space

[spacehyu]

MIDTOWN VIADUCTS PROJECT IN DETROIT Open Call for Artistic Proposals | Application Deadline April 30, 2014

Midtown Detroit, Inc. (MDI) in partnership with the New Economy Initiative (NEI) is seeking proposals to transform the undersides of two viaducts located in Midtown Detroit’s TechTown district with public art and light. MDI is pleased to announce that its Call for Entries is now open.

The Second and Cass Avenue viaducts are two fully operational railroad bridge grade separations located between Baltimore and Amsterdam Streets in TechTown. Originally constructed in 1934, these once magnificent viaducts have been poorly maintained over the years and lack adequate lighting, contributing to unsafe perceptions of the district. This call seeks to give these industrial bridges new life—making them a choice destination rather than a place to pass through.

Accepted proposals will be funded up to $75,000 per viaduct. Applicants may provide proposals for either one or both viaducts. If applying for both viaducts, proposals may treat each viaduct as two separate installations or visually connect the two viaducts with a cohesive design.

Entries will be judged according to the following criteria:

+      Conceives an imaginative transformation of space and conceptual design

+      Combines art and function to create a friendlier environment that promotes use of the space

+      Creates a signature presence for the viaducts that encourages daytime and nighttime interaction

+      Provides adequate and artfully designed lighting

+      Utilizes sustainable building materials and is feasible to maintain

+      Contributes to TechTown’s identity as a hub of innovation

This call is open to all professional artists, architects, designers, design firms and/or teams consisting of these entities located in the following eight southeast Michigan counties:  Genesee, Lapeer, Livingston, Macomb, Oakland, St. Clair, Washtenaw and Wayne. National and international partners may be included in any given team as long as the project lead can prove residency or physical presence in one of the previously mentioned eight counties. Winning proposals will be selected by a panel of Detroit-based curators and arts professionals.

TechTown is a 20-block emerging innovation district anchored by three key institutions in Midtown Detroit—Wayne State University, the College for Creative Studies and the Henry Ford Health System. The Midtown Viaducts Project will contribute to the growing vibrancy of the district and will become a unique destination for visitors.

TO APPLY: Log into the SlideRoom application system. Midtown Viaducts Public Art + Light Project open call applications are only available online at https://midtowndetroitinc.slideroom.com. The closing date for applications is April 30, 2014. The selected projects will be announced in May 2014.

Click here for PDF of Midtown Viaducts Request For Proposals | Last Updated: February 20, 2014

[spacehyu]

The battle has been won in the war between artists and the management of the Biennale of Sydney. The Biennale has announced the ending of their long relationship with Transfield following weeks of intense pressure from artists appalled by the company’s association with detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru. Luca Belgiorno-Nettis has also resigned his position as chair of the Biennale.

[midhyu]

The City as Interface (read first chapter) Digital and mobile media are changing the way urban life takes shape and how we experience our built environment. On the face of it, this is mainly a practical matter: thanks to these technologies we can organize our lives more conveniently. But the rise of ‘urban media’ also presents us with an important philosophical issue: How do they influence the way that the city functions as a community?  

Employing examples of new media uses as well as historical case studies, Martijn de Waal shows how new technologies, on one level, contribute to the further individualization and liberalization of urban society. There is an alternative future scenario, however, in which digital media construct a new definition of the urban public sphere. In the process they also breathe new life into the classical republican ideal of the city as an open, democratic ‘community of strangers’.

[spacehyu]

Seoul, subway, between Seoul Metro Euljiro 1-ga station and City Hall subway station

[midhyu]

서울 중구 가야금 건강 계단 Seoul Gayageum for Health, City Hall (12-stringed zither) http://tinyurl.com/gayageumstairs

[colettetime]

The United States of Attica by Faith Ringgold

This piece is a map of all the violence that has occurred in the US up to the 1971. 

[nevver]

Nakagin Capsule Tower

[mattoidal]

A Very Brief History of Why It's So Hard to Get From Brooklyn to Queens

It wasn’t always this way.

i dunno… it was always easy, at least with a bicycle…

[spacehyu]

"Starting in the 1920s, a company called National City Lines started buying up street car lines, then mostly privately owned. In 1936, the company became a holding company owned equally by General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California, and Phillips Petroleum. Perhaps you can guess where this is going. NCL bought up trolley systems in over 40 cities and 15 states, converting them almost overnight into bus lines. In 1947, they were indicted in federal court, in what became known as the "Great American Streetcar Scandal."  Two years later, the four original companies who owned NCL, along with MAC Truck, were found guilty of conspiracy to monopolize mass transit. But by then the damage was done. Most of the nation’s streetcar system was in junkyards, replaced by buses."

[anniekoh]

Gregory L. Simon & Peter S. Alagona. “Contradictions at the confluence of commerce, consumption and conservation; or, an REI shopper camps in the forest, does anyone notice?” Geoforum 45 (2013) 325–336

Yet because [Leave No Trace] only focuses on what happens inside parks and...

[anniekoh]

Lecture: Follow the Money

Wouter Vanstiphout gave a lecture at the TU Delft architecture faculty as part of the masters program in urbanism. ‘Follow the Money’ focused on the complex correlation between economy and architecture or urban planning. 

[spacehyu]

"Wouter started his lecture with an explanation of the current financial crisis and its effects on architecture. From foreclosures in Las Vegas, through ghost towns in Spain and China, to the risky politics of ground development in the Netherlands, he ended his lecture with a more positive note by describing various projects in which architects take an active role in financing ‘their’ projects."

[inpraxis-blog-blog]

There is not a world that contains time; there is a flow of time, which produces ‘worlds’ or durations. Time is a virtual whole of divergent durations: different rhythms or pulsations of life which we can think or intuit. The everyday illusion is that life flows from one moment to the next and that we exist ‘in’ some general line of time. We can be freed from this illusion of a homogeneous, linear and undifferentiated time only by thinking of time as an intensive flow… We tend to spatialise time. We map or represent time by the movement of the sun across the sky, the hands moving around a clockface or some other moving body. In doing so we locate time within the world we perceive, within an actualised world of images.

Claire Colebrook re. Deleuze (via inpraxis)

[ezibota]

Women in Africa and the Diaspora: “Julie Mehretu”

“I don’t think of architectural language as just a metaphor about space, but about spaces of power, about ideas of power.”

Julie Mehretu is an artist born in Ethiopia, raised in Michigan, educated in Senegal and Rhode Island and currently residing in New York. Mehretu’s complex pieces feature architectural forms, fictional landscapes, and grids layered with scribbles, smudges and shapes of different size and colors. Her paintings are more than just assemblage of random colors and lines. The underlying structure of her work consists of socially charged spaces such as government buildings, museums, stadiums, schools, and airports.

“I think architecture reflects the machinations of politics, and that’s why I am interest in it as a metaphor for those institutions.”

Julie Mehretu has received numerous awards including The MacArthur Award in 2005, often referred to as the “genius grant.” The American Art Award granted by The Whitney Museum of American Art (2005,) and the Berlin Prize: Guna S. Mundheim Fellowship at The American Academy in Berlin (2007).

-Bilphena Yahwon

[wheniwantobe-blog]

October 18, 2013–January 5, 2014 Making Space. 40 Years of Video Art Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts In 1973 video celebrated its tenth anniversary, and Nam June Paik made what would become the cult tape of the history of video—Global Groove. That same year the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, started its collection of videos by acquiring Limite E (1973), a work by Jean Otth.  Since then, from experimenting with the medium to using it to record actions, from the TV set to projection, from the frontal relationship with viewers to their involvement in the installation space, video has developed in a number of radically different ways. Making Space sets out to cover forty years of video art in large strides, in the spaces opened up by the moving image, in a museum that has always given it a special place, both where the collection is concerned and in monographic exhibitions by major artists, from Bill Viola to Renée Green, by way of Bruce Nauman, Alfredo Jaar or indeed Nalini Malani. Making Space brings together works whose common denominator is the recording or reconstructing of the space that can be seen, the space inhabited by the artist’s body, and lastly the space enlivened by the presence of onlookers.

With works by: Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Judith Albert, Francis Alÿs, Emmanuelle Antille, René Bauermeister, Dara Birnbaum, Paul Chan, Silvie & Chérif Defraoui, VALIE EXPORT, Dan Graham, Joan Jonas, Kim Sooja, Ana Mendieta, Bruce Nauman, Jean Otth, Nam June Paik, Anne-Julie Raccoursier, Pipilotti Rist, Anri Sala, Gerry Schum, Richard Serra, Salla Tykkä, Bill Viola Photo: Nam June Paik, Global Groove, 1973 (video still). Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne. Acquisition 2013. Courtesy Studio Nam June Paik and EAI, New York

[cjwho]

Rest Hole in the University of Seoul, South Korea by UTAA

The first floor of the dormitory in University of Seoul was originally an empty parking lot. An area enclosed by columns that supported the main office of the building, people would use the area only for smoking and storing bikes. The place was far too dark and inefficient and further desperately needed to be remodeled. In collaboration, the architectural students of the University of Seoul (Lee Sang-myeong, Ha Ki-seong, Baek Jong-ho) and UTAA designed a solution that would become much more than a simple rest area.

Photography: Jin Hyo-suk, Kim Yong-soon, Courtesy of UTAA

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[spacehyu]

http://tinyurl.com/UTAAUnivofSeoul

[samhorine]

west philadelphia - september 2013 (3/3)

[mattoidal]

North American Gulags: Federal Prisoners Since 1950

[pag-asaharibon]

Los Angeles County is the Capital of Asian America

Earlier this week, the nonprofit organization Asian Americans Advancing Justice - Los Angeles released its demographic research report, "A Community Of Contrasts: Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders in Los Angeles County." The document quantifies the growth and issues facing L.A. County’s 1,497,960 Asian Americans (15 percent of the county’s population) and 54,169 Pacific Islanders — including the non-immigrant Native Hawaiian sub-demographic — (the largest number in the continental U.S.) between 2000 and 2010.

According to the report, in the last decade, the Asian American population of L.A. County grew 20 percent, and the Pacific Islander population grew nine percent, even though the total county population grew only three percent. In contrast, the growth rate for the Latino population was 11 percent, and both the white and African American populations shrank, with decreases of eight and five percent, respectively.

The report also confirms Los Angeles County as the capital of Asian America, with the largest number of Asian immigrants of any county in the nation, and the home of the largest Burmese, Cambodian, Chinese, Filipino, Indonesian, Korean, Sri Lankan, Taiwanese, and Thai populations outside their respective home countries. Chinese and Filipinos comprise the two largest Asian American groups both nationwide and in the county.

Bangladeshi Americans are the Asian ethnic group with the highest rate of growth, with a 122 percent increase in population in the past decade. Other South Asian ethnic groups, such as Pakistani, Sri Lankan, and Indian Americans experienced high growth rates in L.A. County as well. Japanese Americans had the least highest growth rate (one percent), but also the highest domestic-born population (70 percent) and the highest percentage of senior citizens (19 percent). The fastest-growing Pacific Islander ethnic group are Fijian Americans, with a growth rate of 68 percent.

The L.A. County city with the largest number of Asian Americans is Los Angeles, with a little under half a million. Monterey Park boasts the largest percentage of Asians per capita at 68 percent, while the city of Arcadia experienced the highest percentage of Asian American population growth at 38 percent. Of the 88 cities in L.A. County, 13 have majority Asian populations.

For Pacific Islanders, Los Angeles has the largest number at 15,000, Carson boasts the largest per capita, and the city with the highest growth rate of Pacific Islanders is Glendale, with a 74 percent increase.

The report from AAAJ-LA (formerly known as the Asian Pacific American Legal Center) is largely based on on 2010 U.S. Census data, as well as findings gathered from USC’s Center for the Study of Immigration Integration, the California Department of Education, the California Department of Public Health, and the California Health Interview Survey.

Surely such an aggregation of demographic data can reveal trends and indications in community-wide issues such as immigration, economics, employment, housing, education, health, and civic engagement.

The large growth rate of the Asian/Pacific Islander population as revealed in AAAJ-LA’s report reflects the change in the image of the American immigrant through the years: From the huddled masses of Europeans arriving via Ellis Island by boat to Spanish-speaking inmigrantescoming from Latin America, it will inevitably shift to Asians and Pacific Islanders flying by airplane across the great ocean, arriving at emotional gateways such as LAX. Only this time, with American entertainment and popular culture easily downloadable, cultural integration and assimilation might be somewhat faster — although the cultural influence can originate from the other side of the Pacific as well.

Much more importantly, the image of Asian Americans in the American mainstream as a “Model Minority,” consistently blessed with a comfortable income and higher education couldn’t be more shattered through the findings of the AAAJ-LA report. Though groups such as Indian, Japanese, and Taiwanese Americans made an annual per-capita income of over $30,000 — well above the total L.A. County average of $27,344 — Cambodian Americans fared the lowest of all the Asian groups at $14,276. They also registered with 53 percent of their population as low-income and a a quarter living in poverty. The Bangladeshi population in L.A. County has 57 percent of them considered low-income (The Latino population, by comparison, is 51 percent low-income and 21 percent living in poverty). And although many Asian ethnic groups have at least 90 percent of their population possessing a high school degree or higher education level, Cambodian Americans fared at just 58 percent; Vietnamese Americans had 67 percent. And although Korean Americans fared slightly above the average annual per-capita income level, they rank among the lowest in home ownership and are the highest in terms of the lack of health insurance. The “Model Minority” label is meaningless in today’s world; Asian Americans are instead seeking models for equity, empowerment, and change. For the next 10 years, there’s a lot of work to be done in the community.

The complete report, “A Community Of Contrasts: Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders in Los Angeles County” can be downloaded here from the AAAJ-LA’s website.

Elson Trinidad is the Filipino kid who grew up listening to black music in an Armenian neighborhood where people spoke Spanish and ate Thai food.