Lesson Nº 1 + The Ascension
Glenn Branca has always been a musician positioned halfway between the role of avant-garde composer and that of a rock musician. A pupil and disciple of the masters of American minimalism such as La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Philip Glass and Steve Reich, he has always had to fight against prejudice and fierce criticism. His position was certainly uncomfortable, too academic for rock fans and too “politically incorrect” for academics. In fact, Branca was trying to unhinge all the limits imposed by the rigid schemes of the avant-garde, aware of the fact that those who want to be truly avant-garde should have no limits. John Cage was also able to criticize him, even calling him a fascist ( Luciano Berio also did so for all minimalists) for the excessive rigidity of his compositions, even though he recognized his innovative power. After having created his best known album, The Ascension (1981), a true monument of maximalism played with a classical rock formation (guitars, bass and drums), he tries to approach a different format, the Symphony, as always halfway between rock and academia. Branca will like the experiment and will re-propose it several times in the following decades, to date there are sixteen symphonies (not all recordings are available). Here is how young Branca’s ensemble appeared to the American composer John Adams in one of his first live performances of the First Symphony: “Branca’s event that I listened to at the Japan Center Theater in San Francisco in 1981 was one of his symphonies for guitar . The group didn’t look very different from thousands of other independent or alternative rock bands of the time: guys in jeans and worn t-shirts busy with cables while maintaining that typical distracted expression of rock musicians.

La Génération Invisible
La Génération Invisible est une installation dans laquelle Pascal Dombis questionne notre rapport aux images numériques et comment nous les regardons aujourd’hui. Internet génère une profusion d’images qui circulent et qui sont de moins en moins regardées par les humains. Cette installation parle de la disparition des images de par leur circulation et prolifération excessive. Le mur est couvert par un flux de 30 000 images internet entrelacées formant une surface visuelle floue. La nature individuelle de chacune des images peut être décodée par l’utilisation d’une plaque lenticulaire que le visiteur applique directement contre le mur, afin d’en extraire de multiples lectures. Cette installation fait écho au travail de William Burroughs sur le langage et les images en reprenant une phrase d’un de ses livres Cut-Up de 1961 :

T4T LAB
RADICAL RAUMPLAN
The real but withdrawn qualities of the raumplan of the Muller House can be understood as the unknown excess of the object. This is the space of the architectural project that exists beyond the limits of human cognition. Although this space is finite, it is vast and abundant. Any attempt to enter into this space must be somehow framed. As a metaphor, or a vehicle to frame the unknown excess, we take in part the idea of viewing, which is epistemologically important to the raumplan. Using this framework, our project attempts to go beyond our cognitive limitations and enter into the unknown space of the architectural project. From here, we can extract new spatial phenomena that can be notated into the known layer, to be understood by the architectural audience. For us, this means using a series of metaphors to frame our exploration of the unknown and attempt to extract new phenomena that engage the raumplan independent of its relationship to a human subject. This allows us to operate in a jective framework, allowing for an understanding of the object autonomously.

Skin Sucka

A project conceived with Clive van Heerden, Jack Mama (Philips Design Probes) and Bart Hess, Skinsucka explores a vision of our nano technology future whereby bio technology and robotics come together to question our attitudes of a synthetic future. Skinsucka reveals a future where microbal robots live in our shared spaces and autonomously they will undertake menial tasks such as cleaning our homes by eating the dirt. ‘Skinsuckas’ clean the skin, removing the vestiges of make up and providing the remedies to combat the excesses of the night before They swarm over the body extruding metabolized household dirt, dressing the body in a daily ritual of real time, customized manufacture – yesterday’s discarded clothing ready for recycling.” Clive and Jack’s work has consistently brought very diverse skills together in new innovation processes. In the late 1990’s they took designers and other creative skills into Philips Research labs in the Redhill, London and New York and created a specialist studio in London to develop the skills, materials and technologies for a host of Wearable Electronic business propositions in the areas of electronic apparel, conductive textiles, physical gaming, medical monitoring and entertainment.

Ready to crawl
Ready to Crawl is a project of 3D-printed organic-like robots. By printing everything except the motor as one unit, the robots are born with a completed shape like real creatures. After the robots have been printed by a selective laser sintering machine, excess nylon powder is removed, a motor is inserted, and then they start crawling.
Designer: Hiroshi Sugihara
Project director: Shunji Yamanaka

BACON

He painted the abysses of the human soul: the British artist Francis Bacon. Basic mechanisms of relationships such as desire, domination and exclusion he presented with merciless honesty and painful beauty.
With her piece, Nanine Linning fathoms the emotional cosmos of Bacon`s paintings and detects in their uncompromising depiction an analogy with her own art. With excessive physicality, the choreography explores fundamental patterns of behavior, which blur the line between human and feral bearing by their archaic and merciless nature. From an almost disturbing proximity the spectator witnesses the struggle of the individual for affiliation.At the same time fascinating and disturbing, the piece celebrates its comeback on stage fourteen years after its first release. BACON, which received the »Swan« for the best Dutch choreography, returns with revised choreography and new video- and light design.

Visual Orgasms
popcorn
Visual Orgasms exaggerates this mandate to ‘make-visible’ by creating excessive moving image collages that depict metaphors for orgasm with no actual depiction of sex.
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1774
In the year 1774 Louis XV died, marking the sunset of one of history’s most lavish monarchies. In the same year a young Swede named Johann Gahn, working in the deepest and wettest levels of a mine, discovered the metal Manganese. At a molecular level, when combined with oxides, manganese displays a striking “super-crystal” modularity. In this solid aluminum chair, two historic events—the super-excess of Louis XV and the super-crystal of Manganese—are fused into a single moment of design

Pazzazz
Dominique Pétrin brings the image to its highest degree of saturation and develops an intense dialogue between images, their support, and their configuration. Pazzazz is a Greco-Roman fresco that recalls the music-hall of the 70s. Excess, wealth, and decadence are represented in an ornamental style that is almost threatening. Between dreams and apparitions, the optical illusion is lost in a maze of pleasure and abuse, enjoyment and intoxication.

She works with an eye to extremes – monstrous excess, alarming paucity – creating a variety of objects that exist somewhere on the continuum between pure fleshiness and pure cartoonishness. Warren’s heightened appreciation of the framing, placement and context of her works, combined with an exploration of materials’ hidden meanings can also be found in her wall-mounted vitrines.

Инь Сючжэн
尹秀珍
Nowhere to Land
Her artworks have since been shown extensively in various international exhibitions. Best known for her works that incorporate second-hand objects, Yin uses her artwork to explore modern issues of globalization and homogenization. By utilizing recycled materials such as sculptural documents of memory, she seeks to personalize objects and allude to the lives of specific individuals, which are often neglected in the drive toward excessive urbanization, rapid modern development and the growing global economy.

“O impossivel”

They touch. They bite. They get warm. They penetrate. They are made. They get rid of. They stick their tongues in. They put the body in. They get body. They split up. They exist.
They want to be one. It is impossible (“O impossivel”). Which means that a single body, as you would like, is impossible. It can not. For a moment yes, for a moment they can. But no, they can’t. Impossible. They cannot be one. Despite the bites. Their bodies are different. They were born and will die self-absorbed, in themselves. Between them there is an abyss, a discontinuity. But they want to be continuous, they want their bodies to be one body. Since they cannot, they celebrate the sacrifice of the meat. “Essentially,” says Georges Bataille, “the field of eroticism is the field of violence, the field of rape.” Isn’t it violent, perhaps, to want to break the discontinuity of the other closed in on itself? Isn’t it violent to force the discontinuity of the other to be a continuous whole with him? O impossível by the Brazilian Maria Martins (1894/1973) shows the excesses of sex (take note: excess, sex). Or impossível is the moment in which the organs swell with blood and gush sexuality. The moment when animality makes us gloriously human.

Parabolhomme

A perspectiva da clonagem e da automação – dois tópicos aos quais o artista apela em mais de suas obras – acaba levando à reinvenção da vida selvagem e faz com que o artista imagine esse reino animal derivado como consequência do consumo excessivo. A diversidade de formas e as cores chocantes criam um bestiário de animais robóticos que lutam contra os elementos naturais. Mas as esculturas revelam não apenas a dinâmica da sobrevivência; eles também mostram como os animais podem ter mudado de território e podem estar procurando encontrar mais recursos para melhorar sua própria espécie. À medida que as espécies vêem seu espaço vital diminuir, apegadas a nada natural e presas em lugares desconhecidos e irreconhecíveis, elas parecem abraçar a mutação.

ШАХИРА ХАММАД
Excessive III
Scheme B

In Search of Vanished Blood

Malani’s work is influenced by her experiences as a refugee of the Partition of India. She places inherited iconographies and cherished cultural stereotypes under pressure. Her point of view is unwaveringly urban and internationalist, and unsparing in its condemnation of a cynical nationalism that exploits the beliefs of the masses. Hers is an art of excess, going beyond the boundaries of legitimized narrative, exceeding the conventional and initiating dialogue. Characteristics of her work have been the gradual movement towards new media, international collaboration and expanding dimensions of the pictorial surface into the surrounding space as ephemeral wall drawing, installation, shadow play, multi projection works and theatre.

ШАХИРА ХАММАД
Excessive

bio intelligence quotient house
Dubbed the Bio Intelligent Quotient (BIQ) House, the approximately €5 million building was designed by Splitterwerk Architects and funded by the Internationale Bauausstellung (IBA), a long-running exhibition series showcasing cutting edge techniques and architectural concepts, for this year’s International Building Exhibition – 2013.
A total of 129 algae culturing tanks are affixed to the East and West sides of the building via an automated external scaffolding structure that constantly turns the tanks towards the sun. The plant cultures are fed through an integrated tubing system, CO2 is pumped in as well. According to Arup’s Europe Research Leader, Jan Wurm, who collaborated with Splitterwerk on the project:The algae flourish and multiply in a regular cycle until they can be harvested. They are then separated from the rest of the algae and transferred as a thick pulp to the technical room of the BIQ. The little plants are then fermented in an external biogas plant, so that they can be used again to generate biogas. Algae are particularly well suited for this, as they produce up to five times as much biomass per hectare as terrestrial plants and contain many oils that can be used for energy.Not only do these tanks provide shade for every level of the building during the summer and biogas for heating during the winter, the facade itself collects excess heat not being used by the algae, like a solar thermal system. That heat can then either be used immediately or stored in 80-meter-deep, borine-filled borehole heat exchangers located under the structure. Total fossil fuels used in this process: zero.

drawing with robot arm
“With gene mapping, gender reassignment, prosthetic limbs and neural implants, what a body is and how a body operates becomes problematic. We generate Fractal Flesh and Phantom Flesh, extended operational systems and virtual task environments. Meat and metal mesh into unexpected and alternate anatomical architectures that perform remotely beyond the boundaries of the skin and beyond the local space it inhabits. The monstrous is no longer the alien other. We inhabit an age of Circulating Flesh. Organs are extracted from one body and inserted into other bodies. Limbs that are amputated from a dead body can be reattached and reanimated on a living body. A face from a donor stitched to the skull of the recipient becomes a Third Face. A skin cell from an impotent male can be recoded into a sperm cell. And more interestingly a skin cell from a female body might be recoded into a sperm cell. Turbine hearts circulate blood without pulsing. In the near future you might rest you head on your loved one’s chest. They are warm to the touch, they are breathing, they are certainly alive. But they will have no heartbeat. A cadaver can be preserved forever through plastination whilst simultaneously a comatose body can be sustained indefinitely on a life-support system. Dead bodies need not decompose, near-dead bodies need not die. Most people will no longer die biological deaths. They will die when their life-support systems are switched off. The dead, the near-dead, the not-yet-born and the partially living exist simultaneously. And cryongenically preserved bodies await reanimation at some imagined future. We live in an age of the Cadaver, the Comatose and the Chimera. Liminal spaces proliferate. Engineering organs, stem-cell growing them or by bio-printing will result in an abundence of organs. An excess of organs. Of organs awaiting bodies. Of Organs Without Bodies.” STELARC

Шахира Хаммад
Asemic Forest – Westbahnhof Train Station

Dieses Projekt stellt meine Diplomarbeit für das Postgraduiertenprogramm „Übermäßig“ an der Fachhochschule Wien 2012 dar. Wir wurden gebeten, uns einen neuen Bahnhof für Wien vorzustellen, der den bestehenden Westbahnhof entweder modifizieren oder ersetzen würde. Ich entschied mich dafür, das bestehende Gebäude beizubehalten, es aber mit Strukturen zu kontaminieren, die eine Komplexität ausdrücken würden, die jetzt fehlt. Meine Intervention war sowohl von der Natur als auch von der Kultur inspiriert und beabsichtigt, über ihre polemischen Eigenschaften hinaus das zurückzubringen, was in der Wissenschaft als spontane Ordnung bezeichnet wird. Dies ist keine Störung im gesunden Menschenverstand, obwohl sie dieses Aussehen haben könnte. Es ist offensichtlich eine Reaktion gegen übermäßigen Rationalismus und Rationalisierungen. Ja, es ist übertrieben, aber im Wesentlichen versucht es nichts anderes, als die in der Natur vorhandenen Komplexitäten in das städtische Gefüge zu bringen. In gewisser Weise ist mein „Projekt“ nicht wirklich ein „Projekt“, da ich das, was ich mir vorgestellt hatte, fast von selbst „natürlich“ entstehen ließ und nicht nur äußere, sondern auch innere Realitäten zum Ausdruck brachte. Wir könnten sagen, dass dies vielleicht ein epimethisches Werk ist, im Gegensatz zu Promethean, dh ein Werk, in dem das Denken danach kommt. Das Verhältnis zwischen Ursache und Wirkung ist also kreisförmig und nicht linear. Alles in allem ist dies eine architektonische Meditation über Auch die Zeit, da die Strukturen, die ich mir vorgestellt habe, Metamorphose, Zeitablauf, Veränderung, Vergänglichkeit und sogar Verfall widerspiegeln… Themen, die wiederum von herkömmlichen Architekturen vernachlässigt werden. Wenn das Chaos seiner negativen Konnotationen beraubt wird, haben wir vielleicht wieder die Chance, die positiven Aspekte der sogenannten „spontanen Ordnung“ zu erreichen.