domesticating thoughts

occupying the wall

2009-11-19T12:02:00.005+01:00

Walden_Nils Holger Moorman

[images from http://www.moormann.de/en/furniture/other/walden/image-gallery/]

tribu_daniel medina

2009-11-18T10:46:00.012+01:00

"questioning the formal content of our concept of space...through the manual or mechanical alteration of images"_Daniel Medina

[image and text from http://danielmedinab.blogspot.com/]

black maria_hiroshi nakao

2009-11-17T16:00:00.005+01:00

"When slowly opening, the hollow splits and a broad hole is produced. When the split reaches its full extent, nonetheless, the hole again disappears and the original hollow folds back on itself, like a glove turned inside out. Now it looks like a thinly shaved flake. A folding screen. Not the conventional folding screen that distributes space, but one that sucks space inward, or rather, inspires space and expires it." _Hiroshi Nakao, 1998

"Architecture must now immediately abandon its mythical function of protecting the interior from the exterior and seek rather, through its original function as edge, to protect the exterior from the interior."_Hiroshi Nakao, 1998

[image and text from http://www.arch.mcgill.ca/prof/mellin/arch671/winter2001/dkouba/drm/nakao.htm]

virus hacking

2009-11-11T20:44:00.013+01:00

"Scientists have used gene therapy to halt the progression of adrenoleukodystrophy, a fatal neurodegenerative disease caused by a single defective gene, in two seven-year-old boys."

"It took more than a decade to refine the therapy, in which stem cells taken from the boys’ bone marrow were hacked with healthy copies of the gene, then returned to their bodies. Without them, the boys would soon be dead."

[image and text from http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/11/ald-gene-therapy/]

co-opted thoughts

2009-11-11T14:19:00.014+01:00

excerpts from "The Infinite Lawn" from Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino

Around Mr. Palomar's house there is a lawn. This is not a place where a lawn should exist naturally: so the lawn is an artificial object, composed from natural objects, namely grasses. The lawn's purpose is to represent nature, and this representation occurs as the substitution, for the nature proper to the area, of a nature in itself natural but artificial for this area.

A lawn does not have precise boundaries; there is a border where the grass stops growing, but still a few scattered blades sprout farther on, then a thick green clod, then a sparser stretch: are they still part of the lawn, or not?

The lawn is a collection of grasses__this is how the problem must be formulated__that includes a subcollection of cultivated grasses and a subcollection of spontaneous grasses known as weeds; an intersection of the two subcollections is formed by the grasses that have grown spontaneously but belong to the cultivated species and are therefore indistinguishable from them. The two subcollections, in their turn, include various species, each of which is a subcollection; or, rather, it is a collection that includes the subcollection; or, rather, it is a collection that includes the subcollection of its own members, which are members also of the lawn and the subcollection of those alien to the lawn. The wind blows; seeds and pollens fly, the relations among the collections are disrupted...

[image from http://grinningreaper.wordpress.com/2009/06/04/scything-update/]

on my terms

2009-11-11T10:59:00.002+01:00

The terms ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’ can only be understood and defined in relation to one another. One cannot exist without the other. By claiming something 'domestic,' one concurrently deems an-other thing foreign. They are dialectically linked. They are not traits that are naturally inherent but rather are constructed through social and political forces. Thus, for the purpose of this thesis, domestic and foreign will be defined and understood in the sense of their actions. To domesticate(v) is to make something belong to what concerns oneself, to make it intimate, to make it familiar. To foreign(v) is to alienate, estrange, or decide something to be outside of the realm of what concerns oneself. To domesticate and to foreign are both actions that are inextricably linked to opinion and agenda. DOMESTICATED(adj) and FOREIGN(adj) are not then innate conditions but can only emerge through the acts of domesticating and foreigning. The domesticated condition interrelates with characteristics of inclusivity, belonging, security, affiliation, tameness, and the interior. The foreign condition associates with concepts of exclusivity, antipathy, insecurity, alienation, wildness, and the exterior.

initial domestication_statement snapshot

2009-11-10T18:05:00.008+01:00

The foreign and the domesticated are often considered to be conflicting conditions that define specifically what is inside and what is outside, what is included and what is excluded, what belongs and what does not. The processes of organizing space__planning, designing, building__set up the physical condition of what is interior and what is exterior. The contrasting characteristics of the domesticated and the foreign provoke a relationship where often the domesticated is protected from the foreign in order to avoid invasion, contamination, defilement, infection. Tension builds between the internal domesticated and the external foreign. This tension results due to the fact that foreign-ness is not something innate to a animal, plant, person, place, or circumstance. It is constructed based on a perception, opinion, or agenda. Consequently, the surmounting tension between the domesticated and the foreign is a social construction. When the tension of this construction becomes too great, the pressure must be released.

FASCIOTOMIC INCISIONS relieve the physical, mental, emotional, and political tensions between the domesticated and the foreign by first exposing the arbitrariness of their constructions and then embracing the seeping of these two realms through the design construction. My thesis questions the relevance and value of the distinction between the domesticated and the foreign and seeks to propose new coevolutive spatial relationships for these not so dissimilar, socially-constructed opposites.