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Thursday, September 15, 2016

650-ANDREEA_PETERFI_ANNELAKEMAN

Umberto Eco in his Six Walks in The Fictional Woods is referring to the idea of an optical illusion, for explaining how we are perceiving the fictional novels. Throughout his essay we are being shown, several illustrations with which he is visualizing the concept behind his es- say. Although it is not a children’s book, he is adding the illustration for the means of having a common understanding on the topic he is referring to and the concepts he is presenting.
While in children’s books, unfortunately, the freedom of the child using his fantasy is taken away, by – and thus imposing the fantasy of – one or more grownups, directing them in what they must see and understand as to have a common memory. I will come back on this subject later.
In Eco’s book though it is necessary to have the same understanding of the concept he is proposing. He is pointing his finger, saying “this is what I mean and not other”. Being able to maintain a certain common understanding, while using words, either in speech or writing is very difficult, as De Certeau is pointing it out in The Practice of Everyday Life:

“The readable transforms itself into the memorable: Barthes reads Proust in Stendhal’s text; the viewer reads the landscape of his childhood in the evening news.”

 

650-ANDREEA_PETERFI_ANNELAKEMAN-2

Simply because we have agreed that, say: cup is a cup it does not mean that we are talking about the same subject/object. Each of us are having a specific memory of the word, being related to either the time we have learned it first, space, surrounding, atmosphere, mate- rial, color, size or form, are additions to the experience we are relating the word to.
When we say the word cup we refer to all the cups from everyone’s memory, and to the only one cup we relate to personally, all the cups we have happened to see, and even the ones we do not yet know about.
Here I will make a short parenthesis for coming back to what I have said above, about the common memory of the children, whom have shared the same book in the past. Clearly there are a few objects in each generation (related to time) or cultures (related to place) we can think of, that are bringing a sudden nostalgia. Referring to one of these objects from our common memory, has the power to affirm and acknowledge the ground where one that stands facing the others. Thus sharing a specific memory of a specific object can be decisive for taking or not part of the group.

650-ANDREEA_PETERFI_ANNELAKEMAN-3

Once this idea is settled there is no need for other words to explain ourselves. We now can trust each others understanding on a number of other discussions, that we do have similar experiences.
Let’s take the 90’s generation as example. We might have experienced objects as Tamaqotchi, Nokia Querty, Pokemon and Dexter’s laboratory even though we come from all different countries and cultures. Recently I have participated in a some similar talks in a few different settings about Tamaqochi. It seems that somehow the memory of this object, keeps reoccurring. There are exactly a few specific answers to the question: “Oh! And do you remember Tamagotchi?!” that represent the object at it’s best and everyone understand their meaning.With or without the additional –
annoyed : “Oooh! Noooo, please….(it was such a stupid game, it would always die during the class)” .
and the enthusiastic : “Yes Yes! (I actually had a few)!”.
Whether one remembers more the annoyance or the pleasure, in the end both sides know exactly what it all meant or felt like. Thus trough sharing a common reference point they are becoming ‘a group’. They can now feel closer by the fact that they have shared a common/similar experience. Trough sharing a common experience the ‘other’ becomes ‘we’. While the ones that did not share the experience have a harder time to relate to the word and the meaning it carries with it.
This of course is a simplistic example and as such I am here not discussing the importance of sharing the idea of the Tamagotchi persé as an object/name, or as an experience, but replace it with something of a bigger importance – and that is where we, although having developed language to be able to transmit thoughts, can not get over the struggles of truthfully understanding their meaning and in some cases we overlook their importance by not being able to relate to other people’s experiences only trough words.

 

Cover_shaded download this thesis by Andreea Peterfi
all rights to this thesis are property of the author © 2016

 

center expansion


Friday, May 15, 2015

i was interested in the term “meta-modernism” that i had been reading about, so when we got this assignment i decided that i wanted to focus on that topic.
i found an artist named Jonas Staal that works in a meta-modernistic way.
before my meeting with Jonas i made some research about his work, and when we met we went straight into discussing his works.
he had one work about a new prison model, a thesis by the leader of the Freedom Party MP, Fleur Agema.
(book is called Art, Property of Politics III: Closed Architecture if you want to read more. you can download the publication with this : link)

this publication became a starting point for me, as i was inspired to change/improve/alternative solution of an existing structure.
i decided that i wanted to “minimize” the gap between the suburbs and the city center, a topic that have been very discussed in Swedish media lately.
to enter this topic, I felt that starting with something I already know would be a good starting point. to this took me back to Sweden, mainly in Gothenburg.
i tried to find out what have been done/tried to be done, to “solve” it.
there were a lot of different approaches.
i am going to mention some of them briefly:

–       back in 1985ties if you were a Swedish citizen and moved to the suburbs, you got 15% of your rent.
–       some apartment buildings had rules, that X apartment is only for Swedish citizens, in apartment Y you can only live if you are a non-Swedish citizen, and in apartment Z you can only live if you are over 50.
–       a large number of high schools have been built outside the city center, to send people outside of the center.
–       building large shopping-malls with a number of exclusive stores that can not be found anywhere else in Gothenburg.
–       building villa-neighborhoods and schools for kids age 6-12.

with this knowledge in my mind, I started sketching up a city plan, as you can see below.
citylayout

 

hus5

 

my idea behind this plan is based on what have been tried before. but how come those plans did not work?
why do I go out of the city center?
with these questions in my mind, i decided to make a construction plan where student housing/cheap housing, is built around a galleria with some exclusive stores.
when i leave the center it is because i am going to visit someone or if i need to go to a specific place to buy something.
the area i decided was a place where it was possible to make fast collective traffic and effective bike lanes into the center and out to the neighborhood.
instead of creating a new area, how can i expand the already existing center?
here are some try-outs where i try to add to already existing buildings:

 

hustry12345SvampHus

 

designhusgrej

 

HusRiktigtExampel_1100

 

with the try outs above, i tried to use the space that would not take up space on the ground but still expand the construction of the building.
in the last picture, i was trying to work with two buildings and a piece to connect them, that made made me think of Tetris, and my work took another direction.
into something you can always keep adding as long as you have the right pieces.

 

tetris3   tetris5

 

tetris4

 

TetrisIRL TetrisIRL3

 

UnDeR My Own COnstRUCtIOn OF RUIns


Monday, January 20, 2014

 

while wandering around the city center I become an observer….

 

ruin_image_5

 

sPACes considered to be MOnUMents turning out to be RUIns in the FRAGMents of my MeMORIes.

 

ruin_image_10

 

what I mean is a …

RUIN

– that what happens to the image from the moment of first gaze
– is in- between
– although beeing a man made it seems to be a gift of nature
– a law of nature that all things must fall into
– is to pass from perfect state into a state of imperfection
– it is a remnant of a future
– a souvenir -and souvenir as a suggested memory
– solitary presence whose reasons we understand less and less

 

ruin_image_15

 

Figuring out or misusing a building is an interesting way of defining an architecture for ourselves, and that becomes possible with ruins I am talking about.
Where is a ruin there must exist a natural force which created it. Like buildings which were here before us and lived lives of previous generations, survived repetitive demolition of past dreams of future. sometimes trying to reconstruct from old is just a human inabil- ity to adapt to the new conditions and a fear of letting go. Visually I don’t see a ruin as an old architecture not being able to keep up with the shape which it was designed for. I see it as a transition from design back into nature.

text by Denisa Kollarova [graduate student department of Graphic Design 2013] : the images above are random compositions of the folds and flaps that construct or decapitate the pages of a limited Cyclostyled publication of the essay : more Denisa Kollarova

Screen shot 2014-01-20 at 2.36.21 PM Download this thesis [44Mb]

Cyberflânerie


Tuesday, January 14, 2014

The thesis of Olya Troitskaya “Virtual walking” studies a gesture of strolling in physical and cyberspace.

It looks into the history of a “deliberate walk”, starting from the concept of the flâneur developed by Charles Baudlaire, its degradation by capitalism into the figure of the shopper, its later radical political update coming with the concept of the “dérive”, its development through a notion of “Psychogeography” with Guy Debord and Situationist International and its popularity later in 1990s in artistic and academic circles, building up psychogeographical praxis in various ways.

Physiologie_du_flaneur
Louis Adrien Huart / Physiologie du flâneur

Further the thesis draws a parallel between these historical processes happening in the real space to the ones taking place in the cyberspace.
With the development of capitalism flânerie becomes increasingly restricted. Is it possible that Cyberspace, that can be looked at as an update of a personal, bodily and architectural space, would become a more popular place for flânerie?
If in the 1990s “cyberflânerie” is associated with a free “strolling through information space, taking in the virtual architecture and remaining anonymous”(1), then in 2000s it doesn’t seemed such an intriguing activity as in the early days of the Web.

The processes happening to the internet in 2000s can be considered similar to ones happening in 19th century Paris, lead to the change of its original, playful identity.

live-rmb-city-1
Cao Fei / China Tracy, 'Live in RMB City'(2009) Video
: Courtesy of Artist and Vitamin Creative Space

Various artistic practices are being developed around a cyber stroll. Will they react to the changes happening to the figure of cyberflâneur and challenge its appropriation by capitalism, similar to Debor’s challenging capitalism’s hold over the city? (x) http://www.ceramicstoday.com/articles/051998.htm, last accessed: 06.09.2013

What is the future of the cyberflâneur? Is it possible to learn from Situationist’s example? Where to look for the “dérive” in cyberspace?

text by Olya Troitskaya [graduate student department of Graphic Design 2013] : more www.olyatroitskaya.com

 

Pdf-icon Download this thesis ”Virtual Walking“

 

Random


Tuesday, December 8, 2009

The people on the cover of this book were the main reason that I chose this final book for the posting. On the front cover there is a group of people wearing the same outfit: English police uniforms. Even though everyone is dressed in the same uniform everyone is different from each other. This made make me think immediately about the tags which I was focused on in the previous posts namely: nomadic, reality, and city. After opening the book I saw even more faces of random people inside. It is not clear whether they are all from the same city and whether these people are traveling at first sight. It does not matter to me who these people are, and what they do, what interests me is the fact that this book is all about people.

Book nr: 12958

City Signs


Thursday, November 12, 2009

Walking through the library with a specific direction in mind (the tagword signs) my eyes crossed a book with the title ‘City Signs and Lights’. It is a book printed in the seventies and it has a silvershining cover with a lot of black ink printed over it. The book contains a study in city signs and lights. The interesting thing about this book for me is that it shows the paradox I discribed in my last post. And it contains a lot of examples where signs could get confusing.

One solution I really liked was where the writer (Stephen Carr) tried to untie a traffic knot. What he sugested was marking all the different directions by giving them their own color and repeat this in the direction signs, and give each section of the road the right colour wich lead you to the place where you wanted to be.

754.5 -carr-

All about people


Monday, November 9, 2009
  • The first reason I chose the book New York nomadic design, was its title. Recently I visited New York and I thought that the book could complement the information about US design and art that I had gained from the recent trip. The book is the size of an average magazine, and is not too thick either. The cover has a metallic grey cover with a map of New York printed all over the cover. In addition there are four small images that are very different from each other. After a couple of introductory pages, I found that every single page contains three or four pictures with very little text. Those pages as well as on the cover show extremely different things, from a tent made on the street by homeless people to glossy slick furniture. I can appreciate the approach taken by the writer which is giving a real feel for the city.

Rietveld Academie Library No:9788425216213


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