Boston

We're delighted to be on our way to Boston to take part in a fascinating conference co-organized by the BABEL Working Group, Boston College, Northeastern University, M.I.T., Tufts University, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cutural studies, and punctum books:
"Cruising in the ruins: the question of disciplinarity in the post/medieval university".

Thus I propose an abandonment of disciplinary grounding but an abandonment that retains as structurally essential the question of the disciplinary form that can be given to knowledges. This is why the university should not exchange the rigid and outmoded disciplines for a simply amorphous interdisciplinary space in the humanities (as if we could still organize knowledge around the figure of “Man”). Rather, the loosening of disciplinary structures has to be made the opportunity for the installation of disciplinarity as a permanent question. . . . [which would] keep open the question of what it means to group knowledges in certain ways, and what it has meant that they have been so grouped in the past.
~Bill Readings, The University in Ruins

There's a fully packed programme over three days, and we'll be presenting the 3rd plenary session on Saturday.

Fire Hydrant Fountains

The fabrication shop have been working hard and have been fantastic at making this project happen, they finished the three different fountains and they're almost ready to be put in place for Canada Day this week end. Here's a sneak preview of the two other designs and the first one - "strangers" or the "dating fountain" - being used this morning for a TV interview.

More pictures of them in use next week.

University of Oxford

Last week we took part in a seminar at the University of Oxford, Creative ecologies: conditioning inventiveness.
The other people invited were eminent geographers, archeologists, political theorist, musicologist, philosopher and anthropologist, an amazing combination of knowledge.
To put it simply, we were looking at creativity in its wider sense, basing the discussions on some of the objects from the awe inspiring Pitt Rivers Museum which hosted us for 3 days. The objects used, which we were allowed to manipulate,
included a tupilak,
a mandrake root,
a desiccated heart encased in a heart-shaped lead container and a Micronesian Nautical chart.pictures from the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford

From the introducing paper by Charlotte Bates, Joe Gerlach, Thomas Jellis, Wendy Morrison, and Sefryn Penrose, the seminar aimed to engage "with objects which are in some ways unfamiliar to us, which will stimulate us to engage and to talk in ways unusual in an academic meeting. As we have stressed above, the idea of mutual making of people and objects is key to many current approaches to the material world. Academics tend to write and talk about this mutuality, rather than engage with it. There is risk as well as potential in such engagement, but we are hoping not just to consider creativity from a distance, but also to set up some of the conditions in which creativity occurs."
As part of our engagement for the seminar we devised a workshop session looking at the importance of individual recollection of objects and their personal meanings.

We felt very privileged to be able to spend a week discussing and exploring such notions in the company of fascinating people and with the access to such unusual objects.

Marseille

Last week we went to Marseille to meet some people (amongst others Vanessa Santullo one half of the great culture blog Marseille face b) and, after talking about it for many years, we finally started to discover this exciting city.

Along the way we were advised to check the Bonne Mère (the Basilique Notre Dame de la Garde) to see the ex-votos.
There were indeed some fascinating ex-votos paintings but the most amazing sight was the of dozens of models of boats of different periods, and a few planes, hanging from the ceiling, placed there in gratitude to the Saints. Boats floating in church.

We look forward to returning to Marseille soon.

Ad hoc sledging

Snow in Glasgow, ingenious people making sledges out of anything in Queen's Park. The best one was a fridge door with an added cushion, went like a rocket.

punts half models

The local boat building practice for the traditional rowing fishing boat, the punt, is being revived through the punt race. Some of the boat builders use "half models" of different scales and of different constructions to measure up the boats. One of the type of half model has layers held together with pegs, the other has slots in the hull in which inserted cards work as sections to scale up.

El dorado collaboration

We're recently back from a week developing a proposal for an art commission with El dorado Architects. Some very interesting discussions came up on the different approaches to a brief from architecture practice or art practice.
Proposal due in next week.

From a visit to Florence

Market seller reading his paper


Moped parking reservation


Monoculars


Market seller in front of his carefully stacked crates


A door in a facade, carefully made to blend in ('stone' blocks carved from wood)

A narrative Atlas

Researching into the Visual Language project for Calgary, we found Dennis Wood's Dancing and singing: A Narrative Atlas of Boylan Heights in the blog Making Maps: DIY Cartography.
The atlas contains "place-inspired maps, including maps of night, crime, fences, graffiti, textures, autumn leaves, routes, the underground, lines overhead, stars, and jack-o-lanterns".


Lines overhead map


Jack-o-lantern Map


Underground Map

Dennis Wood described the origin of this Atlas: "I thought I might help my students learn something about how to read the landscape by focusing hard on a small piece of it". This way of looking at the aspects of the place that usually pass unnoticed reminds me a lot of Georges Perec Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu Parisien: "Mon propos [...] a été de décrire le reste : ce que l'on ne note généralement pas, ce qui ne se remarque pas, ce qui n'a pas d'importance : ce qui se passe quand il ne se passe rien." (My aim was to describe all the rest: the things that we usually don't write down, what's not noticeable, what's unimportant, what's happening when nothing is happening.)
Georges Perec, Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu Parisien, 1975 (Forgive the bad translation)
He also described this approach in a previous text:
«How to speak of these ‘common things’, or rather how to track them, how to drive them out, tear them from the gangue in which they were glued, how to give them a meaning, a language: let them finally speak of what there is, of what we are.
Maybe it’s a matter of creating our own anthropology: one that would talk of us, one that would look for what we for so long pillage from others. Not anymore the exotic, but the endotic.
Interrogate what seems so natural that we forgot its origin. To find again some surprise.»
Georges Perec, L'Infra-ordinaire, 1973

The Dennis Wood Atlas seems to be a balance between Perec's literary approach and a scientist's one.

Morecambe

We are currently developing an in-depth proposal for a project in Morecambe and last week we spent three days visiting the place and meeting relevant people.
One of the most spectacular place we went to was the Winter Gardens, a grandiose XIX Century building now half gutted and waiting on more funding for restoration. The mix of decayed grandeur, traces and memories, and building site atmosphere turn this building into a very special experience.

Some images from a recent visit to Kentucky.

continental travel



a continental chair - presumably so the maintenance chap can reach.







Pleasant Hill, is a the largest Shaker village in the US, big fans of their craftsmanship and the resulting aesthetic, we visited (and stayed the night) a little sceptical that this original but renovated village might be somewhat 'Disneyfied', the traditional dress of the guides was a little much but the buildings and objects are beautiful.

In sharp contrast was the Louisville craft shop





a picture from a little local shopping trip



a Downtown Louisville fire escape



We were staying as guests at the Bernhiem Arboretum and research forest, just over the road was the Jim Beam Factory, with a number of these lovely sheds.