FOUND OPPORTUNITY: @johnbutlertrio made a plea for all present to stir into action to protect the earth’s oceans before performing his composition “Ocean” at the first of his @SydneyOperaHouse concerts this week. The mellifluous beauty of both the music and the message struck me as an antidote to the melancholy of the last message of the Mars Rover Opportunity, who’d been officially declared dead the previous day. “My battery is low and it’s getting dark,” transmitted Opportunity in June of 2018 and was never heard from again. John Butler’s sincerity and integrity has both light and warmth enough to recharge any battery. ..
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It was a comment he made during the second of his concerts on the forecourt that made me think of the Mars Rover. When he was calling Missy Higgins to the stage to perform a duet with him he said he’s bad at learning other people’s songs so they’d have to perform one of his. “I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me,” he explained, a line from Beck’s song “Loser”. When Opportunity landed on the surface of Mars in 2004 and was preparing to turn on its systems and begin roving it played Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run”. I started thinking of the creation of a mythology for remotely operated robots (as opposed to humanoid robots) with “Born to Run” their equivalent of “The Epic of Gilgamesh”. ..
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I made up a playlist in my iTunes library for this robot mythology that includes the Wallflowers song “One Headlight’ and Beck’s “Loser”, which has a punk version of a robot rover on the cover of MELLOW GOLD, the album it’s featured on. The song always reminds me of the wild anarchic robotic performance art of @survivalresearchlabs , the ‘act’ I’d most like to see perform on the Opera House’s forecourt. ..
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@benmarshall_sydneyoperahouse #rockmusic #robot #marsrover @nasajpl #marsroveropportunity #marsrovercuriosity @springsteen #brucespringsteen @beck
MAX’S DONUT THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE: I am phenomenally amused & inspired by terriers, screwball comedy movies, the Marx Brothers, the music of Louis Armstrong & Duke Ellington, & the song lyrics of Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin & Johnny Mercer. Yesterday @edward.lear, the Cary Grant of terriers, met up with two fellow Welsh terriers. The collective noun is “a disobedience of welshies”. Terriers have an independent streak, are full of character, and have a great sense of humour. @mairakalman ’s dog poet Max Stravinsky isn’t exactly a terrier, but he is all of these things. And in a volume of his adventures where he goes to Hollywood to write the script for a Screwball Comedy there’s an illustration that has become for me a perspective device. ..
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The donut is the middle ground where most of life takes place, it’s a closed circle. Around it is the big picture, the atmospherically inaccessible world of comprehending climate change, government, big business, multi-national immense architecture companies, the business of celebrity. And inside the hole, all that’s wondrous about terriers, screwball comedies, etc. where creatures of all kinds are genuinely happy and creatively define the elements that enrich their lives. ..
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The architecture criticism that interests me goes beyond the donut and focuses on the outer orbit around the donut and inside the hole. I’m reading, at the same time, @marklamster ’s biography of Philip Johnson and @langealexandra ’s THE DESIGN OF CHILDHOOD. What I most value about the biography of Johnson is how to comprehend the big picture: Johnson was a flawed, compromised human being with an uneven design legacy. Knowing what we know about Johnson’s egregious beliefs can we still love the old Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building, for example? Mark Lamster helps us evaluate these concerns in a way that helps us more generally. For example, the Marx Brothers became famous in a time of rampant sexism and racism … but .. Harpo Marx was a terrier in human form, a sweet, strange, wild individual that may redeem temporal transgressions. & Alexandra Lange’s book focuses on how we form and nurture wondrous individuals.
VICTORIANA: I imagine that Ash, in William Gibson’s novel THE PERIPHERAL, is dressed in the 22nd century’s version of clothing from the design house of @alexandermcqueen . ..
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“Ash, flesh white as paper … Her hand quite black with tattoos, a riot of wings and horns, every bird and beast of the Anthropocene extinction, overlapping line drawings of a simple yet touching precision … Netherton was watching the intricate texture of her bustier, which resembled a microminiature model of some Victorian cast-iron station roof, its countless tiny panes filmed as by the coal smoke of fingerling locomotives, yet flexing as she breathed and spoke … Hair the nano-black of the lace at her throat, the bustier of perpetually rain-streaked iron and glass, as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope” ….
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This intricately carved wooden prosthesis designed by Lee Alexander McQueen is from the height of the steampunk era at the end of the 20thC. Swipe right for a new buttoned boot designed by Sarah Burton inspired by the bucolic imagery within Victoriana. “A pioneering traveller’s passion for natural beauty and the bringing home of images of landscapes rich with exotic blossom and birds.” ..
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William Gibson has commented on how “emergent technologies were irreversibly altering the landscape of the Victorians. BLEAK HOUSE is a quintessential Victorian text, but it is also probably the best steampunk landscape that will ever be. Dickens really nailed it, especially in those proto-Ballardian passages in which everything in nature has been damaged by heavy industry. But there were relatively few voices like Dickens then. Most people thought the progress of industry was all very exciting. Only a few were saying, Hang on, we think the birds are dying.” ..
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This week it seems as though we’ve pitched forward into the post-natural intensely ruined world of THE PERIPHERAL … corpses of a million dead fish piled up along the banks of the drought starved Murray Darling River and extreme heat burning stone fruit from within on trees in Australia … train tracks being set on fire during a ‘Polar Vortex’ in Chicago that rendered the city colder than Antarctica.
NICK CAVE’S PHENOMENAL CURIOSITY: I imagine Nick’s brain as a centrifuge, constantly taking in a phenomenal range of raw materials, keeping them spinning until the dense, very important, crucial ideas and observations are separated and become the grist for Bad Seeds albums while everything else is flung to the edges to underpin soundtracks, novels, unusual memoirs, film scripts, etc. I find myself transfixed by these ‘edge works’. At the time that Nick was writing the film script for John Hillcoat’s movie LAWLESS I gave him a collection of my most treasured Duke Ellington recordings including John Coltrane and Ellington playing together. He was momentarily taken with Ellington & Charles Mingus playing “Caravan”...
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While in Australia performing the IN CONVERSATION concerts he was thinking about Artificial Intelligence and wrote in the RED HAND FILES about questioning the possibility of artificially inducing vulnerability and all that’s spinning in the centrifuge that can’t be quantified. He mentioned the strangeness of awe, that it’s too shadowy to be able to be algorithmically fabricated. ..
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Something I am continually in awe of is how thoughtfully and meaningfully Nick is able to process insights from arts and sciences that become grist for powerful metaphors and descriptions: “Prince, that tiny cluster of purple atoms”. ..
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My own centrifuge is less efficient, a device that backfires. It’s something that Wile E. Coyote might have ordered from the ACME catalogue. I’ve been thinking about AI applied to engineering, particularly robotics engineer Ken Goldberg’s suggestions that the human element will always be crucial, that AI won’t replace or surpass what makes us humans, as Nick concurs “it doesn’t have the nerve.” “We need a shift in mindset, rather than ‘us against the machines,’” Ken has said, “let’s focus on ‘us with the machines,’ and explore the potential for machine collaboration—how the combined strengths of diverse humans and diverse machines can enhance the human experience.”.
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#nickcaveandthebadseeds @nickcaveofficial #engineering #robotics #wileecoyote #awe #artificialintelligence #johncoltrane #dukeellington #jazz
DREAMLAND: The Sydney Festival concludes today so the bright orange space figures & installations celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing placed around the city will disappear. Ephemera lingers so the postcard sized fold out map/brochure may be around for several more weeks. “Reach for the Stars” the brochure urges but I keep wondering what that means now. …
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During the Sydney Festival a Chinese probe landed on the dark side of the Moon & placed canisters of plants there, which died almost immediately. During the Sydney Festival the 10th anniversary of the release of Duncan Jones’s movie MOON was celebrated. It documents a worker on an energy harvesting site on the Moon discovering that he’s a clone. A month before the Sydney Festival commenced the Australian Government announced the creation of a Space Agency in Adelaide. News reports carried “beam me up Scotty” Star Trek puns, given that the Australian Prime Minister’s name is Scott. ..
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News reports about the Space Agency were vague about its mission: what exactly is “sustainable defence”? The existing South Australian Space Agency has an internship promoting “appropriate strategies for cultivating the space ecosystem” but what on earth does that mean? And there’s the location of the Space Agency, “Lot Fourteen”, at the Eastern edge of Adelaide’s CBD close to museums & galleries, performing arts centres, universities & sporting venues. But Lot Fourteen sounds to me like Area 51, the US defence industry’s research site in Nevada that conspiracy theorists are sure houses the spaceship & corpses of alien visitors. ..
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@BBCdoctorwho mashed together Apollo 11, the Roswell aliens & Edvard Munch’s The Scream to come up with The Silence, a monster that we forget as soon we turn away from it. The Silence’s mythology is too tangled to provide a neat parable to guide thinking about “reaching for the stars”, but what allegory should we use? The abstract spirituality of “2001” or the spooky conspiracies of the “X Files”? I keep imagining a competition brief for a Space Agency building on Lot Fourteen reading like a cheesy sci-fi tv series script. .
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THE OUTER ORBIT OF ARCHITECTURE CRITICISM: In 2015 I read something that recalibrated my perception of what I might have to offer as an architecture critic. In 2010 Deyan Sudjic had published a biography of Norman Foster. He commented on the “dramatic scale shift in architecture in the last 25 years”. Even though firms might be associated with 1, 2 or a handful of individuals, in reality they are likely to be massive multi-national operations with a diverse range of multi-disciplinary speculative & built projects. “In London, Foster + Partners work is no longer a matter of sporadic individual buildings. There are now so many of them that it is too late to look at them one at a time. Foster’s impact is not at the level of one-off buildings, it has taken on an essential part in shaping the overall context.” ..
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What I’m trying to do in a small way is report on that ‘overall context’. I have no deep connections to the architecture profession, so I follow @architecturensw & @saveoursirius for guidance, & @thearchitectsbookshop , whose post today says: “architects of all types depend on physical books to help shape the way we think.” ..
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The overall context is continually enriched by practising architects teaching, lecturing, & offering guidance by evaluating student projects. I’m out of that loop too. But the recent @uro_publications compendium celebrating a century of the Sydney School of Architecture, Design & Planning at the University of Sydney opens up that world in an incredible & valuable way, connecting the school to socially, politically & culturally important flash points … the Vietnam war, a lecture by Gough Whitlam outlining how government might consider “the power of private interests versus the public interest” 3 years before he became Prime Minister, goofy psychedelic projects in the 1970s including an inflatable floatable structure. ..
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The cover is a wraparound index that helps me see my own small projects as something that might become searchable within the bigger picture.
