Mark Dorrian

This article explores transformations in Peter Wilson’s work by reading his Japanese projects of the late 1980s in relation to Roland Barthes’s Empire of Signs. The specific account it develops is constructed around the entries Wilson produced for the 1978 and 1988 Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competitions. What makes this a comparison of particular interest is that the competitions, a decade apart, were run under nearly — but not quite — the same brief. The first was set by Peter Cook, who called for projects for a ‘Comfortable House in the Metropolis’. This idea was then taken up for the second by Toyo Ito, although he inflected it with an emphasis on the ephemerality of the physical under the effects of new electronic communication technologies. Drawing on Barthes’s observations, the article argues that — across these years — Wilson’s work moves from an approach grounded in metaphor to a mode that is increasingly ideogrammic, and that this is supported by, and reflected in, the way that his drawings change. Here, I claim, the submarine — allusions to which become prominent in Wilson’s work in the period—comes into focus as the key transitional device. Importantly, Wilson’s submarine is not a tool for plumbing depth conditions; rather, it is quite the opposite, insofar as it acts as a figurative cipher, an ideogram in its own right, for the act of screening out relations and drying up metaphoric fluidity. In its conclusion, the article brings the 1988 project into contact with earlier ideogrammic experiments within modernity, including the drawings of Henri Michaux and the reflections of Sergei Eisenstein on cinematic montage and compound ideograms.

The first feature film made about the design and deployment of the atomic bomb, 'The Beginning or the End' (1947), begins with fake newsreel footage depicting the burial in a time capsule of a copy of the film and a projector to show it on. The scene, with its funereal overtones yet grim optimism that, even in the face of catastrophic destruction, the germ of civilisation will endure, recalls the ceremonies surrounding the interment of the Westinghouse time capsule at the New York World's Fair in 1939. Time capsules, this article argues, stand in a complex relation to war and temporality, seeking to at once anticipate and work through the challenge posed to futurity by the threat of global conflict. As a container, the capsule attempts to deliver and control the reception of a legible inventory of the present, yet the principle of selection and the impossibility of predicting how information might be received in the deep future – if it is received at all – threatens this aim. The dilemma faced by time capsule curators is, we argue with reference to William Burroughs' and Brion Gysin's so-called cut -up method of writing, one of control. By reading the time capsule through the cut-up, anticipated catastrophe can be seen to be functioning proleptically in the present and already active as a challenge to the capsule as proof against disaster.

A celebrated aphorism of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe runs “I’d rather be good than interesting.” However in design discourses today, this relation has been entirely overturned. Now it is good to be interesting, indeed better than to be only “good” (which is no longer what it used to be). Reflecting on this – with reference to the work of Sianne Ngai, Mario Perniola, Robin Evans, and Mikhail Epstein – this paper considers the rise of “interesting” as a critical category and examines the sort of judgment-in-suspension that it seems to enact, addressing what issues might be at stake in it and what it means in relation to our understanding of design pedagogy.

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/FvjckRNXvFDryBXcDdX8/full

This paper presents and discusses the design of a retrospective exhibition of the work of Metis, shown at the Arkitektskolen, Aarhus, Denmark between 10 October and 14 November 2014 and at Edinburgh College of Art between 27 March and 6 April 2015.  Making reference to Bruno Latour's distinction between 'objects' and 'things', as developed in his influential article 'Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?', it speculates on what it would mean to conceptualise an exhibition as a 'thing' – that is, as a gathering of relations – and how this might affect our approach to it.  In the case of the Metis exhibition, which was titled 'On the Surface', this issue is related to the agency of the large-scale textile drawing that covered the floor of the gallery, forming a kind of raft within it upon which visitors walked.  Acting as a gathering space for both exhibits and visitors, the drawing was constituted through a complex of representational modalities, which put the seven exhibited projects into play with one another in such a way as to resist their stablisation and resolution into a sequence of objects.

This paper, taking its cue from Gottfried Korff’s theory of museum display, reflects upon the atmospherics of museum objects.  When Korff develops his idea that museums provide a ‘brokering service’ to do with the regulation of distance, he invokes Walter Benjamin’s formulation of ‘aura’, which is understood to arise out of an interplay of proximity and distance, emanating from what Theodor Adorno would describe as the ‘more of the phenomenon’ that exceeds its raw facticity.  Benjamin’s concept is also taken up by the philosopher Gernot Böhme in his influential theorisation of atmospheres as aesthetic phenomena.  Böhme clearly understands Benjamin’s ‘aura’ as atmosphere, albeit in a theoretically undifferentiated form, and locates it within his overall therapeutic programme to develop an expanded conception of aesthetics that overturns the Kantian schema and returns it instead to Baumgarten.  While Böhme advances his idea of atmosphere with a view to a recovery of the totality of the body and its senses for aesthetic theory, this paper questions to what extent atmospheric experience in fact turns out to be in concert with environments that strategically limit or restrain sensory experience, often in ways that participate in the kind of assumed hierarchy of the senses that Böhme wants to reject.  And here the museum, an institution that Susan Stewart has described as an ‘elaborately ritualized practice of refraining from touch’, seems a particularly interesting example, not least in the way it emerges as one of the sites within modernity in which the structure of ritual auratic art, as theorised by Benjamin, comes to be re-performed.  The paper concludes by reflecting on some of the anxieties that attend distance – social alienation and estrangement from objects – and examines two cases in which atmospheric manipulation is solicited in an attempt to overcome it.

... While the cities of the former 'Eastern Bloc' have been reacting to new external forces, at the ... Here we find hidden an artist's studio, in which diverse objects, whose histories cut across the ... Perceived as risky, threatening—but also a byword for rough authenticity—it is an area ...

... If the joke aims at relieving the sinister portentousness of the Palace by ironising it, it directs a second, and this time more emphatic, laugh ... The fear has remained somewhere under my skin.'10 Łukasz Garlicki, cited in Passent, Pałac wiecznie żywy (Long Live the Palace!), op. ...

... 13 Barbara Goodwin, 'The Vertigo of Facts: Literary Accounts of a Philosophical Dilemma', The British Journal of Aesthetics, 18:3 (1978), p.273. ... View all notes. The film's plot is familiar: a police detective, Scottie (played by James Stewart), retired due to acrophobia, is hired by an ...

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries an impressive body of analytical, survey, and descriptive literature on Ireland was produced. This material, associated with the Tudor and Stuart 'reconquest' of the country, included texts, produced in the wake of More's Utopia, which have been described as marking the beginning of English colonial theory. This paper sets out to examine the spatial aspects of the colonial discourse on Ireland as displayed in this literature. In particular, it attempts to show the extent to which these aspects are implicated throughout the texts and to delineate the interplay between them. Colonial regimes of space, while clearly demonstrated at the scale of landscape and settlement, are not concluded there: instead they extend down to the scale of the body in its practices, fashioning, and deportment. The spatial formation of the colonial city, here Sir Thomas Smith's Elizabetha, must be understood in the context of the chain of spatial elements . . . in terms, for example, of the colonial rhetoric dealing with the surface and depths of the land, with penetration and arable cultivation, and with the trope of the colonist-husband. At the end, the paper discusses a nineteenth-century Punch cartoon, which illustrates how the dissociation that the colonial discourse introduces between the native and the land is linked to a thematics of penetration, which swings between first lack (the savage native pastoralist of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts whose condition springs from a refusal or inability to cultivate) and then excess (the monstrous, land-consuming peasant of the nineteenth-century constructions).