“…Asking voters to nominate single buildings necessarily produces results that give a skewed view of the way architecture — and more important, the way we think and write about it — has evolved in recent years.

Among critics and architects alike, there has been a rising understanding that architecture is not just about stand-alone icons but is tied inextricably to urban planning, real-estate speculation, capital flows, ecology and various kinds of networks — and similarly that architecture criticism means more than simply writing about impressive new landmarks, green or not, produced by the world’s best-known firms.

…

Maybe, in other words, the most important achievement in green architecture over the last 10 or 30 years is not a single building at all. Maybe it’s a collection of schools or linked parks or the group of advisors brought together by a young mayor somewhere. Maybe it’s a new kind of solar panel, a tax credit or a zoning change. Maybe it’s tough to hang a plaque on — or photograph for a magazine spread.”

Architecture Television is about using lo-fi, simple and open source technologies to examine borders, possibilities and limitation to the mediatization of architecture. Architecture Television is televised architecture and architecture televised.

The representation of objects as we see them and their measured description, two tasks that are conventionally distinguished in architectural representation, will be shown to have been unwittingly, in many respects, mutually determined and transformed. In this course we study relations between film/television and architecture. It is not simply about creating material or TV about architecture but rather to use moving images and film-making as a tool to produce architecture. We will use lo-fi technology that we all carry with us, digital cameras, cell phones, digital cam-corders, simple editing tools and applications for distribution and circulation to look for the specificity of architecture from different perspectives. The course examines the history, theory and practice of representation and the production of architecture. We will see to what extend projective systems have affected our understanding of space through the evolution of media such as painting, photography, film and computer generated imagery.

What I like most about them is that in a time when programmers, designers, theorists, and animators all seem to pretend to be architects, they seem to be architects pretending to be avant-garde film-makers or conceptual artists.

make shlist || ($echo “Searching for .SH files…”; \
$echo *.SH | $tr ‘ ‘ ‘\012′ | $egrep -v ‘\*’ >.shlist)
if $test -s .deptmp; then
for file in `cat .shlist`; do
$echo `$expr X$file : ‘X\(.*\).SH’`: $file config.sh \; \
/bin/sh $file >> .deptmp
done
$echo “Updating $mf…”
$echo “# If this runs make out of memory, delete /usr/include lines.” \
>> $mf.new
$sed ‘s|^\(.*\.o:\) *\(.*/.*\.c\) *$|\1 \2; ‘”$defrule \2|” .deptmp \
>>$mf.new
else
make hlist || ($echo “Searching for .h files…”; \
$echo *.h | $tr ‘ ‘ ‘\012′ | $egrep -v ‘\*’ >.hlist)
$echo “You don’t seem to have a proper C preprocessor. Using grep instead.”
$egrep ‘^#include ‘ `cat .clist` `cat .hlist` >.deptmp
$echo “Updating $mf…”
<.clist $sed -n \
-e '/\//{' \
-e 's|^\(.*\)/\(.*\)\.c|\2.o: \1/\2.c; '"$defrule \1/\2.c|p"
\
-e d
\
-e '}'
\
-e 's|^\(.*\)\.c|\1.o: \1.c|p' >> $mf.new
<.hlist $sed -n 's|\(.*/\)\(.*\)|s= \2= \1\2=|p' >.hsed
<.deptmp $sed -n 's|c:#include "\(.*\)".*$|o: \1|p' | \
$sed 's|^[^;]*/||' | \
$sed -f .hsed >> $mf.new
<.deptmp $sed -n 's|c:#include <\(.*\)>.*$|o: /usr/include/\1|p’ \
>> $mf.new
<.deptmp $sed -n 's|h:#include "\(.*\)".*$|h: \1|p' | \
$sed -f .hsed >> $mf.new
<.deptmp $sed -n 's|h:#include <\(.*\)>.*$|h: /usr/include/\1|p’ \
>> $mf.new
for file in `$cat .shlist`; do
$echo `$expr X$file : ‘X\(.*\).SH’`: $file config.sh \; \
/bin/sh $file >> $mf.new
done
fi

Eventually, Unix began walking down Telegraph Avenue talking to itself, saying “Panic: freeing free inode,” over and over again.
Sometimes it would accost perfect strangers and yell “Bus error (core dumped)!” or “UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY: RUN FSCK MANUALLY!” at them in a high pitched squeal like a chihuahua with amphetamine psychosis. Upstanding citizens pretended it was invisible. Mothers with children crossed to the other side of the street.
Then one evening Unix watched television, an event which would change its life. There it discovered professional wrestling and knew that it had found its true calling. It began to take huge doses of corticosteroids to build itself up even bigger than the biggest of the programs which had beaten it up as a child. It ate three dozen pancakes and four dozen new features for breakfast each day. As the complications of the steroids grew worse, its internal organs grew to the point where Unix could no longer contain them. First the kernel grew, then the C library, then the number of daemons. Soon one of its window systems was requiring two megabytes of swap space for each open window. Unix began to bulge in strange, unflattering places. But Unix continued to take the drugs and its internal organs continued to grow. They grew out its ears and nostrils. They placed incredible stresses on Unix’s brain until it finally liquefied under pressure.
Soon Unix had the mass of Andre the Giant, the body of the Elephant Man, and the mind of a forgotten Jack Nicholson character.
The worst strain was on Unix’s mind. Unable to assimilate all the conflicting patchworks of features it had ingested, its personality began to fragment into millions of distinct, incompatible operating systems. People would cautiously say “good morning Unix. And who are we today?” and it would reply “Beastie” (BSD), or “Domain”, or “I’m System III, but I’ll be System V tomorrow.” Psychiatrists labored for years to weld together the two major poles of Unix’s personality, “Beasty Boy”, an inner-city youth from Berkeley, and “Belle”, a southern transvestite who wanted a to be a woman. With each attempt, the two poles would mutate, like psychotic retroviruses, leaving their union a worthless blob of protoplasm requiring constant life support to remain compatible with its parent personalities.
Finally, unbalanced by its own cancerous growth, Unix fell into a vat of toxic radioactive wombat urine, from which it emerged, skin white and hair green. It smelled like somebody’s dead grandmother.
With a horrible grin on its face, it set out to conquer the world.

soydondenopienso

(in english)

theginblog

So we have two things: a man who ties a dog to a wall with instructions that say: “Do not feed the dog” and also writes on the wall in dog food “Eres lo que lees” (you are what you read). Then we have people who walk into a room, see a starving dog, see dog food on the wall, and then do not give the dog the food. So, if this is a wrong, an evil, who is at greater fault for allowing this evil? I indict both, as well as an art culture that regards the art work as seperate from the world. Is sadism displayed within an art work ‘not-sadism’? I don’t think so. Can one argue that an artwork can or should exist outside-the-world? When we start to discuss work that deals with or experiments with the experience of deeply taboo subjects I think (though I really don’t have time or space to make an eloquent argument here) that the art work loses it’s ‘outside-ness’ or cultural specialness because it becomes too simple. Death is death. Experience must be mediated in order to be artwork, the illusion, the representation, the signification, must all stand between the moment and the spectator, the participant/viewer. The implicit argument that seems to be put forth again and again is that the institution (the museum/gallery/artist-as-institution) is sufficient mediation, sufficient guarantee of ethical and moral privilege.