Book of Questions
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>on the net, as a wallpaper, in a book
by r a k e t a and invited contributors

Is this really a book of questions? Is this how we started? Why, when we are asked a question, do we expect an answer? Can we not put this off? Did I ask you whether you had read Edmond Jabes? And if you had, would it have made any difference? Am I supposed to avoid the enigma that this invites? If I could have asked more questions would this help us understand Israel, Iraq, Botkyrka, Tensta, Karachi and Kabul? Do you remember why we began with questions at all? When did I come across Georges Perec’s ‘Some of the Things I Really Must Do Before I Die’? Was asking 38 questions one of them? And why did he stop at 37? Did I expect answers? Why did no one answer these questions then? How do we continually manage to walk past the catastrophe of ignorance without looking? Why did you ask me to come back to Stockholm and all those other difficult people only to open my mouth again? Tell me, did you know who stole the ‘ibook’ from the exhibition in Central Stockholm? Did we really expect the metal strap to prevent theft? Why did we not then locate it on the ceiling? And if you know the one who stole it, could you ask them whether - when they see police coming – they too walk on the other side of the road? After all, what is the rear-view mirror for if not to look forwards? And why – just at this moment - is the motorist passing us flashing their lights? What lies up ahead that we don’t know, that we don’t want to know? Could it be that we need to go to places that frighten us rather than places than comfort us? Might this be a book that lives in the space between the question and the answer that might come at any moment? Could this be a book that you pick up in a railway station kiosk and think nothing of? To think nothing of it, would that be such a good idea? What if we could defer answers to questions until at least part of our ignorance is answered?

r a k e t a with Roger Connah

When the screen
ceases to exist

Life behind the Screen 38 Questions from the Hip

36 why?
37 how?
38 art? architecture?

Roger Connah

...

I’d like to enter rooms that are dissolved but still there. Where I can become fully immersed – and become absorbed in the surroundings and feel the flow.

I’d like to enter rooms where two people can become absorbed in each other, see each other, feel a higher level of presence, where their identities can dissolve, where they can become one with each other.

I’d like to enter rooms where emotionally flexible situations have been used as working material, rooms where emotionally flexible unforeseen forms can be the result.

I’d like to enter rooms where there is silence and staying.

I’d like to enter rooms where cloth can be hard as rock, rock as soft as cloth.

I’d like to enter rooms where barely perceptible distortions make me more aware of the surroundings.

I’d like to enter rooms that create a sense of here and now, and help me look upon myself and others with new eyes.

I’d like to enter rooms without visible boundaries, but where I still feel the room strongly.

I’d like to enter rooms where future technology is integrated with the space, like a sensation, something that answers to and communicates with our physical and psychological states, something imperceptible, and yet at once controllable and interpreting.

Where can I find these rooms?

Many years ago I read a book called Rough Male, about a man forced to hide in order to survive. He begins hiding in nature, he becomes one with nature. He is immersed in it, like an animal, sensing the slightest move around him. Later, when he hides in a city, the same transformation sets in. He is fully immersed in the city. He looks, observes, but he is not seen, he does not participate. He is fully immersed in his surroundings.

The situationists spoke about something similar, about moving around in a ‘continuous drift’, experiencing the city without stable points, without a safe haven. Safety could only be found in finding oneself. One of the front figures in the situationist movement was Debord, who stated that ‘Within architecture itself the taste for the drift tends to promote all sorts of new forms of labyrinths made possible by modern techniques of production’.

These two states of minds have always fascinated me - to be fully immersed in ones surroundings and moving about in a ‘continuous drift’.

Where can I find these rooms?

By continuing working with architecture on the computer?

Since the digital world is experienced as a transgression of boundaries and displacement of dimensions, it can be an arena for fantasy worlds/rooms. The body can assume other identities and we can experience a less fettered sense of body and motion.

In the digital world, we may step out of ourselves, test and study ourselves from perspectives yet untried. Our identity is experienced as variable, just as the space enclosing us is variable.
Our body expands and dissolves, we can be in many different places at once. There are different temporal spaces, wherein time can travel with the speed of light or come to a complete standstill.

We are given the opportunity to act without restraint in relation to scale and materials. We feel as if we could navigate without boundaries.

Our experiences of the digital world begin to affect our experience of the physical world.

The concept of space is expanded, problematised, and redefined quickly in the information society, perhaps to quickly for us to keep up with. Physical placelessness increases with the development of the information society, likely to affect our sense of space profoundly.

The information society is a cognitive revolution. But how much, and in what ways does it affect our view of the world, of ourselves, of architecture, of the spaces around us, within us? What are the spaces of the future, digital as well as physical?

How can we use this experience when creating physical rooms? And can it help expanding our experience of architecture, and help us to feel a higher level of presence? To creating the rooms mentioned above?

We are used to thinking how physical rooms can affect the virtual ones – we may need to think the other way around!

What does that mean?

Why?

How?

Camilla Schlyter Gezelius

Thinking about space

What is a public space when it is marked by assorted territories: buildings, art, streets, traffic lights, advertising and sound? Is it a common place where everyone is of equal worth and capable of profiting..?

Can people meet without feeling violated by the meeting? Is there a formula to give everyone equal significance? Can one say that it’s an interpersonal problem, or does the problem or solution exist on an intra-personal level?

Co-operation ought to be the password, oh yes. Where does one begin when words easily become meaningless, used for anything as long as they sound positive? In one sense the word co-operation becomes frightening. What does common behaviour sound like?

Like a dictatorship where people have but one opinion and, elected or enforced, all development proceeds from a central agency for the good of man. Co-operation or interaction implies a structure more attuned to the individual, but in which every person contributes something to the whole, creating a society built upon humanistic values.

A problem that democratic societies face is that man does not have to use his instincts for survival. The motive for survival is substituted for something else; its definition depends upon the ideology assumed.

When one reads about someone who has survived oppression with soul intact, they’ve often concentrated upon a creative thought and/or act.

Companies try to create solidarity in the work-group by assorted survival courses, where a sense of death-anguish is used to rouse survival instincts. In combination with the group having to solve different tasks, this easily creates an unpleasant yet safe environment for the participants.
Surviving in the forest is uncomplicated, although the environment makes it difficult to achieve a balanced intake of carbohydrates, proteins and vitamins. That is good because it forces you to think about what you eat.

Naturally it is not easy to function and think when you’re running on low levels of energy, but it does not create a need to suddenly start eating weeds or something similar. Why survival courses are held in the forest I don’t know, seeing that most people live in cities.

We should create survival courses exclusively for urbanized areas. Suppose something happens, a catastrophe of some sort, the infrastructure is destroyed within a few hours and with it the community’s ability to activate rescue actions. After a couple of days a lot of the food in the city starts to go bad.

You become empty of carbohydrates, your judgment becomes foggy and you start eating bad food because it is easily found. Within a few days a number of persons will become ill with food poisoning, sometimes with lethal outcome due to a poor general condition.

My theory: in a catastrophe it is complicated to function in the type of city environment in which we are used to take everything for granted. This means we have never really considered how to relate to the city in a catastrophic situation, when our survival is threatened.

A survival course like this could increase creativity in society and generate new thoughts in the individual about one’s relation to the group, and ways of understanding. It could displace the way we think, which is important if we are to find new solutions in very well-known surroundings like our cities.

Magnus Wassborg

...

Håkan Lundström is my name and I live in Vittangi. These have been my name and my home for slightly more than half a century. Sometimes I shoot films out here in the woods. In the woods there are animals, so they end up being pictured. Once I filmed the Vuosku-bear, named so because it lives in Vuosku Mountain. At least that’s where it sometimes lives. You pronounce it like this: Voo-oscoe Bear, since we talk a kind of Finnish here. The bear pictures will probably be called just that, ‘The Vuosku-bear.’

Why travel various paths
if you enjoy only one?

The Ecstasy of No Further Communication

‘Today we need a solution to deliver us from resembling others. All that matters now is only to resemble oneself, to find oneself everywhere, multiplied but loyal to one's personal formula; to see the same credit listings everywhere, be on all movie screens at once.’
Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, Semiotext(e) 1987

To each his own bubble?

Yes, it is possible we have been here before. We have tried. We have reconstituted those lost civilizations through the fragments of the library left to us. We have once more stumbled across writings and images that make little sense to us, but which nevertheless assume such great importance.

Now they move ever onwards, outwards; the reference library becomes the street pattern, the world's award winning photographs for Human Rights are soon to be projected over sports fields, across whole arenas. An airport runway is the next installation of just or unjust images, side by side.

Some time ago we were told we no longer partake in the drama of alienation. Gone is our potential for creative illness and shared grief. Gone is our daily anxiety. We entered the ecstasy of communication and the age of information without quite knowing it. And that communication, according to Jean Baudrillard who warned us of this almost 20 years ago, is obscene.

Is it not possible as our technological imaging becomes so accessible, so instantaneous, we are once more in the domain of the obscene. With one difference; there is now in this advance, in this progress, the greatest chance that we reach a new ecstasy, an ecstasy that reaches across airports, arenas and, eventually, astro-domes. Is this not the new ecstasy; the ecstasy of no further communication?

For many years I thought I understood what I studied, the writings I researched, the images I came across. I might have stumbled across those simulations which were to make of us lonely travellers in someone else's world but today I am less sure.

To each his own bubble?

After the 'information bomb' things must change. Not unlike the concept of the 'open work' debated in literature in the 1950s, both architecture and art seem to be encountering this new ecstasy. Huge events, neither public nor private, neither art nor architecture, are revealing the unrest constantly featured in daily events. Anyone witnessing the huge image spectacle at the closing ceremony of the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester will not fail to see the obvious: both image and text have become de-territorialized.

Events have become continuous and active spaces. They de-limit architecture, art and the public body itself. The consequences cannot be exaggerated, the ecstasy obvious: any space, any surface, any void can carry any image. It is highly likely however that this is no transitional space. Nor is this a zone which we enter only to leave when the event is over. Instead this is a permanent condition which we occupy.

To each his own bubble?

Whilst art has done its best to keep ahead of such ecstasy, even promoting it, architecture has remained somewhat behind, more spectacular, still fixed. But the huge advance on readily accessible software and imaging systems has seen new movements to de-limit architecture. From the late 1970s and the emergence of Post Modernism, notions like 'pluralism' and 'multiplicity' ensured increased non-hierarchy; 'plural validities' if you like. Or, to use another jargon, the de-territorialization of concepts and issues!

Along with this came unique opportunities to re-shape architecture itself. The finance demanded for 'imaging development' saw other areas expand what eventually reaches into art and architecture. For example, the type of programmes used by Nasa for flight development and simulation enabled an architect like Frank Gehry to use the 'Catia software' to realise the Guggenheim Bilbao.

The nature of the development of 'software' and digital imaging systems implies - by its very pace of change - that it will favour the young. This has long been the case in the development of computer programming, games, and areas where software is advanced. Students, younger architects, by being closer to the developing imaging systems and software, are poised to become part of the shaping of the profession.

A transitional condition is arising whereby students or graduates 'teach' faculty the software and imaging systems, whilst faculty teach students the grounded base for an architecture about to change.

Images in public space imply potential, provisional architectures. These are architectures in transition. These are architectures which we recognise only for the partial destiny they offer. Using software and imaging systems themselves in transition, everything becomes accessible to transition.

We have already reached a condition whereby - as teachers, students, artists, architects, filmmakers etc. - we occupy this transitional space without desiring to leave or arrive somewhere else. We have seen a shift from defining ideas and using computer aided design to a thinking shaped by digital imaging systems.

Previously the computer acted as an 'aid', a tool to enable the architect or designer to shape their work and 'arrive' faster. Today, these imaging systems and software are no longer only aids, but actually shape the work, the strategies, the programmes. They will continue to shape the future thinking used. In this way these systems in constant movement have become 'commerce', a traffic in new thinking and re-thinking architecture and art. Implied by this is the potential for fused art and architectures not yet realised, spaces not yet achieved but every bit possible.

At the same time, artists are now - have been for some time - exploring 'space' and imagery, events and non-space. They are siting and re-siting their art through the use of the moving image, digital imaging systems and the increased potential in installation art. Artists, if not already, will inevitably encroach on areas previously considered the (sole?) domain of architects. And together it is possible to re-shape public and private space; just as we now learn Sony might be re-shaping the interface, moving their production into intelligent 'buildings' and 'spaces' to compensate for the saturated field of personal electronics.

Will this lead to a new profession of image management and control just as - today - we have 'event management' which brings in architects, designers, artists and graphic artists to shape or design these event environments? Already architects are designing spaces and buildings that offer themselves as fluid, event spaces. Is it possible that we are already there? Art and architecture fused in a new architecture of the provisional, the ephemeral?

To each his own bubble?

Moving images have begun to de-limit architecture, art and public space itself, as a city like Tokyo or an event like the 2002 Commonwealth Games exemplify. An art and architecture changing and evolving constantly, ultimately with no destination, no arrival, would be a programmable architecture combined with the art of the programmed event. Even meat today in one UK supermarket is sold under the campaign 'random price'. What does all this mean?

Talk of alternative narratives makes sense surely if the content itself could be consistently questioned. Who, for example, owns the space within which the just or unjust image can be projected? With file-sharing on the edge of legality and the hacker ethic about to re-engage politics and art, architecture will take over art and art will take over architecture. They will both become that liminal space; the place where the water comes in and meets the land; never permanently wet and never permanently dry. The space in between!

To each his own bubble?

Perhaps we are already 'there' without recognising this condition? Liminal spaces are spaces we have begun to occupy: wars, cemeteries, hospitals, stadiums, mountain sides, airports, gardens, zoos. The nomadic existence is no longer exotic, it is implied in permanent refugee status or permanent unemployment. It is a poetics of unrest but not restlessness that we have begun to recognise as art, and architecture moves us from the constant complaint of restlessness to a serious unrest.

Here, in cities like Tokyo or Stockholm, we occupy this space. Always the same, always different as we search for solutions that deliver us from resembling others! However present we are, however absent we have been, in this ecstasy we don't have to reach more and always try to go further. Gertrude Stein is credited with the phrase, there is no 'there' there. Contrary to that today, there is a 'there' there; it is everywhere.

And we are already 'there'!

Roger Connah

We can Crop Images

Why travel various paths if you enjoy only one?

Now imagine a place that is completely still

Have you ever
longed for different times
or places of peace and quiet

I have

I love that bittersweet
longing feeling
and I know I am not alone
in losing
myself in Arcadian dreams

I think about things like
the happy shepherd
the good old days
the People’s Home
a national electricity company, post offices
or why not
paradise
where bliss and harmony eternally prevails
and where you’re always nice and good
and calm and agreeable

Have you ever longed for another time?
I have

all of a sudden it will strike me that
I know virtually nothing about cows.
so it might be that that’s what I long for
to become a dairy-farmer
hard-working
and unassuming
and everything would be as in real life
and I could
look like this
shawl
parkas
quilted jacket
homemade cardigan
woollen skirt
and red Wellingtons
and I would build a cabin...

If you go away from the city you come to the countryside.
It’s almost never as beautiful there as you thought it would be.
Sometimes it’s really ugly,
muddy
and grey

No one lives in the countryside.
That was all different in the beginning of the 60’s.
then there were more than 200,000 dairy-farmers in Sweden
now there’s something like 1100
so they’re not easy to come by
but you can still come by cows along the roads

They’re not as many anymore either
but they give more milk

In fact Swedish cows give the most milk in the world
more than 20 kilos of milk per day
a capable cow provides

I am not saying it was better before when there were
more dairy-farmers
it’s just that it’s so easy to believe
that there is more and more of everything
but that’s not the case
some things disappear

Gunilla Heilborn

ATM

& space, where is an end to fear?

Fear of the worst that could happen to me or someone else is with me daily, in the park, in the square, in the street – what we call public spaces. I wish they belonged to everyone, that they were made for walks, love, and other important things. As a woman in the city I live with an anxiety and an anger verging on the desperate.

I am standing in the market place of Kadiköy, Istanbul, along with four female artists in glowing sunshine, with the guest and performance artist in place and the tape-recorder rolling. Two small boys are lying on the mat - the work of art - drawing their favourite dish in their sketch books. The surrounding group of curious men grows larger and larger and keeps getting closer. All the time, the anxiety is there – how much closer will they come and how do we draw the line? The unfamiliarity of the codes, the necessity of keeping a distance to the male audience, our weak and threatened position - everything became very clear in this situation. It is fear.

Like the market place, the park has become a place to meet. It's a tricky spot, since public space should be for everyone, but yet is employed by different groups for different purposes. The park is also a place of both prohibitions and possibilities. During a visit to Beijing recently, I once again had the opportunity to see a film – an art work that I found fascinating. In the black and white poetic language of the film we accompany a group of contemporary intellectual Chinese in well-known national park indulging in love and poetry. The narrative alludes to a classic Chinese story from the Wei and Jin dynasties, when the park was a resort for release and devotion. Touched by this work and my experience of Beijing, I became intrigued by the thought of all the parks of the world as places for love.

A month or so later, my thoughts returned to the film when Gellért
Hill in Budapest became the inaugural locus of a group's studies and ideas about how to develop meeting places for acts of love. Just as in Sweden, low nativity is a fact in Hungary. The group's observations about the function of the park as a meeting place for lovers lead up to sketches of cocoon like rooms dispersed over the hill. Numerous examples of the importance of the park as a meeting place for love could be advanced, but can sometimes appear somewhat problematic as well. A Danish artist couple set up a romantic pavilion in the city park of Århus, with a view to facilitate the nocturnal love encounters of homosexuals. During the day the same room was a play room for ladies and children.

For me personally, the park is above all a place associated with vulnerability and fear. It would never occur to me to wander alone in the leafily beautiful unpeopled park after dark, and even during the day it is with some hesitation that I do so. My anger about this is enormous and uncontrollable. I'm scared stiff, but at a loss about what I can do about it, feeling powerless and perplexed. The fear takes me on detours and imposes limitations. Instead of taking a walk around the solitary grass-covered hill in the city park, I choose open streets of asphalt: in the midst of the day and the city. My anger naturally comes from the many cases of rape of and assault on women that take place on a daily basis in Sweden and in the world, and from the consequences of these violations.

I am physically inferior to the male and there is nothing I can do about it. A friend sings about how she is running from the underground in the suburbs of Stockholm, how her heart is beating and the person pursuing her is getting closer. I do not accept living with that fear. So what can I do? According to society, the responsibility is mine, it is up to me to be more careful. But surely women's vulnerability in the city is a social issue, not an issue only for women?

Is the city a place only for men, I wonder? Then I ask myself once again how it can be that city planning is what it is? Who makes the planning and in the interest of whom? As we know, the planners in Sweden are almost exclusively men, making me wonder what that entails for the city landscape. During a seminar last year, one of the things that came up was the fact that councils usually lack a gender perspective. Nor is it custom to return to crime scenes and ask what happened and what could be done to change that specific spot. At the same seminar, sociologist Hille Koskela argued that we should stop locking the door to our house, and refuse to be afraid. The city landscape would become more open and pleasant, and society more tolerant if we allowed ourselves to take risks. Again, I am the one expected to take the risk and the responsibility - is that acceptable?

All these things, codes, boundaries, and equality differ around the world. But the fear and the physical inferiority does not differ, they are always present. Astonished and terrified I continue to carry the pepper spray in my pocket on the way home from the party and in the city park. I look forward to my next trip to Gellért Hill and a walk in a safe park of love.

Veronica Wiman

...

1 To be sure a unique happening no only occurs in one place.

2 No why is needed.

3 Yes, because the information it gives could be misunderstood later.

4 It can give more questions to send back.

5 To reach the state of disconnections.

6 Because the architecture may feel free to use it in any order.

7 The mutated old media, because there is no other way.

8 Why not?

9 We are loosing the use of words.

10 Because an image says more than a thousand words, but not necessarily the truth.

11 He can waste the receiver’s time.

12 Self-evident! No why needed.

13 Yes, in the case of a memorandum. That is why.

14 Not later, because of chaos.

15 We hope to be.

16 No and I don’t know why.

17 Someone can’t help it.

18 The goal’s nature.

19 No, and neither should we see it as such.

20 No, it is self-evident.

21 No, because it is boring.

22 To understand the enjoyable.

23 No, and I don’t know why.

24 The risk to throw the book in the author’s head compared to looking at the architect.

25 We want to know the aboutness.

26 Yes, of course.

27 The answers are easy?

28 It has been told circular teaching.

29 There is a feeling of something left behind.

30 No, no why needed.

31 Yes, for fun!

32 How to ignore it? That’s why.

33 Everybody should do almost the same easy thing.

34 The user.

35 Nobody.

36 Why exactly 38 questions?

37 Ignoring.

38 Yes, no.

Greetings Christer At 21:12 12/06/2003 +0200

Christer Jurén

Culture is not a system, nor systems, but practice, practices.

One of the great tragedies

One of the great tragedies is that we can never truly enter the subjective of another. We are all isolated from one another. That is the core of the video artist Bill Viola's piece ‘Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House’, a videotape made in 1983. That tragedy is also likely to lead to an answer to the first question from the hip:’ Why is communication so central, such a structural component of today's reality?’ and the reason for the necessity of Art. But although the task seems impossible, the artist is always trying to communicate in spite of all obstacles or empty houses, whether imagined or real.

Raketa has turned their backs on the empty houses to create spaces of their own, outside ordinary art spaces. They are researching and conserving their own histories and creating their own sources of information. Often they use public space for their appearances, and in inviting other artists to participate they open up for a new autonomous artistic activity. Using light, film/moving image, photography and objects as means of expression, they invite the visitors to take part in a communication process. The filmmaker Hollis Frampton once said: ‘If I seem to be on the verge of superstition, please recall that the images we make are part of our own minds, they are living organisms that carry on our mental lives for us, darkly, whether we pay them any mind or not.’

Artists using the moving image/film or video as artistic means of expression work in a long tradition within the arts, that started already in the 1920’s when artists like Dziga Vertov, Maya Deren, Viking Eggeling, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray etc. began to explore the possibilities of the moving image. Given the difficult technology of film, the scarcity of equipment, and its high costs, it is surprising that so many vital independent experiments were realized by artists who at the time visualized its great potential. All through the century artists have continued to use the moving image as a mean. And when the video camera and with it the digital technology entered the stage in the 60’s, painting on canvas was once again declared as being definitely obsolete. Now some 40 years later we have seen photography and moving image take its rightful place as artistic means, next to the ever resurrecting technique of painting.

Raketa uses footage of ordinary objects, fragments or events. It could be a woman walking in the street, the rain falling, or the vast sea reaching a shore. It is then transferred to a screen or a wall. Often projected in places where they seldom would appear. Personally I carry with me the memory of an evening in Sundsvall where images from the Red square in Moscow where projected on a wall of an eight story building in the centre of the city. Everyday images, luminous billboards, traffic from the capital of Russia dislocated to a wall in the Swedish town of Sundsvall. And the triumphant moment when their projected images of the sea or the snow slowly falling, covered a wall inside the City Hall of Stockholm during the Nobel dinner. It seems to me when looking back on the previous years that these artists are in constant flux. During the last three years they have performed in Moscow, Kaliningrad, California, Tokyo, Chiang Mai, Ireland, Jönköping, Kiruna, Gothenburg and several other places. Raketa are constantly on the move, or to paraphrase their project 'Coming', working hard to fulfil their task as artists to create spaces for communication. And hopefully to fill these spaces with content that could be shared by others. To reach a possible answer to the question no 27 from the hip:’ Why should art and architecture be asked to house information all over again?’ we can meditate on something that the sculptor Louise Bourgeois once said: ‘Content is a concern with the human body, its aspects, its changes, transformations, what it needs, wants or feels - its functions. What it perceives and undergoes passively, what it performs. What it feels and what protects it - its habitat. All these states of being, perceiving and doing are expressed by processes that are familiar to us and that have to do with the treatment of materials, pouring, flowing, dripping, oozing out, setting, hardening, coagulating, thawing, expanding, contracting, and the voluntary aspects such as slipping away, advancing, collecting, letting go.’

Monica Nieckels

...

A projected contribution with its starting point in Dakar was confiscated by the police. More specifically, after having shot some photos in a museum I was surrounded by four museum guards and five policemen, threatened with arrest until they managed to wring the camera out of my hands and delete all the pictures. After that there were only a few more hours left of my stay in Dakar and I did not have the energy to recreate my project.

The pictures I did manage to take I have yet not had the time to go through.

Jan-Erik Lundström

Break on Through

‘Break on Through’ provided an optical encounter that disrupted our nominative and mechanical perceptions of space, place and time in the creation of a dialogue between audience, artwork, technology, physical surroundings and belief systems. The work uses live and recorded video to produce a curious reality where the past, present and imaginary are mixed together. By using the roof top space of the gallery it drew attention to ideas of internal and external space. The work becoming the unconscious thought of the exhibition, situated alongside yet outside and above the gallery space. The projection faced the Buddhist holy mountain of Doi Suthep conversing directly with this overbearing physical and spiritual landmark through a mixture of technical and spatial composition.

With the increased use of new media, time/space has begun to be experienced as something infinitely elastic where the connection of past, present and future is open to human intervention. I am interested in this ‘mediated’ experience and our perceptions of reality. If we alter experience and consciousness do we also alter the world?

Jim Prevett

...

11. why should the architect take responsibility for the message communicated?

Culture is not a system, nor systems, but practice, practices. You, yes you, you do not live in culture, you are and act and practice culture. Just as architects are storytellers, they believe they build buildings, houses, habitats within which people move, live, think, eat, shit, make love.

But they don’t.

Architects are storytellers, bloggers, tightrope walkers on the clothesline of language, they are speaker’s corner speakers, they are orators, campfire preachers, communicators, messengers; they build and make and create stories and not objects.

Just as buildings are not nouns but verbs.

Like museums. Like people.

And it is in the stories that architects tell that we live.
Whether we want to or not. And where we tell more stories. And tell counter-stories.

Is thus architecture a language? No. And yes. Mostly, it is within language, of language, speech-acts, speech which acts, upon space, upon time, upon the lives of earthlings.

13. why, if the text is no longer trustworthy as a means of representing knowledge, do images assume more precision?

If anything, it is the insistent and consistent power of text that surprises and bedazzles. For centuries, beginning perhaps with the Gutenberg revolution (do recall how “silent reading’ then was a threat as it invited the image to the body, as opposed to “reading loud’) that turned the reproduction of words from manual labour to technology/industry, analogous to the invention of technical images (as Vilém Flusser terms photographs), it was the written word which was the paradigmatic medium for power and knowledge within Western culture. But five centuries after Gutenberg, Western culture has been besieged by the battle of iconoclasts versus iconophiles, text versus the image. Continuously and repeatedly and insistently has the victory of the image been predicted, wished, desired, suggested and confirmed. Yet, in actuality and in reality, the overthrow of text, the rise of the image, is somehow endlessly postponed (not even a friendly take-over). And Western culture, capitalist, late capitalist, late late-capitalist, globalised, colonial, post-colonial, is structured according to and dependent on this very battle, this very opposition, this very unremitting, undecided, irresolute, capricious and irresolvable conflict. For it is so, that the moment we no longer worry about or fear the image, it has also lost its power.

The variable claims for precision, knowledge, trustworthiness, reliability, realness – concerning text or images - is, thus, nothing but the very language of the battle. And the fact that the contest continues indicates that text has lost its monopoly, Yet trustworthy or complete, as system or as mode of speech or as medium, is neither, not text nor image. Neither reliability nor precision are properties of a medium.Is then the idea of images gaining in precision, the idea of the overflow or flood of images, of the visual paradigm, visuality as victor, sight as the dominant sense, all but the defensive and apprehensive response of a text-based culture?

27. why should art and architecture be asked to house information all over again?

I’d like to think that neither art nor architecture are, yet, disciplined. Meaning that knowledge production may thus take place. Meaning that as discourses art and architecture are unresolved, uncontrolled, unpredictable, unruly. Meaning that they are anti-systemic, obsessed with transgressing their own boundaries. Meaning that like capitalism they are expansionist, inclusive rather than exclusive, unfaithful to the norm, ecstatic, homeless. Meaning that they are pragmatic and tactically oriented; information is crucial, navigation is the day, set camp, advance, incorporate, make anew, divide and conquer.

36. why?

Why, indeed, so many questions? I don’t like questions (and I immediately apologize for having started this text with a question). Not because of fear of uncertainty or fear of chaos or fear of the unknown; I lunch with all three daily and they are healthy and reliable colleagues, never ones to turn adventure down. Not because questions seem to think that they have the power to put you on the spot, urge something from you, command a response, coerce you to act, force you to move. They do indeed believe so, but they are mistaken. I am unmoved by them. They are powerless. You may sort into which ever trash can you wish, as metal, plastic, glass, cardboard, paper, you name it. I simply dislike questions, because I like answers. I like propositions, I like hypothesises, I like the ostensive gesture (Wittgenstein knows language: This, that, here, there; the most important element of communication), I like arguments, assertions, proposals, suppositions, nominations, postulates. I like the friction caused by the answer and the resistance effected by the assertion. Much more attractive than the dull pendulum-like and rather predictable motion induced by the question.

Is it not actually a kind of passive aggression built into that questioning gesture? Is it not actually a kind of grand-narrative power assault hidden behind all those questions? The proposition, on the other hand, propels you into the dynamics of discursive fields. You have to take your position, you have to occupy space, you have to act in public, you have to define place, you have to take language out of your pocket, unfold it, power it up, and make use of it. You have to choose and select and expel and compel and impel.
(Yes, I confess that I am a constructivist and a situationist and that I believe there are too few solipsists in the world and that I long for the sea and that I am afraid of fear). Indeed, the question too often offers the illusion of being outside discourse; it seems to believe that you may initiate discourse without actually participating in the game, that you may speak without having to act (I like speech acts).

Or is that it? The game. You cannot score with a question. You cannot win by asking. Only smart-ass your way to the bar, uncommitted to anything, dumbly attempting to unnerve something you know is out of your reach (like those tiresomely silly book titles: Art in Question, Questioning Islam, The Democracy Question, The Mormon Question, Globalization in Question, Heterosexuality in Question, The Question of God). Never dunk or smash, only sip and dribble.

I like bodies (I like my own body) and questions have no bodies. Questions are unsexy and cold-hearted, fidgety and nosy. Passively pretentious, aggressively unpretentious. Answers are hot and juicy. They have libido. Ambitiously unpretentious; actively pretentious. Or can be. Do emotions come from questions? Answer: No. I did not fall in love with you because I asked: Who do I love? What do I love? I fell in love because there were no questions, only an answer, my answer, answers, which, in turn, could not expect or demand neither an answer nor a question.
Sustaining love is continuing or repeating the answer (Is love the answer without a question?). Answers are gifts. Offers and offerings. Anguished they may be, foolish, even false (A question cannot be false, only dull or misguided but not false; you cannot lie with a question; how boring), but nonetheless answers. I like answers. Don’t ask me why.

Jan-Erik Lundström

The visitor

We can Crop Images

We can crop images of oblique planes (like buildings) if a rectangle that is - perspectively distorted is visible – based on the four corners and camera centre.

Sometimes, however, the image of a whole rectangle is not available. We might have a landscape image, where we can locate a 90 degrees angle (like two streets crossing), but nothing else that can be interpreted as perspective projection of a rectangle.

Can we crop perspectively?

Yes, if we see at least part of the horizon:

In the landscape picture, locate a 90 degree angle in the real world (it might not appear as 90 degrees in the picture). Set one corner and the adjacent sides according to that angle. The other three corners should be placed on the horizon (the middle one can be wherever you like on the horizon). Now option-drag the middle corner to transfer the triangle into a quadrilateral. Drag sides or option-drag corners to crop whatever area you like.

Hit Enter.

Have fun!

Key combinations for Perspective Crop:

You can freely drag the corners to set up any quad shape. Then, you can drag any side – this preserves the perspective. In this way you can start from any quad, for example from a window in a building, and extend it to a much bigger quad, for example – the facade of the building. The big quad will be cropped into a rectangle, rectifying the plane selected (including the window) according to the perspective.

So far – no key needs to be pressed.

You can Alt-drag a corner, which modifies the quad while preserving the perspective. You can also Shift-drag a corner along a straight line, as usual.

Some people have the wrong expectations about Perspective Crop. It can do only this sort of thing: Imagine you take a picture of a picture hanging on the wall. The picture in the picture is not rectangular, it is perspectively distorted. If you set the four corners exactly, you will get a nice rectangular crop of the picture.

Relative size and aspect ratio are correct. You can only crop things on a single plane, like a picture; landscape; building. You cannot perspective crop a tree or a person, unless this is a tree or a person in a picture hanging on the wall :-)

One more thing – the case of almost parallel sides is sensitive to small errors. One has to set corners with care. Also, in older builds there was a bug with exactly parallel sides.

Todor Georgiev

One of the great tragedies

When the screen ceases to exist

040524.18.03GTM
-=Oz=-> Hi Lizzy, how are you?
Lizzy> I’m good. What about you?
-=Oz=-> Oh, my usual excellent...

Lizzy> Where are we? Tell me about this place.
-=Oz=-> This particular one is called Nowhere, PrpleTears did this space so I would probably better have her explain it to you. She had a really good friend on the Net that said he was dying so he didn’t want to speak to her any more, just go off and die I guess and that really hurt her feelings. Later she found out he wasn’t dying and she felt very hurt by that so this is an expression of that.

Actually, you’re on the OzGate USA server. OzGate has two servers, one is in the United States in James Madison University in Virginia and the other one is in Europe in Sweden at Umeå University. I started OzGate in 1998 and in 2001 we opened up the European server. So, we’re doing pretty well. We’re on good bandwidth at two different universities and we’ve been hosting global conversations for six years.

Lizzy> When do you come here?
-=Oz=-> Just about any time when I have some recreation time and want to see my friends. That’s probably the biggest thing about this, we use it as a medium to come and meet our friends and hang out for a few hours. We have over ninety different spaces or virtual worlds so there is plenty of variety. The sound in here is 3D stereo distance attenuated audio, that is to say, the closer you are the better you hear. And it is duplex, which means we can talk and listen at the same time.

Lizzy> How did you find this place?
-=Oz=-> I found this in the end of 1995. At that time my computer wasn’t powerful enough so in January -96 when I got a Pentium 100 with 16 RAM and 14.4 kb connection I came back and went into Traveler. It was very bleeding edge technology back then though it was much more difficult to hold a conversation at that time just because of the low bandwidth.

Lizzy> Does a meeting in here differ from meetings in a physical space?
-=Oz=-> To me it’s exactly the same. Imagine if we talk to each other on the telephone, you wouldn’t be any less valid just because we were talking through the phone. This is the same, I don’t see this as different from real life. These worlds are made up by pixels and polygons but there are still people and that’s the thing, isn’t it. This is the same as in real life because I’m talking to real friends.

Lizzy> When entering these graphical virtual worlds you choose a character, an avatar that is representing you in here – but what is an avatar really?
-=Oz=-> An avatar is a representation of a human being. When you see an avatar in here, no matter how freaky, you know there is a human being on the other side. That’s what avatar means.

Lizzy> How did you pick your avatar? How are you being represented?
-=Oz=-> Representation isn’t nearly as important as identity is. I’ve tried lots of different avatars until I found one that I thought suited me. But that doesn’t matter really, this one, I just liked it basically. There are people who come in here as seahorses and you came in as a cat – but I don’t think you are a real cat.

So, representation isn’t that important – identity is. When I choose an avatar I paint it up in my own certain way so people can recognize me as soon as they see me. Just like in real life. Identity is important even if you are being anonymous. People know you as Lizzy and I wouldn’t want someone coming in with an avatar painted just like you. When I see you in here it doesn’t matter what you are wearing, I came to see Lizzy and that’s the important part.

Lizzy> Why can graphic communication extend the possibilities of communication? How does the visual environment support the communication in here?
-=Oz=-> For example, on the European server they have classes in Traveler. Being in the space they can break up in different study groups without bothering each other. They are studying independently and then they can always come and meet back in the middle just like we are and then discuss their conclusions. The distance thing is really cool, you can’t do that with other types of voice chats where it sounds like you are all crammed into a closet together.

When you go to a party, people always break up in a bunch of little groups, mingling with each other; they are not all trying to talk at the same time in the centre. These spaces have that sort of realism too. It’s not just that it’s 3D-audio but it also adds to the sense of realism in social structures.

Lizzy> Who designs these worlds?
-=Oz=-> There are lots of people. The one we’re in now PrpleTears did, she did a lot of them. In fact I would say that she did the most rooms at OzGate. But there are many different artists so there is no easy answer for that. All artists are credited on our worlds page at www.OzGate.com/worlds where you see a list of all the different spaces and who authored them.

We are pretty picky about what spaces we accept on our server. If you did a really crummy space that nobody would want to hang out in we wouldn’t host that one. We want spaces that are well thought out, high quality, as low-polygon as possible and still be cool so the user has a high frame rate. It has to have a certain coolness. That is hard to put a number on. We’re dealing with people you know, like you, I think you deserve a pretty environment.

Lizzy> Do you consider the graphical interface an essential issue?
-=Oz=-> If you and I meet in an art museum and you went back to that art museum a couple years later you would probably think of me. You can associate people with a place. There are people that I’ve known in here literally for years and years and you associate these places with the times that you’ve had in here with your friends and the exchange that you’ve had. It’s very much like a song, you hear a song that you haven’t heard in a long time and it’s nostalgic and it takes you back to that moment in time when you heard it. These spaces are like that too. You become tied to it like any other piece of real estate – with your memories.

Lizzy> Have you fallen in love with someone that you've met here? Or do you know anyone who has?
-=Oz=-> Certainly, you hear about people falling in love in text chat worlds and certainly that is much more true in here. My wife and I met before I started doing this but there are lots of people that fall in love, and have gotten married, online in Traveler. There is a guy, who comes in here named Fishhead and his wife Ariel, they met in a space called the Carousel and fell in love and got married. And a lot of times when they come in, just him and her, they go to the Carousel, just like in old times.

Lizzy> Talking transnationalism – being here, do you feel American or as a citizen of Traveler?
-=Oz=-> I know a couple of people that got hung up on politics but nationality is not important inside these spaces. I would like to point out our Mission Statement on our web page at www.OzGate.com/about where it says ‘across all borders and in cyberspace’. You really don’t know where people are from if you don’t ask each other. Nationality is not important.

Lizzy> Do you consider this a public space? Can anyone come here?
-=Oz=-> Let me explain it to you like this; over the past six years that OzGate has been open we have met a couple of unsavoury characters. If somebody is just in here to raise hell we don’t want them around. This is a private place, it’s owned privately, but it is open to the public conditionally – and that condition is NO abuse. If somebody wants to raise hell there are plenty of places on the Net where they can go and do that. So that’s why we have to emphasize these are private servers but they are open to the public on that condition. Being abusive to anybody is strictly prohibited. We try not to have any nasty names or allow any sacrilegious names. But that’s just about it. If anybody just uses practical sense they get along here just fine forever.

Lizzy> Why do you think people either like these spaces or are being sceptical towards relationships established in virtual worlds?
-=Oz=-> Most of the people in here really love it. The people, who tried it out and don’t come back, those are the kind that are used to a text chat world and this is very much too real. It’s too much in their face, they are used to being distant from the people that they are with. In a lot of text based worlds people say the most outrageous things just to try and get somebody to notice them at all. In here it’s very calm, very copasetic. We’re not running around with guns playing a game, its whole purpose is for people to meet and get to know each other.

People have always had pen-pals from across the ocean. And they write “how are you’ then six moths later they get back “I am fine’. In a text chat world you still have all that, “how are you’ and then you have to wait a little for “I am fine’. Here we don’t suffer from that lapse at all, it’s immediate. The really fast typer can maybe do a hundred words a minute. Here I can do slowly, comfortably 150 words a minute. So it’s clearly a superior form of communication.

I believe humans in nature are very social creatures – we are more like dogs than cats in that regard. Cats can live pretty independably and they really don’t mind. Dogs are very social creatures, they like to be with their kind and run with the pack. Humans are somewhere in the middle. We don’t go some place just because somebody else does. We don’t jump off a cliff just because somebody else does but we still like to meet with our friends. One thing that I’ve noticed more than anything in here is that you always learn something. There is somebody who knows a lot about computers and you don’t and you learn about that or anything about life. This is a sort of Mecca for minds, we can express our thoughts and you will hear them. In that regard it’s very much like a forum and enables community. This is a community that wouldn’t exist otherwise – our own little neighbourhood.

It’s so very real to me so it’s hard for me to talk to someone that has never done it. That’s why I guess I have never written a book about it. Being here is so much more than talking about it. If you just talk about it they are not going to get the idea, they are not really going to understand. You can take them close but they are not going to get it until they come in here.

Lizzy> How do you think the communication in these kinds of digital worlds will develop?
-=Oz=-> The 3D might improve but the old ways will never go away. You know, this offers us a place to meet. I can’t afford to go and see you and you can’t afford to go and see me but we can always meet here. This allows friendships that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. It would be good to shake your hand but this costs so much less and is much more practical for us because we are in two different continents and separated by distance. The same could be said on the telephone but a phone doesn’t make you feel like you are meeting somebody. If you invite a friend of yours and I invite a friend of mine in here our conversation feels like we’re together – so it’s different – better than the phone.

Imagine a man walks up to a river that before was an absolutely impenetrable barrier, he couldn’t get to the other side because the current was running too fast and it was too cold and he just couldn’t do it. Then he came up with a boat and he could cross the river but it was still something that he had to deal with. Then we made bridges. Now we don’t even acknowledge the river, it’s not a barrier at all; we just go past it without even thinking. That’s the way this is. It enables conversations across great distances. We don’t even acknowledge the distance between us because right now there isn’t any. You know, we’re just having a normal conversation. We don’t recognize any boarders. That’s when the screen ceases to exist – when you think beyond it.

ENTER THE SYSTEM
The virtual worlds hosted by OzGate servers can be accessed through the Internet via the 3D browser Digital Space Traveler. The worlds are graphical audio environments that anyone with a PC and an Internet connection can enter. The visitors are represented by graphical characters - avatars - and communicate through a voice based system. Download the free software, Digital Space Traveler at www.digitalspace.com/traveler.
Oz's real-life name is Brian Thomasson and he lives in Huntington, West Virginia, USA with his wife Janet a.k.a. Lady J.

Elisabet M Nilsson and Oz

Break on Through

The visitor

the visitor?

was the animal new?
was the tree new?
was the sound new?
were the lights ever part of another life?

there is a visitor
but one we do not expect, one we do not invite

one which goes where we wish them not to go
does things which we do not expect

upon arrival this visitor is welcomed
without announcement, with no protocol

without written permission
the visitor intervenes in the city

of course in ways we cannot script,
in ways which have no current form

denying the expectation settled on
just a fraction before it disappears

the visitor?

could be part of nature
inserted ‘back’ into the city

like small islands,
long lost to urban ruin

or lights illuminating crime
before it happens

and like a memory, it asks
without waiting to be asked

what memory now exists?

the visitor?

does the visitor by this action
suggest the future

something appearing,
coming up like a dream

or a nightmare?

would this visitor not
be a work of art

dropped in the city
only to be cleared up

as acupuncture needles
the city it has already lost

like the body
rescued by small gestures

and planted
but only virtually!

the visitor?

an image of the visitor
that really cannot stay

but manages to crash the party
stays longer than invited

puts down roots of a sort
finally disobeying everything around

and just staying put!
only there’s nothing there

but a memory of the forest
from where the visitor began

in another time, another place
yesterday in Kalibukbuk

a small village
in the north of Bali in Indonesia

the visitor?

remembers Dostoesvky:
soon we will be able to invent ourselves

from an idea,
any idea

until then, just visit the idea
plant it in a park, a park

drawn up by a software company near you
hardened in the memory

which has all but forgotten how to dream
how to long for…

what?

can an animal be new?
can a tree be new?
is a car an animal?
and why don´t we ever call an aeroplane a house?

were the lights only ever part of someone else’s life?

ask the visitor before it’s too late.

Roger Connah

ATM - from Automatic Teller Machines to Automatic Telling Machines

ATM was originally made in collaboration with the artist group Oda Projesi who invited us to take part in their series of projects for the 8th International Istanbul Biennial in 2003.

In ATM we worked with the idea of creating alternative screensavers for ATM-machines in Istanbul, Turkey. The background for this project was that in Istanbul, many ATM-machines feature “screensavers’ showing commercials and info-animations whenever the machines aren’t actively used. The displays of these ATM’s are sometimes even designed in a way so that the screen is clearly visible from the street. The idea of producing ‘alternative’ screensavers for these machines came from the specific local context of the Galata area. This is a poor neighbourhood with many immigrants coming from the Turkish countryside, but which is located right off the main commercial streak in the European side of Istanbul. Since 1998, the artist group Oda Projesi has been working with different community based projects in this area, with an apartment located on the ground floor in a small courtyard serving as home base. This has become a space were the predominantly Kurdish people living in the buildings around the courtyard engage in different activities, all related to their everyday situation, their needs and their dreams. Oda’s space and their activities, sometimes with invited guest artists, have become an important part in the everyday life of especially the women and children in the area. The kids use the space on a daily basis for mundane activities such as doing their homework, or they become engaged in workshops where they transform the vision of their courtyard through drawings and collage making. It was such transformative thoughts about home that we wanted to develop further together with the inhabitants, and extend them into other sectors of the city.

ATM consisted of two parts - an animation workshop and a screening.

In the animation workshop the participants worked with collage aesthetics and montage techniques using pictures from their daily life in order to create simple-stop-motion sequences. We worked with the topic of the exchange of realities of the homes and the ATM machine. Different topics that gradually builds up a reflection on this was introduced to the participants, and these topics formed the base for producing an archive of images that was used in the collage animations. The topics of the archive revolved around the spaces of home: family, friends, favourite things, activities in the home. After this archive of images had been built, we worked with the participants to create short sequences in which the spaces and activities of the home were juxtaposed with the space and activity of the ATM machine.

The second part was the screening part, where the animations were supposed to be displayed as screensavers on a local ATM-machine, but due to troubles concerning legislation and bureaucracy we ended up asking a local carpenter to make his interpretation of an ATM-machine for us. This ‘self-made’ ATM became a cross between a kitschy piece of furniture in your living room and an actually functioning ATM machine. But this was somehow quite fitting, since the actual form of this fictive ATM evoked the crossing of private and public space that the withdrawal of money implies. This ATM was made mobile so that we could take it around the city and also place it in Oda Projesi’s yard. The screening period was accompanied by a sticker campaign, designed for real ATM-machines – with statements or questions encouraging people to re-think the use of these ATM-machines - as for instance: ‘Turn your automatic money teller into a storyteller!’ or ‘What is on the ATM today?’

The workshop, that lasted for three weeks, produced four short films designed to be viewed as screensavers in ATM machines. Each film was created by a young girl or woman, who delivered a story or just described elements from her daily life. There was one sequence about a 13-year-old girl’s favourite dances; a story of a 17-year-old girl who drinks tea while fantasizing about a chance to interview a famous actor who is also literally the man of her dreams; and a story of a young woman who leaves her mother in the countryside only to find herself leading a very lonely life in the big city, finally dying without having seen her mother, who tragically arrives too late. This last story expressed the concerns and fears of a 25-year-old female immigrant, who is just one in the enormous group of rural immigrants that fuels Istanbul’s (as well as other similar cities) rapid growth.

In contrast to the anonymity of commercials and information usually displayed before the ATM customer inserts a credit card, the alternative sequences give the user a flash of the local reality. An exchange between the global cash flow and the much slower and quite disparate character of local life in the Galata neighbourhood is created. This re-programming of the ATM is also a way of extending the screening possibilities of locally produced media. Where else today could local media have a meaningful place but not in the public information systems and services of the city?

Linda Hilfling and Kristoffer Gansing

Thinking about space

utopia, whatever!

The rug will be very large. Even larger! The rug will be moved around, transported, carried, dragged, packed and unpacked. Like Utopia, it is in constant transfer. Placed in different locations in the world, certain actions, encounters, negotiations, will surely take place on the rug. Accompanying the ‘mother’ rug there are also smaller portable rugs, all with different images on them, all in one way or another relating to the larger rug; for prayer, for rest, for love, for identification, for utopia, whatever!

utopia, whatever! is a work-in-progress where progress must now be used in the most inventive, interconnected, even most dangerous way. Utopia should be navigated through ignorance as much as awareness, stupidity as much as sovereignty, arrival as much as departure. Just as there is always an enigma to any departure, an anxiety about arrival and a thrill at travelling, utopia is always now deferring its own arrival whilst living out its own present. Even utopian architecture must attempt its own agenda whilst deferring any arrival that might be called architecture. Utopia then must share with architecture those partial destinies. Now!

Let us not mistake our impatience, if utopia is postponed, incomplete, ‘whatever’, then that process itself must be utopian. And in such reclamation of the streets, the landing strip, in the current poetics of movement, unrest, discontinuity or displacement, utopia, whatever! must also undress itself.

Laying itself out as a carpet, interconnected, radically co-opting the ‘photoshop’ software in order to re-place itself where it once belonged. Creeping into places it once took for granted, re-invited back to the homes it has lost, utopia must be that liminal space that the British anthropologist Edmund Leach speaks about, that gentle zone which we pass through, dwell within, every day.

Like going in and out of meaning, utopia, whatever! is that zone where we leave one world for another, occupying it, reclaiming it for minutes, for hours, for days, for lifetimes.

utopia, whatever! would need to be assaulted as if it could be embodied in an ‘architecture’ that has arrived before another architecture sets in, always falling short triumphantly of converging toward a re-assembly of known and unknown architectural solutions.

utopia, whatever! is the perpetually re-invented agenda that no longer frightens us, that no longer exists outside us. Utopia, whatever has no logo, no discourse but its own presence as it engages us in an assault on our own comfortable notions, notions which must include others in this liminal space.

Sites become non-sites, just as the rug is carried all over the city, reclaiming the surface for the events that can redefine that surface. Thus by shifting sites, by re-instating utopia within the liminal zone of the city, the geography of elsewhere is re-defined by the geography of everywhere.

Nowhere no longer exists! And utopia is no longer to be postponed by the ability of the avant-garde to blur the public understanding and (obviously) misunderstanding of contemporary art, architecture and transfer. The liminal space is one of transfer. To go nowhere fast is no longer a contradiction, it is a ‘bull’, that Irish literary trope that Samuel Beckett was so fond of; that apparent incongruity and the joy of discovering two things to be dissimilar when a resemblance was fancied.

And there is utopia, whatever! busy sawing off the branch we and it are sitting on.

utopia, whatever! is itself the bull to end all bulls!

Finally, of course there is no ‘finally’, these utopian events, these envelopes, spaces, sites, non-sites, buildings and non-buildings will re-assemble themselves, staying as far as possible away from architecture. Thus, architecture not as we perhaps know it now, but an architecture potentially lying in the wings, waiting, delayed, ready to pounce.

utopia, whatever! is this work in progress, open to erasure, decay, re-definition and refinement . And like the large rug carried throughout the city, this transfer is open, negotiable and self-monitored by each traveller, each visitor, and each occupant of the carpet. As chance becomes part of the process, the rug is an expanded, postponed, delayed and deferred site in which utopia explores its own continuity, its own cliché.

utopia, whatever! is surely a user’s manual for a potential life. Remember: the future only lasts a long time if you think you will not be part of it.

utopia, whatever! only happens somewhere else if you allow it.

Try stopping it if you dare.

Roger Connah

...

the following book of questions is a series of questions and texts by artists who have been invited to various exhibitions over the last four years, from Tokyo to Stockholm, from Roppongi to Botkyrka, and whose work has collaborated to form this collection. No attempt has been made to identify the artist’s work in the book, neither the images nor the texts belong to those that have invented them, hijacked them, adapted them. As words and images now recycle themselves they are inevitably part of a page turned, a page lost or a word or sentence edited. All end up as wallpaper if we’re lucky, as questions, as dust, as the desert, as Jabes once said the book of questions the following is a series of questions and texts by artists who have been invited to various exhibitions over the last four years, from Tokyo to Stockholm, from Roppongi to Botkyrka, and whose work has collaborated to form this collection. No attempt has been made to identify the artist’s work in the book, neither the images nor the texts belong to those that have invented them, hijacked them, adapted them. As words and images now recycle on themselves they are inevitably part of a page turned, a page lost or a word or sentence edited. All end up as wallpaper if we’re lucky, as questions, as dust, as the desert, as Jabes once said recycling the book of questions.com by artists who have been invited to various exhibitions over the last four years, from Tokyo to Stockholm, from Roppongi to Botkyrka and whose work has collaborated to form this collection. No attempt has been made to identify the artist’s work in the book, neither the images nor the texts belong to those that have invented them, hijacked them, adapted them. As words and images now recycle on themselves they are inevitably part of a page turned, a page lost or a word or sentence edited. All end up as wallpaper if we’re lucky, as questions, as dust, as the desert, as Jabes once said

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BOOK OF QUESTIONS
Contributors: Ulf Agnér, Leif Brodersen, Helena Byström, Roger Connah, Kristoffer Gansing, Mats Fahlander, Alberto Frigo, Todor Georgiev, Birgitta Hallerström Wallin, Gunilla Heilborn, Linda Hilfling, Andreas Jonasson, Christer Jurén, Åsa Lipka Falck, Jann Lipka, Malin Lobell, Áron Losonczi, Mikael Lundberg, Karin Lundgren-Tallinger, Håkan Lundström, Jan-Erik Lundström, Shiro Masuyama, Monica Nieckels, Rich McGregor, Martin Morell, Elisabet M Nilsson, John Robert Nilsson, Mårten Nilsson, Oz, Nonkran Jompo Panmonkol, Jim Prevett, R a k e t a, Cecilia Jarlöv, Camilla Schlyter Gezelius, Noriyuki Tajima, Magnus Ullen, Eric Van Hove, Katarina Wahlström, Magnus Wassborg, Lisa Vilhelmson, Veronica Wiman

Graphic Design: Charlotte Hansson Design Stockholm
Editorial: Helena Byström, Roger Connah, Åsa Lipka Falck, Elisabet M Nilsson and Camilla Schylter Gezelius
Proof reader: Maria Lundgren
Translation: Magnus Ullen

Book of Questions is a r a k e t a project supported by Stiftelsen Längmanska Kulturfonden, Helge Ax:son Johnsons Stiftelse, Framtidens Kultur.

Lots of love and many thanks to Hitomi Hasegawa, Jannike Brantås, Carina Törnblom, Filmform, Dan Boson, Charles Henn, Annelie Wallin, Ewa Kumlin, Fredrik Svensk, Peter Luthersson, families and friends.

All rights reserved. Texts and images © belong to each author/illustrator/photographer. No texts or images may be reproduced without the written permission of the copyright owner.

r a k e t a Press. www.raketa.nu