Performative Environments

Urban Design at Architecture & Design

Research

Bo Stjerne Thomsen

Performative Environments

Performative Environments is a research project within Department of Architecture & Design, Aalborg University, investigating how modern communication technology can be used to improve local interaction between humans and environment and in specific directed towards the development of technology and methods to be incorporated in city design and architecture. In connection with this the project works from the principals of interactive environments, where the integration of digital technology in buildings as well as the development of new digital simulation tools and intelligent building components make the individual citizen able to affect the functionality and expression of the architecture of the city and thereby locally individualize and change the environment.

Performative Environments focuses on what a building does instead of what it is. The research project assumptions are with this that the increased utilization of digital communication and pervasive computing will contribute to environments more open to change and able to be reconfigured according to the present people and networks at the given moment. In this way performative environments focuses on the actions between humans and buildings and thereby how design can become a dynamic active for the city environment, instead of focusing on the static appearance in the city. A performative approach to city design is open and dynamic and causes a continuous communication and exchange between the local environment and the physical appearance of the building.

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Performative Environments

Performative Environments

D-tower, Doetinchem

Posted January 25, 2007
Filed under: Project Examples |
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D-tower is a 12 m tall tower designed by artist Q.S. Serafijn and architect Lars Spuybroek / NOX, and is located in the city of Doetinchem, Netherlands, mapping the emotions of the inhabitants. By combining network relationships with a performative sculpture, the project locates itself as both a prefabricated epoxy sculpture in the city and a performative entity affected by the inhabitants.

 

How it performs:
The tower changes the lights according to emotions reflected from the D-tower website, (www.d-toren.nl). On the website there is a questionnaire, where the inhabitants can respond to respectively love, hate, happiness and fear, determining the intensities of their feelings. Each evening the tower transmits the colours as “the State of the Town” assuming the most intensely emotions as a large interactive system of relationships.

Personal messages can be placed in a capsule underneath the tower as well as the tower will present a prize to the address in the city that scores the highest level of emotions.

 

See more on:

http://www.d-toren.nl/site/

http://lab.v2.nl/projects/dtower.html

http://www.noxarch.com/

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Performativity in Japanese Art

Group Show: Between Art and Life - Performativity in Japanese Art [Geneva, Switzerland] | IMAGINE PEACE

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Uprisings by kozyndan

Uprisings

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vernacular architecture: Takasugi-an by Terunobu Fujimori

Dezeen » Blog Archive » Takasugi-an by Terunobu Fujimori
ollowing yesterday’s Charcoal House story, here’s another of Terunobu Fujimori’s projects photographed by Edmund Sumner: this time Takasugi-an, a tea house in Chino, Nagano Prefecture, Japan.

The tea house is built atop two chestnut trees, cut from a nearby mountain and transported to the site, and is accessible only by free-standing ladders propped against one of the trees.

Following the tradition of tea masters, who maintained total control over the construction of their tea houses, Fujimori designed and built the structure for his own use.

The interior is covered with plaster and bamboo mats.

The name Takasugi-an means, “a tea house [built] too high.”

See more Japanese architecture in our Top Ten Japanese Projects

Here is some text about the Tea House, written by Yuki Sumner:

–

Takasugi-an
Chino City, Nagano Prefecture

Terunobu Fujimori, 2003-2004

The academician and architect, Terunobu Fujimori, has observed that a teahouse is “the ultimate personal architecture.” Its extreme compactness, which would at most accommodate four and a half tatami mats (2.7 square metres) or even just two tatami mats (1.8 square metres) of floor space, makes it feel as though it were an extension of one’s body, “like a piece of clothing.”

The tea masters traditionally maintained total control over the construction of these “enclosures,” whose simplicity was their main concern. They therefore preferred not to involve an architect or even a skilled carpenter - an act considered as being too ostentatious. Following this tradition, Fujimori decided to build a humble teahouse for himself and by himself over a patch of land that belonged to his family.

His interest as an architect, however, lay more in pushing the limit and constraints of a traditional teahouse rather than pursuing the art of tea making, and as a result, he has created a highly expressive piece of architecture.

Takasugi-an, which literally means, “a teahouse [built] too high,” is indeed more like a tree house than a teahouse. In order to reach the room, the guests must climb up the freestanding ladders propped up against one of the two chestnut trees supporting the whole structure. The trees were cut and brought in from the nearby mountain to the site.

Shoes are taken off at the midway point. Once inside the room, which is padded simply with plaster and bamboo mats, the architect’s adventurous spirit gives way to the serenity more suited to the purpose of making tea and calming one’s mind.

The room displays a large window that frames the perfect bird’s eyes’ view of the town where Fujimori grew up. It effectively replaces kakejiku (a picture scroll) that would indicate clues appropriate to the time of the year in traditional teahouses. This kakejiku not only displays the cyclical seasonal changes but also the profound irreversible changes taking place in provincial towns like Chino.

Also visible in the distance is Fujimori’s very first project, Jinchokan Moriya Historical Museum. The architect’s penchant for the personal, vernacular, and everyday is particularly evident here in this swaying teahouse.

–

Posted by Megan Wilton

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Anri Sala - ARTINFO.com

Anri Sala - ARTINFO.com

Anri Sala, "Answer Me" (2008). HD video projection, stereo sound, 4 min 50 sec.

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Walker Art Center | Beuys Hyperessay | Material as Metaphor

mATERIAL AS METAPHOR
 Whether they are found or made, autonomous sculptural objects or relics of a past performance, Beuys' objects exist in a metaphoric field--on a continuum of fluid connections and associations from which metaphors emerge and radiate.

 In speaking of his work Rubberized Box (1957), Beuys elucidates the passage from personal experience to a more fundamental and universal human experience that is paradigmatic of his work on the whole.While his comments about Rubberized Box were made at a later date, they suggest that he was already beginning to develop an alternate approach to sculpture--one that was deeply personal, introspective, and that would bring about the evolution of his Theory of Social Sculpture.

 His theory conceptualized the passage of things (raw material) from a chaotic, undetermined state to a determined, ordered state through the molding process of sculpture. Just as language and semantics give form to thoughts and determine how we understand one another, so does the principle of creativity manifest in artistic practice (the molding process of sculpture) and act as a model for the inherently creative aspects of all social processes. This is the essence of his Theory of Social Sculpture which was the modus operandi of his life-long artistic project.

Materials and objects were "effectual tools" employed by Beuys to clarify his Theory of Social Sculpture. He saw art as a parallel "solution" between two poles: between soft, organic forms and hard, crystallized forms.

Such physical matter, or sculptural material, has parallels to thought, which can exist in these polar states and which must be creatively manipulated and transformed. The process of finding the solution between the two poles brings about the "evolutionary step towards a new kind of freedom.

"For Beuys, objects always had physical and metaphorical dimensions that extended to the quotidian. The primary aspect of an object lay in its elemental materiality.

 In Beuys' "system" an object is always a metaphor of something that transcends matter. The genesis of meaning through this paradigm of material to metaphor is a hallmark of his work. Meaning is generated through movement along a series of metaphoric levels: from the elemental material (fat), to the physical state (liquid/solid), to the conceptual (organic/crystalline), to finally, the creative implications embodied by this process as a model for creative solutions--or, "evolutionary step to new freedom"--to problems in all spheres.

In many contexts, the material stands alone, as fat, as felt, but it is also an exemplification of the physical qualities inherent in the material: solid fat is firm, yet pliable. It contains nourishment and kinetic energy--hence fat denotes a potentially nourishing/healing/resolving force. Thus, for Beuys, an immense metaphoric significance lay between fat in its solid and liquid states.

Ultimately, fat is a metaphor for the potential for change and the release of creative energy.Likewise, felt exemplifies materiality, density, entanglement while it connotes the properties of insulation and protection. But the material and physical qualities of felt contain broader social implications: the fibers of felt, consisting of a pressed mass of animal hair or wool, become so intertwined through the transformative process of construction as to be inseparable. This material construction is analogous to "the social dimension of humanity, man in his milieu. He cannot cast off his communal bonds; he cannot defend himself against the dangers of life and develop his potential alone."[16]Often, too, his objects carry a relatively consistent meaning from context to context, that is, between objects, or between actions. The object, or image, of the stag and the hare signify gender, and the intuitive power of animals. These metaphors remain consistent, albeit never finite. For example, the hare appears in various contexts: the image of a hare may appear in a drawing, or hare's blood may be used as material, a dead hare may be used as a prop in an action, or the hare may be absent from the work except as cryptically inscribed as in the title of the work Hare's Grave. While the specifics shift from context to context, the hare consistently signifies biology and gender ("female principle"), the intuitive power and intelligence of animals, the process of burrowing underground, and the Earth, and/or death as a source of regeneration and redemption. In contrast, Fluxus objects did not function as a source of metaphor. Instead, they existed on a literal level--props that served the playful and irreverent purpose of the moment, in a performance or as part of a multiple.

Walker Art Center | Beuys Hyperessay | Material as Metaphor

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Frieze Magazine | Archive | Of Goats and Men

Of Goats and Men
Art
Matthew Barney
Contrary to popular belief, performance art never died. First it expanded and merged with theatre, then it took place behind locked doors, without an audience. Silent and serious, Matthew Barney’s early actions seemed to happen in a new space he had invented. Objects made by the artist to be manipulated in videos were defined by the moment of their use. (Instead of ‘sculptures’, he called them ‘docufragments’.)

Above all, the artist’s employment of more than one video monitor gave his recorded movements a sepulchral quality, tacitly showing actions which continued to exclude the viewer. In 1989, the year Matthew Barney graduated, he made the video Field Dressing (orifill). A figure in a white wedding dress descended two flights of stairs. It was the artist himself, using cross-dressing less as a mode of liberation than a call to order. (One critic even remarked that watching the figure descending was ‘like trying to reconstruct a memory from long ago.’) Field Dressing… was shown alongside a related installation in a sports centre at Yale. Props for the video were displayed as sculptural objects in their own right. More importantly, the space of video and the space of the building were matched, compared, made strange. Looking from one to the other made both seem odder than ever and while the objects, now relics, evoked time past, the video repeated a succession of activities in which sport and performance merged.The Drawing Restraint series had begun a year earlier. Described by Barney as ‘facilities to defeat the facility of drawing,’ these were experiments in prohibition or hindrance, turning mark-making into a physical trial. His role models were Harry Houdini, who regularly cheated death by means of physical and mental feats, often involving literal restraint, and Jim Otto, the ‘Mean Machine’, one of Al Davis’s Oakland Raiders, famous because he continued playing even with an artificial knee. In an interview from 1991, Barney explained his favourite moment in a football game: ‘the delay of game penalty where there is kind of a suspension of play, a refusal to accept the ball and walk into the arena of competition. This brings up the idea of someone who is able to capture creative potential through some sort of withholding or self-imposed restraint mechanism.’Clad only in a rubber bathing cap, his head and feet bandaged, laden with what resembled the kind of equipment a fetishistic scaffolder might carry - ‘internally lubricated self-threading flight blocks, titanium ice screws’ - Barney used these instruments to dangle from walls or move across them like a mountaineer. As a graduate in art and sport with experience of modelling, he already seemed to have perfected his dual role as sportsman/supermodel, as well as deciding on his own particular materials, like refrigerated petroleum jelly. It was as if he had decided to evade definitions. Indeed, if Barney had a genealogy, the most important family member would not have been a performance artist at all. For the complex mythic substratum of his work most nearly approached that of Marcel Duchamp. Didn’t the spiral descent recall the slow motion of Nude Descending the Staircase, itself inspired by Mallarmé’s aesthete hero who decides at last to relinquish his ivory tower and join the rest of the world? As in Duchamp, the self-sufficiency of the artist’s fictive universe was paraded, changes of state were proposed and sexual definitions were blurred. (Barney has described the ideal of a ‘roving rectum’.) And like that of Duchamp, Barney’s sustaining myth involved sexuality, or the differences between male and female. The novel part of his particular use of the myth was his ability to conjure both sexes at once and hold both at a distance while continuing to maintain the impression of sexual interplay. (The work with the climbing nude of 1991 was christened MILE HIGH Threshold: FLIGHT with the ANAL SADISTIC WARRIOR.)An iconography was developing. By 1991, when Barney’s ‘New Work’ exhibition was presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, titles were turgid and drawings were obscure, but the sense of an evolving private language was unmistakable. Titling had become poetry, cross-referencing had lurched out of control until every work seemed part of every other, the tone was humourous, and the joke was a smutty one. Penetration, masturbation, constipation and lubrication featured in the terminology, as well as obscure puns. (It is relatively easy to guess what a ‘mile-high threshold’ might be, but what is a ‘hemorrhoidal distractor’ or a ‘blind perineum’?) And if the regalia of the male figure in Barney’s performances was sportsmanlike and heroic, with swimming, baseball, rock-climbing and gymnastics merging into one activity, his female counterpart, played by Barney posing in a white robe, toque and 50s swimsuit, seemed the epitome of nimbleness and grace. Not even her white gloves and dark glasses could prevent her bouncing a pearl into an elaborately stretched hole designed to receive it by cutting through a skin-like fabric and holding the incision open with a clamp. Shifts between conventional sexual roles, between states and conditions (hard and soft, frozen and liquid, captivity and freedom); the references to protection by coated surfaces (Pyrex, Teflon, Silicon); above all the use of materials such as ‘human chorionic gonadotropin’, relate to the sex act. But which sex act, exactly? As in Duchamp’s work - if the works in drag and the halving of the Large Glass are taken into account - the theme was gender itself, the test of gender being desire. For perhaps only desire can resolve the whole idea of sexing and of what ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ could mean.What Barney meant by anal sadism was ‘the impulse to differentiate the sexuality’ of a human being. To him, the 00 sign (based on Jim Otto’s shirt) which he had elaborated to make an insignia for the poster for his Ottoshaft video shown at the 1992 Documenta, proposed (for Otto) a ‘twin rectum’ which became ‘more of a roving orifice’. Its extension into drawing in 1991, presented as usual in a frame ‘internally lubricated’ with petroleum jelly, showed that symbol as a pair of gonads and the Otto ‘shaft’ - part of the building in which the action was recorded - as the cross-section of a penis, in this case putatively extended to form what could be vestigial ovaries. The videos would elaborate on sexing, from images like the sewing together of two kilts with the occupants still inside them, in the Ottoshaft video, or the appearance of the artist’s mother in the same work, playing Al Davis, coach of the Oakland Raiders, to the equivalent of male rape in Drawing Restraint 7 (1993), when one satyr pulls another’s horns off after a struggle. Despite the apparent obviousness of its elaborate costumes, high colour and ludicrous games, Drawing Restraint 7 contains one puzzle: as the satyrs battle inside a moving limousine, a strange goo seems to be forming on its glass roof, and what resembles a string of pearls can be seen vaguely from inside. Could these relate to a puzzling sequence in Barney’s new video, the most elaborate yet?A drum roll introduces a view of an impossibly long, Victorian pier jutting from a rocky, green landscape. To the drone of a bagpipe, the familiar CREMASTER logo is seen at speed, before Barney himself appears in a white performance space, his face more animal than human, the bright red hair offsetting the whiteness of the room, his suit and the white mistletoe in his buttonhole. As he combs his hair over them, we cannot help but notice the two strange holes in his head where his horns once were. The room is a pavilion at the very end of a mile-long pier, leading to a beach and a road. For the setting is the Isle of Man, a place where it comes as no surprise to encounter mutations. For man, on Man, may have become as much of a hybrid as the elaborately horned goats to be seen there or the rambling route of the Tourist Trophy motorcycle races. In this white room in the white pavilion, near the end of the long pier, three naked, muscled, red-haired, epicene figures pander to their master’s every need. By the insertion of a large pin, they give his hooves new resonance, for example. And as he starts to tap-dance in front of a mirror, they cluster in anticipation. Meanwhile, on the island, two teams of two men in blue or yellow leather start up their motorcycles and sidecars. Side by side and facing in opposite directions, they wait for the flag to drop. Just before it does, the camera rises above them to show that their conjunction forms the outline of the CREMASTER logo, with its vertical capsule intersected midway by a narrow horizontal. And, in an unexpected piece of animation, the logo is surmounted by the three legged symbol representing the Isle of Man. As we watch, the symbol revolves to indicate the start of the race.The three attendants - described in the credits as ‘faeries’ - wait for something to happen. As their master dances, they creep over and slip something in his pockets. Meanwhile, inside the yellow and blue leather suits of the duelling teams, strange things are happening. As their vehicles pick up speed and tension rises, slithery forms emerge from pockets in their jackets and move in one case up, in the other down. When the camera shifts back to the pier, we notice a feature that was not previously visible: two curved, empty ramps on the other side of the rehearsal space. On the racetrack, the yellow team is in trouble: unable to negotiate a large puddle, they are forced to change direction. Meanwhile, on a lonely stretch of road, a pitstop person who looks suspiciously like one of the ‘faeries’ waits to change tyres. All is still, when suddenly a spectacular, if predictable event occurs: the tap-dancing goat plummets through a hole he has danced in the floor of the rehearsal room, drops into the sea and continues his activities by walking on the sea bed between the end of the pier and the beach in the distance. On the lonely road where a car has stopped for refuelling, the pit stop person muses for a moment and, instead of changing the tyre immediately, replaces it with a skin-coloured version for a moment or two before reverting to the normal black one. The strange thing about the temporary skin-coloured alternative is that it has two nipple-shaped attachments hanging below it, which ruin its symmetry - and which, of course, would prevent it from running. The elated expression on the face of the pit stop person as the bike roars off after its strange baptism leaves little doubt that a major event has taken place. Meanwhile, the yellow team encounters more problems. The vehicle crashes into a cliff. Well, not ‘crashes’, exactly; the driver is held in a state of suspended animation only inches from the cliff. Ice on his visor has frozen him to the spot.Wearing billowing skirts, like a cross between Tenniel’s Alice and a pantomime dame, the three faeries have left the pier to take their ease on the cliffs nearby and await the goat’s return. Yet their vigil is disturbed when something is thrown into their midst. Underwater, their master seems to be searching. Finally, he finds an escape route, but a perilous one. Manoeuvring his body through different spaces, in the course of which his direction and orientation are muddled, he wrenches himself through white globules which melt and impede his progress; climbs through tight spaces shaped like one cookie-cutter after another; tunnels his way across the beach, which registers his burrowing as a continuous mole cast; and finally escapes. As he climbs to freedom, the three attendants in their yellow dresses ring tiny bells to encourage him, and the unpleasant, mobile pink objects in his pocket begin to move about. Suddenly he is free. Through a crack he spies a road and on it a goat, dyed red, festooned with tartan ribbons and looking like a regimental mascot. On the pier, the motorbikes have been put on display on the two white ramps. A pause. An empty road. A drum roll, bagpipe music and what looks like the entrance to a tent, its canvas lashed with thread which is pulled steadily to reveal… Well, what exactly? A haggis? A goitrous growth waiting to be lanced? A mound of engorged flesh meets our gaze, its colour almost purple, the skin tightly tied. And finally, when a second shot through a pair of open male legs reveals bagpipe drones attached to and dangling from puckered skin, the experience proves too quick for immediate recognition. Nevertheless, we are convinced that we have seen something like this before.The Isle of Man is an obvious place to make a film about masculinity. Or is it? Inbreeding produces freakish anomalies. Where did the idea of that three-legged man come from? Could it be a sign of rampant masculinity? (Do Manxmen have members the same length as their legs?) Or its opposite? (Three legs leave no room for genitalia.) Or some third alternative? In Drawing Restraint 7, flirtation or sport leads to the removal of the satyr’s horns, which must be restored, for what would a satyr be without horns? That the creature Barney plays is not a goat is crucial, since the sign that he has successfully achieved his aim is his confrontation with a real regimental goat in tartan, the first thing to be seen as he emerges from his undersea journey. Perhaps a goat is to a satyr what a woman is to a drag queen: an object of envy and pity in equal quantities. For sexually, it is a primitive version of Barney’s satyr: suave, fashionable, but lacking animal attraction. You are not born a woman; you become one, Simone de Beauvoir argued. That also applies to heroes. The undersea journey is paralleled in every mythology in the world. And, like this particular baptism, it takes place in tight spots. Crawling with difficulty up a symbolic sphincter is the last stage of the rebirthing process. Or is it a ritual of definition? (Hence the sequence of luminous cookie-cutters.) As the action draws to a close, two separate objects, both elliptical like the two zeroes of the Jim Otto motif, appear and reappear: on the strange, symbolic tyre; on the ramps built to display the motorcycles after the race; above all, in the disturbing, mobile objects placed in the drivers’ pockets, organs which take on a life of their own and crawl up the bodies of the duelling drivers.‘My heart is in my mouth,’ we say when we are frightened. Barney’s references to heat and cold result in a different metaphor: of the retraction of the testicles, a sign of fear. And the final shots, in which it seems that two pairs of real testicles are displayed (one tied, bulbous and purple with strain, the others nipped, wrinkled and retracted) not only resolves the question of the relevance of bagpipes - played not on Man but in Scotland by men in skirts - but also of the strange, slippery good luck tokens by which faeries set such store. What they are giving the drivers is ‘balls’ - in other words, bravery, guts, manhood in its traditional sense. Balls are no more than symbolic, of course. And at the end of the century they are under a lot of strain. But when the artist is Matthew Barney, neither discovery comes as a surprise.

Stuart Morgan

Frieze Magazine | Archive | Of Goats and Men

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There are many ways to be free.

There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do. -Anais Nin

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raumlabor berlin » Blog Archiv » Moderato Cantabile

raumlabor berlin » Blog Archiv » Moderato Cantabile
Design of a festival centre for the Steirischer Herbst Festival 2008 whose main theme is “Misfortuneavoidance Strategies”. The festival centre will be located in an empty baroque museum building. We’re interested in the idea of building an explosion; a shape and structure which develops a fascinating force at the exact moment of its dissolution. We will reduce the colours of the interior walls, floors and fixtures to a few grey tones so that only the shapes of the objects stand out.

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raumlabor berlin » Blog Archiv » Raumstruktur 01

raumlabor berlin » Blog Archiv » Raumstruktur 01

raumlabor_berlin is engaged with temporarily transforming locations: a gallery into a laboratory, a public square into a location for scientific discourse or a cold corridor into a place with new social qualities. When spaces are meant not only to be neutral shells for content but also to convey particular functions and serve as catalysts, the way of dealing with these spaces, their design and programming have to be integral components of the overall conception. For CTM.09, raumlabor_berlin modifies the corridor of Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien - a space of transit - into a communicative and social centre for the building. For this, they will invent a new structure to be built into the space, which will be constructed out of doors from demolished pre-cast concrete buildings in Halle-Neustadt.

23 Jan - 01 Mar 2009
further Information on Transmediale & Club Transmediale 2009
www.transmediale.de
www.clubtransmediale.de

Berlin
2009
within “Club Transmediale 2009″
im Rahmen des “Club Transmediale 2009″

Markus Bader, Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius
mit Violeta Burckhardt Razeto, Manfred Eccli, Marius Gantert, Alice Hallynck, Diana Levin, Andreas Krauth, Maria Garcia Perez,  Andrew Plucinski, Manuel Rauwolf, Florian Stirnemann

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raumlabor berlin » Blog Archiv » Eichbaumoper

raumlabor berlin » Blog Archiv » Eichbaumoper
Vision for the transformation of Eichbaum underground station between Mülheim and Essen into an opera house. A new type of opera will be created in an on-site opera site office in collaboration with specialists in composition, text and space in direct confrontation with the everyday conditions of the place. (premiere planned to take place in June 2009)

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no trust no city

raumlabor berlin

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raumlabor berlin » Blog Archiv » city mattress - die Stadtmatratze

raumlabor berlin » Blog Archiv » city mattress - die Stadtmatratze
The ctiy mattress is an installation in public space. It is a triangular pneumatic structure, measuring 15 metres on each side. As catalytic object it is a platform for various actions. It is concieved for “tuned city”, a 5 day conference on sound and public space. Here it offers a provisional space on Berlins Alexanderplatz for specialists, experts, audience and passers-by to meet, rest and dive into the conferences dialogues.
The over-scaled soft surface questiones our behavioural codes in public space, especially the physical actions of the bodies within the space. For “Tuned City” the sound of the conference speakers is transmitted through wireless headphones to each listener individually. A tension is created between the individual and the temporary collective. The city mattress is an experimental condensator for acting in public.

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ikinci kez blogda: touched echo by Markus Kison

touched echo by Markus Kison

2007/10 till now. Side specific installation on the Brühlsche Terrrasse, Dresden. Railing, messing icons, bone conducters, iron speaker cases, cd player, amplifier.

Synopsis

touched echo is a minimal medial intervention in public space. The visitors of the Brühl's Terrace (Dresden, Germany) are taken back in time to the night of the terrible air raid on 13th February 1945. In their role as a performer they put themselves into the place of the people who shut their ears away from the noise of the explosions. While leaning on the balustrade the sound of airplanes and explosions is transmitted from the swinging balustrade through their arm directly into into the inner ear (bone conduction).

Project description

Every year millions of tourists visit Brühlsche Terrasse (Brühl's Terrace) built on top of the Dresden city walls. At this historic place near the Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady) visitors enjoy the view across the river Elbe to the other part of the Old Town, called "Dresden Neustadt". Markus Kison's project touched echo intervenes here by telling a story about this place. The intervention - at first calm and invisible - consists in taking people out of the present into the past: into the night of 13th February 1945. That was the night, when Dresden's Old Town was almost entirely destroyed by the allies' air raid. The tourists (as far as the are willing to participate) are supposed to adopt a mentally as well as physically contemplative position. An icon on the balustrade will be the only hint given to describe the interaction. According to this instruction one is supposed to lay one's elbows onto the balustrade, close one's ears and look at the Old Town. In this position the motors of B-25 bombers resound and cannonade across the sky above one's head; followed by explosions in the distance. The sound is generated from four sound conductors, which are integrated in the railing. It is transmitted from the swinging balustrade through the arm directly into into the inner ear (bone conduction) and cannot be heard by anyone else. Visitors suddenly get an idea of what it must have felt like that night; they travel back in time to this situation. Everyone by dealing with this terrifying event becomes a kind of "memorial" of it. In their role as a performer they put themselves into the place of the people who shut their ears away from the noise of the explosions. (Translation by Cornelia Schupp)

Markus Kison is a Berlin based artist misusing data material to create time based sculptures. He is interested in situations that are beyond our every day beliefs and question our rational construct of reality. Therefore he uses data material, which naturally implies the fantastic quality to overcome time and space and thus can alter our very personal perspective.

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A Missing Piece in the Economic Stimulus: Hobbling Arts Hobbles Innovation | Psychology Today Blogs

By Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein on February 11, 2009 - 9:28am in Imagine That!

As the economy stumbles, the first things to get cut at the national, state, and local levels are the arts. The first thing that goes in our school curricula are the arts. Arts, common wisdom tells us, are luxuries we can do without in times of crisis. Or can we?

Let's see what happens when we start throwing out all the science and technology that the arts have made possible.

You may be shocked to find that you'll have to do without your cell phone or PDA. In the first place, it uses a form of encryption called frequency hopping to ensure your messages can't easily be intercepted. Frequency hopping was invented by American composer George Antheil in collaboration with the actress Hedy Lamarr. Yeah, really.

Next, the electronic screen that displays your messages (and those on your computer and TV) employ a combination of red, green, and blue dots from which all the different colors can be generated. That innovation was the collaboration of a series of painter-scientists (including American physicist Ogden Rood and Nobel laureate Wilhelm Ostwald) and post-impressionist artists like Seurat - you know, the guy who painted his pictures out of dots of color, just like the ones in your electronic devices. The programming inside owes its existence to J. M. Jacquard, a weaver, who invented programmable looms using punch cards. Exactly the same technique was borrowed to program the first computers and is incorporated into modern programming languages.

Then there are all those computer chips running our critical devices. They're made using a combination of three classic artistic inventions: etching, silk screen printing, and photolithography. Add to that the fact that data from NASA and NSA satellites is enhanced using artistic techniques such as chiaroscuro (a Renaissance invention) and false coloring (invented by Fauvist painters) to increase contrast so it's easier to perceive important information. (Parenthetically, artists also figured out how to hide information. Camouflage was invented by the American painter Abbot Thayer and during WWI the Vorticists in England and the Cubists in France were co-opted by their governments to design prints to protect troops, equipment, and planes.) Hey, the arts look pretty useful, huh?

That's only the beginning. In medicine, the stitches that permit a surgeon to correct an aneurysm or carry out a transplant were invented by American Nobel laureate Alexis Carrel, who took his knowledge of lace making into the operating room. Alexander Fleming discovered the antibiotic penicillin while gathering beautifully colored microbes for his (rather unusual) hobby of "painting" with microorganisms. Pacemakers are simple modifications of musical metronomes. If you have a neurological deficit, your neurologist may employ dance notation to analyze your problem. Physicians at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and other major medical centers are trained by actors to interact humanely with you as a patient. These same physicians may learn to observe your symptoms more closely by being taught to draw, paint or photograph, or through art appreciation courses. Many hospitals employ music to relieve stress in operating rooms and post-operatively. Painting, drawing and sculpting are also used to treat depression and other psychiatric disorders. Indeed, our own institution, Michigan State University, originated music therapy as a way to treat soldiers suffering from what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder.

Oh, and that bridge you may drive over on the way to work? Princeton engineering professor David Billington and Smithsonian historian of technology Brooke Hindle have demonstrated that most innovations in bridge design originated with artistically trained engineers such as John Roebling and Robert Maillart. They're part of a long tradition of American artist-inventors. You may not know that Samuel Morse (to whom we owe the telegraph) and Robert Fulton (to whom we owe the steam ship) were two of the most prominent 19th century American artists before they turned to inventing -- visit the Smithsonian American Art Galleries some time and see for yourself. Alexander Graham Bell was a pianist whose invention of the telephone began with a simple musical game. Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes don't just provide us with unusual architectures, they also inform our understanding of cell and virus structure and permit new biomedical insights. Kenneth Snelson's tensegrity sculptures (stroll past his "Needle Tower" outside the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden on the Washington Mall) aren't just fascinating constructions in and of themselves, they've also created a whole new form of engineering. Google it!

The fact is that the arts foster innovation. We've just published a study that shows that almost all Nobel laureates in the sciences actively engage in arts as adults. They are twenty-five times as likely as the average scientist to sing, dance, or act; seventeen times as likely to be a visual artist; twelve times more likely to write poetry and literature; eight times more likely to do woodworking or some other craft; four times as likely to be a musician; and twice as likely to be a photographer. Many connect their art to their scientific ability with some riff on Nobel prizewinning physicist Max Planck words: "The creative scientist needs an artistic imagination."

Bottom line: Successful scientists and inventors are artistic people. Hobble the arts and you hobble innovation. It's a lesson our legislators need to learn. So feel free to cut and paste this column into a letter to your senators and congressmen, as well as your school representatives, or simply send them a link to this column. One way or another, if we as a society wish to cultivate creativity, the arts MUST be part of the equation!

 

References

Root‑Bernstein, R. S. "Hobbled Arts Limit Our Future," Los Angeles Times, Op‑Ed page B7, 2 September 1997.

Root-Bernstein, R. S., Root-Bernstein, M.M. "Learning to Think with Emotion," Chronicle of Higher Education, 14 Jan 2000, p. A64.

Root-Bernstein, R. S. "Art Advances Science," Nature 407: 134, 2000.

Root‑Bernstein, R. S. "Music, creativity, and scientific thinking," Leonardo 34, no. 1, 63-68, 2001.

Root-Bernstein, M. M. and Root-Bernstein, R. S. “Body Thinking Beyond Dance: A Tools for Thinking Approach,” In Overby, Lynette, and Lepczyk, Billie, eds. Dance: Current Selected Research, vol. 5, pp. 173-202, 2005.

Root-Bernstein RS, Lindsay Allen^, Leighanna Beach^, Ragini Bhadula^, Justin Fast^, Chelsea Hosey^, Benjamin Kremkow^, Jacqueline Lapp^, Kaitlin Lonc^, Kendell Pawelec^, Abigail Podufaly^, Caitlin Russ^, Laurie Tennant^, Erric Vrtis^ and Stacey Weinlander^. Arts Foster Success: Comparison of Nobel Prizewinners, Royal Society, National Academy, and Sigma Xi Members. J Psychol Sci Tech 2008; 1 (2): 51-63

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