Friday 10 April 2009

Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin






Diomede II
, 1989-90, from Projects 1981-1990
Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin
Both Russian, born 1955
Etching 11 x 17
©1990 Brodsky & Utkin, courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York

Smout Allen-Geofluidic Landscape


The Geofluidic Landscape
The passage of abundant water on the Oslo site provides a source of kinetic energy that invades the building. Trenches, gullies, and reservoirs are cut into the rock to channel water and counterbalances and weights shift building pieces. The floors become walls, panels move to reveal new spaces, and garden beds are raised and tilted toward the sun.

Smout Allen-Blooming Landscape, Deep Surface

http://www.smoutallen.com/

Smout Allen-Ballistic Devices




Ballistic Devices
A series of ballistic instruments are designed to momentarily occupy the space between the sky and the ground. Camouflage strategies can be designed to accentuate and reveal figure and position. The instruments use shape, shine, shadow, and silhouette to enable visual recognition of form and consequently to examine the apparent depth of the horizon.


Three ballistic devices are deployed in the deep space of the horizon.


Adaptive Waveform Control?

http://www.springerlink.com/content/ecblyg2n3nbpcwkt/

Applications

Adaptive Waveform Control in a Data Transceiver for Multi-speed IEEE1394 and USB Communication

(1) MIRAI, Advanced Semiconductor Research Center, AIST, Tsukuba Central 2, 1-1-1 Umezono, Tsukuba 305-8568, Japan
(2) Graduate School of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Tsukuba, 1-1-1 Tennoudai, Tsukuba 305-8577, Japan
Abstract
This paper proposes an adaptive waveform control in a data transceiver and demonstrates an adaptive transceiver LSI with a waveform controller. The LSI optimizes on-site transmission performance, with adjustments based on measurements for the whole transmission system, including cable properties. Utilizing genetic algorithm (GA), our adjustment method has achieved a transmission speed that is four times faster (1.6GHz) than current standards (400MHz) for IEEE1394.

Wednesday 8 April 2009

Thomas Ruff






Nacht 14 I
1993
C-print
Image Size: 74 3/4 x 74 3/4 inches 190 x 190 cm
Edition of 2


Nacht 10 III
1992
C-print
Image Size: 74.8 x 74.8 inches 190 x 190 cm
Edition of 2



pg 15

...Palestine emerged as a hologramatized 'hollow land' that seemed spawned of the imaginary world of seventeenth-century British astronomer Edmund Halley, or the nineteenth century novels of Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne, who themselves foresaw a hollow earth inhabited in layers. With it, the imaginary spaces of conflict have seemingly fully adopted the scale of a building, resembling a complex architectural constructions, perhaps and airport, with its separate inbound and outbound levels, security corridors, and many checkpoints. Cut apart and enclosed by its many barriers, gutted by underground tunnels, threaded together by overpasses and bombed from its militarized skies, the hollow land emerges as the physical embodiment of the many and varied attempts to partition it.

Constructive ambiguity

from wiki
Constructive ambiguity
is a term generally credited to Henry Kissinger, said to be the foremost exponent of the negotiating tactic it designates. It refers to the deliberate use of ambiguous language on a sensitive issue in order to advance some political purpose. Constructive ambiguity is often disparaged as fudging. It might be employed in a negotiation, both to disguise an inability to resolve a contentious issue on which the parties remain far apart, and to do so in a manner that enables each to claim obtaining some concession on it. It warrants further hopes that the ensuing postponement of resolution on this particular point, in a way that causes neither side excessive discomfort, will enable them to make real progress on other matters. If this progress takes place, the unresolved question might be revisited at a later date, if not voided altogether by the passage of time. On the other hand, since ambiguity in agreements can generate subsequent controversy, the likelihood of its employment proving constructive in comparison to further attempts to negotiate the point in question in clear terms, is a question best left for historians.

-------------------

A DICTIONARY OF DIPLOMACY by G. R. Berridge & Alan James 2004

constructive ambiguity. [elaborated] A term widely attributed to Henry Kissinger and also known as 'fudging', the deliberate use of ambiguous language on a sensitive issue in order to advance some political purpose. In a negotiation, for example, constructive ambiguity might be employed not only to disguise an inability to resolve a question on which the parties remain far apart but to do so in a manner that enables each to claim that some concession on it has actually been obtained. (The UN Security Council's Resolution 242 of November 1967 regarding the withdrawal of Israel from territory she had occupied in the recent *Six Day War was such a case.) It may also be hoped that, having thereby shelved this particular point in a way that causes neither side excessive discomfort, they will be able to make real progress on other matters. If this should prove to be the case, the ground might be prepared for a return to the unresolved question at a later date; time might even see it dissolve altogether. Of course, such hopes often prove ill-founded, and ambiguity in *agreements can also generate subsequent controversy. Whether on balance, therefore, its employment proves 'constructive' in relation to any further attempts to negotiate the point in question is for historians to determine. See also step-by-step diplomacy.


Examples from wiki:
UN Security Council's Resolution 242

The UN Security Council agreed on the text of the Resolution 242 after the crushing defeat that Israel inflicted on joint Arab forces during the Six Day War in 1967. As a result of bargaining between the powers sitting in the Security Council, the resolution reflected the deeply polarized political opinion. The provision of the resolution which prompted different and incompatible interpretations was the one immediately following the preamble of the text, reading: “establishment of just and lasting peace in the Middle East should include the application of both the following principles:

  • withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in recent conflict;
  • termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for…territorial integrity…of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries.”

The use of an unnatural English construction “territories occupied in recent conflict”, omitting the expected definite article “the”, made it possible to question whether Israel was asked to withdraw from all the territories occupied in the recent conflict, or to withdraw from some, but not all, such territories. Notably, the French translation of the document, unlike the English original, used the definite article, demanding the “retrait des forces armées israéliennes des territoires occupés lors du récent conflit”. Thus the French version, which together with the English version was an official UN version of the document, suggested that Israel must withdraw from all territories that it occupied during the Six Day War. Naturally, the French interpretation suited the interests of Arab countries, who made numerous attempts to prove its validity. By contrast, Israel opposed such an interpretation, and the sponsor of the resolution, Lord Caradon, appears to have had no intention of inserting the definite article into its text. Caradon additionally emphasized the additional and clarifying light that the second part of the first provision shed on its first part, and insisted that it must be given uppermost consideration. According to him, the boundary that existed before the Six Day War did not satisfy the right of Israel to live within secure and recognised boundaries. Consequently, under this interpretation, Israel did not have to withdraw to its pre-Six Day War borders.



"Architecture as event" Richard Wilson on Turning the Place Over

Tuesday 7 April 2009

quotes from Hollow Land, Israel's Architecture of Occupation by Eyal Weizman-3

pg 8

Chaos has its peculiar structural advantages. It supports one of Israel's foremost strategies of obfuscation: the promotion of complexity - geographical, legal or linguistic. Sometimes, following a terminology pioneered by Henry Kissinger, this strategy is openly referred to as 'constructive blurring'. This strategy seeks simultaneously to obfuscate and naturalize the facts of domination.

...many settlements were indeed constructed with the aim of creating a 'irresolvable geography'

quotes from Hollow Land, Israel's Architecture of Occupation by Eyal Weizman-2

pg 6

The following chapters form an 'archival probe', investigating the history and modus operandi of the various spatial mechanisms that have sustained - and continue to sustain - the occupation's regime and practices of control.

(see footnote re: use of this term in Mutations published 2001))

pg 6-7

Elastic geography

...the frontiers of the Occupied Territories are not rigid and fixed at all; rather, they are elastic, and in constant transformation. The linear border, a cartographic imaginary inherited from the military and political spatiality oft eh nation state has splintered into a multitude of temporary, transportable, deployable and removable border-synonyms - 'separation walls', 'barriers', 'blockades', 'closures', 'road blocks', checkpoints', 'sterile areas', special security zones', 'closed military areas', and 'killing zones' - that shrink and expand the territory at will. These borders are dynamic, constantly shifting, ebbing and flowing, they creep along, stealthily surrounding Palestinian villages and roads.... The anarchic geography of the frontier is an evolving image of transformation, which is remade and rearranged with every political development or decision.
...
The Separation Wall, merely one of a multiple barriers, is constantly rerouted, its path registering like a seismograph the political and legal battles surrounding it. Where territories appear to be hermetically sealed in by Israeli walls and fences, Pal. tunnels are dug underneath them. Elastic territories could thus not e understood as benign environments: highly elastic political space is often more dangerous and deadly than a static, rigid one.

quotes from Hollow Land, Israel's Architecture of Occupation by Eyal Weizman

pg 4

Against the geography of stable, static places, and the balance across linear & fixed sovereign borders, frontiers are deep, shifting, fragmented and elastic territories. Temporary lines of engagement, marked by makeshift boundaries, are not limited to the edges of political space but exist throughout its depth. distinctions between the 'inside' and 'outside' cannot be clearly marked. In fact, the straighter, more geometrical and more abstract official colonial borders across the 'New Worlds' tended to be, the more the territories of effective control were fragmented and dynamic and thus unchartable by an conventional mapping technique.

pg. 5

the spatial organization of the occupied territories is a reflection on only of an ordered process of planning and implementation, but, an increasingly so, of 'structured chaos', in which the -often deliberate- selective absence of govt intervention promotes an unregulated process of violent dispossession.
...
b/c elastic geographies respond to a multiple and diffused rater than i single source of power, their arch cannot be understood as the material embodiment of a unified political will or as the product of a single ideology. Rather the organization of the Occupied Territories should be seen as a kind of 'political plastic', or as a map of the relation between all the forces that shaped it.