OBEY

OBEY-Shepard Fairey
When it comes to graffiti it is a well known idea that it spreads throughout the city and the world with an unstoppable speed. Graffiti started on the streets and on the N.Y trians in the late 70´s and was thaught of as something wich was unique to New York. With the help of the books Spraycan Art and Subway Art both by the photographers Cooper/Chalfant. They documentet the movement through interwievs and photos of the pieces and this is one of the main reasons that it spread throughout the world and inspired kids everywhere to take part in the ideas. Later, after the computer and with that the internet became a common household object it spred with a more intense speed and exchange of works across the borders. The american artist Shepard Fairey started a project he called the OBEY campaign in the early 90´s as a an art research to see how stickers and art can be spread across the globe. Nearly 20 years later you can check out the world wide phenomena known as OBEY at his webpage: http://obeygiant.com/
Presenting to you here is from his Manifesto dating back to 1990:

"The OBEY sticker campaign can be explained as an experiment in Phenomenology. Heidegger describes Phenomenology as “the process of letting things manifest themselves.” Phenomenology attempts to enable people to see clearly something that is right before their eyes but obscured; things that are so taken for granted that they are muted by abstract observation.

The FIRST AIM OF PHENOMENOLOGY is to reawaken a sense of wonder about one’s environment. The OBEY sticker attempts to stimulate curiosity and bring people to question both the sticker and their relationship with their surroundings. Because people are not used to seeing advertisements or propaganda for which the product or motive is not obvious, frequent and novel encounters with the sticker provoke thought and possible frustration, nevertheless revitalizing the viewer’s perception and attention to detail. The sticker has no meaning but exists only to cause people to react, to contemplate and search for meaning in the sticker. Because OBEY has no actual meaning, the various reactions and interpretations of those who view it reflect their personality and the nature of their sensibilities.

Many people who are familiar with the sticker find the image itself amusing, recognizing it as nonsensical, and are able to derive straightforward visual pleasure without burdening themselves with an explanation. The PARANOID OR CONSERVATIVE VIEWER however may be confused by the sticker’s persistent presence and condemn it as an underground cult with subversive intentions. Many stickers have been peeled down by people who were annoyed by them, considering them an eye sore and an act of petty vandalism, which is ironic considering the number of commercial graphic images everyone in American society is assaulted with daily.

Another phenomenon the sticker has brought to light is the trendy and CONSPICUOUSLY CONSUMPTIVE nature of many members of society. For those who have been surrounded by the sticker, its familiarity and cultural resonance is comforting and owning a sticker provides a souvenir or keepsake, a memento. People have often demanded the sticker merely because they have seen it everywhere and possessing a sticker provides a sense of belonging. The Giant sticker seems mostly to be embraced by those who are (or at least want to seem to be) rebellious. Even though these people may not know the meaning of the sticker, they enjoy its slightly disruptive underground quality and wish to contribute to the furthering of its humorous and absurd presence which seems to somehow be antiestablishment/societal convention. Giant stickers are both embraced and rejected, the reason behind which, upon examination reflects the psyche of the viewer. Whether the reaction be positive or negative, the stickers existence is worthy as long as it causes people to consider the details and meanings of their surroundings. In the name of fun and observation."

rhizome - the spread of music

an example of a rhizomatic system. how the music constantly spreads out in the world, in a indefinite system. a band from bergen and stavanger, casiokids, has since their start for five years ago spread their music all over the world. they have no control of it. the music lives its own life.

The Brooklyn Pigeon Project

Here is the project Gisle mentioned. Pigeons mapping Brooklyn, by Aranda\Lasch:

The Brooklyn Pigeon Project

Rhizome In The New 2010’ Major Policy Of Administrative District Divisions In Taiwan.

To think about "Rhizome"

in the new 2010’ major policy of administrative district divisions in Taiwan.

After reading "Rhizome", I thought about the 2010' major policy of administrative district divisions in Taiwan. According to Taiwan government publiched on 29th of June 2009, some subordinate districts will be promoted or be amalgamated with others. The concept of this policy tries to reduce the unbalance among the different area in Taiwan. Besides, the government expect to promote the living standard of the central ,southern and eastern parts of Taiwan. Finally create and provide people with the completely comfortable life.

So far as I know some principle of "Rhizome" close to the concept of the new administrative district divisions policy, and therefore I would like to discuss the theme for my 1st assignment.

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Rhizome In The New 2010’ Major Policy Of Administrative District Divisions In Taiwan.

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“Rhizome” In Traditional Chinese Architecture Art And Culture

“Rhizome” In Traditional Chinese Architecture Art And Culture

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“Rhizome” in Traditional Chinese Architecture Art and Culture
The author of Rhizome mentioned China as an Orient of rhizomes and immanence. I want to find some tracing of Rhizome in my background culture to help me to understand the thinking of rhizome and also to use it to offer a new angle of my own culture.

1. As an Opposite Side: “Tree” in Traditional Chinese Architecture
Before I talk about rhizome, it is important and necessary to discuss the opposite side of rhizome: tree and root. As tree is a sample of a system established on hierarchical graph, It is easy to find its tracing in a imperial power machine with centers of signifiance and subjectification, and also in the Imperial Palace in Beijing.
I try to making the tree in this palace to show how the political power flowed out of the central apparatus (building) of the empire in thousand years.

2. Interlaced Segments : “Rhizome” in Traditional Chinese Gardens.
Interlaced Segments:
Without the signs of politics and tracing of power, those gardens in Suzhou had never been planned under one uniform purpose even the mind of the owner and architect. They ware assemblages of a group of talents from different craftsmen, interlaced segments learned from nature, traditional culture essence and desiring of backing to nature.
Instead of Grand narrative, those garden more like a series segments which is always changing. Give you a new image of landscape in every seconds when you walk through. There was the beginning(door) for the garden, but endless segments inside. You ware always in the middle.
Buddha told that: No I and no immutability. This thinking effected our culture and the art of garden deeply. It was another describing of multiplicities.

Wasp and Orchid: Nature and Garden
Art in Chinese philosophy des not always imitate nature, but offer a medium between the owner and natural.
As Wasp, those gardens in Suzhou are not just smaller copy of nature, but make the artificial structure to reterritorialize the nature. The purpose of build gardens is not only to present the desire to live out of earthliness, but also try to find a short cut to translate human to a part of nature again, and keep the comfortable and civilized living style at the same time.
They are sedentarities, but built for nomadism.
Through a process of abstraction and reconstruction, the aesthetics of nature come back to city in the status of a substantive.

3. Scroll Painting: “Rhizome” in Traditional Chinese Art
This Scroll Painting described the city living beside the Bian River in Capital of Song dynasty.
We use especial furniture to appreciate it which keeps the scroll steady. You could never see the whole work at the same time, but any part of this work could be an independent image. It was meaning that people could go into this printing from everywhere. It showed multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight.
This dominating point for perspective did not exist in this painting, which made it more like a map. Comparing with normal map in a plan, this one included more information from different directions. It is a recording of a rhizome.

I use color point to make the characters on the printing, than I got an antigenealogy image. Every point is a connotative central of a happening. It is detachable, connectable, reversible, and modifiable.

The purpose of this essay is not translating the concept of rhizome with Chinese culture. What I want to do is making use of this tool to understand myself and my culture more deeply. The sample I give out maybe is not the ideal model for rhizome, but is a introduction for this big discussion.

the flocking of birds

New Hierarchies

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INDUSTRIAL SYMBIOSIS

satelite picture of Kalundborg

Symbiosis means co-existence between diverse organisms in which each may benefit from the other. In this context, the term is applied about the industrial co-operation taking place in for example Kalundborg, between a number of companies and Kalundborg Municipality, all of which exploit each others residual or by-products mutually.
The Symbiosis co-operation has developed spontaneously over a number of decades and today comprises some 20 projects. The exchange of residual products between the companies is laid out in the diagram.
The Symbiosis are still in development with new projects and initiatives between the member companies and the society. New member is going to be signed in in 2009 - meaning new processes and new potential symbiosis projects. The Symbiosis Institute are also supporting other industrial districts in Denmark and internationally in their effort to initiate symbiosis activities.
The overall goal of the Industrial Symbiosis in Kalundborg is to improve the environmental standard through efficiency, further development and information exchange of utilisation of bi-products in industry. Trough these actions will enterprises minimise the utilisation of energy, water and natural raw materials.

Industrial Symbiosis

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New Hierarchies Of Mostar

New Hierachies - Rhizome as an Blogg

The graph above is an analysis of how blogs from Walter Rafelsberger blogroll are interconnected. He did it by fetching today's RSS-feeds from the blogs, then parsed each individual blog posting and looked for links to other blogs from the blogroll.

I was a bit surprised how many connections there are given the fact that it just fetched the current state of each RSS-feed. Maybe that's because he was just looking for Domain-Names, so youtube.com for example appears as one blog, regardless to which user/video one links.

Next he`ll do an analysis on blog-posting/URI-level. That way this could turn out to be a more accurate conversation tracker.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vl7EsQkma3M&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGg2XLhF_Co&NR=1

New Hierarchies - in the bookshelf

New Hierarchies In My Bookcase

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The Plateau of Thoughts

New hierarchies

The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily - A rhizomestructure of meanings and metaphores

The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily is a piece of litterature that was relevant in the task of architectual history, these day - for me.You can read it if you want, only 54 A5 pages.. here.

A true fairy story is a work of art. In 1795, there appeared in the German magazine Die Horen (The Hours) a series of stories of which the concluding one was a Fairy Tale, The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. This tale tells of magical transformation, yet one which, when the time is ripe, can be experienced by every human being. The author of these stories was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and the creation of this Fairy Tale was to have far reaching consequences...

I have never ever read souch a fairy tail and got so overwhelmed by its underlying messages. It gives me a impression of a flow of pictures in my sensory dimension, and right after a flow of abstract sublime codes/messages/hints/education about life in the spiritual dimension. But nothing is clear.. I thing I will see this fairytale as a rhizome structure of dimensions to accept its complexity.

Many people have analyzed it and some have more credible interpretations than other..

"This Fairy Tale was written by Goethe as a response to a work of Schiller’s entitled Über die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man). One of the main thoughts considered in these ‘letters’ centred around the question of human freedom".

"But both Schiller and Goethe recognised that freedom cannot be ‘imposed’ from the outside but must arise from within each person. Whilst he had an artistic nature, Schiller was more at home in the realm of philosophic thoughts and although Goethe found much pleasure in these ‘Letters’ of Schiller, he felt that the approach concerning the forces in the soul was too simply stated and, it should be said, working in abstract ideas was not Goethe’s way. So he set about writing a Fairy Tale that would show, in imaginative pictures, the way in which a human soul could become whole and free, thereby giving rise to a new and free human community..."

 I will actually talk more of this in a more general way. If you want to read a whole resyme of it you can do it her, but it is almost the same amount of text as the fairytail.. I see this as a dimension of the human existence written in a metaphoric way. It hits my internal system with messages that I have to interpret by my self. By compared it to a rhizomestructure I feel this could have some connections. 

The equalityness is for me about; different regimes of signs. It always has a multiple way of notification going in any direction. It looks like it has a start and a end, but actually you are in the middle of somewhere, in your mind, in a philosophical methaphor written by Goethe.

I wil try to explain this experience for you tomorrow with these little sketches..

 

 

Rhizome in politics

Rhizome in politics

For this task I decided that I would read all the political programs of the parties present in the Storting today. I then had to make a selection of opinions from each party. I tried to see if the parties themselves graded their opinions, if they presented issues as more important than others. Some of the parties had done that, and some had not. I had several attempts trying to balance and make a representative picture of each party, and ended up making a selection of 25 issues/statements from each party, that they had fronted as important on their website. For some parties that meant that only few issues got highlighted, others had spread their focus on a number of issues.

Could I find a rhizome form here? Would their different opinions entwine?

I did find that the opinions entwined. Some of the issues even on the far “right” and the far “left”, but those topics I often found to be harmless, like getting rid of taxes on voluntary work. I also found that when statements were vague, one could more easily find equal or resembling opinions with the other parties. “We want to put money into the rail system” could be paired up with “Speed trains between every large city”. So one of my conclusions is that when the language is unclear, it opens up for more possibilities and ways of renditions. More connection points.

The second part I did not have time for, but these are the thoughts and assumption I have on it;

If I were to write every statement down, and organize them on a table, what form would it take? If I placed topics that were in the same genre next to each other, would there be parts of the table that got more cluttered than others? I think it would, and my assumption is that that would be topics that the parties all were specifically interested in. It could be topics that handled problem issues for Norway, issues that engaged the politicians.

If I am right on this – could it be transferred unto any rhizome system? A cluster of connecting points; would that show a problem in the system? Like a tumour? Or would a cluster just show an area of engagement? These are maybe questions that I can answer after going deeper into the rhizome form in the next weeks.

New hierarchies - in our mind and in exchange of knowledge

In Our mind

We act and react to all that comes in our direction, consciously and unconsciously. I came to think of a documentary about how our brain works. From birth, our brain is an intricate network of connecting lines that makes our brain grow. The brain needs nutrition to keep growing. Besides food, it needs stimuli, in the forms sound, touch, sight. All our senses are highly active in this process. As we develope, grow and are stimulated, all these connections are very active, and this is one way to explain why children have such vivid imaginations. But if these connections are not fed by stimuli, they die. As we become adults some of these connections shut down, simply because they are impossible to feed and maintain. This seems to be how nature intended it to be. However, if a child is not stimulated from birth it can actually die, and will cetainly not develope in areas such as sensory-motoric skills, language etc.. In other words, a tremendous amount of connections shut down irreversibly. Oppositely, it is said that highly creative people are able to develop and maintain more of these connections than so-called normal people. I guess a society works in the same way, diversity and continuous actions make it grow, become richer and more diverse. A place with no stimuli, action and diversity will slowly die.

Human action

Back in 2000 I saw a film called ”Pay it forward” with actor Kevin Spacey. The film is about a child determined to change the world for the better. He intends to achieve this by doing a good deed (action) to three persons, and these people will then do a good deed for three more, and the next three for three more, and so on. No one is in charge, but all contribute to a change. Is it possible to use the concept of continuous action as a driving force for creating a more participating society, that could benefit an urban development ? One starting point could be an individual with specific knowledge on how to become partially self-sufficient by growing vegetables in a kitchen garden. This person then decides to teach three others how to do the same, with the only required payback being that the knowledge is payed forward to three more individuals, who are also required to pay forward and so on. This could again inspire others to share other knowledge or skills in the same manner. The result is a rhizomatic explosion in terms of exchange of knowledge, human interaction and physical structures.

An independent non- profit organization called " The Rizome Collective" work almost like this. They are situated in an old warehouse in Austin, Texas where they operate an educational center for urban sustainability, and at the same time invite communitygroups to use their center for workshops, benefits etc. They mean that community participation is necessary to challenge the values of competition, greed and exploitation in society. Educating, and inspiring others to do the same, is their contribute to change the world to become a place for cooperation and eligatiarianism.They also run a lot of projects in schools, workshops etc where they hope that people are inpired to continue the work of building locally based, decentralized, radically sustainable infrastructures. " By doing this we hope to ease humanity's transition into a post-petroleum future, and simultaneously undermine oppressive powers that maintain resource monopolies." here is the homepage http://archive.rhizomecollective.org/

Managing complexity?

Man acts upon the world and change it, and is in turn changed by the consequenses of his actions. Skinner, 1977
As a man kicks a ball he knows it will roll forward.
As a man kicks a dog one can not now what to expect. The dog might bite, crumble or run away.

Social interactions are hard to predict. Human lives are surrounded by context, history and tradition. How are we all influenced by these? Deleuze suggests that we as humans act out our lives in a conglomerate of interactions through continous negotiations with our context. In this lies an ongoing resistanse against rigid organisation and restriction. "Plateaus" are built as phenonema and context constantly influences each other. Together this builds systems of complexity. This world of complexity has its own dynamics and logic and is difficult to grasp through a sequensal logic. The components are in constant change and make patterns that are hard to plan for and predict.
Opposite to this institutions can be seen as manifested phenomena. But they are social phenomena and will in turn be influenced by the social context they arise from.

"The established order"

Active resistance against rigid organisation and restrictions

The way of the butterfly

The Way of the Butterfly

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Rhizome- The way of living

A flash mob is in its very essence rhizomatic. A leaderless mass event, dissolving as quickly as it appeared. A group of people suddenly gather in a public place performing an unusual, often funny act. The initiative is usually posted on the internet, and spread via mail and SMS. The starting point will be difficult to identify, and once it’s started you can not stop it. 500 people freeze in a trainstation for five minutes. Thousands of people gather to silent rave in Victoria, London. Pillow fights in the middle of the street. Ninja’s fighting on a campus or zombies roaming around in a mall. And recently Michael Jackson dance tributes all over the world....

Movie : Supermarket flash mob

This is considered an undergroup to smart mobs - a term introduced by Howard Rheingold in his book Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. The self-organising structure allowes (the events) to claim to be celebrations or sudden, coincidential gatherings, rather than protests or organised demontrations, arguing to not need the required approvals form police or authority. Flash mobs may not be politically or idealogically founded - often just for fun - but they still represent a need to make an expression in public space. Similar more politically oriented movements like Critical Mass evolved throughout the ‘90s to reclaim the streets, and may be traced all the way back to the ‘70s.