Bonnard, Woman Lying on a Bed, 1899

What would be great–is if I had enough time, and so little distraction, that everyday I could wake up like I did today.

I woke up thinking–which is typical–but we had time and no kids so I grabbed the new ArtForum and my notebook. I climbed back into bed on this cold November morning–the sun is so wonderful this time of day in our bedroom–and I listened to Brandon not snore but only breathe and even though the kitty kept dashing in front of my pages I felt–this is where I want to be. Finally.

My mind clear enough to take this information and these images and digest it, absorb the energy out of it that inspires and transforms myself, my art. That thing I constantly neglect while busy with everything else I am obligated to do in life, but always nagging at the base of my spine, the corners of my heart, the depths of my stomach.

The question arises, What is YOUR art? What are YOU doing? and WHY?

And as I am vaguely thinking those thoughts I read a review of the exhibition “Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors” (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) by Richard Aldrich. He states, “You kind of get the feeling that Bonnard was a real artist. He was concerned not with the past (art history), present (his contemporaries), or future (his legacy), but with expressing himself in terms of his own perceptions, interactions, and experiences of the world…each painting becomes a mirror in which Bonnard is seeing himself. This inward focus, which could be seen as a selfish stance, creates a palpable sense of humanness in his paintings that is completely exterior. Something genuniely tender and vulnerable in his understanding of the complexities and simplicities of himself and what he is painting makes his work, in the end, timeless.”

And maybe I was only intrigued by this because it sort of justifies my own work, which in the past has been somewhat self absorbed, and I’ve become increasingly aware of this and feeling guilty about it–like my work should be about something more important than simply my encounters with life. I ask myself lots of questions about this, but haven’t received very many answers yet. At least nothing ORIGINAL, which for me, is really the most important aspect of my own art–doing something that hasn’t been done.

Richard Aldrich, Boy with Machines, 2007

I feel like I am at a turning point in my life, and with my art, and that everything has been very disconnected and irrelevant with the other parts–but there has to be some common thread running throughout everything that I can take hold of. Now I’m just rambling…

What I wrote down was:

My Work

Directions

Interviews of unimportant artists via Google Wave (I have this urge to use this in art making)

Sociology – prisons in U.S.A.

Print – zines – pamphlets – blog

vintage

textiles

stories – paintings – others

response

“language as opportunity” -Tauba Auerbach

Tauba Auerbach, The Answer/Wasn’t Here (anagram III), 2007

But maybe there doesn’t have to be an answer. I will just keep doing what I always do everyday, and take small steps toward being the person, and the artist, I want to be.

.

Résumé

On considère le problème d’allocation de puissance dans une bande radio-fréquence où communique déjà un utilisateur primaire (PR) pour le partage avec un utilisateur secondaire ou cognitif (CR) moyennant le respect de deux contraintes d’interférence: une contrainte de puissance moyenne limitée d’interférence et une contrainte de puissance pic limitée d’interférence. Nous introduisons une troisième contrainte sur la somme des débits instantanés des deux utilisateurs du spectre: la somme des débits dans le partage, doit être plus grande que le débit de l’utilisateur primaire en absence d’un autre utilisateur interférant. Nous proposons des conditions où l’allocation optimale de puissance au secondaire, sous les contraintes considérées, ne dépend pas des informations du lien primaire.

Pour plus d’information, cliquez ici.

Abstract

This paper addresses the spectrum-sharing in single-antenna fading channels for wireless communications, where a secondary or cognitive user (CR) shares a spectrum with an existing spectrum-licensee or primary user (PR), and, thus interferes with it. The secondary user is supposed to transmit as long as the interference caused by its transmission onto the primary receiver remains bellow a predefined threshold. In fact, we investigate a power control design for the secondary user under joint peak and average received-power constraints at the PR receiver and, in particular, under a new criterion named here by the sum-capacity-profit constraint (SCPC). The SCPC ensures that the sum of the throughputs of the PR and the CR links is greater than the throughput of the PR transmitting alone over the spectrum without any interfering user. Considering these constraints, we show that under some simple criterion (independently of the channels gains), we can design a power control policy, for the secondary spectrum user, exploiting the direct link channel state information (CSI) only.

You can get more information here.

“When you look at a city, it’s like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.”
Hugh Newell Jacobsen

The greatest architectural gestures of our civilisation, the very epitome and physical embodiment of that civilisation, the apparently random and chaotic surge of something intended and planned, the phenomenal paradox of achievement and disaster, the home of ultimate construction and destruction, the Twenty-First century city, is outpacing any attempt to define its nature the very second an image is formed of it. How to represent, how to see, how to know, this most mercurial of forms, that constantly defies notions of what is attainable? As a photographer, the emerging conurbations, the fresh unimagined megalopolises demand a perspective. This is a quest for scope. These horizons, where the patterns and grids of vast populations are assembled out of seeming chaos, are a bright optimistic contribution, a means of attempting to see a future that is happening right now.

Constant sky

left: Downtown São Paulo seen from the top of the Edificio Italiano.With a population of eleven million residents São Paulo is the most populous city in the Southern hemisphere. São Paulo, Brazil, 2008

right: Cuzco seen from Christo Blanco. The city has a population of 350,000 and is located at an altitude of 3,300m. Peru, 2008

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Slicing cities

left: Highway in downtown São Paulo. Brazil, 2008

right: A man ascending an arch of Lupu Bridge over the Huangpu River. Shanghai, China, 2007

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< Previous Chapter Extract

“Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.”
Walter Benjamin

A place is not a conglomeration of functional structures. Where we live, visit or observe, and the images we form and receive of it, gains its real nature from the feelings identified with it. An empty brutalist cityscape and an abandoned school gym, can speak of a more tragic dimension to our lives that is somehow inscribed in the very essence of a place. The way that vanished cultures persist in traces of their legacy, that nature reclaims vast human endeavours, that modern cruelty and power leave an aura or a sense of their very character in an ambience, is something that the photographer can capture. There are deeper, almost intangible remnants, some hauntingly sad, some joyful, that emerge as visual shocks or surprises, to be seen in the frozen image of a photograph. The chilling catastrophe of an abandoned city bereft of humanity clashes, paradoxically, with the defiant optimism of resurgent nature.

Reclamation

left: A doorway in Ta Prohm to a temple built in the late 12th and early 13th centuries as a monastery and university. The door is surrounded by silk cotton tree roots encased by strangler figs roots, which develop their own underground root
system. They then grow quickly, often strangling the host tree, which in time dies and rots away. The strangler fig continues to exist as a hollow tubular lattice that provides shelter for many forest animals. Siem Reap, Cambodia, 2003

right: A silver birch tree growing through the floor on the terrace of the Hotel Polissia 21 years after the Chernobyl disaster. Pripiat, Ukraine, 2007

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Palimpsest

left: Lightswitch in a bedroom of the Hotel Polissia 21 years after the Chernobyl disaster. Pripiat, Ukraine, 2007

right: Billboard with posters removed at Green Park Underground Station. London, UK, 2009

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< Previous Chapter Extract

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“All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.”
Philip Johnson

Photography captures both the visual appearance and the hidden intent inherent in a building. However transitory or ephemeral the structure, we can see the impetus for human survival in the act of creating a shelter, whatever the material, whether it is as ancient and fundamental as stone and wood, or as modern and widespread as glass, concrete and plastic. The fact that a dwelling embodies a more complex range of impulses, a strange mixture of domesticity and adornment, a basic expression of identity, in what can only be hinted at in the concept of home, forms the secret emotional dimension to architecture that emerges in the photograph. This is another landscape, beyond function and form, an emotional and psychological aspect that is only just beginning to be charted in these far-reaching visual connections.

A door & two windows

left: The home of D. Maninha, aged 94, one of the oldest inhabitants. Pylons, Cubatão, Brazil, 2008

right: Thabang and family outside their home in Ha Motenalapi in the Senqunyane valley. They are wearing their Basotho tribal blankets. The door and window mouldings demonstrate Litema, the mural art of the Basotho. The hut floor and window mouldings are made from Daga, a mix of earth and dung. The high ammonia content of the dung acts as an antiseptic. The patterns engraved around the doorways may represent the surrounding furrowed fields. Ha Motenalapi, Lesotho, 2000

Click on image to enlarge or download Print Res (300dpi) PDF of this spread here

Tree house

left: Tree house in the South Tyrol Alps. Italy, 2003

right: Town house with Japanese black pine tree which also may act as a barrier to prevent people climbing over the outer wall. The curved structure is an inuyarai (a lightweight removable bamboo screen) to prevent rain splashes from the ground hitting the wall and causing the timber to rot. Kyoto, Japan, 2004

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Foreword to Drawing Parallels: Architecture observed

As you read this, look about you. Note the shapes and functions that surround you, the squares and right angles, the circles and cylinders, the coarse surfaces and the fine finishes. Try naming those materials – animal, vegetable, mineral.

The earliest ideas for Drawing Parallels were first generated by Quintin Lake over ten years ago when I happened to see a draft for a glossary of structures, buildings and architectural eventuality.

Even at that time, when a young student, Lake’s desire to steer the compendium of his experience towards fresh audiences showed an exceptional clarity of purpose. I was struck by the way that all his images emerged from travel and encounter and articulated real experience in real time and space. Real conditions, real weather and real seasons. I remember thinking that perhaps the images could one day assemble themselves into a magnetic needle which would point a way across the whole puzzling field of cultural energy, the things which humans make and destroy, the things which humans leave behind, and the things which humans come upon. This is something that a good eye and a commitment to travel, not tourism, can set in motion.

The camera is a strange editorial tool – the world of ‘seeing’ has no edges, no right angles, only the marvels of peripheral vision and the edginess which is the gift of being human, that sensation of being curious and always wanting to know more than we can see. In English, this mongrel language, we are as likely to begin sentences with‘I think…’as with‘I feel…’ and we often show our understanding of others by saying ‘I see’. The camera can do none of this but editorial intelligence can. Our ability to do things comes as much from the gift of sight as from the capacity for thought. The eye, like the camera may be ‘stupid’, but it is the owner of the eye who makes ‘pictures’.

Seeing, looking, watching, eyeing, observing, noticing, witnessing – together they add up to a prodigious critical process, one of the great things that all humans share. With the eye of Quintin Lake, you are reminded to look up.

He alerts you to both meanings, not just the spatial one,‘looking upwards’, but also the pleasurable pursuit of information, or the tracking down of an acquaintance, whether a person, a building, or a space. He reminds you that the past is turning into the future. One verb, associated with vigilance, slips into a noun to remind us of the biggest question of all – time. In English, we may ‘watch’, but we also may wear one.

The object which you hold is another of those small, portable, architectural marvels – a book. A cousin of the hinge (and so a relation of both the door and the window) it pivots on its spine and allows a furling process, of befores and afters, of images and type, set in sequences that mirror, remind and rehearse. The reader (we don’t say ‘looker’) brings to a book his own special powers of intervention and interpretation, moving back and forth through the territory before him. This too is how we become spatially intelligent, coursing to and fro in cities and beyond, acquiring our own thesaurus of spaces and places, as much as we map a sense of ourselves as temporary occupants of the world. We discover our ‘whereabouts’ surrounded by our ‘belongings’. We learn to‘belong’.

All those questions of utility and serviceability, which architecture and urbanism can never escape, are played out in the utensils which populate our lives. Many of these mini architectures come with ‘directions for use’, whose counter-intuitivity thwarts and frustrates us.

Drawing Parallels is itself a utensil of a special kind, an un-guide book where the imagination which we associate with the promise of all books is the primary agent for giving directions. Drawing Parallels honours and dignifies the pleasure of inhabiting a haptic world. Its comparisons remind us how we come to differentiate between things, how we sort and re-sort. These multiple acts of recognition, which we store in our own reservoirs of experience, overflow into fresh conversations we come to share. It’s unstoppable.

Text © Richard Wentworth, 2009

First Chapter Extract>

Gruff is ranked #054 in the 100 Rowenta Magazine.

www.rowenta.com

Archidose is a “A Daily Dose of Architecture”, a popular blog about architecture from New York City.

Read the post on Holiday Gift Books about Architecture featuring Drawing Parallels here

Major show in the heart of Europe

Wading through SPS/IDC/Drives 2009

Entrance to show

The biggest city of the ancient tutonic dukedom of Franconia, Nueremburg, is the site of one of the largest automation exhibitions in the world – SPS/IPC/DRIVES
In the English speaking world an electric automation show that presented 1,237 exhibitors to 48,595 vistors sounds like an impossible dream.
These exhibitors – manufacturers of electric automation technology – presented products and services from the following sectors: Control Technology; IPCs; Drive Systems and Components; Human-Machine-Interface Devices; Industrial Communication; Sensor Technology; Industrial Software; Interface Technology; Electromechanical Components and Peripheral Equipment.

Apparently impervious to the ills that other shows like Interkama – now subsumed and swamped in three sections of the Hannover Fair called Industrial Automation, and ISAExpo, which finally closed its doors this year, SPS/IPC/Drives seems to grow from strength to strength. Though we are all suffering from the effects of the global financial chaos this show managed to increase the attendance from last year by 490 – admitedly a small increase but an increase nevertheless.

The organisers reported after the first day “The rush for the exhibition is unbroken in 2009. According to the first analysis the same number of visitors as in the record year of 2008 came to Nuremberg on the first day of SPS/IPC/DRIVES 2009.”

We had selected to attend the Houston Show this year so we have had to rely on tweets and other “social media” to compose this commentary. Unfortunately there was not an agreed hash tag for the show so it was difficult to see the tweets under one heading.

We conducted three searches as follows: #SPS/IPC/drives SPS SPS/IPC

Carl Henning of ProfiBus US was tweeting from the show and also told us how he was tweeting from a blog post entitled “Trekker Tweeting Technology” He uploaded a few pictures as well, though unsurprisingly these were mostly of the PI stand!

ProfiBus at SPS

His first SPS Report 1: The Show was posted on Friday 27th.

Examples of tweets in English from the show were:
“I’m standing at the Aerotech stand at a very busy SPS Drives show in Nuremberg”
“Presentation by Hilscher recognizing the value of social media – like Twitter..”
“Exhibiting new sine wave filters and low-leakage EMC/EMI filters.”
“…Show is extremely busy-so busy I didn’t have time to Tweet until now. Exhibitors are really happy. 1 said “almost too busy!”
“…a great day at the SPS/IPC/DRIVES exibition & congress in Nurnberg – web automation is on the rise”
“..Just returned from a visit to SPS/IPC/Drives show in Nuremberg. Massive show and very busy which is a good sign for a recovery next year!”
“Wrapping up 3 fantastic days at SPS/IPC/Drives in Nuremberg. Thankful for the opportunity to meet with new and long time customers.”
“…that was SPS 2009. SPS 2010 will be Nov 23 – 25..”

Not surprisingly many of the links here are in languages other than English. These have been indicated by the prefixes (D) for German and (RU) for Russian. We may have links in other languages later. We suggest that those who do not read these languages use GoogleTranslate German to translate the German pages and GoogleTranslate Russian for those in Russian.

Shortly before the opening of the show Control Engineering issued a digital issue of their magazine, “You now have the opportunity to view our unique ActiveMagazine prior to the start of SPS in Germany!”
The Australian publication Motors & Drives reports SPS/IPS/Drives exhibition enters its 20th year.
DS Europe SPS: congatec Presents APIX Starter Kit

Another publication was the German language (D) konstructions praxis.de. This publication also conducted a number of video interviews in German.
Channel e (D) SPS/IPC/DRIVES 2009 eröffnet
Pressbox (D) Neuer SPS-Connector stellt direkte Verbindung zu SAP-System her
DerWesten (part of the WAZ media group) (D) Kostal Industrie Elektrik aus Hagen präsentiert Neuheit auf der Messe SPS
IW -online (D) Neuer SPS-Connector stellt direkte Verbindung zu SAP-System her und Innovationen von HARTING auf der SPS/IPC/DRIVES
The Swiss epublication Megalionk (D) SPS/IPC/DRIVES 2009: Bühne der Innovationen
Maschinen Markt MM (D) SPS/IPC/Drives 2009 – die Welt der elektrischen Automatisierung unter einem Dach
Elektrotechnik (D)490 Besucher mehr als 2008
Automation.net (RU) ткрылась выставка SPS/IPC/DRIVES 2009
RussKabel.ru (RU) Продукция компании “Belden” на выставке SPS/IPC/DRIVES

There were a number of people on the floor taking photographs amont these were vanveeteren who gives a blog address of Notizblog (German). However the Industrial Ethernet Book surpassed themselves with pictures which give a flavour of the show. This picture of the Siemens stand, from neumsn, gives a good impression of a well attended show.

FDT on iPhone: You don’t believe it? We’ll show it to you!

An interesting press conference we would like to have attended was by Andreas Börngen, Director Sales and Product Marketing at M&M Software. In it he discussed FDT 2.0: Advantages, Benefits, Implementation. One of the things they promised to show was FDT on the iPhone. Is there anything these gadgets can’t do?

Company Press Releases

Micro-Epsilon to exhibit its thermoMETER CT ratio pyrometer at SPS|IPC|DRIVES exhibition

Energy efficiency and power density from ebm-papst

Belden releases new Eagle 20 Tofino line of Plug-n-Protect™ industrial security products

LEM’s portfolio of comprehensive battery monitoring components

ifm: Compact pressure sensor for applications in robotics and handling

Pictures by Indusoft

(D) Engineers Lounge This is a collection of information in German on products launched or displayed at the show.

(D) Siemens präsentiert neue RFID-UHF-Komponenten

(D) Balluff Presseinformationen zur SPS 2009

(D) TRIMOD: revolutionäre USV-Anlage von Meta System auf der SPS/IPC/DRIVES in Nürnberg

The next SPS/IDC/Drives is scheduled for 23 – 25 November 2010