The Black Box in the White Cube: Lyotard’s Les Immatériaux as Machinic Theater
The 1960s and 1970s mark the first time contemporary art opposed modernist art. Formalist strategies that privileged the art object were displaced by discursive, administrative and conceptual approaches that emphasized relationships, and connoisseurship gave way to the demands of the growing research-industrial complex. The concept of creativity partially shifted from a traditional craft function to [...]
Borromini’s Bricks: Matters of Immanence in the Roman Oratory
And if you think of Brick, for instance, and you say to Brick, “What do you want Brick?” And Brick says to you, “I like an Arch.” – Louis Kahn [1] A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window. [...]
Spaces in Becoming: Heterotopias, the Smooth and the Striated)
In Plateau 14 of A Thousand Plateaus, dated 1440 and titled “The Smooth and the Striated,” Deleuze and Guattari posit two types of space – the smooth and the striated – which act as processes that resist a strict binary or dialectic and “exist only in mixture” (474), each one continually being translated and transversed [...]
The Smooth, the Striated, the Snark and the Sea
Deconcrete has posted an entry entitled Scaled Infinite on Lewis Carrol’s The Hunting of the Snark – An Agony in 8 Fits. The accompanying image of the map of the sea used by the sailors seems the perfect combination of the striated and smooth, concepts developed by Deleuze and Guattari in Plateau 14 “1440: The [...]
Simulacrum in the Tableaux Vivants of Thomas Demand
How the ‘True World’ Ultimately Became a Fable: Simulacrum in the Tableaux Vivants of Thomas Demand Friedrich Nietzsche introduces a chapter of Twilight of the Idols entitled “How the ‘True World’ Ultimately Became a Fable: A History of an Error” with six concise points that purport to overturn Western philosophy by replacing representation with simulacra.[1] [...]
Matthew Barney’s “Hoist” and the Desiring-Production of Space
There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons. -Gilles Deleuze Destricted has finally been released on DVD in the U.S. While I have not watched this version, I have previously seen the one produced for the UK market. The only two films in that series worth recommending are [...]
On the Death and Life of Cities
Only by enlisting the movements of a building and accounting carefully for its “tribulations” would one be able to state its existence: it would be equal to the building’s extensive list of controversies and performances over time, i.e. it would be equal to what it does, to the way it resists attempts at transformation, allows [...]
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 [...]
Stacking Architecture and the Art of Designing in Section
(For a slideshow of projects mentioned here, click a thumbnail at the bottom of the page.) I recently discovered the video above detailing the completed version of VitraHaus, Herzog & de Meuron’s new addition to the Vitra complex in Weil am Rhein. The project (of which Cool Hunting has a good review here) is interesting [...]
Don DeLillo’s Point Omega
Not a movie but a conceptual art piece…like watching the universe die over a period of about seven billion years…I stayed awhile. Because even when something happens, you’re waiting for it to happen. -Richard Elster on 24 Hour Psycho Don DeLillo’s latest novel, Point Omega, like his (perhaps) greatest novel, Underworld, opens by restaging a [...]
The Limits of Control as Machinic Opera
If a quality has motifs and counterpoints, if there are rhythmic characters and melodic landscapes in a given order, then there is the constitution of a veritable machinic opera tying together orders, species, and heterogeneous qualities. What we term machinic is precisely this synthesis of heterogeneities as such. Inasmuch as these heterogeneities are matters of [...]
