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archidolmen-blog · 5 years

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Alma, Cuerpo, & Espíritu is an urban planning and landscaping project that links the Kennedy Park in San Pedro de Montes de Oca with Los Yoses´ Boulevard through a floating park for pedestrians. In this way the phenomenon of La Fuente de la Hispanidad, its architectural-cultural heritage and potential as a civic center is studied in depth; and problems related to public space and its privatization are solved: the lack of dialogue between the pedestrian and the city, and the priority that vehicles have in the area. The architectural project is a biological corridor for the recreation of a convulsed society and for the celebration of a patriotic and poetic identity. Soul, Body, & Spirit is a parallelism with structure, form, and function; understanding that both human beings and architecture are closely related and that since ancient times every civilization has made manifest its ideologies and philosophical principles in the construction of its habitats and its cities.

The vision and interpretation of architecture has been related to light since ancient times. Light in space is what defines it; giving it the notion of time and in some way, making it real through perception. The study of architecture is a broad study that covers perceptual philosophical topics: Space, time and matter. From the scientific and technical perspective, to the artistic and poetic.

The contemporary obscurantism that stalks our civilization through virtual reality has immersed us in a mental slavery state. Bad consumption habits, cars, cell phones, social media, everything for our dehumanization. The human being has lost sight of its tripartite essence, and therefore goes astray in the superficiality of everything around, digressing in junk information, bad habits, new diseases and all kind of problems that contemporary culture suffers due its lack of true spirituality and awakening to the real pura vida that we can still get to have. It is necessary for people to turn their eyes, their whole being, to Light.

Light, undulating and linearly flashing, is the essential material of life and is therefore a symbol itself. Both movements of light, according to contemporary quantum mechanics, give meaning to space and the material study of objects in time. Light is a poem of life that affects every corner known by man. Thus, any absence of it makes the gloom, the darkness, the shadow. These concepts are also part of architecture as partners of a polar world. The world of shadows, studied by analytic psychology, is a universe hidden in the unconscious. Darkness in the world is as necessary as the light that causes it. This play of light and shadow has affected and will continue to affect architecture in the play of volumes that throughout history has made refuge, rite, and power, through the symbol (the architectural object and its components). This is because architecture, loaded with countless symbolisms, is a source for all of them to many cultures and traditions, linked by associative libraries, by analog abstractions, to real life and our perception of it. The door, the window, the path, the dome, the vault, the garden, etc. All these architectural elements constitute with the imaginary, poetic representations of the oniric and the spiritual in the deep psyche of man.

The semantic study of architecture to decipher and design with it our habitat, urban facilities, metaphysical landscapes and all series of architectural assemblies, are one of the topics to be deeply developed for the construction of a critical thinking with this thesis project.

Throughout history, whenever a civilization has evolved into significant achievements, it has always been due to a kind of enlightenment. The light is food to the mind that receives it with gratitude and applies it to the building. Light as wisdom or understanding for the luminaries in society, has guided man to see, to observe through the senses, all appreciations with syncretism.

In the ancient Ur of the Chaldeans, the historical character of Nimrod decided to build the mythological Tower of Babel to reach who he believed his father, the Sun. Many years later, during the Jewish Exodus, the Tabernacle was built with a series of specific instructions to symbolically represent the promise of the Messiah. Thus, many examples of architecture have been built as symbolic reference of something cosmic, something that is craved or desired. That is because architecture happens to be, when it is done well, a part of a cosmic order that belongs to space, and is linked not only to time and culture, but also to its landscape, its spiritual context.

Architecture then, from its primitive origin with the menhir, the dolmen, and perhaps even earlier with the cave, has been and will continue to be a response to the human need of inhabiting space, shaping it by concepts or ideals.

As a necessity, architecture does not differ from any other need that is satisfied through expression, through imitation of nature, immediately becoming part of it by the spatial character it occupies. That is to say, the need of corporal expression in the human being that causes him to dance by imitation of fire or water, does not differ from his need to communicate the seen or imagined through the painting, the writing, the sculpture, and others pure artistic manifestations. In this way, architecture, the mother of the arts (because it presides by space), is an ethnological, anthropological, cultural, and therefore, spiritual manifesto through the architectural object, its habitat and its link with the natural environment. The architect as an artist who expresses himself according to his need or that of the world, talks with his material montage and with the composition of his work, about his time and his raison d'être in the historical context to which it belongs.

“The artist is the speaker of the psychic secrets of his time, involuntarily, like a prophet, he believes to speak from himself, but it is the spirit of the time who dictates his words.”

- Manuel de Prada (Art, Architecture and Assembly)

Nowadays the massive constructions made as disposable products are dehumanized typologies that speak of a capitalist society with a lifestyle far from what can be called spiritual. Architecture is going through a critical stage in terms of avant-garde, and if it does not stop its course towards the ruthless robotization of the human being, it will end up harboring only numbed bodies with sorrowful spirits. Architectural constructions, according to the Situationist Movement, speak of the theatrical work of life that happens in the scenarios or scenographies of space. What kind of tragedy will society be interpreting if things keep going as they are in urbanism and landscape design strategies for the city of San José?

Spatial poetics is therefore a relevant theme for the reconciliation of man with space, with its own intimate space, and with the city. Not only must man be awaken from his lethargy to his own spiritual, mental and physical needs, but once awake, he must appropriate his civil and humanitarian responsibility to achieve his fulfillment as an individual, as a citizen, and thus fulfilling his unique purpose in life. Many people live tied to the leash of logic and reason, acting with the sociocultural currents that dictate their modus operandi. It is necessary for people to reconcile with themselves and thus with the cosmic order that operates in nature. I believe that the cultural phenomena at La Fuente de la Hispanidad are an example of how a space can become a tool for social activation and reinterpretation of a national poetic behavior.

Paradise and Utopia in the City

Wherever we place our paradises speaks of our spiritual vision and how we inhabit them, of our culture. We can find them in a look, in a body of clouds, in a reflection of lights, in the rain, in a fraternal embrace, or in a park, a garden, a square, a place to be. It is the responsibility of architects to promote the paradisiacal use of architecture, and to use its language to approach everything that fosshes between the darkness of life and its activity. Today, perhaps like never before, it is necessary that we look to the sky and reflect on the inner need of the human being. In this way we can, with a divine grace, face the spatial problems of our civilization and thus reverberate in their psyche, as a wake-up call

Lets add value to this metaphysical landscape and develop the construction of projects with this kind of approach, for it is the most radical and problem-solving solution to our nation`s need for public space.

ALMA, CUERPO & ESPÍRITU ( SOUL, BODY & SPIRIT) 2018, San José, Costa Rica. Fabián Alvarado Aguilar

#Architecture #landscape #design #urban #urbanism #costa rica #fuente de la hispanidad

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joemuggs · 6 years

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Old is the New New

Not really. But the question of how and whether innovation happens in the digital age is a perennial one. I remember a drunken New Year’s Eve conversation a decade or more ago with a friend complaining that there was never going to be another summer of love or punk or acid house revolution, and me saying we’re too ready to pre-empt that in the UK now, but subcultural things like that could very well happen in places like Kinshasa or Kuala Lumpur or Kiev... and indeed music is a part of major cultural shifts around the world.

Listening to the We Out Here compilation really got me going this year though. It’s so vivid and of the now, without having any of the high-tech signifiers that we of the post-rave generations have come to recognise as representing newness. But in the bodily movements of the players are encoded London life 2018, just as much as they are in drill MCs’ voices or whatever deconstructed club beat patterns are working for people right now. Though that perhaps only makes sense if you understand the soul-jazz continuum as it is woven through London music. Not that you NEED to, mind, because the music operates on an instant, pleasure-principle level too. My full review I wrote for the Wire is above...

We Out Here by We Out Here

...but that review in turn then set off a few tangents, which became a Twitter thread, which I have tidied up as follows:

A short rant on people who use "innovation" as their primary yardstick for judging music.

If you do this, you are judging music first of all as A Cultural Phenomenon - an abstraction - and sidelining both the sound itself and what it is doing for the real people who love it. If people still love to dance to / make drum'n'bass 20 years on, or deep house 30 years on, or jazz-funk 40 years on, or garage rock 50 years on, or R&B 60 years on, or whatever, and your first response is to accuse them of lack of inspiration, you've gone wrong somewhere. We can't always be in a Cambrian Explosion period like 70s NYC or 90s UK where globally important musical species are created seemingly willy-nilly. Comparing the normal pace of innovation to those explosive times is foolishness. And worse, it denies lasting value to music.

I've been thinking of this wrt the current buzz of what you might call "post-Plastic People jazz" - music which doesn't sound overtly new, but is still vivid with value in the here and now. Thing is, there's always been top parties where you could dance to jazz if you looked. And whether it was 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s, that music had the same instant value in the heat of a club, both for its direct effect on the body and from the fact that it tended to attract some of the most diverse crowds: something that always leads to a better party. Does it lose value over the decades, just because it's not the first time it's being played in that style? Christ no. Does sex become less good because you've done it a few times?

The motives of ppl who insist that newer ≡ better are highly suspect & usually proprietorial.

This doesn't mean things don't change. The concept of "timelessness" is metaphysical and equally suspect. OBVIOUSLY dancing to drum'n'bass at 4am in 2018 is different to 1998. But when the beat drops there's real continuity of physical/emotional/social experience. All of this is no shade on innovation, either! Indeed it's rly the "innovation is dead" argument that diminishes real & amazing developments. From Chino Amobi and Elysia Crampton to mainstream hip hop over the last decade to any number of 'developing world' sounds, it's rife. Innovation is vital, we celebrate it, we seek it out. But to use it as your main measure of social and aesthetic value is bullshit.

"Oh nice house you designed and built with your own hands there... BUT DID YOU INVENT THE CONCEPT OF HOUSES, HMMM??"

Aside from sidelining the value of craft, folk art etc in favour of a vision of "inventiveness" that is always tied up in a tangle of sketchy ideas about cultural superiority, it just suggests you're more wrapped up in your own valuations than in the thing you're evaluating. And with huge irony it's often nostalgia-based: people want to see the same kind of innovation that blew them away when they were first launching out on their own voyage of discovery. It's quite egotistical in these cases, it's centring ideas of progress around your own tastes. Tangentially, there’s probably a whole PhD thesis on compering the theory bro’s modernism with the tech bro’s disruption. But more generally, this desperation to repeat a particular type of innovation v often seems like attempt to isolate "modernism" or "innovation" as an essential quality divorced from historical context. And essentialism and ahistoricalism are bad.

NONE of this is to say that retroism, revival, tradition etc etc are worthwhile qualities in and of them selves, of course. You still have to make aesthetic and cultural judgements yourself about what you're hearing and how it's consumed! Being familiar or traditional in itself doesn't make anything good, any more than it makes it bad.

Here’s another thing. Old things can still smash preconceptions. If you’re so jaded you think Sun Ra or Kate Bush or The Butthole Surfers or Coki don’t have something new to say to you, let alone a 15 yr old hearing them for the first time, I feel for you. These things, heard in the right light, can be as modernist as they ever were.

A tangent, on the job of music critics, and how we value the music of the past:

I think we all to one degree or another internalise the notion that popular music is aesthetically "cheap" because of the illusion of infinite availability, as compared to art or "art music". If you watch art/history on BBC4 you see Andrew Graham Dixon or Janina Ramirez waxing lyrical about the qualities of the pieces of art themselves, as expressions of their time. In BBC4 pop music history – unless it's one of those very specialist musicological things with Howard Goodall – it very much tends to be biographical and social history above all else. Can't help feeling that's because there's a reverence for the artworks, that comes from not everyone being able to go to Florence or New York or whatever and see them in the flesh - but everyone can hear "Purple Haze" or "Strings of Life" any time they want, right?

And to my original point about modernism vs retro, I suspect that adds to a cultural forgetting of how radical, say, "Purple Haze" not only was, but STILL IS. Isn't there a value in talking about it not in a Classic Rock way, not in a cultural history way, but in the way we'd talk about a Picasso? "Purple Haze"/"Strings of Life" perhaps are not good examples actually, because they DO at least get the historical reverence treatment on occasion (though this, too, is more based on historical context than aesthetic antalysis). There's thousands upon thousands more records that - if criticism is going to have any purpose - deserve to be looked at, over and over, AS ARTWORKS.

Especially DJing for Big Fish Little Fish parties I listen to & play a lot of what might be called cheesy dance classics, and I continually listen to them closely as a result. The diff between listening hard to Music Sounds Better With You or the Hardfloor mix of Yeke Yeke and just HEARING them as background in a bar or on the radio is like the difference between seeing a Miró or Warhol full sized and up close, and seeing a postcard of one. And actually those records are as great as works of human intellect and instinct as most Great Gallery Art. When you are up close to - in fact INSIDE - those records as they were built to be heard, their sense of balance, scale contrast, movement, balanced chaos/control, etc etc etc is up there with a Kandinsky or Braque. Obviously Capitalism doesn't value it as such, mind... And I think we (critics) unconsciously undervalue that too. So we talk about the past as movements, moments of cultural significance, but all too rarely about how the patterns and tics and structures of X record embody that and what power they still have now. People often talk of the job of critics as just being either explainers, enthusers, conceptualists or a glorified recommendation algorithm. But if the WRITING part of writing about music is ever to have any value, then what about just discussing and bearing witness?

All of which brings us back to the thing about fetishising innovation. We live in a world where thousands or more of people globally are hearing Nu Groove reissues, or rediscovered tapes from Benin, or some twisted Catalan synthpop record from 1981, FOR THE FIRST TIME. While at the same time, in mainstream and underground, soundcloud rapper and Elysia Crampton records are startling and scaring with newness. And elsewhere people – let's take the 100% Silk label or Dekmantel in Amsterdam as prime examples – are maintaining past sounds as living folk traditions. When you hear a set of Robert Hood type minimal techno, even if you don't share his spiritual beliefs and sense of the eternal, you can certainly feel it as being several steps away from the microhistorical cycles of hype. Because of course devotional or ecstatic music is consistently resistant to - or doesn't need - innovation. A shaman chanting in Uruguay, Sufi dancers in Pashtun country, a choir in Hereford Cathedral, Niyabinghi drummers - what do THEY care for the Shock of the New? But from the global 'old' music forms to the crate diggers' early house compilations to the super innovative post-Arca electronicisits, all of these things ARE our present. It's an extraordinary musical-historical moment to be part of. Scary, unpredictable, best of times / worst of times, etc but fucking extraordinary - including the presence of the past, whether unearthed or transmitted through living tradition. We should bear witness to that!

#nostalgia #retromania #futurism #modernism #innovation #subculture #tradition #jazz #rave #butthole surfers #grime #dubstep #jungle #acid house #psychedelia #devotional music #world music

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glitchperryartistry · 5 years

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My Senior Thesis

My senior thesis has evolved, digressed, and altered, as I matured throughout my senior year. Here are some key phases my thesis has gone through:

Phase 1: Alternate Reality Game

Backstory: over the summer I had developed an application with the Particle Photon that enabled me to interface with a relay via a websocket. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxFKnBqmuAI While I didn’t understand how a lot of it worked behind the scenes, the fact that I was able to get that far, with some basic HTML, CSS, and Arduino knowhow, was exciting. I looked towards https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFD8Xl1LSJQ&t=834s as inspiration, and sought out locations in Kansas City, with my friend, and by myself, as potential places to embed my circuits into the city, to create a Kansas City experience.

At the beginning of the year, I came in, guns a’blazin, knowing I wanted to create an alternate reality game. At the time, I was looking at beacons as a potential hardware to create my experience. My professor instructed I watch a documentary called “The Institute”, which was about a zany alternate reality game in San Fransisco. I learned the power of alternate reality games, as a genre, and about how the creator’s intent was to enchant the trivial. The highlight of the game, for me, was a lighthearted one. At a point in the game, a player was asked to go to a payphone, and wait for instructions from “the institute”. After receiving said instructions that would further the story, a performer, dressed up as Bigfoot, ran up next to the participant, and plopped down a boombox radiating a jaunty song. They then proceeded to dance together, in the middle of a public city-area, with the participant.

Phase 2: AR/Storytelling/Motor explorations

An individual at my church brought up the idea of developing an augmented reality application. Another in the group-chat responded with a link leading towards ARjs using a-frames, a platform I had experience with developing online virtual reality experiences. Nevertheless, I had never heard of the boiler plate being used for augmented reality experiences, which is to say web based augmented reality wasn’t even on my radar whatsoever. So, for the sake of learning, I undertook the challenge. Within the next couple of days, I had created a rudimentary ar “experience”, (for lack of a better word) that used the platform my friend at church brought up.

Around the same time, I had been watching/listening to clinical psychologist, and professor Jordan Peterson lecture about responsibility, and stories. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us979jCjHu8 Often, Peterson talks about stories, and how one views the world through a narrative lens, or about how stories distill truths about how one ought to properly act in the world. He has analyzed both “Pinocchio” and “Lion King”, while talking about the deep metaphors, and archetypes that run rampant through the narratives. Yet his analysis of “Pinocchio” really stuck out to me, as I was able to draw many ties between the marionette, and myself.

I felt as if I too had been stuck on “pleasure island” for some time, and my conscious (that still small voice in one’s head) was able to show me the way out. Pinocchio’s relationship to his consciousness is literal, in the sense that a bug, Jiminey Cricket is his guide. Peterson asked rhetorically to his class “what bugs you”? Often, it is your consciousness. He also explained how expensive an animated film is to make, which he used to bolster the idea that nothing embedded within an animated movie is trivial: it has real thought in it. Additionally, in the south primarily, “Jiminey Cricket” is slang for “Jesus Christ”, which is to say that the still small voice in your head, is god.

Where exactly does that voice come from? Why does it always seem to want what’s best for you? Why can we (and why do we) choose to ignore it? These questions bring up the idea of free will, which is something a puppet surely doesn’t have. This is just an example of many of the deep philosophical ponderances Peterson/Pinocchio bring to question. A particular mediation on the Pinocchio’s relationship to his consciousness (Jiminey Cricket) arises when Pinocchio is about to attempt to save his father from the belly of the whale. As Pinocchio is preparing to embark on his journey, his consciousness is warning him, and telling him how stupid, and foolish it is, to risk your life for the task at hand. Yet at the same time, his consciousness is helping him prepare for the journey, as it is almost necessary to embark on such an extreme journey, for one reason, or another.

I related this idea to my own experience when I happened to descend into the underworld. While I wasn’t on pursuing any, say, answers, or mission-resolution, I was mostly just curious to see what would happen, if I "ate some forbidden fruit”. Perhaps it is embedded in one’s biology, these stories of archetype, but perhaps I was just being foolhardy. In some sense, I lost an eye, so to speak, in my descent into chaos, while in another, I gained one enhanced version (the ability to augment reality). Additionally, the fact that my inner conscious, or god, if you’ve been following the outlined ideas brought forth by reading the subtext within Pinocchio, would allow me such free-will, almost to a fault, is miraculous, and the bases for my augmented reality piece I made.

The 😱face represented my mindset after eating the “forbidden fruit”, and the title of the website “brick-insect” represented the abstracted, juxtaposed nature one’s consciousness must be in to be both support, and reject the descent into the unknown. The image marker utilized the word “Hiro” which plays into an obvious archetype, that is personalized (has more “I”), and is also the name of a character that made me cry. Finally, the idea of seeing things that aren’t really there (through augmented reality), ties into the idea of eating the forbidden fruit. All in all, this piece taught me practically through code, and emotionally/spiritually through contemplation.

Around this time, I began reading about Carl Jung’s view on archetypes. A particularly fond notion pertaining towards the female latched onto me. To Jung, anything that enclosed could be distilled into that of the feminine (symbolic of the womb) which is found in bodies of water, caves, and the Earth itself. This idea is echoed in the Blue Fairy, or mother nature, as the sacred divine is what animates Pinocchio in the first, allowing him to come alive at all. Additionally I had been reading Yukio Mishima’s ideas on “Sun and Steel”, and how the physicality of things is all that mattered. He denounced words, and ideas, and any abstraction from reality. Mishima ultimately claimed all that matters was action.

This notion of pure action led me to want to create something that interfaced, and moved in the physical world. I began development with motors, and looked into various methods of movement. I had used servo motors, dc motors, and stepper motors in the past, but nothing substantial that could be controlled, and powerful enough to instantiate a change in the physical world. My solution I found was through AC stepper motors, in which I had a capacitor blow up in my face (I wish I had video [my friend said I had never looked more scientific in my excited state of failure/progress with my circuitry laid out before me]). AC stepper motors had the torque I was looking for, as well as the control/direction I desired. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvh6oHFjRQ0 My professor had a CNC machine kit too, which was fun to help prototype future interactions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RA3K0Q1p_Zk

Around this time I decided I had learned enough about the drivers (A4988 modules [see above]) of the stepper motors, and decided to make my own CNC machine. I had saw a video online where a maker had deconstructed a couple of old cd drivers, and used the internal stepper motors, and the mounts they were housed within, to create such a machine, and I couldn’t resist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQkCWjL775w While I’ll admit, this was in part a completion for an animation assignment, my teacher encouraged tailoring the assignment towards each’s individual studio practice, so each went in tandem enough to explore this concept of creation. At the time, I was thinking about the fabrication process, and how machines manufacture, and serve as the hands. If the hands were removed from creation, then all that was left of the artist was the heart, which I ultimately found to be irreplaceable by machines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc8agtVp1zk

Phase 3: Experience about Technological Progress?

One weekend, I was talking about my thesis with my mother. We were sitting on a bench within nature, and two rivers ran before us. I explained to her how technology was natural, and we extracted all the materials to get, say, computers and phones, from the Earth. We then transitioned to talking about technology, and how my generation was the first generation to grow up with it, and how much it changed everything. My mom then brought up the idea of the river to the left of us being the past, before technology, and a river on the right being the current state of things with technology in it’s sophisticated, yet primitive state. She pointed out how the two rivers met in the middle, and continued to flow together for as far as the eye could see.

This convergence of the past, present, and future spawned an idea that I adore. I want my work to bridge the gap between the mature, tried-and-true world, and the newer, avant-garde digital one (whatever that may be [if one can even call it a world]). This then transitioned into me thinking of a curated experience in which one comes to terms with the past, and realizes that they are the future. I outlined a floor plan, and structure for individuals to walk through my experience. Ultimately however, this idea was abandoned, out of being confined by the existing structure I’d have to house the experience within.

Phase 4: A Scaled-Up Structure

Around this time, I was donated a 3D printer from a local maker space.

To my surprise, it had the same modules that drove the stepper motors of my CNC machine.

Although I was told that the machine ought to just be used for parts (the z-axis had been obliterated) I was able to connect my Arduino to the 3D printer, and utilize the same process I used on my CNC machine to fabricate a heart.. However, due to alignment issues, the first iteration yielded a scraggly heart half manufactured, that was representative of where my love stood at the time. It was a beautiful, serendipitous moment that Bob Ross might call a “happy accident”.

Nevertheless, as evident in the first post within this section, a natural progression of scale could be seen. I did not see why I could not create a 3D printer of epic proportions, as concrete 3D printers are a thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH-zpnoNLEU&t=129s The fabrication laboratory I work at has a “Wasp” (the company that created the the machine) 3D printer whom also makes (has made? I don’t think they’re available for the consumer market) concrete 3D printers.. I talked to my boss about them for a day, and we thought up how we might make a concrete 3D printer that was smooth, as a lot of concrete 3D printers create bulbous layer marks that are ugly (which is a subjective call [I don’t think the shape itself is inherently ugly]) by societies standards.

At this point, I began asking myself “what if I could make any structure, and embed my experience within that?” and “what would that look like?” as well as “how would my experience be distilled?” By asking these questions, I was able to think bigger, and grander. I thought about my, and potentially human-kind’s relationship to technology, and felt as if a giant wave best represented said relationship. So I thought about housing my experience within a wave structure, to embody my feeling. I found

online, and considered 3D printing the structure, in the future. I also saw the bottom half as a similar structure to the carousel of progress, which has such an optimistic outlook on technology, that you can’t help but fall in love with.

A peer asked me how my thesis was going, and I told them the idea I was dreaming. I used beacons as an example, and grew fond of the idea I presented to her. Pretty much, I wanted to use the computer we all carry in our pockets as a way to interact with the creative, technologic experience. I thought about a long hallway, and at the end, my AC motor aided by it’s screwlike shaft, as seen in my experiment videos. Once the user was within proximity, one could tilt their phone left, to make the motor spin left, or right for the opposite effect.

I thought that would be cool to make, but I didn’t know how to. So, I felt as if I needed to understand more about hardware, as the software side of beacon-development was confusing. I wanted to build this piece of hardware on my own terms, as it seemed like a simple enough concept. So, I set out to research hardware, and I more or less integrated my explorations into a museum/experience/theme park that encapsulated my explorations I had discovered thus far.

As this concept developed, I will admit, I lost sight on the art/gallery/experimental side of things that I had (originally [where my thesis stood, at the moment]) set out to make. I was also semi-upset that others didn’t believe in me, or see the connections that I was able to make regarding how my thesis was natural evolving. Sure, I was getting carried away with learning, and maybe a bit afraid to bite the biggest frog, but I felt as if something was fundamentally wrong with the place where beacons stood in tech-world, and didn’t think creating a piece of technology would satisfy everything I want to make. However, I digress, the movement between a phone’s gyroscope, and a physical object, would still be really cool.. Difficult as heck to make, with full understanding of what’s going on behind-the-scenes, or under-the-hood, but perhaps in the future I will be able to instantiate such an idea.

Phase 5: Why Reinvent the Wheel?

Next, I felt as if my theme park was too uni-dimensional, and wanted to branch out into other realms (as I am a multi-faceted being, with muses that lie outside of technology). Mainly, this realm was storytelling. I was daydreaming sections like mad, and jotting them down in my phone as they came to the surface from the unknown. However, the more I thought about my concepts, the more parallels I was beginning to draw between my theme park, and Disney World/Land. What would separate my theme park from the already famous one? Would critics, or, even myself, be able to understand a different take on my immersive worlds than Disney’s, or even Universals? It seemed as if the market was already saturated with what I wanted to create.

But of course the internetland, and technology aspect was novel to my theme park, yet I could not separate, and part ways with stories. I prefer stories to technology, so creating something that’s not what I prefer just doesn’t make sense. Additionally, Wreck it Ralph 2 will be released in about a month, and I don’t see why Disney wouldn’t just create an internetland, so to speak. So if you can’t beat em, join em, right? I had been looking into SCAD’s “Themed Entertainment Design” program, and knew that I could probably “join em” that way. I have the technical know-how that many artists don’t, so I could create practical concept art, as well as the imagination to think outside-the-box.

I have been to hell and back, and know the depths of my soul. I understand that the more responsibility one undertakes, the more meaning they will have in life. I know how precious, and temporal life really is, and I understand the power of group dynamics. I can help out in the fabrication phase (and actually see myself working at fabrication laboratory in Disney’s Imagineering department) yet I could help out the research and development department phase, and help create interactive objects for for que-lines, or in various interactive installations throughout their “worlds”. Additionally, I can help out during their phase of concept development, through my learning of “sketching user experiences” at KCAI, and through my “Themed Entertainment Design” knowledge base gleaned from SCAD (where I plan to attend post-graduation [what’s a cupcake without some icing?])

Phase 6: IOT/Alternate Reality Game

At this point, I see my thesis starting to come full circle. I know where I am going, and what I am worth. My head, heart, and hands are aligned, which I am thankful for. I was able to create https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5Du5zMdfoM which I plan to scale up with a Particle Electron to allow myself the ability to unplug from wifi, and switch over to 2G, or 3G, allowing my device to be embedded virtually anywhere. My next step to continue exploring mechanics, and modify my motor into an automata like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz8TV7gkeT0&t=58s . I’d like to have an automata triggered by one’s phone, as a crescendo to my alternate reality game. My game’s main focus is to bridge the gap between the physical world, and digital world, in a mature, and focused way.

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darkartandcraft · 6 years

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Philadelphia, Fungus, and Feminism: A Conversation with Fred Grabowsky

It's been years since we last had the chance to talk to Fred Grabosky, the Philadelphia based artist and illustrator. As part of our latest collaboration, we caught up with him in his Pennsylvania studio to discuss album covers, art supplies, and how to stay grounded in the Instagram age.

Are you a native of Philly?

I moved to Philly when I was around 18 and started going to school at University of the Arts, but then I moved back to Jersey. I wanted to change my studies so I jumped out of school for a while, but then I came back for illustration. The first time around I did video, but it didn't speak to me the way it seemed to speak to the other people that were there for it. The first time around, I just didn't know what I was doing yet, you know?

Philadelphia is one of America's oldest cities and it has a somewhat gothic and macabre history. Has that influenced your work at all?

I would say yeah. It has definitely influenced the work around me and that in turn has influenced my artwork. There is a lot of enthusiasm for dark art out here. I'm just a walk down the street from The Convent gallery and I've always loved Jeremy Hush's work, so it's cool to be a part of his gallery shows. As far as the music scene goes, there's been a really good metal scene out here for years now. I'm very influenced by the metal that I listen to when I make the art that I do.

Did music lead you to art, or was it vice versa?

Yeah, music is a big part of me being interested in the kind of art that I make. It took me a while to bridge the gap between the punk music that I listened to and the album covers on that stuff. I just started to study who all these different artists were and where they came from. Like Pushead and even going as far back as Virgil Finlay, who was a scratchboard artist doing a lot of pulp stuff. Music was a huge push in the right direction.

Which album covers do you really love?

When I really started to do illustration work for bands, one album cover that was a huge influence on me - and this sounds like a very kid thing to say now - but when I saw the cover for Baroness' Red Album, it just made me really excited. It made me think about what I could do with ink if I started to take it seriously. I was also listening to Kylesa around then and diving into weird Southern sludge metal. Seeing (Shaun) Beaudry's work on those covers made a connection because I realized he was probably pulling from Pushead, and Art Nouveau, and Alphonse Mucha. That was a good jumping off point for me.

Can you tell us about Decay is a Womb and the inspiration behind it? Yeah, I started making that piece because of my fascination with the parasitic fungus that takes over an ant's brain (Ophiocordyceps). It's a whole cycle; it takes over the brain, tells it where to go, eats away at it, spores new life, and that new life takes over and destroys more ants. I related it to things that happened to me, not necessarily other people trying to control you, but how depression can become a controlling force in your life. There is a lot of fear and insecurity that can start to eat away at you. So that is the idea for the body of work that I'm creating now, which will have a solo show in July. It also ties into what I'm doing with my band God Root, we're writing an album right now. We're doing a split with some other bands and one of the title tracks is called Decay is a Womb, so I'm really fixated on this theme right now and it ties into my art as a whole. What are some of your favorite art supplies that you use and recommend? Definitely Ampersand, they're the scratchboard paper that I use and I'm also going to be using their boards. Always the Pigma Microns from Sakura, I'm always using those. A friend out in South Carolina that goes under Dark Heart Tattoo, she works at Indigo Rose, her name is Chelsea Owen; she showed me Canson Mixed Media paper and I've been swearing by it for 3 or 4 years now. This paper has always been good too because you can ink on it, you can make finished pieces on it. Speedball ink too, their screen printing ink, I love their metallic gold and their metallic silver.

Is your process very regimented or do you just work when the inspiration strikes?

So lately, I just sit the fuck down and say I'm going to make something and it is going to be great. Back when I was doing ink, it was whenever I had the time and I had to force myself to do it, even when I wasn't feeling it, because you have to try to stick to your deadlines. It really becomes a destructive thing because you start to devalue what you are doing and beat yourself up for not working harder. But the process has changed since I started doing scratchboard. Now, I just take the time that I need and don't worry about much else. It feels good because when it's done, it's done, but with ink, you never know when to stop. Like, if I want a black background but it's white paper, you have to plan out all the weird techniques you could use to make that background black. You could scan it in and make the outline, but that can look cartoonish and cheesy. You could go all around the perimeter making dissipating black dots but that takes an incredible amount of time and it's a huge process for something that might not turn out right. With scratchboard, I'm starting with a black background and I'm making white lines and that is it. That's a much more exciting and freeing thing.

Is scratchboard your preferred medium?

Right now, it really is. Scratchboard has made a huge difference in my turnaround time. When it was ink, it could take months to complete a piece because you have to know for sure where you want to make every line and every dot. It was frustrating and I was just like, fuck it! I can't sit here and look at the same piece for months. Scratchboard is really freeing because you just sketch it out. It's more my style, more of a punk rock style, you just go for it and see how it comes out. You can go with how you're feeling in that moment because it only takes an hour or two to complete.

With a more time-consuming medium like ink, did you ever run out of inspiration before you could finish the piece?

Yes, sometimes I would really just hit a wall. There are a lot of ink artists out there in the dark art scene and I don't want to do the same thing everyone else does. It was a good starting point because a lot of ink artists inspired me, but I'm doing something different because I can embrace scratchboard and translate it in weird ways, like in stained glass.

The last time we talked, you were working in a stained glass studio. Do you still work there?

I probably just started that job when I did the first interview with you guys. I've been there for almost three years now and I really love it! It's very interesting, I get to work with beautiful pieces from the 1800's and 1900's. There are not many places that have on-site painters. I feel very fortunate to be a part of that.

Do you work with a lot of iconography or religious stained glass?

Yeah, I work with a lot of iconography pieces. I don't have any religious ties myself, but I appreciate it for what it is. Some of it has had a bit of influence on my work, but I try not to copy it because I feel like it's been done a million times.

You mean that ironic mix of Judeo-Christian images and Pagan themes?

Yeah, there are a lot of people who just do renditions of religious art and make it grim or evil or Satanic.

There is a lot of non-western spiritual imagery in your work. Do you consider yourself to be a spiritual person?

A lot of that imagery came from research I was doing for the thesis I did in 2013, the Sacred Geometry and Symbolism series. I was just fascinated by the idea that the universe shares a connective tissue with mathematics. At the time I thought, if I'm not going to believe in a god, sacred geometry is the closest thing I can hold to a higher power. It's just really powerful imagery and it makes sense that it's in everything; logos that you see every day to religions that all share these same symbols.

We've talked a bit about the artists that you look up to. How would you define artistic success?

There are a lot of artists that I would look at as a textbook example of success, but if you asked them, they would probably say that they've had successes in the past, but don't consider themselves to be successful. They are their own worst enemy and they beat themselves up. I definitely do that too. You have to make sure that you aren't comparing yourself to other artists because everyone has their own story. Little triumphs are something that should be appreciated more. You have to show some self-love and be happy with what you've accomplished.

Do you think social media has made it easier to share and celebrate those little triumphs? Or are people crippled by constantly comparing themselves to other artists?

It's hard to feel like you can be successful without integrating social media into your process. There's just so much content flooding the internet and you have to fight for space with other artists who are trying to make a name for themselves. It's daunting and we have to really try to not let it become that. But even as I sit here feeling good about what I just said, in the back of my head I hear those fears and insecurities, "You know you don't really think that because everyone wants that big online following." But that's just me comparing myself to other artists. It's very overwhelming if you don't know how to put the phone down and tell yourself to just keep making your artwork and keep going. People are always crushing it out there and you just have to see what they've got and use it as inspiration to push yourself forward, but know that your story might be different.

Speaking of online perils, you've spoken very passionately about the struggle women face and how that inspired Strength and Divinity. Would you consider this to be a feminist piece?

I actually wanted to put the word "FEMINIST" on the bottom of it, but I put it out there to my friends and I had a lot of women say that could be misunderstood. That I could be speaking for women and that takes their voice away. So, I decided not to put any text on it. But I'm pretty fucking pissed off about all the things that women have to go through. It took me a while to understand why I didn't see it before. I think as a society, we adhere to these social norms. There are so many male power-hungry norms that have been out there a long time, so you just don't think about it right away. You just think, ok, that's how life works. The man does this and the woman does that. You don't even realize that you're assigning them these roles. You don't think you are doing it because you aren't consciously thinking anything negative about women, but it's still damaging. I started to realize that I have a lot of things that I want to work on. I'll fess up that this piece was originally created just as a commission for The Midnight Collective. I didn't plan it out and think, "I'm going to do a piece about the power of women." I just felt it, and made it, and came to the realization afterward that subconsciously that is where my thoughts were. I think it's important to address just how many things are fucked up about the way that women are treated and people need to recognize those little unfair things that women deal with every day. Like catcalling, or saying those weird aggressive pickup lines, or touching women when they don't want to be touched, or paying them less than men... There's just so many different things that people don't realize, or at least I didn't. I feel like I can speak for a lot of men when I say that we didn't realize it until it was shoved to the forefront and it sucks. It sucks that it took that much for people to realize just how many crazy things happen to women, and they don't even mention it. Why would they mention it when someone is just going to tell you that you're wrong, or misinterpreting it, or that you're just making it all up? It's fucked up. It was a starting point for me to become more involved in feminism, but I can't say that piece was intentionally made for feminism. Sorry, I went on a tangent there. What do you think about that?

I think that's pretty accurate. It's easy to address overt sexism because it's more objective, most people can agree that it's wrong even if it does have to be shoved in their face first. It's the subtle things that aren't so easy to address because, you're right, women are told that they're misinterpreting what happened or exaggerating or just making it up.

That sucks.

The process you're describing is how a lot of artists work. I think most artists work at a subconscious level and it's only in hindsight that you're able to reflect on how it was representative of where you were at that time.

It's hard, I feel like I'm a more scatterbrained individual because I don't think it is all there waiting for me to pull from it. It started because I wanted to create something with the face of a woman because I haven't done many pieces featuring women in them. That was the start but then I wanted to tie in something strong like the skull of a warthog. I always try to represent power and nature in my pieces because I hold nature in high regard. It's what I choose to be spiritual about. I mean, I'm not out in the woods praying to trees, but I can appreciate nature while I'm still struggling to understand what human nature is. ...I'm already thinking of all the ways I could have said all this stuff better.

You'll drive yourself nuts doing that. I drive myself nuts every day.

You can find limited edition prints of Fred Grabowsky's work in the Dark Art & Craft store. For more of Fred's work, visit his website and follow him on Instagram. Events and Exhibits: 07/13 - Grindcore House in Philadelphia, PA. This solo show will run for 2 months. 07/14 - Gristle Art Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. A Phobos & Deimos group exhibition. 09/21 - Shadow Woods Metal Fest in Whitehall, MD. God Root will be performing. 10/04 - Portside Parlor in Philadelphia, PA. Month-long Halloween themed exhibit.

#Fred Grabowsky #FTG Illustration

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restoftheowl · 6 years

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Becoming undoomed

This is the second follow up on Does Culture Need Humans, originally published as an addendum to the book Encyclopedia of Internet Memes and Phenomena. In that paper I argued that memes control genes, and since culture is the main force driving the evolution of homo sapiens, it is a quasi-living entity that is also the pinnacle of evolution. Here I am looking at a scenario in which culture changes due to external factors.

I remember being perplexed finding out futurology was actually about determining possible futures. For me all of science and technology seemed to be pretty occupied with the future, so I expected futurology to be about why there are no masses of chimney pot hat wearing bearded men flying around on planes that seem to be made out of sticks and bed linen, since once that was supposed to be the future, or maybe find out what it was those people did who were better than most at foretelling what was to come.

Anyway, here’s an attempt that goes both ways: determine a possible future and a suggest a more efficient approach to determining it. The original thesis is that life creates the reality in which culture created humans, to carry on the project of expansion and taking over the universe, thus the following is also an attempt at cultural futurology. Our thought experiment is a doom scenario with a twist, and it will be presented with a twirl. The premise is the following:

A cosmic event in the Solar System will render the Earth inhabitable. (An asteroid is about to or has already hit a planet or a moon, causing a cascading effect, changing the orbit of planets, maybe a planet was outright blown to pieces for a shower of megaton asteroids, or maybe it’s a black hole moving in at great speed.)

We find out that we have some 10 to 20 years to make an escape.

Aren’t we lucky?

Midday

All we have to do is move all of humanity into space except those who cannot or will not move. Fortunately we have about ten thousand nuclear warheads lying around, which are no longer useful for their original purpose - that is blowing each other up -, but could be excellent for propulsion, putting really huge vessels into orbit. Background radiation and environmental concerns don’t matter as much at this point. There is some time to manufacture some more nuclear bombs, develop more efficient ways of using them, so we could eventually launch tens of thousands of ships into space. We would like to bring some things with us too, not as much as we could though, since people are priority, so no elephants or sculptures.

At the same time we can set up some serious operation on the Moon, build a few mass drivers, start constructing space habitats of the O’Neill cylinder variety - they are spacious tubular constructions that spin to create comfortable artificial gravity inside. Alternatively we could colonize the Moon and somehow move it out of the endangered region. Also we could do both the space habitat and Moon colony.

A planetary evacuation is costly, but then again a couple of decades worth of military spending, infrastructure building and maintenance, carbon dioxide credits have just become available for funding the great project. People need to be informed, prepared and moved into place in en masse. It’s the greatest undertaking of human history and we can cope all of it with our present technical capabilities.

Day One

Well, nobody expected the whole remaining humanity to fly by Voyager 1, but here we are. The new place is small but cosy. We watched the last spaceships leave and the big farewell party. Now we are on our own in space, gravely depressed for the loss we suffered. Most people lost loved ones on Earth, our planet is gone, our home, our country, history, art, and all the holy places too.

It’s a new life, with new rules. No fire outdoors, no shooting, absolutely no wars (unless we wish to go medieval), no cars. No rich or poor, no growth. Asteroid mining for profit, wiring money through light years, megacorporations, colonialist logic make no sense. Return on investment can wait a couple of centuries. It’s not a sci-fi social commentary metaphor with light makeups, it’s a lifeboat, where you don’t want eat one another.

Most aspects of society needs to be balanced and controlled. A number of things that we considered basic until now are no longer accessible in reality, however we can have them in virtual world. In fact we will probably need to matrix ourselves in an organized way to avoid a total mental breakdown of society. Some mercyful artificial intelligence may help us during and after the evacuation, supervising the efficient dissemination of knowledge, keeping up individual psychological composure.

We have now centuries before reaching another star system and with so much time on our hands and for lack of better things to do, humanity may turn to total spiritual rebuilding. Old religions were tied to our planet in so many ways, most of it had to be left behind, now we need to start anew, incorporate actual Earth-shattering events that went down, the human effort and emotions, integrate our new virtual life, and the holy reality our fleet is drags with itself into the cosmos.

Day Zero

In our cultural futurology thought experiment we now return to the day we find out about the impending doom. Are we better than dinosaurs?

As the news breaks, people realize they don’t really need to keep saving for their pension or pay mortgage. Shortly all stores of value go to zero, stocks, gold, money. General loss of focus and motivation follows. Some panic, some say they were right all along and then panic. Kingdoms fall, all power is lost. Now we are trying to save ourselves, while the whole society is racing down the slope of regression towards disintegration. Some systems, disciplined factions manage keep their act together and evacuate, losing a lot of time and life in the process, for a fraction of effect, meaning serious risk to their actual survival.

Even though societies may have various contingency plans, everyday operation includes the repression of the thoughts of doom and rightly so. Liberal democratic capitalism too is based on the repression of the fact that all turns to dust within an undefined period of time - emphasis on undefined. We need to distort our view of the future in order to be operational.

The good, the bad, and the ugly

What do we do now? You are a leader of your country in live video conference with your colleagues. The news is not out yet and you have two choices. One we call Suppression, the other Unity.

In the Suppression scenario we apparently decide on not letting the news of impending doom go public. The population is kept in ignorance, all available resources are channeled to the evacuation project, all work done behind the veil, until everything is prepared for a full disclosure. Benefits of this approach are: disorder avoided, stress delayed, with tolerable level of efficiency. Downsides are: depriving people of the knowledge is depriving them of pride of being part of the effort, resulting in tension, and the possible burden of those who could have been saved while mankind was kept asleep. The single biggest obstacle to overcome is suppression itself, not only because it eats into your resources, but because what you do involves masses of workers, heavy lifting and numerous nuclear detonations.

How about Unification? You decide to go ahead with the full disclosure. Tell people something like this: “Look, we have a hundred and fifteen months to leave the Earth. It’s terrible news but we can make it. We will work together and try to save every single person. The worst we can do is panic. So we need to carry on with life as if nothing happened. Which will be hard since everything is lost and nothing has value anymore. Only survival has real value, so right now we introduce a new global currency: evacuation karma coin or spacebuck (any odd name will suffice) which will be backed by the effort that goes into saving humanity. You might turn out to be too old, dead or otherwise unfit to leave when the time comes, but with the evacuation karma coin you will be able to save your family or anyone you choose. Learn something that will be useful off the planet, help and encourage your fellow men.”

Quite a sound bite there. We hope we didn’t misjudge mass psychology and the efficiency we gained by openness will not be negated by the insanity and anarchy induced by stress. Also we expect our newly invented emergency currency to soak up fleeing capital preventing total financial meltdown, even better: we use the momentum to turn from growth to post-scarcity.

Now, whether Suppression or Unity would produce better results is up for discussion. As a closure, for such an event I’m offering an opinion and a slogan. Whatever the decision will be, we should choose wisely what we try preserve from the Old World, lest we end up holding on to something in vain. And then our slogan shall be: We are no dinosaurs!

#culture #futurology #futurism #doom #evacuation #cultural futurology #space habitat #space #society #interstellar #humanity #survival

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brwncns · 7 years

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“An Invisible Cauldron Of Black Magick” - Jarett Kobek

Turkish-American writer Jarett Kobek’s novel I HATE THE INTERNET has been called a “relentless, cruel, hilariously inflamed satire” (by Greil Marcus), “entertaining” (by the New York Times) and “useful” (by the author). Kobek was compared to Michel Houellebecq as well as a “mad priest”. We asked him about the book and also his novella ATTA, a fictional biographic account of 9/11 attacker Mohamed Atta.

What’s the most common question you are asked about I HATE THE INTERNET?

The question almost every interview starts with is someone saying something like, “Well, we know that you hate the Internet, but is there anything good you can say about it?” This is often tied to the supposed success of the book via chatter on the Internet.

The book starts and ends with a curse, a death threat, and in-between someone prays to Google and other Internet giants. Is the Internet a spiritual place for you?

I guess it depends on whether or not you consider an invisible cauldron of black magick in services of Necromancers to be “spiritual.” In theory, the necromancy would be predicated on an engagement with spirits and their world, but is the mere presence of the dead “spiritual” in the colloquial sense? Your guess is as good as mine!

Do you have a favorite meme?

I like that Scumbag Steve.

Did you ever write a YouTube comment?

Never have. Never will.

There’s a clip of a man getting very agitated at a reading of yours because he can’t understand your position that free expression on Twitter is not possible but rather an illusion, because all the content generated on social media is part of the company making profit. Do you think real political discourse is not possible on these platforms?

Political discourse is possible, but from the Left, it’s the same kind of discourse that you used to be able to find in cafes in Berkeley and the East Village. Powerless people talking to themselves. What’s new is that whereas before the discourse had a sort of oppositional relationship to our corporate masters, now it serves their financial interest. That guy at the reading in City Lights was right, sort of—he was screaming about there being a Revolution on Twitter. The only problem was that he had the wrong revolution, as he was a Sanders supporter. I think it’s impossible to deny that these platforms are capable of hosting very powerful political dialogues—but only for the Right. After all, Twitter got a cryptofascist elected to the Presidency.

So we generate money, we basically work for Facebook and feed it when we write something there. How is that different to reading an article and the advertisement around it online, or walking through a street with billboards?

The difference, I think, is that the people who created the billboard or wrote the article were, in theory, paid for their efforts.

Was “Arab Spring” really exploited by companies like Facebook & Twitter in the way that they paid for marketing it as an event they made possible?

I don’t know if they actually paid for marketing relative to it, but I can assure you that the way the so-called Arab Spring was covered by the news media in the US was as an advertisement for Facebook and Twitter. Google even got in on the cycle when one of their employees was kidnapped. I went to Cairo a few weeks after Mubarak fell and no one mentioned any of these companies. All they talked about was money and how they had none. I did see a Facebook logo spraypainted on the side of a building near Tahrir Square—I assumed the company’s predilection for graffiti artists, they paid someone to put it up.

How is opposition possible?

It may not be. We may just have to wait until the people in control get so out of control that they break everything. But it doesn’t hurt to be in opposition—especially if it gets people out of their houses.

You write that a medium is inhabited by its intention at founding. How did you develop this thought?

I don’t remember! But I know what must have inspired it: the way that every new technology is presented as a received event, as a foreordained inevitability. Which is really crazy, when you think about it—it suggests that the technology is a fact floating around in the aether, waiting to be discovered, when actually it’s a thing shaped by the perceptions of its creators. It’s a little like a novel—no one receives a novel, everyone knows that someone wrote it.

Your book is written like it was aimed at a future where the things described have already vanished. Why?

Writing about the Internet, or technology in general, is a thankless task. Books about the Internet start to rot from the moment of publication. Imagine if I Hate the Internet had been written ten years ago—it’d be a book about MySpace. So there was a strategy cribbed from Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions—to treat every day objects and ideas as if they required definition and explanation. This ended up being both funny and, hopefully, hedges against the future.

There is also a timeless quality in your novel ATTA, a young man, lost, almost like a Bildungsroman. It’s also a story of psychosis, of madness, with a musical undertone, dark, brooding, funny. I was wondering about some elements, structure-wise, the countdown of chapters, the change of perspective. How did you come to these decisions?

Most of it was instinctual, just trying to figure out how to make the book as readable as I could. ATTA is a strange book—it’s the best thing I’ve written, but it’s also the one which felt the most like channeling, as if the normal decisions and thoughts in terms of writing were more received than consciously thought out.

I like how the father talks to his son, treating him like a child. How much of the story was invented, how much was research?

I think ATTA is about 95% factual, and that factuality is very heavily researched. The 5% that’s not factual is pretty clearly fictitious. In terms of the father/son relationship, that’s pretty much based on interviews with his father, where his father admitted that this was how he talked to his son.

How did you research? Where did you travel, what did you read? Did you actually go to Mecca and to Hamburg?

I didn’t travel for the book. I didn’t have the money! In terms of the reading, I read everything. Every news article, every book, all the FBI files that got released under an FOIA request that some Truthers put online. Just everything.

Are you interested in the perspective of Truthers as well?

No. It’s stupid. But they were useful in doing the book, because they’d put so much of the FBI’s information online.

How did it feel to write this? To be in his mind?

It was fine until the last chapter—when I had to start writing the actual hijacking, it was the only time my own writing made me sick.

Did you have problems with the idea of sympathizing too much with Atta, idolizing or setting a monument to him?

No. I don’t think the book is particularly sympathetic to him—unless you believe, which some people might, that even presenting the individual is inherently sympathetic.

What interested you more in him than someone who was more of a planner in the background, like let’s say Bin Laden?

The interesting thing about the historical figure of Mohamed Atta was his educational background—he did his bachelor’s in engineer/architecture, and his master’s in urban planning. His master’s thesis was on the city of Aleppo, and was specifically about what he viewed as the imposition of Western style architecture on an ancient “Islamic-Oriental” city. In effect, he wrote a document that critiqued modernist architecture and then suggested that it be pulled down and destroyed.

After 9/11, the event was viewed entirely through the prism of Islamic-themed terrorism. But the reality is that Atta wasn’t an imam—he hadn’t even really gone to a madrassa. His training was entirely in architecture, he’d presented this thesis about removing modernist architecture, and then he participated in the biggest attack on modernist architecture in world history. Surely this is a useful prism through which to write about the event? As a matter of architectural critique.

So that’s where the book came from.

It seemed Atta wanted to put Aleppo back in some kind of “primary”, more human state when he wrote his thesis – and Manhattan with its rectangular structure and buildings like the WTC is the antipode to this. You also mention Yamasaki’s failed housing project. And in both novels, there’s this theme of gentrification, of a changing city (Aleppo, San Francisco). What interests you about that?

By virtue of being overprivileged, I’ve spent pretty much my entire adult life in American cities that are either in the process of being gentrified or have been gentrified. When I moved to New York, I was 17 and it was still fairly grimy in the East Village, and I was young enough to believe that this was a permanent state, that the East Village would always be scummy and interesting. Reality disabused me of that notion and I’ve been dealing with the wound ever since.

Where do you live now?

I’m back in Los Angeles. My solution to gentrification was to move to a neighborhood originally built for the gentry.

How has the book been received?

It did well at first, was then ignored for a few years, and then got picked up by academics, who seem to like writing about it and teaching it. So it’s had a very nice life and sells reasonably well for a small press book. It’s gone into several printings.

ATTA was published by MIT, if I see that correctly, an institution that, as you describe it in your latest novel, develops arms for the military. How do you feel about that?

The book was published by Semiotext(e), who are distributed by MIT Press, so it’s a little more complicated than saying that they published it. In terms of my feeling, I think the act of being published by almost anyone but yourself is an act of moral compromise, but that one accepts the reality of the situation and goes forward.

Do you see yourself as an angry young man?

I’m past the age where I can comfortable call myself young. But I’m definitely angry.

I HATE THE INTERNET / ICH HASSE DIESES INTERNET:

http://weheardyoulikebooks.com/releases/i-hate-the-internet/

http://www.fischerverlage.de/buch/ich_hasse_dieses_internet_ein_nuetzlicher_roman/9783103972603

ATTA:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/atta

Questions: Nikias Chryssos. Picture: Courtesy of Jarett Kobek.

#interview #jarett kobek #literature #internet #truther #9/11 #scumbagsteve

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