19.11.09

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.

5.11.09

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

4.11.09

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.

2.11.09

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.