Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2008

Diigo Bookmarks 05/27/2008 (a.m.)

• Prefab-ulous: New Development in England Goes Up Green — and Fast

  Brief article by Andrew Blum about Oxley Woods, a development of “90 eco-friendly homes, with 55 more planned to fill its seven acres.” The key aspect? They’re all pre-fab, relatively cheap to build, can be built quickly, and have in-built green features.

  If Canada had a federal housing plan/ strategy, this would be something the Feds (and the Province) could take a closer look at. It sounds like it could be a reasonable (if partial) solution to our affordable housing crisis.

  tags: andrew_blum, wired_magazine, prefab, green_buildings, green_technologies, oxley_woods, affordable_housing

• “L.A. vision: a towering sign,” by David Zahniser (LA Times) - Astani Enterprises Inc - Annotated

  File this under “life imitates art”? There’s a fascinating battle happening in LA over whether or not Sonny Astani, businessman and developer, should be permitted to install a new kind of LED-generated image, 12 stories above the street and 14 stories tall, on the side of his 33-story condo building currently under construction in downtown LA.

  The inspiration? Opening scenes in Blade Runner of downtown LA, showing “a skyscraper-sized advertisement portraying a Japanese woman smiling before popping a snack into her mouth. Astani says an image, such as that of a flying sea gull, could now even travel from one building to the next.”

  I have to admit this sounds really cool, but I can see why many factions in LA would oppose this, too. We’re all familiar with the really bright illuminated advertisements — even Victoria has a small version of one, installed outside the arena on Blanshard at Caledonia. It’s bright, too bright. But Astani proposes a much more modulated, artistic, and dimmed level of lighting. If the images could look as subtle — yet powerful — as Blade Runner’s, it could work, but there’s no garantee, that if permitted, subsequent developers would follow in that “artistic” style.

  Another aspect is this: the proposal, if it’s art, also calls into question just how intrusive public art should be in public space. Does it have a right to be so intrusive as to be impossible to ignore? Can I, as a citizen, be obliged to register public art — and admittedly, it would be impossible not to register this project?

  Is part of what captures my attention/ imagination regarding this project its uncanny fusion of subtlety and assault, packaged as visual stimulus?

  Another question: is this an art form that expresses a corporate and anti-pedestrian city (”…neighborhood anchored by Staples Center and L.A. Live, the hotel and entertainment complex that includes the recently opened Nokia Theatre”), fitting for LA where people don’t walk anyway (but just wait: it’ll show up soon enough on the very very pedestrian-friendly Las Vegas Strip)? I’m thinking of this in terms of Christopher Hume’s writings on Toronto, and the Leslie big box/ corporate redevelopment plans, which he has characterized (rightly, imo) as being anti-pedestrian and therefore anti-urban, too. But could anyone argue that LA is in any way anti-urban? No. So is this visual art / visual stimulus for a different kind of urbanity?

  tags: astani, advertising, billboards, outdoor_installations, public_art, public_space, los_angeles

• “The Web and Beyond: Mobility (1) - Adam Greenfield” - The Mobile City » Blog Archive » - Annotated

  Michiel de Lange reports on the CHI conference “The Web and Beyond: Mobility” in Amsterdam on 5/22/08, featuring Adam Greenfield (Everyware); Jyri Engeström (Jaiku); Ben Cerveny (Playground foundation, Flickr); Christian Lindholm (Fjord, Nokia). In this post, he focuses on Greenfield’s presentation. A key aspect that struck me was this observation by Greenfield: that ubicom / ubiquitous computing creates a new level of “ambient informatics,” and “information processing dissolves into behavior.” Greenfield’s example is the seemingly choreographed swish of a public transit user who swings her purse in front of the transit card reader, never skipping a beat, but shaped indelibly by the technology into certain movements.

  tags: adam_greenfield, mobile_city, ubiquitous, ubicom, technology

“Techne” and “Arte”: Qualities.

It’s one of those long-buried texts in the back of my mind: Adorno’s dissection of techne and “art” (both of which he of course spelled in Greek letters, so tough luck for you if the Greek alphabet wasn’t something that tripped off your eyeballs easily…).

I won’t embarrass myself by trying to recapitulate what he wrote, but I’m certain that Martijn de Waal’s blog post from May 12, Is GPS-navigation turning us into ‘Men without Qualities’?, relates to the questions Adorno asked in the texts collected in the book, Aesthetic Theory:

The Dutch Daily NRC Handelsblad published a highly interesting interview with retiring law-professor Egbert Dommering. He enters the current debate about new media, personal development and cultural authority by expressing his fear that the dominance of cultural systems for information retrieving like Google or GPS-Navigation will turn us all into ‘Men without Qualities’ (after the Robert Musil book). Are we becoming blank subjects, servile obedient to the instructions that our computers conjure up for us? (…)

Dommering fears that rather than building personalities with an extended intellectual and cultural substance, the current media system encourages us to rely on algorithms like that of Google, Satelite Navigation etc to provide us with the right information when we think we need it. This might be handy, but will we still be able to paint a bigger picture out of all these fragmented tidbits. Will we still be able to evaluate them critically? Can we still place the facts into a bigger cultural context? GPS-Naviagtion tells us exactly how we can get somewhere. But do we still know where we are? What is the history or culture of the places we are travelling through, what issues are at stake here? Dommering fears that we might loose the interest in and capabilitie to answere these questions. (source)

Sounds like just another negative culture critic, doesn’t he? And yet, consider the profile of Piotr Wozniak by Wired Magazine’s Gary Wolf: Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm. Wozniak is the driven genius behind SuperMemo, his program that teaches proper “spacing” so your memory will be able to absorb and recall everything. The catch? You have to surrender to the algorithm.

Hmm, what do I want? Superhuman powers of recall (but nearly servile dependence on an external clock that brooks no escapades of artistic whimsy)? Or…?

Just what do you call the alternative, anyway? “Normal” is so …well, 90s. Or 80s. Or something altogether unhip.

After running through alternatives to what looks like a pessimistic cultural perspective on Dommering’s part, Martin de Waal closes his blog post with some excellent questions:

So what should locative designers or theoreticians take from this discussion? Is it an attitudinal problem, where people get used to not look beyond the first 5 results that Google produces on any search? And is that attitude promoted by the technology itself or the way it is presented? Is it an algorithm-cum-interface problem, where the strength of an algorithm plus the design of the interface might promote deeper understandings of local contexts? Can we design locative media in such a way to promote a richer experience of place, rather than just getting us where we want to go as efficienly as possible? [see complete article here.]

I think those questions — and Piotr Wozniak — prove the need for arte coupled with techne. Wozniak is an artist in his way — but I bet his technique would suffer in “mass” deployment. It works for him, it works for many people. Which doesn’t yet mean that many people should use his techne, his technique. Not everyone could keep hold of “qualities” in the face of such algorithmic rigour.

That same day, Kazys Varnelis coincidentally posted a brief and cryptic-seeming post about Bruno Latour’s book, We Have Never Been Modern, entitled On distinction:

I’m rereading Bruno Latour’s We Have Never been Modern. (…) What’s striking me right now about this seventeen-year-old book is that it’s predicated on an argument against the modern sense of distinction between spheres. In the intervening period, it seems to me (please feel free to shoot me down …better now than later), the postmodern process of “blurring boundaries” has been made obsolete by a thorough loss of distinction in society and culture. The Enlightenment project of modernity, it seems to me, is increasingly something that our generation cannot even conceive of. [see entry here.]

Back to Adorno and his belabouring of the “distinctions” between techne and arte?

Part of Adorno’s point — if I recall correctly (and I should probably follow Kazys’s example and re-read the text, instead of producing a new one off the cuff) — is that the distinction between the two is itself artificial. They are in fact interwoven and are perceived as antitheses or separate endeavours because we learned to parse them that way.

In reality, neither exists without the other — which is obvious when you think about it. You can’t make art without technique, and technology or technique without some sort of art (most highly and refinedly practiced by the best technologists) isn’t particularly compelling, either.

So anyway… to bring this ramble (so precariously close to artlessness and certainly not polished in technique, either) to a close: we are in the thick of rethinking the distinctions between art and technology — albeit too often at the expense of art. During the Enlightenment (as Adorno correctly deduced) people believed the distinctions were clear, and that it was possible to move ahead without further hiccups. Then, when technology was used (artfully, or not) to carry out irrational projects (the world wars, the genocide, other atrocities), that belief was shaken to the core. Now we’re “cynically enlightened“: hip to the fact, perhaps even resigned. But I bet those old distinctions will be back to haunt us yet.

A case of loose cannon remorse

Well, that’s it: I will in future refrain from using a feature called “sound off,” which is appended to some online articles in our local paper (The Times-Colonist, part of the Asper media conglomerate). The “sound off” acts as a kind of comments board, but it doesn’t seem to allow for any sort of formatting, previewing, or immediacy. Unlike Crosscut, which allows readers to comment instantly, a submitted “sound off” is held for hours — sometimes days, it seems — before an editor approves it. This means that you can’t really follow a conversation, because everything is so slowed down and filtered.

The other issue is that, should you criticize (in however a politic — or in my case: impolitic) fashion some flaw in the article, the article might be edited to fix that flaw, but your comment stays — which might magnify an apparent irrationality on the part of the commenter.

I submitted a most impolitic sound off last Saturday evening. It was already fairly late in the day when I read the article, Giant canoe will hang over Bastion Square, by Carolyn Heiman (a very good reporter), about a public art piece that apparently was just approved by …”the city,” although it beats me what the process was by which (and by whom) the decision was made.

Aside from that, Heiman’s article mentioned a well-known city councilor, yet didn’t introduce her as such, and simply quoted her (…’We just announce the winner in consideration of the privacy of the other artists, [sic] said XYZ.), seemingly out of the blue.

I bet the New York Times, when quoting a well-known city politician (let’s say the mayor?), would do it like this: “Blah, blah blah,” said Mayor Bloomberg. At least then you know, ah, he’s the mayor: you’re informed as to who (or what) he is. If only his last name is mentioned, and the reader doesn’t have the entire council and mayor roster of names at his or her mental fingertips, the reader might be left in the dark. But if the reader is literate enough to read the paper, he or she will know what a mayor or a councilor is. The rest is deduction, of a relatively easy sort.

I’m no Lynn Truss, but I have certain issues that really push my buttons, and one of them is clarity in newspaper articles. I know Heiman is a good reporter, but I also suspect that there are many sloppy editors who get careless when they cut the reporters’ submitted texts to fit the column space available. I’d bet that the article originally did identify the speaker as a city councilor, but that this was edited out (for space reasons?). So I first commented on that, impolitically because I charged the editors with not doing their job.

(As an aside: nothing drives me up the wall faster than the colloquial use of the “is” contraction to replace “has,” as in “It’s been a while since he attended.” It is been a while…? What does that mean? It seems that newspapers are constantly bleating about the evil bloggers diluting standards, yet they’re in the front ranks of offenders themselves. When a blogger blogs colloquially, it’s one thing — but when the “official” and usually printed media get all sloppy like that, it’s not ok. And still it happens all over every newspaper, and all the time. “She’s got the experience to make it work.” She is got the experience…? That might work in conversation, but can we keep it off the written page, please? Where are the editors? I think the reporters/writers are doing it to cut their word count. “It has” is two words, “It’s” is just one. Use contractions of all sorts often enough and you can really shave the word count, which I suppose might be important when you know editors are going to whack your pieces to fit the space.)

But, to return to Carolyn Heiman’s otherwise excellent report, what has also really infuriated me for well over a year is this: it is impossible to find out anything online about some of the city’s boards or committees. There’s an Advisory Design Panel — who is on it?, when does it meet?, why are its minutes and agendas so out of date? There’s an Advisory Planning Council — again, same questions. There is also a Public Art Project Advisory Committee, which seems to be dormant and whose domain (according to the city website) “is currently under review.” So who made decisions regarding the winning public art proposal which has been chosen for installation in Victoria’s Bastion Square?

Well, that was the other button. The night before, I managed to catch a short video clip posted to the same newspaper’s website, from CHEK-TV, which showed an interview with a local artist who appears to be part of some committee — one that has done the jurying. He just talked about the winning artist, but said nothing about the committee or the process.

Furthermore, Heiman reports that the two runner-up candidates will remain anonymous:

A seven-member jury trimmed the 21 submissions to three finalists who where given $1,000 to create maquettes to show in more detail how their art would look. Gallant’s maquette is now on display at the B.C. Maritime Museum in Bastion Square.

The city will not disclose who the other two finalists were or describe what their work was like. [emphasis added]

But if these two runner-ups were also each paid $1000 of taxpayer monies to produce maquettes — which the public won’t see — shouldn’t the public have a right to know who they were? (* See “Edit” addendum, below.*)

Why the shroud of secrecy? Why does the city create this fundamentally undemocratic, secretive climate?

And so, while I regret my tone — holy cow, I was incensed when I wrote the “sound off” — I stand by my basic questions.

Yesterday I submitted a second comment to the same “sound off” board — but the editors don’t seem to want to publish this one — at least it’s not up yet, well over 18 hours after I submitted it. It read:

At the risk of digging myself a deeper hole here after my somewhat vehement comment above: I know that in the first version I read, Mrs. Madoff was NOT introduced as a Victoria councilor (otherwise my quoted text, in my first comment above, would have shown this). That suggests that the article was edited *after* I commented. I still maintain that bringing someone into an article without a proper introduction is a breach of standards, even as I’m appreciative of the fact that the TC must have fixed this initial error. Also to clarify: my criticism was directed at the TC editors, not at Carolyn Heiman, who I think is a very good reporter. Finally, I’m still totally in the dark however as to what or who this “city of Victoria selection committee” is (which clearly involves Mr. Porteous, as per the CHEK-TV video clip — see above — but which isn’t in any other way identified). That’s not the reporter’s fault, if it’s a case of the city making the information nearly impossible to track down. I’m still annoyed that the City of Victoria’s website doesn’t have up-to-date information on many of its committees, including the ADP (Advisory Design Panel), APC (Advisory Planning Committee), or the apparently dormant (or not?) Public Art Project Advisory Committee. I don’t think that transparency should be so difficult to achieve in our digital age. Put the information online and put it out in *real time*, not with a delay of months. Many City of Victoria committee websites are inexcusably out of date.

Perhaps they’re not comfortable letting this one through because I claim that they can edit articles after the fact. Or perhaps it’ll magically appear later?

Whatever, but I’m done with this silly method of “reader interaction.” The invitation to “sound off” isn’t an invitation to conversation. It’s really just noise, in my case of cannons going off. And while I hate being a loose cannon, being a cannon shaped to the restrictions of a media conglomerate’s “sound off” is even worse.

**Update** Sometime between my blog post from late this afternoon and now (it’s 10pm), that second “sound off” comment of mine made it through the filters and is up on the website.

Now, let’s see… How else can I tick the city off? Hmm, how about by asking why people who live in the municipalities of Oak Bay, Saanich, Esquimalt, or elsewhere in the CRD, who can’t vote in City of Victoria elections, can nonetheless run for and be elected either to council or even as mayor of the City of Victoria? Does this mean that someone from Langford could become mayor of Victoria, …and vice versa? If that’s the case, why not let those folks vote in City of Victoria elections?

If memory serves, in Boston you can’t even work for the city as staff — never mind be a city councilor or mayor — if you don’t live in Boston.

Why does the City of Victoria staff its city hall with staff bureaucrats and elect politicians and officials who don’t actually live in the city, yet simultaneously have political elections that exclude those folks?

(Edit, March 6: the chosen art work itself will be paid for by funds raised by the Bastion Square Revitalization Association, which means taxpayers aren’t paying for this. Presumably the $1000 paid to each of the 3 finalists was also provided by the BSRA fund. However, my point that public — and publicly appointed — committees should be transparent, their roster readily available, their meetings posted and open: that still stands.  Furthermore, the sculpture will occupy public space, and therefore it’s the public’s business.)

You know eco-consciousness is mainstream when…

…it’s a major theme at Brazilian carnival.

Via PingMag - The Tokyo-based magazine about “Design and Making Things” comes this wonderful recap of Sao Paolo, Brazil’s just-ended carnival season. Season? According to Aroldo Cardoso Jr., who wrote the intro for PingMag’s entry, planning and preparation for carnival starts in July. It’s more or less an 8-month obsession, sort of like pregnancy (minus one month).

Go read the entry, but here are some photos of costumes, as posted on PingMag, with eco-themes.

First up, wind turbines!

Next, Ethanol!

And Biodiesel!, which looks a lot like Ethanol, but that’s ok:

And finally, because other species are endangered and need a “voice,” there’s Coral Reefs!

Gateway Green (Victoria)

I just discovered that the developer of Gateway Green, a new Class A office building that’s going up in Victoria this year, put my December FOCUS article online as a PDF (with the publisher’s and my permission). My article discusses Xane St.Phillips’s living wall design for this building. Go read Not just another brick in the wall (PDF) and learn about an exciting new project for Victoria.

Update: the article is now also available on my Articles published in FOCUS Magazine page.

Auto de Feo: the Beat goes on

I would be very interested in seeing this exhibition, if I were in Brooklyn or nearby enough: Michael de Feo curating a group of street artists in Behind the Seen (starting on Dec.13, through January 15/08). Admittedly, change in age and circumstance has led me to lose my natural taste for much beyond-the-pale kind of boundary-pushing-into-what,-exactly cultural production. But you have to keep in mind that (unless my memory fails utterly) Michael de Feo is Jay de Feo’s son. And that imparts quite a pedigree — he came by his vocation through immersion. Pointer to this exhibition via Cool Hunting: Behind the Seen.

More on Jay de Feo here, here, and here. And the wikipedia article on The Rat Bastard Protective Association…

Could culture marketing go into overdrive?

This could get tricky or messy or both. CEOs for Cities’ blog entry, To Tax or Not to Tax?, shines a light on the (potential?) problem of non-profit organizations having tax-exempt status. In the US, collectively over 23 cities, non-profits represent ~$1.5b in “lost” tax revenue, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

CEOs for Cities writes:

Universities, hospitals, museums and other nonprofits are generally exempt from taxes, most notably property taxes. These exemptions in 23 cities, according to a survey by The Chronicle of Philanthropy, amount to $1.5 billion.

The biggest exemptions are in NYC, Boston, LA, DC, Houston and Philadelphia. But the biggest impacts are in Denver, Baltimore, San Diego and Memphis.

Most exemptions go to universities and hospitals in exchange for the public good they are expected to provide. But the pressure on city budgets continues to grow, so pressure is increasing on nonprofits to pay something for the city services they require (or for the land they take out of circulation that could yield property tax).

Clearly, not all nonprofits are created equal. Some hospitals, for instance, serve more indigent patients than other hospitals. We may be moving to a time when cities will demand that nonprofits exempt from property taxes account for the value of the public service they actually provide, as well of the cost of public services they use.

The really far-reaching idea is that cities might eventually “demand that nonprofits exempt from property taxes account for the value of the public service they actually provide, as well of the cost of public services they use.”

Obviously, that’s possible to do — to an extent. But it will be a nasty food fight all around when it comes time to determine the dollar amounts of “intangibles” provided by cultural non-profits.

I can just imagine it… “Our art exhibit/ music performance/ theatre piece provides mental stimulation, keeps people off drugs, and saves souls, therefore it’s worth x-amount of dollars,” says the pro-culture camp. The opposition, who don’t want “their” tax money to support the “useless” arts, counters, “Your cultural product drives people crazy, and far from providing a benefit, in fact adds to social costs.”

Well, maybe that’s a bit far-fetched, but trying to pin a price on everything and anything could get absurd pretty quickly. Just look at advertising, which wants us to pay the price (buy the product) — silly claims abound.

Art & Science Symposium in Edmonton (on now)

I would love to be at this event…  Hope someone is blogging it!   Art & Science Symposium - Edmonton Cultural Capital of Canada

“My medium is motion control”

Watch this: Cool Hunting: Bruce Shapiro

It’s a terrific video produced by Ami Kealoha, on the artist Bruce Shapiro.  He grabs my attention immediately by introducing himself thus:

"My medium is motion control." 

That’s the first time I’ve heard motion control described as an artistic medium.  After seeing Shapiro’s work in the video, though, I get it, and I hope I see a whole lot more work like this.  Great stuff! 

Hmmm, I want some here, in Victoria — "Pipedreams," for example, would look great on a building facade…