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"slow" Tag


The chair as a subject of slow thought


Saturday, March 28, 2015

This is how I remember my grandfather’s chair. I remember how I used to watch him sit on it. Or, sit in it. The chair was big and my grandfather had then already begun to become tiny. It was as though this chair, with its plumpness, its doubtful green color and its leather cushions pushing into skin, offered him an escape.

Since then I’ve never seen anyone sit and disappear like him.
Maybe people don’t have the time.
Maybe people don’t have the space.
Maybe people don’t have the guts.

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Human beings are standing beings; our muscles are constantly at work to keep us up, while gravity is constantly pulling us down. Keeping this in mind, sitting seems to be merely a way to discharge these muscles, to compensate for the unnatural posture that is ours as a result of evolution.
It is compensation that shows that even though we’re trying (as we are developing new techniques and exploring new ways of enhancement every day) we have not reached the state of super human yet. We are still in some state where we possess human intelligence, but are trapped in our animal bodies.
To sit is to accept this animal body.

– or is it?

It is easy to speak of only physical aspects in regard to sitting. However, as both the brain and the rest of our body are part of the same nervous system, there is of course a connection between our mind and body; these two influence each other every second of every day.
Having the object ‘chair’ as a framework, I’m interested in how this chair can, being a  specific physical condition, extort or stimulate a specific mental condition. A desk-chair for instance has another mental state as a purpose than a dining chair; there is concentration on the one hand and relaxation on the other.

 

To explore this, I’ve been sketching chairs I come across lately. By doing so, I aimed to assemble a variety of chairs, carrying a variety of different appearances, to see what the similarities are.

mrs-fast-chairs

As it turns out, the designs of these chairs share quite some similarities (even though the chairs don’t all share the same purpose). You can see that none of them have armrests, for instance. Partly due to this, none of them seem to be ‘heavy’. All of them are quite small and all fitted in the place where I encountered them.

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I feel like these daily chairs, that I will refer to as fast-chairs, trigger two reactions in us;

Firstly, awareness of one’s surroundings: these chairs are in a way elongations of what is already there, instead of autonomous objects. This stimulates a way of living in which one is always cautiously aware of what is happening around him, and therefore less aware of what is happening within himself. Society tends to distract us from ourselves. As we are being placed in groups everywhere and also forced to function within these groups, we are reminded that it is these surroundings that matter; it is the society around you that you should play your part in.

Secondly, these fast-chairs stimulate fast-thinking: the lack of armrests, the light feel; all of these elements make that these chairs are only shortly used. As we rush through the day, we accept the world we live in and try to give the right answers to it. Who still dares to propose deliberate questions, though? Who still dares to sit alone, and be consumed by existential thoughts? Who still dares to disappear, like my grandfather would?

Considering the second thought, it is interesting to refer to Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist whose book ‘Thinking, fast and slow’, was published in 2011.
In his book, Kahneman distinguishes two systems of thought: “System 1” is fast, instinctive, stereotypical and emotional; “System 2” is slower, more deliberative, more calculating and more logical. System 1 is much more frequently used than System 2, explains Kahneman in the following interview:


As Kahneman distinguishes these models of thinking, you could also distinguish two types of chairs. Type 1 is the fast-chair I mentioned earlier and Type 2 is the slow-chair ; the type of which there are less and less to be seen in our daily routine. This I consider as a scary thing, since the level of critical, individual thinking might follow the way down.

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It’s in my grandfather’s living room where you can find the slow-chair. Sitting in his chair caused for him the seemingly paradoxical situation where while surrendering his physical control, he gained mental control. Because of its physicallities (pointing towards the plumpness I talked about before), this chair was something autonomous:

It didn’t need my grandfather to sit in it to exist, my grandfather needed this chair to exist.

 

(more…)

#wow


Sunday, April 6, 2014

#interesting #easytofollow #slowfashion #slowcouture #painted #fashioncollective #processing #newfashionideology #slower #sublimitedfashion #wellwritten #spendingtime #takingtime #doingnothing #importantnothing #reflecting #understandable #makingbyhand #inspiring #bulgarianneedlepoint #timeisgold #nomultitasking #notime #forgottentechniques #hybridfashion #meditation #japanisetradition #repairclothes #workshop #brokenclothes #makingnew #startingagain #somethingdifferent #notcategorizing #ontheedgeoffashion #nocatwalk #nocollections #notrends #work #constantchange #fragility #history #inprocess #manydesigners #garmentgrows #noplans #collaborativefashion #story #handmade #value #questioningmoney #timeinvestment #imformative #links #endwithmusic #personalexperience #balanced #explained #2013 #research

#rediscover

#fashionwithagoldtread

 

knitting machine


Saturday, January 28, 2012

 
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4chUCehdbY&feature=related

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Get the Flash Player to see this content.

 
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQMtBBnMi_g

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Invisible Expression


Friday, January 27, 2012

Why do we build walls, roofs, doors? The same reason we build fires, run air conditioners, blow fans, humidifiers and de-humidifiers: to define and bend the atmosphere to our will. Once it is contained within walls, we change our atmosphere to the conditions we find to be the most pleasing, the most conducive to our continued growth & existence. In a cold place, the walls protect us from certain death at the hands of the wind & the freezing air. But what does the house do but capture the frozen air all around & tame it, domesticate it, as one would a wild animal, with constant care & attention? Human survival nearly everywhere on earth depends on this task.

Keeping air is like keeping the sea–it is all flow and energy, and everything we do to one part of it affects it all, creates a wave of reaction, for air resembles water in its motion: its currents and waves are wind, its warmth and chill move atom by atom up or down, each molecule making way for another as the others make way for it. How do we learn to use the qualities of this substance to our advantage, instead of treating it as something that happens to be there, an inconvenience, a battle to be fought with radiators and air conditioners? We know that this void is no void but a thin liquid in which we swim. Inside and outside, this air-thing called “climate” has finally found a place in the modern imagination, something that has its own identity, something that changes, that must be “saved”, and now that we recognize it, it is necessary to take it into consideration as we continue to build, as we continue to exist and grow.
 
Philippe Rahm is in some sense an activist for the interior climate, for finding an integrated way to use and not waste the nature of air and to revolutionize the way that we would constrain and encourage its flow with architecture. His focus is not the efficiency of the building for ‘the greater good’, however; he redefines how interior space is conceptualized in order to create a new language of architecture, one that can be equally bent to the need of function, efficiency and art.
 

 
His “Digestible Gulf Stream”, a series of projects begun as an installation for the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale, is a prime example of this language in use. As opposed to heating or cooling the different spaces in the structure to the optimal temperature for their use (warmer in the bathroom and living room, cooler in the stairways and bedroom), he uses the principles of thermodynamics to create a convection current that is perpetually cycling, aided by the structure of the space and two radiators that are set at a difference of 16 degrees Celsius. The function of the different areas of the house is thus prescribed by their place in this current as much as by their trappings.  This is not a new idea, of course, but what is new (at least to this writer) iis the sense that there is a continuity, instead of merely a radiating outward of heat, from cold to warm, or vice versa.

This cyclic flow of air and energy implies an efficiency that is currently being used in sustainable architecture (as well as many traditional types of architecture that are not reliant on central heating and cooling), but with the sun as the warming influence and the shaded area to the north of a building as the cooling influence. The Earthship design concept has been around since the 1970s, and other practices in sustainable architecture and living–using recycled and recyclable materials and determining the form of the building by how to best use the natural forces available in the area, among many others–have been being implemented for millennia. In the industrialized world, however, these considerations have mostly only used as guiding architectural forces by the “hippie” community, but in a very practical way they speak to the same concerns and techniques that Mr. Rahm uses to an expressive end. They both assert the necessity of involving the atmosphere that we capture in our houses in the architecture, involving the living with the rules and patterns of the natural world instead of attempting to deny or fight them.

The concept that nature is a force opposite to the interests of humankind is, to all modern sensibilities, a very dated idea. It is an idea brought on by the industrial revolution, colonialism, an us-vs.-them mentality, one that as the world progresses past fossil fuels, past the ‘civilized man civilizing the savage’, past the need to explore (read: conquer) the unknown and remake it in our own image, we find of less and less value. To see the world as irrevocably “other” is to assume that we are not connected to it, that it is in some sense infinite, & time and technology have taught us that the world is a much smaller place than we think. We must throw our lot in with the trees and the fishes & all the other peoples of the world, because we are all connected and it will be a delicate balance that we strike, if we can strike it at all.

This emphatic need is being recognized in modern architecture and design, characterized by the so-called “green” movements of Slow Design (in the image of Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food movement) and sustainable architecture. Again, though, much of this design is based on a desire to make something that works in the best way, the most efficiently or the most cleanly. Philippe Rahm, although first an architect, is among those who recognize this need as an opportunity to create a new and subtle artistic medium, the chance to bend the very air around us to the task of expressing the human experience.
 

slowMe: tagging slow design part 1


Monday, May 4, 2009

Wonder where all the tagging started?……….

It was the 5th of February when we started a project moderated by Carolyn F. Strauss, designer, curator and founding director of slowLab. Together with the students of the FoundationYear’s D group she lectured and set of an investigation into slowdesign and related designers and artists. True to the principle of personal connection we started with a quick mapping of ourselves and our working process as designers and artists in relation to “slow” as a subject. Mapping to find keywords for processes and experiences that make up our conditions and inspiration for behaving and performing, to visualize that flow and determine specific tags to describe it. How do these tags symbolize slowness in our work and working process.
Ask yourself the question “slowMe”?
The results became clear instantly through a series of “slowMe” postings

read also: tagging slowdesign part 2


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