Jadadora’s Weblog

CAMOGLI.- In the installation by Tomas Saraceno at the latest Venice Biennial, Galaxies Forming along Filaments, like Droplets along the Strands of a Spider’s Web, thousands of strands filled the room, forming an enormous web with bubble-vessels clustered inside.

At Fondazione Pier Luigi e Natalina Remotti in Camogli, with the installation From Camogli to San Felipe, spiders weaving stars… curated by Francesca Pasini, Tomas Saraceno offers another view of the strategy of the spider and its capacity to cross enormous distances dangling on strands of silk.

The installation it’s part of the experimental project Space Elevator, a project made in Argentina last Spring by Tomas Saraceno, with the support and contribution – among others – of Fondazione Pier Luigi e Natalina Remotti.

To understand Saraceno’s visions it is important to touch base with the English scientists of Rothamsted Research, who have developed a mathematical model to describe the phenomenon of the flight of arachnids known as “ballooning”. The model shows that air turbulence can transport them hundreds of kilometers out to sea. Most spiders in search of new territory, or a mate, cast their silk into the air and can thus “parachute” to a new location. The main seasons of this activity are fall and spring. Normally they migrate from one side of a field to another, but at times they can cover great distances. For twenty years the best mathematical description of the ballooning phenomenon was the so-called Humphrey model, but the Rothamsted researchers say it did not explain certain characteristics of the flight of spiders moving in air flows. In short, it treated the silk as if it were a stiff rod, and the spiders as if they were just dangling from the bottom end, like a sort of “upside-down lollipop”.

Instead, their flexibility permits the filaments suspended in the wind to twist with the turbulence, which alters the aerodynamic characteristics and allows the spiders to travel for unpredictable distances. Understanding how and why they move may help us to use spiders as biological control agents against agricultural pests.

This research prompted Saraceno, in the spring of 2009, to conduct a “ballooning” experiment in Argentina, flying some objects covered with helium-filled acrylic film. Another step with respect to his utopian habitat structures (Air-Port-City) that dialogue with the constellations and the research of architects like Richard Buckminster Fuller, Peter Cook and Yona Friedman.

In the exhibition at Fondazione Pier Luigi e Natalina Remotti, Tomas Saraceno proposes a synthesis between the images from the Argentine experiment and the bubble-cockpits for spiders seen in Venice. Along different trajectories, four bubbles cross the two levels of the building, while the strands that support them seem to be energy vectors that could ideally make the building itself lift off, if we imagine them being unfastened.

In the flight photographs shown on the walls of the second floor the structures at times take on the physiognomy of large drops of water vapor condensing in the sky, and at times seem like physiological entities that float at the edge of the horizon. In other cases, they take on the form of a tent. The photographs document the effective possibility of an airborne architecture, but also a poetic and intellectual tension, to imagine a more evanescent concept of human habitation. Forty years after man landed on the moon, Saraceno tells us that the next step is to gain experience, here on earth, of a gradual absence of gravity.

Inside the Fondazione Pier Luigi e Natalina Remotti, the bubbles suspended in space make us perceive a gravitational feeling inside the building itself, which on the ground floor interacts with the diverging trajectories of the three video projections Space Elevator II (2009), and on the upper level with the photographs of the flight experimentation in Argentina, and with the images arranged around a table, entitled Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating in Space and Mars on Water (2009).

The result is a variable circuit that involves above and below, making us sense a “ballooning” in the atmosphere and the building itself.

The desire to experiment with ascent into the air led Tomas Saraceno, in the summer of 2009, to the International Space Studies Program of NASA, in Silicon Valley, where he developed further passages.

Among the discoveries of the neurosciences, that of mirror neurons has demonstrated the existence of a synchrony between action and observation. Mirror neurons fire in apes when they perform an action or see others perform the same action. But the research group headed by Vittorio Gallese has discovered that in man an effective interaction with objects is not required: the mirror neurons fire even when the action is simply mimed, and they are capable of encoding transitive and intransitive motor activity. Their primary role is the understand the actions of others.

Faced with the actions of Saraceno, what type of comprehension can be activated through the system of mirror neurons? How does synchrony happen between artistic action and observation? Does the attempt to dwell in the air, even temporarily, remain confined to fantasy? These are questions that art, cinema and literature have often asked, but if it is plausible that a mimed action makes mirror neurons fire, then the objects created by Saraceno permit transitive and intransitive actions that can encode an understanding of the air and the void.

ABU DHABI (REUTERS).- Abu Dhabi’s Tourism Development & Investment Company (TDIC) said on Tuesday it has launched the main tender competition for building a branch of the Louvre museum on its flagship development Saadiyat Island.

“The main contract works, the dome, mechanical, electrical, is tendered today,” Felix Reinberg, director of projects delivery at TDIC’s museum division, told reporters on the sidelines of a tour of the island.

Reinberg said the tendering process would close in June.

Located off the coast of Abu Dhabi, Saadiyat Island — which means “the island of happiness” — is a $27 billion art and culture project that is planned to house spin-offs of the Louvre museum in Paris and New York’s Guggenheim.

TDIC commissioned French architect Jean Nouvel to design the island’s Louvre building, which will be shaped like a floating dome.

Reinberg said TDIC had shortlisted between 10 and 20 companies for the construction of the museum.

The museum is due to open in September 2013, Reinberg said.

Bidding for the main contract for the Guggenheim offshoot will start in the first quarter of 2011, while a third museum, the Zayed National Museum which was designed by Lord Norman Foster, will have tendering launched in July 2010.

The island’s cultural district will house the three museums, as well as a Performing Arts Center that was designed by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid.

(Reporting by Cynthia Johnston; writing by Tamara Walid)

http://www.amazon.com/Face-Human-Rights-Walter-K%C3%A4lin/dp/3037780177
Cardboard Boxes and Plastic Tents — Housing Rights as a Human Right

In Afghanistan, political turmoil and war have displaced and broken many of the country’s families and lives, forcing people to live in abandoned houses or buildings. In a photograph taken in 2002, an Afghan mother prepares food on the cement kitchen floor of a deserted house for her young son. The walls are peeling and vandalized, the windows covered in pieces of cardboard — and the house is little refuge from the world outside.

Is the protection of homes, and the right to housing, a human right? In “The Face of Human Rights,” the editors state that the “right to housing is a right to adequate accommodation.”

Rights to prevent the infringement of private housing are essential in upholding human dignity and privacy.

In the United States alone, there are at least 700,000 people without a home, and in Latin America, there are 40 million children estimated to be living on the streets. The right to a protected home is overlooked, but it is a right that is fundamental to living as dignified human beings.

In Las Norias, Spain, Morroccan laborers live in plastic and carboard tents, sleeping and cooking in the flimsy walls as best they can. In another image, an aging Japanese man slowly settles himself into a sturdy cardboard box, hangers hanging from the cardboard sides, the lids of the box propped up to lengthen the walls.

Homes in many countries are no longer places of safety, but places of danger and discrimination instead. In 1992, one man described the destruction of his neighborhood during the Serbian Siege of Bijelhina.

He said, “One of the men in the Yugoslav army uniform then sprayed the house with machine gun fire and the second uniformed soldier threw one hand grenade through the window and one through the door. The grenades must have fallen near the gas bottles because the house exploded and burned to the ground.”

Although the right to housing is not absolute, it is still crucial for governments to protect its people and the homes they live in. In Sri Lanka, Mary Nona, a 37-year-old woman, leaves her home everynight around 5:00 or 6:00 pm to another village in order to avoid the possible night attacks from the Tamil Tiger insurgency. She has been doing this for ten years, taking her pillow and gathering her things for the night away from home. “This is our life,” she says. “We are used to it.”

About the Editors

Walter Kälin is a Member of the UN Human Rights Committee since 2003 and is Representative of the UN Secretary General on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons since 2004. He is also a Professor of constitutional and international Law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Bern, Switzerland.

Judith Wyttenbach is an academic assistant in the Institute of Public Law at Bern University. She teaches at the Lucerne School of Social Work and has written and spoekn on women’s and children’s rights.

Lars Müller manages a visual communication studio in Switzerland since 1982. He has been teaching since 1985.

LONDON
Tue Feb 23, 2010 10:26am ESTLONDON (Reuters) – Digital dumping is on the rise, according to a survey, with growing numbers of people preferring to use email and social networking Web sites to break up with their partners.

Oddly Enough

Over one third of 2,000 people polled (34 percent) said they had ended a relationship by email, 13 percent had changed their status on Facebook without telling their partners and six percent had released the news unilaterally on Twitter.

By contrast, only two percent had broken up via a mobile phone text.

The rest had split up the old-fashioned way by face-to-face conversation (38 percent) and by telephone (eight percent).

“Digital Dumping will soon take over when it comes to ending a relationship,” said Sean Wood, Marketing Manager for DateTheUk dating service for whom the survey was carried out.

“It’s often easier, quicker and avoids any misunderstandings.”

(Editing by Paul Casciato)

NEW DELHI
Tue Feb 23, 2010 10:28am ESTNEW DELHI (Reuters) – A Bollywood filmmaker has issued a lucrative challenge to horror movie fans: a $10,000 reward for anyone who can watch his latest supernatural thriller, alone, in a cinema until the closing credits.

Oddly Enough