Dinner Conversation: what did you talk about at your last meal? by Erik Adigard + Ross Altheimer (and 500+ guests)
for Cinque Mostre at the America Academy in Rome

ScalaCupola: ascend_sacred_descend_stairway  by Erik Adigard + Jesse Jones (music), for the Cinque Mostre exhibit at the America Academy in Rome

ScalaCupola is a site specific media installation that explores the possibility of “sacred spaces”. To do so we have brought together the Sistine Chapel and a profane space (a staircase of the American Academy in Rome) together they aim to suggest that a staircase may be seen as a motion toward the heavens.

ScalaCupola is part of the larger project Cave To Cloud, an investigation of the nature of “image” in the age of mobility and digital networks. As such, it explores relationships between the sacred and notions of architecture, iconography, crowds, noise, harmony and tourism, as well as concerns of meaning, temporality, spaciality and motion.

Facsimile: “we need not destroy the past—it is gone”

This quote is from John Cage, who was the inspiration of the Nuova Consonanza Festival 2012. As it penetrates the walls of Villa Aurelia, Facsimile aims to echo his vision. It explores the porosity of opulent spatiality as it is “caged” in timelessness. The facsimile seemingly penetrates windows and walls to occupy the moment, marking noise, silence and harmony within.

“Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time”
by T.S. Eliot are words that more specifically express the creative intent of this piece as they remind us that the fax stands for the futile attempt to overcome the obsolescence of the moment, and its thoughts.

2012: thermal fax paper

A 12 second flight to the new location of M-A-D, my design studio with Patricia McShane. We are now part of a creative compound at 2210 Sixth St, in the design hub of Berkeley, California. Under our 1,600sf rooftop logo are M-A-D, the architecture firm envelope a+d and the recording studio Motion West.

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
•.•    
Did we invent language to tell complex stories or did we inherit simple stories that turned into a complex language?
0_o
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.
•.•
And now they are dying overnight because we have destroyed their language. Will humans have to pollinate for the bees?
0_o
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.