Where is the avant-garde?

[version]

A building someone you knew once lived in can do this. There's someone else there now, someone with no connection to any of you, someone for whom the place is almost a blank slate.

I went past a friend's old house a few years ago and caught myself wondering whether the stain was still on the floor where one of us had spilled a cocktail, whether there was anything left of us and all the time we spent there or whether it had all been overwritten by the new occupant(s). A palimpsest.

 

[luka]

A building someone you knew once lived in can do this. There's someone else there now, someone with no connection to any of you, someone for whom the place is almost a blank slate.

I went past a friend's old house a few years ago and caught myself wondering whether the stain was still on the floor where one of us had spilled a cocktail, whether there was anything left of us and all the time we spent there or whether it had all been overwritten by the new occupant(s). A palimpsest.

there's another map, the map of interiors and the city turned inside out. and what we can access is always changing. sometimes doors are bolted and areas we knew well become off-limits. like a friend's old house as you say, or places we used to work.

WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO ADD TO SHIELS POST IS AS FOLLOWS....

 

[luka]

there's something about the spaces themselves and how they act on us, the states they engender. my eye has always been very attracted to the sloping entrances to underground carparks. there is something about the formal rigour, the smootheness and regularity of poured concrete, the strange murky yellow light. a geometric cave.

emptying them of people emphasises what is inhuman about them. lifeless moons. extinct planets. hotel carpets. magnolia paint. how corporate space is desinged to be radically impersonal. even the prints on the walls are a kind of alien anti-art. nothing is allowed to match up with any known personality type or preference.

 

[luka]

what is distinct about the world we have created is that it is not for people. it is for people in the abstract. Ballard in Shepperton was savouring these sensations.

 

[luka]

it correlates on the one hand to alienation, but on the other hand to a radical kind of freedom. the freedom from affect. the freedom from personality.

 

[luka]

naked in your Travelodge room, a huge weight lifted from your shoulders, no identity, no history, no self.

 

[luka]

and this is wehere it links to vapourwave and finding affect in the affectless. in the synthetic corporate jingles that correlate with no known emotional state, that serve no human need.

 

[luka]

in an office after dark and banks of computers displaying the same screensaver

 

[luka]

can you forgive me now shiels or do i have to keep going?

 

[version]

Those sorts of spaces can be more affective and stimulating on a trip than anywhere consciously psychedelic. I think I've seen more patterns and colours in the blankness of a plain, white wall than I have in anything else. The blankness can act as a canvas.

 

[shiels]

You have to keep going

 

[luka]

computer spaces are evocative in some of the same ways and are information poor in the same way. there's no grain. they aren't spaces that repay study. you can't zoom in. you can't trace their history. they don't have a story.

 

[luka]

the photographs on the wall are randomly aquired, no one knows who that is staring out of the frame, or if they even existed. the books were not collected by anyone, don't represent a set of interest. they're just props.

 

[luka]

the photographs on the wall are randomly aquired, no one knows who that is staring out of the frame, or if they even existed. the books were not collected by anyone, don't represent a set of interest. they're just props.

none of the things you are looking at function as clues. they will not yield any information.

 

[luka]

To disappear, arrive in another place, with no name and no past. To say, hello, my name is Anthony, I work in auto insurance. All sins deleted. Lime soda at the bar of a Holiday Inn, at the edge of the orbital road.

 

[version]

Those sorts of spaces can be more affective and stimulating on a trip than anywhere consciously psychedelic. I've think I've seen more patterns and colours in the blankness of a plain, white wall than I have in anything else. The blankness can act as a canvas.

Ironic really. In trying to remove all individuality and humanity, they inadvertently turn these places into the perfect medium for individual expression. If there's no meaning provided, you create your own.

 

[version]

Maybe that's how we should be looking at this stuff. The way a graffiti artist looks at an unmarked wall.

 

[shiels]

naked in your Travelodge room, a huge weight lifted from your shoulders, no identity, no history, no self.

Do you physically feel this? In the chest, in the groin? The pangs and twinges and yearnings to be nobody and nowhere

 

[luka]

Brewers Fayre

Featuring a rendered SketchUp presentation for a Brewers Fayre restaurant concept for Whitbread

innsightdesign.co.uk

 

[linebaugh]

Those sorts of spaces can be more affective and stimulating on a trip than anywhere consciously psychedelic. I think I've seen more patterns and colours in the blankness of a plain, white wall than I have in anything else. The blankness can act as a canvas.

Took a walk while tripping through uni after dark. No one there at all. Felt like I was in an abandoned city and all the space was for me to set up some new order in