Light Beyond Vision

On a Wednesday in April

Yeuneu Chang, student at GSAPP research about Architecture daylighting.

“Natural light is the only light that makes architecture Architecture…”

Louis I. Kahn

Tomorrow morning, I am going to meet, for a magazine project, Jean-Louis Scartezzini at EPFL where he heads the Solar Energy and Building Physics Laboratory. The research includes passive and active solar technology, building energy simulation, air infiltration and ventilation, stochastic simulation methods in solar energy and predictive control, as well as daylighting technology. I discovered his Laboratory with this very interesting conference at Swissnex in San Francisco.

J.G. Ballard in Crash

On a Sunday in April

Once late at night, I discovered this film on TV, Crash by David Cronenberg, and it was pretty strange at first. The title is quite a good explanation of what is the content of the movie, a very psychological and sociological presentation of the car as the most representative object of the last century in our society with its sexual side. It’s only recently that I discovered the origins of that movie, the great mind behind this idea, the writterJ.G. Ballard. Sadly, he died in 2009, but his science-fiction books and other writtings influenced many artists, like Joy Division for example. Ballard’s cloud is really big and it will need some times for me to follow his traces, but I want first to read more of his works. The man leaves but the ideas stay. I give you here some link for interview with the man, a written one on Streptos Music and a video interview about Millenium People and more (part1, part2). Then you can watch this short film, called Crash, realised by the BBC and starring J.G. Ballard.

Portrait of the Artist as a Motocycler

On a Sunday in April

The museum of Arts in La Chaux-de-Fonds presents an exhibition wich I am looking forward to visit, in place up to the 12th of September. Portrait de l’artiste en motocycliste is an exhibition about Olivier Mosset’s work, without showing any of his work. The artist has generously given to the museum an important part of his personnal collection of other artists’ work, collected during almost 40 years. Olivier Mosset delivers us ways of understanding for his own work with his passion as a collector, being only defined through his artistic references and the evolution of those ones. I cannot ask for such an exhibition closer to the idea of Slash Slash and the share of references. That’s why I want to add to this the relation between the name of the exhibition and James Joyce’s book, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Keep learning.

Moped Rebels

On a Sunday in April

I had already heard about Moped Gangs in a magazine, but Wired made a report about one of them inside Brooklyn. It sounds maybe like another hipster thing, after the fixies wave, but in fact I like their simple mechanic of both of them. The fact that you could sit down and concentrate on how the mechanic works is a brainwork that I like pretty much in our century, where we have to repair cars with computers, but that is another story, next time maybe. I’ve been searching for a while a nice moped, hopefully it is quite cheap, that I could repair myself for some roadtrip. It would be great.

Voguing for Malcom Mclaren

On a Saturday in April

While I was watching Deep in Vogue clip, in memory of Malcom Mclaren, I discover the connection in the title with the Voguing dance, wich is that characteristic dance part. As wikipedia says it so well: “Voguing is a highly stylized, modern club and urban dance, that evolved out of the Harlem ballroom dance scene. Vogue was originally popularized in the late 1980s, within the inner-city club scenes of the United States”…”It has evolved since its beginning and continues to be developed further as an established dance form that is practiced in the gay ballroom scene and gay clubs in big cities throughout the United State-mainly New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Miami, Detroit and Chicago“. Even Will Smith, the Fresh Prince of Bel Air was voguing.

A sky without a Flight

On a Saturday in April

What a beautiful day, a day of a quite complete parylysis of plane traffic in Europe, I said to me how peaceful was our sky without a plane at sight. When airports and companies are complaining of their money lost and States thinking of how they would go to Lech Kaczyński‘s funeral, I see my mother Earth breathing, blowing her pressure out, avoiding maybe one future earthquake and I told me she’s taking her rights back on our selfish use of her and maybe one day we won’t be her pimp anymore. Let me think my Utopia, but not the Isaac Asimov‘s one. Enjoy this magic moment and don’t forget to look at the sunset tonight.