Telectroscope's Suppression of Absence

Telectroscope started out as a dream of digging a transatlantic tunnel that turned into a terrifying and tragic nightmare. An eccentric 19th century inventor, Alexander Stanhope St. George began with the grand scheme to build a two-way tunnel connecting London to New York.

According to Alexander's plan, once the tunnel had boroughed through Altantic shore and the earths core, an amplifying set of mirrors and lenses would act as a giant telescope to transmit an image (almost like a fiber optic cable) from the City of London to the Brooklyn Bridge or from one side of the world to the other, so tells Paul St. George.

As legend has it, after raising some capital, Stanhope St. George hired a workforce of unemployed laborers from Liverpool and began digging the tunnel to America. Eventually, tragedy struck when on March 5th, 1892, the Atlantic ocean breached the tunnel roof and 15 men lost their lives.

As most visionary inventors would do in the face of tragedy and even death, despite all reasonable laws of physics, the unyielding Stanhope St. George vowed to soldier on and persevere with his dream. However, fearing for their lives his workers mutinied and Alexander, filled with shame from failure, died in a asylum in Bethnal Green after suffering deteriorating mental health in 1912.

What began as an idea for a “device for the suppression of absence” as Alexander wrote in his resurrected journal complete with elaborate drawings and plans, and then seemingly ended in a tragedy searching for a lesson, fell into the hands of Paul St. Goerge, Alexanders grandson. Where would Stanhope St. George legacy lead?



Paul St. George a professor of 19th-century chronophotography at London Metropolitan University picked up where his grandfather left off and with grants totally over $700 thousand from the British government, private sponsors and Artichoke has built the Telectroscope connecting the Brooklyn and London's Tower Bridge via visual amplification (transatlantic fiber optic cable perhaps?), arriving in time to celebrate the 125 anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Okay, so this story is almost true but not quite. Why let the truth get in the way of some elaborate and expensive fun? You may experience Paul St. George's Telectroscope at the Brooklyn Bridge in New York or the Tower Bridge in London from May 22nd through June 15th, 2008 or visit the telectroscope's flickr group.

MUTO: Exterior Animation

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
Running Time: 7 minutes, 26 seconds

This new ambitious short animated film by BLU was done in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2008. Created as a painted wall mural, ultimately due to its fluxus nature it only exists in its final form as hand drawn cell animation on digital video.

In order to get the most enjoyment I recommend clicking on the expand picture icon to view full screen and listen with headphones or turn up the volume on your computer to hear the sound effects. Great effort has been made to keep video and sound quality better than average YouTube or other internet animation.

Confounding Public Expectations

You've probably seen this video documentation of the Grand Central performance by Improv Everywhere based in New York City as it is hugely popular on the internet and has been viewed over 11 million times on YouTube. However, the group has done more than 70 missions using social networking tactics to draw together willing participants in their public works.

Reminiscent of Michael Kirby's 1960s New York Happenings and Adrian Henri Liverpool movement, a phrase coined by Allan Kaprow for performance art and spontaneous street theater, IE has taken public happenings to a whole new level. As interesting as missions can or cannot be, the social networking methods Improv Everywhere uses to assemble a group, focus the public on a temporary happening, documenting it and then just as quickly disperse into the ether, punctuates the surprise element the unexpected interruption can accomplish.

In a recent mission, three agents, as IE calls them, haul their desktop wifi enabled computer CPU, monitor and keyboard into a Starbucks and start working as if nothing is abnormal at all. "Their schlepping! Their computer! Their server! Their keyboard!" says one customer outside the coffeeshop in Manhattan. Improv Everywhere's missions are conceived to cause observers to rethink place and their routine expectations. Perhaps more skillful than any previous pubic art performance has been IE ability to document their missions on video for wide-spread dissemination and ultimately historic preservation.

You usually have to do a lot to break the ice and get noticed on the NYC Subway system but No Pants certainly can get a person noticed in New York. And if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere...

Improv Everywhere's Freeze in Grand Central Station has been watched replicated in 80 cities in 30 countries and No Pants has been performed in January every year in New York since 2002 as well as 12 cities worldwide. Comedian Charlie Todd, one of the founders of IE, says he is in talks to produce a national program based on IE performances.

Octocube: What is it?

What is that mechanical brain-like matter sitting in the corner?

Designer Vivien Muller has created this combination art object and space heater using a simple 90 degree plumbing elbow as the repeating nexus element of her design. The modular tubing increases the surface area producing radiant heat and you can make it just as simply at home but following the concept. That the beauty of simple elegant design - art following function.

Sixteen foot Multi-touch Obscura Digital Screen

You know you want it...

Counting Crows, Teaching Them New Tricks

Joshua Klein asks why we can't just get along with crows. Crows, we are finding out, are very adaptive in living around human beings and all we want to do is kill them. As a hacker and writer Klein embarked on a amateur study of corvidae behavior and he thought it might be great to harness the power of the intelligence of crows.

Urban Loft Cube Addon

As urban-living becomes more sacred and living space more valuable, the city dweller and country nomads alike look for alternatives to expand and parcel out life. Loftcube is a pre-fab personal mobile home modular structure consisting of 420 sq. ft. of living space conceived by German furniture designer Werner Aisslinger.

The unit sells in Great Britain for roughly between 65 and 80 thousand pounds ($125,000 to $150,000) depending on the kitchen and bathroom configurations (plus shipping unless perhaps you can get Amazon to throw in free shipping on orders over $25).

The modular unit could be used as an rooftop add-on to an urban industrial loft, a weekend cabin in the country, a bunk house at a ski lodge, or a backyard studio and guesthouse in the suburbs.

The various window spaces can be custom designed during prefabrication for transparent, translucent, and louvred coverings to match with its placement, room arrangements and lighting environments. Floor coverings can also be customized and an unique stone floor in the bathroom evaporates water quickly while messaging the feet.

The interior structure also uses a number of innovations to maximize floor and wall space. For instance, wall panels separating the kitchen and bathroom feature integrated waterspouts or facets that can be maneuvered to each side of the panel. Likewise, a shower-head flips down into the bath space for bathing while it turns out over plants in the living-room to water them. Water, lighting, and electricity runs up through narrow hi-tech fabricated panels minimizing wasted space.

Fixtures and appliances recede into their panels or fold into cabinets so that they are not openly visible during the day or at times when not in use, clearing space and clutter for alternative uses of the wide open living space.

Overall, the modular mobile loft space itself can be custom configured to match a variety of uses: disconnected office space, guest house, elderly apartment, relaxing retreat, crafts studio, or private apartment for returning parents or unemployable bounce-back children. The minimalist domicile makes use of flat rooftop urban space often wasted or left used in the conversion from industrial warehouse to residential living and accomodating backyard. We can only expect the demand for these structures to increase as urban living space and transportation demands intensify.

Bio-Design by Luigi Colani

Unabashed agent provocateur of industrial design, Luigi Colani created a four-rooms-in-one space-saving house with a 20 sq. ft. (6 meter) cylinder inside that contains a bedroom, kitchen and bathroom.

Colani is an advocate of Bio-Design and has been joined by a younger generation of designers like captain organic Ross Lovegrove and Karim Rashid who pre-empt the technically feasible using a fusion of art and organic design. The German-born Colani applied his unique ideas to produce cars, trucks, boats, aircraft (he studied aerodynamic design at Sorbonne in Paris), motocycles, Colani tea pots, mineral water bottles, SLR cameras and sun-glasses.

As Lovegrove describes his fellow techno-anthropomorphic believer, "Colani’s place is secured as perhaps the most influential form visionary of the twentieth century in the field of industrial design. He remains ever relevant, connecting man to machine in the most profoundly utopian of ways."

A cylinder located inside the modular cabin rotates left or right bringing the room you want into view of the main living room. There's a separate toilet and a small hallway, and the moving parts are controlled with a remote. Colani's house, not unlike Kurokawa's Nakagin Tower, was designed with young professionals who need minimal space while they focus on career in mind.

As a designer, Colani saw his responsibility to translate nature into design as paramount, using the birds wing as evolutions design for aerodynamics in aircraft and automobile design. His C-Form designs from the 1960s established a shape language seen for years in vehicles such as the Corvette. Later Colani moved to Japan where he designed the Canon T9 camera body, applying bio-forms that we see in all SLR digital cameras today.

Bio-design's signature in Colani's work is rounded, organic forms that he sees as the biodynamic. Colani himself wrote, "Everything on the microcosmic as well as the macroscopic plane is made up of curves... I can only obey the laws of nature."

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Design Museum website: designmuseum.org

Colani website: colani.de

Robert Rauschenberg [1925 - 2008]

Two artists with tremendous influence over me as an art graduate student in my 20s were Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg. Last night Rauschenberg died at age 82 in Florida. In one very memorable act, the course of art history collided, when in 1953 Rauschenberg went to de Kooning's Greenwich Village studio with a bottle of Jack Daniels (de Kooning was an incorrigible alcoholic) to ask the modern master of painting and drawing, at the peak of his career, if he could erase one of his drawings. de Kooning wasn't very happy with the request but granted the young unknown painter his wish.

Rauschenberg took the de Kooning drawing away that night and began to erase it and when the work was exhibited at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York it caused great controversy in the art world. The arguably "best artist in the world" de Kooning was outraged. According to de Kooning's biographers Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, the Dutch immigrant New York artist feared pop-art and neo-Dada was supplanting the New York School of Abstract Expressionism and that Rauschenberg had laid down an anti-expressionist manifesto, of sorts, not so much by the act of erasing the drawing but by hanging it in an exhibition of new American artists. In other words, de Kooning expected it all to end after that night and it would not surface in the art world front-and-center.

The significance of Rauschenberg's act wasn't lost on the New York art critics - especially Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg both highly critical of Pop Art and what they termed Kitsch. There was much speculation that Abstract Expressionism had run it course and a new generation of pop-artists using direct images from the popular media and capitalist advertising carried a more relevant message that the painters from the 40s and 50s obscured with action painting and flat gestural drip field obfuscation.

Even though he had one foot firmly in the world of action painting and the other in pop art, Rauschenberg's act of erasure was taken as a statement that "Abstract Expressionism is Dead!" And de Kooning in his darker moments, while fighting his own demons, also began to think Rauschenberg's act of fluxus did signify exactly this sentiment.

Rauschenberg recalled about this time, “Everyone was trying to give up European aesthetics. John Cage said that fear in life is the fear of change. If I may add to that: nothing can avoid changing. It’s the only thing you can count on. Because life doesn’t have any other possibility, everyone can be measured by his adaptability to change.”
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NY Times article on the life of Robert Rauschenberg.

A recording of the panel discussion, Who is Robert Rasuchenberg?: A Discussion with Mary Lynn Kotz, Christopher Rauschenberg, Robert Rauschenberg, and Darryl Pottorf. Running Time: 42 minutes 45 seconds


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Walker Art Center has in its permanent collection 120 prints and two multiples by Rauschenberg including the 1960 painting Trophy II (for Teeny and Marcel Duchamp) currently on display in Gallery 2. The Minneapolis Institute of Art has one combine sculpture and numerous prints including Rauschenberg's largest (72" by 638") but none of his work is currently hanging at MIA.

Capsule Architecture

Being a post-sputnik child, we grew up with a especially tainted idea of the future. Part of our notion of the future was capsular in nature and another part, no doubt because of the cold war nuclear fear, was post-apocolyptic doom. Basically, we assumed earth would be destroyed by the stupidity of man at war with aliens like in H.G. Wells War of the Worlds and in order to survive, we'd be propelled into the dark outer space of the non-gravitational universe like 2001 A Space Odyssey. We would need pods, sachets of Tang, and life support-system modules to exist.

A nation with a more intimate knowledge of apocalypse cannot be found than Japan. Ravaged by atomic horror, after the 1950s, the Japanese seemed to embrace radical new ideas in architecture and urban design. One designed movement, that has been referred to as capsule architecture, manifest itself in the work of architect Kisko Kurokawa and his landmark Nakagin Capsule Tower in Shimbashi, Tokyo, Japan. Architectural tourists have pilgrimed to the upscale Ginza neighborhood to see this unique building of the Metabolic movement.

Kurokawa's modular tower was completed in 1972 and consisted of two concrete towers with steel frame and reinforced concrete shaft to which are attached pre-fabricated galvanized, rib enforced steel capsules by four high tension bolts. The capsules are about the size of a small Winnebago (2.3m x 3.8m x 2.1m or 7.5 ft x 11.5 ft x 6.8ft) designed to be easily replaceable. Stacked on top of each other, the capsules climb 13-stories and look like washing machines with their round windows and square-box repetition. The two steel shafts to which the modular units are attached also function as elevators to bring owners up to their abodes from the buildings lobby.

The features of these Metabolic pods include a built in rotary phone, a color TV, stereo radio tuner, numeric clock, built-in speakers and a reel-to-reel tape deck -- in the day when Nakagin was constructed all very high tech. And let's be fair, Kurokawa always imagined that due to the modular pre-fabricated factory construction and assembly of the pods that they would be redesigned, rebuilt and replaced periodically as technology advanced and the pod aged in need of repair.

The 100 square foot pre-fab unit feels very much like the interior cabin of a commercial aircraft or a closer to Nakagin reference the shinkansen or Japan's bullet train. All along one wall there is a series of storage cabinets, a desk, the built-in electronics. At the far end next to the single round window, is a double bed and on the other end of the 11.5 length is the door and a bathroom with sink, shower, and toilet all combined in a space roughly the size of a airliner lavatory.

When the building opened in the disco era of the 70s all 140 units sold within a month. Kurokawa imagined that the residences of his tower would be young energetic professionals living in the fast-paced city who'd spend long hours in the office, eat all their meals in Mochi, Soba and Sushi restaurants, and long evenings at the discotheque. However, many of the original buyers were corporate journeymen and commuting salarymen with larger homes and families further outside the city and simply needed a place to crash three or four nights a week

But the capsules haven't been replaced since they were orignally built and in a recent Architectural Record reported that the tower will be demolished. In a Dwell magazine essay by Tom Vanderbilt, he reported that the Nakagin Tower owners association had voted to tear down rather than repair the aging structure. One of the compelling reasons looming over Nakagin's fate was the asbestos used during the construction has condemned the entire structure to die.

Kurokawa died in 2007 but before his death campaigned to keep his architectural landmark from being consumed by the forces of urban renewal and Tokyo's rampant development engine. Kurokawa 's Sony Tower, also designed and built on the Metabolic modular capsular concept in 1976, was constructed with stainless steel materials rather than galvinized. Sony Tower in Osaka was brought down last year. The international heritage protection group Docomomo, have unsuccessfully pleaded for the United Nations' heritage arm to protect this landmark building.

In the Metabolic maestros own writings, the Buddhist Kurokawa expectantly wrote, "We used to consider things that could live forever to be beautiful. But this way of thinking has been exposed to be a lie. True beauty lies in things that die, things that change."

SENSEable City's Digital Water Pavilion

Imagine an outdoor pavilion with four exterior walls made of running water. This summers international design Expo Zaragoza 2008 will feature and interacive exbitional area, cafe and public spaces designed at MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory.

According to Patti Richards of the MIT news office, the "water walls" that make up the structure consist of a row of closely spaced solenoid valves along a pipe suspended in the air. The valves can be opened and closed, at high frequency, via computer control. This produces a curtain of falling water with gaps at specified locations - a pattern of pixels created from air and water instead of illuminated points on a screen. The entire surface becomes a one-bit-deep digital display that continuously scrolls downward.

The Tribute to Water Expo Zaragoza 2008 will be held from June 14th to September 14th in Zaragoza, Spain and is committed to searching for solutions to water and its sustainable development in the world.

Memphis: The New International Style

When I arrived in London for graduate school in the early 1980s, a radical new design movement coming out of Italy was the Memphis Design collective from Milano. Ettore Sottsass and a group of furniture, ceramic, print, industrial products, and architectural designers inspired by the Radical Design of Italy in the 1960s were joined by Andrea Branzi one of the leaders from the earlier movement.

The Memphis Group formed in 1981 included Martine Bedin, Andrea Branzi, Aldo Cibic, Michele de Lucchi, Nathalie du Pasquier, American-born architect Michael Graves, Viennese designer Hans Hollein, Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, Japanese designer Shiro Kuromata, Italian product designer Matteo Thun, Spanish artist and designer Javier Mariscal, British industrial designer George Sowden, Marco Zanini, the journalist Barbara Radice in addition to Sottsass.

Sottsass called Memphis "The New International Style" which we took to have a hint of irony since the international style we were seeing all over in Eastern Europe from Yugoslavia and East Germany to the Soviet Union was utilitarian hard, cold steel and glass boxes and redundantly large with gray humorless severity. Meanwhile Memphis screamed with cartoon wavy lines, lyrical patterns, neon glow, and bright primary colors.

Memphis' most memorable pieces on show were the the Carlton Cabinet (left) and the Dublin sofa that popped vibrant in contrast to the stern minimalism in design had become the norm. Memphis' use of industrial materials – printed glass, tortoiseshell luminance, leopard print fibers, celluloids, fireflake finishes, neon tubes and zinc-plated sheet-metals – jazzed up with flamboyant colors and patterns, spangles and glitter followed Branzi's ideas about "exalt everything kitsch and pop" in the 1960s to break from old European traditions.

Writers and critics accused Branzi and the other Memphis designers of having too much fun and folly with design, not practical to the real world but Sottsass shot back explaining that Memphis design was serious while doing industrial design for Olivetti or other Italian manufacturers was all play.

Viewing Memphis designers you can easily see the influence of 60s and 70s pop artists Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Dazzle panel artist John McHale, optical artists Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely as well as commercially designed objects like film projectors, aero-dynamic kitchen appliances, jukeboxes, gramophones and comic book illustration. Memphis brought high art values and pop art fantasy into industrial and commercial design.

An exhibition at Boilerhouse, Victoria & Albert Museum, London brought Memphis to the forefront of European design and crowds stood in line for hours to see this new Milan based design group. The Memphis designers were like rock stars with design groupies anxious to jump on their every word. Memphis disbanded in 1988 but members of its group continue to have influence world-wide in a variety of design fields.

Utopian Visions: One Laptop Per Child

If utopia has returned in these cynical times it is the buzz around the technology of this little machine being developed at One Kendall Center in Cambridge. One Laptop Per Child. Of course, cynics would like to say that Western culture technogeeks are looking through rose colored glasses and pronouncing what third world kids "need." What poor kids need, says Nicholas Negroponte, is the OX laptop computer and they will be raised out of poverty.

Aside from the underlying assumption OLPC that this will be good for poor kids, the design challenges the XO computer are formable. The case needs to be very tough. Power consumption must be minimal. It must be water and dirt proof. The hard drive cannot be mechanical - no moving parts. The wifi antenna must be powerful enough to work in a range of circumstances. The goal was to make it for $100 (although they've only been able to get it to $188). And it needs quality software and educational "content" delivered to it every where in the world.

As one employee of Red Hat, the Cambridge based company developing OLPC, said this is not a product it is a global humanitarian cause. In this case, the team in Cambridge is trying to apply difficult design concepts, mesh networks, open source software communities and social networking to solve world problems of poverty. And it should look freaky cool also.

Archizoom & Folding Enclosures

In 1968 Italian designer Andrea Branzi and a group of radical designers in Florence, Italy decided to take the ideology of architectural modernism to its absurd limit. They headed a group in Italy that became known as Radical design. With No Stop City they proposed an endless stamping of circuit board buildings stretching as far as they eye could see. The group he formed with Gilberto Corretti (b 1941), Paolo Deganello (b 1940) and Massimo Morozzi and joined by Dario Bartolini and Lucia Bartolini as it became known as Archizoom split up in 1974.

Archizoom led to the Anti-design movement in Italy, whereby as Free thinkers in order to get away from Tradition, they stated, "...men must overturn conventions and exalt everything kitsch as a statement of aesthetic and ideological challenge." The gravitational center of anti-design shifted from Florence to Milano.

In the 1980s, a group led by Ettore Sottsass founded the Memphis Group (allegedly inspired by Bob Dylan's lyric "stuck inside a mobile with the Memphis Blues again..") with the purpose of reviving the radical design movement with Branzi as one of its members.


Branzi has currently exhibiting Open Enclosures at the Cartier Fondation in Paris through June 22nd. This project involves a surrreal piece of folding furniture of metal, glass, and organic matter that unfolds to form walls, a bed, personal workspace and shelf.