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Writing Response
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References
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1. Conditional Design Workbook (2013)
Andrew Blauvelt, Luna Maurer, Edo Paulus, Jonathan Puckey & Roel Wouters
Amsterdam: Valiz (Excerpt pp. ii–xiv)
Conditional Design Manifesto (process, logic, input), page ii
As soon as Ong arrived in Zhiango it was patently obvious that the situation had become impossible. The city needed rules. But while the average administrator had cleaned up the slums and replaced them with a rigid centrally directed structure, Ong came up with a creative solution. A few years earlier he had taken part in a conditional design workshop during an international cultural exchange. During that session, led by the artist-designers Luna Maurer and Edo Paulus, the participants had made—or rather, generated—drawings on big AO sheets. The most fantastic patterns were generated on the basis of simple rules such as 'choose the longest side of an existing triangle and add a triangle to it'. Ong had been very inspired at the sight of how a few simple rules could lead to unpredictable, layered, complex structures. All the participants had been given a book at the end of the workshop, and he still leafed through it now and then. He came across the book again during the move from Beijing to Zhiango. He remembered the wonderful, complex bubble structure that he and his fellow participants had generated during the workshop. Ong wondered whether what they had done on a sheet of paper could be transferred to his new city. And he got down to work.(page vii)
Type of relationship
Process – method of investigation
The patterns were generated on the basis of simple rules/ restrictions
1. the moves while the scanning process were according to the shapes of the carpet design
One of the main advantages of the urban development based on conditional design was that it could be kept in continuous movement. The city should be seen not as a design but as a process in which time, mutual relations and change were the primary factors. (page viii)
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2. What do pictures want? (2005)
What Do Pictures Want: The Lives and Loves of Images
W.J.T. Mitchel
Chicago: University of Chicago Press (pp. 28–56)
The dominant questions about pictures in recent literature about visual culture and art history have been interpretive and rhetorical. We want to know what pictures mean and what they do: how they communicate as signs and symbols, what sort of power they have to effect human emotions and behavior. When the question of desire is raised, it is usually located in the producers or consumers of images, with the picture treated as an expression of the artist's desire or as a mechanism for eliciting the desires of the beholder.(page 28)
Type of relationship
Form – related in structure
Theme – related in its subject
Pictures are things that have been marked with all the stigmata of personhood and animation: they exhibit both physical and virtual bodies; they speak to us, sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively; or they look back at us silently across a "gulf unbridged by language.." They present not just a surface but a face that faces the beholder. While Marx and Freud both treat the personified, subjectified, animated object with deep suspicion, subjecting their respective fetishes to iconoclastic critique, much of their energy is spent in detailing the processes by which the life of objects is produced in human experience.(page 30)
The idea that images have a kind of social or psychological power of their own is, in fact, the reigning cliché of contemporary visual culture.(page 31)
In any event, it may be time to rein in our notions of the political stakes in a critique of visual culture, and to scale down the rhetoric of the "power of images:' Images are certainly not powerless, but they may be a lot weaker than we think. The problem is to refine and complicate our estimate of their power and the way it works. That is why I shift the question from what pictures do to what they want, from power to desire, from the model of the dominant power to be opposed, to the model of the subaltern to be inter-rogated or (better) to be invited to speak If the power of images is like the power of the weak, that may be why their desire is correspondingly strong: to make up for their actual impotence. We as critics may want pictures to be stronger than they actually are in order to give ourselves a sense of power in opposing, exposing, or praising them.(pages 33-4)
What pictures want from us, what we have failed to give them, is an idea ofvisuality adequate to their ontology. Contemporary discussions of visual culture often seem distracted by a rhetoric of innovation and moderniza-tion. They want to update art history by playing catch-up with the text-based disciplines and with the study of film and mass culture. They want to erase the distinctions between high and low culture and transform "the history of art into the history of images." They want to "break" with art his-tory's supposed reliance on naive notions of "resemblance or mimesis," the superstitious "natural attitudes" toward pictures that seem so difficult to stamp out. They appeal to "semiotic" or "discursive" models of images that will reveal them as projections of ideology, technologies of domina-tion to be resisted by clear-sighted critique. It's not so much that this idea of visual culture is wrong or fruitless. On the contrary, it has produced a remarkable transformation in the sleepy confines of academic art history. But is that all we want? Or (more to the point) is that all that pictures want? The most far-reaching shift signaled by the search for an adequate concept of visual culture is its emphasis on the social field of the visual, the everyday processes of looking at others and be-ing looked at. This complex field of visual reciprocity is not merely a by-product of social reality but actively constitutive of it. Vision is as impor-tant as language in mediating social relations, and it is not reducible to language, to the "sign," or to discourse. Pictures want equal rights with lan-guage, not to be turned into language. They want neither to be leveled into a "history of images" nor elevated into a "history of art," but to be seen as complex individuals occupying multiple subject positions and identities. They want a hermeneutic that would return to the opening gesture of art historian Erwin Panofsky's iconology, before Panofsky elaborates his method of interpretation and compares the initial encounter with a picture to a meeting with "an acquaintance" who "greets me on the street by re-moving his hat." What pictures want, then, is not to be interpreted, decoded, worshipped, smashed, exposed, or demystified by their beholders, or to enthrall their beholders. They may not even want to be granted subjectivity or person-hood by well-meaning commentators who think that humanness is the greatest compliment they could pay to pictures. The desires of pictures may be inhuman or nonhuman, better modeled by figures of animals, ma-chines, or cyborgs, or by even more basic images—what Erasmus Darwin called "the loves of plants." What pictures want in the last instance, then, is simply to be asked what they want, with the understanding that the answer may well be, nothing at all. (pages 47-48)
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3. Invisible Cities (2013)
Italo Calvino
Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Company
The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things. (pages 13-14)
Type of relationship
Process – method of investigation