cold silent white

APPEEARING AND DISAPPEARING LANDSCAPES

al — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 19:59:43 +0000

Appearing and disappearing landscapes is a master studio at AHO – Oslo School of Architecture and Design, run during the spring term 2010 by Knut Eirik Dahl, Kjerstin Uhre, Alice Labadini and Ellen Braae.

The notion Stavanger and Jæren is the prisoner of the Norwegian economical Landscape was invented by one of the students. This expression describes both the field of study in our master landscape studio and the character of exploitation of resources in the region. The footprint of oil economy has reached its peak and represent a disappearing landscape.
15 students from seven countries has during the semester developed a new cartography of this territory in transition, reformulated landscape structures and systems and tested this out through a specter of concepts. The studio has evolved through five themes encircling this field, exploring layers of information with the intention of charging the Jæren landscape and seascape with new energy. This thematic journey has created a comprehensive matrix of information on the appearing landscape, highly informed by another journey over 10 000 km creating 11 studios of conversation on our way through Jæren and Greenland, in the footprints of Eirik Raude. It is the sustainable urban territory of our time that is tentatively measured through this studio. (text : Knut Eirik Dahl)

Follow the studio blog on http://www.appearing-and-disappearing-landscapes.blogspot.com/

READING SITES IN EXPERIENCE : ON THE IDEA OF AN AFFECTIVE SURVEY

al — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 19:30:23 +0000

I have presented this paper in conjunction with a Research Poster at the conference As Found at LIFE (Skov & Landskab) at København University.

> pdf

> keynote

Visualizing Sound at TED

al — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 23:11:10 +0000

Relational Architecture : Body Tuning

al — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 18:30:35 +0000

Rafael Lozano Hemmer

Frequency and Volume

Curve at Barbican Art Gallery / London

For the eight Curve Art commission, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer transforms this unique space into an immersive interactive art installation, Frequency and Volume. On entering the gallery, last Sunday, I was struck by a powerful sensation of presence when intense directional lights cast the shadow of my body into the curved white wall. It is a sudden awareness of my physicality, feeling myself as phenomenon of space occupation, weight and density filling the air.Three, four time as big as me, with my shadow I can overlap with the other visitors, my little gestures becoming immense figures in autonomous movement, which I can only partly control. Then the more I advance inside the space, the more I assume consciousness of my actions.

There is a kid, he is improvising a dance, his huge shadow reminds me of some ancestral rituals: indigenous bodies dancing in a circle, invested with the light of a fire. But our projections are not spectral, instead they are precise, there is a sort of technological cleanness that shifts the setting into a time closer to future. Then frequency starts to tune, shadows activate different radio-frequencies depending on their location. A random combination of sounds simultaneously emitted is generated without mediation. Outlines control the frequency, sizes control the volume. I stretch one arm and another radio comes in, I move closer to the wall until the sound is only a subtle whisper, I run towards the light and the space explodes with white noise. The kid is still dancing, his mother joining his movements, far away in space, their shadows intertwining sensuously.

Is this future a shadow theatre where people will be able to experience interactions with each other trough technology, in way that they would never be able on a face to face communication?

( photos : Matteo Poli )

Empirical research is also a question of scale

al — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 23:17:43 +0000

Hilde Haslum´s PhD dissertation Reading Socio-Spatial Interplay has raised today at AHO crucial questions on potentials and risks of conducting a research by design. Haslum has presented her work as a “search for a way of combining architectural and social analysis in order to investigate socio-architectural interplay in current processes of urban transformation”. Field analysis, photo-documentation, crossing of empirical data, interviews: this operative choice invests empirical material of critical importance. As precisely noted by the opponent Kirsten Simonsen from University of Roskilde, empirical material can never be an objective reality, it is indeed always a representation of a selected way to look at the world. In this sense it can never be neutral, nor it can be innocent. Interviews are always the result of a dialogical process between the interviewer and the interviewed, the former contributing to the final statements as much – if not more - as the latter, being able to direct the discourse in a purposeful direction. Photography, again, is a medium in which technical choices are crucial to the significance of the final image, often beyond the shooted subject. Then one can ask how much representative such material is, especially in a research environment. In which way empirical contributions can negotiate a stance, in order to be proved documentations in a research? In Hilde Haslum´s work there is also a question of scale. The relationship between an assertive generality, necessary in a research investigation for its outcome in the discipline, and the reality this investigation is grounded in, is also critical. “Microanalysis” has been here the chosen operative mediator. This question is crucial in my research also. When I talk about “perceptions” the immediate question is “who´s” perceptions? Which degree of generality one has to accomplish for a research to be such and have a relevance within the disciplinary field(s)? There in also an issue of comparability hidden within the lines. How opportunistic can we be in the choice of core concepts while building an argument in a comparative dialectical process? ”Micro” is a very specific approach that I believe has a great potential, for its manifesto-like declaration of its intrinsic limits. Yet one must be very conscious about the extension of one´s arguments – in space, as well as in the conceptual landscape the research is situated. Scale has a role in determining the degree of affirmative will behind a gesture, a piece of poetry has not the same rhetoric as an ephic poem. But, on the opposide side, if the micro remains such without claiming to become a general principle, can it still be called research? Perhaps yes. Research in this sense will not be a definitive answer, but the creation – or ampliation – of questions within a world. Addressing very small issues in order to inform by fragments an ever changing pattern of disciplinary knowledge.

Walk!

al — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:26:23 +0000

Hamish Fulton

KORA

Galleri RIIS / Oslo

Walking is a creative aesthetic practice. Approaching a discourse on the work of the artist Hamish Fulton, it might be interesting to read what Fancesco Careri writes in Walkscapes. Walking as an aesthetic practice (2002). Hamish Fulton takes the simple movement of walking as the generative act of his work, the outcome of which varies from diaries, to photography, to collages to painting. In this sense the objectivity – i.e. the object qualities – of the piece of art retains meanings only in direct relationship to the experience it results from, that of individual walking. It is this narrative quality in the work of Hamish Fulton that I find most fascinating. A text is created in the lightness of a gesture, walking, that narrates the construction of a landscape in one to one relationship to the world. I still remember the feeling when I was walking in Patagonia, last July: an empathy after few days was established with the surrounding nature that any gesture, any said word was steeped in it and immediately out of control talking about it. There is no physical sign left in the landscape, nor there is an artistic representation of it. The reality of the world experienced reveals its presence through an individual perception of beauty. Behind the gesture, a generative feeling, an absolute information. There is also a speed in walking that directs our perception. The same speed is reproduced in the white rooms of the Galleri RIIS in Oslo, showing in these days a work called KORA. KORA is, among Fulton’s biography, an unusual work. When the act of walking becomes intertwined with symbolic references and meanings, a certain innocence inherent in the curiosity of a “journey” seems to be lost, in engagement with the prescribed experiential purpose of a “path”.

Immaterial?

al — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 17:09:42 +0000

When I first presented my research proposal at AHO, its title was Immaterial Landscapes. Immaterial is not the opposite of matter. Indeed, this word recalls in my imagination a presence that does not have weight and is perceived immediately as an affirmation in absence. Intangible, changeable, light, ephemeral… Rediscussing the term immaterial I will look at different states and consistency of matter. Where different degrees of materiality can be discussed, a dynamic factor will be introduced, that perhaps the dichotomy im-material / material was cutting in an oversimplified definition. In the meantime I have found this image, belonging to one of the beautiful works of the czech artist Nedko Solakov. Is materiality just a challenge to gravity?

Nedko Solakov, Dead-Lock Stories, Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, 2005

This story begins with a flight

al — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 23:32:18 +0000