serial consign (2 unread)

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  Border Town

  Posted: 16-June-2011, 6:58pm CEST by Greg J. Smith

  

  [Illegal immigrants appear on a night vision monitor screen of Hungarian border police / photo: Bela Szandelszky/AP]

  I'm excited to have signed on to participate in Tim Maly and Emily Horne's "independent research and design workshop" Border Town this summer – the first session is tonight. I've been mired in large client projects for the last year and while that is going pretty swimmingly I can't actually remember the last time I did research outside a writing project (we worked on a Wikileaks timeline last summer with Tim Groves – but that was commissioned.) So, it goes without say that I am really keen to dive into gloriously complicated exploratory research – especially as I now know that the answer to all design problems is not to, er, build a building.

  Tim and Emily have outlined the M.O. for the studio as follows:
  

  We believe that a great deal can be learned by investigating the strange edge cases of the world. Border towns are the extreme edge of where geography and politics collide. They throw the abstractions of governance into sharp physical relief. They are a fertile site for investigation into questions of security, freedom, architecture, immigration, trade, smuggling, sovereignty, and identity. Border Town is a 10-week, multi-participant collaborative design studio that will investigate the conditions that surround life in cities situated on borders, divided by borders, or located in conflict zones. By investigating these strange specimens of political geography, we can being to think and design about the interaction of legal and physical architecture and how these forces shape the built environment and the lives of the people living in it.

  … and that mandate is rather nicely summarized in the below teaser video.

  I am fortunate to be able to count my partner-in-crime Jordan Hale amongst the studio participants and the inclusion of our talented peers Cyrus Irani and Jay Hurtig Fraser (and new chum Andrew Lovett-Baron) will in my opinion make for a dynamic multidisciplinary production environment. Also, now that I'm teaching regularly I have to admit that I'm thrilled that this whole enterprise is happening outside of the parameters of a formal institution. Although I'll undoubtedly share some news about whatever we cook up soon, consider keeping tabs on the studio blog if this milieu is up your alley.

  One of our assigned readings for the first week was Eyal Weizman's recent classic "Walking through walls: Soldiers as architects in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict" – check it out if you've never encountered this revelatory/disturbing text on contemporary military strategy before.

  
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  .txt/110615

  Posted: 16-June-2011, 5:15am CEST by Greg J. Smith

  

  Recently noted:

  • Joshua Noble presents a brief overview of the work of Japanese media artist Daito Manabe (pictured above) for Creative Applications. Noble: "What?s so refreshing about Daito's work, particularly in contrast to many North American computational artists, is his willingness to engage the body as a canvas, as a site of action, rather than the engine of action. He might be one of the most interesting post-screen artists working today quite simple because of the canvas on which he?s chosen to work and the playfulness with which he approaches the body as a canvas."
  • Much less playful: Charli Carpenter and Lina Shaikhoun debunk the entire suite of stock anti-UAV sentiments for Foreign Policy – a sobering read.
  • Tom Armitage explores buttons as a facet of 'the game design of everyday things' for Kill Screen.
  • Facial recognition, real time data and customer metrics – together at last. Dan Rowinski discusses a new startup called SceneTap for ReadWriteWeb in what is undoubtedly a glimpse of the near future of business analytics.
  • Nathan Jurgenson dissects 'the faux-vintage photo' phenomenon as an offshoot of his dissertation research. Jurgenson: "The quickest way to invoke nostalgia for a time past with a photograph is to invoke the properties of the physical, which is done by mimicking the ravages of time through fading, simulated film grain and scratches as well as the addition of what appears to be photo-paper or Polaroid borders around the image."

  I post .txt dispatches bi-weekly to highlight noteworthy content from across the web (and beyond). Feel free to subscribe to my Google Reader shared items.