Who made your iPod?
“The real value of the iPod doesn’t lie in its parts or even in putting those parts together. The bulk of the iPod’s value is in the conception and design of the iPod. That is why Apple gets $80 for each of these video iPods it sells, which is by far the largest piece of value added in the entire supply chain.
Those clever folks at Apple figured out how to combine 451 mostly generic parts into a valuable product. They may not make the iPod, but they created it. In the end, that’s what really matters.”
[via nyt]
meaningless distance
Never in history has distance meant less. Never has man’s relationships with place been more numerous, fragile, and temporary. Throughout the advanced technological societies, and particularly among those I have characgerized as “the people of the future,” commuting, traveling, and regularly reloacting one’s family have become second nature. Figuratively, we “use up” places and dispose of them in much the same that we dispose of Kleenex or beer cans. We are witnessing a historic decline in the significance of place to human life. We are breeding a new race of nomads, and few suspect quite how massive, widespread and significant their migrations are.
-Future shock by Alvin Toffler (p75)
limbo
It is a pit stop, an in-between place, a “nowhere,” a technicality – a grudging intrusion into the seamless dream of teleportation that is transcontinental jet flight.
The hub is essentially an anti-experience borne of technological necessity and the imperatives of petroleum, flight schedules, the curvature of the planet, and geographic accident. Hubs are nowheres, with their security apparatuses, landing and fueling infrastructures, and pictograms both patronizing and incomprehensible. The unspoken ethos is one of keep-up-with-the-Joneses anti-regional sterility.
Hub signage almost exclusively employs the Helvetica type font, a font specifically engineered to have no personality. Hub food is always vacuum-packed and seems to strive for unitized, stainless placelessness. The buildings feel so sterile that they could only be the precise opposite: incubators of great plagues; fathers of all microbial lies. But airline hubs – more so than airports – are complete nowheres.
This nowhereness both attracts and repels; seduces and frightens. The hub is the embodiment of a certain dimension of capital-P Progress – that dimension equating progress with comfort, the dimension that views progress as those technologies that separate our senses from the world as it was created by nature. The hub is where we experience the horrific torpor of Extreme Progress, where Modernism is fully integrated into a universe of Smarte Kartes, nubbly maroon fabric chairs, nonspecific accents squawking across grand halls that flights with numbers four digits long are currently boarding. The hub is a dead-number office for damned digits, where numbers like 1388, 1490, 1218 are abandoned and thrown away, only to be reappear with Sysyphian regularity.
-Douglas Coupland
annihilation
“Annihilation of space by time”
-Karl Marx
Light Pavilion
Set within a more known three-dimensional geometry and framed by it, the Light Pavilion exerts its differences. Most apparently, the elements defining it do not follow the known, rectilinear geometry of its architectural setting. The columns supporting stairs and viewing platforms obey a geometry defined by a dynamic of movement. Their deviation from the rectilinear grid releases its spaces from static stability and sets them in motion, encouraging visitors to explore.
via[Lebbius Woods] (broken)
Architecturally originated sensations
“Certain of De Chirico’s paintings, which were clearly inspired by architecturally originated sensations, exert in turn an effect on their objective base to the point of transforming it: they tend themselves to become blueprints or models. Disquieting neighborhoods of arcades could one day carry on and fulfill the allure of these works.”
[img via flickr][via Bureau of Public Secrets]
-
Debord, Guy. “Critique of Urban Geography.” Bureau of Public Secrets – Situationist Texts and Translations. Trans. Ken Knabb. Web. 14 Oct. 2010. <http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/urbgeog.htm>.
I am not interested in art as affirmation or complicity.
Works which are built within the contextual frame of governmental, corporate, educational, and religious institutions run the risk of being read as tokens of those institutions…Every context has its frame and its ideological overtones. It is a matter of degree. But there are sites where it is obvious that an art work is being subordinated to / accommodated to/ adapted to / subservient to / useful to… In such cases it is necessary to work in opposition to the constrains of the context so that the work cannot be read as an affirmation of the questionable ideologies and political power. I am not interested in art as affirmation or complicity.
–Richard Serra