kallans

Nakagin Capsule Tower

2009-11-07T16:53:00.013+11:00

The Nakagin Capsule Tower is a mixed-use residential and office tower. Designed by architect Kisho Kurokawa, located in Shimbashi, Tokyo, Japan.

A response to concepts of prefabricated, interlocking and replacable self-contained units and characteristics of mass-living habitats. I find futurist concepts such as re-arrangeable capsules poignant in their failure, as in the case of this building which has remained unchanged since completion in 1972.

The sound which emanates from the structure, elevators, washing machines, tenants, etc, intends to present the model as a living organism and stimulate a re-imagining of the space. My desire is to create an underlying vitality in a decaying concrete environment.

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2009-10-29T11:03:00.008+11:00

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2009-10-28T23:56:00.006+11:00

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2009-10-11T00:37:00.006+11:00

Viewing cities through limited technology, a pixelated filter on a TV screen, plugged into an electrical current. The same energy illuminates/powers a train through subterranean shafts.

oil

2009-10-08T18:10:00.004+11:00

subway

2009-09-23T10:29:00.001+10:00

modern living

2009-09-15T14:54:00.001+10:00

56 Leonard Street

2009-09-10T19:24:00.007+10:00

Here is a similarly between my stacked mazes and 56 Leonard Street by Herzog & de Meuron in New York, described as 'houses stacked in the sky'. Both are a deconstruction of the tower form.

auto/graphic

2009-09-10T19:21:00.000+10:00

2009-08-27T21:32:00.004+10:00

capsule / cartridge

2009-08-19T11:09:00.004+10:00

To map the paths of commuters or to view them from above, they become circular shapes- viewed as icons, navigating an anfractuous maze-like world of grid-plan cities, scrabble board microchips. The walls of dungeons and labyrinths direct commuters, moving vertically in shafts and horizontally in subterranean tubes. Containers acquire passengers as though an inventory of collectable items, pulsing with rhythmic mechanical sounds and electrical charges. They operate in a loop, a time schedule, events triggered by related event types. A plethora of parallax scrolling, sound triggers, sprites, and icons.

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2009-08-18T16:59:00.012+10:00

A framework existence; an architectural array, life in batch units, modes of symmetrical living. The movement of tenants on a converging sound-scape of point locations. An organism on a tidal loop, a shifting plane of view. The loop / ebb of the sea measured in repeating units. A handwriting technique, the beating of a heart on hospital screens. Bureaucratic paper with tabs and punched holes.

2009-07-31T11:26:00.002+10:00

n

2009-07-27T20:18:00.009+10:00

Nishinomiya High School

2009-07-19T14:41:00.011+10:00

PA 09

2009-06-18T19:58:00.013+10:00

All history disintegrates into the earth; the memes and shared experience of civilization disintegrate into physical remnants, all memory evaporates in time. The plastics of vinyl records, cassette tapes, compact disks and hard-drives are discarded. The juxtaposition of mass-consumed entertainment with soil and terrain questions the notion of transcendence; at what point does an artistic work escape its material existence, and how does its memory outlast a physical casing.

mousepads

2009-06-14T11:51:00.007+10:00

These are the marks of numerous hours input into a computer, representing masses of data/information, mostly irrelevant, filtered through the brain. The mark is spread and reinforced by the path to taskbars, drop menus, hyperlinks, and text fields. It is the outcome of a purely functional action.

the pixel

2009-05-07T15:51:00.015+10:00

The association of the pixel to the square is a misconception; the way the majority of graphic cards, scanners and printers function is better described as gaussian (?), working in overlapping points. The conception that an image on screen is made of little squares stems from the fact that when zoomed image processors group together similar colors in a process of box filtering. This is because the processing power required to render the image is impractical.

Nevertheless I still find the pixel remains a pleasant poetic, the simplicity and categorized certainty within the enormity of the larger image. There is a charm to the technological connotations; the nostalgia to cream off-white plastic casing, game cartridges with their exposed edged microchip, the floppy disk and its mechanical groans when inserted into the machine. Out-dated devices contain a beauty in the way they extract sympathy, remind one of their childhood, a history that has been transferred to memory.

I realize the cartridge is a fantasy, an emotive stream of memory like a square of color. The gameboy is the framework and its systems are the grid on which the color is added. The color is a small box, which is surrounded strategically by thousands of other dashes of color. This repetition aestheticizes the experience.

Think of a housing complex as a shell, each room is a square pixel. The beauty inherent in the repetition stems from the possible narrative each pixel contains. The outside façade is like a map of the complex; behind each window is an imagined space, in which fictional lives and relationships exist.

The same poetic works at the scale of the microchip, which then mirrors a sprawling cityscape. Skyscrapers inherent the mentality of life inside a box, living as a pixel, an avatar, inside a cartridge video game, people are an inventory of characters experiencing the emotions, the state of being alive. The world is a network linked by shipping containers, electronic fields, imagined space and things beyond intelligence.

influences, art statement

2009-04-15T21:33:00.014+10:00

Simcity. SNES version

SimTower. 1994. PC

Andreas Gursky. Montparnasse. 1993. 206x406cm

Callum Morton. Habitat

To illustrate the life-society I live in is by a framework, the structure of walls which symbolize an inhabited setting, a blank canvas that is coloured by the shifting thoughts that occur in its space over time.

As the narrative unfolds in a commercial television series, film, novel, etc. the stories are integrated into fictional locations, which the viewer builds and pieces together as they save mental images and repeatedly link and relate them - they become imagined cities, universes which can be as much real as our grasp of the physical world we exist in, and by extension the imagined/hidden spaces- partitioned/obstructed we experience everyday.

The elevator which navigates high-rise building contains the idealisms of vertical travel. Of the elevator shaft, the dark empty space above and below remains imagined, the tenant does not see outside of the container. The doors close and when they open a new place is entered- one comes familiar with an experience like teleportation.

Consider the tenants of a high rise building and their understanding of the structure; they exist above and below floors which they have never set foot in, the incomplete picture they have of the building is formed by few rooms they may have occupied. An entire understanding of the tower can only exist in the collective minds of a multitude of tenants, while an omniscient intelligence understands the entire structure. The lobby and the elevator systems are the common hubs, whereas personal private places occupy a mostly imagined space.

For an omniscient intelligence to view the entire structure through the experience, memory, imagination of all the organisms it contains, there must be masses of individuals existing within for the image of the structure to be complete.

This is my attraction to the patterns found in inhabited environment, the uniform grids and box systems which contain narratives and metaphors, the psychological state of existence in the structure and its function as man made organism.

office

2009-03-31T15:26:00.001+11:00

something new

2009-03-24T15:12:00.001+11:00

tower

2008-12-15T22:02:00.008+11:00

My lecturers told me about Callum Mortons 'Habitat' http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/habitat/inst.shtml

I've been thinking about making my own 'Apartment', shallow in depth with fold outs like advent calendars, sliding partitions with exposed squares revealing painted walls (wallpaper designs), partially filled rooms with maybe a figurine, concealed mini speakers inside it which play sounds, like vacuum cleaners, elevators, muffled voices. But just the front view point, maybe front and back if it can balance being thin and has a stand.

,

2008-11-13T14:10:00.000+11:00

maze tower

2008-11-06T17:09:00.007+11:00

"The tower is built of 46 individual mazes, stacked on one another. It is created at human height so that it takes on a physicality; the viewer standing next to it relates to it as a physical presence. The mazes are individually functional but have edges left open, so that one can look further into the center. Instead of the viewer being able to solve this maze, the overhead view is obstructed, and so the maze is presented the same way as a person would relate to a life sized maze. This allows it to evoke the mystery of hidden spaces, and present the sense of journey and exploration.

To me the enjoyment of imagining inhabitable places is the prospect of hidden journeys and pathways. The model figures are added for the purpose of emphasizing that it is intended to be an inhabitable building; the viewer is encouraged to imagine themselves as the figures inside this anfractuos environment.

A tower of mazes also represents the anxiety and restlessness of an urban society. Our individuality being lost in the world of concrete, lives being dictated and contained in a claustrophobic state; an impersonal environment. However personally it is about capturing the essence of fun, the surreal in a monolithic structure.

The number of possible configurations is over 2,228,000,000...(39 more zeros); the absence of a definitive configuration emphasizes a randomization in the final outcome, a chance result; the chance of choosing path A or path B; continually multiplied until the human element of being a single figure is lost."

,

2008-10-30T02:46:00.002+11:00

Egypt Pyramid

2008-10-20T19:50:00.007+11:00

About a thoasand frames of individually arranged Windows XP buttons, this was my project for a 'screen for the arts' unit. To me the major qualities are in meticulousness of the process, the pastiche to parallax scrolling, box-filtering -in the way monitors display graphics, the iconography of the simple screen button, and the context and feeling sound creates.

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2008-09-26T13:50:00.001+10:00

,

2008-09-26T13:39:00.002+10:00

labyrinth II

2008-09-16T12:01:00.001+10:00

labyrinth

2008-09-03T17:13:00.010+10:00

.

2008-07-30T14:28:00.012+10:00

The assignment topic was 'categorized information', this is based on the 20 most recent torrent files I've downloaded. (it's 20 A4 images)

c

2008-06-16T14:39:00.000+10:00

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2008-05-09T14:57:00.005+10:00

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2008-04-21T13:22:00.002+10:00

2007

2008-04-10T12:40:00.004+10:00

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2008-04-09T20:01:00.001+10:00

.

2008-04-09T19:17:00.004+10:00

My hometown.