an application for internship

Whew. And that was a tough term…

Lucky for me I am on break now and have some time to prepare for the next term. Part of the requirement of the 1st year of my MA is to participate in a professional internship.

For the first time in the history of the course, Karin, Alex and I are applying as an R&D team collectively for our internship. Our course director refers to us as “the 3 for 2 deal”, we hope to continue our collaborative strategizing and development that has been fostered at the course and contribute to a creative organization we could be happy to work for.

One of our dream companies that we have collectively approached is the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, also know as OMA and their alter-ego, AMO.

We have prepared a portfolio for them based on our past work, and details on a new collaborative work we specifically developed for the OMA application. We have bound and printed 5 copies of the book so far but if you would like a copy, let me know and we can work something out ;^)

A little more about OMA: OMA is the architecture firm of Rem Koolhaas and was founded in 1975 along with Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp and Zoe Zenghelis. They are the architecture firm responsible for some of the coolest buildings and interiors, and have published books as their brainy thinktank alter ego, AMO.

In order for us to meet the deadline of application, Karin, Alex and I had to produce and publish a book in less then 5 days. In the end we had it bound before jumping onto a plane to do a re-branding project in Benidom, Spain. The final assembly of the package was done on a sunny beach on the Mediterranean. Our cover letter was written on a postcard addressed to our Oma, which happens to be German and Dutch for grandmother. There were a lot of grandmas out and about in Benidorm, BTW. Now cross your fingers. Thanks!

The Zeitgeist Heist

Another week, another project, another learning log entry. 

our guest tutors for the Zeitgiest Heist are Adam Levene, Benjamin Reichen and Man Somerlink.  also joining are the usual suspects, Tricia Austin, Kevin Flude and Sarah Featherstone.

zeitgeist

(n) : the spirit of the age; the taste, outlook, and spirit characteristic of a period; a phenomenon based on fate where something simultaneously happens everywhere at a certain time

heist

(n) : a robbery or burglary, especially from an institution such as a bank or museum

(v) : to steal, rob or hold up something

synonyms: robbery

 

the initial research conducted for this project included the selection of a location, place or space where an object was stolen, lost or missing and then to document that non-space or void space as a photograph.  here is the location i chose:

 

 

In a workshop, all the students exposed there photographic work alongside three dimensional work which we had to make in one hour from foraged materials and found objects (read: garbage).  tutors then tried to place the newly made object within the non-space depicted by the photograph.

using whatever we learned from this experimental exercise, we then preceded to part two of the brief, which involved using the “missing” approach or methodology to choose a building or public space based on the lack or deficiency of a story. 

most of a buildings’ interior and exterior architecture is constructed to communicate definite themes.  a police station for instance communicates to the visitor connotations that may include power, intimidation, functionality, confinement, etc.

after considering the identity/message/story of a handful of buildings and locations in London, my group choose the Greenwich Observatory where the Prime Meridian was established.  this was an obvious choice for its socio-cultural associations and political symbolism.  The very fact that the modern understanding of time is defined with the Prime Meridian as measure lead us to risk a reinterpretation of the brief in order to argue the Meridian as an architectural, imperialistic construct.

using the philosophies of the Long Now Foundation, we designed an intervention that included a campaign to enrich visitors of the observatory.  mostly we wanted to see how people envisioned the future. 

in the 21st century, most people envision it as a distopia ridden with disease, poverty and nuclear fallout barely held together by an ultra-police-state.  this future is usually placed within the the confines of ones own lifetime and not beyond generations.  imagine the implications and the goals that we collectively strive towards from this shortsightedness!

in order to free the minds of our audience from the heavy handed oppression of time in its current definition, our heist was to steal time itself.  this proved to be far too difficult a campaign for only the four of us to achieve in one morning.  oh well.

here is video documentation of the project:

behold the wonders of dripping

for the third and final project for the first term of my MA studies (damn. has it only been two months?), my group and i had to fulfill a brief within the topic of fat. no, not as in pretty hot and tempting, but as in;

…a category of lipid, distinguished from other lipids by their chemical structure and physical properties. Fats are solid at room temperature as opposed to oils which are liquid. This category of molecules is important for many forms of life, serving both structural and metabolic functions. They are an important part of the diet of most heterotrophs (including humans). – wikipedia.org

if you are familiar with the specifically british cuisine of dripping, then you would know the process of extracting dripping derives from cooking a large section of meat, whether it be pig, cow or goat, or cooking an animal in its entirety, which commonly includes duck, chicken or smaller pigs, cows or midget goats.

once the beast is cooked, one collects the succulence or essence of the animal within a jar to let cool. after the cooling process, the fats from the animal form two distinct sections within the jar; the top, solid, white, almost waxy substance of the dripping which is used for cooking other dishes like fish and chips (used to cook both the fish and the chips), and the gelatinous bottom half of the dripping which is prized for its flavor and is usually eaten with toast (known as a mucky fat sandwich in parts of Yorkshire) and is served for breakfast. truly, flesh marmalade. meat jello. ugh.

the collection of animal fats cannot be solely attributed to this cornerstone of culinary arts, this last bastion of sensationally flavorful cooking known as british cuisine. cultures from around the world have also partaken in the honorary tradition of collecting the cooked off scrapings of one of gods poor creatures. Ghee is a type of clarified butter important to indian cuisine. schmaltz is rendered goose or chicken fat that is kosher if prepared properly and is used in jewish cuisine. fat is a universal truth and a pillar of civilization.

anyway’s, for our project, violeta, anastasia, alex and i had to design an exhibition space and user experience at the Good Food Show that would promote the virtues of cooking fats over so-called healthier choices, and how cool and hip it is to put utter crap into your body again, just like grandma used to do. we came up with a kinda old-time grocery store during the day, Iron Chef tournament by night, sorta event. you had to be there for the powerpoint i guess.

here are some pictures from the model (click on the picture for the album).

a means to justify a beginning

a few days ago in the bar i began toying with some peers, the idea of a CPfNE periodical publication. currently at “brain-fart” stage and far from being more then just a notion of drunken inspiration, i have thrown together a quick and dirty mind map to visualize the idea.

please take a look at the attached jpeg and let me know what you think; if it is a viable and worthwhile project, if you would actually contribute time and work towards such an endeavor and if it’s all wrong and how we should actually do it, if to do it at all.
all cut-ups welcome.

space2place transmutation part two

here is an audio track that i slapped together for the crit on friday. it is simply a selection of anicdotal conversations that we encountered during the ethnography study element we conducted for a project mentioned in the previous post.

space into place transmutation

this week at school i am currently involved in a mandatory group project involving space intervention under the guise of social capital. the project involves several students from the MA courses of CSM school of design and school of interdisciplinary studies, including the Textile Futures MA students, Design Studies MA students, our colleagues at Industrial Design MA, MA Design by Project and of course, the MA Creative Practice for Narrative Environments posse. wuzzup.

so far it has been an intense 2 days of lectures, workshops, field work, research and meetings… lotsa, lotsa meetings. the project occurs in span of three days and in this time we are suppose to do all that and a bag o’ crisps… on top of getting to know each of our cross-discipline MA fellows, do an ethnographic study AND present an investiture of some sort. tomorrow is the crit. poo.

what we decided upon for a space2place intervention was to seek out and define the areas that were monitored by CCTV within london; something pretty easy to find, actually. the average londoner is photographed 300 times a day by CCTV cameras, not to mention some commercial spaces are even being audio recorded now so that conversations can be listened into in case of dissident smalltalk and flirting… i’ll let you chew on that for a moment.

using 2 inch wide yellow packing tape we marked out on the ground of covent garden, an area that was being monitored by CCTV. we choose covent garden specifically because it was at a crossways of several pedestrian walkways and roads, and was a meeting place and also a place for tourists and locals to work, shop and be at leisure. also using the same tape, we wrote out in plain english, signs on the ground denoting areas that were in and out of CCTV range.

our goal was to make apparent the actual boundaries and physical areas that were being monitored and vise versa. working differently then just a simple warning sign, people now had new perceptions of where and when their actions were being recorded.  along with the experiment, we also conducted surveys and a small anthropological activity to create a more rounded ethnological study. as the day progresses tomorrow, i will update this post with more materials and findings.

here is a photograph gallery of our field research day in covent garden.

WoW Comic

here is the World of Warcraft comic that was created by Myrto Karanika, Pernille Schmidt, Ryo Terui and yours truly.

this project is primarily for CSM – CPfNE (rationale in bold italics) so i suppose the following text will be quite boring to read (sorry!) unless you are involved with the course and for those of you reading this that are involved with the course, sorry it’s so boring!

We choose the comic format as our wayfinding proposal for Unit Two/Project Two for its tried and true historical role of being a media that is digestible, is dissident, and is also an accessible means to communicate socio-political ideas. it is also particularly favorable towards our target audience, which happens to be the “WoW addict”. it is also indirectly targeted towards the “counseling lifestyle professional” i.e., nutritionists, psychiatrists, etc.

the comic is entitled “Worldcraft”, to point out the wayfinding system that we are proposing within the context of the hybrid narrative. we propose that the counseling lifestyle professionals such as said examples play the game as in-game counselors. Other in-game players for advice regarding their own “real life” can then access these counselors. we feel that this would be a successful means to communicate advice, for it would still exist within the comforts of the virtual space that they have already been accustomed to.

click here for the large, readable version found on flickr. hope you enjoy it!

Vox Populi, Vox Dei!

if and when i do complete my studies at the University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design, Masters of Arts in Creative Practice for Narrative Environments, i will be the only one in the world with my combination of degrees along with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Monumental Art, which is my undergraduate degree. i know this doesn’t mean squat at the end of the day, but it is a thought that strokes my ego quite nicely.

for those of you who are thinking WTF?!? is Narrative Environments, i did manage to find a wikipedia entry regarding Narrative Environments within the sphere of Narratology. here is an excerpt from the entry:

A narrative environment is a space, whether physical or virtual, in which stories can unfold. A virtual narrative environment might be the narrative framework in which game play can proceed. A physical narrative environment might be an exhibition area within a museum, or a foyer of a retail space, or the public spaces around a building – anywhere in short where stories can be told in space.

hope this confuses you enough to be impressed… go wikipedia!

Vox Populi, Vox Dei! (the voice of the people is the voice of God!)

LUA – CSM – MA CPfNE – ARUP – STEEP group – manual research aggregator (that’s a mouthfull!)

This is a link to the blog for the CSM – CPfNE – ARUP project STEEP groups and those of us who are too lazy to remember or bookmark the actual URL of the address (like me) and have to navigate to certain pages by retracing the series of links visited before stumbling upon the one you actually wanted.

cpfne-arup.blogspot.com

come to think of it, i am starting to navigate and remember the psychogoeography of nodes around the internet through the use of virtual landmarks (kinda like “go to boingboing, left on slashdot under the -1 modded troll comment in whatever article, click through the banner ad, straight to flickr and then right on the link found in the signature of the dude who started the google cached discussion about monkey-less bananas on the LastFM forum). it kinda reminds me of when i first moved to the netherlands.

not really being able to navigate around urban spaces like i was used to in toronto (the grid of streets found in toronto and other north american cities pretty much ment it was “up and over or over and up” to get to certain places. this personal navigational system was replaced by concentric circles of streets, twisty roads, bridges and dykes that radiated from the center where the church was and became the “where the fuck am i and where the hell am i going, but i am riding a bike so try not to think about how stoned you are or you’ll get crushed by the tram” system of dutch city way-finding), so i had to begin to remember the progression in which i came across certain landmarks in order to get to specific places like my favorite coffeeshop for instance, only to realize that all the while i was taking inefficient routes to places for years after friends native to holland would actually, physically show me that where i wanted to be was just around the corner and not around the city in a downward spiral movement… or maybe i couldn’t navigate that well because of time spent in the coffeeshops… ah, i can’t remember any more… i’m hungry..

…oh and yes, i know i could use del.icio.us… and i do. just to confuse myself even more i have two accounts and also aggregate all the fii_research material on the CPfNE-ARUP blog… for those who actually get all the diminutives and abbreviations, this post is for you. come to think of it, bookmarking the URL would have been easier by now since i have started to make this a full blown blog post. i will make sure to tag this in the “excuses for posting inconsistently” category… ok… shutting up…

…now.

my first assignment for CPfNE

this video was my contribution to the first assignment for my MA in Creative Practice for Narrative Environments (CPfNE) at Central Saint Martin’s College (CSM); University of the Arts London(UAL).

this was essentially a “get to know your peers” assignment in which i made a short stop-motion animation narrative of a colleague in the class. i had just a couple days to create it using a computer, dslr and mp3 player with microphone.

enjoy.

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