I recently ran into this mini project from students of FEI Jun‘s media lab at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (courtesy of NO+CH). They call them “micro-observations”, and according to the students, serve “not merely as a magnification of the thing itself, but as an enlargement of the act of noticing. ‘Micro-observations’ bring about not only a paying attention to the unnecessary, but in revisiting these objects the transformation of their semantic meaning.” Nice public intervention~
点击图片查看箭头指向的物体 Click on the images to see enlarged object
Seed bombing has been used for alternative urban gardening techniques here and there. Idea is originated “Nendo Dango” of Masanobu Fukuoka who propose natural farming since the late 40’s, and also Green Guerrillas activist-gardeners in NYC are playing important role to spread the techniques around. Mud balls made with clay, organic fertilizer and mixed seed of flower and vegetables are tossed around the hutongs in Gulou area of Beijing. This time, we bombed !!! seeds carefully into some people’s flower pots (including flower sales guy) and crack of concrete with soil. Hope to sprouting some greens, but we’ll see… next time we will combine the hutong tour and seed bombing together. Peace out.
“BAREBJ” forms the triangle of Buenos Aires, REykavik and BeiJing and the title of a recent showing at Espacio Formosa in Buenos Aires, where our friends in the barrio of Nuñez have remixed the winter soundwalk made by 谢婷婷 Hailey and i. Hlynur explains that it was made “using a process in SuperCollider and as parameters the house-numbers in the representative ‘manzana’ in Nuñez.”
Park (in which the sounds we make in public are both expressions of ideology and good for the body)
— Calling (in which the sound of advertisement forms a fabric that envelops us)
— Dongfanghong 1 (in which the sound of the bell at the Beijing Railway Station reveals a story of our relation to the voice of authority)
— Dongfanghong 2 (in which the voice of authority is found to be composed of echoes)
— Music (in which we are introduced to the workers who live on their downtown work site)
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The audio drama “Sound Research of China” (Michael EDDY, KANG He, 李增辉 LI Zenghui) is composed of episodes from ongoing research into the makeup of the sound environment of Beijing. The process consisted of many outings as a group into the streets of Beijing and following and questioning the sounds that we identified as “characteristic” of life in China, and of the relation of sound to life there. Working as a unit of three “specialists,” each of our backgrounds informing our manner of recording, analyzing and editing the source materials, we pursued the sounds in various ways to see how they might compose their own narrative and drama.
_______ “Sound Research of China” was a component of Vitamin Creative Space‘s participation and resulting in the installation in the “Structural Integrity” project in Melbourne’s Meat Market for the Next Wave festival. For further documentation, please check here.
This is a sound walk that 谢婷婷 Hailey Xie and i made in January, seven days after another big snow storm in Beijing. It was originally intended as material for the second issue of wear journal, but it felt a pity to turn all of these sounds into text-only format. We ended up leaving it out, though now in light of a recent conversation with Bruno and Hlynur in Buenos Aires, we could imagine the winter again.
I am walking with the ZOOM H4n digital recorder with built-in mics (now panned for left ear), Haxi is using a minidisc player and Sound Professionals in-ear binaural mics (now panned for right ear). If you listen carefully you’ll hear some things in a strangely layered effect, though i’m sorry though to say, i’ve destroyed the binaural in putting our tracks together. Here’s from the doorstep of HomeShop to the edge of the alleyway, before everything gets lively. Download the mp3 version [256kb/s, 11.4 mb] here.
When I was exporting the file for this, somehow the file became corrupted and time-stretched… Thought some of you might enjoy that, too.
His name is Christian Nold and he has been working mainly on public space and particularily how “masses” use and move into space. As he says, nowadays, there are so many events happening already in the public space (for example, protests, etc.) that there is no need to organize events or performances. there is enough to observe already. what he has been mainly doing in recent years, is to produce subjective cartographies of areas, cities, etc. He made kind of emotional maps, for example, renaming all the subway stations, or he asked people to draw their neighborhood…in another project, he asked people to walk around with a kind of machine that measures stress (like a lie detector) and a gps, and afterward they discussed together to understand what were that main reasons for stress. actually his maps look like the one I posted last summer on our blog…
I think the whole point of his work is to give community a voice to express its own space, and to personalize maps instead of having objective, pseudo-neutral maps. somehow, I felt that his work is trying to put together the two dimensions of mapping and tracing…I gave him Petrescu’s paper, he was interested! His work goes sometimes a step further, in the sense that it is used by urban planners or local politics, who need to have a better understanding of the environment.
The work we did in Geneva was quite different though, and although i found it interesting, it was somehow too similar to what I’m used to do in social sciences. we chose an area we wanted to explore, describe and map, and we ended up working on the UN/international organizations area, which is a very special area in Geneva as it is very cold, unfriendly and unlively area. almost like the bad chinese new constructions you see everywhere.
well, so as we could feel it in the built environment, we tried to explore the connections/disconnections between this area, the people working in those IO and Geneva. Basically a lot of those people are expats, so they have a particular relation with the city, as expats have everywhere else in the world. but what at least for me is interesting, is that all those IO, NGOs, etc. are kind of acting for the world, that is, in a scale we all belong to. But as I showed on the pictures (the world upside down that I posted a few weeks ago) there is something very weird about the world they represent: something that is far, stranger, cold, that nobody seems to be able to appropriate, and this is strongly felt in the built environment. So during the workshop we got kind of stuck with this very huge topic of international organizations…and tried to map them, or at least tried to map their presence into the city, but we didn’t really have enough time to finish…so the result wasn’t that interesting. it was funny though to interrogate people about those IOs; we asked them to draw the people working there and get a bit into their imaginary of what those guys are (doing). I think it could have been funny to try to imagine the city actually without its international part and see what would be left…but I think these drawing and mapping techniques are definitely very interesting and could be something to explore in Beijing projects as well…
and here is my question, the post about electric palm tree is very interesting, how do you imagine we could get further on the co-existence discourse? do you already have some ideas in mind?
* i just came across this, reminded me of the workshop you did last month, though you might find it interesting. also, the thoughts behind electric palm tree are quite relevant. i wonder if we can take your “cosmopolitan” positions much further with thoughts on co-existence…?
Drawing from the cartographic workshop organised by Electric Palm Tree in Amsterdam, May 2008.
from their site:
Cartographic workshop with Philippe Rekacewicz
Prior to the lecture by Philippe Rekacewicz as the launching event of EPT, a workshop was held with him, developing an in-depth, critical and playful examination of cartographic understanding and shaping the world, with a group of laround 20 local artists, designers, intellectuals and activists. Various forms of world maps based on subjective perceptions and knowledge were drawn and discussed during the workshop. They are used to extend the discussion about unstable cartographic boundary of what Europe is.
HomeShop invites Beijing’s Critical Reading Group to discuss two readings: Doina Petrescu’s “The Indeterminate Mapping of the Common” [download PDF here] and a selection from The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere by Jürgen Habermas. The Habermas chapter, entitled “The Polarization of the Social Sphere and the Intimate Sphere” [download PDF here], didn’t make it to the discussion for reasons of dryness and tardiness, but in about three hours, the group manages to make it through the difficulties of defining a trace, Shaanxi Mo King buns, mapping China, a bit of beer & sake and a curious visit from the local police.
the notes below are simple tags to help you find your way —- the meeting in full is recorded below; skim through and hopefully find something interesting for you, or try playing them all at once and listen to the signal-to-noise ratio…
ON “THE INDETERMINATE MAPPING OF THE COMMON” | 3′ 23
contradicting, controversy of social mapping, a solipsistic position, Deligny, “the marker of a hidden ontological data”, do they share that relationship with the people imbuing meaning into their normative behaviours?, common to him, loss when you bring in language, discursive things…
MAPPING and TRACING | 7′ 11
GPS versus tracing, locative mapping versus tracing as invocation of essence, tracing has no purpose as such, tracing as the “way of doing it”, intention, Situationist, surprising within everyday life, not about finding something extraordinary, mental maps, how people live space, a minefield of gestures, a social mapping entanglement, ontological presence that you can’t really touch, anthropomorphism, common ground, tracing as creative process, anthropological process, fraught with danger, Sichuan, daily subjectivities within a larger urban plan, practical application, their locomotion, more aesthetic than logical, magnetic waves…
A LATECOMER, INTRODUCTIONS | 4′ 27
as little disturbance as possible, bad theory joke, angie – california, berkley, arts, bea – swiss, phd, geography, anthropology, urban planning, sean – toronto, phd, critical sports theory, olympics, collin – colorado, caijing, not where my interests are exactly, julia – contemporary art history, southern california, chinese, three shadows, elaine – texas, artist, freelancing, hence this, chris – artist, brooklyn, shanghai, theory, hanora – consulting, also not my main area of interest, matthew – long walks on the beach, capricorn, photographer, film, documentary, we’ve been on and off for awhile…
BALL, ANOTHER ARRIVAL | 4′ 06
Deligny, aqueducts, Berkley cognitive science professor, Himalayan graphic image of ball rolling forward, Buddhist monks, physical difference in brains, gravitational differences, dirty your floor, katie – come with duck and things, awkward being in the middle, other vegetables, open the sake, have at it, that’s all i’ve got, i like your haircut, rain, panic, panic, anyway…
THE OTHER | 10′ 12
theories of gravity, Tibetan monks, post-structuralist utilization of the Other, all this other without a kind of an object, autistic kids and Tibetan guys, rationalist flaw, let’s find an Other, ben stiller, line of crisis of modernity, our cities are poorest, flexible spaces, borders keep moving, the softness of cities has come to the fore, meditating, Edward Said’s “Orientalism“, hegemonic white male, Benedict Anderson‘s flaw, concrete Marxist ideals, is it a flaw or a mechanism to understand, language inherently leads to Otherness, polarizing nouns, Deligny breaking down polarization, everyday dispositions, a bridge, tracing that evokes a common space of understanding, describing, the limitations of the cartographic model, alternative models, trace as action, intense attention to something else without explaining, “a seeing that is not related to thinking, a gaze which does not reflect”, shooting for something passive, describe something in its own terms, ton of criticism, not completely there…
DEFINING MAPPING AND TRACING | 9′ 58
weakness of this article, juxtaposition, boundaries not clear, GPS locative mapping versus non-intentive walking, leaving realm for possibility in the act of doing, subjective process, walking as beginning of architecture, gesture as beginning of utterance, speech, writing, tracing as embodied communication, trace to map is shift of sensory focus to intense bias of visual, corporeality, knowing oneself in the world, trace as remnant, left behind, pinpointing, everyone in this room is constantly tracing, tracing as production of space, GPS is inherent map, imposing trails upon places already there, walking through this room, remainders, plotted footprints, embodied act becomes a leftover, mapping as judgmental or critical, tracing ontological, mapping and language, deterministic, mapping as reflexive practice, mapping: scopophilic, hegemonic, totalizing, problematic, tracing: nice, soft, centering closer to the abstract, foucault, approaching the liminal?, the approximation of a definition, never access through language, Deleuze & Guattari, affect before thought, codify affect to thought and thought to language, tracing as affective, embodied experience, codified in language, another way of saying mapping…
TRACING BEIJING OLYMPICS, 警察来了, 就是朋友 | 8′ 16
Does tracing have anything to do with how Beijing was radically altered in advance of the Olympics?, Yuan, Ming, Qing, buildings wiped out, how modern Beijing has been built, tracing like breathing, because the development’s there I go to it, pathways through hedges, desire paths, Beijing is meant to control that, you can never control that, space for improvisation, mapping consciousness versus social consciousness, opposite the hutong vibe, tracing in hutongs, structure businesses, houses, lives, dream of the architects, 没有，就是一些朋友过来吃饭，在北京工作，这个我帮一个朋友, did someone call?, the station’s just down the street, maybe we just carry on like everything’s cool, an example of control, exercise machines, follow that grid exactly, social control built, who you guys were, state-prescribed exercise equipment, 20th century history of hutongs not existing prior to 1949, talking about fashion or something, multiplying things over…
COMMUNITY, CHINA, URBAN ENVIRONMENT | 14′ 42
what’s impossible about community in Beijing, generational differences: Long March survivors, Cultural Revolution generation, first benefits of kaifang, one-child only generation, communications technology generation, how do you resolve disjointing ideas of what community is, what recreation is, fundamental approach to living, what is comfort, what is entertainment, nationalism at its highest, what happens after the Olympics, falls out over the next year, huge economic fallout, currency fluctuations, Chinese community formed on basis of socio-economics versus family, growing middle class, growing upper class, more than any top-down policies, do away with the hukou system entirely in the next few years, 1,000,000 empty apartments, 15 new Shanghais across the interior, 90 new airports, huge headwall in terms of natural resources, employment, pollution, energy use…, the world can’t handle it, 1.2 billion in China living like we do in the U.S., the horror of seeing another United States, consumer model carrot of the Communist Party, house with 3 cars, all the way from Sichuan to work, migrant workers in Africa, promise of increased material wealth, social unrest in countryside, Henan, Hubei, their vision of what it means to be modern and successful, xiaokang shehui, top-down vision, Three Moderns: sewing machine, refrigerator, tv second wave, cell phone third wave, directly equated with happiness, what material wealth means, three C’s in Japan, equal rise in urban and rural dwellers over last 20 years, but skyrocket of urban in last five years, decline just outside of major metropolitan areas, living on site right off Wangfujing, things just don’t seem to be improving, not reported widely at all, trying to negotiate with 15 new Shanghais, exacerbate all the existing problems, Neville Mars’ new book, every book is “this is China’s downfall” or “this is China’s great rise”, high levels of politburo, how is policy implemented in such a fractured manner, rethinking how people live in urban areas, disaster waiting to happen, that book is big…
EVEN-ING, DEVELOPMENT, CHINA AND AMERICA | 11′ 07
world is becoming more even, places look like Nairobi, shoddy worksmanship, infrastructure, Lagos as THE model megacity, general call for alarm, what’s new, every emerging developing nation, an egalitarian peak, a lie, less mobility now than before, 1968 was last year in U.S. where blue-collar worker could sustain a family of five in comfortable middle class lifestyle, accumulation of capital among top 2%, Guilded era in the states, shifting ways in which we assess, we’re making new maps by talking about it new ways, money being available for everyone, renting, property ownership will evaporate, easy for Chinese to get a loan and by a house, China’s American dream, ethnic differences with socio-economic differences, going to hell, we are setting a horrible precedent for the developing world and the developed world, clean-up, rate of growth, Chongqing, Guangzhou, Pearl River Delta, runaway rapacious development, manufacturing sector dying, biggest open pit in China, Tianjin waterfront like Chicago, river-cruise in Chongqing, a complete mess…
CHANGE, PRECEDENT, ADVERTISING, CONSUMPTIVE PATTERNS | 12′ 29
post-War, west Virgina, where my people are from, the ‘Burg, today very difficult for people to buy a home, terrible precedent, cusp of massive wealth transfer, dying babyboomers, money you didn’t work for, young people of floating network, media perpetuation, service and information economy, how does the precedent change?, a missing piece, production and consumption habits, avoiding talking about China as a monolith, splintered, how an individual will accept, opportunity to change things or for further decadence?, is China really looking to America as as an example, consumption, Hong Kong developers, healthcare system based on U.S. system, countryside, basic medical care yes, emergency response is bad, advertising, consumptive patterns are what will be really detrimental, extremely misleading, setting into motion fast consumer cycles, apple juice, technology, two-month cell phones, clothing, 50’s American, education, willingness to be swayed, propaganda, global production of advertising, new millenium techniques with 1950’s propaganda, a technique that works gets disseminated in a month, black & white televisions, separation from reality, no conclusion…
This activity of the HomeShop Games 2008 project was organised by HomeShop and Angie Baecker. Thank you to all who showed up despite the summer rains…
时间 posted on: 18 November 2010 | 
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