I walk the line

WEEK8 - DAY 7

1. SOUNDTRACK OF THE DAY

I walk the line - Johnny Cash

2. PLACES TO KNOW

Jerusalem, Isreal - a video doc

3. PEOPLE TO DISCOVER

Francesco Careri - (Roma, 1966) é arquiteto e, desde 2005, professor do departamento de estudos urbanos da Università degli Studi Roma Tre. Foi cofundador, em 1995, do Laboratorio d’Arte Urbana Stalker/Osservatorio Nomade e, desde 2006, é professor do laboratório de projetos e do curso de artes cívicas da faculdade de arquitetura da Università degli Studi Roma Tre, um curso totalmente peripatético em que se caminha interagindo in situ com os fenômenos urbanos emergentes; desde 2011, é diretor do programa de pós-graduação “Artes arquitetura cidades” da mesma universidade. É autor do livroConstant. New Babylon, una città nomade (Turim, Testo & Immagine, 2001).

4. QUESTION OF THE DAY

5. INSPIRATION

Mappa Mundi

Francesco Careri (aka Piccio, one of the founders of Stalker group in Rome)
Walkscapes: Walking as an aesthetic practice 

“Walkscapes deals with strolling as an architecture of landscape. Walking as anautonomous form of art, a primary act in the symbolic transformation of the territory,an aesthetic instrument of knowledge and a physical transformation of the “negotiated”space, which is converted into an urban intervention. From primitive nomadism to Dada and Surrealism, from the Lettrist to the Situationist International, and from Minimalism to Land Art, this book narrates the perception of landscape through a history of the traversed city.”

John Brinck Jackson‘s quote says it pretty nicely,“Roads no longer merely lead to places, they are places.”
Ulysses

Luopan chinese compass.

Will Self - Obsessed with Walking - video

“The great perambulator muses on his walking obsession and the fascinating
concept of psychogeography.”

 “Brain Picking” - nice content

NYC subway maps

A nice historical map collection

Some magnificent maps

Radical Cartography’s website (nice stuff here)

A nice idea (to have a hand drawn map association...)

A classic: Visual Complexities

GOOD Transparencies’ Archive (maps and infographics sometimes go together...)

And finally, some bits of typography...The Ebstorf Map

6. Extras -

Walkig and reading group

Woman with a mission

WEEK8 - DAY 6

1. SOUNDTRACK OF THE DAY

Girl with a mission - Les hommes

(More from Les hommes)

2. PLACES TO KNOW

Mountain View, California!

Google’s headquarters in NY

Google's Headquarters in Mountain view, California

3. PEOPLE TO DISCOVER

Mr. Google - doc

4. QUESTION OF THE DAY

5. INSPIRATION

Google, is set forth to understand us, humans. Our way to put together words to form meaning. It constantly analyses and shapes our language. For better or worse.

Computer History Museum - Site

the first chess-playing automaton was created in 1770. The principle was very simple. A human chess player was hidden inside the machine.

Virtual exhibition on “Visible Storage”.

Seymour Cray’s supercomputers - Between the 1960s and the 1980s,he designed the world’s fastest computers. The “self-portrait”.

Google has introduced Sketchup, a free 3D modelling program that can be used by everyone. Google says about Sketchup : “Great tools are ones you look forward to using. They do one thing (or maybe two) really, really well. They let you do what you want without having to figure out how. They help withhard or boring tasks so that you can focus on being creative, or productive, or both. And they are, in their own way, beautiful.”

Each one of us should shape his personal set of missions and goals. The important thing is not about having extremely high goals. It is about setting up clear ones.

“We want Google to be the third half of your brain.” 

Sergey Brin

Nowadays there are a lot of powerful (and free) tool around. Tools to draw, to write, to plan, to do all kind of different things. Do you use them?

 Mural

 Paper

 Storify

 Medium

Art-Project

Lego
Supercomputer designer Seymour Cray -  “as long as we can make them smaller, we can make them faster.”

Confucius - “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”

The workshop of carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen -  Lego - Its name comes from the Danish phrase “leg godt,” which means “play well.”

SimCity - It’s about city-building: developing a city and seeing that its citizens are happy and have all the makings of a nice, comfortable life. There are different zones for different types of activity: residential, commercial and industrial. The zones are developed when the player provides adequate factors and conditions like sufficient power, transportation infrastructure and good tax levels.

“The Sims.”

 Railroad Tycoon: “empire building in the Golden Age of railroads.”

Homework - Think about your own personal plans or missions.

A pinhole

WEEK8- DAY5

1. SOUNDTRACK OF THE DAY

Songs from Manca Spik,  Sasa Lendero and a young guy called  Žan Serčič...and Jan Plestenjak. 

2. PLACES TO KNOW

Ljubljana, Slovenia

3. PEOPLE TO DISCOVER

Elvis Halilovic’s portable ondu pinhole cameras.

4. QUESTION OF THE DAY

5. INSPIRATION

“In the digital age of photography and image processing, there is not much
room left for alternative photographing techniques. Some require a lot of time to master yet others are just not very practical and simple to obtain” says Halilovic.


About the pinhole camera on Wikipedia.

Makezine has some nice how-to’s...

And here’s an instructional video...

Miroslav Tichý - He was homeless, he built his own cameras from cardboard tubes and tin cans. He spent most of his time photographing girls around
his city (most of them unaware they were being photographed).

A movie about him. “First of all, you have to have a bad camera”

Michelangelo Antonioni’s movie “Blow Up” 

“I never discuss the plots of my film, I never release a synopsis before I begin shooting. How could I? Until the film is edited, I have no idea myself what it will be about.” (Antonioni)

Wayne Wang’s Smoke. One photo a day for eighteen years.

Franco Vaccari -  He believes in returning to the basics of photography… “Afterthe slow food, it’s indeed time for Slow Photo,” he says.

Francesco Capponi has nice examples for you (how to make a pinhole camera inside a pine-nut or an egg).

George Eastman

Polaroid SX70


6. Homework

Make a pinhole and, if possible, try keeping the same point of view for youra series of different pictures. Doing this exercise is nice because you will be able to better understand how the whole process really works (exposure, diaphragm, lighting conditions…

7. Extras

Measures to build a pinhole and more

How to make cardboard pinhole

Fotografia com lata

Fotografia com pinhole - tudo 

Pinhole com caixa de fósforo

Revelar Pinhole com café, mais fórmulas

A video about Cafenol

Develping B/W film

How to Pinhole

Pinhole Day website - Participate

Paper Pinhole download

More paper pinhole download

Comprar uma Ilford Pinhole

Or a  Zero Image Camera

Art is not design

WEEK8 - DAY 4

1. SOUNDTRACK OF THE DAY

2. PLACES TO KNOW

Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico

3. PEOPLE TO DISCOVER

Robert Smithson - projects

4. QUESTION OF THE DAY

5. INSPIRATION

Robert Smithson - He was an artist and not a designer. His The Spiral Jetty

Video Smithson made about it.

“At the time of Spiral Jetty’s construction, the water level of the lake was unusually low due to drought... Within a few years, the water level returned to normal, submerging the jetty for the next three decades... In 2002, the area experienced another drought, lowering the water level in the lake and revealing the jetty fora second time. The jetty remained completely exposed for almost a year.”

Three examples to learn from art:

Dan Flavin’s neons

Jean Dubuffet’s artificial garden

Tatsuo Miyajima’s leds

“Mirror, mirror, here I stand. Who is the fairest in the land?” Wilhelm Grimm

The Mirror Cage by Michelangelo Pistoletto.Jeppe Hein’s labyrinths? 

While in Mexico, Robert Smithson created the Yucatan Mirror Displacements by installing 12-inch-square mirrors on dispersed sites. The resulting series of nine color photographs was published in Artforum to accompany Smithson’s essay “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan.” The mirrors reflected and refracted the surrounding environments, displacing the solidity of the landscape and shattering its forms. (From the Course Letter)

"Part Earth work and part image, the displacements contemplate temporality; while the mirror records the passage of time, its photograph suspends time.”

6. Homework

Today, you will reflect. Starting from Robert Smithson’s work. His works with mirrors. Get a mirror (or maybe more than one), to place somewhere in your city. You will create new spaces, combine fragments of matter reflect on illusions, duality or multiplicity. To show (something) in a very clear way.
Generating new relations between space(s)...Setting up links. Coming up with reasons for. Today is to analyze an artist’s work (in this case, Robert Smithson’s mirrors), and using it as a starting ingredient for a project of yours. Designers we need some real (or invented) function. Tell us a consistent story. Layering
up the city, the mirrors and some necessity. How can we transform ingredients
taken from other fields into something meaningful and valuable for our purposes?

 3D Movie Experience in my room

A movie in my city - Splendor in the grass

7.EXTRAS

http://www.climbtherainbow.blogspot.co.uk/

HREINN FRIDFINNSSON

seokminko

A city in a box

WEEK8 - DAY3

1. SOUNDTRACK OF THE DAY

Amy Winehouse - You know I'm no good

2. PLACES TO KNOW

Wuppertal, Germany.

Not only does this city have the oldest monorail system in the world, it is floating in the air! A suspended monorail...

3. PEOPLE TO DISCOVER

George Maciunas’s box - Maciunas was the one who conceived + triggered Fluxus, the international network of artists from the 1960s (which is in some extent, still active today).

George Maciunas - The Foundation

4. QUESTION OF THE DAY

5. INSPIRATION

John Cage? Fluxus was born mainly because of him, and the concepts he was developing with his experimental music...

Marcel Duchamp, known for his “readymades”, works based on objects found in the street.

Fluxus transformed the meaning of what art could be.

Piano Activities (1962)

Three special works from the Fluxus people:

- the Street Theatre

- the special white Chess Board

- Mapping Tokyo

Lots of things inside the box - here

Stop Stealing Sheep and Find Out How Type Works - book by Erik Spiekermann’s where you get to understand how type works, and why it is a language.

Some pages

“Anti-art is life, is nature, is true reality, it is one and all.” George Maciunas

Total Art Matchbox, Fluxus

Fluxkit, assembled by George Maciunas, Fluxus

6. Homework
You will create a box with objects taken from the city. You’ll set up a walk: where to go, a specific neighborhood or a random promenade. How long, how short, alone or with someone, directions, this and that. And then, you’ll record your exploration collecting some objects.

Events in flux you will select to be fixed in time.

- How to organize the box? Using these:

Figure of speech

Schemes

Tropes

- How to collect objects?

Using the adnomination trick.

Or you can use synecdoche. Analogy or archaism... Choose one of these schemes or tropes as a general rule.

Making a map

WEEK8- DAY 2

1. SOUNDTRACK OF THE DAY

Raglan Road - Sinnead O'Connor

2. PLACES TO KNOW

Ireland - a brief history of Ireland

Anthony Bourdain in Ireland

Connemara sculpture - the Labyrinth

3. PEOPLE TO DISCOVER

Richard Long

4. QUESTION OF THE DAY

5. INSPIRATION

What's a map?
A petroglyph?
Map symbols?

World maps...
The blog of maps...

Bucky Fuller Dymaxion map 
Thematic maps
Map creation tools

Sara Princivalle shared on the platform yesterday a wonderful book about maps: Where You Are: A Collection of Maps That Will Leave You Feeling Completely Lost.


“I seek balance between the patterns of nature and formalism of abstract ideas like lines and circles...Walking, leaving footprints, fingerprints, it all has to
do with my body...Types of energy, the force of gravity...sharing the nature of these natural forces...” Richard Long

“I was part of the generation that did things because they seemed like a good
idea at the time, which they were.” (Richard Long)

Richard Long - A line made by walking

Land Art - Jeanne-Claude and Christo’s work. 

The surrounded islands, 1983

Covering Christo - site

“All my projects are some kind of flirt with nature and really, no one knows how to do Surrounded Islands, I tell my crew to improvise and use their creative abilities to solve problems; it is part of the piece.” -  Christo.


6. Homework no. 51 - We're halfway Design101!

You will first search for references of maps related to your city. While doing this, concentrate your attention on one particular place. What’s your favourite map you found? Why? Share it with us, we would love to see it!

Ready to make your own? Go for a walk in your city, marking / indicating the places which are most meaningful to you (in the way you consider most appropriate).

But then, the true heart of this exercise has to do with your map’s legend (the relationship between the symbols you will use and their meanings). Which symbols will your map have? Why don’t you invent your own set of symbols?
Once you have found a way to transform a part of your city into some kind of informational visual representation, share a picture of it with us!

7. Extras

Map of Porto
Mapping Sterotypes - Alpha design
40 different maps that they don't show you at schools
On Looking - Eleven walks with eyes experts - book (suggestion by Thomas Pitre)

Zoom out

WEEK8 - DAY1 - Zoom out

1. SOUNDTRACK OF THE DAY

Video about Exposition Guy Debord

2. PLACES TO KNOW

Paris anos 50 home movie

3. PEOPLE TO DISCOVER

Guy Debord 
Constant Nieuwenhuys 
Raoul Vaneigem
Asger Oluf Jorn 
Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio

 Situationist International (SI), video of this organization of social revolutionaries in Europe (between 1957 and 1972).

4. QUESTION OF THE DAY

 

5. INSPIRATION

YOUNG GUYS, YOUNG GIRLS

Talent wanted for getting out of this and playing

No special qualifications

Whether you’re beautiful or you’re bright

History could be on your side

WITH THE SITUATIONISTS

No telephone. Write or turn up:

32, rue de la Montagne-Geneviève, Paris 5e.

If your city’s levels and ways were to be decided by you...
Which way would you choose? To which level would you go?“A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees. He whose face gives no light shall never become a star.” (William Blake)

A city is an accumulation of ecstatic microplaces (and spaces). A series of
microplaces, events, moments, images, feelings and emotions.

Fin de Copenhague
Psychogeographic Guide of Paris, Guy Debord
The Situationists - a site

La Société du spectacle the book 

Society of the Spectacle - 1/9 video

6. Homework 

We will discover new dimensions. Spaces, people, buildings, memories. We will transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. Simple activities to put ourselves to the test.