Posts Tagged ‘Add new tag’
Monday, January 11th, 2010
Josh Owen has designed and developed a portable Stoop Bench for use in varied urban environments. He writes, “Philadelphia is a city of stoop dwellers. Stoops entered into the vernacular of American architecture during the colonial times…The Philadelphia stoop functions as a fundamental social meeting place.” He goes on to point out that the stoop is a place of transitions and of pause, serving as a social anchor for friends and neighborhoods. This project frees the stoop from the front door to other urban areas will be an interesting experiment. Many modern public areas are designed without the human scale in mind; without spaces and places to sit, relax, talk and watch. The stoop gives an opportunity for social behavior and interaction in urban locals that are currently devoid of such design features.
Image via Wikipedia
(more…)
Tags: Add new tag, Design, Josh Owen, Philadelphia, Public space, Social Sciences, Urban area, Vernacular architecture
Posted in Anthropology, Architecture, Built Environment, Social Norms | No Comments »
Saturday, January 9th, 2010
In a creative example of how surveillance cameras can be used as a new media tool, Pitchfork Media has begun to film music videos using CCTV. The films capture the performers from a unique and voyeuristic perspective while also splicing in surveillance footage of the surrounding environs for added effect. The videos, although simple, are captivating and interesting to watch. It will be interesting to follow this project and see how it continues to unfold.
Tags: Add new tag, Closed-circuit television, Film, Music video, Surveillance, Voyeurism
Posted in New Media, Surveillance | No Comments »
Saturday, January 9th, 2010
This is an interesting article by Glenn Greenwald that looks at the effectiveness of the many surveillance measures employed by the government for anti-terrorism purposes. This is particularly relevant with the recent events on Christmas Day. It has been repeatedly stated by President Obama and others that a lack of information was not the problem. Rather, a lack of “connecting the dots” led to these lapses in security.
Greenwald points out that there is simply so much data to fish through and so much gathered through broad and indiscriminate collecting that there is too much information to handle. Even with suspicious connections, communications and other warning gathered, no one was able to clearly see the whole picture. In an age of unprecedented surveillance perhaps we are learning to rely too readily on overwhelming technological efforts than on our own senses.
Tags: Add new tag, Counter-terrorism, Data, Surveillance
Posted in Surveillance | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010
Nick Gogerty has put together an interesting and brief post on the coinciding events of economic bubbles and skyscrapers. The latest example of this is of course the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which began five years ago in a boom. The newly completed tower now stands in a very different Dubai that is suffering economically. So why do we continue to make the decision to build these monolithic and amazing structures in such a competitive and one-up manner?
Image via Wikipedia
(more…)
Tags: Add new tag, Architecture, Arts, Building, Dubai, Skyscraper
Posted in Anthropology, Architecture, Built Environment, Social Norms, Storytelling | No Comments »
Saturday, January 2nd, 2010
An upcoming presentation at the club Sinema Old School in Singapore will feature a film by Mike Kowalski about sound and storytelling. According to the brief:
“This presentation will explore how sound can be used creatively in film to expressively tell the story. One of the main themes of the presentation is that by applying an understanding of the principles of psycho-acoustics and human perception to the sound design process we will not only create better sounding films but also films that are more expressive and engaging.”
Image via Wikipedia
(more…)
Tags: Add new tag, Film, Hearing, Perception, Peter Zumthor, Sound, Storytelling
Posted in Anthropology, Architecture, Built Environment, Storytelling | No Comments »
Friday, December 25th, 2009
“We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear—fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer.”
Hunter S. Thompson —”Extreme Behavior in Aspen,” February 3, 2003
In similar veins of exploration to previous posts on storytelling and surveillance, this post will seek to examine how the stories told in our 24-hour media culture affect our vision of the world; our perceived reality. As previously discussed, storytelling plays a large part in cultural transmission and learning. So what affects are seen when we embed ourselves in an environment of stories about disaster, disease, death and terrorism?
(more…)
Tags: Add new tag, Gallup Poll, Hunter S. Thompson, New York Times
Posted in Anthropology, Fiction, Storytelling | 2 Comments »
Thursday, December 24th, 2009
A recent Pew poll has been released concerning opinions of technological and social changes and how positively people view the different changes. Surprisingly high on the list was the increase in surveillance and security, with 58% of those polled viewing it as a positive change. That was a higher positive than for iPhones and Blackberrys, genetic testing, social networking sites, blogs and reality TV, which of course are other technological creations that are wildly popular among many segments of the population.
Image via Wikipedia
(more…)
Tags: Add new tag, Closed-circuit television, London, San Francisco, Television
Posted in Anthropology, Built Environment, Surveillance | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
Austrian artist Manu Luksch recently completed and is now showing the movie Faceless, comprised entirely of CCTV footage from London. The UK Data Protection Act gives individuals the right to access personal data held in computer filing systems, including CCTV footage. At 50 minutes in length, it is the first film that has been made entirely out of CCTV footage. According to the synopsis:
“In a society under the reformed ‘Real-Time’ Calendar, without history nor future, everybody is faceless. A woman panics when she wakes up one day with a face. With the help of the Spectral Children she slowly finds out more about the lost power and history of the human face and begins the search for its future.”
Image via Wikipedia
This is a fascinating example of how one may sidestep the usual privacy/control/security debate and look at the inherent opportunities of surveillance, particularly huge systems like the one found in London. My architectural thesis project similarly sought to take advantage of surveillance technologies and cultural obsessions of the media image for new explorations in new media art. It will be interesting to see how Faceless is received and what future projects it may inspire.
Tags: Add new tag, Closed-circuit television, London, Security, Surveillance
Posted in Narrative, Surveillance | 2 Comments »
Monday, December 21st, 2009
After completing the previous post of Storytelling, Cultural Transmission and Architecture I began to wonder if there are any architectural folklore or stories, and if there are, how they affect the built environment and people’s preferences toward architecture and cities. Vernacular architecture is the most promising place to begin, as the architecture varies highly among different cities even within the same country, particularly in Europe, Asia and Africa and the American Southwest. Building methods, aesthetics, spatial arrangements and materials are all closely tied to the local environment and culture. Spatial arrangements at the urban scale are also influence highly by the culture and its customs.
Image via Wikipedia
(more…)
Tags: Add new tag, Architecture, Folklore, History, Vernacular architecture
Posted in Anthropology, Architecture, Social Norms, Storytelling | No Comments »
Saturday, December 19th, 2009
Storytelling has a great value among societies as a method of cultural transmission and social learning. I have recently reread an anthropology article entitled Cross-Cultural Comparison of Learning in Human Hunting. The goal of the article was to examine the role of learning on the evolution of human life history patterns including why humans have such a lengthy juvenile period. In particular, researchers studied several different cultures of hunter-gatherers and how young boys learned about hunting. In addition to learning through experience by accompanying adults into the forest to check traps or for simple hunts, the boys are exposed to hunting conversations at a very early age. Conversation expose children to hunting knowledge but stories in particular are valuable. From a very young age, boys will hear stories of past hunts that are laced with knowledge about different types of prey, animal behavior and human-prey interactions. Myths and folktales also add to the knowledge and ideas children gain access to through hearing stories.
Image by paalia via Flickr
(more…)
Tags: Add new tag, Fiction, Folklore, Great Gatsby, Literature
Posted in Anthropology, Social Norms, Storytelling | No Comments »
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=9211f72e-edff-4979-8f20-b8485334a340)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=987da529-1493-4022-9962-caa27b5213f0)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=db788fd3-d076-40f9-b163-45ce5c724af5)
