#tool test

[basicbicthkey]

Another quick draw

Just testing out the watercolor tool on Sketch

[stholtzmann]

OK, first off, I know this is pretty bad. It's been years since I drew regularly and I wasn't that good back then. So, I got myself a new iPad and the pencil thingie. Tried it tonight with an app that's also new to me, Procreate (ahahaha). And I totally used a photo from the recent Elle photo shoot. So many problems, lol. No idea what I'm doing. But it was a fun way to mess around for a while when I was too sleepy to work on the zine! Maybe I'll get better eventually. (And yeah, her hair's parted on the wrong side.)

[qupritsuvwix]

‘This was not expected at all’: Mechanics reveal whether you should use Harbor Freight vs. Snap On tools after testing them head-to-head

'We're ALL rethinking our past purchase decisions!'

[cathgomes]

[edens-edge-blog]

Film shoot test, Vienna. Yesterday Petra filmed us from a top view on a bluescreen. Next step will be to also do this with the model of the lot in our studio. In a procedure of postproduction we will then key ourselves into the model.

[edens-edge-blog]

So here we are in our studio. While waiting for night to fall we set up the dedolights and prepare the desert model for filming.

[edens-edge-blog]

Student Workshops

As part of our preparations for building a practice for narrative landscape design we needed to explore the precepts of our approach. We did this in a series of workshops that included the participation of students of the class for landscape design at the University for Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria.

Our hypothesis is that our perception and use of landscapes are cultural constructions. Our spatial relations are embedded in them. Radically thought even the most objective space is the product, or maybe side product, of the contexts of its use. Seen this way the idea of landscape design is about the understanding of the "cultural natures" of landscapes.

On a political level these "natures" remain heavily debated as ideologies that are stabilized and destabilized by social power relations. How a particular landscape actually reflects the way users also define themselves hints to the complexities involved Ecological studies of interest to our approach therefore include landscapes as shareholders of many conflicting economies. Cultural narcissism, as Christopher Lasch emphasised for consumer culture, is one one of them. The focus we are therefore particularly interested in is how popular culture plays in to these economies, ideologies and spheres of environmental use and identification in everyday life. How are our environments produced and what does our experience of them rely on? What are most contemporary landscape-natures made up of, who are their stakeholders and what are their means of design?

The starting point we chose to explore these questions were our favored relationships to landscapes. The first assignment we followed in our workshop Nr 01 was to build a landscape design practice dedicated to explore this relationship and to develop designs for by using narrative tools that we introduced them to in the beginning.

The second assignment was to participate in Steve Rowell's practice of land use interpretation and develop a landmark for the first successful teleportation experiment outside a laboratory executed under the Danube in Vienna 2004 by the Austrian Institute of Quantum Physics.

Methodically the first workshop featured a bottom up approach  that challenged students to explore the narrative topography that their own spatial experience was constructed by.

The "bottom up" approach describes the course of exploration. At the beginning students did not necessarily know what larger cultural contexts and debates their given landscape attraction was participating in. Identifying them as the terrain they could script their practice, role and mission in for target audiences was our goal. 

Methodically the second workshop could be described as "top down approach". Context and debates were provided and opened for workshop participation. Challenging landscape relations implicit in the practice of quantum physics however had to be appropriated by the students to realize speculatively comprehendable deep time landmark designs for future generations.

In both cases narratives were applied to develop contextual settings for creative acts using varrying explorative strategies within a narrative topography. 

The perspectives this opens for the practice of landscape design is quite in line with what Trebor Scholz calls "a cultural context developer and context provider". The industries of popular culture are great in doing it. Why not hijack their means for our purposes?