Wonder-wall

Curious Interface

http://wonder-wall.com/

Collaborative Art (Feminists)

Judy Chicago

Joyce Wieland

writing

i'm paralyzed...or nearly so...moving slower than a snail, than a sloth...progressing at about the rate of fingernails growing or continents shifting (that's about the same, i hear)

i'm writing a paper for contemporary discourses in architecture

and every word and sentence seems so important...

and i'm paralyzed with self-criticism. i think something or write something and then can't decided if it's right or not

so it gets erased...or never even written

not written

no paper

more stress...panic...deadline long past

it's only 2000 words!!!

the gist is this:

an argument for an experiment in material emergence. an experiment which includes as a force the occupation of a space.

people moving through, or lingering in, a space is translated through a computer into vibrations which in turn translates into density of material and thus transparency, acoustic absorbency, and insulation value.

the gist is easier than the paper.

someone else's "material" experiment

i couldn't resist posting this

experimental felt making

at mill race festival
galt, ontario
august 1, 2009
2:28pm

architectural felt

i'm working on my paper for kathy's contemporary discourses in architecture.

the gist of it is that i would like to do a kudless/kolarevic-type emergent material experiment.

so i thought of an exhibit which i saw at the mexican pavilion (venice biennale 2008) called wavefunction. 50 eames molded plastic chairs were mounted on pistons which raised or lowered the chairs based on a wave pattern generated by movement around the room. (in the next room was the computer which calculated the response to movement and showed the waves radiating out from people in proportion to the intensity of their movement.

i love that exhibit in particular...it was curious and inviting and a little bit magical and it made children and adults alike run around the room, stop dead suddenly, whirl around and run back the other way - just to see and here these chairs rise and fall in waves.

and then i thought of felt...i don't know much about felt. there is a felt-making workshop at the art gallery in the school, if i remember correctly. i googled it and found this among other fabulously whimsical creations:but before i even got that far, i googled felt-making and the first two video hits are of architectural felt - mongolians use felt to clad their buildings!

the process of felt-making is fantastically visceral - beating the wool and rolling it to make and shape it. so my thought is to try and combine these two ideas to create a felt shape which is the result of a digital translation of movement in a space into variable forces applied to the wool.

A Dangerous Thesis - Thesis Group Assignment

Just like the clock maker metaphors of the Enlightenment, or the dialectical logic of the nineteenth century, the emergent worldview belongs to this moment in time, shaping our thought habits and colouring our perception of the world.
(Steven Johnson. 2002. Emergence : The connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software. 1st Touchstone ed. New York. p.66)

Emergence as a theory is philosophically challenging to many people. The shift in thinking from top-down to bottom-up requires new cultural narratives which reimagine human agency and fundamentally challenge existing narratives.

A design rooted within an emergent worldview risks knee-jerk dismissal not only because of it's new-ness but because of it's implicit challenge to the reviewer to reimagine their own place in the world as both individual agent and member of the emergent collective both acting-upon and affected-by the group.

In mapping public space, hegemony, social interactions, and social/cultural response to interventions in public places and advocating for further interventions which support adaptive emergence in the citizens of the downtown core, I risk initiating a process with a highly uncertain outcome. Not only will Galt naturally resist change, but it may also revolt against its role as the subject of my thesis experiments.