Archive for January, 2008
folk
if emo was the music of maudingly depression and nostalgia, folk as it’s coming, is a music of alienation. while Banhart and Newsom have full bands now, it was the singularity of their voice and the sense of difference that first made them memorable, that little bit of not pretension, but rather just being different. That truimph individualism, a kinda bravado lurks behind ‘m.
links for 2008-01-18
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read it
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who is the most cited sociologist this year?
links for 2008-01-17
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probably the best press the church of scientology has had to date, and that kinda tense intro to funk track in the background… it’s well produced and yes he does beleive in it apparently.
links for 2008-01-16
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if this british researcher is correct, large amounts of socialized government services and idealic nordic natural beauty = happiness
What is the most played space in Video Game history?
Architecture is reliant in the familar, the experienced, the experiences we build up behind it. Video games are mass Architecture, we might all know the Gehry Guggenheim, but how many people have walked in it compared with Super Mario Brothers? Rebuild a scale room model of a level from a video game.
Delueze and Democracy + Meaning and Architecture
Did Delueze accidentally give us the beginnings of an argument against democracy? While e-democracy movements have existed for years along with of course mathematical critiques of voting systems and the simple feeling that it’s just all a popularity contest. Their words, ‘political elite’ and their anti-idealism viewpoint points to a world in which amatuer law drafters might be able to realize their political desires directly and idealist revealed for their reliance on going against the nature of humanity. But similarly, Democracy is repression, of our own viewpoints for those of the majority, is it possible to design a government with a plurality of different laws and viewpoints? Is it possible to have different groups realizing and living in their own values, but sharing a land mass? It’s not terribly far from what’s here now, but the actual admission of it might change things.
This is an olde isssue, here is Howard Rheingold on how the internet is changing democracy, and Daniel Hillis’ thoughts on how it all works, I might add that Mr. Hillis makes a good point, that the limitation of choices might actually make acceptance of the outcome of an election more acceptable, by forcing people into polarized camps (regardless of how close those two camps might be).
Architecture
There’s a little spot up Chareon Krung 8 here in Bangkok that keeps nagging at me. It’s far from me home and inconvient to get to, yet I walk there all the time. It’s an electronics market nudged underneath a bridge. It’s organized in such a means that it seems to cater to age, it starts with remote controled vechiles, moves over the video games, and then end with a small camera shop and a mall for magic the gathering. Strolling it, is like gazing at my childhood in layers, I began with remote control submarines, moved into video games, briefly moved into photography, and then bottomed out into Magic (yeah, I started playing again recently). But it certianly wasn’t the intention of the builders to organize their market in such a manor, it’s simply that it retains a memory of mine in form that gives it meaning, that makes it worth an 8+ stop subway ride and a 30 minute walk just to play Magic. It’s this variance that makes Architecture hard to sculpt into the intentional meaning that film or books have, it lacks a linear narrative and compiles meanings like soil’s layers. Prem Chandavarkar has a pretty good paper here on making architecture meaningful. Such problems don’t just vex the architect, but the media builders of today, after all narratives are quickly dissemenating into multiple stories, perhaps what we should focus on is how space expresses meaning and how to make buildings like that market, perhaps not fully functional, but instead meaningful.
Idea: could you turn a level from Doom or Quake into an actual room? What would it mean if the virtual became real? and how uneventful would it seem stripped of aliens and demons? What would we be suggesting if such a situation existed? Why do we spend so much time exploring barren landscapes on computers that in real life hold little interest to us?
