socks-studio

Electric machines and light installations, mechanic sidewalks, ramps and escalators, metropolitan lines and hot air ballons were among the urban scale technological achievements showcased at the 1900 World Fair in Paris.

The excitement procured by the merveilles at the Exposition was so high that the concomitant Olympic Games came almost unnoticed by the public.

On an opposite (small) scale, the exposition also introduced the widely famous Matryoshka doll (Russian Nesting Doll).

There’s a lot of material available online, thanks to Things Magazine

Yesterday, one half of our favorite artists’ duo has died of cancer.

We’d like to celebrate him posting (again) the work for which Fischli/Weiss are best known: the 1987 “Der Lauf Der Dinge” (The Way Things Go), a piece centered on an almost infinite chain reaction of objects.

A post apocaliptic industrial environment is the set for physical and chemical interactions between bare objects. The dadaist piece is able to elicit laughter (echoing the Rube Goldberg machinery so frequently used as absurdly complex contraptions in the Road Runner cartoons), while offering a sober representation of the world, of its technological intricacies and its precarious condition.

This exhibition at the Betonsalon Art Center in Paris tries to address the socio-economic, cultural and political implications behind the worldwide circulation of tropical plants since the 16th century.

Through anthropologists Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff’s concepts of “social life” of things or “cultural biography” of objects, Tropicomania shows the implications of the expansions of tropical products from the local to the global scale.

Artworks, scientific illustrations, maps, films are showed to address “the interrelation between science, exoticism and commerce, and the power relations engendered by this very alliance.”

Read more.
Commodity Pathway Diversion

Colonial garden, 1910s – expedition of plantation in “Wardian cases”, intended for the gardens of experimentation of Bingerville (Ivory Coast), Sor (Senegal), Papetee (Tahiti). © Historical library of the Cirad

Mark Dion, “Iceberg and Palm Trees”, 2007, teddy bear, tar, plastic plant, straps, aluminium box, wooden crate, 330 x 170 x 100 cm, unique piece. Courtesy : In Situ Fabienne Leclerc gallery, Paris, photograph : Rebecca Fanuele

Otobong Nkanga, “Contained Measures of land”, 2008, volcanic sand, cactus, grass, wood and metal plaques, 500cm x 230 x 50 cm, Courtesy : Otobong Nkanga

Lois Weinberger, “Prayer Book”, 1976, folded tobacco leaves from my grandfather, Courtesy : Lois Weinberger

Lois Weinberger, “Untitled”, 2003, Ventilator, wire, wood, metal, bean husk 123 x 45 x 32 cm, Courtesy : Lois Weinberger

Marie Preston, “Table servie” , 2009-2010, Enamelled terra-cotta, brioche, fruits, vegetables and wood, Courtesy : Marie Preston

Claire Pentecost, “Intensive farming with plastic greenhouse effect near the sea”, Almeria, Spain, 2005, photograph. Courtesy : Claire Pentecost

Yo-Yo Gonthier, “extract of carnet leporello”, 2012, Courtesy : Yo-Yo Gonthier

Back to Socks from Rome and the lecture!

We remember, from our time as students at the architecture school, a typical lecture in “Descriptive Geometry”, on the perspective restitution of Velazquez’s “Las Meniñas“.  From the supposed, (historically established), height of a single stair’s step we were able to derive a whole plan and section with the proper positions of the characters and the real point of view of the scene. The science of representation was in a mutual dialogue with artistic historiography.

Lately a lot of collective effort has been focused on the reconstruction of the scenario of Hitchcock’s classic Rear Window, bringing to light the architecture behind the hidden secrets of a demanding plot.

Marialuisa Pacini was able to build a set model for a an adaptation of the drama in modern London.

Jeff Desom used modern video editing tools for dissecting the film and stitching back together. What he obtained was a single panoramic view of the entire backyard.

Here’s the video and some scene of his READ WINDOW Loop 2011 installation:

The “Wrong House, The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock” provides a plan and section of the Jeffries apartment complex:

Things Magazine, from which this post is inspired, informs us that this movie features “diegetic cinematography”. This is the case of movies whose denotative narrative material does not include only the narration itself , but also the fictional space and time dimension implied by the narrative. See Wikipedia.

Rhizome.org voice on “diegetic cinematography” features an analisys of the recent movie Chronicle and opens the speculation to uncharted territories, questioning the relationship between truth and representation, violence and entertainment : “Unlike Carrie, which was made for a generation that grew up watching the Vietnam War unfold in one hour nightly episodes,  Chronicle was made by, and for, the generation who was sitting in home room when the World Trade Center was attacked. And more than the content, the way Chronicle was filmed reflects psycho-social terror of that experience.”

From Things Magazine:  ”The complete archive of Synapse Magazine , a 1970s publication about the nascent electronic music scene”.

Download and enjoy.