Art visual np2

One story by Jorge Luis Borges is interesting to read as it reveals his vision of his own work. This short story, entitled The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths in fact compares two types of labyrinths; the first one, complex, full of tricks and devices and the second whose labyrinthine aspect comes from its extreme simplicity and "desertness". It has been written that those the first labyrinth was assimilated to Borges' vision of James Joyce's litterature, which lost the reader thanks to the complexity of its form, whereas the second labyrinth was Borges' interpretation of his own work which lost the reader thanks to the vertigo of its essence. The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths It is said by men worthy of belief (though Allah's knowledge is greater) that in the first days there was a king of the isles of Babylonia who called together his architects and his priests and bade them build him a labyrinth so confused and so subtle that the most prudent m...

O' Neil Lawrence He co-curated a show called 'Shot in Kingston' at Alice Yard alongside Christopher Cozier. The show explored ideas of a dialogue between Caribbean artists and the possibilities of new digital media which now, arguably, form a new wave of contemporary art. The event is part of a series of events marking Alice Yard's fourth anniversary. The final event takes place on Friday and is expected to be an interactive one, featuring the Barbadian artist Sheena Rose. FROM ALICE YARD: "Barbadian Sheena Rose was artist in residence at Alice Yard in May 2009, when she presented her animated video work Town. She recently participated in a residency and exhibition in Cape Town. Lauren Hinds is a Trinidadian artist working in the medium of the graphic novel. She recently completed a year-long programme at the Centre for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont. Rose and Hinds will spend a week working together, then present their collaborative project to th...

Still from Equilibrium courtesy Alice Yard FROM ALICE YARD BLOG: Heino: “The context of much of my work is concerned with narrative and the reconsideration of personal stories in the public forum. Using a variety of media, such as video, drawing, installation, and photography, I investigate the often simple, sometimes irrelevant encounters and collisions between people and their environments. “Although I strive for universal metaphors, I approach each body of work in a very personal way. Using self-referential experiences as an avenue to illuminating collective experiences, I hope to reveal the subtle social dramas that inform our lives and ultimately bring those realities to the forefront for discussion. “The image above (from < (temporary horizon)) combines the use of common material and repetition to candidly examine the shifting tensions between action and inertia, balance and imbalance. The positioning of the two bottles, though fragile and ultimately unsustainable, evokes surp...

William Heath Robinson is a cartoonist from the first part of the XXth century who spent most of his time to invent complicated mechanical apparatuses in order to achieve a single action. The absurdity that emerges from those machines is, in my opinion, a pretty good expression of technophilia in its ambiguity, most of the time fascinating but also sometimes sustaining its existence by its own contemplation... It makes me recall Hernan Diaz Alonzo's lecture 's conclusion at the Pompidou Center, one year ago, that was questioning the hyper sophistication of the Coyote's apparatuses in order to catch the road runner. This sophistication is so planed and contemplated that it eventually fails but rather than condemning it, Diaz Alonzo claims that this failure should be thought as part of the work. William Heath Robinson is regularly quoted by Peter Cook and CJ Lim as a potential reference for their work and their architectural studios in schools.

Archinect recently published a project entitled A roof is a roof is a roof designed by Janis Rucins for Alex Lehnerer 's research studio at the University of Illinois . The poetical narrative is merely useless -I don't mean it in a pejorative way- and interrogates the very idea of paradigm and pre-conceived ideas by questioning the idea of the roof as an under-developed architectural element. He thus re-interprets the house archetype and code -following Hugh Ferriss - and flips it in a way that recalls the Oblique Function (see previous article ). I recommend reading the nice narrative and explore more documents on archinect .

Pieter Bruegel 's paintings of the Tower of Babel are impressive by their sense of details; one can probably spend one whole day exploring the multitude of scenes populating the canvas... But Bruegel's paintings also acquired the status of paradigm in the Tower's representations. After him, painters from the XVIth and XVIIth centuries -and even later- continued to paint the biblical edifice with similar compositions. Something peculiar in Bruegel and later, van Valckenborch's paintings is that the Tower seems to be based on a mountain as some pieces of rock emerge from it. The Tower seen that way would have not been an addition of material but rather a monumental sculpture of a mountain... For this article I chose five of them but several dozens of them can be seen by following this link . I also already wrote about the Tower of Babel and Kafka's poetical hypothesis that the Great Wall of China had been designed to be its foundation: read the article Read the Chapt...

photograph by Matthieu Kavyrchine I already published some information about R&Sie(n) 's exhibition An Architecture "des humeurs" but I thought it was definitely worth it to introduce less the exhibition in itself and more of the speculation as much as emphasizing the fact that R&Sie(n) is one of the extremely rare architectural offices who offer the totality of documents and information on their website. As an introduction of Francois Roche's lecture at Columbia last week, Mark Wigley brilliantly elaborated on the fact that a lot of contemporary architects are self proclaimed "experimental", "provocative", "on the edge", "innovative"; however the proper of such characteristics is to disturb people by their novelty and few architectures can be defined as suchnowadays. Wigley then affirmed that Roche was one of those few who lead you in the uncomfortable zones of experimental architectures and narratives. Only a little h...

see previous Deleuze's article about Carroll thanks Nikolas !

Following is the programme of an upcoming event I really invite you to join ! I'll be around for an installation, and I'll try to do a report for the unlucky ones that won't be able to come. See you there! Utopia today? Saline Royale Arc-et-senans, 22-24.10.2010 friday 22.10.2010 14:00 – 14:30 Andri Gerber, Brent Patterson (ESA Paris) introduction 14:30 – 14:50 Michel Pierre, Director Saline Royale welcome 14:50 – 15:00 Martial Marquet, Paris Rise above 15:00 – 15:30 break 15:30 – 16:00 Ole W. Fischer (Harvard) After Modernity – architecture between utopia, nostalgia and dirty reality? Comments on the uncertain state of an ancient profession… 16:00 – 16:30 Michel Pregardien (Université de Liège) Il n’y a plus de place pour l’utopie 16:30 – 17:00 break 17:00 – 18:00 David Harvey (New York) 18:00 – 19:00 round table discussion , moderators Odile Decq, Andri Gerber, Brent Patterson 19:00 – 20:30 dinner 20:30 movie projection ...

In 1974, Denis Hollier (the current chairman of NYU's French Department), published a n absolutely brilliant book entitled La Prise de la Concorde that will be later (1990) be translated in English with the title Against Architecture. The writings of Georges Bataille. This book takes as premises the very limited amount of writings that Georges Bataille published about architecture and makes out of them a beautiful treatise on architecture and society. I meant to write an article about this book a long time ago and I never made the time for it, so now I would rather publish an anthology of excerpts of this book than nothing at all. Two quotes about death and architecture stroke me when I read them as I was very interested by the association of two notions at the time I read the book: “For Bataille the world of the Aztecs will remain the model of a society that does not repress the sacrifice that forms it. Ephemeral, at the height of glory and at the peak of its powers, this societ...

“ These are the oldest memories on Earth, the time-codes carried in every chromosome and gene. Every step we’ve taken in our evolution is a milestone inscribed with organic memories- from the enzymes controlling the carbon dioxide cycle to the organization of the brachial plexus and the nerve pathways of the Pyramid cells in the mid-brain, each is a record of a thousand decisions taken in the face of a sudden physico-chemical crisis. Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs. The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. The uterine odyssey of the growing foetus recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its central nervous ...

Following is an interesting article of Manuel de Landa excerpted from a series of "columns" he wrote for Domus Magazine a couple of years ago. It is entitled The Importance of Imperfections and investigates the minor science of metallurgy (to use Deleuzian terminology) as a celebration of material transformation by its main characters: the blacksmiths. The Importance of Imperfections In the ancient craft of metallurgy the distinction between being hard and being tough has long been understood. A blacksmith manufacturing a sword in classical times, for example, knew that the edge and body of the weapon had to have distinct properties. The edge, if it is to stay sharp, must be able to preserve its pointy, triangular shape for as long as possible, that is, it must be hard. But the sword’s body, the part that must perform a load-bearing role, must be tough: rather than trying to hold on to a particular form it must be able to change shape, that is, it must yield without breakin...