a lesser extent also those of Derrida).

The absolute dominance of capital as the driving force of contemporary global society is indisputable, and it has been the case for some decades. Saarinen’s TWA building at Newark (a magnificent structure even today) has been abandoned for no other reason than that it fails to serve capital any longer. A more contemporary example would be that of Dubai.

In Rem Koolhaas’ Junkspace he tells us explicitly what capital inevitably produces: ubiquitous, atopical detritus.

+++

Eisenman recently won a competition in Milan, and the client came and asked him for a 40-storey building. The size of the site did not necessitate it, nor the context of the city lend itself to such a proposal. “Does the desire for a tower stem from theories of living?” he asked, and the client replied, “No, we want to make a statement.”

There can be no spirit of place to a 40-storey tower, or a 100,000m2 mall, because the scale upon which the building is founded is not that of architecture, but that of global capital. This demand requires larger and larger projects from larger and larger firms, with a necessary homogenisation of planning and degradation of detail quality. Additionally, we do not have a grammar to describe this contemporary situation: what is the grammar of a 40-storey tower?

Eisenman paused. “At what point do you refuse? Have I sold out? Is this the end of Eisenman as an architect? I don’t know…” In any case, the result will be a shed with signage, where the signage is the word ‘Eisenman’.
This degradation leads to an architecture that abandons space and concerns itself only with surface (he gave Zaha in the front row a pointed look).

+++

When Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi flew to Las Vegas in 1968 they classified the architecture they found into two categories: the ‘decorated shed’ (a block volume with elaborate signage) and the ‘duck’ (a building whose form resembles its economic purpose, as in the giant duck that sells ducks). The two terms subsequently became widely accepted metaphors to broadly describe the approach of contemporary architectural projects.

“If you were a young Scott Brown or Venturi today where would you go to re-enact ‘Lessons from Las Vegas’? You couldn’t go anywhere, because Las Vegas is everywhere – it is New York, it is Milan, it is Singapore, and we have to ask ourselves… Is this where we want the world to go?”

Rem argued that, since Junkspace was unavoidable, better to embrace it. As a consequence his more recent projects (CCTV, Seattle, Casa de Musica) are really nothing more than ducks, albeit somewhat decorated-ducks. Although, and Eisenman didn’t mention this, it could be said these were conscious decisions on Rem’s part, foreshadowed in S,M,L,XL.

Ultimately the main problem with the dominance of capital in architecture remains the question of scale. Architects trained in the design of domestic-scale buildings struggle to imagine the scale of modern capital.

For Eisenman’s City of Culture in Galicia he was asked to design not one building, but six: “how can an architect conceive of 6 buildings simultaneously?” He mentioned a man he knows building a city in China for three million and he wondered how such a thing could be possible.

+++

The other day Gehry was around Eisenman’s place trying to hawk his Catia program, saying how a program designed to realise architecture was indispensible for a practise like Eisenman’s. This set Peter on a rant: the younger generation behave like computers – they have lost the capacity to develop creative response, and instead limit themselves by the programs they use, like rhino, or maya, or max. These programs are not designed to describe space and time, but for film animation, or for other media, or whatever. He calls this thinking the “Parametric disease”, which is spreading, and whose origin is found under the thumb of capital… At one student crit recently a young woman had produced a script to generate a certain type of building, and Eisenman asked her which one she was going to choose. She responded “but choice is no longer the issue, any one will do!”

+++

Peter’s comments about the spirit of our age, and particularly the prolongation of Hegelian history, seemed too good not to pick out and roll into Millennium People’s second post on the Digital Dialectic, scheduled for the 10th Feb. Be sure to check back on us then…

Cultural City at Galicia, under construction.

supercritical #2

2010-02-05T08:30:00.007Z

AA Words series 1-4.

I don't want readers thinking I'm being overly supercritical – even though the meeting between Rem and Peter (see below) was a poor excuse for a conversation, this is neither indicative of Supercritical as a volume or the AA Words as a series. Millennium People reviewed Anti-Object (the second book in the series) September last year, and thoroughly enjoyed it (featuring two guest reviews by M. Rosin-Melser – late of ETH, recently returned to Sydney). In a sense, the failure of Koolhaas and Eisenman to establish a dialogue is practically inevitable given the intensely complicated history of these two figures. This is all by-the-bye, and I am no apologist.

The series aims to "deflect" the force of an architectural culture dominated by the endless production and consumption of images by means of "direct language, concise editing and beautiful, legible graphic design". As a concept it works – as much for its visual appearance as its content. I suspect (and in several cases this suspicion has been confirmed) that quite a lot of the students I've seen buying the Words series do so initially for the Underground typo and bold primary colours, only to find that the text is pretty alright too.

That said, in response to Brett Steele's claim that it's "really a magazine in disguise", its really only issue one, Supercritical, that feels like a miniature magazine, and I think this is due to the diversity of its content, even if it does largely revolve around Rem and Peter. Apart from the disastrous dispute there is a great discussion between Robert Somol and Jeffrey Kipnis, moderated by Mark Cousins, (the highlight of which is when the two critics impersonate Koolhaas and Eisenman and have the "conversation they might have had if they had been honest with each other"), a really interesting discussion between Alvin Boyarksy and Peter from 1975 (broadcast on AA radio, which, though fascinating, shows that Peter was just as difficult back then as today), a 1976 interview between Koolhaas and Peter Cook, and a 100 point document by Brett Steele analysing the nature of Peter and Rem's work, rise and success, writing, as individual entities and in comparison to each other.

The result of these varied chapters is to present a snapshot of the two architects not just at one moment (one discussion, one night) but over time. The nature of the starchitect is to have their popularity reinforced by the present – this method of displaying a timeline of vignettes goes a long way to removing something of the aura of the two men and presenting them in a more critical light. What becomes very evident from the 'miniature magazine' is that Koolhaas and Eisenman are only human after all...

I highly recommend the series.

supercritical #1

2010-02-03T08:30:00.007Z

Architecture Words 1: £12.

“I wouldn’t want you to cry for having had to come here tonight for this conversation, because nobody dragged you here.”

Peter Eisenman to Rem Koolhaas.

So ends Supercritical, a little volume that documents the rare meeting of two architect friends/enemies/rivals/(whatever) – Rem Koolhaas & Peter Eisenman. It accurately transcribes the two’s complete inability to say anything meaningful to each other, and their ultimate decline into dressed-up name-calling. This spectacular failure on the part of their dialogue has forced me to split this review into two posts: one on the discussion itself, and one on the novel medium through which this piece presents itself (“its really a magazine in disguise” says Brett Steele).

While I was really disappointed by Eisenman, I don’t want you to think that Koolhaas – who preaches a type of internationally-informed, nationally-dictated, culturally-sensitive, global-metropolitan architecture – is any less narcissistic or arrogant.

Eisenman constantly compares himself to Koolhaas, at times absurdly, almost farcically so: he compares Delirious New York to his own 1963 thesis The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture; S,M,L,XL to his forthcoming Eisenmanual. Then he spins off into reflecting on this discussion as comparable to Corbu meeting Mies. Rem’s response is blunt: there is no comparison to be made, the terms are not exchangeable.

Further, Koolhaas is not interested in discussions of semiotics or form, and does not engage in the tallying up of personal achievements. Eisenman compares his Max Reinhardt Haus to the CCTV on formal grounds, and Rem interjects: “For us [OMA] the diagram is no longer only a device that triggers architecture [that is, it is no longer simply intellectual]. It is also a device with which to look at the world and to try to represent some of the bizarre conditions we observe.”

Left: CCTV by OMA (Rem Koolhaas); Right: Max Reinhardt Haus (Eisenman Architects).

Koolhaas defends CCTV not formally, but programmatically. The importance of the building, he says, is not its iconic form, but its role as informing a new era of Chinese media communications. “We’re interested in people… not in an intellectual, humanist or architectural sense… but simply how they exist in flows and behaviours of global culture today.”

The contradictions run thick and fast: “Peter is arguing for an optical, thinking individual–” “no, I am against opticality.”… “Peter you just said you see yourself withdrawing from things like magazines and journals to focus on buildings?” “No, no, no. Let me make sure that we get this straight…”

The discussion ends with Eisenman saying he conceives of every building as a one-off, unlike Richard Meier, who has a signature, reproducible and intellectually vacuous style. “We’re dummies, you and I” says Rem, and asks Peter not to intellectually belittle Meier. He reminds him that they met for the first time at one of Meier’s lectures, and that Peter’s dismissal of Meier makes him want to cry… “every time Meier gave a lecture at that time he came to Peter’s office beforehand so that Peter could basically prepare the lecture and write the script for him. And the reason Peter was angry with me was that I was attacking the script, not the dumbness of Meier.”

fistful of links

2010-02-02T02:02:00.002Z

The Chloride Lake, via English Russia.

Cha Chink: some news.

Some big news actually: we will find Earth's twin by the end of the year. Yeah! Related, fusion energy is on the way. Still related, Mammoth's top 10 architecture list from the last decade (including the LHC at CERN). A store in London with no packaging, I think its sad that I find this actually novel. Still London, my local cinema turns 100. What school grade would you give Obama? (asks Fox). Pop quiz, should the US sell weapons to Taiwan? Or, like, what's the deal with that? Haiti Ghetto Biennale; One frame per day: that's very, very slow television.

"Like Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst, the success of their blatant shit-ness speaks volumes about the state of their field, its ideologies and economies." Entschwindet und vergeht on Zaha Hadid Architects... Other dystopic visions: a construction update on Harry Potter World at Universal Studios; 24 abandoned hotels, derelict soviet structures, (which look a bit like 1960's Birmingham) and the last tourists are air-lifted out of Machu Picchu. Also, one that just won't go away – I hear about Fordlandia about once every 6 months.

"Future Olympic Park (2007)" by Bas Princen

Death: Sir Terry Pratchett, of the Discworld series, reveals he wants to be a test case for state assisted suicide in Britain; Holden Caufield lives on, but Salinger is decidedly catching in the rye. A bit of a shock to hear Nick Dewar is dead too. He was only 37. That's one of his on the left...

On a lighter note, a dictionary of blogger rhetoric. "Barred: If you have been barred from a blogger's comments thread it is always because you 'reminded them of some uncomfortable truths', you 'told it like it was' etc, never beccause you were an insufferable troll or (for example) a tedious prick whose diversionary ramblings and clumsy put-downs were an embarrassment to all but yourself." Also web, I hope you didn't miss Google Data Privacy Day 2010. Still related, the new Apple iPad (just a big iPod really). Also, how Apple thought it would look in 1988.

Finally, something sent in by an old friend of Millennium People:

white pebble syndrome

2010-02-01T08:31:00.000Z

poster series (#2)

2010-01-31T08:31:00.002Z

The final two posters in the Millennium People Internet series (find the other 5 down the page, on flickr, or here)

NSW vs. manhattan

2010-01-31T08:30:00.001Z

Tottenham Court Road Tube, on Flickr, via the Londonist.

A quick response to Dan Hill at City of Sound, who tweeted recently:

"If the ENTIRE world's population had the density of Manhattan everyone would fit into New South Wales. Can someone prove this for me, cheers"

The density of Manhattan is 27,490.9/km2 (wiki) and the area of New South Wales (a state of Australia) is 809,444 km2. Therefore, if New South Wales had the density of Manhattan (which is, I believe, the question) then you could fit 22,252,344,060 people.

The current world population is 6,692,030,277 (google) so you could fit about 3.3 worlds into NSW.

fistful of links

2010-01-26T08:30:00.010Z

via the Londonist Flickr pool

You'll get on that net; maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life: some news.

The Londonist has been good this week (providing the shot above, as well as notifying me of the enormous collection of old films available at the London Transport Musem). Also, the tube map of the galaxy. Some futuristic stuff: man's future in Hydrospace; Female Androids.

In the news this week: a movie recently made by chimps surprisingly not related to anything on the interactive chart of 2009 US movie hits; related, 50 incredible Polish film posters. Unrelated, South Koreans told to make babies. Tech: how tough are NES games? How many computers made this year? Bubble-wrap turns 50– and goes virtual (via this isn't happiness).

Russian iceskaters impersonate Aboriginals (which they saw on Youtube), win gold (Russian dance here). Also ice cold, a coyote frozen in its tracks. The meaning of a short squeeze (not sexual). Related, (vaguely sexual) pixelated nudes (as seen at left). Related, perhaps, Curious Expeditions. Also curious, a cross-section of two women (one who is fat).

Now, there seems to be some debate going on over why it was so cold this winter, leading some to comment on the gulf-stream myth. Topical: the airport scanners that look at you nude, and which don't work anyway. Also airport security, "If the US can create Avatar, they can fake 9/11" says Malaysia's former premier. Vaguely related, first-world problems.

Finally, via Cessums.

millennial escapades

2010-01-25T08:30:00.001Z

If virtual space is treated as seriously as real space, then at a certain point the design of wireless fields comes into play. But how to design with an invisible medium? My aim was to influence the virtual, so I built a room within a room, a network within a network....

I went to the Apple store with a wireless broadband dongle and changed the network of the computers from Apple to myself, then set the network homepage to be my blog. The Apple red-shirts tried to work out what was going on... it took them some time, during which all Apple store customers were obliged, upon opening the safari browser, to read my blog. I was discovered and ejected.

Observant readers will notice this took place at the end of last year, during the hiatus, before MP got its makeover.

poster series

2010-01-24T08:30:00.002Z

A new Millennium People poster series aiming to bring to light some interesting facts about the Internet, question our relationship to it and the portals we use to view it. Viewable on Flickr.

iceland #4: sudeyreri

2010-01-23T08:30:00.004Z

This is the final post in my Icelandic Saga... and the post is likely to be a saga in itself...

There is a magnificent approach to the village of Sudeyreri, which is found on the farthest tip of Iceland's West Fjords. During the winter the fastest way (weather permitting) is to fly from Rekyavik, in some sort of modernised Short's 360. Anyone who flew Aer Lingus across the Irish Channel in the 90's would probably recognise the aircraft by the name 'vomit comet'.

The descent into the West Fjords is a treacherous one. At an altitude of only several hundred feet, the plane races up and down the valleys in a very particular pattern, zipping over warning beacons and performing tight turns around lit poles. There is something of the aerobatic race about it. Then suddenly the engines throttle back completely, and you drop the last few feet onto the icy runway at Thinkery.

The little arrivals building was mostly crowded with parents and families waiting for their returning children; and so tight was the space, and so intimate the atmosphere, that it took on the appearance of a living room with a conveyor belt running through it. Outside, a massive Swedish truck from the 70's painted a dashing red and upholstered in several tints of brown took us up into the tunnel. Until relatively recently Sudeyreri was completely cut off for about four months every year. A mammoth construction project... a tunnel several miles long cut through the mountains... was the solution. Perfectly straight, its vaults lit up like a medieval banquet hall.

The village, only 350 people, is completely centred around the fishing industry, and is run by a type of benign protector – Odin – the owner of the fish factory and fish drying house. He employs only couples, in an effort to build up the population of the village, and owing to the fact that in his experience men make better fishermen, while women have better attention spans for skilfully de-boning fish for hours on end. "There are no men on my factory floor" he said "they just lose concentration and mess things up." They do however employ the local kids, who, when there is a large haul of fish, will work for a few hours after school to make up the numbers. These same kids, with nothing much to do, have discovered the joys of putting your back flips on youtube, and composing black metal music (brot were practising in the church when we arrived).

The all-female factory workforce. De-boning takes place on thick perspex light boxes, the rhythmic flick and swish of the knives barely audible over the hum of the central conveyor belt.

There is such a rationally organised system to the village: everyone works for the company, which invests in the school and donates money for local amenities. The whole place is powered by the hydroelectric plant installed on a local farm, and by a small geothermal plant in the town centre. There was something vaguely socialist about the single party equal distribution of profit. One night I had dinner with a local family and asked, bathed in the glow of their enormous television, would it not be a good idea to make the fish factory a union-run venture, organised by the people of the village? But they seemed against this: it was wiser and more efficient to have Odin at the helm (so to speak).

Another time, I went out on one of the small fishing boats. Myself and two friends, an Italian and a Swede, packed into the tiny vessel, and set out for the Arctic circle. The system of fishing, which is conducted in the eternal night of Arctic winter, is done using a long line (comprised of 24 segments) onto which bait is tied. The line takes about 3 hours to spool out, and then 6 hours to reel in. The two fisherman stand at an open hatch, waiting for the incoming line to present whichever fish it has caught. These are stabbed with a hook on the end of a stick and flicked into a large tray. Here they are killed by the other fisherman and slung into the hold (being sorted by species). A good haul would be about 4 tons.

The weather was particularly violent when we went out (though I am proud to say that of the 15 in my group that went out in several boats, I was one of only 3 that were not constantly ill), with the swell over 3 metres. It was so rough that we had to abandon a spot where it was known there were plenty of fish. While turning south to shallower waters the swell caused our line to snap, and we spent a good hour roaming around the outer Arctic circle looking for the flashing buoy – a pinprick of red in an ocean of black. The line had dragged along the bottom, and had picked up a wild assortment of sea-creatures, some of which I don't really even know how to describe. Amongst them was a giant crab, with a pincer the size of a child's hand, at least 50cm across. Due to the weather we pulled in just under two and a half tons.

The last buoy coming in, around 1pm, after 10 hours at sea. The waters had irritatingly calmed by the time the light came, making photographic evidence of the storm impossible. At its height, the boat had switched on a search lamp to see how bad it was – the beam cut straight through the high waves rolling over the deck, lighting up crystal turquoise mountains all around us.

if these walls could talk

2010-01-22T08:30:00.004Z

The real Architecture Association on the left, and the perceived digital AA on the right... via Flikr.

When the richness of a place, its history and aura are better captured in the imaginary spaces of a virtual city, what good is the building itself? When my home network password is more important than my front door key, when my door has become nothing more than an icon and an option list… Why not knock it all down? Why not remove the physical obstacle that prevents us from seeing the building?

new millennium

2010-01-22T08:30:00.001Z

The London Eye, modified from this image, and the cover of Ballard's novel 'Millennium People'.

Millennium People has moved – our new url is:

www.millenniumpeople.co.uk

Although we are no longer at www.millenniumppl.blogspot.com all traffic will automatically redirect.

fistful of links

2010-01-19T08:30:00.005Z

Iceland, via Kevin Cooley. Related, false landscapes.

What's that in my fist? Why, its a bunch of fresh cut roses for my love: some news.

Spillway's Raging for the Machine. Related, CommunistRobot. Kind of related, how many computers have been sold this year (in real-time)? Not really related, how many track combinations can you get out of an Ikea train set? It seems like a bit of a Brio rip-off if you ask me (old-school Brio you understand, before it got all hi-tech). Related, the meaning of the word brio.

Cliqset, another one of those open-plan internet tools (like we didn't have enough social networks already). Related, social image bookmarking: vi.sualise.us. Super related, 500px. Accidental social networking 'I found your camera...'

I really love the xkcd cartoons (left). Consistently brilliant. Some cool WW2 posters. 50's fonts and stock images. Fuck Yeah! Dioramas! First person tetris. The golden age of comic books.

Not sure if you heard, but Banksy and Robbo have been having some sort of graffito spray-off in Camden: Banksy started it, then Robbo replied, and now Banksy is getting it again.

The dangers of a high-information diet. Goddamnit. Ten classic Simpsons episodes. Pretty much right, I reckon. The Harbin Ice Sculptures. Crayola colours go crazy. When I threw rocks at a glacier this is pretty much what I heard. I mean, I could go on forever, there's just so much crap out there (my own included), but I'm going to stop it right there and end with this bad boy:

12 Pipe Dream 2
by Scorpiotistic

nomadic banks

2010-01-16T08:30:00.003Z

An MP original...

From all around the town, and from the hills above it, the good folk tumbled out of their homes, and collected in the square. The bank was in town. Anxiously, the people formed a queue, the ritual most strongly associated with this social institution.
Most had come to see the bank clerks employed in valuation: the Fortune Tellers as they were called. Behind their long trestle tables of mahogany, the Tellers would Tell, judging each object as it was presented to them, and passing comment on its interest to the bank.

It was on the basis of these proclamations that the people would decided whether to keep or destroy their belongings. Something that was useless to the bank was useless to society, because the bank was the storehouse for all social objects.
You never really owned anything anymore, but simply exchanged it for credit. An object given to the bank on loan equated to the possibility to loan something else in return. A constant fluctuation in social needs for certain items, furniture, vehicles, jewelry, clothes, ensured a constant exchange. The bank worked like a cooperative society for objects, with 80 million members...
The ease with which objects were deposited and retrieved from the bank very quickly loosened the ties people had with them. The inherent desire to hoard soon melted away.

People found that in time they did not miss any of these things they gave up, and never asked for them back. They remain to this day in the vaults of the bank, able to be viewed, like a still-living museum to our civilisation. The bank was a stepping stone to the objectless society.

iceland #3: growth

2010-01-14T08:30:00.003Z

Greenhouses at the Icelandic Agricultural University in Hvanneyri.

This is a continuation of Millennium People's Icelandic Saga...

The first question to come out of every Icelander's mouth on hearing that we were a group of architects from London, and that we were interested in the end of the world, was "why on earth did you come to Iceland?" This apparent self-deprecation in fact masked a rather bizarre understanding of the current global condition: they didn't think Iceland was a very good place to look for the end of the world.

Economic ruin, melting glaciers, massive deforestation and dwindling supplies of fish (the only real product to come out of the country in any appreciable quantities) and yet the people of Iceland were irritatingly blasé about everything. The economic woes will pass, they felt, and if the glaciers melt, well, that's just how it is. Rising sea levels? Iceland sits at the junction of two continental plates, and is growing all the time.

'Do you realise', I said 'that the world is quickly running out of oil?' They smirked into their hardfiskur (fish dried to resemble balsa - mine gave me a paper cut). All they have to do is a dig a hole and practically unlimited amounts of power and hot water come out. The vast majority of this energy goes into refining aluminium, but, so scientists at the Agricultural University told us, if this energy was diverted to agriculture Iceland could easily grow several times as much produce as it needed.

At their campus, rows of glasshouses cascading down a hill in Hvanneyri, the glowing warmth of sodium lamps shines out into bitter cold and eternal crepuscule that is Icelandic winter. Inside the hot houses: room after room of perfectly shaped tomatoes, enormous cucumbers, coffee, bananas, kiwis. Also one room, apparently without purpose, filled with examples of cacti. One scientist speculated on perhaps growing wheat next winter. The idea of vast fields of grain grown under an Eden-project like roof in the freezing north of Iceland does my head in a bit.

fistful of links

2010-01-12T08:30:00.001Z

70's space colony concept, via F*Mass, via Design Swan. I particularly like the indoor sun. Nice.

A fat, fat fistful from the future: some news.

2010 is apparently the Year of the 3D Television. Also technology: mobile phones from the future, related the bio-phone; 2009's sexiest geeks. (w-wait, did Jade win or not?); so now your keyboard knows if you're stressed; iPhone apps are crap. Why not use your phone to control a military spy plane instead? Related, iPhone fingerless gloves. Also future: the London Transport Future Generator (although just getting London Transport to work in the present would be nice). Related, Indian transport future; related, retro-future: Atomic Annihilation. A bit related, Airminded.

Hardcore technology: Web 2.0 suicide - the fastest way to permanently delete yourself from all social network sites. The Consumer Electronics Show was on in Japan this year. So cool. Microsoft obvious fail. I mean, look at the guy's jumper. Related, Microsoft Word 2010 parody. Also Japan, the suicide forest at the base of Mt. Fuji; Pimp your maps with Cloudmade.

Meanwhile, a look around the world: its so cold here in the UK pensioners are burning their books. Very Bradbury. Related, the Ballardian forum is up and running again. Winter is cruel: muppet suicides; not related, global warming solved by paint; super-sweet anti-whaling speedboat rammed by the Japanese recently. Now sunk; Australia still accidentally racist. America: NY's proposed cable-car network; Boston's abandoned subways; California: nudists upset over rotting seals buried at their beach. Also California, Arnie says prisons must be at least as good as schools (or something). In America, plane thieves get their own Facebook fan pages. How not to write about Africa. More globally: weird shit's going on with the Milky Way's Dark Matter.

Cool shit: beauty is she (models/fashion/SFW) in particular I think there is a shoot to be made on the subject of WW1 women; Interesting letterheads (Einstein, Hitler, Johnny Cash, etc); DIY Kung-fu film script; CGUnit (which I embarrassingly misread), a sort of CGI/graphic art/photography mega-site; the new book from Jason; 60's sex and style from Pour 15 Minutes d'Amour (for 15 minutes of love). Ne le regardez pas au travaille (NSFW); Related to you: mum and dad.

William Shatner reads Palin's tweets on Conan's show. Related, Palin gets a job with Fox; super cool Australian photography: bang bang dot dot; Chris Schaberg invokes Heidegger against airport delays; Hilobrow (because middle-brow is not the answer). Start here; the amazing photos of Richard Mosse. Really. Check him out; Apollo 12 lunar diary. Related, the Gemini 16 press release (pdf); I've always been a fan of Carlo Mollino's furniture (BLDG blog article), architecture, car design, etc, but had no idea he also took dirty polaroids; a 19th century flow-chart of all of human history. Related, a flowchart of whether you need a panflute; Body Mapping/Ghillie Suits at Mount Olympus.

And... finally,

how big is the internet?

2010-01-11T08:30:00.002Z

The Internet, via.

There are somewhere in the order of 4.2 billion unique Internet addresses (IPs), housed on 44 million servers. These consume about 5% of all the world’s electricity and produce about 2% of all carbon dioxide emissions. This amounts to roughly 80 megatons a year and is similar in output to the emissions of Argentina or the Netherlands.

It is comprised of about 40 million gigabytes of information, which, in its simplest form, would weigh something in the order of fifty-six millionths of a gram.

Here the contradiction: the Internet might, theoretically, occupy less space than a single grain of sand, and yet its contribution to global warming is equal to a small country. It is both an immense geographical entity and a miniscule atomic whisper. It exists in a time and place, and yet transcends that to become timeless and aspatial.

It is an emergent system, where a highly-engineered, yet simple, set of rules has allowed for the creation of a massive network sprawling across the planet. The structure of the Internet is a hub and spoke system, in which information is hoarded at central servers and trickled down to individual IPs, making it, in technological terms, far from democratic.

olafur eliasson at the mca

2010-01-08T08:30:00.002Z

Several times while photographing Iceland I was reminded of the haunting images taken by Icelandic-Dane Olafur Eliasson. He replaced Antony Gormley as my favourite living artist a couple of years ago – as I became less and less interested in people and more and more interested in landscapes.

With surprise and delight I stumbled upon a major exhibit of his work at the Museum of Contemporary Art while visiting Sydney recently. I'm a massive fan of his works: waterfalls, his Serpentine pavilion, and here are two good articles about the guy.

snow

2010-01-08T08:30:00.000Z

An image doing the rounds on national newspaper covers. I'm right in the damn middle of it. Should have stayed in Sydney... Nonetheless, the city can be quite beautiful:

wireless fears

2010-01-06T05:00:00.003Z

A visual representation of the Digital Dialectic...

City people do not give a damn about their physical orientation. Urban dwellers do not know where they are. They could not tell you where north is, or at what angle the sun rises in winter. They will tell you that London is flat, because online maps have no topography. Almost no Londoners have seen the mouth of the Thames, nor even a photographic representation of it. Psychogeography is outmoded, depressingly retrospective.

The real has already become irrelevant.

The fear of city people, who make up more than half the world’s population, is not physical disorientation, but digital disorientation. Our eternal angst about social acceptance has been superposed into the digital realm. Belonging is about Facebook networks, Twitter followers, Blogger comments, and, to a lesser extent Myspace fans, ICQ & MSN Messenger contacts. Of course, the names of these programs will change, but the essence of online acceptance will remain. It may even get more extreme, as perhaps indicated by the rising popularity of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG).
Further, our fear is not only that the online community will accept us – in whatever guise we choose to present ourselves – but also that we will be able to connect to them.
Chat abbreviations like ‘do’ (dropped out) are becoming more and more rare. The era of the permanent threat of imminent disconnection is over. The fear of temporary disconnection had been replaced by a much greater fear of permanent disconnection...

iceland #2: power

2010-01-03T08:30:00.001Z

Hellisheiði Geothermal Power Plant, at Hengill.

The landscape of southern Iceland is a vast treeless environment; a desert of lava flow, salt flats, and luxuriant mosses. It is so perfectly horizontal you would swear you could see the curvature of the planet. At certain points steam rises directly from the earth, whipped up by the wind into sulphurous slipstreams, backlit by the five hour sunrise that is hibernal day. The ground is warm to the touch at these places, and is marked by the brown stain of burned vegetation. Sometimes there is a puncture, a pool of bubbling water, sometimes just darkened soil.

This is the primary power source of the Icelanders, geothermal energy. At Hengill, in the south, bores have been sunk to a depth of 3000m, where the water is several hundred degrees in temperature. Through a complicated system of heat exchanges and turbines the plant produces an enormous amount of hot water and electricity, primarily to fuel the ever-hungry aluminium industry. Although Iceland has none of this metal itself, cargo ships will bring ore from as far away as Australia in order to benefit from the cheap electricity.

The over-abundance of power and hot water manifests itself in unusual ways. Graveyards are often lit up 24 hours a day. As you drive through the countryside, rolling through the twilight fog, suddenly a cluster of neon crosses will flash by… Also, everything is heated, the side-walks, the soccer fields. There can be two foot of snow all around a perfectly dry concrete walkway.

“We have so much energy,” a geothermal operator at Sudeyreri’s miniature power plant told me, “that at night we have to disconnect the generators. I’ve been thinking of solutions, and I think that if we could charge electric cars or boats at night we would not be letting so much go down the hill.” He gestured to the steaming rivulet cascading away from the plant.
Its hard to imagine, but if cities like London want to continue into the twenty-first century, they will have to put themselves in the same position…

2010-01-01T00:02:00.003Z

As a blog purportedly dedicated to the spirit of the times, what could be more fitting than to remember twenty great moments from the last ten years?

2000 Al-Qaeda Summit: held in Kuala Lumpur, it was basically a knees-up for terrorists. The 9/11 plot was hatched over cigars in a lady-boy strip club. True story.

Y2K: The Millennium Bug. Biggest disappointment ever.

Concorde: Air France flight 4590 burst into flame and trailed into a hotel, 113 dead. Concorde was subsequently canned, the first time in history aviation technology has taken a backward step. Supersonic air travel is now a retro thing of the past, which is perhaps the strongest argument that this is not the future after all.

The End of Mir: irreparably punctured by an unknown source, the depressurised space station was pushed into a lower orbit and burnt up: the fiery death of cold war competitive spaceflight.

9/11: Where were you?

The Euro: The thing I will never understand about the introduction of the Euro is why the notes weren’t made of plastic, like the Australian currency. Their wonga is foolproof for forgers, and waterproof for days at the beach. Given the amount of rain and humidity in Europe it would have made so much sense.

Britney + Madonna kiss: the beginning of the end for popular music, one went on to date a boy called Jesus and the other to shave her head and make a habit of walking into public toilets without shoes on…

Columbia: Foam from the boosters dislodged some heat tiles, and rather than send up another space shuttle to help fix the damage, cheapskates NASA decided to risk re-entry. It would have been pretty cool to see two Space Shuttles in orbit at the same time, instead Columbia and her crew of seven were spread over several miles of central Texas.

SARS: you remember that? Before Swine Flu was popular, Avian Flu was supposed to kill us all.

Mission Accomplished: The greatest pre-emptive strike of the decade has to go to Bush, as he strutted in a fighter-jet jumpsuit onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln declaring that the major combat in Iraq was over. This inspired the song Dirty Harry, by the Gorillaz, which as far as I’m aware was the first real anti-war song of my generation –

“Out in the desert, with a street sweeper,
The war is over, so said the speaker,
With the flight suit on, maybe to him I'm just a pawn,
So he can advance, remember when I used to dance,
Man, all I want to do is dance”

Spaceship One: Commercial spaceflight. What could possibly be cooler than that? Of course Branson bought the company…

Smoking Ban: Now clubs and pubs only smell like fart and sweat.

Abu Ghraib: I have nothing to say.

Boxing Day Tsunami: Crazy. Shit.

Liquids and Gels: A very irritating addition to the list of aeroplane “do not’s”.

Iphone: Perhaps the strongest evidence yet that we are living in the future.

LHC @ CERN: Rumours were spreading thick and fast about whether or not the Large Hadron Collider was going to destroy the world by creating a black hole along the Franco-Swiss border. When the machine kept breaking down this led to a group of scientists claiming that people from the future were coming back in time to sabotage the machine, to prevent us from seeing into the origins of the universe. Now being made into a major motion picture.

Obama: What a handsome, tanned man. But while I loved him during the election for not descending to Palin-McCain’s level (name-calling) and taking the moral high hand, now he is president I just want him to stand up for himself.

MJ dies: ‘show us on the doll where the bad man touched you, Jimmy.’ That black/white man/boy was dead to me a decade ago…

December 16, 2009: Astronomers discover GJ1214b, the first-known exoplanet on which water could exist. If advances like this continue it is only a matter of time before we make Star Trek a reality. Cool.

the first ten years of the future

2010-01-01T00:01:00.002Z

Via Paleo Future

A Joyous New Year to all of you still using the Gregorian system. If, like me, you roll with the World Calendar, Happy World's Day, and don't forget to stop your clocks for the next 24-hours!

Iceland #1

2009-12-27T08:30:00.003Z

Millennium People is back, with a new look (pretty sweet), new series of posts, but the same agenda: to examine the spirit of the times, to psychoanalyse the people of the new millennium. Yeah, yeah, you've heard it all before; to the meat in the millennial sandwich...

Iceland is a microcosm for the current global condition. Crippled by the last financial crisis, it is also the home to several of the world's largest glaciers, all of which are quickly disappearing. It is the only country powered by 100% renewable sources, and is one of only two countries permitted to hunt whales (the other is Japan). Down its middle is a ridge formed from the tectonic movement of the European and American plates, shifting against each other at the rate of about 1cm a year. In 20 million years Iceland will be the largest nation in Europe.

Examining the country in terms of energy and sustainability, the development of both global warming and global economic systems has practical applications at a larger scale. Over the next couple of posts Millennium People will recount its exploits to the strange land of Iceland...

seasons greetings millennial peeps

2009-12-25T12:00:00.004Z

The lights in the next town over – reminding us all about the true spirit of Christmas.

stocking fillers (ho ho ho)

2009-12-25T00:01:00.001Z

Santa and his elephant, via Minesota Historical Society, see also Sociological Images on Black Pete...

Fill your stockings with this hefty packet of links: arranged in no particular order.

Top 10 people who died too young. Related, Young Gallery (not really, its cool pictures of animals and shit); what breakfast cereal you should eat; related, Cairo: garbage city; the Japanese ex-mining town/modern ruin that is Gunkanjima; abandoned malls (a really good one that); Sustainability is a myth; Badass of the week.

Drawings of Ray guns; tricks of the eye? street installations; like, what even is that thing, in that jar? Thing in a jar; stupid IT questions; DIY converting text to binary; how to dress up like a lego man; emoticons from the 70's made with a typewriter; a weird, but gramatically correct sentence: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Send a postcard from NASA to the International Space Station; Star Trek was the most ripped off film of the year; Retro Junk; Tracing the journey of a single bit; comic about cars and murder; someone once asked me, 'how do you go about drawing the face of someone you've never seen?' Dude, Flashface.

Shrigley's notice; mind over matter; Lem's lost opera; London, now and then; an existential video game that's doing the rounds; the world's first functioning molecular transistor; the future of the World...

The first time I've ever done a fistful and not referenced Things.

Via Norwegian photographer Rune Guneriussen

unfinished 2009 drafts #1: data visualisation

2009-12-24T00:01:00.002Z

From top: Dan Hill's 'The Cloud'; 'Sound as object' via Generator X; Toyo Ito's 'Tower of Winds'; Weather Bracelet from The Teeming Void.

This is an unfinished draft from 2009, there are two others which have been chronologically placed into the archive (#2 & #3)...

The precipitation of the digital into the real has been accelerated by a virulent new wave of 'data visualisation', through which digital data and statistics are presented either through real-time displays or objects, mostly made by 'rapid prototyping' (which, as anyone who has ever used the process knows, is far from rapid).

I don’t know if you heard about it already, but Dan Hill (of City of Sound fame) recently posted about his new project: The Cloud. I won’t go into details, nor cast an opinion, but simply group it together with several other projects as examples of a New Millennium Spirit: data visualisation. In times-gone-by the problem was collecting the data, not representing it. Researchers developed speculative manners of presentation (graphs and specialist charts) and then went out into the world to collect the information. What I'm really saying is that modes of data visualisation were propositional about a certain reality.

Today, there exists way too much data: insensible and unreadable. Understandably, the challenge is in creating new ways of presenting that data. Unfortunately, very few of these modes are intuitively comprehensible. In the world of arbitrary employment of technological tools (Za … what was her name?) data visualisation has remained ‘meaningful’. But in reality, it’s just a new tool for the generation of forms and images. And yet there is something rather banal about all these works (with perhaps the exception of Ito – not out of favouritism, but simply because he was so far ahead of his times).

Baudrillard wrote: “It is the difference that constitutes the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real.” This difference belongs to the order of representation. Though it might equally be the order of transduction: the conversion of one physical quality to another (as light to heat, kinetic energy to electricity, magnetic impulses to sound, etc). The map is in some sense a translation of the territory, from a space through the hand & mind onto the page.

Data visualisation is not the same as cartography (although cartography could be seen as a type of data visualisation, it is at its foundation a conceptual visualisation, since our perception of landscape is not a data operation) – the difference is that there is no difference between the source data and the presented data. There is no abstraction of the information, only an abstraction of the presentation of that data. The reification of the digital only produces a physical version of the electronic dross. Nothing about the information has changed, only its mode of presentation.

This goes beyond Baudrillard’s notions of simulacrum and simulation in the sense that his hyperreality had no counterpart in the real. The visualisation of the digital has recently moved from the ethereal to the real – 3d printing, and any number of other manners for turning data into objects. But what is the meaning of these objects? And what are their purposes? A map is a practical document related to the revelation of the real, but a bracelet of the year’s weather?

hiatus

2009-11-30T08:30:00.003Z

Its that time of year again.

Rather than let Millennium People drift into the region of half-written, never posted entries with the obligatory Fistful keeping the thing ticking along, MP is going on holiday – to the Arctic of all places. Next post no later than Christmas Day... with a re-launch and re-vamp for the New Year.

Take a load off, Sally. Take a load for free. And happy holidays...

unfinished 2009 posts #3: steampunk

2009-11-28T10:14:00.002Z

This was going to be a crushing indictment of the steampunk movement, revealing it to be a kitsch throwback, a false nostalgia, and so on. Never got round to it, and have since lost interest, so find some links: I am the Weather; Herr Doktor; Tombanwell; Neatorama; Behind the Steam.

Ah, what could have been... There is actually one more unfinished draft, on the use of colour in ancient temples, but I think I will save that one for later in the new year.

unfinished 2009 drafts #2: M.McLuhan

2009-11-24T08:30:00.020Z

This is an unfinished draft, posted at the end of 2009.

The phonetic alphabet, Marshall McLuhan tells us, requires only the eye as medium for comprehension:

"The alphabet is a construct of fragmented bits and parts which have no semantic meaning in themselves, and which must be strung together in a line, bead-like, and in a prescribed order. Its use fosters and encourages the habit of perceiving all environment in visual and spatial terms – particularly in terms of a space and of a time that are uniform, continuous and connected. The line, the continuum, became the organising principle of life."

This post was originally going to explore how the fundamentals of a language impact upon our perception of space. Popular demand may see it revived.

fistful of links

2009-11-24T08:30:00.019Z

Via The Day After You Die.

A short one today: some news.

John Mayer threatens to sodomise NY Mag editor (via Gawker). Not related, Rabbi's pimp gets worried for his health, cancels girls and coccaine. All lightweights, compared with the Internet Vices. Still sort of religious, the Christian Dollar Store's Scripture Candy (Testamints, Jesus Loves You Suckers, etc). Kitsch. And Christian. What do you know, there's even a blog for that: Kitchianity.

Projects by Cabracega including the 'you are here' umbrella for identifying yourself on Google Maps (yeah, like if you wait about 3 years). Picked by Six, a weblog. Also, NoMoreBrains. Wikipedia's list of legendary creatures. Another legendary creature, the amazing 50's pin-up that is Bombshell Betty (via Shae, from Spokane). Related, accidental geography. 15 days in GTA4, via Digital Foundry, what do you need real cities for anyways? Related, the miniatures.

The Fall, via bldgblog. Pop-architecture firm BIG have released a comic book of their exploits. UK launch tomorrow. The pigeon towers of Iran; Abu Dhabi does its thing. What the hell is this film? X-Wing explodes in the desert.

Yeah, I mean, the links are all still there, but they just don't run as glibly as they used to. Maybe I need help?

What to do with the other arm while spooning, via NYT blog: Abstract City.

riding the wave

2009-11-23T08:30:00.005Z

Apparently the world's best surf photographer: Clark Little.

Over the last three months or so I've been researching the idea of the 'open plan internet'. In the 19th century homes were designed in a hub and spoke manner – a central entry leading through corridors to rooms with single functions: bedrooms; bathrooms; dining rooms, etc. Robin Evans explained how the relationship between these rooms was highly limited, most rooms only had one door, or, in exceptional cases, two (kitchen/dining, for example). The open plan rooms of the 20th century, rather than being simply the sum of the older rooms, became a new and different type of space. There was a spatial gestalt effect.

The Web: today the internet is comprised of monofunctional internet programs or sites connected in fairly linear ways: e-mail; social networking; chat and phone programs; video and image sharing, etc. Youtube, Myspace, Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail, Skype, MSN Messenger (if anyone still uses it), Flickr, Picasa, are all examples of 'rooms' on the internet. These were either created by one of the two internet giants (Yahoo/Google – Goohoo as I call them) or quickly absorbed into their families. The clan-like collection of these sites was the first step towards the 'open plan internet' – an internet that will be other than the sum of the applications and sites that make it up. A digital gestalt.

Today I joined Google Wave (many thanks to Will Wiles), which is what I would consider to be the first open-plan web browsing application. It differs from previous feed amalgamation programs (where you can view twitter and facebook at the same time, for example) in the same way that putting a doorway between the dining and kitchen is not the same as knocking down all the walls to make an open space.

In what looks like an e-mail window, the user can 'start a new wave' and then add to it using 'blips'. The only way I can think to describe a wave is like a massive, informal, wikipedia page, or possibly a blog: it can contain chats, videos, images, references to external sites, in both real-time (like googlechat or ICQ) and delayed-time (like hotmail or flickr). It seems at first like a mess. Especially when you consider that all the elements are editable, and all edits are saved and able to be reviewed. Imagine receiving an e-mail from a friend only to find that the next day the message has been changed. Unlike the world of 1984, for the moment the changes are traceable.

I think something should be said about the rise of real-time editing. The ability to doctor information (images, text, etc) as it is in the process of being created has far-reaching philosophical ramifications. There can be no 'original' – simply a series of second order simulations (or worse, a chain of simulacrums). More to folllow...

fistful of links

2009-11-17T08:30:00.081Z

Over 300 works by deceased sci-fi artist Peter Elson have been scanned and put online. Above: his magnificent art for the Kim Stanley Robinson titles: The Martians (Elson's last work); Red Mars; Green Mars; Blue Mars. Elson died of a heart attack painting a mural for Butlins.

I was a young teenager when I first discovered the world of terraforming, and the bizarre 'future histories' of Robinson, yet these images were perhaps even more powerful– they inspired a whole world of lego models and pencil drawings. There was something so terribly normal about the sight of a pine tree in a Martian valley. Foreign planets are a lot like earth, really, just very far away.

Word out to my Gerroa homeboy Richard for hooking me up with that shit: some news

2012: there's only one person I would trust to investigate the end of the world and that's my good friend NASA. Ask an astrobiologist. Related, if the apocalypse does come, its better underground (says China). Signs of life from Dubai at night. Related, view from the top of the tallest tower in the world: Burj, via Archi-Ninja. Still crazy architecture, another reminder of why Hadid won the Pritzker... Related, I am Zaha and you can too: Grasshopper and Rhino tutorials (the design programs, not the animals) at Digital Toolbox.

What if Ice Cube had become an architect? NY's Highline is saved; not saved, the bunkers of Albania: Concrete Mushrooms. The City Project, a blog. Australia splits conjoined twins; man attempts to smuggle 1000 live spiders in Brazil; scenes of joy from Berlin; Murdoch gives Google the cold shoulder.

What to do with all that foreclosed property just lying around? Answer: The Land Bank. NME names top 50 albums of the decade – what dopes, they forgot Hot Chip? Top new words of the year, 'unfriend', 'intexticated', etc. And 'hashtag' for those of you on Twitter. I didn't realise it wasn't a word already. Not related, Hitler on Letters of Note. Not related to that, the photography of Greg Miller, via Sociological Images.

Finally,

ghost forest

2009-11-16T19:29:00.004Z

Walking through Trafalgar Square last night I took a photo of a crews installing a new artwork, called Ghost Forest. I'll let the website fill in the rest. Oh, and new pictures via the Londonist.

where in the world / scatterbrain

2009-11-13T11:25:00.005Z

If the future dialectic is the real/digital (I've heard your comments, just run with it a bit) then a poignant question might be "what of the real is already in the digital (read: Second Life, MMORPGs) and what of the digital is already in the real (read: where on the earth actually is the internet)?"

Also, I toyed with putting this up on Inter 7 (I've just put up some images of visualising wireless fields), but decided in the end it was MP worthy. It is a photo-cartoon series I've been doing about the future of the Internet, drawing the comparison between the process by which houses with monofunctional rooms (dining room, bedroom, bathroom, etc) became open plan (where the open plan is in fact other than the sum of its composite functions) and the changing nature of the Internet from a collection of monofunctional sites (facebook, wikipedia, twitter, etc) into the open plan internet (read Google Wave, and any other of those things).

fistful of links

2009-11-10T08:30:00.003Z

The crisis in California via This isn't happiness

I missed our little tête-à-tête last week, it was like a fistful to my heart: some news.

Hardcore gamers adopt strap-ons. Related, a court is played a couple's sex sessions. Still related, Orgy, via Geekologie. Only related if you consider children the inevitable result of careless foreplay, Maclaren pushchairs create amputees. Apropos of nothing: Art-con? Related, Chinese mass-produced art. So that's where all those paintings I saw at Montmatre came from.

Everyone knows Vice's do's and dont's are passé (unless you're a hipster); seek shameful joy at People of Walmart. Battersea, I hear, is the new Left Bank. I certainly didn't hear it from the man on the Clapham omnibus (that's a little geographical joke). Another joke, the top 100 defining cultural moments of the 2000's. Not on my list.

News of the world... Texas: Major goes postal. Related, the origins of the term 'going round the bend'. Australia: hacker invents first iphone worm. No worms in Paris: one table restaurant atop the Palais de Tokyo (one-time home of Würsa). Other turning tables: 9/11 – that's not funny. Also Stateside, an article on design observer that has been doing the rounds. Not a Millennium Person, if you ask me. London: pecha kucha is back. The Net: the amazing Beagle escape.

Second to last, Mas Yendo - an ex-student of Lebbeus Woods - is speaking at the Bartlett this week via Tomorrow's Thoughts Today. Also from that think tank: the power of dystopias.

Last: Richard Dawkins, Britain's foremost aethiest, uses one nerdy profanity.

toyo ito talks it over

2009-11-09T21:03:00.009Z

When I got home to Battersea the fog had completely permeated the suburb, leaving nothing but the orange halos of streetlights and massive neon 'Tescos' sign to guide my navigation. I shudder to think what it was like when this was all still swampland. That's right, I shudder.

+++

I spent the evening at the Architectural Association, listening to a talk by Toyo Ito entitled 'my first and most recent works'. This was a confusing title, because his first works seemed to encompass 1964 to 2002, and his recent works 2006 to 2009. I can't remember what he did in 2003,4 & 5, but he must regret it. He arrived, and bowed to everyone, and then just launched into an explanation of his beginnings in Japanese, with translator: the end of the 60's/early 70's, when rapid technological advances clashed with student political ideologies. He worked on Tange's Olympic Stadium, and Kikutake's Expo 70 Tower. Ito took inspiration from the Metabolists, particularly the Nakagin Capsule Tower, but also from less influential architects like Shinohara. He described Japan as being divided between Metabolism and another school that focused on minimalism, interiority and isolated space. This, he said, led to the current Japanese architectural trend of closed boxes [What We Do Is Secret] .

In 1971 he wanted to go back to university, but because of the revolts all universities were closed. So he was forced to open his own practise. His explained his first work, the Aluminium House, [unusually I can't find any good images of this building] as being founded around two Nagakin capsules that had fallen to the earth. This grounding, for him, signified the end of Metabolism, but also a new beginning. He purposely chose aluminium for its disposable connotations, as opposed to the solid durability of the Metabolist modules.

After his famous White-U building, where he had tried to create a completely isolated and socially disconnected space, he tried to re-engage with society and community through a Dom-ino mass produced housing system. They only sold one, which went to Sejima's parents. Towards the mid-eighties he tried to revisit some questions of traditional ephemerality in modern Japanese architecture. The Japanese house, he said, is like an empty stage [Kuma]. It only remains to bring in the furniture, which will immediately imply certain relationships – relationships brought to life through rituals.

He touched briefly on the 90's, ending with the Serpentine and Brugge pavilions, before brushing over completely the Sendai Mediatheque and concentrating on his Tama Art University Library. "I try to avoid becoming reliant on high quality finishes, because if you become too used to Japanese quality, you find it very hard to build elsewhere." In this building, through the furniture and the shelving, he tried to explore what the positions of the body associated with learning might be. What is the physicality of education?

Several questions were asked after the lecture: first Jencks rambled for a bit, really boring everyone with a long winded discourse, and finally with no question. If he hadn't been Charles Jencks I'd have reminded him whose lecture it was. Brett Steele asked a good one: Ito mentioned that he wanted to reject traditional symbolism in architecture, but, since his Dom-ino system he had in fact been rejecting some of the most fundamental elements of architecture: the column and the grid. None of his buildings after the Dom-ino possessed columns at all, nor a regular grid. Was this purposeful? Ito smiled and said, in broken English, "this is a subject of current research."

I asked "You mentioned several times the fact that this lecture is mostly translated, how would you say the language, or vocabulary, of Japanese space influenced your work?" He paused. At length, he said "Language is about an ambiguity, and there can often be a contradiction of expectations in translation. I find this metaphor useful: you go to the water temple, the surface is of still water. You pick up stones of different sizes, and you throw them. Each one creates different ripples. The meaning of the shape comes not from any single pattern of ripples, but through the collection and association of the sum. This is the Japanese language."

One other student asked "how do you conceive of ephemerality in your buildings?" Ito responded "The notion of ephemerality may not lie in the structure itself, but in its occupation, as at Sendai..." He spoke in English "But, generally, I should wish any architecture to not rest too long."

Certified Millennium Person.

shetlands and urchins

2009-11-08T19:53:00.005Z

Battersea Mill - unique for having no windmill, but wooden shutters that opened to turn a central shaft.

Winter is coming, the air has a certain bite to it. That grey light of dawn persists the whole day, and then brightens to dusk, before dimming to night. I emerged from my house at 5:30, to find myself in utter darkness.

If you catch the 344 past Battersea Power Station there is a type of bridge that goes over the railway, and down on the right is a small back street with an old Irish pub, called Finnegan's, on the corner. As I passed it this afternoon I noticed a small band of children peering over the handrail – kids from the estates, shivering without coats. They had a slight sheen under the lamplight... vaguely oily. Not a clean shine like machines, but like old newspapers wrapped around greasy chips. It really struck me.
In any case, the street had been partially blocked by two or three horse floats, and about three dozen Shetland ponies were tied to any iron or wood fixture their owners could find. The owners, pints in hand, were feeding the horses from buckets while the children nervously jeered from above. I looked more closely at the pub. Was that gas burning in its lanterns? The street was lit by gas?

One more piece of evidence that London is at best a Victorian city.

nature versus technology

2009-11-04T08:30:00.001Z

A natural landscape. See also: 14, by David Bickerstaff.

Technology, as I wrote yesterday, means only ‘to assemble’ (and shares this root with 'tectonic'). The traditional misconception, however, is that nature is somehow atechnological. Nature is pure, it precedes humanity and is complete without it. So there is a dichotomy established- that technology is dangerous, that it will threaten nature. In light of the original meaning of ‘technology’ nature is most certainly a technological creational force. The dichotomy disappears.

Human technology, as opposed to natural technology, is distinct only in the manner by which the product comes to being: the body must always be the mediator for its creation, while nature generates itself. Hence the association that the root of technology is the tool, and the belief that if the tool is made big and dangerous enough it will one day turn back on its maker and pummel him.

The etymology of 'nature' is the Latin 'nasci' meaning birth (the root trickles down to 'renaissance'). The Roman notion of birth is that it occurs when the baby is complete - which is why nature carries implications of being finished, perfect and balanced. The sense of these two terms opposite each other is: the perfect, finished world versus the constructive, unfinished assemblage. And so the point I am making is that the meaning of 'nature' is misconstrued, and that it is also technological, it is also in a state of construction and evolution, and is not a static, finished thing. There can therefore be no such thing as 'tampering' with nature, or 'playing God', since all our actions are essentially natural.

Let's just assume that global warming stems from human activity. It remains nonetheless a natural process. But it is also a technological process, since it occurs over time and through the coming together (arrangement, assemblage) of innumerable sub-processes. This distinction carries through to all of our current experimentation with 'nature'. Growing an ear on the back of a mouse, cloning a sheep, stem cell research, each of these is both technological and natural.

digital dialectic

2009-11-03T08:30:00.003Z

It was eerily silent at Oxford Circus last night. It had been on Sunday night too. I waited in front of the Tube exit for my father while a constant stream of empty buses rolled past, flicking up wakes in the gutters. The pavements were deserted. Then I suddenly had the irrational sensation that London was concealing itself in preparation for some imminent event and only I remained unwarned.

+++

Fukuyama famously announced the Death of History a couple of years after my birth (I don't believe the two were connected). The Death of History? The end of all history? His basis for this statement was a worldview he had extrapolated from Hegelian thinking. Hegel basically saw the spirit of any epoch (zeitgeist) as being defined by the struggle between two principal opposing entities. The neutralisation of this great struggle signals the end of the age.

The first epoch is supposedly the human struggle for mutual acknowledgement; to be recognised and recognisable to ourselves and by each other. Perhaps less opaquely, the late 19th century might be seen as the struggle between worker and master - the resolution of which signalled the end of the Industrial Revolution. The mid to late 20th century might be seen as the struggle between Communism and Capitalism.

Fukuyama's argument is that when the USSR packed up it ended the Communist/Capitalist struggle, allowing for global free-market Capitalism. The idea of the opposing entities is that they are fundamental. Capitalism is a fundamental organisation of society, as is Communism. The vacuum of the struggle, the absence of a dialectic, apparently signals the end of all history, since no major struggle replaced it.

Fukuyama's basic problem was that he was considering the 'spirit of the times' from a strictly economic standpoint. I find his dramatism about the end of history pretty absurd. Although it is true that the collapse of the USSR did signal the end of the Communism/Capitalism struggle – and Capitalism, having no opposition to keep it in check, ran out of control. The '07 crash (which we are apparently climbing out of) signalled the actual end of this mighty struggle. Which is part of my argument for why we are only now at the beginning of a new decade, new century and a new millennium, people.

To define the new age, to find the spirit of the times, in Hegelian terms is a lot easier than it sounds. It only requires the defining of the two opposing entities. Some people would say that the principal struggle of our times is technology versus nature. I'm not going to get into it too much (perhaps in another post) but this is a false division. If you look at the root of technology - tekne - it means simply 'to assemble'. Technology is an assemblage. Nature, however, is also an assemblage. That is, nature is technological. When we talk about nature and technology as opposites we are really talking about the differences in the manner of assembly. Nature assembles itself, while human assembly is always mediated. Our technology has to be assembled by our own hands.

The nature versus technology struggle can be excluded. For me, the strongest alternative is the struggle between the real and the digital. This is for several reasons - firstly, it would seem to be a logical historical progression: we have moved from the manual revolution (industrial) to the digital revolution. But a digital revolution cannot be without purpose, it has to have something to revolt against. And that subject is the real.

More to come on the subject...

fistful of links

2009-10-27T08:30:00.013Z

Relics of the Cold War, photography by Martin Roemers.

A nice cup of tea and a sit down: some news.

What do you want in life? No joke, no link, its a legitimate question. Post Secret style. Related, what bloggers want (bunch of wanke... oh). Segway to London town. "shock as figures show Britain is still in recession" from the Times (via And Another Thing) – who the hell is in shock about that? More importantly, the freesheet newspaper wars could soon be over, as the London Lite hints at kicking it in. Derelict London, & London Skylines. In the same vein, a page doing the rounds at the moment: 33-part guide to abandoned places.

A Bill Bailey classic, just to put this blog in some context. Related, the profound depths of our universe. Meanwhile, Royal de Luxe are doing their thing (Giants, surprise, surprise) in Berlin, via Big Picture. The beautiful analogue images of Ren Rox, and the kaleidoscopic hulicination that is The Whole World is Peaceful.

If you're cheating on your partner: stop it. If you are, consider perhaps an alternative: Cockula, the vampire sex-toy (via the normally safe for work Warren Ellis). You remember Mork and Mindy? Well then. Old construction drawings. Topical data visualisations: I particularly like Left vs. Right and a Twitter breakdown. You mean 5% of Twitter users are producing 75% of the Tweets? I'm looking at you: Marcasaurus, Kosmograd, Fatcharlesh, Tragedyhatherle and BBC. I've never met any of these people (who really is the BBC?), but I know what they're thinking in real-time. As Will Wiles recently wrote: "We had one of those I-know-you-off-of-the-internets moments for which the etiquette is still kind of hazy."

See this film. Let me know if I should see this one. I quite liked this: TVs From Craigslist, are images of the screens of TVs for sale I found on Craigslist. With hints of the seller’s interior space reflected in them, they offer inadvertent glimpses of intimacy and function as self-portraits of the sellers (the camera’s flash announcing the seller’s presence in the image). Landscapes of felt; related, Blizzards of Tweed. The end of the (digital) world, in style. Kiruna: the town that moved; architecture re-used (why are all the Battersea proposals so goddamn ugly? Remember this?)

Finally,

würsa

2009-10-24T16:40:00.004+01:00

Last year I went to the Palais de Tokyo to see an exhibit. This is what I wrote.

“At a distance of 18,000km from the Earth," the guide notes "the elephant Würsa could balance on her trunk. It is on the basis of learned scientific calculations that Daniel Firman reached this conclusion, and came above all to produce this extraordinary work which confounds all our certainties regarding the gravitation of bodies.”

Wishful thinking at best, sophistry more likely. This phrase implies that the trick of the fibreglass cast on a pole is the logical end of a scientific investigation, it implies inevitability. The passage conjures the image of a diligent artist-scientist investigating gravity. Late into the night he pores over reams of calculations and suddenly, to his immense surprise, finds that the mass of an elephant… but this is a deception.

Fibreglass Würsa (herself not based on a real elephant, but the sum of images of elephants) surrounds a steel pole structure. The art is a trick, but the deception lies in the order of the art and the investigation. The passage implies that the art is inevitable, that it is nothing other than the logical outcome of scientific reasoning. In reality, it is the answer to an arbitrary question ‘how far from the Earth does an elephant have to be to balance on its trunk?’ In which case, why even ask the question? What is the difference between this and simply balancing the elephant on its trunk? Scientific validation to artistic whim. There is mystery and credibility to technology. I find this ‘technological’ approach to modern art flimsy, but ubiquitous. ‘I used technology as a tool to generate meaning and beauty’. This idea of the divinity of technology is false. It is controlled and predictable – the desired answer always dictates the technological question. In fact, this work is far more about ‘confounding all our certainties’ – not by presenting us with the unexpected, but the desired.

We live in an era in which the ease of technical generation (and extension by mechanical production) has rendered most art banal. The power of the virtual is such that we perceive homogenous space as virtual space. The ‘white cube’-style art gallery is the paramount example – it could be anywhere and anytime. The importance of the hidden structure in these places relates to their ability to suspend the laws of gravity, to generate the virtual manifest. Having conceptually idealised space in the virtual, a confusion or frustration results from the shortcomings of reality and our inability to arbitrarily control (consume) objects. The floating elephant, the semblance of a weight impossibly supported, is our desire, as it validates the virtual by manifesting it in the real. It is, of course, immediately recognisable as an illusion, and is therefore no longer such.

The moment of semblance lies only in the first fraction of exposure. Indeed, even this illusion does not whole satisfy our desires, this would involve the actual precession of the virtual, the actual suspension of gravity, the actual elephant actually floating. So we quickly lose interest in this ‘one-liner’. Semblance itself no longer interests us because the semblance of the virtual is perfect. In other words, the precession of the virtual means the real will always be catching up, the real will always be the virtual’s simulacrum.

To this extent, quite a lot of art and architecture concerns itself with ‘effects’. There is, however, one thing that remains meaningless in the virtual and meaningful in the real – violence. Hence the interest of Arcangelo Sassolino’s ‘Afasia 1’, “a sculpture that propels empty beer bottles [into a steel sheet] at more than 600km/h thanks to compressed nitrogen.” The mechanism is randomised, and a good deal of the spectacle lies in the anticipation of the loud bang and the instantaneous vaporisation of the bottle into a fine powder of green glass. But it is really a spectacle, a gratification of destructive desire. Not “physically compressed time… permanent memory, a dangerous equilibrium” but a gratification of the sole refuge of the real, violence, as it retreats from the primacy of the virtual.

ballard and the near future

2009-10-22T16:10:00.005+01:00

The giant shining face of Jim Ballard stared out at us, like some deity critically surveying his assembled congregation. Below this over-sized icon Nic Clear swayed back and forth on his feet, at times falling into a reverent chant as he picked up on some core Ballardian doctrine: the high priest behind his technological altar.

Nic, amongst other things, is the editor of a recent AD entitled “Architecture of the Near Future”, which began as an investigation into the influence of Ballard on contemporary architecture – and he began by answering the question: why “near” future? Conception necessarily precedes construction, so architecture is necessarily a profession founded in tomorrow’s work. It is, therefore, also necessarily utopian, in that it is always foreseeing the immediate future. The relevance of Ballard is his critique of ‘laissez-faire’ architecture; an architecture that avoids social engagement, searches only for form and which is based in the world of speculative finance (MP on speculative/specular architecture). “Architecture” Nic said “has replaced a vision of the future with an image of the future.” Touché.

It was basically a lecture exploring the juxtaposition of extremes in the events of Ballard’s life: the sudden and shocking death of his wife from pneumonia while on holiday was contrasted with his domestic situation, which Ballard called ‘dreary and boring, ubiquitous suburbia’. His feelings of injustice, that in some way Nature had committed a crime, inform his earlier novels: Drowned World, Drought, Crystal World.

His early life was a strong theme, as it almost always is in discussions of Ballard: his childhood in Shanghai as the son of a civil servant, the Japanese invasion, and his young adulthood in a prisoner of war camp. The speed with which the normal became extreme; the amazing capability for humans to adapt; protagonists that are simultaneously liberated and condemned; and the essential tendency of people towards power abuse and violence are all Ballardian motifs that find their roots in this time.

As the discourse moved on to Ballard’s later life in England, as Englishman yet somehow perpetual foreigner, he made a good point about just how influential the author has become: Ballard’s last novel Kingdom Come was based around the shopping centre, commercialism, a civilisation that lacks any civic identity except the shared experience of consumption (with undercurrents of latent nationalism, and borderline racism), and its protagonist was a mid-40’s advertising agent. This rang untrue, but only because, as a man in his mid-40’s, Nic knew that he would never have been sucked into the plot, because in reality he would have immediately identified the setting as Ballardian. To this extent, not being an author of meta-fiction, Ballard could not have written himself into his own novel, and its lack of credibility was based upon the fact that the influence of Ballard was absent in the characters of the Ballardian world. Ha.

The lecture accompanied the work of his studio. In the dark of the movie room, I asked several people what they thought, to which one said: “the films are provocative, and atmospheric, but they are not providing any solid ideas.” In any case, the production of the unit is truly remarkable. Nic’s conclusion about Ballard's thinking was this: we must embrace the future, if only because we have no other choice.

we

2009-10-22T08:30:00.005+01:00

Church near Ferrybridge (scroll down) via John Davies.

In Zamyatin's 1920 novel We everything is made of glass. There is only one city, ruled by the Benefactor, a glistening metropolis of green glass – all the buildings, all the streets, all the furniture, even the very wall of the city itself are cast from that one pure liquid. The 'cyphers' (as the mathematically-minded citizens are known) operate in a transparent world where everything is immediately visible, and therefore immediately perceivable.

At the edge of this vast crystal dictatorship is "the ancient house", a home from the early 20th century protected from the age of millennia by a protective glass pustule. It is remarkable because of its solidity, its opaqueness, and its strange ornaments and objects that imply outmoded societal structures. But as the protagonist, D-503, points out, while in the process of solving a question of mathematical logic: "there is no end to revolutions. Revolutions are potentially infinite." Even the magnificent towers of glass will one day crumble back below the surface of the earth, leaving behind them only one thing: a violent and savage humanity.

Not wholeheartedly related.

the wake of the wealth of nations

2009-10-21T08:30:00.005+01:00

After Adam Smith by Shannon C. Stimson and Murray Milgate (of Palgrave’s fame) is a recent publication from the Princeton University Press that examines how, and in what ways, our thinking about the relationship between politics and political economy was transformed in the one-hundred years or so after the publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776).

And yet, for what is at its base a detailed historical analysis of the development of 19th century economic theory, the book remains remarkably current. And with everyone from Barack to Brown name-dropping Keynes it is certainly refreshing to read about the somewhat eclipsed Smith. By re-visiting the grand questions that interested Smith (for example, the relationship between the market and the state, or between individual liberty and common good), Milgate and Stimson re-assess the relevance of his thinking to our current global economic predicaments.

The premise of this (mostly architectural) blog is in fact an economic one – that the period 2001-2007 was not the beginning of a New Millennium, but the continuation of the 20th century, because it was a continuation of 20th century economic thinking. This conclusion is based on a subliminal association: I am defining an epoch not by its essential social dialectic, but by the economic principles that largely determine that dialectic.

In this respect, works like After Adam Smith become important signifiers of the emerging zeitgeist. The book will be of interest to anyone concerned with how the ideas of economics and economists have influenced (and continue to influence) politics and politicians. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Adam Smith on the new £20 note.

fistful of links

2009-10-20T08:30:00.020+01:00

The 1900 Paris World Expo, via the FlickrCommons.

The locus of links that leads straight to our hearts: some news.

There are not enough tampons in Williamsburgh. Not at all related, Auschwitz is now on facebook. Still not related, man seeks Glaswegian translator. Probably not related, The WHO has decided to ban booze. Finally related, this is bad news for the inventors of the Beer Belly (don't miss their equally amazing Wine Rack). Blurring the human-machine interface: the talking Piano (via Shawn Sims) and Vocaloid (via Tokyo Bling). Looks like the robot workers of the future will be... Mexicans? Pretty much related, the possibility for a ten-fingered mouse/keyboard: 10GUI.

American readers (you make up over 50%) will no doubt have been following the Balloon Hoax fiasco: Gawker's exclusive; The Balloon Boy Game. Coincidentally, the Queen recently wrote to a different Balloon Boy. Related, only in the sense that playing with ants was something I did as a boy, the man who makes casts of ant colonies.

In case CCTV seems too impersonal, there's now a camera to capture your life. Related, the camera to capture your dog's life. Related, the company that will look after your dog when the apocalypse comes. Related, a spectacular anti-evolution poster (via unknown Tweet). Still related, the end of the world is probably not 2012 after all, according to reliable sources; movie (is it just me or are apocalyptic films getting lazy?) sticks by its guns: Kids with Guns; Bullets from Guns.

Old man caught in doors by faulty Tube, abused by Underground staff (via the Londonist). Also in this City of Cities: London After The Rain (a film by the AVATAR); map of London brownfields (via Things). Not related, Hi-Rise– hi-res images of mars. Related, the beautiful art of Florian Maier-Aichen (via But Does It Float?) Related, but is it art: the 4th plinth. Also art, dead flies.

Finally,

fully sick

2009-10-19T08:30:00.009+01:00

Image: my project for a remotely located research station, UNSW, 2007 – pdf here.

As I lay in bed Saturday morning, feeling ill and self-piteous, my thoughts turned away from the bleak landscape of 1970's social housing outside my window to my home in Australia. If I had to describe autumnal London in a word it would be 'grim'. I made a cup of tea and turned on Australian Radio National. By Design was on, a discussion between architect Glenn Murcutt (under whose tuition the above project was completed) and writer David Malouf – held in Utzon's Opera House.

It was an interesting talk for a number of reasons, not least for Glenn's comments about the Opera House shifting the city's focus to the harbour side (whereas previously it had been centred on Sydney's commercial district). He also mentioned Utzon's proposals to unite Sydney's laneways. It was the first time I've heard Glenn talk about the city this way. He is known to irritate a lot of Australian architects for his refusal to wholeheartedly engage with the metropolitan condition, which is after all the condition of the 21st century. His expensive homes in beautiful scenery are seen as marginal to the discussion of contemporary architecture.

But if you dig architecture and want to gain a window into a very particular type of Australian thinking, this is for you. The undertone of the talk is a criticism of Australia's litigious and restrictive architectural thinking (which I believe stems from its origins as an imperial penal colony). This type of self-deprecation is common to Australia, with everyone complaining about the situation and yet nothing changing. It makes me sick. Or, sicker, rather.

I passed out to Sunset Rubdown, which always reminds me of driving in the sun.

moonwards

2009-10-17T08:30:00.005+01:00

Battleground, via Nasa

I'm out Sunday, so I'm bringing you tomorrow's post today (which is more than can be said of the actual post).

In theory, the moon belongs to no one. That is to say, it belongs to everyone. We take solace in the fact that while the Earth might be geo-politically torn by the petty disputes of its microscopically visioned peoples, there lies beyond our fragile sphere the vast reaches of deep space. It calls to us with the voice of the New World, inviting us into the tranquility of eternal emptiness, a profound vacuum of silence.

This is perhaps why the recent bombing of the moon by American satellites sits so uncomfortably in the public mind. The idea of pristine lunar landscapes being exploited by nations (India, China, Japan, Europe) and corporations is abhorrent, because we do not trust our own countries to behave responsibly. We're no longer sure who is the parent and who the child in the modern citizen-state relationship: 20th century policies of paternalism have largely dissolved into models dictated by the Market Economy.

One thing you sometimes hear from astronauts, although it is now fairly passé, is that 'from space, the earth has no borders'. This invokes for me not grandiose visions of one nation, nor one love, one hope, nor any of that other white-rasta-fake-hippy shenanigans. I am after all a realist. It makes me reflect more on why there are no boundaries on other heavenly bodies. The moon is an inaccessible, but perpetually present, celestial element that for us is unified because it is unoccupied. I've written about the problems of mapping the moon before – the subtext of this post is concerned with the conceptual difficulties of creating a socio-political map of the moon. But what will happen when it is colonised? Most people hardly know the geography of the earth, let alone the moon. But will we begin to look up at that satellite and subconsciously divide it into its political regions, as we do with images of the earth?

The final thing I wanted to say is that the difficulty of visualising the future human boundaries of the moon is tied up in the fact that we know those boundaries are arbitrary. When we view maps of Antarctica, the effect is similar. Yes, that segment belongs to Britain. But it is not a part of Britain, because it is physically unconnected to the socio-political evolution of that country. The New Millennium requires humanity to radically shift the way it conceives of boundaries, and I am not just referring to those that are socio-political. Perhaps the effect of a divided moon will have far-reaching impacts on the way we conceive of space that we cannot even begin to predict...

prophetic visions

2009-10-16T08:30:00.004+01:00

"When Burt Smallways" reads the blurb to Wells' 1907 classic " is accidentally whisked off to Germany in a balloon carrying plans for a top-secret aeroplane, he gets involved in Prince Karl Albert's massive airship raid on New York... the first step in a war which soon flares into world-wide catastrophe." The novel sees fearless and hapless Burt witness, from relative safety, the destruction of the Western world, before striving to make a new life for himself in a brutal and feudal post-war society of devastated Europe.

He tumbles into the balloon while assisting an eccentric inventor (a narrative technique perhaps borrowed from Verne's Mysterious Island?) and when, at length, the fog clears he finds himself bobbing between gargantuan Zeppelins – he lands in a German air park, described as an endless matrix of orthogonally aligned airships, each tied down to the ground by a mass of fuel pumps and strings of lights. The scene invokes a cross between Gulliver's Travels and Archigram's Instant Cities.

He sees the fire bombing of New York, a massive aerial battle over Niagara Falls, and only after many years of travel does he make it back to the small suburb where the story began. Civilisation is completely destroyed, and the novel ends with an interesting remark from one of the characters. As he stares up at the rusting monorail lines he realises that even if his children were to live to 100 they would never see the wonders of the society he grew up in.

Image via.