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Wednesday, November 3, 2010
High-end-Kinko's-xerox-ine Junk Jet's latest issue, the statistics-of-mystics-issue, is now available to order via PayPal. And yes, it comes with a magic mask, which unfortunately has come too late for this year's Halloween.
Editors Mona Mahall and Asli Serbest write:
Junk Jet n°4 was combing through studios, laboratories, and garages to find those works and theories that make 1 become 2, 2 become 3, 3 …, works that make something out of nothing or nothing out of something, that discover new – even if microscaled – galaxies, that believe in alchemy and maintain a certain kind of apocalyptic thought; works that move from mumbo-jumbo to real magic and back.
Junk Jet daydreamt of alga plantations, cristal architectures, optical jamboree, synthetic foam buildings, multimagic rainbow colorings, of all that has the potential to question contemporary design and architecture and its statistical rationality. Junk Jet daydreamt of alga plantations, crystal architectures, optical jamboree, synthetic foam buildings, multimagic rainbow colorings, of all that has the potential to question contemporary design and architecture and its statistical rationality. Junk Jet nightdreamt of something that has the potential to fluidize what has become monumental, of something that speculates on speculation. Something that is able to create an alternative universe, in which thrilling transformation, mystic metamorphosis, and insane invention build up a modern wunderkammer, a visionary show window and a living laboratory. It asked for contributions from those who turn the everyday into the unique and the ordinary into the xxxxxxtra-ordaniary.
Contributors include Enrique Ramirez (a456), Jimmy Stamp (Life Without Buildings), Sam Jacobs (Strange Harvest) and Kazys Varnelis.
We also have piece inside as well, basically a reprint of our proposal for a wayfinding infrastructure of networked cyborg fauna, but without the images and the link to YouTube video showing Snow White as a sonic fauna-magnet. Luckily we were paired with Alex McCleod's cristal towers.
Note that 888 copies were printed, so get yours as soon as possible.
Flux-us! Flux-you! Flux-me!
Monday, February 8, 2010
The fabulous Junk Jet has just released their third issue, and it sounds amazing. They asked for:
Fluxing architectures, boogie, buildings, rolling rocks, flying architectures, provisory pyramids, and temporary eternities; for all kinds of practical concepts and conceptual practices, for stable happenings and unstable thoughts, for lifted cellars and dug in landmarks, for curtains, mobiles, house boats, bubbles, zeppelins, flying saucers.
And they got:
Fantastic forms of material, immaterial, physical and mental flux. Not only were immovables made movable, but also were put forth moving ideas of aesthetic, social, and political concern. We recognize that it is in microarchitectures, where architecture resides today, that speculations cannot be hilarious enough, and that the post-digital is the era we already live in.
We're thrilled that one of the contributors is David L. Hays. His piece will give an update on his investigations into thermally-responsive, dynamic structural systems, a research project which he had begun for his 2001 thesis work, Sentient Architecture, and then continued during an academic career predominantly occupied with landscape history and theory.
“As a practice of design in which boundaries between art and technology are fully dissolved and in which form is both motivated and modified by shifting conditions of environment,” Hays wrote in his project statement, “sentient architecture conflates concepts of structure and environment that have hitherto been at odds, thereby allowing architecture and landscape to be theorized as a single discipline.“
It is exactly what Junk Jet was looking for.
Meanwhile, we were asked to submit a piece to the issue, but unfortunately we found ourselves in several kinds of fluxes and couldn't get around to it. Sorry Junk Jet!
Our contribution was to have been a mixed bag of resampled posts, such as our proposals for an Aurora Bibliothèque; a Versailles hydrologically rendered to terrorize coastal cities; mass producing the Netherlands' Shanghai Expo pavilion as an Archigramic infrastructure for the nomadic population along the Eastern seaboard; the related supersurface of architectural diaspora; a performance art in which Maurizio Cattelan choreographs a modern reenaction of the moving of the Vatican Obelisks through the streets of Rome but this time involving four parade balloons in the exact shape and dimensions as the minarets of Hagia Sophia; and The Army Corps of Engineers: The Game.
Only a few hundred copies are printed per issue, so act fast to get yours.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
No one wants to think about shit and the act of shitting. When we go, we want it out of sight and out mind as fast as we can quickly flush, for to linger longer than is socially acceptable could be a sign of an atavistic pathology. However, should an alien happen to drop by and see how much energy, time and resources we spend just on our sewers, it might think we are absolutely obsessed with our excrement. It would be right, of course.
We propose, then, a zine about this all too important biological process. Provisionally titled BUTT, it will collect any and all investigations into the myriad ways scatology is spatialized. Many will keep on regurgitating promotional materials like those automatically archived on dezeen but not BUTT. Everyone will talk about Daniel Libeskind but not BUTT. It's the contrarian preposition.
Coverage, then, will likely include ancient Roman sewers, Victorian public loos, modern pay toilets, the zero gravity toilet of the International Space Station, boutique pissoirs, big event porta-potties, battlefield latrines, methane farms, Appalachian heritage outhouses, Mexican sewer divers, and public transportation powered by poo.
Any proposal that sets out to rethink urban sewer systems, regardless of quality, will always be a featured content, and realized projects that address the sanitation needs of the other 90% will be automatically accepted for publication.
Published as well would be field reports from guided tours of municipal wastewater treatment plants, for instance, the world's largest located right on the periphery of Chicago, and also from illegal urban explorations of subterranean drainscapes.
A lucky freelancer would be sent off to Dubai to see if the beaches around the fourty-three-star Burj Al Arab hotel are still noxious with illegally dumped human waste. He'll probably write that it's actually clean but only because there aren't much sewage around to be spilt, as everyone has left. If the miniscule budget allows, another freelancer would be assigned to get an update on Zimbabwe's cholera epidemic and the Gaza Sewage Flood of 2007.
Interspersed throughout each issue would be engineering illustrations of sewer tunnels that immediately call to mind certain anatomical drawings by Jean-Jacques Lequeu.
How about self-portraits, preferably of architecture students, taken inside the bathrooms of post-Bilbao museums?
Shit. From Every Angle.
It'll be the infrastructural porn rag for the hipster design crowd, always mistakenly shelved in the fetish section, along with the German scheiße bestsellers, of your nearest independent bookstore.
Slice
