Jane's Walk Vienna

On Sunday May 4th I will be guiding a Jane's Walk in Vienna. This post contains some preparatory images I took. Please have a look into the walk's details on the website of Jane's Walks. 

As I just moved to Vienna's 9th district (Alsergrund) I decided to explore the area of the "University Center Althanstraße" encompassing the now vacant Business University buildings, the Institute of Ecology (where I studied, amongst others), as well as the Geology and Pharmacy Institutes.

I am happy about this initiative and am curious to see how we are going to walk, converse and vision about what this whole building complex can turn into in future. 

Meeting point: Sunday, 4th May, 5PM in front of Franz-Josephs Bahnhof.

Click images to enlarge! 

Talk "The Promise of Bicycle Urbanism" @ TEDx Vienna - The City 2.0

I recently gave a talk at the TEDx Vienna City 2.0 event. Running through this process and meeting the inspiring team and other speakers made me learn a lot. Thanks to everybody who supported me in preparing the talk and of course to the whole team at Smarter Than Car! :)

Here is the video.

"The mainstreamed bicycle as a tool for creating future cities is just starting to take-off. Can we imagine a city where the benchmark for successful urban development is how we are able to use pedal-powered vehicles?
The idea of such a bicycle urbanism is what Florian is working on with the Chinese-Austrian NGO Smarter Than Car. He will make you understand why the bicycle is the most effective way to restructure our cities to become fit for future urban challenges.
Florian explains why he believes that the bicycle is still massively under-explored in contemporary urban planning and administration. He shows examples of what we can learn from bicycle cultural exchange with a city like Beijing to re-think our cities along the lines of pop-up urbanism on two or three wheels."

Urban Stories Beijing

I am looking forward to giving a talk in Zürich at ETH DARCH's Chair of Architecture and Urban Design run by Urban-Think Tank, alias Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner. The talk will be part of the Urban Stories lecture series which puts an emphasis on deciphering the underlying "urban plans, instruments, visions, political decisions, economic reasonings, cultural inputs and social organizations" which have produced a certain urban morphology. With this knowledge 'urban operational tools' shall be defined which collectively will form an operational urban toolbox as an "improvised manual to navigate theories".

It is a great opportunity to merge the research were doing in Beijing with Smarter Than Car with new insights into Beijing's urban development and contemporary urban morphology. 

@ Occupy Wall Street

"Though the pirates are extinct, all of our international trade balancing and money ratings, as well as all economic accounting, in both the capitalistic and communistic countries, hold strictly to the rules, value systems, terminology, and concepts established by those Great Pirates. Powerful though many successors to the Great Pirates’ fragmented dominions may be, no one government, religion, or enterprise now holds the world’s physical or metaphysical initiatives." 
R. Buckminster Fuller 'Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth' (1969) chapter 3. Comprehensively Commanded Automation (online at: Buckminster Fuller Institute)

Buy Plastified Body Parts to be Fashionable

Did you ever think about owning a plasticized human being? Or wearing 'horse penis slice earrings'? You can fulfill your wishes now!

[source and copyright]

Products such as these are now offered by 'Plastinarium Guben', a company founded by mister 'Body Worlds', Gunther von Hagens. I read an interview today in an Austrian newspaper in which he stated the potential of these products to be supporting female beauty for example.
I always found sections - through plant or animal tissue - very beautiful and can't help but finding these earrings and other products on the website on one hand extremely intriguing but as well far reaching. Is that what makes an artistic product? The products of Plastinarium are surely something to distinct yourself from others. Im curious where I will run into the first person using a 'bull penis walking stick' (for about 2500 €).

[source and copyright]

Regarding the issue of wheater or not to use animal and human bodies for these purposes: According to von Hagens human bodies are only sold to referenced buyers who use them for educational purposes. At least you know what is in these products and you can see animal/biological beauty and showcase it on your own body. There are numerous items produced with animal ingredients of which you have no idea about so a well referenced, transparent and controversial item is by far better. Moreover, using plastified bull penisses as walking sticks may allow us to start a dialogue about body, beauty, decay, life etc. which may be much deeper than a dialogue arising from wearing a Svarovski crystal on your ear. ;)

 

[source and copyright]

Mika Rottenberg's Squeeze

 Last Saturday Mika Rottenberg's solo show Squeeze opened at Mary Boone gallery. Rottenberg's piece was previously shown at San Francisco SFMOMA and will later travel to Europe (tba).

"Mika Rottenberg’s latest work Squeeze continues the artist’s inquiry into the mechanisms by which value is generated, considering the logistics of global outsourcing and the alchemy of art production. Through movie-magic portals, Rottenberg links video of her Harlem studio stage set to on-location footage of an iceberg lettuce farm in Arizona and a rubber plant in Kerala, India. This composite factory toils ceaselessly to create a single precious object, one small sculpture. The video is presented in a custom-made theater. The sculpture is inaccessible – preserved offshore, out of reach for public or private viewing." [source]

The white cube, viewing machine for the video Squeeze, inside the white shiny space of Mary Boone gallery in Chelsea. Everybody had to squeeze inside the box to watch the ~20mins video. You leave the bright scenery of a representative art opening and walk into a box where is becomes darker with the pace of your steps.

 The inside of the narrow exhibition space mirrors tactile qualities of exchangable office spaces across the globe. Acoustically perfectly tuned airconditioning and generic ceiling materials (asbestos?) comfort your way into the white box to watch the video of the machine which in turn features the same elements (aircon, ceiling, flowerpot). You are not outside the system.

Inside you are anonymous with the other spectators sitting in a box watching another box acting as machine and inevitably become part of what is happening in the video.I don't write too much here. Go and see the show yourself. ;)

The small sculpture, produced by the machine featured in the video, presented by Mary Boone. This image is sold as c-print in life-size.

Detail of the small sculpture. Resin holding together rubber, cosmetics and lettuce as analogies for female survival strategies in a society of capitalised bodies.

 The sculpture could have been a valuable artpiece, produced for a hungry global art market to make and represent money, exhibited around the world and traded among galleries, museums and curators. Rottenberg in turn decided to have it stored "in perpetuity" in the financial offshore hotspot Cayman Islands. Just as so much capital is sitting banked offshore, untaxed and useless for other purposes, Rottenberg's sculpture is locked away from the public and will slowely degrade in a crate inside of a warehouse on Cayman Islands (notice the shipping company 'Tropical Shipping'). Collectors can meanwhile buy shares of the blush-salad-rubber-cube which, just as any piece in the art market, may increase or decrease in value. Buying Rottenberg's art has become a real investment and metaphor of the functioning of the global art market intertwined with global business and industry.

Squirting air condition for a livable home on the outside of the installation.

Power supply. This detail of the installation was very intriguing for me. The power cord runs unhidden through half of the gallery before nurturing the video and providing conditioned air within the tight projection space. At one point during the opening a small boy almost unplugged the power supply for the installation. (Only his mother's courageous intervention could prevent the disaster!) This showed in a nice and coincidential way the fragility of the whole picture and as well the pressing issue of energy security which is so necessary to maintain a system of globalized capitalist production.

Squeeze was shot by Mahyad Tousi, the set built by Quentin Conybeare and spcial effects done by Katrin Altekamp. The aesthetics of the movie's working scenes reminded me of films such as 'Our Daily Bread', 'We Feed the World' or 'Workingmans Death' which, of course, are merely personal analogies. ;) 

 "
Squeeze
heavy mass
magnetic force
friction
a crack
a squeak
twinkling stars
electromagnetic fields
a buzzzzz
tongue flickers
fountain squirts
space expands
pressure applied to Rose's cheeks
Redness extracted
Iceberg Lettuce
Pure Latex Cream
pressure at its max
moist butts
bouncing ponytails
two holes align
ice crackles
temperature declines
space shrinks back to first position
shrinks, back to first position. Ingredients willed in, first layer is laid.” [source]

Electric Mobility in Austria

The Tesla Roadster is the sexy icon of electric mobility.

What is going on in terms of electric mobility in Austria and the CENTROPE region? Several aspects are of interest: initiatives for social integration of e-mobility, technological as well as scientific advances regarding e-mobility, and, policy as well as economic concepts for the advancement and integration of e-mobility .

'Regarding e-mobility, The Mobility House considers first and foremost a modification of human mobility patterns in urban agglomerations as indispensable. The majority of the driven distances are short and can even at this point in time, be easily covered with e-vehicles. As a consecutive step The Mobility House envisions the merging of urban agglomerations and regions as a chance of applying e-mobility supra-regionally.'
from: http://www.mobilityhouse.at/en/electric-mobility/vision.html

'The future belongs to mobility with electric vehicles.' Walther-werke offer a complete kit for charging car and smart grid.

See a video about the future of energy supply in smart grids on the Siemens homepage. A smart grid will be able to balance temporary fluctiations in the availability of renewable energy supply. Smart grids will be an important future infrastructure to allow a diverse and renewable energy generation to power our society in a clean way.

Mobility is more if you are moving with less, like a scooter or a bike, due to lower entropy factors. e-scooters or e-bikes for long distances or rainy and lazy days.

Yet, I still don't see so many e-scooters on the street in vienna.
So get your supplies for example at: scooterman.at webshop

btw., in china e-scooters sales are soaring.



And e-bikes in Vienna:
As resident of vienna you can get 30% (max of 300€) back from the cities subsidy. 'Antragsformular für mein Elektrofahrrad'

Image showing Viennas city counselor Ulli Sima on a tesla-like electric bike. :)

E-mobility in Graz: The Magna 'BionX' is frequently represented in Austria. Magnas BionX motor is a future bestseller of this company.
photo: Stadt Graz / Foto Fischer

Nonwithstanding, walking and biking - mechanical forms of mobility (m-mobility) - are still the most efficient in keeping our environments alive.

LiJiang, Yunnan, China