It’s in vogue to speak of the advancement of technology as a process that is simultaneously inevitable, and yet, without apparent awareness of contradiction, something which every needs to be on board with in order for progress to occur. Technology “wants” things, but relies on us to do its bidding, in the words of some commentators. I ran across these thoughts from W.H. Auden earlier today:
…it is our task to discover what everything in the universe, from electrons upwards, could, to its betterment, become, but cannot without our help. This means reintroducing into science the notion of teleology, long a dirty word. For our proper relation to nonliving things, the right analogy might be that of a sculptor. Every sculptor thinks of himself, not as someone who forcibly imposes a form on stone, but as someone who reveals a form already latent in it…
We have to realize that every time we make an ugly lampstand, we are torturing helpless metal., every time we make a nuclear bomb we are corrupting the morals of a host of innocent neutrons below the age of consent.
This may seem like a crazy idea – and it may turn out to be, seeing as it does not appear tested in practice yet – but BLDG BLOG has led me to an interesting project by some folks at MIT. The idea is to have tiny helicopters fly in sequence, emitting various colors and patterns of light, in order to form, basically, a large-scale, flying screen in the open air. See their video from youtube below:
I’m about 30 pages in to Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. I may just be overly involved in the link between spaces and imagination (and therefore blind to what a normal person would read), but this one looks like it’s going to be a “must” for our thinking. The main thing I’m getting so far – other than great ideas about how poetry happens – is about the imaginatively shaping work of our childhood homes. They are a sort of “first universe” for our imaginations – a place in which we learn to dream, and to which we often return in revery and thought. I see plenty of direct relation to our earlier post on Lewis’ ideas on medieval cosmos – an inhabitable universe. Both Lewis and Bachelard seem to be getting at an amazing idea: we cannot imagine and live within a void, even if it is more “real” than our value-laden experience of spaces.
In Cube terms, this type of work gives us insight into what shapes our imagination – as well as some of the how and why (embodied, inhabited, childhood spaces versus those that we experience in general). In some ways, it perhaps is a work that offers some direction in terms of large-scale film: it can’t get “thin” in terms of physicality and what James Wood calls “thisness” – the quality of particularity that we look for in fiction. At the same time, with projects like Olafur Eliasson’s, it seems equally clear that experiences of extreme simplicity (say, a monochromatic room) can still meet this criterion (I think) by virtue of their focus and sensory particularity.
There is a somewhat recent TED talk we’ve come across and been intrigued by recently. The talk by Evan Grant is on cymatics: the visualization of sound waves, or modal phenomena. This is something that could be used by artists and engineers to create amazingly unified image-music performances.
Update: see comments section for a link to the art, machinery and people involved with the CymaScope
The photo above (by Noah Sheldon – all of which are worth seeing) comes from the BLDGBLOG article – which might just be better to read than what I was going to say about it anyway. Suffice it to say, $200 million into a project to create a protected environment for life, things more or less went to pot.
I don’t have the estimate for how many millions have gone into the massive online environment Second Life, but it seems that it too is headed toward attrition of a certain kind. In the PC Pro article, Barry Collins argues that the promises of Second Life – among which that its ultimate-sandbox openness to invention would produce new and better ways of expressing humanity – have reduced somewhat since its creation. What Collins observes is that, given complete freedom to explore and create new ways of life, artistry and commerce, Second Life users have narrowed their energies onto real estate speculation, endless multiplication of needless possessions, and prostitution (of sorts that would be illegal in most places in “real life”) – the combination of which is now bringing in more money for the game than ever before.
Reading these articles together (which I hope you can find time to do), I was struck by the imagery of massive, technologically advanced structures built for the purpose of nurturing and guarding nascent and precious forms of life. A spirit of American enterprise and entrepreneurship fills both types of endeavors to the brim with optimism, pride and hope. Yet – anticlimactically – these projects have become (or are in the visible process of becoming) testaments to a spirit of waste, incoherence, self-focus, and social fragmentation. Cast as a place with no upper limits, Second Life seems to have come to be a place with no lower limits.
This is not as it somehow “must” be when it comes to grand projects – and this is not at all to say that there aren’t real, human interactions that can and do take place in virtual worlds and social networking: if either were true, this blog would neither be written nor read. But I still have to ask, what would it be like to see a massive means for artistic expression used well by a community of people – for each other’s sake?
Just watched two amazing films recently: Man on Wire, and Into Great Silence. The films could hardly be more different – what connection is there between a tight-rope walker and Carthusian monks? – but I felt a deep sense of affinity between them. Both films draw you in. Both films give a radical picture of a different, transcendent way of life. Both films depict intense individual and communal discipline and focus, and yet also, incredible fruitfulness and creativity.
In a sense, Man on Wire is the more artistically inspiring of the two. It is incredible to see someone do something so beautiful, so surprising, so dangerous. It becomes inconsequential that the act is illegal – in fact, that only contributes to the surprise and beauty in a positive way (even the NYPD and the district attorney at the time, 1974, had to admit this).
Into Great Silence also manages to capture some of the same spirit of radical, beautiful departure from the norms of society. At first, I had the thought How do they get anything done? There’s so much praying, silence, waiting, chore-doing. But by the end, I had changed my tune. There was a real sense of liberation in the monks’ ascetic lifestyle (at least in the film). They had the freedom to do things that mattered – all day, every day. It seemed the exact opposite of my obsession with “getting things done.”
The most significant commonality I was able to see between these two films was that both show a discipline of being overwhelmed and re-inspired toward the highest possible aims. Both the monks and Philip Petit (the wire-walker) displayed a lack of self-consciousness made possible by the hugeness of their aims and surroundings – the utter absence of false humility.
This poem, “The Man Watching” by Rainer Maria Rilke, really struck me this week. I’ve posted the Edward Snow translation below, from the North Point Press edition of The Book of Images:
__________
I can see that the storms are coming/ by the trees, which out of stale lukewarm days/ beat against my anxious windows,/ and I can hear the distances say things/ one can’t bear without a friend,/ can’t love without a sister.
Then the storm swirls, a rearranger,/ swirls through the woods and through time,/ and everything is as if without age:/ the landscape, like verse in the psalter,/ is weight and ardor and eternity.
How small that is, with which we wrestle,/ what wrestles with us, how immense;/ were we to let ourselves, the way things do,/ be conquered thus by the great storm,-/ we would become far-reaching and nameless.
What we triumph over is the Small,/ and the success itself makes of petty./ The Eternal and Unexampled/ will not be bent by us./ This is the Angel, who appeared/ to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:/ when his opponent’s sinews/ in that contest stretch like metal,/ he feels them under his fingers/ like strings making deep melodies.
Whomever this Angel overcame/ (who so often declined the fight),/ he walks erect and justified/ and great out of that hard hand/ which, as if sculpting, nestled round him./ Winning does not tempt him./ His growth is: to be the deeply defeated/ by ever greater things.
________
Not that Rilke had this in mind, per se, but I immediately thought of our different approaches to the world, divided rudely into use and wonder. (I suppose “domination” and “respect” could work too). There’s a way in which scientific pursuits can be fueled either by fear and risk management, or by the intrigue of nature itself.
As I mentioned in an earlier post on C.S. Lewis’ vision of medieval cosmology, there is a way in which we can acknowledge the hugeness and grandiosity of nature without ever inhabiting it, without having the experience of it because of distraction toward smaller things. Part of what we’re concerned with here is a personal and communal discipline, if you will, of being blown away by reality – “to be the deeply defeated by ever greater things.”
A friend was recently in Jerusalem and had the chance to see a show called The Night Spectacular. It’s an outdoor, projection-based show that takes place on the walls of the Tower of David museum. The projection and film work were done by a French company called Skertzo (you can see other interesting installations of theirs at their website – apologies to non-Francophones). The trailer is pretty over the top, which actually makes it harder to get a good idea of the experience. My hard-to-impress friend reports that it actually was quite good.
Is there Cube relevance here? At least in regards to the communal story experience, set in a spacious area, without all the gimmicks of air-jets and lurching floors (this is the type of thing you write when you just know you’ll never make any compromises – pre-foot-in-mouth prose). Probably the most exciting thing here is the ability of filmmakers to do a new kind of story on a new kind of canvas. There is something irreducible about the palette, something very enabling. What we’re ultimately going for is not the abstract advancement of technology, but rather, the right use of new technology to do good art in more and better ways – for more and better purposes, in other words.
This could be a great idea, or a terrible one. It’s actually kind of hard to tell the difference.
Reading bldgblog today, I was struck by images that came to mind as I thought further about the idea of an open-air planetarium, projected onto the low over-cast of London skies above Trafalgar Square. What kind of experience would that be? Amazing and inviting, perhaps (who wouldn’t like to have a window through that cloud cover to the deeps of space beyond?). I could picture a leisurely walk filled with usually invisible constellations and detailed views of deep space phenomena. These types of things would (and have, ever since humans had eyes and stayed awake past sundown) make for excellent viewing.
On the other hand, I had images of a less salutary sort come to mind as well: a complete digitization of the sky – one more source of light pollution, a buzz of projected activity always turned on whether welcome or not, a kind of pixelated graffiti painted over “boring” parts of nature. Though I’ve seen plenty of digital art that involves natural structures as part of the image (projections on mist, waterfalls, fog, etc.), I think the question I still have is in what manner nature gets to serve as inspiration, content, or medium for art.
We ought to keep exploring these types of things. My hunch is that nature will ultimately serve as our best source for thematic content for films in the Cube. Perhaps that’s too obvious – what besides nature do we have to work with? I guess what I’m driving at is that the wilderness – not just patches of grass next to bus stops – may be the place we all need to go, imaginatively speaking, for a renewal of our minds.
The other day, I was relating the experience I had last year: walking in moonlight out over cooled lava in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. My friend and I were trying to catch a glimpse of the place where the flowing, molten rock reached the ocean. It wasn’t a good night for viewing that, but that made no difference to us, because of what we did find: ourselves at the edge of the newly-formed land (you know, the part we’d been warned not to stand on) looking out at the largest waves we’d ever seen, 60 or 70 feet from trough to crest, almost silently rolling to the top of the cliffs – I say silent, but I mean something more like sublime; with a sound of elements moving the earth, not of splashing. I’m not sure that the earth has ever felt so real to me as for those glorious minutes when we couldn’t make ourselves move away from the sight and feel of danger.
I’m not so much a Hemingway disciple as to think of all this as man versus nature, nor so much a hippie to think of nature as a gentle, caring mother. Something else was happening. And I think that something else – the inexhaustible otherness, yet present to my senses – was a sacramental gift; but no less dangerous as such. This is different than a projection which is under our control (or simply a visual annoyance to the uninterested). Could something like this experience be brought inside a theater?
I had the pleasure last week of attending a lecture by scholar Michael Ward. He was talking about his new book Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis(Oxford University Press, 2008). I haven’t read it yet, but have it sitting on my desk next to me, ready to go. The gist of the book is that the Lewis’ Narnia series is, in fact, organized around the classical/medieval cosmological model of the heavens – with the planets, sun and moon all exerting their own, peculiar “influence” over the content of each book, and the rest of the symbolism involved therein. That description may be, to you, one drawn out reason for a yawn, but I find it quite intriguing – particularly since no one has figured this out before, though it was there in plain sight. Dr. Ward spoke of Lewis’ method as “transferred classicism”: taking classical figures, symbolism, and, in this case astrological and cosmological models in order to tell a story about something quite different (a Christ-like salvation history in another world).
I’ve spent quite a bit of my own time and thought considering Lewis’ obsession with medieval cosmology – partly as it comes out in his Ransom Trilogy and partly in his scholarly writings on medieval and Renaissance literature (especially The Discarded Image). The interesting point Lewis continually brings out, both as a scholar and a fiction writer, is that, while not “accurate”, the medieval model of the universe was at least imaginatively engaging. Unlike the boundless void which comes to mind when we hear “space”, Lewis claims the medieval model was, clearly, a real place – vast, yet also comprehensible and meaningful. More contemporary theories of cosmology also tend to place emphasis on inter-connectedness and beauty, but the modernist damage is mostly done. Among other things, our human imagination (at least in places dominated by technological priority and scientism) is hopelessly alone and disconnected in a sea of empty space. That may be “deep” existentially speaking, but it doesn’t ultimately take you anywhere (unless you love slogging through H. P. Lovecraft novels – which some friends of mine do, to be honest).
One way or another, I think one key inspiration from Lewis’ work is that it is possible (and beneficial) to develop stories in such a way that their thematic structure supports their imaginative accessibility while remaining mostly invisible (indeed, invisible to scholars for decades). This, I believe, is different than pulling off a good illusion.
As for the Cube, I find all sorts of connections here. For one, the point that our imaginations reflect the universe in which we believe we live. This can be illusory or over-literal – to the point that we miss deeper meanings in scientific learning. One purpose of the original visions for the Cube was as a place where people’s view of the universe became expanded – but not toward the expanse of nothingness. Rather, to become more real, full, visibly beautiful, enjoyable, and thoroughly livable. That may sound entirely abstract, but the idea is rather in the opposite direction: to expound upon the mystery of the universe in a meaningful way rather than a “shock and awe” trip to the edge of a black hole (which doesn’t sound too bad as a visual story – just not the whole story).
I just read a very thought-provoking article by author Michael Chabon (pdf form here) on the idea of the future. Chabon was (2 years ago, in this case) writing about the Clock of the Long Now – a project of the Long Now Foundation: a group hoping to promote better long-term thinking in many areas. What Chabon writes is very interesting to me, for all sorts of reasons. I suppose it helps that I already enjoy his books, but his insights on this issue are very good, as well as being connected to some of our earlier posting about “alternative futures”. One thing that I automatically agreed with is that our imaginations lead us into our pursuits and inventions. Chabon makes the intriguing point, though, that “the future” – as it has come to be pursued – is really rather archaic (if you can call the 1950s that).
There is an oddness in realizing that, having done everything the “future” of the past wanted to accomplish (minus infinite food supplies and personal rocket packs), we are yet confronted by the same difficulties – and yet more deeply, perhaps we have lived out our past’s version of the future and now don’t know what to do next. There is no more future of the past to live out. So as we see the power of the imaginations of those from envisioned the future before, it should inspire us to re-envision for ourselves that future.
But part of the problem now is that “the future” previously envisioned hasn’t amounted to the utopia imagined – it’s just gotten filled with all of the gadgets and systematization we “always wanted”. The Clock that the Long Now Foundation is making reminds Chabon (and many others who think about this project) to take time to imagine life 100, 1,000, or 10,000 years from now. The incredible thing is, this can sometimes produce only a blank slate – forcing us to realize just how little vision we actually have, and how much “the future” of 60-year-old sci-fi is really a function of the past and present, rather than something we’re actively and creatively thinking about.
It’s been a little too long – especially given all the great things to write about from the past few weeks. I suppose we’ll have to look back in bullet point form:
Other friends who’ve visited commented on the simplicity and accessibility of the experience, but also the surprises to be found there. Those type of comments remind me of the desert experiences that keep coming back to mind in our brainstorming meetings: Is there a way to simplify film (while also making it huge) that clears the mind of digital distraction, opening people to profound experiences of the world around them? That’s why I like the tagline for Eliasson’s exhibit so much: “devices for the experience of reality.” It’s not so much “fantasy” that we’re interested in, but a new way of seeing what’s really there, and imagining what could come next.
In Eliasson’s work, I kept being taken back to the experience of nature. That seems so obvious, in a sense, but it was striking on many levels. As Wittgenstein writes in his collection of aphorisms Culture and Value, “You must say something new and yet it must all be old….You have got to assemble old bits of material, but into a building.”
I’ve watched the presentation by Global Lives executive director David Evan Harris, and really enjoyed what I saw. If you’re interested in hearing him talk about the project, I’ve embedded the video below. You may find yourself skipping around a bit, but the most Cube-related material comes about 21 minutes into the video. Part of the goal of the Global Lives project is to make an art installation to allow viewers to wander through various 24-hour long films of interesting but non-famous people throughout the world. This is a great idea, in my book anyway – and seems to be something worth celebrating and keeping track of for future viewing (so long as it gets made).
What I loved in the Take Your Time exhibit at the MCA was the actively pursued idea that nature itself, seen with new eyes, can provide for us endless supplies of beauty – especially when seen in new juxtapositions, compilations, singular sensory experiences, and the like. The various series of photographs (especially “Horizon series” – 2002) were particularly compelling to me. It was like watching a film, in that scenes were linked together in a logical, proportional way – but unlike a film, in that the scenes were not predictably placed. The mathematical beauty and nature’s patterns are discovered – or re-seen, I suppose. It’s not so much the artist as creative force, but as seeing creature. In any case, it made me so happy to wander around in these pieces today – experiencing light and natural forms in a bright new way.
This makes me wish I could have seen Eliasson’s “Weather project” (part of which is pictured below, as it appeared in the Tate Modern in 2003):
I wrote about Obscura Digital in a much earlier post – but they’ve really taken things to a new level with this immersive visual-auditory performance in Carnegie Hall. The music-film combination is very exciting to see, and completely relevant to our vision.
Between a dawn airport run and my 9 o’clock appointment in the loop, I killed a couple of hours watching a great film that’s been on my shortlist for a while: Tokyo! (dir. Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, & Bong Joon-ho – in three parts, each overseen by one of the directors).
View the trailer from youtube here:
The whole set of three made for an enjoyable experience, but especially the third, Shaking Tokyo (dir. Bong Joon-ho). The lead character (Teruyuki Kagawa) retreats away from the sight of other humans for a decade, until finally breaking out of his “perfect” world into the real, larger, brighter, but still frightening one, in pursuit of another extreme introvert (the pizza delivery girl – played by Yu Aoi). My favorite quote from this segment of the film comes after Teruyuki Kagawa’s character has finally rushed out into the city, only to find that everyone else in the city has fled in doors, into their isolated lives. As one of the characteristic earthquakes shakes the apartment building, a man yells out, “It’s collapsing! Everyone come out!” This isolation cannot continue, but is difficult as anything to escape from once it becomes more and more controlled, less painful.
Even as it participates in the technological world, our goal for the Cube is to find ways to re-connect people, to reverse the trend toward diseased isolation we can so easily see in increasingly mediated lifestyles. Tokyo! itself works this way, but also calls out for us to find more ways to break free from our fear of each other, of sunlight, of reality, of all things beyond our control. The movie’s tagline is instructive: “Do we shape cities, or do cities shape us?” It’s a both/and, but the exploration of that question is very important. It’s interesting that it is the incursion of the “real” environment (sunlight and other humans) that presents that greatest threat to our sense of control, yet also provides a pathway out – far enough to recognize the pallid, small, dirty place we’ve so long called ideal. One of the early inspirations for the Cube was to bring people (who might otherwise never leave the city) as close to the complete experience of nature as possible. Among so many other possible routes, this is still one that drives our vision.
A friend sent me to a great design/film tech site the other day: Whitevoid. I like their aesthetic and mission – very much trying to figure out the best interactions between people and their digital accoutrements.
Here are a couple of their videos on the ol’ youtube (though the Whitevoid site is probably the best way to view their work – I just need visuals in my posts, for neurotic reasons, I guess):
And another, more along the lines of a special category of digital media we call “the courtyard of gizmos” – things related to the hypothetical atrium of the Cube:
It would seem apropos to write this post on a milestone anniversary of the release of the film Koyaanistqatsi, but instead, it came to mind today, a Tuesday, 26 1/2 years later. This has been one of the most significant films of our time on the subject of life in a technological environment. Jacques Ellul’s thoughts figured heavily into director Godfrey Reggio’s vision of “life out of balance”. Ellul is also often on my mind – partly because his perspective is radical enough to be memorable: the city is doomed, so flee from it. Prophesy against it, but also pray for it, because though doomed, it has covered the entire earth, and swallowed much that was innocent. Though its dark heart (the prison, sharing some with Foucault’s thought on that) is irredeemable, there is yet something to be done – a meaningful mission into the technological simulacra that is not optional; we stay afloat or sink always deeper under its crushing pressure (these summary references are from The Meaning of the City).
Beyond Ellul, Reggio’s film explores the insanity of modernized life, the strange beauties within it, and the possible sources of fresh ideas in nature. A connection comes to mind again from Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just (obviously, my favorite book of the summer). Somewhere in the neighborhood of page 29, Scarry makes the argument that beauty is so important for living well and with justice because beauty gives us the experience of being wrong and liking it. Natural beauty can do this same thing: cause us to realize that we’ve been profoundly wrong about life. When we stand in the wilderness of nature, we get to choose again whether we will be alive in person or by proxy – whether we will exist for the sake of our technology, or whether we will use it rightly in the service of others and the blessing of the earth. Koyaanistqatsi stands out to me so much because it brings me into contact with a different pace and horizon of life – the fast, the massive, the insane: these are all more so in this film, a hyper-reality of experience. But because of beauty, I desire this challenge instead of running from it in fear and escapism.
The whole movie has been posted to Youtube, but I don’t at all recommend watching it on any less than a large screen. Besides, product placement does not mix well with this film.
Reading yesterday on defaults, I was reminded of several conversations about the “spiritual footprint” left in art by its creator. In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, “writing” icons is as much about letting God work on you as an artist as it is about working with a material to produce some result. In a sense, an icon is not made, but received – partly from tradition, partly from the overflow of spiritual health given by God. A friend (Baker Galloway) who went on a pilgrimage to the monastic/artistic Orthodox enclave of Mt. Athos spoke at length with the monks there concerning this mode of artistry. Something that intrigued me about their perspective was the idea that the spiritual state of the artist automatically transfered itself through their artwork – and that no amount of intention could overcome this transfer. In this way, the only adequate preparation for producing something of value was through prayer, confession, and reception of grace. The result would not be the artist’s profound vision arriving through a heroic act of will, but rather, as clear a channel toward God as visual possible – a window into heaven. Nowhere in this model is the skill, insight, or fame of the artist brought to the forefront. The purpose and spiritual state of the artist, however, are present (presumably). Perhaps this is the connection to defaults: whether a work of art is a self-referential system, or something the points away from itself while taking the viewer inside at the same time. For icons, this happens in a variety of structural ways – inverted perspective being one example: the idea that the vanishing point for the painting is located on the viewer’s side, rather than within the painting, so that the viewer is included as a participant in the reality portrayed. How might other technologies (besides wood and pigment and hammered metal) be used to include participants in open, expansive systems of meaning and life (unlike a standard video game, or other such closed world)? This is a major question for our work. Plenty comes to mind, both for artists and viewers. A few preliminary ideas might be that artists be mindful of their role – not from the perspective of how important they are (or are not, yet), but knowing that their work overflows from their person with meaning and power of certain kinds, and not just what they had in mind. For viewers, the work of participation and reception – going beyond passivity in our intake of beauty, entertainment, and so forth.
On Orthodox icons generally, the following books have been helpful to me:
I’ve started to pay more attention to things Kevin Kelly is writing, especially on the “non-neutrality” of technology. His Technium is going to be a very important piece as we consider the issue of alternative futures and the imaginative visions driving those possible directions (in fact, the Technium project seems to be Kelly’s direct response to Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near). The post that I’ve just been reading today is “Triumph of the Default” (June 22, 2009). Kelly is commenting on the hidden influence on users’ experience of technology as it comes from its makers loaded with biases and presumed ideals. I quote the posting at length here:
Systems are not neutral. They have natural biases. We tame the cascading choices we gain from accelerating technology by introducing small nudges — by deliberating embedding our own biases (also called a default) into the system here and there. We wield biases within inevitable technologies to aim them towards our common goals — increasing diversity, complexity, specialization, sentience, and beauty.
Defaults also remind us of another truth. By definition a default works when we — the user or consumer or citizen — do nothing. But doing nothing is not neutral, since it triggers a default bias. That means that “no choice” is a choice itself. There’s is no neutral, even, or especially, in non action. Despite the claims of many, technology is never neutral. Even when you don’t choose what to do with it, it chooses. A system acquires a definite drift and clear momentum from those inherent biases, whether or not we act upon them. The best we can do is nudge it.
I think it becomes obvious that our “defaults” as producers and artists – while not controlling the use or interpretation of our work – definitely carry implications to audiences. We want people to take it a certain way, even if that certain way is “to keep an open mind and not assume it only has one meaning.” This is one of many ways in which the presentation space – physical, acoustic, visual, etc. – profoundly influences audience experiences. Think of the difference between taking in a movie passively on a small laptop screen while simultaneously facebooking/twittering/youtubing around and actually taking the trek downtown to that little theater that plays the independent films on a huge screen with warm projected light beaming through always high-resolution analog film (thanks to Read Schuchardt from his thoughts on this topic). Each format “wants” something different from you – and your behavior as a viewer trends toward that demand, even or especially through inaction (as Kelly points out, on a more general basis). This relates directly to whether we will use technology as it is handed to us, or make something else out of it – whether we will shape the tool, or be shaped by it.
For more from Kevin Kelly, watch his TED talk from several years back on the evolution of technology:
Hyperbolically, I wish more than anything that I could believe the second part of this story were completely incidental and poetically just, rather than contrived. Part 1: Artist Mike Bouchet floats a stereotypified McMansion – complete with mind-numbing taupe vinyl siding – through the canals of Venice as a performance piece as part of the Venice Biennale. Part 2: The house, called Watershed, sinks, to become embedded in a mythological aqua-architectural graveyard. See the video here (embedding disabled).
What does this thing (below) mean?
And what does it mean when it sinks – dying, yet becoming a permanent part of the underwater foundations of society? This is, somehow, contemporary splendor – an apex of accomplishment. But why? And what else might we pursue instead? We need renewed vision, healed imagination in order for our cultural products to be worth more than mockery. Our spaces have everything to do with the formation of these visions, while also being the barometers of the state of our collective imaginative virility.
(Thanks to bldgblog for this find – an excellent blog well worth looking into)
