Célines band (ROMAN) (French Edition)

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

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Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. Get to Know Us. English Choose a language for shopping. Explore the Home Gift Guide. We need to perform because to do so is what is asked of us. When we choose to make our living on the basis of doing what we want to do, we need to get our act together, we need to get things down, in any place at any time. I ask you and I am sure that you will be as ready as you will ever be to perform yourself, do things and go places. Some have said that we have come to inhabit the post-industrial condition.

But what could that mean? One thing seems to be sure: This group is ever expanding. It is us, the creative types who have created jobs for ourselves by exploring and exploiting our talents to perform small artistic and intellectual miracles. It is us, the socially engaged who create communal spaces for others and ourselves by performing the roles of interlocutors in and facilitators or instigators of processes of social exchange.

When we perform we create concepts and ideas as well as social bonds and forms of communication and communality. Thereby we create the values that our society is supposed to be based on today. The Deutsche Bank currently sum up their company philosophy in a simple slogan formulated in a symptomatically a-grammatical international English: A Passion to Perform you have a passion for something but never to realise an end through actions.

So which side of the barricades are we on then? Where do the barricades stand today, anyway? We are the avant-garde but we are also the jobslaves. We serve the customers who consume the communication and sociability that we produce. We work in the kitchens and call centres of the newly opened restaurants and companies of the prospectively burgeoning new urban centres of the service society. To offer our services we are willing to travel.

Being mobile is part of our performance. So we travel, we go west to work, we go north to work, we are all around, we fix the minds, houses and cars of those who stay in their offices. What do we feel about ourselves and our lives? Are we in charge? What pain and what pleasure are we experiencing in the lives we have created for ourselves?

What would it mean to resist the need to perform? After all the forms of resistance we know are in fact usually dramatic performances themselves. What silent but effective forms of unwillingness, noncompliance, uncooperativeness, reluctance or non-alignment do we find in contemporary culture when it comes to inventing ways to not perform how and when you are asked to perform?

The context and nature of French medieval literature

Can we ever embrace these forms of non-performance in art and thinking as forms of art and thinking? Or do we always find ourselves on the other side of the barricade, together with the performers and those who want to get things done and get enraged by people who stand in our way by being slow, sluggish and uncooperative. After all is not uncooperativeness the revenge uncreative people take on the society of the creative by stubbornly stopping it in its tracks? Have you ever found yourself screaming or wanting to scream at an uncooperative clerk behind a counter: These people work hard to protect society from change by inventing ever new subtle ways to stop those in their tracks who want to revolutionise it.

Are they the enemy? Or are they today maybe the strongest allies you may find when you want to put up defences against a culture of compulsive performativity? But does it have to take other people to make you stop performing? When and how do you give up on the demand and need to perform? Does it take a breakdown to stop you? Was that not what Punk for instance was all about? To transgress your musical capacities by rigorously embracing you incapacities? To rise above demands by frustrating all expectations? To embrace latency goes against the grain of the logic of compulsive performativity because it all about leaving things unsaid, unshown, unrevealed, it is about refraining from actualising and thereby exhausting all your potentials in the moment of your performance.

We have to re- think and learn to re-experience the beauty of latency.

St-Ben-Abbé (Résidus de mémoire t. 1) (French Edition)

What is the time? Performance is all about the right timing. A comedian with a bad sense of timing is not funny, a musician useless. Career opportunities, we are told, are all about being in the right place at the right time. Finding a lover to love maybe also is. Is there a right time for love? What is quality time?

When is a good time to talk? To be in synch with the timing of just in time production you have to be ready to perform all the time. This is the question you must be prepared to answer positively: Ready when you are. As ready as I will ever be. Always up for it.

Stay on the scene. Porn is pure performance. Impotence is out of the question. Frances Stark recently quoted it to me when we talked about the culture of performance. She got the sentence from Henry Miller and included it in one of her collages. What happens when there is a lapse of time, when time is out of joint. Migrant workers bridge this gap in time. They travel ahead in time to work in the fast cities of the West and North. Yet, they face the risk of any time- traveller as they lose touch with the time that passes while they are away. Will they ever find back into their time or learn to inhabit the other time of the other country.

How much time-zone can you inhabit? Who is to set the clock and make the pace according to which all others are measuring their progress? Why would we ever want to do that? After all the joy of art, writing and performing freely lies in the realisation that you can, a sense of empowerment through creativity that in ecstatic moments of creative performance can flood your body with the force of an adrenaline rush. And then living out the I Can is not just a cheap thrill. To face up to your own potentials might be one of the most challenging tasks of your life if not even your responsibility.

Giorgio Agamben speaks about the pleasure and terror of the I Can in this way. He refers to an account by the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova who describes how it came about that she became a writer. Standing outside a Leningrad prison in where her son was a political prisoner, another woman whose son was also imprisoned, asked her: Can you write about this?

She found that she had to respond that yes, indeed she could and in this moment found herself both empowered and indebted. Today it seems most crucial to really understand this link between the empowerment and the debt at the heart of the experience of creative performance. In what way are we always already indebted to others when we perform? In what way is it precisely this indebtedness to others that enables us to perform in the first place?

Could an ethics of a different type of performance — one that aknowleges the debt to the other instead of over-ruling it hectically to improve the efficiency of performance — be developed on the basis of this understanding? How could we perform differently? In his film Theorema Passolini draws up a scenario of unleashed performativity. A factory owner hands over the factory to the workers. His obligations to work haver thereby come to an end. In the villa of the factory owner a young man arrives, he has no personality or features except for the fact that he is a charming lover.

He sleeps with all members of the family and leaves again. Disconnected from work and freed by love all family members start to perform: The son acknowledges he is gay and becomes a painter. The daughter decides to never move nor speak again. The mother cruises the streets and sleeps with strangers. The housemaid decides to not commit suicide, instead she becomes a saint, starts to levitate and cure sick children. The factory owner himself decides to take his clothes off in the main train station and walk off into a nearby volcano.

All of these actions remain uncommented and they are presented as all having the same value as they are equally possible and the possibility of each of these performances does not nivellate or relativise the possibility of any other. Passolini thus describes a situation where the end of work and the arrival of work creates the possibility for a radical co-existence and co-presence of liberated performances which are not forced under the yoke of any single dominant imperative to perform in a particular way. How could we create and inhabit such a condition of undisciplined performativity?

To recognize the indebtedness to the other as that which empowers performance also means to acknowledge the importance of care. You perform because you care. When you care for someone or something this care enables you to act because you feel that you must act, not least because when you really care to not act is out of the question. Paradoxically though, the I Care can generate the I Can but it can also radically delimit it. Because when you care for yourself and others, this obligation might in fact force you to turn down offers to work and perform for others, in other places, on other occasions.

The I Care is the question of welfare. In the historical moment of the dismantling of the welfare state this is a pressing question. In a talk Jimmy Durham cited two people he had met in Italy as saying: What we need now is a better life. My intention is to investigate the potential for creating useful new designs by blending together stylistic or structural elements of existing chair types. I also hope my chairs illustrate — and celebrate — the geographical, historical and human resonance of design: The stories behind the chairs are as important as their style or even their function.

Raymond Queneau, Exercises in Style Exercises in Style , written by Raymond Queneau, is a collection of 99 retellings of the same story, told in a different style. In each, the narrator gets on the "S" bus now no. Informed by the Works Progress Administration WPA of the Great Depression in the s, TWO is a gesture to "make work" for visual and performing artists, writers, and others by giving them simple, idea-based assignments to explore, document, or improve daily life in New York. From a temporary central office, TWO's administrators interview, register, and hire employees; assign, collect, and exhibit work; and distribute Depression-era wages to employees during weekly Payday Parties.

For Antonio Negri, a 17 year long chapter of repressive Italian politics of detention, exile, and imprisonment recently ended. The question for Negri is how one can preserve the freedom of spirit within a penal structure that focuses more on the interior than exterior life of the prisoner. He characterizes this particular loneliness as the powerlessness to act politically, in contrast to another solitude drawn by Spinoza, whom he already dedicated a study during his first imprisonment from to Angela Melitopoulos is an artist and filmmaker who has realized experimental single-channel films, video installations, videoessays, documentaries and sound pieces.

For her, media art as time based technology reveals mnemonic and micro-political processes in documentation. Her work focuses on migration, memory and narration. French writer and Situationist Guy Debord first theorized this concept in his studies of architecture. The original concept was to explore a built environment without preconceptions, without limiting legitimate discussion to architectural styles or residential percentages, instead aiming to discuss the reality of inhabiting an environment. They live and work in Rotterdam. For Bik Van der Pol, the art experience happens as a collaboration with the public, who through making use of the work, complete it.

Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol do not restrict engagement, but rather funnel it by means of the forms they give their work: The conditions they set up for art experiences to happen, make their art a gift: The gift that is their art is offered unconditionally, without obligation or payment. Yet it is because they give their art generously with no fixed expectation or goal, and because they give it with clear intentions informed by a 'continuous optimism and trust in the function of art as a catalyst for change', that manifold, reciprocal effects are set in motion.

This website is built like a book and offers a survey of their work:. Therefore taste, insofar as it, like any other judgment, appeals to common sense, is the very opposite of private feelings. In aesthetic no less than in political judgments, a decision is made, and although this decision is always determined by a certain subjectivity, by the simple fact that each person occupies a place of his own from which he looks upon and judges the world, it also derives from the fact that the world itself is an objective datum, something common to all its inhabitants.?

At any rate, we may remember what the Romans the first people that took culture seriously the way we do thought a cultivated person ought to be: Klein paid enormous attention to all the arrangements surrounding the exhibition, especially focusing on the opening night: Le Vide shows what frames the effective reality of art: A hallmark of Balderassi's work, from the earliest to the most recent, is that even viewers who might be unwilling to consider it as serious art, perhaps even as art at all, can still understand his humour and approach.

That long-present quality is something he sees as deriving from an interest in pulling away from a more cloistered idea of art practice. John Baldessari Sings Sol Lewitt. For displaying an artwork as it exists in the context of everyday life, in its tangible reality of ownership, meaning how one works and lives with it. For disclosing how an artwork considered as exemplary appears outside the rarefied and thoroughly controlled space-time of the exhibition. Finally, for demonstrating how this laying bare of conditions and repressions is not a contradiction with making art, and that the critique can and should be integrated in the work, especially as it reveals how the separation of capitalisation is something in which artists also take part.

While being someone normally excluded from the homes in which major artworks might exist, Lawler was one day granted full access to the Connecticut home of twentieth-century collectors Mr and Mrs Burton Tremaine, and without her knowing, just a few years before much of their collection was dispersed at Christie's. The photograph only uses available light, capturing with a 35mm camera the intimate dialogues established by belongings, as a late Jackson Pollock converses with the filigree of a soup bowl. Through its focus and frame, Pollock and Tureen tells how the hierarchies of value rely on specific acts of framing, classification and maintenance.

Chick Strand, Fake Fruit Factory This is a twenty minute documentary about a group of Mexican women making fake fruit. It is however something far grander and more realized than simply documenting an unusual type of employment. What Chick Strand creates in her brief documentary is an ethereal study of human existence as seen through the lives of a few under-appreciated and blatantly exploited women. Unlike other fly on the wall documentaries, Strand offers you no explanation as to what you are watching besides an occasional title card of explanation, you are left to glean from the film what is shown and what is said by the works, most of which is referencing the sexual life of the women.

This approach makes considerable sense given Strand's close ties to the ethnography program that existed at UCLA in the 's. What Fake Fruit Factory becomes through Strand's vision is a concise narrative essay on a few women who are being exploited by an often faceless white man, who only desires their craftiness and, at times, exotic bodies. We as viewers fear the worst when we realize that their is little these women can do to escape, until we are shown the women enjoying a picnic and swimming at an unknown park. This brief moment reminds viewers that life is not about the products we create or those things we can quantify, but instead the always fleeting moments of quality which toss and turn like agitated waters.

Chick Strand offers something different and proves how integral experimentation in film has become to the grander evolution of cinema. Gordon Matta-Clark, Day's End Gordon Matta-Clark's artistic project was a radical investigation of architecture, deconstruction, space, and urban environments. Dating from to , his most prolific and vital period, his film and video works include documents of major pieces in New York, Paris, and Antwerp, and are focused on three areas: Hans Haacke, Photographic Notes , documenta 2 For showing how people inhabit exhibitions and working against the removal of the perception, intention, and individual choice in how art exists: It is a series of 26 black and white photographs that were taken at Documenta 2, where he worked as an assistant during his summer break from the Art Academy in Kassel.

The photographs record one of the first confrontations of the German public with modern and contemporary art, including works by artists such as Mondrian, Pollock and Kandinsky.

It also documents an important moment and attempt to re-ignite hope, through the possibility for culture, after the Nazi period, in a Germany devastated by destruction and depression. This series of photographs were only first shown in , in Stations of Modernism at the Berlinische Galerie. Photographic Notes, documenta 2, reveals that galleries and museums are the intricate amalgam of social structures and historical narratives, visual and material culture, exhibition practices and strategies of display, and the concerns and imperatives of various governing ideologies. And yet social spaces are not containers in which subjects and objects are simply placed and in which the action then happens, rather they are made as spaces through the changing relations between subjects and objects.

In that sense, a gallery is never empty and waiting to be filled with subjects, objects, discourses or signs , but rather its condition of possibility as a gallery is brought into play through the tensions established around subjects, objects, discourses and signs. The exhibitions they host, therefore, manifest the complex and only partly explicit negotiations between museum or gallery conditions and the various practices and agendas that contend with them, while these might be imbedded in overlapping, or conflicting cultural ideologies.

So, there are two responses. One that confirms the white cube as a necessary modality for showing art and the other that says we must break down the notion of this privileged space. Inside the White Cube is part of the rich discourse that throughout the s and s meant the upheaval of western art world, while in the wealth of writings on space and politics and the ideology critique of the museum since then however, there appears to be a lack of critical literature on the means and underlying ideologies of the making and presentation of space, like scaffolding, support structures and infrastructures, types of frames and framing.

As has been said many times, by integrating the critique, in many ways institutions only co-opted it, and in this way capitalised upon potentially dangerous practices, a process which inevitably lead to their de-politicisation. For crafting the existing contingencies that make its own presentation possible. For literally opening the discourse of the exhibition to issues of labour and economic exchange, while inviting gallerist and public alike to re-examine their understanding of what constitutes an artwork.

Untitled consisted of removing the partition wall that used to separate the exhibition space from the office area at Claire Copley Gallery, revealing the otherwise hidden gallerist working at her desk. All physical traces of any work having been done were cleaned up in the same way that these are erased from any exhibition and, in this way, visitors to the gallery entered a space whose only apparent focus was the administration of business. This simple work of removal has often been misunderstood for the display of an empty gallery space, while on the contrary it allows it to be filled with an altered set of conditions, which are in effect what is being exhibited in their full materiality through this act of inversion.

Aspects of their philosophy sound very dated, too, although there is a utopianism to their ideas and designs that has, for the worse, been squeezed out of the discourse. The Smithsons, if they were still alive, would be heartbroken that Robin Hood Gardens is currently being demolished to make way for a complex designed primarily for the financial classes that populate Canary Wharf. Dan Graham, Theatre, Cinema, Power In his essay, Theatre, Cinema, Power , Dan Graham analyses the development of the theatre as an enclosed architectural form, linking it to the codification of laws of perspective, and the political emergence of the bourgeois city-state in the European renaissance.

First Published in Parachute Montreal , no. In addressing the broad theme of architecture and power, this essay continues many of the arguments Graham raised in The city as Museum , which was published slightly earlier. Most importantly perhaps, this essay is also a piece inscribed in his larger body of work, which uses text as a medium and the magazine as a format. Text as separate PDF. Okwui Enwezor introduced the text as follows: In the lecture, The Author as Producer , Benjamin addressed an important question that, since, has not ceased to pose itself, namely, "to what degree does political awareness in a work of art become a tool for the deracination of the autonomy of the work and that of the author?

The collection includes the work of writers who have been sent to prison for the contents of their writing, for their political involvement, as well as of prisoners convicted of other crimes who have used the time and seclusion of their incarceration to become writers. Through the collection of texts an archipelago of prison cells emerges. The cells are thus revealed as sites of intellectual production, marking the limit condition of writing.

The collection is assembled in recognition that spatial confinement and isolation may induce a process of creative, imaginative, sometimes spiritual, cultural production. Commissioned and designed by and for the state, prison cells acquire a potential subversive content, becoming critical spatial apparatuses. Paradoxically, imprisonment emerges as an active practice of citizenship a mechanism of political opposition that call for a confrontation or intolerance with certain forms of government. In it, he combined his disparate scholarly interests to develop a theory of the productive and consumptive activity inherent in everyday life.

According to de Certeau, everyday life is distinct from other practices of daily existence because it is repetitive and unconscious. Instead, he attempts to outline the way individuals unconsciously navigate everything from city streets to literary texts. Whereas "strategies" are linked with institutions and structures of power, "tactics" are utilized by individuals to create space for themselves in environments defined by strategies. In the influential chapter Walking in the City , he describes "the city" as a concept, generated by the strategic maneuvering of governments, corporations, and other institutional bodies who produce things like maps that describe the city as a unified whole, as it might be experienced by someone looking down from high above.

By contrast, the walker at street level moves in ways that are tactical and never fully determined by the plans of organizing bodies, taking shortcuts or meandering aimlessly in spite of the utilitarian layout of the grid of streets. This concretely illustrates de Certeau's assertion that everyday life works by a process of poaching on the territory of others, recombining the rules and products that already exist in culture in a way that is influenced, but never wholly determined, by those rules and products. Encyclopedia, or a systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts, and crafts was a general encyclopedia published in France between and , with later supplements, revised editions, and translations.

It is famous, above all, for representing the thought of the Enlightenment. General info about the encyclopedia can be found here. The New Domestic Landscape was described at the time as "one of the most ambitious design exhibitions ever undertaken by the Museum of Modern Art". Combining design objects with 11 environmental installations commissioned from the finest of the Italian design vanguard Joe Colombo, Ettore Sottsass, Gaetano Pesce, Superstudio and more , the exhibition went one step further in its representation of design culture, by inviting the environments' designers to produce short films to activate and accompany their installations.

Combining 70s electronic and rock soundtracks with sci-fi futurism, the suite of films document a mesmerising set of experiments and a time capsule of 70s design thinking. Often appearing like a form of abstract theatre set inside the house of tomorrow, the films are saturated both in the film-culture of the s, the aesthetics of advertising, and the spirit of a pending near future; a future viewed with a mixture of utopic revelry and dystopic apprehension by the assembled designers.

The press release is available here and a feature here. Placed in the position of having to justify his profession as an artist to an El Al security officer, Snyder was forced into a series of frank admissions through which his relationship to his own practice and to the mechanisms of the art word were laid bare.

The Agreement form has been written with special awareness of the current ordinary practices and economic realities of the art world particularly its private, cash and informal nature, with careful regard for the interests and motives of all concerned. It is expected to be the standard form for all transfer and sale of all contemporary art and has been made as fair, simple and useful as possible. It can be used either as presented here or slightly altered to fit your specific situation. If you have questions as regards any part of the agreement, you should consult your attorney.

The distinction between art practice and other creative human endeavors is irrelevant to us.

Spatial Agency since A project by Tatjana Schneider and Jeremy Till that presents a new way of looking at how buildings and space can be produced. Moving away from architecture's traditional focus on the look and making of buildings, Spatial Agency proposes a much more expansive field of opportunities in which architects and non-architects can operate. It suggests other ways of doing architecture. In the spirit of Cedric Price the project started with the belief that a building is not necessarily the best solution to a spatial problem.

The project attempts to uncover a second history of architecture, one that moves sharply away from the figure of the architect as individual hero, and replaces it with a much more collaborative approach in which agents act with, and on behalf of, others. The film uses radical editing techniques and cinematic pyrotechnics to portray a typical day in Moscow from dawn to dusk. But Vertov isn't just recording reality on his camera, instead he transforms it through the power of the camera's "kino-glaz" cinema eye.

Vertov's rich imagery transcends the earth-bound limitations of our everyday ways of seeing. Vertov was a working-class artist who desired to link workers with machines. His film opens with a manifesto, a series of intertitles telling us that this film is an "experiment," a search for an "absolute language of cinema" that is "based on its total separation from the language of literature and theater.

A general introduction to Dziga Vertov is here and the film is here. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but word can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it.

Casse-pipe / Guignol's band I & II (Céline Romans, #3)

The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Berger's scripts were then adapted into a book of the same name, which was made by Berger and Dibb, along with Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox, and designer Richard Hollis who is listed, appropriately, as co-author. It consists of seven numbered essays: The book has contributed to feminist readings of popular culture, through essays that focus particularly on depictions of women in advertisements and oil paintings.

And the amazing book. In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odour of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the despatches announcing to us the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax of the seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies' protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell.

It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption's gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our sceptre, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing. Only in Marco Polo's accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites' gnawing.

A selection here More here. For opening up the possibilities of an artist working in society by collaborating directly with people, a city department, and with infrastructure. The position included a studio, from which the artist still works, but no stipend, thus reflecting some of the issues at stake and providing structural support to her practice.

For Ukeles maintenance corresponds to the realm of human activities that keep things going such as cleaning, cooking, and child rearing.

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Her Maintenance Art Manifesto! Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art. Founded by the Senegalese thinker Alioune Diop, it housed the writings of some of the most important francophone thinkers in the latter half of the 20th century. It is this notion that the second half of Les Statues meurent aussi engages with most deeply, and perhaps most controversially, especially as it strives to connect the death of the statue with the rise in the commercialisation of African art for the pleasure of the colonial classes.

It is little wonder then that such a film should have been censored until the late s, by which time it might have lost some of its topicality, but none of its political vigour. Barthes often claimed to be fascinated by the meanings of the things that surround us in our everyday lives. Mythologies contains fifty-four short journalistic articles on a variety of subjects.

These texts were written between and for the left-wing magazine Les Lettres nouvelles. The fifty-four texts are best considered as opportunistic improvisations on relevant and up-to-the-minute issues rather than carefully considered theoretical essays, and in this way they provide us with a panorama of the events and trends that took place in the France of the s. Although the texts are very much of and about their times, they still have an unsettling contemporary relevance to us today. Mostly, I have had the chance to understand what collaboration can be.

How fragile the development of an idea is and how quickly a collective structure can fail. It was founded in At the very least, the center attempts to emphasise the multiplicity of points of view regarding the utilization of terrestrial and geographic resources. Rock My Religion is a provocative thesis on the relation between religion and rock music in contemporary culture.

Graham formulates a history that begins with the Shakers, an early religious community who practiced self-denial and ecstatic trance dances. With the "reeling and rocking" of religious revivals as his point of departure, Graham analyses the emergence of rock music as religion for the teenage consumer in the isolated suburban milieu of the s, locating rock's sexual and ideological context in post-World War II America. The music and philosophies of Patti Smith, who made explicit the trope that rock is religion, are his focus. When we think about space, we have only looked at its containers.

As if space itself is invisible, all theory for the production of space is based on an obsessive preoccupation with its opposite: Architects could never explain space; Junkspace is our punishment for their mystifications. The beauty of airports, especially after each upgrade. The luster of renovations. The subtlety of the shopping center. Junkspace is the body-double of space, a territory of impaired vision, limited expectation, reduced earnestness. Junkspace is a Bermuda triangle of concepts, a petri dish abandoned: It substitutes hierarchy with accumulation, composition with addition.

More and more, more is more. Junkspace is overripe and undernourishing at the same time, a colossal security blanket that covers the earth in a stranglehold of seduction Junkspace is like being condemned to a perpetual Jacuzzi with millions of your best friends A fuzzy empire of blur, it fuses high and low, public and private, straight and bent, bloated and starved to offer a seamless patchwork of the permanently disjointed. Seemingly an apotheosis, spatially grandiose, the effect of its richness is a terminal hollowness, a vicious parody of ambition that systematically erodes the credibility of building, possibly forever Space was created by piling matter on top of matter, cemented to form a solid new whole.

Junkspace is additive, layered and lightweight, not articulated in different parts but subdivided, quartered the way a carcass is torn apart - individual chunks severed from a universal condition. There are no walls, only partitions, shimmering membranes frequently covered in mirror or gold. Structure groans invisibly underneath decoration, or worse, has become ornamental; small shiny space frames support nominal loads, or huge beams deliver cyclopic burdens to innocent destinations Where it is absent, it is simply applied - mostly in stucco - as ornamental afterthought on hurriedly erected superblocks.

Like a substance that could have condensed in any other form, Junkspace is a domain of feigned, simulated order, a kingdom of morphing. Its specific configuration is as furtuitous as the geometry of a snow flake. Patterns imply repetition or ultimately decipherable rules; Junkspace is beyond measure, beyond code Because it cannot be grasped, Junkspace cannot be remembered.

It is flamboyant yet unmemorable, like a screensaver; its refusal to freeze insures instant amnesia. Junkspace does not pretend to create perfection, only interest. Its geometries are unimaginable, only makable. Although strictly non-architectural, it tends to the vaulted, to the Dome. Sections seem to be devoted to utter inertness, others in perpetual rhetorical turmoil: Themes cast a pall of arrested development over interiors as big as the Pantheon, spawning stillbirths in every corner. The esthetic is Byzantine, gorgeous and dark, splintered into thousands of shards, all visible at the same time: Brands in Junkspace perform the same role as black holes in the universe: The shiniest surfaces in the history of mankind reflect humanity at its most casual.

The more we inhabit the palatial, the more we seem to dress down. A stringent dress code - last spasm of etiquette? As if the People suddenly accessed the private quarters of a dictator, Junkspace is best enjoyed in a state of post-revolutionary gawking. Polarities have merged, there is nothing left between desolation and turmoil. Neon signifies both the old and the new, interiors refer to the stone- and the space age at the same time.

Like the deactivated virus in an innoculation, Modern architecture remains essential, but only in its most sterile manifestation, High Tech it seemed so dead only a decade ago! It exposes what previous generations kept under wraps: Transparency only reveals everything in which you cannot partake. At the sound of midnight it all may revert to Taiwanese Gothic, in three years segue into Nigerian Sixties, Norwegian Chalet or default Christian. Earthlings now live in a kindergarten grotesque. Junkspace thrives on design, but design dies in Junkspace. There is no form, but proliferation Regurgitation is the new creativity; instead of creation, we honor, cherish and embrace manipulation Junkspace is hot or suddenly artic ; fluorescent walls, folded like melting stained glass, generate additional heat to raise the temperature of Junkspace to levels where you could cultivate orchids.

Pretending histories left and right, its contents are dynamic yet stable, recycled or multiplied as in cloning: Junkspace sheds architectures like a reptile sheds skins, is reborn every Monday morning. In previous building, materiality was based on a final state that could only be modified at the expense of partial destruction.

At the exact moment that our culture has abandoned repetition and regularity as repressive, building materials have become more and more modular, unitary and standardized; substance now comes predigitized As the module becomes smaller and smaller, its status become that of a crypto-pixel. With enormous difficulty - budget, argument, negotiation, deformation - irregularity and uniqueness are constructed from identical elements.

Instead of trying to wrest order from chaos, the picturesque now is wrested from the homogenized, the singular liberated from the standardized. Architects thought of Junkspace first and named it Megastructure, the final solution to transcend their huge impasse. Like multiple Babels, huge superstructures would last through eternity, teeming with impermanent infill that would mutate over time, beyond their control. In theory, each megastructure would spawn its own sub-systems, and therefore create a universe of rampant cohesion.

In Junkspace, the tables are turned: All materialization is provisional: The joint is no longer a problem, an intellectual issue: Each element performs its task in negotiated isolation. Where once detailing suggested the coming together, possibly forever, of disparate materials, it is now a transient coupling, waiting to be undone, unscrewed, a temporary embrace with a high probability of separation; no longer the orchestrated encounter of difference, but the abrupt end of a system, a stalemate.

While whole millenia worked in favor of permanence, axialities, relationships and proportion, the program of Junkspace is escalation. Instead of development, it offers entropy. Because it is endless, it always leaks somewhere in Junkspace; in the worst case, monumental ashtrays catch intermittent drops in a grey broth. When did time stop moving forward Since the introduction of Real Time?

Change has been divorced from the idea of improvement. There is no progress; like a crab on LSD, culture wobbles endlessly sideways Junkspace is draining and is drained in return. Everywhere in Junkspace there are seating arrangements, ranges of modular chairs, even couches, as if the experience Junkspace offers its consumers is significantly more exhausting than any previous spatial sensation; in its most abandoned stretches, you find buffets: Each Junkspace is connected, sooner or later, to bodily functions: Because it is so intensely consumed, Junkspace is fanatically maintained, the night shift undoing the damage of the day shift in an endless Sisyphian replay.

As you recover from Junkspace, Junkspace recovers from you: Junkspace does not inspire loyalty in its cleaners Somewhere, workers sink on their knees to repair faded sections - as if in a prayer - or half-disappear in ceiling voids to negotiate elusive malfunction - as if in confession.

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