how many people are in space right now?

:: via

A Spacesuit Ballet

:: via swissmiss ::

The Casket of magic: home and identity from salvaged objects

Susan Digby

_ objects can be mobilized to make a home in unfamiliar surroundings. p.170

_ Closely related to possession of souvenir objects are performances of place-making, specifically homemaking (Miller,2001) p.170

_ … mobile people use objects in performances that construct both home and away … p.170

_ I suggest that collections of salvaged-object souvenirs and their inscription constitute one such spatial practice of travel and that their collection, together with practices associated with them, serves to reproduce knowledges and constitute identities. p.171

_ Souvenirs are not generally objects of need but items gathered, signified or created in response to nostalgia for other and past places. (…) Through them, places and actions can be revisited. p.171

_ Susan Pearce comments that: “Objects hang before the eyes of imagination, continuously re-presenting ourselves to ourselves, and telling the stories of our lifes in ways which would be impossible otherwise”.(1992: 47). For Susan Stewart, souvenirs serve as a trace experience fulfilling “the insatiable demands of nostalgia” (1993:135) p.174

_ The word “salvage”, derives from the Latin, salver – to save, and the primary meaning is that associated with compensation for saving a ship or a cargo from the perils of the sea, or for lives and property rescued in a shipwreck. (…) In terms of souvenirs, as mentioned earlier, salvaged-object souvenirs are not officially sanctioned objects exchanged for money in a store dedicated to selling hegemonic memories of a place; rather they are salvaged encountered objects. (…) They are objects to which individual meanings are attached, often seemingly of the everyday, plucked from anonymity or destruction. Attached stories are those from previous lives as well as those newly made, such as the story of the find and acquisition”. p.175

_ Bassett Digby´s collection of salvaged-object souvenirs and the activities around it act in similar ways to the collection of quilting displays. The similarity lies in the precesses of memory recalling and reforming through telling stories linked to locations, many of which are distant in time and space. As with the quilt components, many of the meanings are not inherent in the objects; rather, meanings are invisible, attached only though stories. p.176

_ to an outside person, the contents of Bassett Digby´s tin would have appeared not as a “casket of magic” but as a tin containing the debris of living, “stuff”, without meaning or “junk”. However, I suggest that the tin (…) contains items that are constituent to Digby´s identity and provide a spatial mapping onto the landscapes of his travel. p.177

_ + – collecting as a search for revenue from a source other than his pen. p.178

_ Performances of telling enrich and rework stories associated with objects. (…) It is a double inscription of the objects. p.180

_ Stories connected to souvenir objects are not static; rather they are mobile and fluid. The interactive telling is a performative mapping during which alterations in and evolutions of the stories can be expected to occur. p.182

_ … the telling of stories associated with the objects was more important than the objects themselves … Thus objects act as containers for stories, they are “wild things” to which a variety of meanings can be attached. p.182

:: pdf file

15 April 2011“Renowned film director and photographer Wim Wenders discusses his new exhibition of mostly unpublished photographs with Professor Yve Lomax (Goldsmiths University), in his first show in London since 2003”

15 April 2011

“Renowned film director and photographer Wim Wenders discusses his new exhibition of mostly unpublished photographs with Professor Yve Lomax (Goldsmiths University), in his first show in London since 2003”.

some notes:

_ titles, captions, takes us towards a place,

_ place for things out of place

_ having a place, naming a place,

_ place brings displacement

_ strange and quiet :: as adjective or verbs

_ places becomes quietly strange and strangely quiet

_ as a traveler you discover places

_ getting lost as a royal experience

_ it is getting difficult to get lost

_ space are underrated, because there are basically no more unknown places in the world

_ the experience of being somewhere, looking at a place, start reading the place, is something we all forget to do, because we thing we know it already.

_ asking locals about the place as a big mistakes

_ we are loosing the ability of being somewhere, exposing ourselves, to read the traces we see and let the space tell us its story

_ a space can suggest a story (related to his movies)

_ the place belongs to the story and the story belongs to the place

_ story as an expression of that place :: “as soon as I start feeling I could be somewhere else and I could tell it somewhere else, I get very lost (…) not in a good way”

_ place steps into the background :: necessary process in film making.

_ photography gives the chance to give place a center stage and let it keep it :: stories becomes a bit more like a secret

_ photographer as a translater between the place and the viewer

_ but as soon as you have people, even in the photographs, they dominate it right away

_ sense of place once was critical for survival

_ how does a place affect me?

_ we as a result of a place

_ people can tell us about the place where they live, but we can also hear this from the place itself.

_ dangers are eliminated, there are maps, signs “please stand here, take a picture and move on”

_ to relate to a place not being a tourist

(to be continued :: 30:05)

Area Chicago

“Because maps are a visual tool for sharing information with others. Because they can be produced by many people and combined together to tell stories about complex relationships. Because maps are never finished and only tell part of a story that can constantly be expanded upon. Because power exists in space, struggle exists in space and we exist in space. Because we cannot know where we are going if we do not know where we are from.”

Michel Foucault. Of Other Spaces (1967)

“The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment”.

http://hurry-slowly.net/

About Hurry Slowly :: “This web page was developed by Ingrid Hjelmstad and Aashild L. Øren as a part of our master thesis by the Faculty for Architecture and Fine Arts at the NTNU”.

Berlin – Fragmented City

some quotes

_ Berlin is a city where such a fragmentation can be clearly read. Not only through the inner-city emptiness, but also because of the many crashes of different realities which can be observed all over the city.

_ the city is pieced together of fragments from several historical layers.

_ After the fall of the Wall, large inner city areas lay empty, and a heated public debate arose on possible future developments and strategies; hence how the future stories of the city could be told.

_ Oswalt continues to claim that what is missing can never be replaced by something which simulates history, and that these buildings do therefore not create the desired homogeneous image. Rather, they add yet another dimension to the conglomerate city.

”Die Simulation können das Fehlende nicht ersetzen, sondern nur  auf das Vermisste verweisen. So wird in Berlin die Heterogenität der Stadt, die eigentlich kaschiert werden soll, um eine weitere Dimension bereichert” (Oswalt)

_ new projects have “failed to project an image that Berliners could recognise” (Bisky 2006).

_ Berlin is a conglomeration of parallel worlds.

_ urban development projects initiated by the planning authorities in Berlin after the reunification do not correspond with people’s perception of the realities of the city (…) “crashes of realities”

_ Temporary use has even turned out to be “an important component of urban planning in Berlin” (Overmeyer 2007).

_ A void so filled with history and memories would lie as a reminder, telling the story of the city with its emptiness.

_ Thus, in an empty space it was easier for him to recall his memories and reconstruct the former platz in his imagination (Casu and Steingut 2006). Wenders continues with comparing the function of empty and open spaces in a city to reading between the lines in a text: “…the empty spaces in the cities work like that as well. They encourage us to fill them up with ourselves” (ibid). Perhaps this points out the most crucial quality of empty space, that it is a space of opportunities, of future stories. Thus, these places trigger our imagination; encourage us to add our own stories to the city. Because where nothing exists, everything is possible.

„Wo nichts ist, ist alles vorstellbar.” Phillip Oswalt

:: http://hurry-slowly.net/

In Conversation with Antonio Negri

Hans Ulrich Obrist: The last time we met was with Rem Koolhaas in 2001, and we spoke about what could be called your “city projects.” What are you working on related to this subject at the moment?

Antonio Negri: I can start by saying that while discussing the concept of the multitude, Michael Hardt and I found ourselves facing the question of the city, which we brought up as part of the question of the territorialization of the multitude, the space in which the multitude deploys itself. To be honest, I think that while a number of problems started to clear up after we wrote Multitude, others remained in the shadow, like this fundamental question of space.

…

Antonio Negri:   (…) But today the city, and the metropolis in particular, have become directly productive. And what exactly does this production consist of? I would say that it consists of the movement of people—it is in the construction of urban cooperation, in the liberty and the imagination of people who define and provoke it. Look at Brazil. They say “But there is so much misery…” And of course, it’s true! But I would respond, “Then go look what is in that misery.” Because there is an incredible capacity for creation in that misery, in those favelas. Music, human connections, and, of course, at times, deadly connections as well. But there is an enormous creativity that produces new things, and that creativity does not come without negative aspects.

…

HUO: (…) It’s a question that art students ask themselves a lot, and it bothers young artists too: one asks oneself whether there is still a space for resistance.

AN: Today the elements around which we can create points of reference—even points of resistance to the market—are the ones built on the land of the common. Because the common basically signifies that which costs nothing, that which is necessary, that which is participatory, that which is productive, and that which is free! And I believe that there are new use values already present in our common, and that these values can be easily spotted. Just think of the metropolis, where ninety percent of what we do are common things that cost us nothing—or at least could cost nothing if we made the effort to make them so…