Sunday, January 27, 2008

light criticism

"Between October 2006 and December 2006, the City of New York has removed or obscured 59 illegal banners on sidewalk sheds. In that same period, Citibank Chase was forced to remove all illegal sidewalk projections at branches around Manhattan. And now, years into NYC’s crackdown on graffiti writers and protesters, after we’ve watched our friends be detained, arrested, beat, fined, tried, and given real jail sentences, not a single corporate toy from any ad firm has had to do any time." graffiti research lab

building on cinematic vision


"Sonny Astani walked into a Westwood movie theater in 1985 and saw the film that changed his life: "Blade Runner," the science-fiction tale that imagined a dystopian Los Angeles where jet-powered cars zoom past skyscrapers covered with enormous, cinematic advertisements. Decades later, the Iranian-born businessman is determined to bring some of those futuristic images to life. His plan? Attach an animated sign 14-stories tall on the 33-story condominium project he is building in downtown L.A." David Zahniser, Los Angeles Times

Friday, January 18, 2008

color like one other

"Mad-hatter artist Graziano Cecchini has struck again. The public-art prankster who filled the Trevi Fountain in Rome with blood-red dye last October released 500,000 brightly colored plastic balls Wednesday from the top of the Spanish Steps in Rome." By sonia zjawinski,blog.wired.com

Sunday, January 13, 2008

MediaSCAPES studio final review















The MediaSCAPES design studio final review took place on December 13, 2007. We were joined by a diverse range of critics attending from Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco-
Jason Anderson, Juan Azulay, Benjamin Bratton, Christian Bruun, Jean Michel Crettaz, Rene Daalder, Blair Ellis, Jeffrey Inaba, Carla Leitao, Marcos Novak, and Scott Perry.
















Projects were presented by
_Kenneth Cameron
_Nina Marie Barbuto & Bjork Christensen
_Jordan Kanter, Arthur Switalski & Bao Quoc N. Doan
_Christopher Norman
_Guillermina Chiu & Sepehram Khamjani
_Jihyeun Byeon
_Saman Hosseini-Pou & Salman Masmouei
_George Labeth
_Hao-yun Ambrose Chuang
_Valentina Vasi

Student Projects can be viewed individually
at this link: MediaSCAPES WIKI
















The studio brief proposed an investigation of the 'Post Empire' world in relation to political agency in contemporary society:

POST-EMPIRE SCAPES: MediaSCAPES
Professor: Ed KELLER
Assistant critic: Greg THORPE

'Parallel Realities, Trans-national Archipelagos, New Urban Ambiences
"Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication...
But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world..."

This voiceover from Jean Luc Godard's film Alphaville, spoken as the camera pans across nondescript post-war middle class high rise residential towers, identifies two kinds of global systems. The first is the wildly proliferating Hollywood mythmachine, which is able to colonize most of the world as America's most visible export, and which Godard satirizes directly in his film, by creating Lemmy Caution [E. Constantine] as a doppelganger of Bogart; and second, the global space which began to coalesce as the world recovered from World War Two, when urban centers were rebuilt and global networks of capital and materials intensified. The first problems of infrastructure, information science, highways, social housing on a mass scale, and systemic architectures in general emerged in macro-urban assemblies as the embodiment of such systems.

The core principles of the concept of 'MediaSCAPE' are defined through this set of catalyst conditions: the migration of vast numbers of people, caused by a range of geopolitical factors; and the emergence of a new set of infrastructures that ultimately merged the control of physical systems with the control of energetic and information systems: Media and Migration.'