476 research outputs found
Winter strangers, by Isobel Wohl
No full textLila said that she needed to get something out of the way: she had never been with someone in a gimp mask, nor had she ever worn a gimp mask herself. So she was a bit nervous. She was bringing this up now because she wanted to be up front. To be totally honest she did not know the first thing about the masks or Fet or Fetlife or what they called the scene or scenes or the lifestyle or any of it. The man said not to worry about that now.
Winter strangers did not get what they expected. Winter strangers are not in full bloom. They are in the right place at the wrong time or the wrong place at the right time or the wrong place at the wrong time.
The short stories in Winter Strangers examine dynamics of barrenness and thwarted or misrecognised satisfactions. Attempts to give or receive succour founder in the spaces of contemporary alienation where the figures that populate this book contend with the manufacturing and vitiation of their desires. A search for pleasure begins: pleasure at home, online, in work, in the body, in thought and speech, in vision and language. Winter Strangers makes contact with its reader where such pleasures reckon with loneliness and make no compromise.
‘Isobel Wohl’s stories have an unsettling immediacy, charting with a keen eye our coldness and cruelty, our resilience, and small pleasures and tiny perversions. They are like devotions to a strange and wonderful god.’ –> Lauren Elkin
Isobel Wohl is a visual artist and writer. Her work concerns itself with distance, capture, loss, and insufficiency as they manifest in the contact and disjunction between sensory experience and grammatical structures. She lives and works in London, U.K., and Brooklyn, NY, where she grew up
The Turkish Tea Garden: Exploring a 'Third Space' with cultural resonances
No full textThis article examines the history, use, and significance of the Turkish Tea Garden or Cay Bahcesi, positing that these gardens offer unique democratic spaces for public discourse set within the polis. The article unpacks the historical, cultural, and symbolic features of these gardens, and the role these shared spaces play in Turkey’s multivalent civic environment. It employs Ray Oldenburg’s notion of “third space” to consider how these gardens provide inclusive settings for a culturally diverse citizenry. Furthermore, the article considers how these spaces act as repositories of shared memory, mediating conflict that appears in other societal spheres. The gardens are presented as uniquely “sacred” third spaces, distinct from the “profane” third spaces characterized by Oldenburg.Accepted Author ManuscriptSpatial Planning and Strateg
Complex Adaptive Systems & Urban Morphogenesis: Analyzing and designing urban fabric informed by CAS dynamics
No full textThis dissertation builds upon research that considers how cities operate as Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS). It focuses on how certain characteristics of urban form can support an urban environment's capacity to self-organize, enabling emergent features to appear that, while unplanned, remain highly functional. The main thrust of the work is to unpack how elements of the urban fabric might be considered as elements of a complex system and then identify how one might design these elements in a more deliberate manner, such that they hold a greater embedded capacity to respond to changing urban forces. The research is predicated on the notion that, while such responses are both imbricated with, and stewarded by human actors, the specificities of the material characteristics themselves matter. Some forms of material environments hold greater intrinsic physical capacities (or affordances) to enact the kinds of dynamic processes observed in complex systems than others (and can, therefore, be designed with generating these affordances in mind). The Ph.D.'s primary research question is thus:What physical and morphological conditions need to be in place within an urban environment in order for Complex Adaptive Systems dynamics to have an opportunity to arise - such that the physical components (or ‘building blocks') of the urban environment have an enhanced capacity to discover functional configurations in space and time as a response to unfolding contextual conditions?The dissertation is based on a compilation of articles that have, for the most part, been published in academic journals. A+BE | Architecture and the Built Environment No 10 (2018)Spatial Planning and Strateg
Sensing the City: Legibility in the Context of Mediated Spatial Terrains
No full textSmartphones, with their “pervasive presence” in contact with our bodies, have come to act as sensory prosthetics that mediate our experience of the city. They activate new possibilities of navigating the urban, such that we can find exactly what we want, rather than what has been placed before us. This article argues that smartphone technologies produce a more fluid engagement with urban space: where space is not so much “given” as “enacted.” In this context, notions of “legibility” take on new algorithmic and virtual forms. Thus, according to Hamilton and colleagues, where “the legible city waited to be read, the transparent city of data waits to be accessed.” Here, stable features dissolve as urban space becomes increasingly fluid and contingent, no longer limited by static patterns of inhabitation. Instead, how we move and where we move shift in accordance with the kinds of urban resources being activated at any given location, at any given moment, and in conjunction with the shifting vicissitudes of the crowd. In this context, the virtual (in its technological definition of cyber-enabled or -enacted space) mediates and activates the virtual (in its philosophical definition pertaining to the capacities of an entity that may or may not be manifested depending on context). The article considers the implications of this novel spatial mediation using an ontological perspective informed by complex adaptive systems theory, which considers forms and objects not as absolutes but rather as contingent entities activated through interactions.This article is published as Wohl, S., Sensing the City: Legibility in the Context of Medicated Spatial Terrians. Space and Culture. 2018, 22(1); 90-102. Doi: 10.1177/1206331218811571. Posted with permission.</p
Fluid Urbanism: How Information Steered Architecture Might Reshape the Dynamics of Civic Dwelling
No full textThis paper speculates on how new forms of dwelling might be re-conceived as more nimble, flexible components: ones capable of deploying to different sites and atmospheres, while simultaneously providing more broadly distributed access to amenities that otherwise remain limited to the privileged few. Specifically, it examines the notion of a mobile dwelling architecture that could be deployed to various sites across the city - each site being characterized by particular “niche” offerings. Here, rather than dwelling units being considered as static entities within the urban fabric, they are re-considered as nimble, deployable agents - able to relocate to different sites and settings in accordance with different parameters that are customized through individual cost-benefit analyses and feedback dynamics. Accordingly, over time, bottom-up, self-organizing “niches” of fit inhabitation emerge. The paper associates this kind of designed environment with the dynamics of complex adaptive systems - where emergent global features arise from the bottom-up. Here, a kind of “swarm” urbanism is deployed: one adjusting over time in response to atmospheric variables.This article is published as Wohl, S., Revariah, R., Fluid Urbanism: How Information Steered Architecture Might Reshape the Dynamics of Civic Dwelling. The Plan Journal, 2018, 3(2);401-426. Doi: 10.15274/tpj.2018.03.02.8. Posted with permission. </p
From form to process: Re-conceptualizing Lynch in light of complexity theory
No full textNew Urbanism’s disposition towards urban design emphasizes creating places that, in part, derive structure and meaning from ‘imageable’ components. These components resonate with the formal categories articulated by Kevin Lynch. That is to say, New Urbanist projects emphasize defined streets (edges) neighborhood coherence (districts) civic buildings (landmarks) connective public open spaces (nodes) and gridiron street networks (paths). Lynch, however, deemed that such urban features arose from dynamic processes, whereas New Urbanists pre-designate formal features without full consideration of their functional dynamics. In order to better situate this notion of ‘functional dynamics’, this paper argues that urban settings can be considered as examples of complex adaptive systems (CAS). The paper re-purposes Lynch’s formal categories to discuss CAS dynamics in urban settings, with processes rather than forms providing the essential mechanisms with which to achieve the conviviality NU projects aspire to.This article is from Urban Design International (2017), doi:10.1057/s41289-017-0048-6.</p
The Grand Bazaar in Istanbul: The Emergent Unfolding of a Complex Adaptive System
No full textThe Grand Bazaar in Istanbul offers an example of a physical environment containing specific districts that have emerged over time. This paper theorizes that the Grand Bazaar exhibits the characteristics of a Complex Adaptive System. Then, it considers specific urban elements found in the Bazaar, in light of complexity theory, to see how these facilitate processes that lead to the emergence of contiguous districts. This study repurposes Kevin Lynch’s categorization of urban elements to provide a useful framework for discussing complexity theory. This research is further informed by economic analysis derived from Evolutionary Economic Geography, which examines the emergence of business clusters.This is the author’s accepted manuscript of an article from International Journal of Islamic Architecture 4, no. 1 (2015): 39–73, doi:10.1386/ijia.4.1.39_1. Posted with permission.</p
Tactical urbanism as a means of testing relational processes in space: A complex systems perspective
No full text Too often, master planning strategies have failed to produce spaces responding to the social, cultural, and economic needs of their inhabitants. Accordingly, many planners have turned to relational strategies to redefine their practices. These tend toward methodologies that explore relational forces preceding design interventions rather than unfolding by means of design interventions. This article considers an alternative mode of understanding relational processes: one that considers tactical urban strategies theorized through the lens of complexity theory. This article argues that tactical approaches harness relational junctures in situ, effectively exploring relational configurations of cohesive urban environments. A design competition entry provides an illustrative example of this approach: one that channels and choreographs relational urban processes. </jats:p
Self / Love : Issue 8, E.R.O.S.
No full textSally O’Reilly | Daniella Valz Gen | Victor Burgin | Olivier Richon | Joseph Noonan-Ganley | Tim Etchells | Adrian Paci | Philippa Snow | Lara Konrad | Hannah Regel | Naomi Segal | Alice Hattrick | Sophie Calle | Megan Nolan | Alex Cecchetti | Anthony Auerbach | Oisín Byrne | Patrick Coyle | Isobel Wohl | Marine Hugonnier & Michael Newman | Adrian Rifkin | Jessica Worden | Ann-Marie James | Tai Shani | Francesco Pedraglio | Lauren De Sa Naylor
E.R.O.S. is the journal of Eros Press. It is published biannually, and dedicated to the subject of desire. It covers a wide range of fields, drawing together often disparate disciplines under the auspices of each issue's theme. Alongside newly commissioned work, E.R.O.S. contains excerpts, reproductions and reappraisals. Eros Press is a London-based independent publisher of periodicals, books and artists' editions. Our publications are initiated by invitations.
Commissioning Editors:
Sami Jalili
Fabian Lang
Emma Jones
Sharon Kivland
Rebecca Jagoe
Alice Hattric
Transient landscapes: insights on a changing planet
No full textIncludes bibliographical references and index.Landscape-the unique combination of landforms, plants, animals, and weather that compose any natural place-is inherently transient. Each essay in Transient landscapes, Wohl introduces this idea of an ever-shifting, ever-transitioning global landscape, revealing how to see the ubiquity of landscape transience, both that which results through the earth's natural environmental and climatological process and which comes from human intervention.--Provided by publisher
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