After these four days of Transmitting Architecture, it's time for a little budget.
Although we managed to get some really good video interviews, the congress itself was pretty disappointing, and the many critiques and complaints we collected from the very architects we interviewed during our stay is a further proof to this. Ok, transmitting architecture is not easy, but it gets trickier if you lock yourself into a conference stronghold and only express yourself through slides, that most of the time don't show when they're supposed to. As a medium, the congress is not a very conductive one.
However, all of this doesn't mean our congress experience was fruitless. If you guys are patient enough to wait a couple of days, there's a lot of stuff coming up on our video blog, and some of it is pretty entertaining: our old acquaintance Cino Zucchi and CCA director Mirko Zardini - both with a wrestling mask on, at some point - discussing about media; François Roche and Mario Cucinella showing some contrasting views about sustainability and matching ones on the architecture star system; a super interesting interview with Aaron Betsky about architecture and building. We were also able to get a hold on P.K. Das and Adam Greenfield.
As we were collecting material for you guys, another crew was shooting a documentary about the congress, directed by Vittorio Badini Confalonieri. He's also a Mini DV master and saved our asses recovering a cassette that had fallen on the ground and that we thought was lost forever, with some magic expertise only a film pro could have. The documentary will feature lots of interviews and images from the city and the congress venues, but we'll give you more info about it as soon as we have them. For now, be sure to check the blog every day for new videos.
The Transmitting Architecture Report (teaser)
Mapping Lost Imaginaries: Telex From Cuba
We've written here before how underwhelmed we can by sparky new technologies in the service of literature, more often than not they hide in their pyrotechnics a lack of content. The explosions masks a story as thoughtful as George W. Bush and as emotional as the clip on tie of a salesman selling Florida time shares.
Technology hasn't often worked in the service of literature, weak attempts at hypertext bore us and Google has become the place people look for answers not Shakespeare. So it goes. We're no luddites, perhaps this blog is a testament to that.
Two recent websites have sparked interest outside the author and their publicist, the first was indie darling Miranda July's simple site devoted to her book No One Belongs Here More than You, which had July writing out her messages in dry-erase marker with the same kind of self-conscious, awkward cuteness that characterizes her book. Self-conscious awkward cuteness sounds pejorative (and maybe it is a little), but really, sometimes and in some ways, it's our bag; We always make passes at girls (or boys) who wear glasses and dig the naive simplicity of the Beat Happening as much as the next gang of cardigan-sporting, twee-loving twenty-somethings.
This a long way to get getting to the second site, built for Rachel Kushner's Telex from Cuba, released this month. None of the awkward cuteness of July is found here, in fact it's better than most web-art projects we've seen trying to pull off the same thing. The book, we've only read the reviews and the first chapter accessible at the NY Times, but the site built for the book opens up to a map of Cuba with a simple haunting piano music like the last song at the last bar at the end of the road, where Borscht Belt comedians and Cuban strippers come to die.
The site displays a map of Cuba with different locations lined up. Each site, when accessed, gives a brief slide show, like some Gerhard Richter paintings or even some Sebald stories the text/image (and here music) is a little haunting. Snaps of French Nazi Christian de la Maziere mix in with weighted family snaps and glamor shots of some Castro's black bereted female revolutionaries. And the ghostly presence of the images, with Kushner's robust and sometimes sexy prose, brings bout an epiphany. One that maybe attracted Kushner to this space as well. There's a lost world in Cuba.
There was place called Cuba, filled with gambling halls packed with government spies and leftist prostitutes, a Cuba of shitty tenements and fields owned by the United Fruit Co., and lorded over by bully Fulgencio Batista (our man in Havana, another painful CIA blunder), with the rebels in the mountains who can never win, or says the American expatriate sipping rum punch at the country club, knowing little that his waiter works for Castro. It's like all these strange in between places that are now gone forever that play on the American imagination, Casablance when the neon lights of Ric's cafe americain blinked into the desert, or the weathered maps and moving red lines Spielberg plays on in the Indiana Jones films. Some exotic place, filled with excess and troubles, where no one is in the right, but the glamor and the danger mingle together in an intoxicating cocktail. Though this kind of lost imaginary is always tinged with romanticism, we expect Kushner's novel punctures it as much as it explores it.
The first chapter of Kushner's novel (mentioned earlier on the NY Times website)
relates the memories of a man who spent his boyhood as the princely scion of a United Fruit executive, who years later, his exile complete, relates the tales of his lost world. For all its inequity and inequalities that put Castro on the right side of history, is still gone, and the ritual, glamor, and elusive imaginary went with it.
A curious piece of the internets in the service of literature, or more likely something separate from the book, a project born from the same imaginary, producing a strange result of its own.
The Singing, Ringing Tree and Panopticons - Not Just for Terrorizing Prisoners Anymore
We found this video of a rather peculiar public landmark project emerging from the Lancashire midlands, not far from Manchester. Abandoned and depressed since the industrial revolution revolved to Asia, with all the mines and factories shuttering into oblivion, the region has had to start getting creative about how to reinvigorate the local economy.
One of their methods of getting creative is by building a series of unusual monuments, readymade landmarks to drive any kind of tourism up into the English hinterlands, dubbed "Panopticons" with a peculiar interpretation of the word. The "panopticon" we know is the one developed by Jeremy Bentham to provide total isolation and awareness of prisoners, later picked up by Foucault and others to describe the terrorizing surveillance that governments inflict on their citizens. Which is to say, the word coined by Bentham, leaves a bit of a bad taste in our mouths.
One of the most peculiar of these "Panopticon" landmarks is the unfortunately named "Singing, Ringing Tree." Built near a site known for its history of witchcraft, the tree is made of twisted pipes that pick up the wind and thus sing, emitting a truly spooky sound, one that could be easily, and cheaply, used by a horror film for the sound of lost souls. The fanfare and the rhetoric surrounding the project are a bit weird, but the structure itself is so strange and unintentionally beautiful that it doesn't matter. I say unintentionally (given its name and the city press release) because seems an odd way to reinvigorate a dying region by giving voice to its lost souls.
But it works. We think it's truly worth a road trip to Lancashire.
CIA Transmitting Architecture through partying
Transmitting Architecture can be pretty boring at times. But we manage to party the congress away. Yesterday night, after an intense day of working and interviewing, the whole CIA crew gathered with lots of other congress visitors and random Turinese bohemians in Piazza Vittorio. As we were sipping on some fresh drinks, different performers livened up the porticos with music. When it got a little late - for the neighbors - we danced to the noiseless beats pumped through wireless headphones directly into our heads, making the Piazza our own silent disco.
As the night pushed on, a smaller group of partying nighthawks rallied to a rather bizarre Villa in the outskirts of Turin, a very old building turned into a party that the late Stanley Kubrick would have dug. The tipsy crowd danced to the Invernomuto and Shackleton dj sets until rosy-fingered dawn, occasionally climbing the rocky stairs to the bar, where a darker version of Benicio Del Toro - who eventually wanted to beat up our chief editor Fabio - served us a few cocktails.
Making a Country Into a Theme Park
Baudrillard once wrote that the purpose of Disneyland was to hide the fact that all of Southern California was a simulacra, or in other words, a replica for which there exists no original, a fake made real because it's not quite faking anything. In researching this project, we've come across all kinds of curious folds in Europe that make us feel that tourism, not the jetsetting lowcosters using a living Europe, but the hordes going to refurbished pallazzos and the childhood homes of semi-obscure medieval celebrities, that coupled with a declining population, threatens to turn Europe into a museum or likely worse, a theme park.
In Italy, Mussolini (the seeming father of modern Italy for better or worse), interested in uniting Italy under the brand of nationalism, strongly promoted internal tourism to create a better national cohesion. He encouraged towns to cash in on their history, politically useful for him as the celebration of the past hinted at its continuity with the future, in his mind the interminable Fascist Empire. Tourism both internally, and more profitably, externally has made Italy a curious case study and parts of it in particular are especially susceptible to becoming mere theme parks. What happens when your country becomes a tourist trap?
Italy, is not a fake, not a simulacrum, but is still beginning to suffer a fate stranger than even the sunshine noir surreality of Los Angeles. Italy might be becoming a theme park of history and collapsed empires, with the museums and historical centers, like Disneyland, hiding this fact all along. Venice, of which we've done a few missions on, seems a city perpetually in decline, whether it's plague, or conquest, or acqua alta, or the worst yet, tourism eroding the dignity of the city, destroying it in the process of appreciating it. We're loving it to death, and once it's dead, we'll stuff it, mount it, and then love it's well-preserved corpse.
Like Disneyland, maybe Italy should start charging an admission fee to enter the country, matinee prices in the winter, full price during the high season. Or it should manage its economy to try and become less dependent on tourism as the primary form of industry. Venice is becoming a very fragile place, other fragile places have limited tourism, Bhutan as an example, certain national parks and land art. This is a problem perhaps bigger than I've a solution for, even a joking one. But Venice especially and Italy at large, needs to find an answer, or Italians risk becoming only theme actors, security guards, and guides to their own dead history.
CIA Transmitting Architecture with Invernomuto
Day one in Turin and significant representatives of the CIA crew have now gathered with us for Transmitting Architecture. As we stroll through the pavilions, interviewing interesting people as we go, we've got a few interesting things going on ourselves in the CIA outpost in the Oval.
Our friends Simone and Simone, better known as Invernomuto, performed the first of a series of audio/video sessions, mixing live music and images from the remainders out of the Check-in Architecture footage. An intense experience for those lucky enough (as we feel) to be in attendance. The same formula - not the same performance, since it's going to be different every time - is going to take place twice a day. Don't miss the next one.
Architecture is not building
Aaron Betsky makes it pretty clear: it's not the buildings that make architecture, it's the architects, and they don't even really need to build. In fact, architecture is more about unbuilding than building, or so says Betsky.
Betsky talks about architecture like someone who is not only passionate about the building-lingo, but about life in general. It's no surprise he wrote a lot about architecture and sex, also becoming one of the main contributors to a spatial interpretation of queer theory.
During his conference at Transmitting Architecture in Turin, he explained how architecture is the whole process around building, not necessary including it. Thinking, talking, experimenting with an environment's geography, landscape, history, people, relationships, culture, beauty.
The exhibition he's curating, taking place at the Venice Biennale and titled Out There: Architecture Beyond Building, deals with interventions in space and landscapes aiming to make our world feel like home, without covering it with the "architecture graves." That is, the buildings. Betsky's vision is rather minimal: he looks for beauty in simple and subtle things rather than in grand celebrations of wealthy clients that only house bureaucrats.
Making the people feel at home in their world is the mission of the architect, but by people Betsky means the widest range possible. When we interviewed him and asked him about low-cost traveling, he believes that what we call "low-cost" is not properly "low" for the environment, and it's available only to high-end customers and not to the much bigger crowds of the poor of the world, who can't afford to satisfy their most basic needs. We're not so sure.
But enough with the babble, the video interview we made speaks for itself. Check it out.
The research is on!
Unluckily, we're not always partying. We at Check-in Architecture have a mission too: Transmitting Architecture.
Next week we're going to be in Turin, in the lounge area at the Oval. There are three spaces you should check-out:
- the interactive area, where you can access the internet to check out our website,
- the video exhibitions, where you can watch the Carlos Casas and Invernomuto videos and a selection of missions,
- the upstairs balcony where we'll be working hard as usual - and taking some video interviews - in case you want to pay a visit.
Transmitting Architecture is one of the most important moments in our Check-in Architecture research, so make sure you pass by.
NYC Waterfalls
Summer in the City can be pretty damn hot, so a couple of waterfalls might just do. Although it looks a little like shaman material by someone from the rain forest or Niagara, it actually took a Dane to provide the Big Apple with this spectacular - and refreshing - kick to its already iconical Brooklyn Bridge. New York's last public art piece, commissioned by the Public Art Fund to artist Olafur Eliasson, consists in this one waterfall in the picture and three more, falling from free-standing scaffolding towers on the East river. The artist is known for its past success at London's Tate Modern, the Weather Project, worth the museum 2 million visits, and has had the kind of meteori rise softened by green credentials that makes him almost smug seeming to other artists.
Being as tall as the Statue of Liberty, his new public installations will be temporary landmarks and, since the only thing more powerful than water in shifting our perception of a place is moving water, they're granted to shape the nearby area and its relationship with the passers-by. Rivers are the coolest thing ever, and there's no doubt vertical ones have a special appeal of their own.
