projekts:
this is meant to approach a subject matter for the abstract, not necessarily a character or tone.
collaboration implies working together. one generally thinks of collaboration as a convergence of intellectual energies, diversified experience sets, pooled resources, and aligned goals. Collaborations are often worked through under the auspices of some constitution or banner of operating methods or alphabetized participant lists where muted voices of the players whisper only to their annunciators to say “you gave in” or “they did not understand at all.” These collaborations are controlled and the loss of information is a concession that the participant must be willing to accept. These collaborations are corporate and tested.
But there are collaborative efforts whose unspoken codes and adjacent fields of production leave holistic results dangling upon the choices of rogue players and subversive entities who ride into all facets with the trumpets of their own agenda. Even in isolation the whispers are unstable and must be cupped and attended. Of course there are guidelines, and charts, and grids, but the collaborative project that is the social world within the built environment behaves so much like the natural world it seeks to pave over that in the space of a decision every factor changes and the rules have been rewritten. This is a collaboration of parallels, not convergence. This is a collaboration that must be moved through to ratify.
Yet it is even within this milieu that an even more diaphanous collaboration seeks to model the quest for identification with one’s fellows and the drive to communicate through the noise. The space across which the collaboration occurs is the aforemention collaborative contract of the social world within the built environment. Within this collaborative effort that is periodically eclipsed, silenced, blotted, blurred, reordered, tweaked, obfuscated, and misunderstood, a lower set of unspoken rules exist that serve to further and foster only these things: the stemming off of isolation and the empathetic manifestation of the world of our fellow within our own compartment.
What of the unspoken contract and how does it fill the gaps and realign the glitches wrought by the greater system. This, unlike the environmental collaboration and approaching the corporate collaboration, must be ratified internally by the player. The individual is left in the silence from their fellow to empathize with their own condition, to communicate reflexively, and to begin rebuilding that condition of their distant fellow. At the other end of the wire, or the ether, is that individual deciding whether or not to enter into that contract, and whether they can count on their fellow to serve their condition in earnest.
tags:
tagged: collaboration, composition, ex_nihilo, rfp
09:16 PM
Receiving reports of numerous fires on Park Ave south. It is possible they were set by provocateurs.
the inclusion of ‘american sphinx’ was your idea, if i recall. i don’t think it needs to be in the new edition, since i still haven’t read it. i did read ’six armies at normandy’ for trio, but you had us stop working on that. do you think we should try to format this piece as a text, instead of a collection?
that is what i was envisioning. i figured that we could craft the texts on the site, the aim chats, and emails into the text body in order to pad the 16 pages. upon further thought, however, the texts might be fragments - same as the images - so perhaps they should be independent. are we submitting a project for publication or an idea about publishing churning out projects?
i think the mass of the work could be woven into some sort of continuous sequence of text and images. i agree that the texts are rather fragmentary but they do play off of each other and would benefit from being seen together.
i believe this would be an published project that embodies a particular way of churning out other projects for publication.
john writes:
“i believe this would be an published project that embodies a particular way of churning out other projects for publication.”
i am looking at it from the perspective of pandering to the lords of pamphlet architecture. i didn’t look at their site, and i have never seen a pamphlet; i am not aware of whether the pamphlets usually include a project as a singularity or a project as a practice. it seems to me that ex_nihilo, and most of what goes on ’round here, is about including the development in the artifacts. your answer seems to be, and i would agree, is that we are not only telling them that ‘here is a cool project called ex_nihilo’, but also ‘here is a cool project, ex_nihilo, that built a cool project, a00743.’ now, since ex_nihilo is contrived by us, should we mention the work.group as a project? or is that what the abstract is for? i don’t know if pamphlet architecture is into work or into metawork.
i think we should submit this as, first-and-foremost, a project. it should be made clear by the abstract (and one would hope, the ramshackle nature of the representations) that this is a project that is a search for the future bearing of the workers. it is both a project and a practice. i think this is important.
i think, based on their proclamation that the publication ‘launched the careers of’ zhadid, sholl, and wtf else, they would be comfortable publishing such unlaunched luminaries as ourselves.
as long as their sensibilities are shattered by both the work (manhattanville) in the project and by the work of building (the search) the project, then you have my blessing to compile the pages as you see fit.
ok! let me put pm6.5 on my machine!
john [w]
07:57:21 / 01.September.1999
are you taking are of this entire project? i already have the images burned to cds; it would be easier to copy them than to upload everything to the server, unless you already know what 3 images you are including in your pamphlet.
jc, today might not be the best time; do you want to meet tomorrow at lunch time? i can give you some files, my advice for includes, and perhaps some dtp from this century, if you are interested.
