Architecture and sexuality

I’m interested in the relationships between architecture and bodies - embodiments both. Not just the spaces where things happen, but more than that; spaces that represent, and epitomise, and shape the people that live in them.

A new book out offers some interesting starting points:

Fire Island Modernist: Horace Gifford and the Architecture of Seduction
by Christopher Bascom Rawlins
pub. Metropolis Books / Gordon de Vries Studio (May 30, 2013)

From NYMag.com:

[…] When it was developed in the fifties, [Fire Island] Pines wasn’t meant to be gay—just another weekend getaway. But because it was next door to Cherry Grove, the community of theatrical bungalows filled with theatrical men, the Pines began to attract closeted gays, who by the mid-sixties defined the place.

In those days, the Pines was seen as an “untainted address,” observes Christopher Rawlins in Fire Island Modernist, his new book about Horace Gifford, who designed just about one in ten houses there. Gifford was a strapping idealist, and his houses were communal, economical, and exhibitionistic: the bedrooms small, the central areas open, with everything wooden or glass (he “essentially treated all surfaces like floors,” Rawlins writes).

Gifford’s was a gay architectural vernacular that eschewed camp—“butch,” Rawlins calls it. “But in its muscular austerity,” he writes, “a hypermasculine form of drag could also be discerned.” As time went on, the houses became more elaborate, with conversation pits and make-out lofts—a form of sexed-up cocaine modernism. Gifford, a fixture in the community, embodied this pre-AIDS boundarylessness.

From AIA.org (American Institute of Architects)
Christopher Rawlins responds, in an interview

Gifford housed the first generation of gay Americans who dared to make themselves visible. It is a bit tricky to speak of a “gay aesthetic” in monolithic terms, but if you look at the older adjacent Fire Island gay community of Cherry Grove, its prevailing artistic and architectural expressions—drag, high Victoriana, camp, a coded language of double entendres—spoke to the profound alienation of a gay man or lesbian circa 1947.

A little later, in the Pines community where Gifford built most of his homes, you have a more assimilated generation seeking its own forms of expression. Those haunted houses in Cherry Grove no longer moved them. Gifford embraced the popular movement of Modernism, while imbuing his work with a particular dialect that mirrored the freewheeling physical and cultural landscape of its inhabitants. His stripped-bare structures of cedar and glass, with prurient lines of sight and an amusing lack of closets, resonated with a generation that had finally emerged from the shadows.

I think the book amply demonstrates that there is such a thing as “gay architecture” in a number of expressive forms, but when it comes to the singular term “gay aesthetic,” I am trying to avoid the error of essentialism—assuming that a particular cultural or ethnic group behaves in a monolithic fashion. In the same vein, one would describe a “black aesthetic” or a “Jewish aesthetic” with a measure of modesty and care. There are often multiple “gay aesthetics” occurring at one time. It’s not as if the Pines’ aesthetic entirely displaced the Cherry Grove aesthetic the world over. But Gifford’s work spoke to an emerging, upwardly mobile New York demographic which was one subset of the gay world.

Image credits:
[1] Image courtesy of Michael Weber.
[2] Tom Yee / Courtesy of Artbook D.A.P.
[3] Image courtesy of Michael Weber

Illustration by Steve Thomas
Published in ICON, Oct 2012

For those outside London, it’s a play on the “Cycle Superhighway” infrastructure (aka blue painted paths on roads) which happened to exactly match corporate sponsor Barclays’ branding. Our velo citizens are implored not to stand for such nonsense.

emergentdigitalpractices:

CREATIVE TECHNOLOGIST

We’re looking for a full-time creative technologist / coder for our Manchester office. You’ll need to be driven by experimentation and thrive on ‘never been done before’. Ideally you’d be literate in some of the following: C or C++, OOP, OpenGL and Augmented Reality. Have played with SDKs like openFrameworks, OpenCV, VVVV and Cinder. Love hacking periferals like Kinect (and DMX).

Must also be cool with making work that makes prison rape jokes.

“B-buh-but irreverent spirit of the brand, man!!”

Try harder. Do better work.

My Facebook’s getting quite keen on The Color Run, “The happiest 5k on the planet” - or a truly genius bit of experiential marketing from Dulux in aid of Cancer Research. It’s coming to London on 14 July.

The concept:

“Wear white at the starting line
Finish plastered in color”

“Less about your 10-minute-mile and more about having the time of your life, The Color Run is a five-kilometre, un-timed race in which thousands of participants are doused from head to toe in different colors at each kilometre. The fun continues at the finish line with a gigantic “Color Festival,” using more colored powder to create happiness and lasting memories, not to mention millions of vivid color combinations”

This is extremely clever.

It’s got deep, primal cultural reference points - the Hindu festival of Holi, and La Tomantina, the Spanish festival with the tomato-fight. More broadly than that, Carnival.

It’s Instagrammable and shareable as all fuck. Not just social run-with-your-friends, but producing fantastic digital social currency as well. It’s got media crossover nailed.

And it steals from the best - specifically Fallon’s Sony Bravia “Color Like No Other” campaign. The 2005 Bouncing Balls ad - and more particularly the 2006 Paint slot, where director Jonathan Glazer used 70,000 litres of paint, mortars, bottle bombs and 1,700 detonators to redecorate Glasgow’s Toryglen estate to a soundtrack of Rossini.

That, and this Dulux work, is marketing at its most emotionally evocative and beautiful - which is a conflicting feeling. I don’t especially like being sold to effectively: it makes me feel like I am being manipulated.

(Then again, I had no idea the Sony Bravia was a TV rather than a mobile phone, and indeed first recalled the campaign as being by Samsung. Far East Asian company, beginning with S… So perhaps advertising’s influence is not exactly invincible yet.)

Anyway, campaign is from IMG STG (Sports Technology Group). Dulux should do more work with them, because their TV campaign by BBH is unfortunately falling flat on its face.

I am speaking at a thing:

Big Data, Social Networks, Data Selves

On: Sunday 12th May, 6pm
At: Auto Italia South East, London N1C 4AE

The explosion of social networks means that the whole richness of human interaction - fights, breakups, love, loss, work, politics, art - are played out across network space by large numbers of the human population. Simultaneous with this is the rise of “Big Data” - huge data sets drawn from these networks that allow researchers (states, the public and private sector) to learn much about the populations under study. Virally and memetics, allegedly spontaneous phenomena can be analysed with the statistical gaze. And everything else.

Alex Andrews is joined by Jay Owens and Ed Manley to ask what does all this mean? What does it mean to be intensively connected like this - selves porous and attached at every waking moment, blurring the boundaries of self-performance work and leisure? How do the micro-banalities of every day life - from the daily commute to the walk in the park - play out on a vast aggregate macro level of Big Data? What is it to have a self on a social network, a data self?

This could not make me happier. To hell with capybaras, I now want some grass as a pet.

(via iamdanw, but because his Tumblr is self-hosted at iamdanw.com I can’t reblog it)

jomc:

(via What’s This? - The Daily WTF)

grinderbot:

Hacking away in the middle of tear gas [ May Day demonstrations in Turkey]

(via worsethandetroit)

The weekend’s new reading.

i. Histories of the Dustheap, eds. Stephanie Foote & Elizabeth Mazzolini (2012)
ii. The Social Media Reader, ed. Michael Mandiberg (2012).
iii. The Object Reader, eds. Fiona Candlin & Raiford Guins (2009)

Long time no see, Tumblr.

I guess I’ve been growing tired of the screen, lately. When social is the space you work in - Gmail, Wordpress, analytics; ten tabs open in Twitter - it’s difficult for it to be a wholly positive space for your time off. On Twitter especially it’s as though someone’s turned up the noise: tweet tweet tweet, half a dozen a minute, every minute, every minute of the day. Know this, read that, pay attention to this, see that I am aware of that… I favourite articles daily with now really no intent to go back and read them later. So what’s it for? I have a lot of friends on Twitter, but too few of the messages are from them.

So instead I’ve been seeing people in person. 40 miles on the bike up the Lea Valley. 10 miles on foot, getting muddy and exhausted in West Sussex. Turkish lamb stew in Manor House; pints and nachos in Shoreditch.

And last night. Arrived into Oxford late on a train filled with the party crowd - little dresses, tall shoes, loud and excited yet polite, nice Home Counties kids on a big night out. In jeans, walking shoes, rucksack, layered up for a cold night ahead, I felt anonymous, almost invisible - older, earnest-looking, too dull to be of note. Caught the bus at midnight to a parking lot nowhere in particular, then walked along the periphery looking for a place to jump the fence. A segment with barbed wire missing; shopping trolley on the other side to use as a step - got it. Then round the back of the building, through a window - and there’s Brad just abseiled down a grain chute. A big bear-hug then up the stairs lit with tealights - to a party.

My hair and my hoodie still smell of woodsmoke from the bonfire and whatever’s in fireworks and burning glowsticks. My skin smells of all that plus whiskey for breakfast. All that and a proper conversation over cofffee and brunch, plus three new books from Blackwelll’s Oxford’s academic basement.

Paper-based, see.
Physical.
Analogue.
Offline.

There’s a new balance to be struck. Everyone I speak to these days - we’re all looking for it.

via cibelle:

Transparent Business Coffee Shop #newtrend?! #hunt&darton cafe on Lower Clapton road

I like this. There’s lots of talk about “transparency” vis-a-vis the “social business”, which is mostly just jargon but here it is in action.

I also think it’s likely to be good business sense - it brings the customer into the workings of the business and you can see how buying your coffee helps them. There’s also a motive to return, to see how they’re doing next week. (Well, if you’re a data wonk like me!) The British love an underdog, so while takings are pretty tiddly like this, I think it’ll make people feel more involved in the business.

Sorry, did I say ‘business’? I meant ‘experience’. Not just a cafe, also an “interactive art installation”. Oh Hackney…

All encompassing hosts Hunt & Darton expose the inner workings of their business by presenting everything as art – from the public display of their bank balance to the lovingly handpicked charity shop crockery.

Well, know thy customer…

Still, I do wish twee and ironic gourmet coffee wasn’t a Thing.

(via new-politic)

Cornell NYC Tech, Planned for Roosevelt Island, Starts Up in Chelsea.

This release-and-iterate model is probably just great if you’re building something, but it stinks for us users. We get to try half-baked products, help the builders fix it, and then stand by helplessly as they sell themselves and their technology to a bigger company that shuts the service down. Here’s hoping that Cornell won’t be training these people in Worst Practices of Software Design.

(via ayjay)

THIS. The purpose of software development is not, in fact, to entertain the devs (you get paid handsomely guys, suck it up). It’s to build something that’s useful. Inventing a shiny new feature each week isn’t useful if the basics are unreliable. Be agile, fast, cheap etc within these constraints.

Holds true some distance beyond software.

(via ayjay)

In an inter-connected world, where products have sensors and are connected to the internet, companies will know in real-time how people use their product, when they use it, for how long they use it and when things go wrong. Whenever a product needs to be improved or a new product needs to be developed, organisations can simply look at the real-time sensor data pouring into the organisation and understand the needs and wishes of their customers. If they want to understand how people think of their products, the company or what the sentiment of the brand is, they can simply connect to a big data startup and real-time data starts appearing on their screen, analysed and visualized, to be understood by everyone in the organisation.

And:

“In a world of big data, however, understanding of the context is done automatically by the algorithms.”

This is the most hilarious and ideological thing I’ve read this year - purest Borg Complex.

You don’t need me to debunk all the ways this is inaccurate. Instead, it’s better viewed as an artefact of big data ideology, and the way it moves through the hype cycle such that a leisure and travel marketer (the author) decides he can become a big data guru.

This is truly the “peak of inflated expectations” - a faith-based model of data, where its mere presence cures scrofula and transmits enlightenment.

Would it were that easy…

1. OK, Cupid: giving your love life to Google Glass and the hive mind
Tim Maly, Verge - 11 April

2. Meet the Man Who Sold His Fate to Investors at $1 a Share
Josh Davis, Wired - 28 March

cc Charles Green (2000), Doppelgangers and the Third Force: The Artistic Collaborations of Gilbert & George and Marina Abramović/Ulay, Art Journal 59.2: 36–45

“In both teams’ performances, the artists folded themselves into an elusive extra identity: the double body of the collaborative artist. […] Abramovic/Ulay’s bodies changed dramatically during their collaboration. According to many observers, they became remarkably similar in appearance […] In fact, they looked and behaved almost like twins: they were both tall, muscular, athletic, and long-haired and dressed in similar clothes. In Relation in Time and Breathing In - Breathing Out (both 1977), they effectively presented themselves as joined halves of a double being, like Siamese twins. In addition, they had met on their mutual birthday. Abramovic/Ulay were well aware that they were recreating themselbves as doubles - that they were moving beyond conventional gender-based markers of identity at the same time that they were attempting to develop faculties such as telepathy through sensitization processes. In public lectures after their collaboration had ended, they described the collaboration as symbiotic, emphasizing the absolute trust that had been necessary to produce their works.

Just as Abramovic/Ulay, through extreme self-absorption, spectralized their bodies, so their collaborative body became their real body, for their corporeal bodies had been stripped of normal significance, like shadows.

Most commonly when we discuss augmented reality and ‘augmented self’ we simply mean perceptions or a body enhanced by technology. We remain caught within the metaphor of cyborg, “hybrids of machine and organism”.

I find it interesting to consider taking that a step deeper and asking what happens when we augment with the thoughts, feelings and decision-making powers of other human beings - when we bring these deeply into interaction with our own selves, forming a conscious entity expanding beyond the singular body.

It sounds extremely radical, but in fact love, sex, having a child - some sense of a merging self is in fact quite familiar. Which makes it interesting why these conscious artistic interventions above seem so taboo. Perhaps because they make conscious, explicit and durational what’s otherwise a highly liminal moment.

It reminds me of someone I used to know a very long time ago on LiveJournal. As they put it, “Zie is multiple, part of a collective entity.” I was young, perhaps 14, and the only point of contact was their blog, different people writing about their lives together - “we”, “us”. I envisioned maybe a house of half a dozen people, different ages, genders, queer; living radically with a profound commitment to the group over the individual. I was unsure what was going on. I didn’t know about Multiple Personality Disorder then - but better not to; it helped me see the truth of their experiences, not just the category.

“Since each of us were several, there was already quite a crowd.” [D&G]