Town and Revolution: Soviet Architecture and City Planning, 1917-1935

Imprint

London : Thames and Hudson, [1970]

Post-Soviet art and architecture / edited by Alexey Yurasovsky and Sophie Ovenden

Note	Papers based on material presented at an international conference/exhibition on post-modernism and national cultures which was held at the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, in October 1993.
Bibliography	Includes bibliographical references.
Contents	Moscow, October 4, 1993, 10:10 am : Modernity is dead / Charles Jencks -- Apocalypse and utopia through Post-Modern eyes / Elinor Shaffer -- Post-Modernism and national cultures / Lisa Appignanesi -- The immovable feast : a story of Soviet/Post-Soviet post-Modernism / Nadezhda Yurasovskaya -- The flower of the snow queen / Andrey Bartenev -- The garden of architecture at the millennia / Sergey Orlov -- Fin de siécle through the eyes of a contemporary / Andrey Tolstoy -- Nicholas Feodorov and Venus Stockman / Yury Leiderman -- The new dis-order summarised in St. Petersburg / Olesia Turkhina and Viktor Mazin -- Shaman art : Engel Iskhakov / Olga Yushkova -- Two exhibitions / Evgeny Semyonov -- Re-animating culture : St.Sebastian / Natalya Kamenetskaya -- Games in the twilight : Valery Cherkashin's Museum Metropolitan -- The eastward voyage of Post-Modernism : the home theatre of Faik Agaev / Lana Shikhzamanova -- The experimental laboratory / Olga Ziangirova and Maria Tehuikova -- Determining the point; Yellow Mountain Group, Bureau of Scientific Research / Evgeny Solodkii -- Post-Modernism on a scale of 1:666: the phenomenon of 'paper architecture' in the USSR / Alexey Tarkhanov -- Paper architecture : a postscript / Alexander Rappaport.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Architecture after Images

 Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Architecture after Images, Edward Dimendberg offers the first comprehensive treatment of one of the most imaginative contemporary design studios.  Since founding their practice in 1979, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio have integrated architecture, urban design, media art, and the performing arts in a dazzling array of projects, which include performances, art installations, and books, in addition to buildings and public spaces.  At the center of this work is a fascination with vision and a commitment to questioning the certainty and security long associated with architecture. 

Dimendberg provides an extensive overview of these concerns and the history of the studio, revealing how principals Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio, and Charles Renfro continue to expand the definition of architecture, question the nature of space and vision in contemporary culture, and produce work that is endlessly surprising and rewarding, from New York’s High Line to Blur, an artificial cloud, and Facsimile, a video screen that moves around a building facade.  Dimendberg also explores the relation of work by DS+R to that by earlier modernists such as Marcel Duchamp and John Hejduk.  He reveals how the fascination of the architects with evolving forms of media, technology, and building materials has produced works that unsettle distinctions among architecture and other media.

The Moment of Complexity EMERGING NETWORK CULTURE

The Moment of Complexity

EMERGING NETWORK CULTURE

"The Moment of Complexity is a profoundly original work. In remarkable and insightful ways, Mark Taylor traces an entirely new way to view the evolution of our culture, detailing how information theory and the scientific concept of complexity can be used to understand recent developments in the arts and humanities. This book will ultimately be seen as a classic."-John L. Casti, Santa Fe Institute, author of Gödel: A Life of Logic, the Mind, and Mathematics

architecture soviet modernism

Soviet Modernism 1955-1991

Edited by the Vienna Centre of Architecture

Park Books

To nonspecialists outside Eastern Europe, Soviet architecture conjures up vast, gray cityscapes of monotonous Brutalistbuildings, all created with utility rather than style in mind. This widely held impression glosses over the many stunning works created during the Soviet era and the diversity of architecture throughout the Soviet region. Soviet Modernism 1955–1991 seeks to correct pervasive opinions on Soviet architecture by exploring and documenting buildings throughout the former Eastern Bloc.

locating science fiction

Locating Science Fiction

Andrew Milner

Liverpool University Press

In Locating Science Fiction, Andrew Milner looks at science fiction within the context of a host of other genres—including fantasy, romance, and the thriller—and explores the historical and geographic contexts of science fiction’s emergence and development.

Expression architecture

Expression

Edited by the Chair of Josep Lluís Mateo ETH Zürich and Florian Sauter

Park Books

Architectural Papers is a series of books published by Josep Lluís Mateo of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich. Established in 2005, the series covers a wide range of topics related to teaching architecture and architectural culture in general. One of two new volumes in the series, Expression is an investigation into the influence of other media such as film, literature, and the visual arts on architectural thought and design.

Mindscapes of Montréal

Mindscapes of Montréal

Ceri Morgan

University of Wales Press

In Mindscapes of Montréal, Ceri Morgan examines a number of francophone novels written between 1960 and 2005 and set in Montréal. Morgan captures each book’s formal innovations and engagements with the complex cultural and linguistic geographies of Montréal. She then broadens her analysis and fills in the aesthetic, social, and political backdrops against which these novels were written. In doing so, Morgan demonstrates the importance of the imagination in our experience and understanding of the urban.

Alan Liu The Laws of cool

Automating

Karl Marx    Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844      staging alienation as a struggle between, or within, identities.

a) estrangement from the "labor process" or "producing activity itself," (loss of self)

b) estrangement from the "species being"  (romantic terms of organic naturalism)

c) estrangement of "man from man" 

revisions or challenges to Marx's view

 Mills       White Collar

incompletely tragic class    "the hero as victim, the small creature who is acted upon but who does not act, who works along unnoticed in somebody's office or store, never talking loud, never talking back, never taking a stand... (he is ) the generalized Little Man."

Liu's critique

1) not from product       for white collar labor had no clear object-product     it produced "service:" the legion of organizing, communicating, publicizing, accounting, and other facilitating or mediating tasks

2) white-collars both supervised or coordinated labor and were debarred from actual ownership.   

it becomes necessary to speak of the professionalism of white-collars in a way that bypasses the notion of property.

Thus rose revisionist theories of alienation to account from the new middle class

p85 "The consist of the genealogy of Weberian sociologies, humanist and structural Marxisms, structural anthropologies, Foucaultian historicisms, media studies, and so on that arose to describe— in lieu of relations between persons— the nonrelation of persons to institutional structures, machinelike organization, and rationalized techniques..... It is all 'cultural criticism' and 'subject critique'—a mode of grasping alienation that refuses to dramatize it in terms of essential identity, and instead views it only in terms of constructed identity. Alienation becomes a structural function of 'modes of production,' 'bureaucracies,' 'institutions,' systems, apparatuses, technologies, media, discourse, and other such macro-agencies that construct identity but are fundamentally incommensurable with the identity concept."

capitalism is a drama not of workers versus capitalists but of bureaucracy systems of technology/technique            Max Weber's analysis of bureaucracy

p92  systemic or technical friendship — the ideology that enforces the adjustment of technique to technology— has been the primary instrument of emotional labor management in the 20th century. 

Bruce Robbins   secular vocations: intellectuals, professionalism, culture

p100 the basic engine of cultural cool :  the consumption by middle-class workers of forms of entertainment, journalism, and dress influenced by that part of culture excluded by definition from normal work— subculture.
p103 thus did cool first come into its own as the ethos of modern alienation: a whole attitude or character of low affect that at once harmonized with the system of technological rationality and disengaged itself from that system by identifying just enough with outsiders to live a depersonalized fantasy of the Outside as pure style or decor.

informating

p107 (Shoshana) Zuboff coined the term (informating) to mean that computers generated an inescapably thick wrapping of second-order information (information acting on information) around the primary interface of information acting on matter where automation occurred— a wrapping so thick and interesting that it called into question the distinction between primary work and secondary mentality.

108   the tight coupling of the instrumental and the mental— the system and the sense of system—in computerization

How did computerization allow routine work to become "aware of" or "sense" the systematicity of work?  the key sense, it turns out, was "vision"

110 Such reflective distance was hard-wired or programmed into the system itself

computerization installed a whole culture of symbolic analysis and critical reflection in everyday work antithetical to earlier industrial culture of deskilling and routinization.

119   the parallel booms in information work and service work

        In an age when communications media increasingly supplanted physical transportation in carrying the bulk of exchanges between firms and their public, suppliers, contractors, and regulatory agencies, business necessarily had to be conducted in a compound idiom of information and service we might call   information service.

120 in this light, both information workers keying data and front-line workers dealing with the public must be seen to from a continuum of service through which information flowed

in other words,  front-line workers were the public inter-"face" of back-office computerization. They were living dumb terminals.

p127 Corporate culture in the mainframe age managed the unsupervised mentality or vision of information work ("fantasy") by making it part of a greater enterprise of service work that was now all the more productive because it appeared to be self-managed as part of a collective cultural fantasy.

Networking

By "networking" I mean the combination of new information architectures (personal computers, client/server networks, the Internet) and organizational structures that has created what Manuel Castells calls "network enterprise."

Information architectures       the networking paradigm arose through a twofold rhythm of convergence in underlying technologies and divergence in understanding what might be called the "philosophy" of those technologies. 

The technological convergence occurred when computing and communications fused together in three overlapping stages. 

1) the preliminary decade of the 1970s    such new devices as the microprocessor, digital telecom switch, and optical fiber

2) second stage from 1981 to 1991 when business adopted the personal computer as its own. The watershed year was 1981 when IBM brought to market its business-focused PC personal computer.

3) third stage  began in the early 1990s, when office computing fully merged with the new communication networking technologies.

divergence in the way the new networking was received, understood, and deployed

1) decentralization

2) distributed centralization      

cursory ideas about chapter 4 and introduction

Introduction:
postsocialist      post-binarism structure btw workers and capitalist
                         white-collar mental worker      affective labor
                         information challenges representation mode   crisis of representation in a large context?(discussion of postmodern/ism jameson, baudriallard    crisis of enlightment?)    socialist realism  
                         information and modernization /modernism ----- postsociaism doesn't mean simply return to capitalism   does modernism in post-socialist context implies a critique of modernization (dreamworld and catastrophe)  


Chapter 1
body and technology   utopia/dystopia built upon body
to which extent socialist    to which extent post-socialist


Chapter 4
alan liu's analysis on Marx's notion of alienation
alienation of species  -----   marxist humanism    
professionalism includes the professional regulations of emotions
Fangfang---    intellectual work with no affective labor to mediate machine and human

Fu, Poshek. “Modernity, Diasporic Capital, and 1950s' Hong Kong Mandarin cinema” in Jump Cut, No. 49, spring 2007.

1） Postwar Mandarin cinema in crisis

changcheng pro-beijng

yonghua- pro-taiwan

close of mainland market   inconsistent censorship of Taiwan

the plan of the Cathay Organization to expand its distribution network into Southeast Asia and expand its production facilities in Hong Kong brought hope for a renaissance of Mandarin film culture outside China

2) Air hostess (1959)

At the same time, available research indicates that Cathay-MP&GI was inadvertently entangled in the Cold War politics of anti-communism. These concerns for modernity and anti-communism come through powerfully in MP&GI’s prestigious picture, Air Hostess.

glamour and a modern lifestyle, was invariably associated in the local mind with “northern” migrants, who remained aloof from (if not contemptuous of) the local society.

gender aspects   love for a male chauvinist

The airline company as a modern transnational corporation functions in the film as an expression of Western Fordist-Taylorist capitalism, which demanded total dedication and emotional identification of individual workers to the mass production regime of hierarchy, rationality, and discipline for the sake of maximum profits and efficiency. 

Clearly pilot Xu Ke represents the “masculine values” of rationality, discipline, and fairness celebrate by Fordist-Taylorist capitalism.

google scholar / BBC

Googlescholar，想必大家常用。Google家还有一个伟大产品叫Google book。涵盖很强大，可以预览，比如输入croxtonplay，就跳出一大批讨论了这个作品的书。在网上预览，省去了在图书馆翻来倒去的时间。技术窍门很快可以摸索到，比如很多页不能直接浏览，但search inside the book就可以浏览该页了。国内图书馆没有的书，可以通过Googlebook看。一些过了版权期的旧书，可以在Google book大大方方地看，下载。力荐JohnCarroll写的三部《神曲》的书，这套书应该翻译过来！前两部都可以下载，第三本也快了（名叫In Patria，扉页题词In Via etin Patria）。过去的著名老学者GeorgeSaintsbury，Grandagent，都可以下载了看。还有Wikipedia，每日的必需。国内没有完全解封，我当年是通过answers.com看的，它包括了wikipedia的资料。现在不晓得怎样，但一定是有办法突破的。 



网站广播。对学英语很有益。BBC的在线广播基本可以通过flashget等软件下载（也可在firefox装flashgot插件）。推荐BBCarts anddrama，戏剧和文学朗读节目，

Mao’s New World: Political Culture in the People’s Republic

In this sweeping portrait of the political culture of the early People's Republic of China (PRC), Chang-tai Hung mines newly available sources to vividly reconstruct how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tightened its rule after taking power in 1949. With political-cultural projects such as reconstructing Tiananmen Square to celebrate the Communist Revolution; staging national parades; rewriting official histories; mounting a visual propaganda campaign, including oil paintings, cartoons, and New Year prints; and establishing a national cemetery for heroes of the Revolution, the CCP built up nationalistic fervor in the people and affirmed its legitimacy. These projects came under strong Soviet influence, but the nationalistic Chinese Communists sought an independent road of nation building; for example, they decided that the reconstructed Tiananmen Square should surpass Red Square in size and significance, against the advice of Soviet experts sent from Moscow.

2066 韩松 特异功能

the beginning of the chapter four    this history of research into extraordinary powers

对宇宙间第五种神秘力量的探索可以回溯到二十世纪五十年代。作为冷战的一个内容，美国中央情报局开始对超感官知觉与药物的关系进行研究。
　　到了七十和八十年代，除中央情报局外，五角大楼、国家航空航天局等都介入了这个领域。当时，美国每年花在特异功能项目上的钱为六百万美元。
　　军方的实验包括：用超感知觉破译苏联密码，遥感苏联洲际导弹发射阵地，测知苏联潜艇，遥控动物大脑。
　　在此期间，一个叫查尔斯·怀特的人甚至发明了一台多谱形象分析仪，只要塞进有关照片，就能感知敌国潜艇航向。这是最早的把人的超能力与机器结合在一起的尝试。

　　对实验结果存在很大争议。但至少有一部分高级人士趋向于相信，的确存在第五种力。它与已知的重力、磁力、强相互作用力和弱相互作用力不同，能够瞬间超越时空，穿透并渗入一切物质，释放出神奇的能量。
　　这种能量具有负熵性质，能在热、光、电、磁化学过程中观察到，但不属于它们中的任何一种。
　　“如果能掌握它，不亚于原子弹吧？”一些人兴致勃勃地这么想。“共产主义的崩溃便会提早到来了。”
　　在实验室中捕捉这种能量的努力在整个二十世纪趋于失败。有关它的传说仍主要存在于自称具有超感知觉的特异功能人身上。随着冷战的结束，相关研究也趋于停滞。
　　但到了二零二五年，事情却有了意想不到的进展。该年，斯坦福研究所发明了一种大脑脉冲放大器，以研究人在催眠状况下的深度反应。部分使用者自称收到了来自未来的信息。这与特异功能者对未来事件的预言有某种类似

Real Emotional Logic: Film and Television Docudrama As Persuasive Practice

The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art [Hardcover] Hiroko Ikegami (Author)

In 1964, Robert Rauschenberg, already a frequent transatlantic traveler, became even more peripatetic, joining the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as costume and set designer for its first world tour. Rauschenberg and the company visited thirty cities in fourteen countries throughout Europe and Asia. During the tour, he not only devised sets and costumes but also enacted his own performances and created works of art, often using local materials and collaborating with local art communities. In The Great Migrator, Hiroko Ikegami examines Rauschenberg's activities abroad and charts the increasing international dominance of American art during that period. Unlike other writers, who have viewed the export of American art during the 1950s and 1960s as another form of Cold War propagandizing (and famous American artists as cultural imperialists), Ikegami sees the global rise of American art as a cross-cultural phenomenon in which each art community Rauschenberg visited was searching in different ways for cultural and artistic identity in the midst of Americanization. Rauschenberg's travels and collaborations established a new kind of transnational network for the postwar art world--prefiguring the globalization of art before the era of globalization. Ikegami focuses on Rauschenberg's stops in four cities: Paris, Venice (where he became the first American to win the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale), Stockholm, and Tokyo. In each city, she tells us, Rauschenberg's work encountered both enthusiasm and resistance (which was often a reaction against American power). Ikegami's account offers a fresh, nonbinary perspective on the global and the local.

Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media

architecture

New Book in the Spatial Habitus: Making and Meaning in Asia's Architecture
series

Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China by Bianca
Bosker

books

London From Punk to Blair

REVISED SECOND EDITION

London from Punk to Blair is a rich portrait of Europe’s foremost capital. An array of contributors, including poets, journalists, teachers, historians, wanderers, drinkers, photographers, and foodies, offer a selection of personal and subjective readings of the city since the late ’70s. These essays chart a variety of literal and metaphorical explorations through modern and postmodern London, showing how it works, and how it fails to work; what makes it vibrant, and what makes it seedy. 

Harlem

In Harlem, Spivak engages with thirty-four photographs by photographer Alice Attie as she attempts teleopoiesis, a reaching toward the distant other through the empathetic power of the imagination. In the hands of Spivak,teleopoiesis is a kind of identity politics in which one disrupts identity as a result of migration or exile. For the last two decades, Spivak notes, Harlem has been the focus of major economic development. As the old Harlem disappears into a present that simultaneously demands and rejects a cultural essence, Spivak dwells in Attie’s images, trying to navigate some middle ground between the rock of social history and the hard place of a seamless culture.

Radio in Small Nations

Whether at a local, national, or international level, radio has played and continues to play a key role in nurturing or denying—even destroying—people’s sense of collective identity. The essays in this volume provide a historical and contemporary overview of radio in small nations. A number of representative small nations are featured: some grappling with new postcolonial identities and others still operating under repressive regimes; some struggling to find a new common purpose in the postindustrial age and others unifying previously ignored ethnic or language groups. As a whole, the collection strives to present diverse voices commenting on the influential and essential place of radio within these countries.