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"At present, the single-family house is an erratic architectural pursuit. It is a product of patronage for the few. Developer cost-driven productions and popular taste in housing turn the masses elsewhere for shelter. Yet the architectural housing exercise still holds value. An opportunity for experimentation, domestic design has helped many renowned architects develop reputations. Ellwood modeled his practice on a distinct set of ideas, and actively marketed his ability to produce the commercially desired modern home."

(loudpaper)

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fakeshop


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utopian plagiarism

Critical Art Ensemble: Plagiarism often carries the weight of negative connotations (particularly in the bureaucratic class); while the need for its use has increased over the century, plagiarism itself has been camouflaged in a new lexicon by those desiring to explore the practice as method and as an alegitimized form of cultural discourse. Readymades, collage, found art or found text, intertexts, combines, detournment - all these terms represent explorations in plagiarism. Indeed, they are not perfectly synonymous, but they all intersect a set of meanings primary to the philosophy of plagiarism; they all stand in opposition to essentialist doctrines of the text: They all interpret that no structure within a given text provides a universal and necessary meaning. Consequently, one of the main goals of the plagiarist is to restore the dynamic and unstable drift of meaning, by appropriating and recombining fragments of culture. The pla! giarist sees all objects as formally equal, and thereby horizontalizes the plane of phenomena. All texts become potentially usable and reusable. Herein lies an epistemology of anarchy.







Merzbow - "Ananga-Ranga"
from the album Music for Bondage Performance.
Extreme Records (XCD008) 1994.







Arthur Kroker: The millennium is most certainly not the so lamented "end of history," nor a period of "post-history," but, most definitely, the beginning of recombinant history. We live, that is, at the edge of a fantastic intensification of a history that is yet to be written: the telematic history of the virtual body. It is a history marked by a double moment: its reflex, the archiving of the horizon of human experience into relational data bases; and its dynamic will, a will to virtuality, the creative recombination of our telemetried past into monstrous ("The will must be made monstrous"-Rimbaud) hybrids that will form the incisions of the electric landscape of the emerging century. Data trash? We are data trash, and it's good. Data trash crawls out of the burned-out wreckage of bodies splattered on the information superhighway, and begins the task of putting together the pieces of the (electronic) body together (again). Not a machi! ne, not nostalgia for vinyl, and most certainly not a happy digital camper, data trash is the critical (telematic) mind of the twenty-first century. Data trash loves living at that violent edge where total human body scanning meets an inner mind that says no, and means it. For who can now speak of the future of a postmodern scene when what is truly fascinating is the thrill of catastrophe, and where what drives on economy, politics, culture, sex, art, and even sighing is not the will to accumulation or the search for lost coherencies, but just the opposite - the ecstatic implosion of postmodern culture into excess, waste, and disaccumulation.




2.) Appropriation - The manner in which a recombinant element is handled as a discrete entity, that is, the changes or treatments which are applied to it in its movement from a preceeding context to a current one. Though the shift of contexts serve as the condition for this mode of recombination, the emphasis is on what specifically happens to the formal (and thus hermeneutic) properties of the specified and isolated recombinant element in that contextual shift. Changes in a recombinant text can be a matter of (recombinant) innovation and technique (as the OuLiPo has shown), and, for a certain situation, the appropriation of earlier techniques - avant-garde or not - can have varying effects depending on the text to be treated and the discourses involved. Appropriation may take place on the level of concepts/ideas/theoretical paradigms, on different formal bases such as linguistic alterations, formatting, or it may be based on a pastiche of outdated or traditional c! haracteristics such as genre, or individual (artist-based) and historical (period-based) style. The degrees to which appropriations are meant to be referential may also vary, from Joycean reference-games to indistinguishable mutations in Burroughs, each also varying the importance placed on the contexts from which an appropriation emerges (it may be less important to know which exact scientific article it is than to produce the effect of a scientific article, it may or may not be important that it is from a newspaper article, it may or may not be important that a certain author/text is being appropriated). Examples are any recombinant texts since this is but an emphasis on a fully interconnected phenomenon, but isolated examples include the Cabala (temura, notakarion, gematria), Tzara's "How to make a dadaist poem", as well as Burrough's treatments of specific texts (scientific/rehab articles, Rimbaud), and Acker's novels (diary, pornography, the myth of Rimbaud, sci-fi,/! /




Appropriation

Acker: What a writer does, in 19th century terms, is that he takes a certain amount of experience and he "represents" that material. What I'm doing is simply taking text to be the same as world, to be equal to non-text, in fact to be more real than non-text, and start representing text.
Sherrie Levine: In most cases it is reduced from the original but maintains the size of the book plate. The watercolors and drawings are traced out of books onto 11-by-14-inch pieces of paper. The paintings are easel-size on 20-by-24-inch boards. The pictures I make are really ghosts of ghosts; their relationships to the original images is tertiary, i.e., three or four times removed. By the time a picture becomes a bookplate its already been rephotographed several times. When I started doing this work, I wanted to make a picture which contradicted itself. I wanted to put a picture on top of a picture so that there are times when both pictures disapp! ear and other times when they're both manifest; that vibration is basically what the work's about for me - that space in the middle where there's no picture.

excerpted from : Decay Heraclitus Velvet "Recombinant" [Textual Composition - Eugene Thacker] (interview)


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death by architecture online journal links



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error message generator

(boingboing) (atom smasher)

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"The iMac proved that consumers crave high design within economic reach. Architect Michael Graves achieved household-name status selling teakettles at Target. So when Robert Humble, AIA, and Joel Egan, Associate AIA, insist that prefab is about to take off because the public is demanding design sophistication in their housing as well as their shoes and MP3 players, it's hard to argue. “We see an opportunity to potentially influence design for the next century, and we mean to do it right,'' says Egan."


(cargotecture)

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Yet through conversations with people familiar with the circumstances—including a student who witnessed the original incident—a picture emerges of a crisis that began on November 29, when in the course of a performance for a class taught by visiting instructor Ron Athey, a graduate student entered a classroom at UCLA's Warner building where roughly thirty other students were gathered. The student, wearing a coat and tie, produced either a gun or a convincing replica of one, put what looked like a bullet into the weapon, spun the cylinder, and held it to his head, Russian-roulette style. He pulled the trigger, but the gun did not fire. The student then left the room; while he was out of view, a shot was heard, at which point he returned, now apparently unarmed. A short discussion ensued between what the witness described as the "freaked-out" performer and a room full of people who were "a little frozen and a little scared," and then the class broke up for the day. This version of events expands upon but is basically corroborated by UCLA's official statement made by assistant vice chancellor Lawrence Lokman, who said that the performance "raised a number of important issues and concerns for faculty, staff, and students with regard to artistic freedom, safety, and the boundaries of performance art within an academic setting." He added that the dean of students office and the University of California Police Department were investigating to determine whether the student had used "an actual gun, or a replica."

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bjork's new spike jones vid triumph of a heart


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the physical appeal consumers quickly associate with design could "become more invisible, more transparent." In other words, you look through the design rather than at it and, it is hoped, register a product's appeal on a less conscious level.



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