TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "context"
Artists often cling to control of their work and the context of its display, but to interact with Tumblr, they must give up that control. Art on Tumblr might get seen by many people, but 1,000 reblogs doesn’t mean anyone will be looking at your art next week, know that you made it, or be having a critical discussion. Given these reasons, it would make sense for artists to be wary of putting their work on Tumblr. But this isn’t always the case; a younger, more internet-savvy generation has embraced the web 2.0, feeling that the costs outweigh the benefits.
cf. Cory Doctorow’s “Think Like A Dandelion”
Filed under: Tumblr
It seems Chinese copycat architects are pirating the design of Zaha Hadid’s latest project, the Wangjing SOHO, as the building comes to fruition. This isn’t the first time pirates have copied architectural plans on a massive scale — it’s just that now it’s happening in real time.
One of the major ways to tell whether something is a remix or a ripoff is whether the thief has transformed the stolen material into something new. One of the ways this transformation can happen is by simply appropriating material from one context and tweaking it just enough to make it work in another.
But when you consider how Hadid feels about context, things get a little interesting:
I don’t really believe in relating to the environment, per se. [It can be hard] to start afresh with something new if you’re always constantly relating to context. And I think what’s happened in the last, let’s say, twenty or thirty years is the whole idea of context has changed a lot.
Some would say this is exactly the trouble with architecture today: architects design buildings regardless of their context, in the hopes of making “something new,” something less like design and more like art. In some ways, it seems fitting that Hadid is having her design ripped off—if one designs without “relating to context,” then it makes sense that the design could be lifted and plopped right down in another context without any transformation.
Byrne posted about this a while back, but it’s worth watching the video to hear all the sound clips matched to the pictures.
I’m very much in love with the idea that although we all have “passion” inside us, this passion has to be channeled into a vessel—an art form—that exists as part of a context: an art gallery, a blog, a bookstore, an iPod, a concert hall, etc.
Byrne suggests that “context largely determines what kind of music is written”:
That doesn’t sound like such a big insight, but it’s actually backwards from what I perceive to be conventional wisdom — which is that creation emerges out of some interior emotion or from an upwelling of passion that inevitably and must find an outlet. This is the romantic notion of how creative work comes to be.
He goes on to examine several musical spaces, and the music that was made to fill them. Here’s what he says about CBGBs:
Here is the room where some of the music I wrote as a young man was first heard….The sound in there was remarkably good — the amount of crap everywhere, the furniture, the bar, the uneven walls and ceiling made for a great sound absorption. The sound system was decent as well — better than in many other clubs, which was great, for this music anyway. Because of the lack of reverberation one could be fairly certain that details of one’s music would be heard. The lyrics would probably be understood and the rhythms and bass would be punchy and clear. Given the size of the place, intimate gestures and expression would be appreciated as well, at least from the waist up — whatever went on below the waist was generally invisible, obscured by the audience.
I’m a big fan of this idea. If the internet didn’t exist, I’m not sure I’d be making the visual work I do…
