Invisible Cities - the experience of negative space
(2024)
author(s): vittoria pavesi
published in: Research Catalogue
"What is today the city, for us? I believe I wrote something like a last love poem to cities, in a time when it’s becoming more and more difficult living them like cities. Maybe we’re coming to a moment of crisis of the urban life, and Invisible cities are a dream born by the heart of unliveable cities." - I. Calvino, Introduction to Città Invisibili, Mondadori 1983
Starting by a confrontation between two historical utopian projects (Arturo Soria’s ciudad lineal and Constant’s New Babylon) I try to investigate with a broad and heterogenous look the idea of adopting path as fundamental topic of the city: whether Soria or Constant, in different ways, suggest an architecture of roaming, a nomadic and virtual space, that is the same space of cosmopolis, an anticipation of globalized culture that’s identified in a flux-condition and not in a stasis-one. Ciudad lineal and New Babylon projects prophetically forestall many tendencies of contemporary urbanity, proposing an idea of cities that are at the same time hyperlocal and hyperplanetary, ahistorical and superficial, acentric and non-identitary, inhabited by people always in movement. Streets don’t conduct anymore just to some places, they are places themselves: the condition of movement, and the street trail that constitutes his support, represents the urban archetype that is the basis of all contemporary architectonical and social disposition. From the description and comparison of these two projects the Generic City emerges, alienate and privatized, where we’re living in nowadays.
Novel
(2021)
author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
published in: Research Catalogue
Single-channel video with text. Shown at: Online Exclusives, Afterimage Online, 2015. The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural CRiticism, 2007. 3rd Athens Video Art Festival, Athens, Greece, 2007. "Video as Urban Condition", Video-pool Archive, Austrian Cultural Forum, Austria, 2007. "Her Shorts", International Women's Video Art Festival, Plugged Art, USA.
Space, Sound, and the Home(less)
(2021)
author(s): Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Following Rosalyn Deutsche, this essay examines how the binary opposition enforced by the boundaries of domesticity enforce containment and enclosure, particularly of excluded bodies, i.e. the homeless. This enclosure, which is read through Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the decorporealization of space, is enforced primarily through a logic of visuality and compartmentalization. This essay proposes sound as a means to counter these states of enclosure. Using concepts of dwelling (Heidegger), weaving (Ingold), and nomadism (Braidotti), a sonic recorporealization is developed through personal, domestic sound art experimentation and instrument building. The results and repercussions are then examined in the context of the singular home, its local community, and society more broadly, wherein sound is proposed as a means to instigate practices of spatial recorporealization.
Listening in/to Exile: Migration and Media Arts
(2019)
author(s): Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition responds to the current flux of migration and the resulting condition of estrangement. The projects – an augmented book project and a corresponding media artwork – respond to mass migration, hyper-mobility, placeless-ness and nomadism, which are blurring the boundaries between the local and the global, the corporeal and the digital, the private and the public. Through an exploration of the poetic and critical capacities embedded in everyday listening the two projects attempt to shed light on the aesthetics of addressing the notion of exile, alienation and estrangement. The exposition let the viewer/reader engage with the artistic matter; namely, the field recordings and on-site writings - artistic acts of poetic contemplation grounded in a personal experience of the urban alienation, with the aim of movement towards self-understanding and emancipation.
Exile and Other Syndromes
(last edited: 2019)
author(s): Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
We live in an era of pervasive mobility and (dis)connectivity that triggers perpetual dislocation, where perceptions constantly shift across places to form unsettled geographies, producing meanings that at times are arguably independent from the locative sources. As increasingly migratory being, a wandering urban dweller of today's post-global cities is sensitive to environmental sounds navigating through various urban sites considering them as spatio-temporally evolving but gradually disorienting auditory situations, juxtaposed with real-time spatial information, and memory of another place in another time. The nomadic subject relates to these situations through contemplation, mindfulness and contingent processes informed by the enhanced sense of mobility. ‘Exile and Other Syndromes’ (2015 – 2016) responds to this indisposition of migration, placeless-ness and nomadism – impulses of a contemporary condition that eventually blurs the boundaries between the digital and the corporeal, between local and the global, or between private and enhanced access and freedom of the public domain, helping the nomadic subject to emerge as an elevated, emancipated self. The project intends to examine these contemporary realities manifesting in a responsive, augmented, and intelligent environment incorporating multi-channel sound diffusion, modulated text and audio data visualisation. The work considers mindful aspects of deterritorialized mode of listening, and explores its introspective capacity transcending the barrier of immediate meaning to touch the poetic sensibilities. The première of the working version will take place at CUBE, IEM: Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics, Kunstuniversität Graz, 19:00, 19 January 2016.
Hyper-listening: Praxis
(last edited: 2019)
author(s): Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The project examines the complex processes through which everyday sounds are perceived as contours of unfolding and intersecting narratives in the mindful contemplation of an itinerant listener; and how do they trigger streams of cognitive associations as contextual interpretation of the sounds in the thoughts. The outcome of the project includes an artists' book consisting of textual interpretation of sound with poetic connotations.
The project examines the complex processes through which everyday sounds are perceived as contours of unfolding and intersecting narratives in the mindful contemplation of an itinerant listener; and how do they trigger streams of cognitive associations as contextual interpretation of the sounds in the thoughts. The outcome of the project includes an artists' book consisting of textual interpretation of sound with poetic connotations.open exposition comments (0)