Dodes'ka-den is the first color movie by Akira Kurosawa. It is set in a Japanese slum and explores several more or less dramatic episodes of its inhabitants' life. The film's name comes from the onomatopoeia produced by a quite peculiar character who cross the slum thinking he is actually driving a tram, nostalgia of a modernity which produced the even existence of this shanty town which lives in a quasi-total ignorance of the external world since then.
openHouse is the last project released by our friend Francis Bitonti (Fadarch. see also this former post) and his partner Brian Osborn (bo-th.com) for DesCours event in New Orleans. The project is a 500 square feet canopy interacting with people under it.
New war technologies implies some new way of resisting it. US Department of Defense revealed this week that the video transmission of the attack drones operating in Iraq have been hacked by Iraqi insurgents who were thus able to see what the pilot (comfortably sat somewhere 20000 km away) was seeing.
Miyazaki's movies are always introducing heterotopias hosting imaginaries (I use the word imaginary here in an Edouard Glissant meaning) only accessible to people who did not give up their interpretation of the world as children. His movies fits absolutely with Foucault's own definition of a certain kind of heterotopias, the parents' bed which becomes a ship for example, but even more the most remote point of the garden, the one which remains unknown and therefore entertain all kind of fantasies and materialization of fear. Each of those movies are a journey following Lewis Caroll's rabbit and dramatizes worlds where evil comes from a lack of imaginaries.
Francois Bellanger is organizing for Transit-City a new conference day this Friday (December 18th) in Paris about a new era of urban riots. The lecturer will be Alain Bertho, anthropology Professor at the European Studies Institute and Director of the PHD School of social science of Paris 8.
David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch (1991) is an interpretation of William Burroughs' novel (1959) and Burroughs' life in general. It thus dramatizes the interzone, the famous heterotopia of the novel, Burroughs' vision of Tangier (Morocco) with a layer of hallucination due to drugs. The interzone is an incredible metropolitan place (I am pretty sure Georges Lucas had it in mind when he created Tatooine) where all kind of "creatures" interact with each others...
The loss of architecture or how I stopped worrying and started to love the cyborg is another brilliant project from Vito Acconci's grad studio at Pratt (see previous post). It has been designed by Martin Byrne in the frame of a research of the hybridization of the human body with products of technology. The project dramatizes a high tech laboratory on Mars which has been desinstitutionnalized over time and then cannibalized in a rough way by small groups of people kind to have their bodies embracing technology.\\__] transmission received [.
[.10.010.Martian_development_
\\After significant research, the Collective for Martian Recovery, has the following to report_]
\\in the early stages of the 21st Century, the now defunct Rosen Foundation (see attached dossier) had developed a highly controversial process by which humans could actively control their evolution. ]]..1001.110.1100
\\the occupants of Mars Colony Spirit_21x-4 were among the first to experiment with these developments. once the foundation's endowment vanished, the building and its products were left to their own devices.
\\at first the facility was simply used to capacity, but quickly went well beyond capacity. Additional production robots were compressed so tightly and with such density within the facility that the shell of the production room could not hold, and has buckled at the robotic platform mountings.
\\it swings loosely from the carbon fiber structure as the building flexes around the user that is being passed from one mechanical hand to another.
\\ ]. 0.011.00.101 text censored _
\\not long after this development, the facility's stock of parts was depleted. in order to meet overwhelming demands, new harvesting spaces had to be created, one for each raw material needed; flesh and metal.
\\the technological harvesting digested material from the colony's junkyard, while biological harvesting processed its material from the colony's graveyard.
\\we have found these colonists in an unfortunate, yet fascinating, condition. In the name of science, we recommend maintaining an analytical distance before engagement.
\\ 0.11.001.0[_[collective_for_
D.k. Phillipson, assistant to temporary presiding mediator
.] transmission end.010.0011.01. [__//
Here is an absolutely brilliant project by 陈欣阳 (Chen Xinyang) for Vito Acconci's graduate studio at Pratt which was proposing to create a space station all along last semester (finals were two days ago).One day, 10 most dangerous criminals and 10 most devoted monks enter the space station.
They left earth forever, and live in the space station in the rest of their live.
If a person died, cell is his or her grave.
As there is no way to escape, no guard is needed in this station.
Three rulers set to ensure monks and prisoners could stay together.
a. people have to work.
prisoners do manual labour.
Monks read prayer.
b. cooperation is necessary.
each prisoner learned one special skill to maintain the space.
Monks knows all the skills.
3. prisoners can't kill monks.
if one monk be killed by a prisoner, the computer would close one cell of prison as
punishment.
Underground is a 1995 movie by Emir Kusturica dramatizing not only an heterotopia but also an heterochronia. In fact, the topia here is a underground resistant shelter in Yougoslavia started during the Second World War. The heterochronia is constituted by the fact that, many years after the end of the war, this little node of resistance continues to organized itself in order to resist to nazis. Their only contact with the surface world being a manipulator/opportunist general, people living in this underground world have no idea of what is going on outside their universe which insists here on the filtration of exchanges between an heterotopia and the normative world.
