Monthly Archives: January 2009

The Pamphleteer, part 1

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ghettohb11This is an interesting little archive of racial politics and the state of public education in Houston, Texas in 2007. Apparently, a police officer assigned to Houston public schools created this pamphlet for his colleagues in order to help them “learn to speak ebonics.” See more of the officer’s pamphlet here.

Pamphleteering, as an urban archival practice, has a long history, and has been connected to some of the most incendiary and revolutionary urban actions of all time. (Think Thomas Paine in the streets of Philadelphia, 1776).

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George Orwell wrote a great review of the pamphlets circulating around London in 1943. Most of them, he concluded, were rubbish. But at the same time, he argues that the pamphlet is a “flexible form,” perfect for documenting things as they are happening, and for expressing one’s feelings quickly and succinctly. Kind of like a blog, right?

What would it mean to collect pamphlets handed out by “crazies” and “weirdos” around the city? Do you have a collection of pamphlets from some time in some city? Do you remember how you came across them? I’d love to see or at least hear about them. How would one go about collecting blogs of the city?

Archigram

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My friend Jana just reminded me of Archigram. I love their graphic technique. Like this manifesto written in the language of fifties space comics. I find their take on the city as media very interesting. For more of this groovy sixties avant-garde “architecture without architecture,” check out these scans, mostly from Simon Sadler’s book about Archigram.

Shop Windows

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One day last winter, I noticed this interesting exhibit/display in the windows of Macy’s Department Store. These images grabbed me immediately: The drawings and posters of Josephine Baker as a fashion icon, and the mannequins, with their expressive hand gestures, and the colorful printed text, of (real? and) imagined “Baker-isms”

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“Maman” Josephine       Beyonce you can have my costume
No, I have no regrets   A certain smile!    Ah. Those Bananas!     Me, a diva?

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All of this imagery is meant to help us in ”Rediscovering Josephine Baker” during Black History Month. We are also to meant to “discover” the great items on sale at Macy’s.

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Like Betsey Johnson Handbags on [Floor] 1.

What can we make of this as an archival practice? I think the use of images, original posters, and fashion drawings “on loan from the Jean Claude Baker Foundation and the Jean Rennert Collection,” is a traditional museum practice. But paired with the mannequins advertising the latest fashions on sale in the store, and the colorful fictional utterances, the Baker archive changes from a document of the past into an image of contemporary urban sophistication. But not without raising some disturbing issues… Continue reading →

Table for Electronic Dreams

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We carry mobile phones, and laptops, and similar devices everyday. We forget that these devices operate at electromagnetic frequencies beyond basic human perception. In other words, our phones have other lives and exist in other worlds of connectivity, different from our own. New media artist Andy Doro wants to remind us of this fact, by making that other world visible, at least momentarily.

I have constructed a table which reveals the hidden electrical activity of electronic objects placed upon it. Through this interaction, people will develop a greater awareness of the invisible workings of their electronic devices and the limits of human perception… Perhaps our inability [to perceive electromagnetic] space is our repression of the dreams of electronic objects. There is a disconnect between the voice we hear over a cellphone and the raw medium which the cellphone uses to transmit sound–the two are not analogous. Table for Electronic Dreams allows these hidden dreams to become visibly apparent.

He calls what he does making electronic dreams visible, I call it a seance for the ghosts of mobile phones. (Can “seancing” be an archival practice?)

Mobile Architecure

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My friend Barbara asks:

“How would you archive mobile buildings? Buildings that (dis)assemble like Legos…”

She is referring to the work of Alberto Mozó, an architect based in Santiago, Chile.

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Mozó has the idea that pre-fab mobile architecture–buildings which can be assembled and disassembled with ease, or the parts re-purposed at will–has great value for Architecture and Urbanism today. The architect’s statement about the office building pictured above introduces the theme of “Transitividad” or transitivity to describe the quality of in-betweeness, or openness to disassembly, that the building embodies.

To get back to Barbara’s question, if the building embodies transitivity then how could it be archived? Well my first suggestion is that the method of archiving, the archival practice, must also have a transitive quality.

Continue reading →