Reel to Reel Tape as Read Write Cultural Artifact

I have chosen a Tandberg Series 14 reel-to-reel tape player as an artifact for the Tensta Museum Apartment as I believe it reflects the democratic values and social possibilities associated with the Million Program (Swedish: Miljonprogrammet). The company of the same name manufactured the Tandberg between 1968 and 1978 in Oslo, Norway. Tandberg was a high quality device that was used in schools, universities and homes in Sweden. (1) The reel to reel placed media in the hands of ordinary people, allowing them to record audio and even abstract and collage the sounds around them. In this sense, the Tandberg represents the beginnings of a read/write culture that is standard with digital media today.  

People could produce media as well as consume it with the Tandberg. 

Like the typewriter in the early 20^th century, the reel-to-reel tape recorder enabled people to record and represent and even abstract their experiences and ideas. But unlike the typewriter, the Tandberg did not need extra coding (i.e. literacy) to operate. As long as someone could speak and listen, home produced audio became accessible. Finally, the Tandberg player here is accompanied by a found recording from the early 1980s of the exiled Somalian writer Nuruddin Farah (b. 1945). On the tape, Farah speaks of his writing, as well as the Somalia he grew up in and of the diaspora he was part of and his exile. The Somalian diaspora is an important part of Tensta today. Thus, almost 50 years of Tensta history is embodied in the Tandberg Series 14 reel-to-reel player, from the aspirations of the Million Program to the multiculturalism of Sweden today.

James Barrett

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^{1. "På 1950-talet och 1960-talet ansågs Tandbergs bandspelare vara bland de bästa och det var som regel Tandbergbandspelare som köptes in till svenska skolor." Music in Folkhemmet http://www.ravjagarn.se/blogg/tag/musik/}

Blockholm: Crowdsourcing City Planning with Minecraft

The Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design has announced a project where the topographic site for Stockholm has been reproduced in Minecraft and people are invited to rebuild the city virtually.

Blockholm opens on 24 October and allows people to realize the city they always dreamed of. It is interesting as it allows a form of modelling and design rarely practiced on a large scale in city planning. According to the website (not my translation):


Blockholm - A new Stockholm in Minecraft

In architecture, work is in digital tools and models. What happens when these tools become available to anyone? Maybe we can see where the road will be, the house was to stand. Building a model in three dimensions and show how we think. In Block Holm will all be with. A simple method, the same for all, we can build a new city, block by block. We have cleared the city of all past. There is something scary, yet liberating in to start anew.

How can we change our city?

Can the game be a way to show what we think and what we want? In Blockholm we build all side by side, adult children, our dreams and ideas. Everybody has the same conditions but with different starting points. We can test ideas and forms without preconditions, possible and impossible. We have a new way to have a conversation with each other and with policy makers.

The digital mirror image

- By maintaining the road network, we can orient ourselves in this amazing reflection. The basic structure is the same, but everything is different, says Markus Bohm, artist and project manager:
- We want to create a meeting between the game's realities and current urban planning and architecture. Minecraft has become a great platform for creativity and we want to show new ways of working, new ways to organize.

The world's largest Architecture and Design Projects

Each property in today Stockholm is an identical plot in Blockholm.
- We have generated approximately 100,000 construction sites. It will be the world's largest architecture and design projects in terms of number of participants. We will release district for district to allow the city to emerge piecemeal. All participants will work side by side and see how the city is emerging from within. There is a huge process that anyone can follow. In an interactive map on the internet, the construction of blocks islet seen in real time, says Mats Karlsson, architect and project manager.

The Country House Revealed as Monument

"The balance of forces between monuments and buildings has shifted. Buildings are to monuments as everyday life is to festival, products to works, lived experience to the merely perceived, concrete to stone, and so on. What we are seeing here is a new dialectical process, but one just as vast as its predecessors. How could the contradiction between building and monument be overcome and surpassed? How might that tendency be accelerated which has destroyed monumentality but which could well re-institute it, within the sphere of buildings itself, by restoring the old unity at a higher level? So long as no such dialectical transcendence occurs, we can only expect the stagnation of crude interactions and intermixtures between 'moments' — in short, a continuing spatial chaos. Under this dispensation, buildings and dwelling-places have been dressed up in monumental signs: first their façades, and later their interiors. The homes of the moneyed classes have undergone a superficial socialization' with the introduction of reception areas, bars, nooks and furniture (divans, for instance) which bespeak some kind of erotic life. Pale echoes, in short, of the aristocratic palace or town house. The town, meanwhile, now effectively blown apart, has been 'privatized' — no less superficially — thanks to urban 'decor' and 'design', and the development of fake environments. Instead, then, of a dialectical process with three stages which resolves a contradiction and 'creatively' transcends a conflictual situation, we have a stagnant opposition whose poles at first confront one another 'face to face', then relapse into muddle and confusion"- Henri Lefebvre The Production of Space p223.

Ann Pendleton-Jullian "Design Through Gaming"

Architects and designers of buildings, cities and landscapes- or systems and institutions even- work within physical and cultural sites in which value and meaning exist as embedded entities. As embedded entities, they are manifest in matter (material and the form it takes) and energy (systems of interaction and exchange of people, things, information), both of which may already be in play or exist as potential. To realize that which is potential within a complex and changing system of meaning, material, and exchange requires the ability to approach the problem as an interconnected fabric of definitions, frames, constraints, and opportunities, and to work (or play) within this fabric, making meaningful form emerge.

About Ann: Ann Pendleton-Jullian is an architect, educator, and writer of international standing. Her design work negotiates the overlap between architecture, landscape, culture, and technology. Her work is motivated towards internationalism as both a concept and a reality.

Life by Google

An image of sorts of the two places I have spent longest in my life. The town in Australia I was born in, Toowoomba Queensland, and where I live at the moment, Umeå Sweden. Toowoomba has a saddler, pasta and real estate. There is a university in Toowoomba, but it is not related by Google to the town name. Therefore it does not appear in searches. Compared to Umeå, a town of roughly the same size and demographic, where the university is directly related by Google to the town.

The architecture of information proceeds.

Jet Junk and Speculative Architecture

Fanzine for Electronics and Aesthetics Junk Jet just released their second issue, which examines "Speculative Architecture." Published out of Stuttgart, Germany, each installment of Junk Jet pulls together a chaotic assortment of collage, text, art projects, lists, photographs, and much more. The term "speculative" is used to group "works of unpredictable architectures and volatile spaces within real and virtual environments." One such space could be the empty bedrooms found in booty dancing demos on YouTube minutes before the dancer enters the frame. Olia Lialina writes on Dennis Knopf's Bootyclipse which compiles fuzzy, webcam footage of these domestic interiors, while maintaining their original soundtrack. (This article also appeared as a section in her essay Infinite Seance 2.) The confused comments from non-art seeking YouTube users posted in response to Knopf's video entries draw out a sense of speculation in their attempts to understand what it is they're viewing. 0100101110101101.org's An Ordinary Building also toys with the viewer's expectations. They contribute documentation of this project, in which they placed a plaque on a nondescript building in Viterbo, Italy declaring that the structure "...was designed by an unknown architect in an irrelevant epoch and never belonged to an important person." The sign stands in contrast to others found throughout Italy which detail the history and importance of specific buildings. While Junk Jet's themes are generally quite open (JODI contribute a recipe to this issue), one salient strand seems to be the confusion and suspension which follow speculation, regardless of its architecture.