Arthropods: New Design Futures

 

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5. ARTHROPOD CHARACTERISTICS

There are a number of approaches, themes, situations, ways, and means through which the Arthropods in this book deal, individually or in groups, with new concepts of environmental creativity and involvements. I list and characterize many of them in this chapter, not from a desire to immobilize these protean aspirations and activ­ities in sepulchral columns of comparisons and descrip­tions—far from it. I simply wish to provide a starting point for the reader to use in orienting a personal view­point of what is going on. After that, I invite you to infuse your own responses into these processes, make up your own terminology, feel your own feelings.

I see the Arthropods and their activities basically from two viewpoints, which I call "attitudes" and "aspects." The first is concerned with the persuasions and philoso­phies of. the designers; their impetus for doing what they are doing; interests; professional positions; concerns about people and environment—their particular processes. The second involves the nature of that they are doing— what it looks like, feels like, how it involves or excludes, what its characteristics are.

Within these two areas, I have further characterized the "attitudes" and "aspects" for a more descriptive over­view. Here is an illustrated glossary:

 

Attitudes

Performance:

Designs, events, and places principally involving per­formances by the designers and or their creations. These performances most frequently deal in new experiences —by the performer and the observer—of everyday places, actions, or objects that are placed in a new plane or dimension through the performance.

Salz der Erde and Zund-Up of Vienna, perform in the streets, in the subways, in the sacrosanct halls of the Establishment, freaking out the people with extravagant actions designed to make evident to them the actualities of their environments.

Tote Kultur—Hitl, Kistl, Krippl, Taferln—symbolic play in the streets to puncture pretensions of nationalism, society, traditional approaches to just about even-thing. A performance at the 1970 Architectural Congress. What is this all about, architect? Your sublime traditions don't deal with our reality. We perform and you laugh. How much longer will you laugh?

Living in the subway. Enter naked into a new environ­ment. Build a life-style in the underground regions. Talk with the people, eat. sleep, drink. Make a film of it called Metro and show it around.

Involvement:

Processes that seek to involve people in the ongoing nature of the communal event, artwork, or performance, to give them a more direct contact with the environment or process.

Phoenix House is a therapeutic community for treat­ment of former drug addicts. One of its groups occupies Hart Island offshore from New York City. Each summer, Phoenix House has a Summer's End Happening and invites the public for a day of rock music, games, cooking contests, inflatables, funhouses, a strobe-light environment, and other activities. The visitors participate in tie happenings, but more importantly through them be­come involved in the meaning and activities of Phoenix House.

Participation:

Attempts to allow people to become more personally active in the actual experience of working with creativity and change, generally in a process-oriented sense.

Roth Recycles is an event by Evelyn Roth of Vancouver done at the University of British Columbia Kontemporary Festival and at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York. Participants brought old clothing about to be discarded—sweaters, socks, dresses, shirts—to a com­munal resource pile where everyone could add or ex­change items as they wished. The discarded clothing was cut up and—continuously throughout the week-to-ten-day period—knitted into a "huge, giant ART-icle which we could crawl into at the end of the time."

Play/Recreation:

Events or plates in which particular emphasis is given to the fun aspects of involvement and/or participation.

Children-Clouds by Angela Hareiter of Missing Link Productions. Vienna. Lire made of PVC (poly-vinyl chloride) and hang between buildings in crowded sites, inter­connecting the children of many families in a kid's play communitv high above the teeming' traffic. "Soft, tender, and flimsy, for jumping in and hiding. Clouds change. Children-clouds do the same. They grow with the children, they get wider. larger, piled up for plays and] gymnastics, until the children are old enough to come down to the ground."

Theater:

Dramatic environments, dramatic performances to make particular experiences vivid, to underscore environ­mental happenings—In other words, to encourage public involvement.

Funeral for the Don by FUNCO-Canada for Pollution Probe was a theatrical event dramatizing the slow death of the Don River in Toronto from pollution and neglect. Results: public interest, media coverage, poster cam­paigns, and, hopefully, positive ecological action by au­thorities.

Live-In:

New places and ways for people to live; temporary or permanent involvements with the kinds of places people live in today and tomorrow, and the ways they live in them (and some transformations, such as Ham Hollein's aircraft carrier in the landscape—an instant megastruc-ture).

Nonstop City by Archizoom of Florence is a megastructural concept encouraging the interpenetration and inter­action of service lines, traflic. parking, transit, trucking, and other mobile systems in the lower levels of a vast superstructure for urban living. Vertical transportation systems and top-level recreational and park spaces add to the three-dimensionality of the concept.

Haus-Rucher-Co LITE was the title and the theme of a 1970 exhibition in New York's Museum of Contem­porary Crafts by Haus-Rucker-Co of Diisscldorf, Vienna, and New York, Members of the group lived in the museum, shared food and drink with the patrons, ex­plained their work and philosophies, slept, and bathed, watched TV, and celebrated together.

A "pneudesic" system is proposed by Edward Suzuki of South Bend. Indiana, as an answer to the need for low-cost, individual housing. The basic module is an air-inflated, plastic-membraned triangular "cushion"; in­stead of rigid members constituting the geodesic system as in normal construction, the sides of the triangular modules do this here. Suzuki says that utilizing this system, the hopeful householder will be able to go to the store, buy the appropriate units, return to his site, and put up the house himself in the size and perhaps con figuration he desires. Modules are fastened together along their sides by zippers and plastic fasteners to form a geodesic sphere or dome. Growth is accomplished by addition of units. The complex plugs into power sources just as mobile homes do today. The house can be simply folded up and taken away to another site when the owner wishes. The present floor system is a tetrahedral space-frame, but Suzuki notes that with the development of very lightweight structures, the home could actually float when inflated with helium—a mobile-home balloon.

Communications:

Exchange of information in various forms of media (graphics, sound, tapes, film, video-tapes, etc.). Also, sub­liminal "messages" in designed events and environments. This category can include almost any form of com­munication between the designer and his audience, of course.

Documentation of the ephemeral continuum of com­mercial television is the process in which TELETHON of Los Angeles is involved. John Margolies and Billy Adler say, "If commercial television is about creation of the forgetful, TELETHON is about remembering what we have forgotten/' The documentation is going forward as a day-to-day process using color slides and research papers, with exhibitions, films and other media to be utilized in the future (including TV. of course). TELETHON states that its concern is with TV as an information medium rather than an entertainment. They grant that entertainment is a major conduit o: cultural information, however.

Architect and Arthropod Gunther Feuerstein of Vienna, sensing a lack of information flow between Arthropod-and other interested parties, did something about it: he started his own magazine— Transparent—which you can find out about by writing him at Wiedner Haupstrasse 40. A-1040, Wien, Austria.

ONYX of New York began a communications network by mailing posters to friends, famous people, magazine', etc. The network grows and grows with every mailing; a communications process.

Interfacing:

The juxtapositioning of two or more supposedly "in­compatible" areas or processes, e.g.: art and science; men and machines.

Experiments in Arc S: Technology was founded in 1966 to encourage creative relationships between artists and engineers and scientists from industry. It has since be­come an international "group," with sub-groups in many countries and missionary projects to other countries and cultures. Notable interdisciplinary events have been: 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering, of I966; Some More Beginnings: An Exhibition of Submitted Works Involving Technical Materials and Processes at the Brooklyn Museum, 1968-69; and the Pepsi-Cola Pavillion at Osaka's Expo 70. EAT maintains a full-time communications network among artists and technicians working in environmental events and designs.

Monumentally:

Creation of superscale environmental effects for:

environmental awe;
creating illusionary effects;
"commenting" on matters of appropriate scale; fun.

Superstudio of Florence is into a series of investigations dealing with the impact of man made buildings—objects —on the landscape and citYscape. The most concentrated visual application of the theories so far has been in The Continuous Monument, in which "the history of monu­ments, which began with Stonehenge and. passing on to the Kaaba and the Vertical Assembly Building, found its completion with a monument capable of forming the whole world (forming = understanding)." Here are Superstudio's continuous monuments for Rome's Colosseum and for the city of Graz.

Object Design:

Design oriented toward .specific visual and or physical ends. Consider cities, buildings, toys, ballets, music, statues as objects.

Superstudio's Endless Grid responds to a multitude of conformations to make possible object-design buildings —Architect's Tombs, a Catalogue of Villas—with com­modity, variation, and possibly (I am not sure) responsiveness to individual needs.

Process Design:

Design working and changing within the ongoing activ­ities of an open-ended creative system, as contrasted to object design, which usually works toward a precon­ceived, three-dimensional goal.

Computer City by Archigram's Dennis Crompton is a systems-oriented example of process design. The service networks of the city are sensitized to changing needs and demands in the ongoing processes of the city s life. A three-dimensioned informational system interacts with the city's changes and feeds them back to program the computer to respond to the new situations.

Permanence:

Structures or environments designed with a view to some permanence, if not immutability. Housing, for in­stance, might be designed for long life, but have built-in possibilities for change by its inhabitants.

The Brooklyn Navy Yard across the East River from Manhattan is an abandoned industrial-military base with vast potential for redevelopment. Instead of destroy­ing the strong nature of the area and substituting a "nice" design. Hardy. Holzman & Pfeiffer of New York propose a "community center as a straddle structure," whose aim is the interrelationship of existing neighbor­hoods to a future industrial use of the Navy Yard through a strong community structure.

Sam Carter of FUNCO-Canada. in designing the exhibits for Toronto's new Science Centre, drew his inspiration from ancient people-processes: "an ultimate altar-temple process: the marketplace. Oaxaca, Mexico—[a] designer-shaman-people cycle." He transposed these meanings into a series of exhibits that can involve the people of Toronto in a permanent, albeit changeable, process. "Museums are temples. I call the Science Centre in Toronto a macro-museum. ... It is a temple to science and technology. . . . whose function should be to provide the necessary lubricant for change. . . . that is what seems to have made temples and churches work in the past. ... it makes change easier or it dies. Hopefully, museum people and other temple people will realize this. There will always be temples—more and more in the mind."

 

Aspects

Graphics:

Visual effects with paint, print, signs, symbols, and words to transmit messages or affect the appearance of build­ings, interior spaces, and temporary environments.

The supergraphics on the buildings of Hart Island by Jason (Cruru) Sky and the residents of Phoenix House transform what had been prosaic buildings for a New York state institution into a visually exciting community, one that announces its optimism and togetherness across the waters to New York City.

Movement:

Movement scores and spontaneous movement events add another dimension to environmental happenings, and infuse the atmosphere with the feelings and physical attitudes of participants.

Blindfolded walks together in unaccustomed places—a wooded mountainside, an old house, city alleyways-create mystery in movement, emphasize mutual de­pendence for safety, bring about new experiences of space, textures, bodily awareness. Here, young dancers and architects move through a blindfolded walk below Mount Tamalpais, California, in the Experiments in Environment workshops of Ann and Lawrence Halprin.

Dispensability:

Temporary structures, environments, exhibits, inflatables, objects that can if desired, be discarded after use. perhaps to be replaced by another "model."

Fleder-Housing by Missing Link Productions is ideally suited for people with tiny house budgets. A foldable structure of cloth, synthetics, or other fabrics over a lightweight frame, the system can be situated in many places, and can be disposed of when the owners can afford more substantial living arrangements. It appears to be a good Arthropod, incidentally. Arid I feel Mr. Strauss would have appreciated the tribute in nomencla­ture by his fellow Viennese.

Mobility:

Structures and environments that can be moved from place to place using various means of locomotion, in­cluding means interral to the structure itself. Includes most plug-in systems.

The proposal by Einar Thorsteinn of Iceland and West Germany for a housing capsule system concentrates on the mobility of the units. The architect notes: "It should be possible to change the position of houses relative to each other as easily as driving a car. . . . Houses should be transportable in order to give the occupants freedom to choose new surroundings rapidly." (Note: Thorsteinn's environmental montage illustrates en­vironmental concepts and preoccupations; it is a good example of good Arthropod graphics communication.)

Sensuality:

Environments and happenings designed to enlist the senses of participants in the experience of the event. We often depend so primarily on the strong visual sense that it can alter our perceptions when other senses are brought actively into the process: smell, touch, taste, hearing, awareness of moving into altered environments, and so on.

Cily Feast was staged by Peoples Plans Company (Helen Goodwill, Director) in Vancouver. Canada, as the climax of a ten-day festival by the Intermedia artists at the Van­couver Art Gallery. Restaurants, homes, studios, and peripatetic food-stalls were used as the sites of a com­munal eating event throughout the city. Choice was built into the program by everyone deciding where he would like to eat. what he could afford, whether he would host a feast or be a guest at one. At the end of . the feast, all feasting groups converged on the Vancouver Art Gallery for "an extravaganza of entertainment gathered from the city's night spots."

Changeability:

Structure, environments, objects with the capability of being changed or changing themselves in form, function, use. applicability, and appearance as the needs or wishes of. the users and participants change.

Edward Suzuki of South Bend. Indiana, has invented a geodesic dome that can be converted from a tent-like dwelling into a boat, and vice versa. It may also be made into a "soap-box-derbv" car when wheels are attached to the two horizontal members of the boat configuration. Suzuki says: "The members that constitute the geodesic framework may be disassembled and packed around the plastic (continuous) membrane that covers the frame­work. The whole apparatus thus mav be shoulder-packed and serve as a useful camping tool—a tent at night and a vehicle by day."

Transformation:

Designs, structures, activities, graphics, and performances that alter the impact, effect, and appearance of existing environments, things, and sometimes people.

Apparitions on the Ponte Vecchio by 9999 of Florence transforms an ancient monument for a brief period into a living performance of kinetic graphics. Op-art slides and supergraphics were projected on the bridge at night, altering the experience and perception of a famous land­mark. A similar event has been staged at an old power-plant in Georgetown. Washington. D.C.. by Doug Michels who later co-founded Ant Farm.

Situation Schackstrasse was an environmental transfor­mation event in Munich by HA Schult. One section of the street was completely covered with the printed word Now. The second section was "soundproofed" with hun­dreds of doormats placed over tar. The third section was filled with about five tons of waste paper. A lawsuit fol­lowed. Responses are not always favorable!

Man/Machine Media:

Creation of places and situations that can bring about interfaces and exchanges of messages and maybe feeling'' between men and machines, men. and media. A cyberne­tics trip, really.

In March, 1970, Coop. Himmelblau performed Hard Space, an event in which heart microphones were at­tached to the three group-members and electronicallv connected to three explosive charges two kilometers away. The transmission of the three heartbeats activated the explosions, and three "instant" (and very temporary) spaces were realized.

Willard van de Bogart designed the Film Chamber as an environment for the experimentation with projection systems and visual effects. His Plastic Inflatable Media Environment incorporates visual sensations as well, but also introduces sounds (electronic), smells (odor varia­tions), touch f large foam-rubber objects!, and balance (irregular floor levels). A timing device connected to I two fans permits the environment to "breathe/' expand­ing and contracting like a living organism. A sensorv-media experience.

Architectonix:

Design wherein a more traditional approach to architecture-as-object acts as the environmental agent.

Super studio's "mental furniture," such as desert lamps, information table, and dining room, and its Catalogue of 1'illas, including Cubic Villa and Villa on the Sen Coast, emphasize the group's belief in the power of the architectural statement to make a firm commitment to influence the way humanity lives.

Closed System:

Affords a prestructured environment or series of experi­ences—a more traditional approach wherein the observer is treated as audience. Examples might include Willard van de Bogart's Film Chamber (p. 49) and Superstudio's Villas.

Open System:

An environment, artwork, and/or experiential series that allows the observer to become involved and perhaps participate, adding additional, and unexpected, inputs to the process.

Archizoom's Interior Landscapes presents us with a vast, loft-like, characterless interior space within which people can move and make their own environments for them­selves. The existing environment makes no demands and creates no parameters. What environment develops is totally developed by the people in their provisions for play, performance, sleep, love-making, eating, storing their bikes, and so on.

Pneumcicosm of Haus-Rucker-Co is a means of inducing continuing, open-ended process into existing cityscapes through the use of pneumatic dwelling units in vertical urban structures. The units respond to changing needs, are transportable, plug into existing common facilities, and add a vivacious slow-motion kinetic rhythm to the metropolis.

Individuals:

Mini-environments or events for the experience of oni or at the most two persons.

Haus-Rncker-Co did Flyhead for a single person to put on and have a complete alteration of his environment, get away from the daily, dreary sameness. A solitary trip: refracting prisms, colors, different sizes and dis­tances than in "real" life. Mind Expander is for two-presumably male and female. A place for them to really get together; a changed environment for two people to be alone in.

Various activities, environments, happenings, and struc­tures designed for the experiences, involvements, and/or creative inputs of a number of people—artists and audi­ences.

There are numerous examples, including Coop. Himmelblau's Restless Ball, an inflated vinyl bubble for the activities ol nvo to fifteen people indoors or out-or-doors; Yukihisa Isobe's inflatable for a thousand people at the Phoenix House Summer's End Happening; Haus-Rucker-Co's Giant Billiard, a superscale jumping in­flatable group game; and many, many more.

Permanence:

As under Attitudes, a structure or environment in­tended to last, perhaps to be lived in. or offer other long-term use.

The group-planning process for Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, by Hardy, Holzrnan & Pfeifler with the university community illustrates an open-ended, process-oriented activity that will result in the creation of a permanent, three-dimensional complex for living and learning.

As I said, these are a variety of the attitudes and aspects of the work in this book that I have responded to and experienced during the preparation of. Arthropods. Every reader will bring his own feelings, knowledge, experi­ences and in-experiences, needs, ideas, criteria—in two key words, his attitudes and aspects—to the material presented here. I hope this can. in a sense, become part of a continuing process of investigation among many people in many places for ways to energize shared environmental involvements.

The next seventeen elements of this book will be in-depth portfolio presentations of the work of Arthropod groups and individuals, ranging from such "old masters" as Cedric Price and Francois Dallegret (very lively young old masters, those!) through some of the newer Arthro­pods such as 9999 in Florence and Missing Link in Vienna. (The Halprins and John Johansen, though of an older generation, speak much younger than most under-thirties.)

"The present technological age occurs in a new environ­ment, an electric environment, which has reconfig­ured our senses. Seeing is no longer the primary means of knowing. Hearing, tasting, touching, and smelling have become more important. Our five senses are rapidly becoming more completely integrated. We • now demand greater participation in events. We have ; reached the end of contemplation, impartiality and | disinterestedness. We are embarking on a new phase i of artistic awareness in which participation, partiality and interest are the chief characteristics. There is an increased participation in the physical environment that results in an open-ended experience which can only be completed by the participant. Involvement mitigates the inside and outside split. It destroys the subject-object duality. Fusion brings us into a single spiritual body."

Willoughby Sharp