Adhocracy » Fun

#OccupyGezi Architecture

Mattia Spresian — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 13:06:04 +0000

Herkes İçin Mimarlık (Architecture For All) is a non-profit and independent architecture organization based in Istanbul devoted to offering architectural solutions to social problems, which are faced today in Turkey and beyond. Also, it promotes participatory design process in architecture education.

Souzy Tros Art Canteen: The Embassy

Mattia Spresian — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 10:02:45 +0000

Under austerity, heavy surveillance and stringent migration policies in the urban space of Athens, a similar space was created on the initiative of artist Maria Papadimitrou, with the help of artists, architects, designers, NGO workers and immigrants. Entitled Souzy Tros, it was established as a food/sewing/art/design space based on the free exchange of labour. Artist Maria Papadimitrou’s equates to a vision of a “coming community”, a community that seems impossible to form but appears in a collective imaginary through everyday life practices.

The Ad-hoc Machine

Mattia Spresian — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 09:56:51 +0000

The Ad-hoc Machine disassembles and recombines the components of an industrial CD pressing machine, transforming their function from data transfer to live sound creation. Analogously, audio software has been adapted to trigger the physical motion of the various components in a chance-based way. The final creation thus cannibalizes the apparatus of manufacture to give birth to a system open to evolution and experimentation. Join and experience the sound of evolving automata.

Technology is the Answer

Mattia Spresian — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 09:55:11 +0000

Fun Palace is Cedric Price’s most celebrated work. Whether characterised as a giant toy or as a building-sized transformable machine, the project’s interest resides in its radical reliance on structure and technology, its exemplification of notions of time-based and anticipatory architecture. With Fun Palace, Price addressed social and political issues that go far beyond the typical bounds of architecture. The famous lecture “Technology is the answer, but what was the question?” is being reproduced publicly here for the first time ever. Following Price, we suggest you to explore this place as an instrument of pleasure and enjoyment.

Crea.tu

Mattia Spresian — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 09:41:58 +0000

This toy is the result of mixing young and unemployed talent, digital fabrication and the energy of neighbourhood networks. The main objective of these groups is to support people whose financial situation makes it hard for them to meet their basic food and housing needs. But their initiatives go beyond simply providing assistance. With the support of local small businesses, they have come up with ideas and projects that boost the autonomy of local residents, and even create new types of jobs.

Self-Fashioning Escape Objects

Mattia Spresian — Wed, 01 Apr 2015 15:53:48 +0000

Maria Papanikolaou’s artworks focus on the fantasy, the act and the attestation of escaping from an oppressive environment. Inspired by her first degree in law and her practice at the felonies’ department of Athens Supreme Court, Maria combines personal testimonies, tales, myths and historical facts in order to create artworks based on fictional escape stories. Throughout history, thousands of people have been trying to escape from slavery, fascist regimes, poverty, war, immigration detention centres and imprisonments of all kinds. In the project Self-Fashioning Escape Objects, she designs the objects these people fashioned themselves in their attempt to escape, using all available materials and ordinary, everyday items in incredible innovative ways.

Tele Coffee Grinder

Mattia Spresian — Wed, 01 Apr 2015 15:36:19 +0000

The Tele Coffee Grinder presents the logic of conjunction of whole natural objects. Together with their autonomous functions, they also participate in a parallel secondary production process, seemingly different from their original use (via Arduino software, a handset activates an objects circuit, which ends up grinding coffee). This logic alludes the way social and production procedures operate, where subjects, products and services participate without their ‘awareness’ or supervision in an infinite number of socioeconomic ‘circuits’, open to continuous enrichment and adaptation. The objects that the tele coffee grinder consists of have an ironic reference to human freedoms of movement, communication and production.

In the contemporary field of inexhaustible ‘generations’ of products, the concept of encyclopedia—as an objects catalogue—could now be substituted by an encyclopedia of ‘attributes’, which could define the potential ‘integrations-uses of objects within different contexts. These properties would refer to concepts such as ‘motor’, ‘coil’, ‘capacitor’ or ‘resistance’ and can serve as potential waiting interconnections. It is the overall amount of its potential accessions that now defines an object. The small structure is part of a theoretical ongoing research on tinkering and ad hoc translations of architectural exemplars.

Conversion+

Mattia Spresian — Tue, 31 Mar 2015 10:03:33 +0000

Conversion+ is a collective device creating itinerant festivals about the bottom-up reuse of abandoned urban landscapes.

Born in Bari, South-Eastern Italy, in 2011, Conversion+ is a non-stop investigation on the possible ways to inquire, represent, share the urge of action on the problem of abandonment. Understanding it as a complex question with deep economical, social and even global reasons that affect the urban dimension, Conversion+ tries to experiment constantly evolving methodologies to collect ideas and transmit them to the technical audience of designers, as well as to the large public of the communities of citizens.

During the first three yearly editions, Conversion+ has been using many tools to approach the problem: short and mid-length festivals; architectural design, photography and videoart workshops; “open source set-up” collective shows; exhibition design and DIY performances; placehacking explorations; locative media participatory mapping; public talks; online photogeotagging contests; innovative funding methods; best practices sharing; strong local relations; national and international networking; all with the aim to stress the boundaries of the expertise that architects and designers are no more bound to. Conversion+, then, is the tale of the complexity of urban landscape abandonment as well as a tool to put under the light the possibilities of shared knowledge about the city.

Friction Atlas

Mattia Spresian — Tue, 31 Mar 2015 09:54:05 +0000

Always implicitly present in any public space, law tends to be algorithmic, quantitative and invisible. Local and national regulations discretise human behaviour; sometimes they are rigorous and mathematical, other times loose and under-defined. Here, they lend themselves to be represented visually, and through staged choreographies. Friction Atlas is an ongoing critical archive, where laws regulating behaviours and gatherings in public spaces, sampled from different contexts, are represented and collected. Addressing the issue of legibility of public space, it aims to make regulations explicit, through graphical devices. By drawing 1:1 diagrams, enacting laws on public surfaces, the project makes legal prescriptions and loopholes debatable. Through the engagement of the public, the dynamics of authority become also physically discernible. The diagrams represent cases from different cities, including Athens, Genoa, Cairo, Washington, Stockholm, Sydney, New York, and Rome. We invite the public to participate in a choreographed debate, in a rereading of urban space, which will highlight some of its hidden aspects.

Friction Atlas was initiated during BIO 50, the 24th Biennial of Design in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

The Character of Bread

Mattia Spresian — Tue, 31 Mar 2015 09:32:48 +0000

The project focuses on the idea that food can act as a mediator for personal connection with a stranger. More specifically the project focuses on the production and consumption of bread, not only as a staple food common among many cultures, but also as a substance that is loaded with spiritual associations in many different religions. Using bread as the material bearer of an intimate message, I devised a new ritual inspired by the Christian Orthodox tradition of “prosforo” bread. The ritual of prosforo-making included the production of the bread by the people and then the symbolic offering to God, within the space of the church. The bread, that then represents the body of Christ, is divided and given to the people during the ritual of communion.

Through the analysis of common religious rituals, I came to the conclusion that every single one of them is made up by three elements, Backstory, Repetition and Exclusivity, which I incorporated into the proposal. The purpose of the new designed ritual is to communicate who made the bread to the consumer. A set of stamps is used while making the bread, imprinting on each bread, a secret 4-digit pin code that is then unlocked online. Using this pin code on the website the person consuming the bread is able to read about the character and story of the maker. In this way, a material link is made between the two people, an exchange of essence, through the very intimate act of consuming the food that someone prepared. The ritual is re-enacted once per week and the person that is consuming the bread can choose to attend a bread making workshop and imprint his own bread, to connect with someone else.