A good idea that doesn't happen is no idea at all. -- Louis Kahn
This quote is relayed by Richard Saul Wurman in My Architect [2]. I enjoyed the film and would recommend it to those with an interest, but some architects seemed to want less personal journey and more architectural analysis.
Louis Kahn said to me shortly before he died that an idea that does not happen is no idea at all. Late in his life, Mies van der Rohe told a student interviewing him about his work that the secret to his success was to "do good work."
Nathaniel Kahn: I think you've built way more ... you've had way more success ... rate, in terms of your buildings that you --
I.M. Pei: [sighs] Oh, building doesn't mean success. Building ... three or four masterpieces [is] more important than fifty or sixty buildings. ... Quality, not quantity.
If I'm going to encourage people to post videos to MemeStreams I might as well just cut to the chase. You ever seen these guys on MTV?! I know I could have made a better video for this song, but I couldn't have made a better song.
It seems clear to a lot of us that there is a problem ...
What kind of art does the future deserve? How should we advance?
Much of the [current] work is repetitive and derivative in a way that starts to resemble planned cultural obsolescence.
A strange cycle has set in, whereby the most valuable attribute an artist can have is "promise." With a lot of big bets being placed, the artist has to be both young and verifiable. In other words, marketable. But almost none of our superstar artists have delivered on their promise.
A practical avant-garde is post-careerist. It seeks out low rent and private time, and it concentrates on powerful objects.
It takes real bravery and commitment to one's project to, essentially, take it underground, and eskew the financial resources of the system and their associated strings. Perhaps the art we're looking for is out there, but its looking for a way to find us that doesn't cost money.
I'd been avoided looking at this because electronic writing on buildings has been done before, but their setup is actually fairly cool. The folks at Graffiti Research Labs created a rig that facilitates painting with light on the side of a building. It uses a high lumens projector to project the light, a green laser pointer to do the writing, and a security/astrononmy camera to detect where the green laser was pointed. They have made all the code available under the GPL.
A set of long exposures that were taken while playing video war games of the 80's, created by Atari, Centuri & Taito. The photographs were shot from video game screens while playing the games. By recording each second of an entire game on 1 frame of film, captured complex patterns were captured not normally seen by the naked eye. Fantastic! Where can I get prints?
