Hunting Gonzo Architecture !

HUNTING GONZO ARCHITECTURE! - a MASTER TVERR KURS at BAS organized by DAV project teacher Ron Sluik in week 45 / 2009:

A workshop at Bergen Arkitekt Skole / Norway. The project is now kind of documented in a series of weblogs. The aim was to create new personal options in looking ahead more than finding another perfect and final solution for future urban developments.

Surrealist Activity on streets of Leeds

The latest ( print) edition of Phosphor includes an article by Peter Overton about surrealist group activity, including object making, in " lumps of urban fabric shaken well and dropped randomly, or just abandoned and left to silt over..."

Details of mag at:

http://leedssurrealistgroup.wordpress.com/

Google's ghost town

Owing to quantum instability, this town is invisible:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/6474746/Mystery-of-Argleton-the-Google-town-that-only-exists-online.html

Migrant shopping trolleys

An image from a growing collection of photographs of shopping trolleys encountered in various locations around the world. A daily sight in most cities, and sometimes in more isolated places. It would be interesting to know how and where they migrate, and how often. With electronic tags / tracking devices it would be possible to follow their progress as they move around the city. Somebody could presumably write an iPhone application that would do the trick!

I wonder what the economic consequence of shopping trolley migration actually is? One thing is for sure - the supermarket chains are not interested in allowing disappearing trolleys to eat into their profits, which means that the cost is presumably passed on to us, their customers. A further extrapolation of this thought  leads one to conclude that it is therefore us, the customers, who own this fleet of migrant shopping trolleys that is distributed throughout the cities of the world. Since this distributed ownership is extremely diffuse and impossible to formalize or co-ordinate, it follows that co-owners must all all have equal rights of access and shared responsibility for the fleet. So what should it be used for? A few simple suggestions for guidelines:

Fair Use:
1 - Homeless people who use the trolleys to transport their positions from place to place: this must be considered a priority, on the basis of need.
2 - Racing: an ecologically sound alternative to motor sport: races to be arranged along the lines of 2 man bob sleigh events, on the main streets of major cities, which would be closed to motor traffic.

Unfair use
1 - Drunken yuppies who fill  the trolleys with booze, use them as mobile bars, then abandon or even destroy the vehicle when the party is over: to be actively discouraged, with extreme prejudice, if necessary!
2 - Prototype submarines; it is blindingly obvious that this is never going to work, so submerging the trolleys can only be considered a useless and antisocial act.

A few links to wake up BUU!

The blog has been pretty dormant recently. Everybody is presumably occupied with other projects at the moment. In the meantime, a few things have popped up that are relevant and interesting. A seminar entitled "Photography as Alternative Urbanism", happening in London on November 10th. looks like an event designed for BUU! Hopefully someone involved in this discussion will be able to attend.

My current neighbourhood, Woolloomooloo, Sydney, is an inner city neighbourhood with a rich, colourful and not always peaceful history. It was a site of conflict in the 1970's, when developers wanted to flatten the district to make way for more high rise buildings. Local residents and unions managed to prevent this happening, and the stories of these conflicts were recorded in a series of murals - a few of which still survive. There is a blog devoted to the murals, with some photographic documentation. Wikipedia also has a substantial section on murals, graffiti and street art in Sydney.

I continue my wanderings around the city, gradually moving out into less central areas. The last few days have been spent seeking out Ballardian urban landscapes around expressways, subways and gaps between concrete buildings. I've been trying to find out if there has been any "hardcore" psychogeographic activity around Sydney, but all I came up (via google) with was an example of the kind of "psychogeo light" that the media do periodically and some rather lacklustre academic papers.

Article on Ballard, Iain Sinclair & urban space

The Ballardian website features this interesting article by David Cunningham:

http://www.ballardian.com/re-placing-the-novel-sinclair-ballard

Laneways: By George! Hidden Networks

"Laneways: By George! Hidden Networks" is the title of a temporary public art project currently on show n Sydney. It forms part of the larger public art showcase "Art & About" which is, in turn, part of a month-long festival of food and culture entitled "Crave Sydney".


Produced by Steffen Lehmann, an urban designer, author and curator, the project aims to bring art to hidden, forgotten or overlooked urban spaces, while challenging understandings of the roles of architecture and art. A map published in the guide brochure for "Art + About" and also available online, allows visitors to navigate to a series of narrow alleyways between George Street and Pitt Street in the downtown business district of central Sydney. The projects are all the result of collaboration between groups that include artists, architects, designers, urbanists and others. The project has high ambitions in terms of the discussions it hopes to provoke about urban regeneration, sustainability, our understanding of public space, etc. Whether it will achieve that goal is questionable, but what it does succeed in doing is to create a series of "incidents" that will certainly arouse curiosity, and, at best, provide the accidental visitor with a stimulating and intriguing experience.


All of the individual installations are interesting in the way they interact with a particular urban environment, though the quality varies considerably, and only a minority would stand up to sustained critique as autonomous works of art. Several of the pieces come too close to the kind of "event scenography" that could just as easily belong to an advertising campaign or an elaborate outdoor party, and thereby lose any critical edge that may have been intended.


For me, the single most successful piece is "Forgotten Songs", an installation consisting of a large number of bird cages suspended about four metres above the street, incorporating several loudspeakers that play back recordings of birdsong. The work changes the environment subtly rather than dramatically, and creates a sense of enchantment that draws in the spectator. Another project that aims to bring nature into the midst of the urban environment is "Infinity Forest" which is not so much a forest as a very small grove of silver birch trees inside a mirrored box. The mirrored walls create an illusion of profuse growth, but this is undermined by the fact that the trees are growing in black plastic bags, and they are saplings rather than full-grown trees. So the effect is more like being in a psychedelic display at a garden centre than being in a forest. The result is mildly amusing, but hardly challenging.


A more unsettling experience was to walk through Bridge Lane where a series of strange, pink, hairy sculptures appeared to be growing out of the brick walls. It felt not so much like a dialogue with the space, as an invasion by alien life forms. In the middle of the day these grotesque items had a kind of gothic comic effect, but encountered unsuspectedly at night they could prove to be seriously disturbing to the faint-hearted.

Forgotten Songs, not to be forgotten!

The Infinity Forest - not very infinite and not quite a forest, but an amusing diversion.

The Urban Barcode - an installation of white fluorescent tubes in a dark alleyway. Quite effective, though not quite the "Giant Barcode" promised in the brochure. And the "pocket-sized open air cinema" that goes with it seemed to be turned off.

I Dwell In the City And The City Dwells In Me. Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid!

The Meeting Place, a Serra-esque sculptural installation in yellow nylon material that changes the architechtural space of Little Hunter Street, narrowing it to a small gap that would encourage physical contact between passers-by.

Seven Metre Bar which, according to the publicity should "combine the landscape of weather and topography with the architecture of a catastrophe and the interactive technology of video games. Seven Meter Bar highlights inaction on climate change" But actually, it looks like a small piece of a Jason Rhoades installation that has just been dropped into the street.














Conclusion: full points for a good initiative and for the intention of creating productive disruptions in the urban environment, but not more than 5/10 for the result; most of the works are just not good enought to stand up to the ambition of the project's mission statement.