Art visual np2

The biblical episode of the battle of Jericho has always fascinated me. The story from the book of Joshua (6:1-27) introduces the first battle the Israelites had to win in order to conquest the land promised by God after the Egyptian slavery period and the forty years spent in the desert. God gave Joshua instructions in order to take the city of Jericho: the Israelites had to march around the city's walls once every day during six days. Then on the seventh day, they had to do the same but in addition to blow in their horns which would make the walls collapse and the city easily defeated. It always pleases me to imagine a poetico-scientific explanation to this episode by thinking that the horns actually reached the resonance frequency of the walls; this same phenomena that explains why military manuals prevent troops to march on bridges not to risk to make them collapse. I find very compelling the potentiality of destroying whole buildings with only human means (or in that case, mu...

picture: La Fievre d'Urbicande by François Schuiten & Benoît Peeters From October 12th to October 14th, will be held in Lisbon a very interesting symposium entitled Once upon a Place. Haunted Houses & Imaginary Cities . Guest speakers include: - Alberto Manguel (Author: The Dictionary of Imaginary Places , A History of Reading , among others) - Colin Fournier (Bartlett School of Architecture, London) - François Schuiten & Benoît Peeters (graphic novels authors) - Kazys Varnelis (Columbia Univ., NY) - Ângela Ferreira (artist) - Gonçalo M. Tavares (author/writer) The program is attractive with three full days of literary stimulation ! Thanks Pedro for reminding me about it.

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...

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...

see previous Deleuze's article about Carroll thanks Nikolas !

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...

The third issue of Beyond (see previous post 1 & 2 ) has been released. This journal edited by Pedro Gadanho (read his manifesto for boiteaoutils) is smartly investigating current issues by means of essays and short stories, coherently gathered around a specific theme. This third opus is entitled Trends and Fads and attempt to question the factors of influence of the current architectural scene. The contributors to those essays and short stories are: Ole Bouman, Martha Cooley, Mockitecture, MOOV & DASS, Oren Safdie, Georg Simmel, Giovanna Borasi, Valéry Didelon, Krunoslav Ivanišin, Kieran Long, Marcosandmarjan, Ines Weizman, Jimenez Lai, Vanessa Liaw.

On May 2010 was held an important symposium about James Graham Ballard 's literary architecture at the London Royal Academy of Arts. This conference, entitled Ballardian Architecture: Inner and Outer Space , is composed by ten lectures by architects, authors, philosophers, sociologists etc. and two discussions that you can visualize here. The emphasis is made on the ambiguous architectures depicted by Ballard in his novels, both fascinating and terrifying, monumental concrete behemoths that were born with a technocratic modernism. Nic Clear (him again !), quotes Jean Baudrillard in his own lecture. In fact, Baudrillard wrote a small text about JGB's Crash that can be read by following this link on DePauw University's website . Ballardian Architecture 1 - John Gray from static tv on Vimeo . Gray's lecture discussses the latent and manifest content of spaces and buildings, comparing Guy Debord's notion of the spectacle and Ballard's investigation of celebrit...

Cyclonopedia is one of those books that drives you ecstatic for being so different from anything you have ever read so far. In this book, Iranian Philosopher Reza Negarestani elaborates a beautiful narrative of the Middle East seen as a sentient and alive entity. Following the tracks of Deleuze & Guatarri's Thousand Plateaus , Negarestani go far beyond them by granting an alive autonomy to every entities composing the Middle East (sand, dust, oil, plague, rust, war, bullets, rats, corpes, Zoroastrian divinities etc.) except maybe human being themselves. The text is very obscure and sometimes even esoteric, but the feeling of being lost in it provides even more jubilation when a paragraph becomes vivid for the reader. Here are some beautiful excerpts (and there are so much more in the book): “Everywhere a hole moves, a surface is invented. When the despotic necrocratic regime of periphery-core, for which everything should be concluded and grounded by the gravity of the core, i...

[...] " The surgeon hesitated before opening the door. "Look," he began to explain sympathetically, "you can't get out of time, can you? Subjectively it's a plastic dimension, but whatever you do to yourself you'll never be able to stop that clock"- he pointed to the one on the desk-"or make it run backward. In exactly the same way you can't get out of the City." "The analogy doesn't hold," M. said. He gestured at the walls around them and the lights in the streets outside. "All this was built by us. The question nobody can answer is: what was here before we built it?" "It's always been here," the surgeon said. "Not these particular bricks and girders, but others before them. You accept that time has no beginning and no end. The City is as old as time and continuous with it." "The first bricks were laid by someone," M. insisted. "There was the Foundation." "A myth...

picture: Etching by Eric Desmazieres for The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges. Boston : David R. Godine, 2000 As I wrote a week ago, I was lucky enough to write for the last issue of Pratt's grad students' journal TARP which was proposing to investigate new ways of considering Computational Architecture. Here is the article: COMPUTATIONAL LABYRINTH or Towards a Borgesian Architecture Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before its death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face. Jorge Luis Borges It has been several years now since computation has grown within a group of international architecture schools in the Western world. However, something that I regret too often, computational architecture stands as a self-contained discipline. Increasing the limits of the field of possibilities is definitely...

picture: Alice in Wonderland . Walt Disney 1951 The following short essay is excerpted from a collection of texts by Gilles Deleuze entitled Critical and Clinical . Deleuze described the mathematical shift from the depth to the surface achieved by Lewis Caroll through his work. It is also interesting as he write about the smile without the cat, that will serve Slavoj Zizek several years later in order to illustrate his counter-Deleuzian concept of Organs Without Bodies (in opposition to Deleuze and Guattari's Bodies Without Organs ). Lewis Carroll In Lewis Carroll, everything begins with a horrible combat, the combat of depths: things explode or make us explode, boxes are too small for their contents, foods are toxic and poisonous, entrails are stretched, monsters grab at us. A little brother uses his little brother as bait. Bodies intermingle with one another, everything is mixed up in a kind of cannibalism that joins together food and excrement. Even words are eaten. This i...

Still following the adventures of Julius Corentin Acquefacques, prisoner of the dreams (see previous article ), here is another graphic novel by the extremely talented Marc-Antoine Mathieu . This one is entitled La Qu... and has unfortunately not been translated in English (apparently only Dead Memory has been). This novel is once again extremely Kafkaian, but also borrows a small part of its narration to one of the best (and not so known) short story by James Graham Ballard called Billennium , which depicts an overpopulated world in which each citizen has the right on 3.5 square meters. The first image above also illustrate the influence of Marc-Antoine Mathieu since Lars von Trier's Dogville has been released ten years after La Qu... 's publication in 1993. An important precision here, I tried not to spoil the novel by including the best frames of it, so you can still be fascinated while reading it for the first time.

The Lost Drone Army is a short story told by Tim Maly on his blog Quiet Babylon that dramatizes the existence of a mutineer group of drones that threatens to strike back its former masters. MERAUX, La. – A swarm of drones, known as the “Lost Army,” appear to have established themselves in the New Orleans area, the defence commissioner said. The autonomous force has been operating without human control for nearly a decade. Three units were spotted by junkyard workers, about 10 miles from where the reconnaissance units were discovered in November, commissioner Baako Arceneaux said Wednesday. Though the exact nature of the drones remains unconfirmed, goggle imagery provided by the workers matches the profile of constructor-type units. This most recent sighting was close enough to last year’s location that the drones could have been part of the main swarm. But they might also have been blown ashore by hurricane Quinton or Stephanie, said Arceneaux in a news release. “Altho...

Maharishi Tower is a beautiful narrative project by Carlos Teixeira who drew an hindu skyscraper in Sao Paulo (!) after Murilo Rubiao 's short story entitled O Edifício (1965). The story depicts the construction of the biggest and tallest city in the world. Foundations takes five years to achieve and then the building seem never to end and host little by little the entire city of Sao Paulo. I really recommend to click on the pictures below in order to read this fantastic text.

Following the previous article about the desert, let's stay in the realm of sand with the masterpiece 砂の女 ( The woman in the dunes ) by Hiroshi Teshigahara directly interpreted from Kobo Abe 's novel. The plot dramatize the captivity of a man in a house which lays at the bottom of a sand "dwell" in which lives a woman who needs each day to extract a certain amount of sand for the nearby village and in order to maintain her house out from being swallowed by the sand. It represents a daily fight for the existence of her life environment in order to survive against the intractable process of the sand. Whether one talks about the book or the film, the sand descriptions are absolutely splendid and even comports a kind of metaphysical aspect to some degrees. Here is an excerpt of the novel: Sand: an aggregate of rock fragments. Sometimes including loadstone, tinstone, or more rarely gold dust. Diameter: 2 to 1/16mm A very clear definition indeed. In short, the sand came...

Desert is something between an heterotopia and what I would call an atopia (a non-space). It defines itself as a territory whose limits seem to reach the infinite, which is not to say that it seems to have no limits. In fact, in the cinematographic desert, one always tries to reach the horizon as a tenacious impossible quest. I think an appropriate author to quote here is Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio (see previous post ) in his beautiful humanist novel Desert: They appeared as if in a dream at the top of the dune, half-hidden in the cloud of sand rising from their steps. Slowly, they made their way down into the valley, following the almost invisible trail. At the head of the caravan were the men, wrapped in their woolen cloaks, their faces masked by the blue veil. Two or three dromedaries walked with them, followed by the goats and sheep that the young boys prodded onward. The women brought up the rear. They were bulky shapes, lumbering under heavy cloaks, and the skin of their arms ...

Franz Kafka, in his short story called The Great Wall of China, draws an interesting literate association between the most horizontal edifice with the mythic vertical one, the Tower of Babel, the first one being the foundation of the second. I am pretty intrigued by the obvious anachronism and its Cabalistic aspect... "First, it has to be said that achievements were brought to fruition at that time which rank slightly behind the Tower of Babel, although in the pleasure they gave to God, at least by human reckoning, they made an impression exactly the opposite of that structure. I mention this because at the time construction was beginning a scholar wrote a book in which he drew this comparison very precisely. In it he tried to show that the Tower of Babel had failed to attain its goal not at all for the reasons commonly asserted, or at least that the most important causes were not among these well-known ones. He not only based his proofs on texts and reports, but also claimed to h...

The film Fahrenheit 451 is a 1966 cinematographic adaptation from Francois Truffaut of Ray Bradbury 's 1953 novel. More than a visualization of the book, Truffaut's movie is a real personal interpretation and brings something in addition of the original plot. Fahrenheit 451 is the story of a system where firemen are burning every books they find since those records of knowledge are being prohibited. The heterotopia here is this zone in the woods where rebels to the system are living and happen to have traded their name to a book they have read and remembered. Literature and knowledge are thus being transmit from generation to generation as both a hyper-personification of their content (since somebody actually embodies it) and a personification of this same content (since the author is not anymore the important thing here). This heterotopia is then dramatizing a territory where culture is not contained by objects but by people and triggers thus a global solidarity and equality...