In this interview edit, Paul Virilio relates the notions of void, speed and life (Vide, Vite et Vif). He brings up Foucault’s theory of claustrophobia as it is reflected by interfaces that shrinks everything into the palm of our hands. He talks about the race to build upward and even to reach upward toward other worlds—all the while progress is taking reality beyond our control hence bringing new generation of threats. Virilio also suggests the creation of a Ministry of Time to help us manage our present.
For the AGI Congress 2011 “Special Project” in Barcelona: bees, agriculture and pollination
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Did we invent language to tell complex stories or did we inherit simple stories that turned into a complex language?
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Perhaps we conceive language not to tell stories but to build survival systems. Just to be. But all systems exist within a larger and more complex one. Bees do live in a stunning architecture, but we have harnessed it as a mere machine for the sake of billions in market commodities, as well as ninety percent of the world’s commercial plants, from fruits and veggies to coffee and cotton. They have virtually been feeding the planet.
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And now they are dying overnight because we have destroyed their language. Will humans have to pollinate for the bees?
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Yes. Pollinate ideas to save bees. To start with…
A workshop conceived for the California College of the Arts: In the midst of city spaces large and small, we will catalogue notable aspects of street life, messaging, iconography, art, interfaces, devices, and other constructs that can bring both life and identity to spatiality. We will consider how these heterogeneous design agencies relate to each other, to people, to culture and/or to the economy.
Every year the congress of Alliance Graphique Internationale, challenges its members with a visual essay. This year, it did so by asking for an interpretation of the “creative process”.
The simple answer is easy: Mostly, we all go from research, to concept, to design, and finally to implementation. But that is caricatural and more false than not. In truth it took me a while to understand why I couldn’t immediately conceive a more accurate answer, and that is because I do not own a creative process. If any, it is an ever shifting jumble of expressed and implied concerns from client, audience and so many stake holders. Therefore, each project is a wonderfully unique venture, always exposed to contingencies that may lead into graceful love affairs as easily as into conflicts of interest. However it happens, the creative process remains a dynamic between demands on the client side and the yearnings of creative innovation on the other. A potential to invent is what each designer possesses and thrives to cultivate, and we all have our own clever ways to ensure that it is expressed as seductively as possible somewhere in the “solution”…
…Exhibited in Mapping The Process, Porto and published in Process Is The Project
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An edited version of postDELUVIAN, a short documentary created in 1993 for City TV and for the AIGA national conference—on the correlations between mass media, corporate practices and gang culture. Despite condemning each other through opposite discourses, these societal blocks do share language commonalities, and we see that they often influence and build on each other.
A series of prints that explore how various notions of perspective can be applied to seascapes and urbanscapes
another exploration of the relationships between, imagery, collage and the notions of fragmented perspectives
Proposal for the Architecture Venice Biennale 2008, to be installed in the Corderie dell’Arsenale. It was conceived as a 360 projection running live from SecondLife.
One in a series: Florence and Normandy converging on the Congo river: History, locations, implications and consequences.
The Los Angeles riots of 1992, triggered by the acquittal of Rodney King’s attackers caused 53 deaths, 2,383 injuries, more than 7,000 fires. On May 1, 1992, King appeared before television news cameras to appeal for calm, asking: “People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along? Can we stop making it, making it horrible for the older people and the kids?…It’s just not right. It’s not right. It’s not, it’s not going to change anything. We’ll, we’ll get our justice….”
