South Pole Station - over 1000 days of nonlinear aesthetic detours and architectural detox: detour communications

Showing posts with label detour communications. Show all posts

It's a tough job to keep up with the logistics while finishing a diploma project, I've realized. Today I found this postcard, supposed to be sent months ago. It's a snapshot from my light + H₂O-lab video session in the beginning of march 2011. Even though it's not so long ago, it actually feels like ages. There has been a lot of water under the table since, so to say.

Those dark winter days and nights in and around the workshop/mock-up space at the school was sure challenging, demanding both discipline and play, physical strenght and mental clairvoyance. Looking back on it now, I think that's where the foundation of my diploma project was solidified, and it sure was a substantial platform of raw concrete to both build upon, but also an anchor to hold on to while going through storms.

However, right now the same very models are actually back in the mock-up space, after a few months of drifting around in the schoool, waiting to be exhibited in the exhibition space nearby in a few days.

I'm looking forward to catch up with you people at the SPS soon again. I DO want to sit around a table with you before the world goes bananas.

Best Regards,
Jakob

2-way Computerless email system

South Pole Station has during the last six months worked on how to create a post-digital autoarchiving system of fluxing ideas. It's been a struggle with many up's and down's but we hope to have the system up and running by Summer 2011. In the meantime we decided it was time to look around to see what other similar technologies, working in the intersection of analog and digital communication, that is 'out there'. Let me introduce Celery:

Celery is offering a 2-way Computerless email system that let you exchange Email without a Computer or Internet Access!

* Easy to Use System
* Works with Any Fax
* Internet Not Required
* Caring Support Staff

Celery is also offering Fax to twitter / Twitter to fax!

Epiphyte Telestrielle (E.T.) up and running

On May 16th 2010 Epiphyte Telestrielle (E.T.) started a situation specific architectural performance. A physical arhive of digital information; traces of a 760 kilometers and 13 days long bike adventure, articulated in motion and space.

One after the other, the letters flows through the structure creating a performative archive of the blogposts at enannanvag.blogspot.com. More documentation (also in motion) will be online soon. Until then - and before the 31st of October 2010 - use the possibility to experience it at Wanås Foundation in the South of Sweden.

Epiphyte
A plant, such as a tropical orchid or a staghorn fern, that grows on another plant upon which it depends for mechanical support but not for nutrients.

Telestrielle
Depending on operations performed remotely, living on or in or growing from land.

Media Coverage: 1, 2, 3, 4

Preface by the unknown copyist

"as I walked along the seastrand, I saw a shining object cast upon the beach by the high tide [...], the object spekled mysteriously, that which greed could not do was done by curiosity, and I descended, wading kneep-deep into the water, and I snatched it up. At first glance, it was just a common bottle of fine glass, carefully sealed with pitch. Immediately I called my driver and rode home. That evening, in the privacy of my study, I broke the bottle. Inside was a scroll of paper, the manuscript of Captain Adam Queensdale, deted 23 October 1761.

Although it had been well protected, over one hundred and twenty-five years the bottle had been carried by the ocean currents, the paper had suffered a degree of damage. I spent several exciting evenings copying the contents of the original which threatened to dintegrate into dust and ashes at any moment. The text contained a description of a shipwreck that only Captain Queensdale had survived; a description of the island, Ultima Thule, north of Iceland, where the castaway was taken in by the inhabitants, members of the heretical secto of Two-Wheelers, exiled from Europe in the 14th century: a description of life and rituals of the inhabitants, of their mythology and eschatology; abd at the end, a copy of the wholy text, The Purgatory of Sleep, the greater part of which, unfortunately, was so heavily damaged as the be unreadable.

Studying this tale, which had a healing effect on my sould, I decided to save it from oblivion, but also from the curiosity of the masses, from the quasi-scholars and sensationalists. The only way to do that was to act just as the bottle had acted toward me: I hade to let the story find its readers by itself. I made six completely identical copies and inserted them into six expensice, but uninteresting, books. I sent the boks to the addresses of reputable secondhand bookstores in London, Istanbul, Heidelberg, Reykjavik, Cairo and Bombay. They will. I am certain of it, know how to reach their readers. Everyone who comes to believe in their contents will do the same thing I did: he will make six copies of the text and find a way to release them into the world.

J. H. W.
4 July 1982"

Excerpt of "The Cyclist Conspiracy" by Svetislav Basara, 1988
Photo from Belgrade harbor, February 2010

So, what brings this text here? I read it last night in the book mentioned above and I felt directly how it connected to our ongoing investigations about detour communication, but also adding a layer of self-replication, an almost biomorphic approach, but still so low-tech and poetic.

SPS anbefaler - extern papirkurv!

Detour dust-Easthetics Exhibition?

'aesthetics of dust'_initial easthetics

'aesthetics of dust'_detour 1_digital grid

'aesthetics of dust'_detour 2_ ASCII

Is it possible somehow to arrange a kind of exhibition in the realm of SPS; considering the'easthetics of dust'as the theme of the exhibition; presented as video.
And then, explore the one million detours possible to communicate the ecxact same 'data' ideas presented in the dust-videos.
In other words; what happens if we see the 'detours' as a kind of encrytion, through which we modify the basic easthetic set of rules.

Here is a piece of paper dotted with various inks, and lead, describing some initial ideas for how this would come to be, photographed.