So far, the best evidence that something has really changed is of this kind. Imagine you were walking around your own familiar neighborhood with some young, clever guy. Then he suddenly stops in the street, takes a picture of something you never noticed before, and starts chuckling wryly. And he does that for a year, and maybe five hundred different times.

That’s the New Aesthetic Tumblr. This wunderkammer proves nothing by itself. It’s a compendium of evidence, a heap of artifacts, and that evidence matters. It’s a compilation of remarkable material by creative digital-native types who are deeply familiar with the practical effects of these tools and devices.

Still FREAKING OUT!!!!!
Bruce Sterling for Wired

Also:

http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com/

The New Aesthetic Needs to Get Weirder
Ian Bogost

The New Aesthetic/ New Politics #4
Poszu/Adam Rothstein

Thanks Brigitte!

How would you know if some new aesthetic was really and truly a “new way of seeing?” How would you prove that this had happened in real life? What would be convincing evidence that such an event had taken place in our world? What proofs could one demand, or offer, that such a thing was an authentic cultural change?

People are asking me that now, and sometimes offering answers of their own, such as, “My students are asking me New Aesthetic questions without being prompted from the podium, so that shows that something new is happening.”

I lack good answers to these questions, and I’m unsure even how to formulate the problem. Furthermore, it’s unfair to hang this barnacled anchor around the necks of activists in the New Aesthetic network. On that issue, I’m in the Julian Bleecker camp: when the iron gets hot, it’s time to tighten your lips and hammer the anvil.

If creatives over-indulge themselves in abstract speculation, nothing will happen. Real Artists Ship, people; don’t let networking become not-working. That’s why theorists exist.

That being said, somebody who’s not all that itchily-creative is gonna try some critical problem-formulation, and by golly, I’m gonna belly up to the theory bar here. I’ve got the time for it, don’t you worry. We Zenlike gray eminences of Swiss media-philosophy are not atemporal for nothing.

Normally, I don’t burden the surf-blog here with deep, time-consuming analytical essays. Now I will. This may take me all summer, or a decade, a whole noospheric kalpa maybe, who knows — for me personally, this is a compelling and attractive issue, and I won’t let it go till it gets somewhere.

How do you grasp the schauung in the weltanschauung, and the geist in the zeitgeist? Where is the boundary between the “New Aesthetic” and a new aesthetic?

So far, the best evidence that something has really changed is of this kind. Imagine you were walking around your own familiar neighborhood with some young, clever guy. Then he suddenly stops in the street, takes a picture of something you never noticed before, and starts chuckling wryly. And he does that for a year, and maybe five hundred different times.

That’s the New Aesthetic Tumblr. This wunderkammer proves nothing by itself. It’s a compendium of evidence, a heap of artifacts, and that evidence matters. It’s a compilation of remarkable material by creative digital-native types who are deeply familiar with the practical effects of these tools and devices.

They’re looking for instances when this use-activity pops out of the background of some older, contrasting worldview. Without this eye-catching glitch aspect, without this sharply perceptible and thought-provoking contrast, it wouldn’t look or feel “new.” That’s what’s “new” about New Aesthetic — not that it’s new by arbitrary calendar time, that it happened after, say, January 1, 2010 — but that it demonstrates some sharp apparent contrast with the surroundings of an earlier order.

There’s an “eruption” going on, but it’s not visible to everyone, and it will always vary in meaning and significance to people of different sensibilities. In the many entries of the New Aesthetic Tumblr, many people appear. Yet it’s rare for those people in these New Aesthetic images to show any visible awareness that an eruption has occurred. They are standing around in the eruption, and part of it, yet they’re not witnesses to it — they don’t perceive their situation with a New Aesthetic sensibility.

Commonly, they have no idea that they’ve committed a gaffe, been present during a glitch. Consider, for instance, the Indian legislators porn-surfing on iPads while their legislature is in session. These dignitaries are not performing-freaks who are there to amuse us. They are fellow human beings just trying to get through their day. Real legislators are always bored silly by legislation. That’s rather the point of grinding down the opposition in long procedural debates. But it doesn’t occur to these Indian nabobs that their brand-new Apple anti-boredom toys are big screens flashing sleazy softcore pr0n to indignant shoulder-surfers. So that’s the rupture there; that’s a digital eruption big enough to qualify as a regional political scandal.

That’s why this interesting incident shows up on the New Aesthetic tumblr radar. The prurient Indian press thinks that this story is all about porn and the class privilege of the Indian ruling caste. The New Aesthetic crowd thinks it’s about the social impact of handheld-device deployment. They’re both right, but porn and class privilege are both eternal, while iPad deployment is a phenomenon we’re all still getting our heads around.

Sometimes the people under New Aesthetic surveillance are screechingly aware of the “eruption.” For instance, consider this recent tweet by globalized British radical pop star M.I.A., aka @MIAuniverse, aka Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam. After months of public admiration of hacker radical Julian Assange, she is thunderstruck to physically encounter him:

@MIAuniverse julian assange borrowed my computer last week, im still FREAKING OUT !!!!!

I’d judge that MIA is having a conscious moment of the New Aesthetic type there. She’s not star-struck about Julian Assange, who’s obviously a lesser “star” than Madonna, a celebrity with whom MIA creates videos. She is FREAKING OUT because this legendary emblem of global computer dissidence physically took her own computer and typed on it with his real, three-dimensional hands, thus endowing her beloved computer with, well, some form of contemporary Walter Benjamin aura, basically.

How are we to react to this New-Aesthetic piece of evidence, what does it signify, what does it mean? Well, for the many MIA fans on Twitter, the proper social reaction is not “FREAKING OUT!!!!!”, although one might imagine that it should be. It is not the right reaction, because the fans will not do that, and MIA doesn’t expect that of her Twitter fans. The proper reaction of MIA’s Twitter fans is some simple, old-fashioned, much-impressed, popstar-wannabe adulation. Something akin to: “Wow Maya u are so brave and out-there and politically uncompromising! XOXO <3″.

If you lack the native reactions of a freaky MIA fan on Twitter, and are more the contemporary and yet contemplative digital Walter-Benjamin type, the reaction feels rather different. It is a culturati illumination, a private stream-of-thought, something like this: “Well. Look at that. Nowadays, I live in a world where the radical musical underground, and the radical hacker underground, really do share some profound compelling interests. They’re united by their shared hardware — united to the point where sharing a digital device becomes a genuine totem of intimacy to them. Henceforth, it’s going to be increasingly difficult even to distinguish them, formally.”

That is the change in the weltanschauung. Really, to the extent that a historic weltanschauung is different from some cornball mystic noosphere, that is true change in the world. Aesthetically, it’s a change within contemporary music, as MIA feverishly glides off with her politically-contaminated laptop to obligingly compose the soundtrack for Assange’s new TV show, so that he can continue their joint struggle through yet another medium. Because she did that for him, right away. And he appreciated that action on her part, and showed that. And it’s all there, now, on the net, blatant and obvious. You can agree with their politics or consider their actions abhorrent, but it should be pretty clear that they’re not merely carving cute 8bit stencils there.

The New Aesthetic eruption displays itself as a FREAKING OUT!!!! curiosity — but it’s also evidence about the way the world works nowadays, and how this world differs from the world that an older generation once knew — a world which is receding, with more than all-due speed, into the past. It does not state that conclusion in any long and labored blog-post, like this one. But it is carrying that water-bucket. And rather effectively, too.

So, I’d wrap-up today’s head-scratching textual contemplation with an analytical QED here — but to wrap things up, in an ivied, literary, fashion, is never very New Aesthetic. The New Aesthetic practice would be to unwrap it, post it, and leave it there all ragged with retweets, favorite buttons, permalinks and an open-API, so that somebody on the network can *do something* with it.

The field describes a space of propagation, of effects. It contains no matter or material points, rather functions, vectors and speeds. It describes local relationsLondon of difference within fields of celerity, transmission or careering points, in a word, what Minkowski called the world.
- Sanford Kwinter, 1986

Stan Allen, From object to field: field conditions in architecture and urbanism,in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, (London: Routledge, 2009)

Field conditions move from the one toward the many, from individuals to collectives, from objects to fields. The term itself plays on a double meaning. Architects work not only in the office or studio but in the field: on site, in contact with the fabric of architecture. “Field conditions” here implies the acceptance of the real in all its messiness and unpredictability. It implicates architects in a material improvisation conducted on site in real time. Field conditions treat constraints as opportunity. Working with and not against the site, something new is produced by registering the complexity of the given.

(1) “Art’s love affair with the machine”;
(2) “The powers that be” (covering the period 1914 to 1930s);
(3) “The landscape of pleasure”, 1870s to 1950s;
(4) “Trouble in utopia”, 1890s to 1960s;
(5) “The threshold of liberty”, 1880s to 1940s;
(6) “The view from the edge”, 1830s to 1970s;
(7) “Culture as nature”, 1910s to 1970;
(8) “The future that was”, 1840s to 1970s.

Disorientation is the current malaise of the teen-ager. With nothing to do and nowhere to go, the teen-ager lives through a time of disorientation, restlessness, and confrontation.

Play and Interplay–A Manifesto for New Design in Urban Recreational Environment
M. Paul Friedberg with Ellen Perry Berkeley

The Macmillan Company  1970
866 Third Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022
Book Design: Gary Fujiwara 

Added to Library

(Excerpt)

The country – An environment of life, texture, and richness; clean, healthful, and beneficient.

The city  – An environment of contrasts and contradictions; crowded, noisy, and dirty; exciting, active, and vital–a dynamic world of richness and complexity.

The child is a product of his environment. No one can meaningfully apply to his different needs and experiences.

Interplay between the object and the child makes his total world–play. He exploits the vitality of his environment and draws imagination to create his world.

Complexity offers alternatives and choice and the tools of the growth process. Psychologists tell us that rich environments make for healthy personalities. Limit the environment and you limit the man.

Adventure at the end of a piece of rope

Translation of the natural to the man-made

Climb–to observe; to dominate; to hide; to play; explorers, mountain climbers, pilots, ect.

Balancing is a skill in which the challenge develops a further understanding in gravity. The child is in constant competition with natural forces.

Barriers like signs are invitations to disregard. A child looks for challenge in his environment. A fence or a wall must be tested as to it’s adequacy before it can be honored.

Scale defines graduated levels of challenge and territory. Smaller children sit on the columns, older ones use them as a maze, and the oldest jump from one mountain top to the next. When design is scaled to only one group, it excludes others by imitation and activity.

Literal design restricts a child’s imagination, for he can bring to a playground, in his hand or in his mind, any fire engine. An object with only one use creates attitudes and experiences, with one dimension.

Art and play if not spontaneous and unintentional must inevitably suffer. The artist’s concern is the aesthetic; he comments on life through his art. Any compromise to any ancillary function diminishes the artists first goal. Another dilemma of play art is realism; the literal definition of an animal finds it’s play value quickly exhausted.

population, maps, real estate, averages, homes, statistics, relocation, travel, jobs, hospitals, schools, crime, moving, houses, news, sex offenders

http://www.againstthegrain.org/

We had just gotten back from a trip to the British Isles. Norman thought he was going to have a heart attack and wanted to see Europe before he died. He later found out that it was just anxiety.

Over the course of a nearly four-decade career, Norman Jaffe’s architectural philosophy evolved from sculptural to spiritual.

His early works were characterized by their setting in the landscape. The best of these houses combined the Japanese aesthetic Norman experienced during military service in Japan with the deep inspiration of Wright’s modernist vision.

With the success of these early works came bigger commissions and even more spectacular projects. It was no longer the avant-garde who wanted Jaffe houses, it was those who wanted to be avant-garde. By the 1980′s much of the work became ostentatious (or as noted by Paul Goldberger in his book Houses of the Hamptons, ‘vulgar and bombastic’). Many of these projects were an exercise in ego, as much the client’s as the architect’s.

The increasingly futile attempts to satisfy the neurotic fantasies of the nouveau riche pushed Norman in a new direction. He began studying eastern philosophy and traveled to India several times, immersing himself in a spiritual journey.

When the Jewish Center of the Hamptons announced that it was planning to build a new synagogue, Norman suddenly rediscovered his Judaism and tried to win the commission for the project. This was a critical turning point in his career.

But winning the commission was not so easily done. Every presentation he made to the board was turned down. After all, how could the architect of ego-palaces for the rich possibly design a proper spiritual space?

Desperate to break away from the cycle of unsatisfying residential commissions (which he commonly referred to as ‘pig-outs’), Norman persisted for the better part of two years. Eventually, when he offered to design the building for no fee, the board figured “what have we got to lose?” (best when intoned with a Jewish accent), and awarded him the project.

With the synagogue commission, Norman’s commitment to Judaism deepened. This in no way diminished the Hindu influence; to the contrary, while he found parallels between the two, in the end it was Sai Baba who had the most profound effect upon him.

The synagogue was a transformational experience, revealing to Norman that his true purpose was not to design houses for the wealthy. Starting with Gates of the Grove, Norman began to more seriously consider the philosophical aspects of his work and developed what he called the Five Elements of Architecture.

These elements are space, light, materials, connections and concept. Space is defined by light, which is manipulated and controlled with crafted materials and joined with connections to satisfy a purpose. Any work that did not adequately address all five of these aspects was doomed to failure.

The Five Flements philosophy is closely related to the bushido philosophy immortalized in Miyomoto Musashi’s classicThe Book of Five Rings (Go Rin No Sho), which Norman may have discovered during military service in Japan during the Korean War.

The Five Elements address our interaction with the physical world, and Norman spent years writing about and trying to further develop and explain these concepts.

Norman’s later houses, done after Gates of the Grove, clearly show his lack of interest in – and patience for – the trials and tribulations of residential architecture. The avant-garde film director and jazz musician clients of his early career had given way to morally bankrupt garmentos and mailing list moguls who didn’t understand or deserve what their wealth could do.

The Berrie house is an exception for several reasons. First, the fee enabled Norman to provide substantial funding to ICROSS, his favorite charity, helping justify the work for a higher cause. But just as important was the opportunity to further explore the kind of texture and detail, first realized at Gates of the Grove, that would become more fully developed in his next major project.

Retained as an design consultant on a new commercial building, Norman quickly wrested responsibility for the entire project away from the firm of Emery Roth & Sons, architect for the World Trade Center. The result was565 Fifth Avenue, a building that critic Paul Goldberger called the finest new building in New York, “Frank Lloyd Wright made sleek”.

Pinar & Viola:
You have a great interest for the vernacular, can you explain what it means to you?

Ed Fella:
The vernacular is done with great care imagination and love. It’s done with the endeavor that people have. It’s like the history of two masons, one is lying bricks, the other one is building a cathedral. The vernacular is about how people feel about what they are doing. Human beings decorate themselves, it’s part of our evolution, we started with painting our caves. You can compare it to animals. For sexual attraction they grow beautiful hair.

via

Buster Keaton builds his very own heart & home in “One Week”.

(turn the audio off)

Not all concrete is ugly, hard, cold and difficult to work with. There exists a whole range of light weight concretes “which have a density and compressive strength very similar to wood.They are easy to work with, can be nailed with ordinary nails, cut with a saw, drilled with woodworking tools, easily repaired . We believe that ultra-light weight concrete is one of the most fundamental bulk building materials of the future.” A Pattern Language

Flying Concrete – Structural and Sculptural forms in Light Weight Concrete

Reccomended

142. Definition and Uses. – Lightweight concrete has been used in this country for more than 50 years. Its strength is roughly proportional to its weight and its resistance to weathering is about the same as that of ordinary concrete. As compared with the usual sand and gravel concrete it has certain advantages and disadvantages. Among the former are the savings in structural steel supports and decreased foundation sizes because of decreased loads, and better fire resistance and insulation against heat and sound. Its disadvantages include greater cost (30 to 50 percent), need for more care in placing, greater porosity, and more drying shrinkage.

The principal use of lightweight concrete in Bureau work is in construction of underbeds for floors and roof slabs, where substantial savings can be effected by decreasing dead load. It is also used in some insulated sections of floors and walls.

Lightweight concrete may be obtained through use of lightweight aggregates, as discussed in the following sections, or by special methods of production. These methods include the use of foaming agents, such as aluminum powder, which produces concrete of low unit weight through generation of gas while the concrete is still plastic. Lightweight concrete may weigh from 35 to 115 pounds per cubic foot, depending on the type of lightweight aggregate used or the method of production. In Bureau construction, lightweight concretes have been limited to those whose lightness depends on inorganic aggregates which are light in weight.

143. Types of Lightweight Aggregate. - Lightweight aggregates are produced by expanding clay, shale, slate, diatomaceous shale, perlite, obsidian, and vermiculite through application of heat; by expanding blast-furnace slag through special cooling processes; from natural deposits of pumice, scoria, volcanic cinders, tuff, and diatomite; and from industrial cinders. Lightweight aggregates are sold under various trade names.

(a) Cinders - Cinders used as aggregates are residues from high-temperature combustion of coal or coke in industrial furnaces. Cinders from other sources are not considered suitable. The Underwriters Laboratories limit the average combustible content of mixed fine and coarse cinders for manufacturing precast blocks to not more than 35 percent by weight of the dry, mixed aggregates. Sulfides in the cinders should be less than 0.45 percent and sulfate should be less than 1 percent. Stockpiling of cinders to permit washing away of undesirable sulphur compounds is recommended. Cinders have been used in concrete construction with satisfactory results for more than 50 years. Cinder concrete weighs about 85 pounds per cubic foot, but when natural sand is used to increase workability in monolithic construction the weight is from 110 to 115 pounds per cubic foot.

(b) Expanded Slag - Expanded slag aggregates are produced by treating blast-furnace slag with water. The molten slag is run into pits containing controlled quantities of water or is broken up by mechanical devices and subjected to sprays or streams of water. The products are fragments that have been vesiculated by steam. The amount of water used has a pronounced influence on the products, which may vary over wide ranges in strength and weight. Concrete in which the aggregate is expanded slag only has unit weights ranging from 75 to 110 pounds per cubic foot.

(c) Expanded Shale and Clay - All expanded shale and clay aggregates are made by heating prepared materials to the fusion point where they become soft and expand because of entrapped expanding gases. With the exception of one product made from shale, the raw material is processed to the desired size before it is heated. In some cases the particles are coated with a material of higher fusion point to prevent agglomeration during heating. In general, concrete made with expanded shale or clay aggregates ranges in weight from 90 to 110 pounds per cubic foot.

(d) Natural Aggregate - Pumice, scoria, volcanic cinders, tuff, and diatomite are rocks that are light and strong enough to be used as lightweight aggregate without processing other than crushing and screening to size. Of these, diatomite is the only one which is not of volcanic origin.

Pumice is the most widely used of the natural lightweight aggregates. It is a porous, froth-like volcanic glass which is usually white-gray to yellow in color, but may be red, brown, or even black. It is found in large beds in the Western United States and is produced as a lightweight aggregate in several States, among which are California, Oregon, and New Mexico. Concrete made with sound pumice aggregate weighs from 90 to 100 pounds per cubic foot. Structurally weak pumice having high absorption characteristics may be improved in quality by calcining at temperatures near the point of fusion.

Scoria is a vesicular glassy volcanic rock. Deposits are found in New Mexico, Idaho, and other Western States. Scoria resembles industrial cinders and is usually red to black in color. Very satisfactory lightweight concrete, weighing from 90 to 110 pounds per cubic foot, can be made from scoria.

When obsidian is heated to the temperature of fusion, gases are released which expand the material. The interiors of the expanded particles are vesicular and the surfaces are smooth and quite impervious. Expanded obsidian has been produced experimentally. The raw material was crushed and screened to size and coated with a fine material of higher melting point to prevent agglomeration.

The rock from which perlite lightweight aggregate is manufactured has a structure resembling tiny pearls compacted and bound together. When perlite is heated quickly it expands with disruptive force and breaks into small expanded particles. Usually, expanded perlite is produced only in the sand sizes. Concrete made with expanded perlite has a unit weight ranging from 50 to 80 pounds per cubic foot. It is a very good insulating material.

Vermiculite is an alteration product of biotite and other micas. It is found in California, Colorado, Montana, and North and South Carolina. The color is yellowish to brown. On calcination, vermiculite expands at right angles to the cleavage and becomes a fluffy mass, the volume of which is as much as 30 times that of the material before heating. It is a very good insulating material and is used extensively for that purpose. Concrete made with expanded vermiculite aggregate weighs from 35 to 75 pounds per cubic foot; the strengths range from 50 to 600 pounds per square inch.

144. Properties of Lightweight Aggregates - Properties of various lightweight aggregates, as reflected by those of the resulting concrete, vary greatly. For example, the strength of concrete made with expanded shale and clay is relatively high and compares favorably with that of ordinary concrete. Pumice, scoria, and some expanded slags produce a concrete of intermediate strength; perlite, vermiculite, and diatomite produce a concrete of very low strength.

The insulation properties of the low-strength concretes, however, are better than those of the heavier, stronger concretes. The insulation value of the heaviest material (crushed shale and clay concrete) is about four times that of ordinary concrete.

All the lightweight aggregates, with the exception of expanded shales and clays and scoria, produce concretes subject to high shrinkage. Most of the lightweight concretes have better nailing and sawing properties than do the heavier and stronger conventional concretes. (For information on “nailing concrete, see part B of this chapter.) However, nails, although easily driven, fail to hold in some of these lighter concretes.

145. Construction Control of Lightweight Concrete. – Commercially available lightweight aggregate is usually supplied in three principal sizes depending upon its application. These are fine, medium, and coarse and range in size to ¾-inch maximum. Production of uniform concrete with lightweight aggregate involves all the procedures and precautions that have been discussed elsewhere in this manual in connection with ordinary concrete. However, the problem is more difficult where lightweight aggregates are used because of greater variations in absorption, specific gravity, moisture content, and amount and grading of undersize. If unit weight and slump tests are made frequently and the cement and water content of the mix are adjusted as necessary to compensate for variations in the aggregate properties and condition, reasonably uniform results can be obtained.

Concretes made with many of the lightweight aggregates are difficult to place and finish because of the porosity and angularity of the aggregates. In some of these mixes the cement mortar may separate from the aggregate and the aggregate float toward the surface. When this occurs, the condition can generally be improved by adjusting the grading of the aggregates. This can be done by crushing the larger particles, adding natural sand, or adding filler materials. The placeability can also be improved by adding an air-entraining agent. The amount of fines to be used is governed by the richness of the mix; as the sand content is increased, the optimum amount of fines is reached when the concrete no longer appears harsh at the selected air content. From 4 to 6 percent air is best for adequate workability, and the slump should not exceed 6 inches.

To insure material of uniform moisture content at the mixer, lightweight aggregate should be wetted 24 hours before use. This wetting will also reduce segregation during stockpiling and transportation. Dry lightweight aggregate should not be fed into the mixer; although this will produce a concrete which can be readily placed immediately after being discharged, continuing absorption by the aggregate will cause the concrete to segregate and stiffen before placement is completed.

It is generally necessary to mix lightweight concrete for longer periods than conventional concrete to assure proper mixing. Workability of lightweight concrete with the same slump as conventional concrete may vary more widely because of differences in type, porosity, specific gravity, etc., of the materials. For the same reason, the amount of air-entraining agent required to produce a certain amount of air may also vary widely Continuous water curing, by covering with damp sand or use of a soil- soaker hose, is particularly advantageous where concrete is made with lightweight aggregate.