AndrewBlum.net

Olafur Eliasson is Playing With Your Mind (Wired News)

Weather Project Artist Eliasson Brings Techie Installations to U.S. (link)

For Take Your Time, a major new exhibition that opened September 8 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the internationally-celebrated artist Olafur Eliasson changed out the gallery lights, put mirrors on the ceilings, created a small fog bank, filled a room with a pool of water, and turned a skywalk into a trippy disco kaleidoscope, all in an effort to tinker with the way we experience space and light, and how we navigate the world. Open through February, the exhibition travels to New York's Museum of Modern Art and P.S. 1 in April, then to the Dallas Museum of Art in November 2008.

Eliason became famous as an artist in 2003, when 2 million people visited The Weather Project, a giant installation at London's Tate Modern that created an artificial sun from 200 yellow sodium lamps.

But, explains SFMOMA curator Madeleine Grynsztejn, Eliasson's work is never mere special effects. Like a DIY guru morphed into an international art star, Eliasson likes to show the mechanisms behind his artwork. "The revelation of his process is part and parcel of the work," says Grynsztejn. "It's equal parts 'wow' and 'a-ha.'"

Living On the Network (Metropolis)

Objects should celebrate our connection to the digital world, not minimize it. (link)

The week in January when Apple announced the iPhone, I went from an ecstatic reverie of secular futurism to feeling pretty let down. The problem wasn’t what the iPhone didn’t do, the “features” it lacked. The thing was thrilling—a beautiful object, crystalline in its realization, revolutionary in its interface—and of course I wanted one. But I had mixed feelings about what it represents.

The iPhone epitomizes the larger movement in the shape of digital products today: industrial design is all about making containers for bandwidth, bringing form to the threshold between the physical world of our bodies and the digital world of the network. Yet in a single stroke of product and interface design, the iPhone nearly wiped away that threshold altogether. Its touch screen eliminated the need for buttons, its cellular connection eliminated the need to be anywhere in particular, and its form suggested that we’re nearly able to replace objects with flat slabs. But should we? The digital network has been socially transformative—and that’s a fact worth celebrating, not smoothing over be-neath a smudge-proof screen.

Rare Bird (The New Yorker)

Talk of the Town (link)

For all its eccentricities, bird-watching is a respectable hobby, practiced by psychiatrists, kings, and forty-six million Americans. But plane spotting—which also entails tramping around swamps to watch flying objects—somehow lacks the same cachet.

Phil Derner, Jr., the president of the Web site NYCAviation.com, estimates that there are fifty active plane spotters in the New York City area. At noon last Monday, nearly all of them were gathered, telephoto lenses in hand, in North Woodmere Park, which is situated at the head of Jamaica Bay and beneath the flight path to Runway 22 Left at John F. Kennedy International Airport. The occasion: the maiden arrival, from Frankfurt, of the double-decker Airbus A380, the largest passenger plane in the world. (It was on a promotional and “route-proving” trip organized by Airbus and Lufthansa.) During its development, the A380 had been trouble for Airbus, with production delays resulting in cancelled orders and layoffs. But the Airbus is big and she is rare, and that is more than enough to bring out a crowd of plane geeks.

A tenth grader named Matt—he asked that his last name not be used, since he was skipping school—had travelled from Westchester with his father, a lawyer. “I think the A380 is a landmark in aviation,” Matt said, explaining why he had come. “My mom was really against the idea.”

“It’s his passion,” his father said. “We were struggling for a while, because he wants to be a pilot, and we want him to be an engineer. We have only one kid, so a pilot seems kind of, you know.” Matt recently started taking an online course in Danish, to prepare himself for a job with Scandinavian Airlines. “They have a really good fleet, a lot of long-range A330s and A340s,” he said, before excusing himself to watch a Singapore Airlines 747-400 on its final approach.

The spotters had been nervous for days. J.F.K. has four runways, some as long as fourteen thousand feet, which can be used in either direction. That means dozens of spotting sites, some miles apart, and it wouldn’t be possible to know in advance which runway the Airbus would use. “The thing that will suck is that if we are at N. Woodmere, and they decide to send him to 31L or 31R,” someone had written on the group’s message board.

Workers of the World, Unite! (Popular Science)

Realistic videoconferencing is the single most important development in the future of the workplace, and it's already begun to arrive. Prepare to face the boss. (link)

Alexander Graham Bell had it right from the beginning. "Mr. Watson," he called to his assistant through the first working telephone, "come here—I want to see you." Fifty years later, the first television transmission made his words literal. And now, 130 years later, the pieces are falling into place to finally let us all be seen.

The promise of a video telephone has been around for years, of course. But now the essential factors are truly in place to give you the digital equivalent of a face-to-face experience with co-workers thousands of miles away. And of all the advancements you'll see in your workplace over the next 10 years, realistic videoconferencing is the one that will change everything.

IDEO’s Urban Pre-Planning (Metropolis)

Can its “Smart Space” practice shake up the lumbering world of infrastructure, zoning, and public process? (link)

Eighteenth and Vine—Kansas City’s historic but down-and-out jazz district—had a vision problem. “I always heard people say, ‘The vision for 18th and Vine is this, the vision for 18th and Vine is that,’” says Daryl Williams, director of research and policy for minority entrepreneurship at the Kansas City−based Kauffman Foundation. But whenever he asked people in the community what the vision looked like, nobody could ever produce a picture. “It was just people talking,” he says. “But a vision is not something you talk about, it’s something you look at.”

The Kauffman Foundation, with $2 billion in assets, bills itself as “the foundation of entrepreneurship”; but 18th and Vine, right in its backyard, had for decades been struggling to reinvigorate its storied past as a center for both jazz and black-owned businesses. In the late 1990s the American Jazz Museum opened, but rather than revitalize the community it seemed to turn a living place into a museum. For nearly a decade the Jazz District Redevelopment Corporation (JDRC) had been struggling to attract commerce back to the neighborhood without much success. So over lunch with now former JDRC president David Whalen at Peach Tree, the Vine’s famous soul food restaurant, Williams offered to “bring some resources to bear” to help develop a vision for the neighborhood—essentially to create a marketing brochure to attract future development. “We want to see the neighborhood be successful,” he told Whalen, “not by dictating what it has to be but what it can be.” Eighteenth and Vine had already tried the if-you-build-it-they-will-come approach with the jazz museum. What Williams envisioned instead was a set of possibilities rooted in the history of the neighborhood: “A straw man—something to give the community a jumping-off point to really do something else.” He had an idea how to get it.

A few months earlier Williams had visited IDEO—the California-based design consultancy eternally famous for designing the mouse and the Palm Pilot—for help restructuring Kauffman’s internal organization. But he was also thinking about 18th and Vine. In 2000 IDEO had begun supplementing its industrial-design work with a growing interest in designing spaces, including hospitals, schools, and hotels. A couple of years ago that scale shifted again, to the point that the work of IDEO’s Smart Space practice, led by architect Fred Dust, now looks a lot like urban planning—but not in any conventional sense. Instead of doing massing studies or land-use plans, laying out infrastructure, writing zoning codes, or proposing blockbuster museums, IDEO’s Smart Space group articulates the spirit of a place but leaves its realization to the clients: developers, park conservancies, hospitality companies, and—Williams soon determined—the JDRC, with the Kauffman Foundation footing the bill.

Roshi Givechi, a frequent collaborator in the Smart Space practice, first came to Kansas City in April 2005. Soon after, she and her team, including IDEO designer Joe Graceffa, immersed themselves in “the Vine,” applying the multidisciplinary method they bring to nearly all their projects, whether bathroom cleaners or hotel rooms. They hosted “whine and dines” (focus-group dinners), walked the streets, ate in the restaurants, did historical research, took photographs, and interviewed dozens of people about the neighborhood, sometimes on videotape. Part anthropology (with IDEO’s trained anthropologists), part site exploration (with IDEO’s trained architects), part documentary filmmaking (with IDEO’s trained media artists), their approach is to seek the qualitative essence of the community from the perspective of the community.

Radical Craft (Metropolis)

A Few Stories (and Podcasts) from the Source
Metropolis captures the conference that explored the craft in architecture, technology, fashion, science, and more. (link)

"Radical" means edgy, out there on the fringe, but it can also mean root, or even effecting fundamental changes in current practices. Over two days in March at the Radical Craft conference at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, more than three dozen speakers tried to explain--sometimes directly, and sometimes by demonstrating their own work--what the term "radical craft" means in the world of design. And, consequently, in the broader sense in which we live. It wasn't easy: "craft", like "design", is a slippery idea, especially when it's applied not to macramé but to (among other things) spacecraft, magic, music, lexicography, New Yorker cartoons, and (of course) iPods.

I spoke with six of the Radical Craft speakers, several of the conversations were conducted right after their presentations. Two of the speakers are from design's corporate realm: Claudia Kotchka, Vice President of Design Innovation and Strategy at Procter & Gamble; and Jim Hackett, CEO of Steelcase, who brought along James Ludwig, his director of design. Two speakers approach design as a political tool: Maurice Cox,the former architect-mayor of Charlottesville, VA and a professor at UVA's school of architecture; and Martin Fisher, CEO of KickStart, a non-profit selling a water pump as a means to eradicate poverty. One approaches design from outer space: Constance Adams, spacecraft architect. And finally,Chee Pearlman, guest program director refines the term "radical craft."

Videoconferencing Gets Real (BusinessWeek)

With the "Halo Room," DreamWorks Animation and HP have taken virtual meetings into a new world of high-definition shared space (link)

They're ready for me when I arrive. As I enter the conference room, they look up and greet me. There are introductions. But in place of handshakes there are waves -- because the five Hewlett-Packard (HPQ ) engineers sitting across the table are actually across the country, in Corvallis, Ore. I'm seeing them on three enormous plasma TV screens, mounted end-to-end on an office wall in Midtown Manhattan.

Suicide Watch

The New York Times, Arts & Leisure, 3/20/2005
Timeline

The board of directors of the Golden Gate Bridge recently voted to explore installing a barrier that would jeopardize the bridge's least welcome claim to fame: its status as the world's most popular place to commit suicide. That decision was the result of a distinctively San Francisco process in which psychiatrists, lesbian activists and-- perhaps most surprisingly --documentary filmmakers had a direct impact on the making of public policy.

House Keeping (Saturday Night)

At Heritage Estates in Markham, Ontario, Historic Homes Find New Life In A Subsidized Postmodern Subdivision. Their Rescuers May Save A Few Bucks -- But Are They Really Saving the Past?

Markham, Ontario, used to be an agricultural community. Now it grows subdivisions. They shoot up from the fields like corn in July -- old farms of rolling hills replaced by new neighborhoods of gently curving streets. Drive east along 16 th Avenue, the arterial road just a half-dozen kilometres north of the Toronto city line, and the inexorable spread of the city is clearly visible. In some spots, 20-year-old mature subdivisions lie behind high, sound-dampening fences. In others, town planners have only recently released the farmland for development, and green fields alternate with subdivisions in various states of construction: brand-new houses, frames of houses, holes for houses or eerily empty streets along which holes for houses will soon be dug. This is the ragged edge of the city, poised somewhere between farm and neighborhood--fertile ground for a strange kink in the time-space continuum of suburban development called Heritage Estates.

Hybrid Place: The Experience of the Local and Remote

"Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world?" - Henry David Thoreau, Walden

(A research paper submitted to the Graduate Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto.)

1.  Phenomenological Beginnings
Discussions about place in geography often begin with the notion of here, and this one is no exception. Here, at the moment, is my desk on Clinton Street in Toronto.  It is an unremarkable desk in a rented house on a street I moved to fifteen months ago, and whose nuances remain for the most part a mystery to me.  I would be hard pressed to say that I am of this place, in any profound way.  Its essential character is elusive.

And yet from where I sit, just off to my right, I can see a twisted pair of thick black wires stretching from the telephone pole across the street to the side of this house.  One of the wires feeds 75 channels of television, the other carries both a phone line and a connection to the internet.  The phone sits a few inches from my elbow, waiting to be summoned to ring.  The internet connection leads to a slot in my computer beneath my left palm.  Somewhere amid the piles of papers here is a cell phone about the size of a deck of cards.  The four bars on its screen indicate that it is currently in good communication with the network.  The same could be said for myself.  This array of telecommunications may seem excessive but it is certainly not unusual, nor is the attention I pay to news from all over the world of relatives, friends, armies, athletes, disease, corruption, or movies--the whole range of human experiences absorbed through my particular consciousness, just like places.