If you happen to be there... or around or like it so much to get on a plane/train/bus/car/bicycle... check this: images between images


Saturday, December 3, 2005 at Princeton University
101 McCormick Hall
10 am - 5 pm

All is good... but here is my biased pick :)

Nomadic
Janet Bergstrom, Professor and Vice Chair, Department of Film, Television and Digital Media, UCLA
Border Times: Akerman's Geopolitical Frame
Philip Rosen, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University
Crossing Borders, Navigating Boundaries, and Embodying Time Past: Chantal Akerman's Installations
Bruce Jenkins, Dean of Undergraduate Studies, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Please note that "To register for the symposium please email between@princeton.edu."

Watch the MoMa exhibit: SAFE, Design Takes on Risks + read Ulrich Beck, Risk society, Towards a new modernity (London; Newbury Park, Calif. : Sage Publications, 1992)! Survival kits... and again more objects...

InternetActu.net [get the newsletter!]
http://www.internetactu.net
La synthèse hebdomadaire de la recherche et de l'innovation
n°92, le 18 novembre 2005

InternetActu #92 features an article by Daniel Kaplan, a report on the activities of Ci'Num, the conference on Digital Civilizations I have attended early October.

Below, few excerpts of the article entitled “Civilisations numériques”, première : Conquêtes et conflits

"Nous entrons dans un cycle technologique marqué par la disparition d’un certain nombre de frontières auxquelles nous sommes tellement habitués que nous avons fini par les considérer comme naturelles :

Entre le naturel et l’artificiel (même si l’on peut arguer que dans notre monde développé, il reste peu d’éléments qui ne doivent leur existence, leur forme ou même leur préservation à la main de l’homme),

Entre le mécanique et l’organique,

Entre le numérique et le physique.
La “méta-convergence” des sciences et techniques de la matière (nanotechnologies), de la vie (biotechnologies) et de l’information (technologies de l’information et sciences cognitives) résume ce changement de paradigme. L’”intelligence ambiante”, autrement dit la dissémination de puces dans l’environnement, les objets et les corps, et leur articulation au travers de réseaux omniprésents et “sans couture”, le préfigure aujourd’hui."

"En ces temps de mondialisation, on n’a jamais autant parlé d’identité : identité collective, nationale ou religieuse ; identité personnelle, mouvante, éventuellement multiple, libérée des attaches de la naissance, en construction continue au prix d’une constante inquiétude ; identité administrative, à l’inverse toujours plus figée, sécurisée, biologisée, pour répondre à la fois à la crainte du terrorisme et aux besoins des relations électroniques distantes.

La mondialisation est souvent assimilée à une forme d’homogénéisation. Pourtant, de la pratique réelle des technologies et des réseaux, émerge plutôt le sentiment d’une appropriation au bénéfice des différences, de l’expression active des identités individuelles et collectives [...]"

How long one can dwell in transit? Check the Voltaic™ Solar Bags.

:: the making of environments for living in the age of physical, mental and digital mobilities : is the title of the lecture I gave Monday November 14, 2005 at the Bartlett, London, UK, to students enrolled in the Master of Science Adaptive Architecture and Computation program, and for the BENVACO2 Digital Space and Society module. I had been invited by Ava Fatah gen. Schieck, a Senior Research Fellow at the Bartlett, who I first met in Tokyo at the Metapolis and Urban Life Workshop. She had read Parasites?, the article published in the proceedings of the workshop.

As stated in the course description, "The MSc Adaptive Architecture and Computation replaces the MSc Virtual Environments as the Bartlett's taught MSc in the field of digital design. It draws on the unique multidisciplinary milieu at the Bartlett School of Graduate Studies to bring together designers and programmers in the pursuit of enhanced architectural product and process. The course begins where many leave off, with the realisation that computation is a means, not an end, to bringing about a revolution in how we approach architecture. As such, the course is underpinned by a social theory of architecture, space syntax, which examines the links between the configuration of space, people and society. [...]"

My thoughts on automats (as described in Parasites?) had reminded Ava of the coincidental research on ecomorphic design (and introduced to me by Alasdair Turner, Lecturer in Architectural Computing).

Sheila Kennedy ("Sheila Kennedy is a founding Principal of Kennedy & Violich Architecture, (KVA) an inter-disciplinary practice that explores new relationships between architecture, technology and urbanism in contemporary culture.") is currently teaching the following studio: Shadow Cities: Nomads + Nanomaterials at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design! (this tells me that I clearly need to finish my thesis!)

Course description excerpts:
"Technology Remix: El Terminal / SHADOW CITIES will reconsider the traditional relationship between building infrastructure and architectural form through the design of a new public bus terminal and market structure in the Centro district of the Mexican city of Zacatecas."
"Nomads / SHADOW CITIES will study and address the needs of the nomadic Huichol people of Mexico, The Huichol (Wirrarica) are one of the few indigenous groups in Mexico to have maintained a large corpus of Mesoamerican textile weaving, thatch and wood braiding traditions. The Huichol are a nomadic culture, traveling (often on foot) 400 miles on annual journeys to the Pacific and the Sierra Oriental."

Leading to the other interesting link (I let you explore :) at the University of Michigan: Nomads + Nanomaterial, Sustainable Textile Building Technologies in Architecture

It happened on Tuesday November 8 starting at noon... Robin Chase had invited me to participate to SHARE and "discuss with professional designers and innovators interested in sharing ideas and experience on mobile design. Thanks to efforts in miniaturization, we are entering an era of "everything, everywhere, all the time". From iPods to ultralight laptops, we are taking our professional and social lifes mobile."
This happened at the consulate of Switzerland: SHARE, 420 Broadwaystreet, Cambridge, MA!
To be continued...

we-make-money-not-art is a cool blog! Search "travel"! You will find a lot of curiosities and for example a project by Valeska Peschke: instant home... all worth rss-feed ;)