new kwinter book for any architectural technophiles out there...

Far from Equilibrium

Essays on Technology and Design Culture

Sanford Kwinter

Sanford Kwinter ponders the complex encounters between technology, culture, and architecture. Critical essays offer an extended meditation on infrastructure, war, computation, mechanical and material intelligence, and other multivariate facets of modernity. Far-reaching in scope, Far from Equilibrium amounts to a performance in writing of what Kwinter describes as radical anamnesis: “the imagination's escape from the sterile logic of what is.” Compiling over a decade of architectural and critical writings, many published here for the first time, Far From Equilibrium is essential reading for anyone interested in the state of architecture and criticism today. A primer for (re)thinking design in the 21st century.

Is Architecture one of the Creative Industries?

http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=3106849&origin=BDweeklydigest

An interesting debate, worth posting a comment on the site above, I did, would you agree/disagree?

"Its people like Mr. Kenealy that make this profession so dull and restrained, subsiding it to merely tactics and trouble shooting! If it wasn’t for the creative individuals in this field that strive to "reinvent the wheel" we would still be living in 'thatched cottages’... Architecture is an art, beauty and intellectual thinking. It is very much related to the creative industries where it is cross informed by all the other subjects like fashion, ceramics, fine art, interiors, digital design, product design, modelmaking.....It is a social profession that is at the heart of society that listens and responds and not one that governs and dictates!"

Ted

Explosive Car Ballet...

This is quite amazing, changing something quite horrific into something almost beautiful?!...

"Artist Cai Guo-Qiang has achieved the impossible. His installation Inopportune, featured at MASS MoCA in Massachusetts presents a virtual ballet of individual cars as they twist, revolve and flip in sequence making their way through the motions of a car crash. Long transparent rods radiate from the car, pulsing with dazzling multi coloured light as the vehicles appear in stop motion. Suspended from the ceiling with transparent cables the vehicles takes us through the contorted journey of an experience we would otherwise not want. Described as as "an explosive moment“ expanded in time and space as if in a dream Cai Guo-Qiang's work is dramatic, severe and frighteningly beautiful."


It's a 2006 project if you wanted to have a look but there's also some other interesting stuff on the website...

LINK:
http://www.caiguoqiang.com/shell.php?sid=2

To Travel Somewhere

To Travel Somewhere was made as a result of an artists placement at Adobe/Macromedia in San Francisco.

The aim of the placement was to explore ways in which mobile technology intersects with social experience.

I began this project by asking people I met on the streets to direct me to their favourite place. I followed their directions documenting the route in image and video on my mobile phone. This material was later loaded onto the project web site and positioned on a map using GPS co-ordinates.

The project took place in three cities - San Francisco, USA, Cambridge, UK and Helsinki, FI. All cities synonymous with the development of mobile technology

I was directed to swimming pools, cafés, parks, rooftops, harbours, rivers, museums, markets, bars. I met other people on the way, took detours, got lost, but usually found the right place in the end.

On the web site a kind of psycho-geography or alternative portrait of the city is created as we discover places through the memories of others.

Julie Myers

the 17

link

art&architecture

'Art & Architecture is an independent association providing a public forum for cross-discipline debate.

Celebrating twenty-five years, Art & Architecture (A&A) has been influencing the role of art, design and building, ever since its inception at a landmark ICA conference in 1982. To date A&A has presented over 200 lectures and numerous events, a considerable achievement for a voluntary group.

Applying the principal of art practice at the forefront of innovation, A&A promotes the collective approach as the vehicle to a better public domain. Rallying and empowering practitioners it advocates joined-up thinking between architects, engineers, planners, artists and academics to meet new challenges, such as a low carbon society and "restorative" ecological design.

In order to achieve the desired levels of quality and influence the future of the built environment the aim is to stimulate a lively and open debate through its open talks programme'

has a useful links section to various journals and foundations > see blogroll >>>

Metro Zones

metrozones is a really interesting Berlin imprint. the website has some selected essays translated into English.

link

Visual Complexity

VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project's main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.