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The Wilderness Downtown and The Poetics of Space

The Wilderness Downtown and The Poetics of Space

I just discovered “The Wilderness Downtown“, an interactive video for Arcade Fire’s “We Used to Wait,” from their new album Suburbs. The project was created and directed by Chris Milk, who is responsible for a number of interesting videos and commercials, including one my favorites.

Sep 04, 2010 | Categories:Architecture, Art, Film, Literature, Music, Theory | Tags: Arcade Fire, Chris Milk, Gaston Bachelard, Maurice Blanchot | Leave A Comment »

David Byrne on Architecture and Musical Evolution

David Byrne on Architecture and Musical Evolution

David Byrne recently (I’m not sure how recently, but the video is new to me) gave a Ted Talk on the relationship between architecture and music (see video below). Byrne begins by considering the architecture of CBGBs, a venue that facilitated the early career of the Talking Heads, as well as countless other punk and [...]

Jun 17, 2010 | Categories:Architecture, Music | Tags: David Byrne, Hans Hollein, Music Halls, Space | Leave A Comment »

It Beats Pickin’ Cotton and Waitin’ to be Forgotten

It Beats Pickin' Cotton and Waitin' to be Forgotten

Thanks to that rather unnecessary cinematic sequel, the dawn of 2010 should make the present seem futuristic. But, for me, the reality of the future, the ineluctable advance of time, came in realizing that today is Paul Westerberg’s 50th birthday. This has no direct relevance to anything architectural. But it’s significant (to me at least), [...]

Dec 31, 2009 | Categories:Music | Tags: Paul Westerberg, Robert Christgau, The Replacements | Leave A Comment »

any-space-whatever [microblog]

Gabriel Tarde's Monadology and Sociology
Monadology and Sociology, Tarde’s 1893 book, is now available from re.press, as an open access pdf.

From re.press:

Gabriel Tarde’s Monadology and Sociology, originally published in 1893, is a remarkable and unclassifiable book. It sets out a theory of ‘universal sociology’, which aims to explicate the essentially social nature of all phenomena, including the behaviour of atoms, stars, chemical substances and living beings. He argues that all of nature consists of elements animated by belief and desire, which form social aggregates analogous to those of human societies and institutions. In developing this central insight, Tarde outlines a metaphysical system which builds on both classical rationalist philosophy and the latest scientific theories of the time, in a speculative synthesis of extraordinary range and power.
Tarde’s work has only recently returned to prominence after a long eclipse. His work was an important influence on later theorists including Deleuze and Latour, and has been widely discussed in the social sciences, but has rarely been a focus of philosophical interest. The translator’s afterword provides an explication of the key ideas in the text and situates Tarde’s theory within the context of the philosophical tradition, arguing for the importance of the text as a highly original work of systematic ontology, and for its importance for contemporary theoretical debates.
About the Author
Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904) was a French sociologist, criminologist and social theorist. He originally trained in law and worked as a judge. Subsequently he was director of criminal statistics at the French Ministry of Justice, and then held the chair in modern philosophy at the Collège de France. His works cover a wide range of interests; he is best known for his theories of imitation and his work on crowd psychology, and for his debates on sociological theory with Émile Durkheim.

Theo Lorenc is Research Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

12/20/11
Gilles Deleuze from A to Z

From Semiotext(e):
Gilles Deleuze from A to Z
Gilles Deleuze, Claire Parnet and Pierre-Andre Boutang
Translated by Charles J. Stivale

Although Gilles Deleuze never wanted a film to be made about him, he agreed to Claire Parnet’s proposal to film a series of conversations in which each letter of the alphabet would evoke a word: From A (as in Animal) to Z (as in Zigzag). These DVDs, elegantly transtlated and subtitled in English, make these conversations available for English-speaking audiences for the first time.

In dialogue with Parnet (a journalist and former student of Deleuze), the philosopher exhibited the modest and thrilling transparency that his seminal works (such as Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus) reveal. The sessions were taped when Deleuze was already terminally ill; he and Parnet agreed that the film would not be shown publicly until after his death. The awareness of mortalityfloats through the dialogues, making them not just intellectually stimulating but also emotionally engaging. Because Parnet knew Deleuze so well, she was able to draw him out—as no one else had—to what might be the 1001st plateau: a place of brilliance, rigor, and charm.

In “A as in Animal,” for example, Deleuze vents his hatred of pets: “A bark,” he declares, “really seems to me the stupidest cry.” Instead, he praises the tick: “… in a nature teeming with life, [the tick] extracts three things”: light, smell, and touch. This, he claims, in a sense is philosophy. “And that is your life’s dream?” Parnet wryly asks. “That’s what constitutes a world,” he replies.

12/13/11
Bruno Latour's new website
11/26/11
Reclaim Resi[lience]stance
CFP: Log 25, “Reclaim Resi[lience]stance, edited by Francois Roche.
11/23/11
Parrhesia, Issue 12
Issue 12 of Parrhesia, which includes essays by Meillassoux, Lyotard and others, is available for download.
11/19/11
STUDIO Magazine Issue#01 "[from] CRISIS [to]"

RRC studio architects is proud to announce you that STUDIO Magazine Issue#01 is OUT now!

The theme of this issue -[from] CRISIS [to]- is the Crisis as a turning point, as a decision moment that involves also the urban contexts.
Contributions have been written by several international architects, critics, photographers and artists: Bernd Upmeyer (MONU magazine), Domenico di Siena (Ecosistema Urbano), Marco Introini and others.

You can download the Magazine at STUDIO.

11/17/11
Filip Dujardin
11/11/11
HORIZONTE N° 4 Release
Horizonte – Journal for Architecture, No. 4, “Building Matters” is now available in Germany and from Motto.

Read more (in deutscher Sprache) at Arch+.

11/06/11
http://library.nu/
10/27/11
Artists Documentation Program

The Artists Documentation Program (ADP) interviews artists and their close associates in order to gain a better understanding of their materials, working techniques, and intent for conservation of their works. All interviews are conducted by conservators in a museum or studio setting.

NOTE: access to the interviews requires registration.
10/14/11
Villa Flaming Lips
10/10/11
A Cock and Bull Contest
09/17/11
Peter Sloterdijk's Bubbles, the First Volume of Spheres: Microspherology
From Semiotext(e):
Bubbles
Spheres Volume I: Microspherology
Peter Sloterdijk
Translated by Wieland Hoban

If I had to place a sign of my own at the entrance to this trilogy, it would be this: let no one enter who is unwilling to praise transference and to refute loneliness.
—from Bubbles

An epic project in both size and purview, Peter Sloterdijk’s three-volume, 2,500-page Spheres is the late-twentieth-century bookend to Heidegger’s Being and Time. Rejecting the century’s predominant philosophical focus on temporality, Sloterdijk, a self-described “student of the air,” reinterprets the history of Western metaphysics as an inherently spatial and immunological project, from the discovery of self (bubble) to the exploration of world (globe) to the poetics of plurality (foam). Exploring macro- and micro-space from the Greek agora to the contemporary urban apartment, Sloterdijk is able to synthesize, with immense erudition, the spatial theories of Aristotle, René Descartes, Gaston Bachelard, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Bataille into a morphology of shared, or multipolar, dwelling—identifying the question of being as one bound up with the aerial technology of architectonics and anthropogenesis.

Sloterdijk describes Bubbles, the first volume of Spheres, as a general theory of the structures that allow couplings—or as the book’s original intended subtitle put it, an “archeology of the intimate.” Bubbles includes a wide array of images, not to illustrate Sloterdijk’s discourse, but to offer a spatial and visual “parallel narrative” to his exploration of bubbles.
Written over the course of a decade, the Spheres trilogy has waited another decade for its much-anticipated English translation from Semiotext(e). Volumes II, Globes, and III, Foam, will be published in the coming seasons.

About the Author

Peter Sloterdijk (b. 1947) is one of the best known and widely read German intellectuals writing today. His 1983 publication of Critique of Cynical Reason (published in English in 1988) became the best-selling German book of philosophy since World War II. He became president of the State Academy of Design at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe in 2001. He has been cohost of a discussion program, Der Philosophische Quartett (Philosophical Quartet) on German television since 2002.
09/12/11
Quiz: Which Metaphor Best Captures Your Personal Brand of Post-Modern Ennui?
Answer: A bathroom in a hipster bar from which the mirror has been removed because it caused excessive self-consciousness in its patrons
09/07/11
Herzog & De Meuron
I just discovered that Herzog & De Meuron finally have an official website. However, after a few minutes frustratingly clicking around, I have to say I preferred the ~~obstinacy~~ mystery of the firm sans site.
08/30/11

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About

Space is no longer a particular determined space, it has become any-space-whatever [espace quelconque...] Any-space-whatever is not an abstract universal, in all times, in all places. It is a perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle of its metric relations or the connection of its own parts, so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways. It is a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible. What in fact manifests the instability, the heterogeneity, the absence of link of such a space, is a richness in potentials or singularities which are, as it were, prior conditions of all actualization, all determination… - Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image

Read more about me

And just as the image must attain the indefinite, while remaining completely determined, so space must always be an any-space-whatever, disused, unmodified, even though it is entirely determined geometrically (a square with these sides and diagonals, a circle with these zones, a cylinder “fifty metres round and sixteen high”). The any-space-whatever is populated and well-trodden, it is even that which we ourselves populate and traverse, but it is opposed to all our pseudoqualified extensions, and is defined as “neither here nor there where all the footsteps ever fell can never fare nearer to anywhere nor from anywhere further away.” […] It is a matter of covering every possible direction, while nonetheless moving in a straight line. There is equality between the straight line and the plane, and between the plane and the volume: the consideration of space gives a new meaning and a new object to exhaustion—exhausting the potentialities of an any-space-whatever. -Gilles Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” Essays Critical and Clinical

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