mimi zeiger apparently reads this site;
have you sketched up some plans for that ‘nice’ paper?

The work.group is an aggregate form of labour, continuity, consumption, and expansion. Continuity is not to be confused with the homogeneity of consistency but an ever-branching arabesque. Consumption is the perpetual sensory ingestion of material and stimulus. Each phase in the life of a community is an informed cataclysm; the thunderclap is the voice of each citizen. The branches of the work group sprout not from its members but the interests of its members. In this sense the group is not a stoic conifer but an elastic hortulan mess of pseudopods and feelers. The more potent the pollen the more fecund the production.

 
The group is not disciplined
 
bend the means to end where you desire. if the ends meet not, prune the goal.
 
every experience and assimilation has value toward any given subject
 
conflict, non-sequitur, open process

 
hand drawing, recycling, plurality
 
theft, wit, asceticism salads/les batards!
 
rigour, freedom, skepticism
 
anachronism, construction lines, derivative

 
clive barker, coen brothers, terrence malick
 
 
this text is subject to constant scrutiny and redevelopment, get back to work!

origins of the feature:

“a new section for omnidirectional texts that are more considered than the average post…”

“i wouldn’t mind crafting reports if it were a monthly (quarterly?) feature”

“the feature’s purpose is to make a statement of position to the masses, not necessarily to ‘work through some things’”

More discussion about the purpose of the feature is available in the news

The Completist
How do the voracious confront the impenetrable?

Atlanta Scene Report
Only a nobody walks in Atlanta.

Work = Life
Presented to the ‘Art≠Equal Design’ Symposium in April, 2005.

Places at Infinite Distances
Return to the byways through which you followed a feral tom, as to an elusively roving landmark, hoping that you may see him again.

sorry. i just got this email from the new emerging voices d00d who said i needed to answer immediately. hopefully you will find this up to snuff.

How did participation or selec-tion benefit you? (personally or as a firm)

The exhibition gave us a forum to frame our past work in a new way. We did not look at this as an opportunity to just show our work but to present it in a unified way that would transform it into a living mission statement, an allegorical charter for usefulness. We did not take anything away from the selec-tion directly other than faith in ourselves for being able to complete the work and the excitement at breathing new representational life and potential into old projects.
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on these bound blue lines, with such clear definitions, on this stack of cards i will write, in words, what could not be writ in the haphazard lines and shades of the draughtsman’s pencil, the cad jockey’s click, at least not by fragments of people, barely speaking, and not over the months that eclipse into earlier darkness, when they arrive home to their desks in darkness to cough out shapes, not so quickly as those craven predetermined rote forms, i wanted to see architecture itself, as a practice, ruined, and what it wrought ruined, and i wanted it to slide onto the paper in such a way as to belie its infancy, i wanted it immediately ancient, with us erased, so that the ruinous history given to the people all at once could be immediately claimed by them, broken down, individuated, owned by anybody but me, i wanted this nightly sacrifice of my own time, my sleepless hours, my self worth to be pushed toward so much nothing that i could not be blamed for it, all of these years working out backwards why i should not have the power to put something before you, but done in the only way i know how, through perpetual creation that now continues in these cards where i sift through the ruins of an aspiration that never got to the point where it could be broken down again, by time, and by someone other than me, i give myself two weeks.

this drawing takes various formal icons culled from the conducting bodies drawings and begans to strew them across the site, overlapping and interspersing diverse functions and giving initial prepositional strings to thread them into one another. this one is specious in its consistency and grounding to previous discussed principles, but i just wanted to take a first stab at something, to ‘work through some things,’ and i will try to be less fast and loose in the future.

also might be interesting to drum up a discussion about the role or position of the renwick ruins in the project.

† manhattanville
‡ brkln
‡ forked river
† pinelands
‡ king pond
‡ baltimor highlands
† arlingtonton
‡ st louis
‡ rock island
‡ sioux city
‡ badlands
† pierre

† atlanta
‡ oakridge
‡ madison
† remington
‡ lebanon
‡ elk river
† arlingtonton
‡ saint louis
‡ branson
† groom
‡ winslow
† republic of los angeles county

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The Unownership Society
On how proprietary ideas are fettered.

Collaboration is generally considered a convergence of intellectual energies, diversified experience sets, pooled resources, and aligned goals. Collaborations are often held under the auspices of some banner of operating methods or alphabetized participant lists. These collaborations are controlled; the inherent loss of information is conceded by all participants. The collaborative project that is the social world is bound by the same guidelines, charts, and grids; society is a collaboration of parallels, not convergence. Agreements on allowed contributions are silently made.

Yet, within this milieu, a dedicated workgroup of participants pushes forth efforts of production which contain openings for the roguish advances of unknown entities, enabling the group’s efforts to be periodically eclipsed, silenced, blotted, obfuscated, and misunderstood. Rather than taint or obscure progress, the feverish input of the audience serves as fertile mulch for the players. While the collaborations of the corporation are tested and verified, the deposed corporate model is slowed by comfortable hierarchy; the workgroup model is fueled by noise and intrusion.

To investigate one universe, one must create a second; the phantasmagoric diversions from the original serve as its critique. Ex_Nihilo functions as a narrative vehicle to carry out such investigations; the interference faced by the workgroup is reflected in the counter-insurgency of Manhattanville. The modes of intra- and inter-office communication are the traces and scars etched into the walls and floors of the island; IM and FTP are replaced by iron hooks embedded into stone walls and grooves cut into shattered brick.

“you put two million dollars into a single family home, and we are supposed to be impressed that it makes it to the cover of dwell?”
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