A weak apparatus/1. The People’s Perk Complex. (Ermanno Cirillo)

SPAM 16: E4N2C

El efecto cambio de palabra puede servir para dirigir el texto al espacio que hemos decidido estudiar. Basta con ponerle un nombre a ese espacio y aplicar el efecto. Lo llamaremos ____________. (ge+p_DJset)

No parece que la belleza se encuentre en el objeto acabado. Los procesos se diseñan teniendo en cuenta el factor tiempo, una vez construido el objeto, éste se convierte en semilla que reaccionará a las vicisitudes de su entorno para evolucionar en el mismo. Así podríamos hablar de belleza performativa, dispositivos que reaccionan inevitablemente al cuerpo, a la sociedad, al entorno para generar ambientes dinámicos. Sistemas inacabados, no como estética de lo inacabado, sino que necesiten de la interacción del usuario para completarse, constantemente y a lo largo del tiempo. Llegará el momento en que el dispositivo sea incapaz de actualizarse, de absorber más información, ahí morirá con dignidad. Si ha logrado responder a las preguntas complejas mediante estrategias simples y concretas (y no al revés, a lo que estamos acostumbrados), el proceso habrá sido bello/real. (t+cBelle+Proc)

Clement nos dice que el Tercer paisaje es el refugio de la diversidad, el espacio donde se producen las invenciones biológicas (resultado de la hibridación de varias especies). El Tercer paisaje que he escogido en Oporto pertenece a la categoría de residuo, ya que resulta del abandono de una actividad. El autor nos informa de que “La suma de residuos constituye, por excelencia, el territorio de la mezcolanza planetaria”. (Clement, Gilles, Manifiesto del Tercer paisaje, Barcelona, Gustavo Gili, 2007, p.22) Esta investigación también quiere ser refugio de la diversidad, plantear herramientas para provocar invenciones textuales (biológicas de Clement), y fomentar la creación de residuos. El residuo lo entendemos como aquello, que carece de valor oficial establecido por alguna entidad, y que por ello, contiene un valor no-oficial que le otorga otra dimensión, la que cada uno imagine. El residuo invita a la reinterpretación, manipulación e incluso perversión. El residuo puede combinarse, transgredirse y mezclarse con otros para producir nuevas especies textuales. (ge+p_DJset) “Como diría Bakhtin, gracias al carácter abierto de todo texto que necesita de un contexto extratextual donde debe ser comprendido, un contexto que aporte nuevos sentidos nunca previstos enteramente por el acto de producción ni por la industria cultural que quisiera parar todos estos procesos.” (Adell Pitarch, 2004, en Intersecciones: La música en la cultura electro-digital, Sevilla, Ed. Arte/facto) (C&P) SEÑOR CenTec: Con rapidez y violencia, el señor CUS desenfunda su revólver a la vez que se levanta arrastrando escandalosamente su silla hacia atrás y apunta con pulso preciso a la cabeza del señor CenTec, y éste, tras sus gafas, ni se inmuta. (t+cLR) Correcto, sincero, limpio, sosegado, austero, amplio y luminoso. Hoy tomé té en el edificio industrial y rotativa del diario Heraldo de Aragón con Silvia, Antonio y Alicia. Entre tanto estrés, información y caos en que hoy nos vemos inmersos, venía bien esta parada. El té ya estaba disuelto cuando llegué, y no tenía azúcar. (t+cSilCol)

MAP 16: A weak apparatus/1. The People’s Perk Complex.

Definitely it seems really hard to find beauty in a finished up object. We are no more interested in forms, but in the developing processes of reality shaping some momentary stable configurations. I would like to introduce an emblematic object recently encountered. Avoiding any purpose of elegance or any esthetical willing, the recently green-and-yellow painted complex is one of the landmarks standing aside the Chinatown’s shophouses, just few minutes walking to the Singapore River, along the crowded Eu Ton Sen Street. How should we approach such a building? In which manner consider it? Our architectural categories could help us in decrypting its inner values and its external mechanism of connexion to the city? We may consider morphological aspects, or the relatively simple typology of its general layout. We possibly analyze space while divide it through a diagram which serve as an abstract matrix; in any case go back to the very reason of such an intervention, at the end of the sixties, when the architect William Lee designed it, in a tabula rasa surrounding, after his foreign experiences at the AA and Harvard, and thanks to the meeting with Fumiko Maki; where there was no city, this complex, as many others, rose up as immediate concretization of a political project, artificially and quickly created to supply basic needs, and urgent call for growth, density, rational control. But maybe, we don’t mind about it, or we mind but we leave these mentions to another context; or, for the very characteristics of this place, just forget about what was formerly, and use novelty as mean of efficacy, and eventually of illusion. Above all, what it is important to us, it is the way it works. How it produces events, within its space and through the time. How it has became what it is, out of the designer’s will. The way it generates a collective space of acceleration, antagonist to the city, capable to reach a brutal density, a continuous transfiguration in time, a sense of alienation and disjunction. This urban object, born under the double influence of the political dream of the People’s Action Party and the architectural visions of the Metabolism, represent, paradoxically, a soft urbanism. Despite its ferocious image generated by the juxtaposition of two huge concrete blocks, one vertical and one horizontal, the People’s Park Complex is everything but a wound up and frozen form. Thus, what is it? We are attempted to bring clearness into the incoherence, to draw some concepts from the confused field of references and observations, but for now we just would like to show up some problematic facets which are to be interconnected, displaced, contaminated, and recomposed in a later and more conscious conclusion. This is a process that requires time. Within a pretty open scenario along the experimental axis of Eu Ton Sen Street, the hard boundaries of a defined object conceal an open field where space is constantly deformed by the pass of time, and where, in spite of the rules that broadly encoded social behaviour, some unexpected accidents could occur. Un expected as the religious ritual happening last afternoon, when I went there looking for something to eat. And perhaps it will be clear why we have been brought here.

Does the following quotation by Sanford Kwinter fit what we have just described? It doesn’t really matter, just leave these words closed to the pictures, as a commentary that can proof or negate our first intuition, taken while having some good vegetable dumplings with a cold tin of tea on a plastic table. “From the moment a system is understood as evolving over time, what becomes important are the transformations it undergoes, and all transformation in a system is the result of energy – or information – moving through it. As energy courses through a system it induces three general types of transformation: (1) It imports information from outside the system. (In addition to changes provoked internally within the system, this also transforms the external milieu in such a way as to affect the type of information it will, in subsequent stages, channel into the system). (2) It exports energy from within a system to its ambient milieu, producing this same double effect now in asymmetrical reverse. (3) It transports information from certain levels in the system to other heterogeneous levels – producing morphological events that are often dramatically unpredictable with respect to location, causal sequence, and magnitude of effect.” (Sanford Kwinter, The Complex and the Singular, in Architecture of Times, The MIT Press 2003).

We enjoy heterogeneity. We enjoy movement. We enjoy machines.

+ PICTURES a_b_c