for the past couple weeks the team and i have been working hard getting our multitouch video/installation/performance interface to an alpha state, and meet our march 12th deadline. this has definitely been the most difficult personal project i have worked on, as i feel much of the development depends of the diverse skills, knowledge and background of my teammates. some of the hardest decisions to make are simply to trust in the opinions, skills and knowledge that my teammates bring to the project. no longer something i can consider mine, the project has become a great example of the co-creative process. we are not working with the market in mind, but to simply get a chance to work together with good people and have fun doing something we are all interested in.
the project is defined by three key elements. these elements are the hardware design, the software design, and the usability and performative aspects. each element is highly reliant on the other, and i really have no idea how i would have gotten this far if it wasn’t for the excellent, dedicated and incredible people i am collaborating with.
in terms of software and usability, Jan and Martin; our dynamic duo of software developers, spent the weekend setting up the essential underpinnings and infrastructure of the Stutterbox interface. working with our user Crystal; who is a talented designer, video performance artist and fellow MACPNE colleague, we continued to iron out the metaphors we will use for the interface and address the critiques and suggestions raised during the course of its development and production.
at the moment we are trying to blend the VJ workspace with the actual performance output display. by making a hybrid interface between workspace and output, Crystal will be able to construct her performance narratives in the same area where the story would unfold for the audience. this somehow reminds me of the process of making graffiti, as in graffiti the inspiration, workspace and gallery end up being the same place. as graffiti artists make the urban environment all three places at once, so should our multitouch interface.
regarding hardware, Adam and i are now at the stage of putting everything together we made in the woodshop last week. Adam is my oldest friend (we’ve been friends for something like 15 years!) who came over from toronto via berlin to help me out. he happens to be a talented industrial designer and it shows in the craftmanship of the design and construction of the table. it really is well (if not over!) built.
in order for us the have full, 24h access to the table, we have moved much of the hardware to KKOUTLET so we can continue building without the encumbrance of closing times and security guards, which we were running into working at CSM. at the moment we are around 75 percent done with the construction, and hope to begin to drop in the electronics by wednesday.
monday marked a milestone of good intentions, as 2nd year students from the 2008 graduating (pending) class of my MA degree hosted schematic proposals for our final project. i was lucky enough to grab a good spot to present (last before the first brake) but was still stoopid nervous at trying to pitch my project in front of both years of the program, the program director, the guest critique tutor and our 4 project tutors.
the projects were pretty interesting, and it’s good to see that most of the projects are developing quite nicely. people seem to have solidified their concepts and there appears to be an end in sight!
some of the projects included a psycho-geographical atlas, a ceramic tile that gets worn away with the passage of people to reveal evolving content, the future of outdoor media, emergency shelters that are customizable to the typology of refugee, an allegorically immersive museum installation of baroque carriages for the pope, a user-design led participatory show, an engaging workshop that reaches out to the muslim communities in london, an urban installation that addresses the feeling of danger and security in hackney, a workshop that gets artists and architects to understand how to collaborate, an edible garden, and many, many other insightful projects.
and my project? i will hopefully get to work with some inspiring people to develop a grassroots oriented, multitouch interface. if you are interested, here is the link to a pdf of my presentation.
it’s hard to draw lines. no, i don’t mean lines that make drawings. i am talking about the virtual lines and psycho-geographical boundaries we make for ourselves and the world around us. now that kairn and alex have joined me in rotterdam, our internship is in full swing. it seems like we have been working on this together for months already…
on order for us to digest the massively huge amount of data that AMO has produced over the years, we came up with a simple but effective way to quantify the ideas, concepts, themes and typologies. here is a short video that we produced during our first week of research. enjoy!
look away! nothing to see here! whatever you thought you read, you didn’t. just look over there at the pretty pictures of our ultra-bland and non-eventful stay in Rotterdam, where we concentrate on a job we truly love to do:
the time goes by so quickly. it’s blinding, the speed of it all. i will attempt to summarize my experiences so far this season.
how do i quantify the value of this last month? so soon the pang of summer will be upon us. as is in most states of change, this spring has been a torrential series of mountains and valleys; no doubt that king pendopoo himself need prove to one and all our (in)significance, as we walk the precarious landscape of the long now.
of all the events that can change the course of life in any given direction, some stand out as president, its true significance only apparent to some. the first was known to me back in march. karin, alex and i received news from OMA in rotterdam that we were to join them for the summer as an intern “dream team” for the thinktank section of the company called AMO. since that time, i have been steadily gearing myself towards our eventual move to rotterdam to participate in arguably, one of the most exciting firms in architecture/urban planing today.
meanwhile, with the new spark that collaborative strategies offered, karin, alex and i did some great work with violeta houbenova and niki lampaski for the Argent/kings cross regeneration in the city of london. while working on this project, i soon re-realized the importance of the virtual domain and its blurring of perception and paradigm. as the real and virtual became unified, so do our online experiences collide with real life making our lifestyle that much more intangible, the two complimenting one another more and more by the nanosecond. this project was so well received that the director of my MA course in london has decided that the project is worth pursuing farther. this good news of course, excited me. along with our joint internship with OMAMO, i felt as if everything i have learned up to this point was being harnessed and directed towards a bright future.
then my grandma in singapore passed away. it wasn’t unexpected, as she was sick already for quite some time, yet it is truly miraculous what she has achieved in her lifetime, with the cultivation of such an amazing and loving family that spans the globe. as matriarch of our widespread clan, she was our living ancestor from a time when life was very different and proved to us the invaluable skill of adaptation. my relationship with her was sparse but never temporal – i would say timeless. i will miss her very much but know that her legacy will persevere in the people she has affected in her lifetime.
and not only did i loose my grandma this month but i lost my OMA as well. just last week karin, alex and i received a letter from OMA stating that they could not find an appropriate project for us (but we suspect it was actually for visa reasons). this unfortunate turn of events completely disrupted my plans for the summer, already giving notice to our landlord that we would leave our flat in london, not to mention losing the dream of working for a company that so inspires such as OMA. my collegue Myrto put it quite bluntly to me; as a young architect, from OMA, there is no where else to go but down.
not knowing what to do next, i reached out to my friend and mentor Dan Hill, of cityofsound.com and monocle magazine fame. he was the first person i turned to and his help and advice has been spot on and extremely supportive. seeing more in me then i have wisdom to even notice, he has taught me the genius of personal experience. after talking to him i pulled myself together and began to rearrange my outlook of the future. he also kindly posted on his enlightening weblog about karin, alex and me, even in the midst of organizing Postopolis! in NYC. because of his invaluable input and the inspiration of just witnessing his own practice, i realized the immense work and passion that one has to endure to be happy with what they do.
this morning i set out to find a new place to live since i am about to be homeless on the 6th of june. when walking out of the finsbury park tube station, i noticed that alex was trying to call me so i took a seat on the curb and gave him a call. he frantically conveyed to me that OMA wrote back and said they wanted us, after all. then i asked myself, how can this month get anymore thrilling?
fitting that the final project for the first year of my MA degree involves working with fellow worshippers of the mightiest of all the of pantheon of gods, King Pendopoo. joining karin, alex and i on this final project is violeta and niki; video artist and scenographer, respectively.
the brief for this particular project involved generating sustainable and lasting dwell time within Granary Square, which happens to be the largest area of contingent public space in Kings Cross. this space is also important because it will link public, private, business and residential areas all together. i should probably also mention that Granary Square is situated directly in front of the site of the new Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design building which will finally bring all 4 campuses together under one roof.
The purpose of our proposal is to generate emotional durability within the social-geographic community known as Kings Cross Centre, focusing on the office worker and the cyber-slacking generation. Our proposal is a hybrid community building system consisting of three elements that are developed to engage members of the Kings Cross populace.
In order to generate sustainable desire to participate in the initiative, the proposal uses two easily accessible digital platforms that are facilitated with an essential third physical layer. The first digital platform is packaged in the form of a web-based, online community using Web 2.0 concepts. The second digital platform is packaged within the widely accessible platform of digital mobile phone technology to provide a personal, “always on”, portable interface device. we looked at accelerometer technology and other emerging technologies that would facilitate more intuitive game-play.
some other inspirational research included the Pacmanhattan geo-centric game:
Both digital platforms are used as interface to the physical “playground” of Kings Cross Centre for interaction with the various games and social networking systems. think Web 2.0 + Nintendo Wii + mobile phones using a physically real and unique space (Granary Square / Kings Cross Centre) as playing field; kinda like a giant Dance Dance Revolution game, er something…
imagine office workers getting a little exercise in the morning before work by playing a short game in the square with their phone:
or spending their lunch break virtual fishing with their phones by the canal:
and then meeting in the evening to play dating games or larger, league tournaments:
in terms of learning outcomes, the great thing about this final project is that we were not limited by technology when it came to proposing our ideas. we worked together quite smoothly which was proof that karin, alex and i could collaborate together successfully.
i hope this is a sign for things to come when the three of us collaborate together again for our up-coming joint internship at the Office For Metropolitan Architecture this summer in rotterdam.
for another perspective from one of our tutors, please check out his blog entry about the project here.
it has taken me three months to reflect upon the recent quasi-disaster that was the abake prescribed, three part project, the zeitgeist heist.
since posting about the first two elements of the project, team dynamics have run-a-muck, and the last group dinner/brainstorming session ended up in a… shall we say, heated discussion, at best. after a particularly critical reaction from the panel during the second presentation, we did manage to meet one more time before the final crit, and came up with a poetic proposition to end such a seemingly futile attempt at designers trying to generate interactivity through performative means.
designers. actually we were a group which consisted of an architect, curator, exhibition designer and yours truly, media art monkee. without strong graphic design skills between the 4 of us, we luckily didn’t have to present a high in concept and research illustrated with flashy graphics presentation and presented as simply and to the point as possible, while adhering to some narrative themes (a guided tour comes to mind) to efficiently convey what we wanted to say.
rounding-up our colleagues and tutors into the stairwell on the 9th floor of our building, we made the group walk down the stairs holding a rope which formed a line. the stairwell is kinda groovy, with huge glass windows overlooking holborn. its cool and windy, walls littered with forgotten posters of past CSM shows and bad signage so you never know what floor you are on. hundreds of students walk up and down these stairs throughout a day.
people being people, we were soon a mix of bodies, while the four of us narrated a metaphorical and critical journey of our experience throughout this laborious project. we told emotional experiences, criticized the brief and its prescribers and more or less vented. we role-played as if we hated each other, which wasn’t far at the time (big kiss to aranzazu, gilly and anna)!
in the end, the tutors seemed positive about it and we had a chance to present something we were happy with, not to mention it made us stronger in the process. as the saying goes; you can only collaborate with people who want to collaborate. i have learned that my colleagues are damn good.
a few weeks ago i had a taste of life in rotterdam while working for the V2: Institute for Unstable Media. called in by my good friend and colleague danja, i had the opportunity to work in the “hack” department of the V2 Lab during this years DEAF07 and V2 25th anniversary events.
most of the work i did was of a technical nature, and involved climbing up to the tops of buildings fixing yagi antennae (all hail the mighty zip-tie!!!) to throw network accessibility wirelessly between the various locations of the festival. some buildings i am proud to say i stood on the roof of include Witte de With / TENT, NAi and of course the V2 building proper.
we also had to lay down quite a bit of patch cable (we were dropping CAT-5e like spidey slings web) and also deployed numerous wireless hotspots, computer terminals and workstations for visiting artists and other tech-monkee-ish jobs. even had a chance to VJ along side danja at unDEAF… that was cool.
one of the more mundane tasks i had to perform at the festival was to monitor audio and video live-streams that were being cast on the DEAF07 webpage. this involved sitting and watching and listening to lectures… which isn’t so bad until you realize that you have spent the entire day sitting in a dark hall staring at 4 or so monitors while outside it is immaculately sunny and 25 degrees.
what i did enjoy the most was getting to spend time with some sorely missed friends. sabruno and danja were kind enough to let me stay at their place during the duration of my contract with V2, and even though i was pretty tuckered out by the time we got home from work, we still managed to have that cozy feeling. eating good food and sitting in the twilight of the setting sun over the vista of rotterdam’s skyline, on top of bruno and danja’s building, drinking beer and fixing bikes, is my minds’ eye of the netherlands quintessential.
thanks to danja and bruno for putting up with me while i was in rotterdam and i can’t wait to come back this summer with karin and alex to begin work with OMA/AMO… w00t!
So as to follow up on the on-going antics of the gamelan gang, for the past few months the MACPNE department has been generating research and development that encompasses the design of a user experience and deployment of a pavilion to house the Indonesian instrument know as the gamelan. This commission is to coincide with the grand re-opening of the Royal Festival Hall and renewal of London’s Southbank Centre in mid-June of this year.
The gamelan is considered one instrument in Indonesian culture but when we got one delivered to our studio on the 9th floor of CSM’s Red Lion Square building a couple of months ago we discovered it was so much more then what we expected. as part of our research we were instructed in its playing by one of the UK’s premiere gamelan players and gamelan expert in residence at Southbank Centre, Sophie Clark.
A lil’ diddy about the gamelan; a complex collection of percussion instruments, the version of the gamelan we played (there are several different types of gamelans from the various island districts that Indonesia is comprised of) is considered the “portable” version. the full-size version of the gamelan maintained by southbank centre is housed in its own room within the Royal Festival Hall.
Gamelan music is composed of intricate patterns that are unique to the each part of the gamelan and is quite mathematical; Bach would have had a handful to deal with. Every gamelan is tuned within itself, so every gamelan sounds different from one another. Playing a composition on one set could sound drastically different on another, and often players learn all instruments and rotate so that everyone plays each part of the gamelan throughout a performance.
The gamelan is the centerpiece of local Indonesian community. most Indonesian people that live around a pendopo (a building that serves as something reminiscent to a town hall or community centre) learn how to play or at least have heard a gamelan before at one point or another. It is an important element in shadow puppet theater (called wayang) and as accompaniment to Indonesian dance and ceremony. It is used for old-school jammin’, too.
Within the pendopo, the gamelan is played at ground level where musicians sit alongside spectators on even ground. Gamelan sessions have the potential to last days, and often people come to the pendopo and eat with family and friends, converse with fellow community members and even take naps in the shade away from the heat. Everyone in the pendopo is barefoot, which adds to the general coziness of the atmosphere.
right… so back to the project, other research conducted included people flow studies, ethnographic research interviews with gamelan groups, visitors to Southbank Centre and local skateboarders at the skate park adjacent to the Royal Festival Hall, reading of the ancient texts the Ramayana and Mahābhārata and site visits to the rebuild / retrofitting of the Royal Festival Hall.
After a consultation with structural engineers, the final pitch will occur this Friday, a day after another crit for a project for the master-planning of the new Kings Cross Center in London.
I think it’s going to be yet another tough and exciting week.
In 1982 Larry Dossey, an American physician, coined the term “time-sickness” to describe the obsessive belief that “time is getting away, that there isn’t enough of it, and that you must pedal faster and faster to keep up”.
Guy Claxton, a British psychologist, thinks acceleration is now second nature to us: “We have developed an inner psychology of speed, of saving time and maximising efficiency, which is getting stronger by the day”.
These comments and quotes motivated our group to base our final Unit 1 project on the new trend of ‘slow’ living; to ask ourselves whether conducting one’s day to day actions slowly genuinely promotes quality of life, and whether this quality can generate happiness and wellbeing.
Festina lente is the best way to describe the essence of all the movements which proclaim the need for people to slow down (Slow City, Slow Food, Slow Sex, Super Slow Exercise, Slow Dating, etc.). It is a phrase attributed to Svetonius and was often used by Caesar Augustus, and means to quicken slowly. The saying encapsulates numerous dichotomies, such as patience and urgency, velocity and flexibility, action and meditation. In the case of movements such as Slow Living, it refers specifically to a lifestyle which “respects tradition and quality, and seeks to use the best aspects of the modern world to enhance, preserve and enjoy the old ways of doing things, but not to the exclusion of progress and not for the sake of avoiding change”.
Our group’s idea was to create a video which would illustrate vividly this contrast which is now common in society between people who choose to slow down and people who continue fast-paced living, as well as seeing how people would react to our ‘slow’ intervention and seeing if it is true that British people are ever increasingly looking for ways to calm down modern life rhythms.
Our intervention comprised of an afternoon tea break taken along the river Thames at Southbank. Our group set up a table and held a proper and original afternoon tea party with a china set, scones and preserves, in order to raise awareness among those walking by so that they too should sit and take a break.
The choice of having a tea break as our intervention fell upon our desire to use something which is very close to the British people, so as to not only research into slow and fast perceptions of time but also on identity and traditions. As we researched into the history of tea, it became obvious to us that tea is extremely important to all cultures, from the Russian zavarka using tea to welcome guests into one’s home to the Moroccan mint tea served to cool down on hot days and facilitate social community.
Tea is the most consumed beverage in the world after water. It has taken on many forms and has much significance throughout history. It is a symbol of relaxation and generates social interaction.
BACKGROUND RESEARCH – TEA IN THE BRITISH CULTURE
AFTERNOON TEA or LOW TEA: A traditional afternoon tea is served between 3 PM and 5 PM at a low table. The menu consists of three courses-assorted crustless finger sandwiches and savouries, scones with Devonshire (clotted) cream and preserves and assorted finger sweets and petit fours. It is not uncommon for a trifle or dessert to add as a fourth course.
INFORMAL AFTERNOON TEA: Served in a salon or outdoor setting, with either placement seating or casual seating at low tables. Candles are never used.
(http://www.seedsofknowledge.com/teahistory.html)
Great Britain was the last of the great sea-faring nations to break into the Chinese and East Indian trade routes. The first samples of tea reached England between 1652 and 1654, and it quickly proved popular enough to replace ale as the national drink. Prior to the introduction of tea into Britain, the English had two main meals – breakfast and dinner: Breakfast was usually composed of ale, bread and beef, while dinner was a long, massive meal at the end of the day. It was without a doubt an impractical way of distributing food throughout the day and many often felt sluggish by mid-afternoon. It is said that it was the 7th Duchess of Bedford, Anna, who introduced the concept of afternoon tea, which included other than tea also small cakes and bread and butter. The novelty soon took on and it became almost immediately a very popular activity of the day. It was Queen Victoria who introduced the custom of adding lemon to tea, after visiting one of her daughters in Russia – before that, the English took only milk with their tea.
A common pattern of service soon merged. The first pot of tea was made in the kitchen and carried to the lady of the house who waited with her invited guests, surrounded by fine porcelain from China. The first pot was warmed by the hostess from a second pot (usually silver) that was kept heated over a small flame. Food and tea was then passed among the guests, the main purpose of the visiting being conversation.
Tea was introduced into the British culture as a time to meet friends, to relax and to regenerate.
RESULTS AND OBSERVATIONS
Our performance not only attracted many passers-by but also generated in us mixed feelings – though we felt that our actions were forcibly too slow, we felt as if we were practicing yoga: our breathing calmed down, our heart rate appeared to beat slower. Those who stopped to watch us were informed of our project and ask to contribute comments which we audio recorded. It is interesting to note that most people were pleased to watch us and almost observed us with envy, and when asked about what they thought with regards to ‘slow’ living, most responded that it was an unobtainable dream, that though they too wanted to slow down they felt that it was not possible. Few people said that they have recently made changes to their lifestyles, so as to include more quiet time or thinking time, by themselves or with their companions, but all stated that they were not yet satisfied with their quality of life. Most of those who responded positively to our questions were nevertheless in their mid-40s and they tended to stress the fact that their decision to change their lifestyles derived from years of fast-paced living.
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