I'm thinking about conversation I had yesterday, but yesterday's conversation bleeds into the conversation of the day before with Francesco Vitelli about ornamentation of Melbourne Buildings - Art Deco & Art Nouveau and Francesco's idea about the grid, a kind of imposition on the city in which a clear demarcation was made between white settlement & that of indigenous Australians. We agreed after much thought and energetic discussion that indeed buildings reflect in many ways the social, racial, political, economic state of the human body and why would it be other than that, doesn't all art in some way reflect the body? I offered that Art Nouveau, with its curvilinear shapes & illusions to Darwin's theories of evolution and fecundity, in fact represent the female body, reproduction, sexuality. But what of those buildings, more Art Deco - minimal, geometric, did they represent the masculine - order - rationality, can we anymore think in these terms? Does not the new buildings - Federation Square (bounded by Birrarung Marr - 'mirror of mists') and those buildings that exemplify sustainability, such as the new Economics and Commerce building at Melbourne University and the Melbourne City Council CH2 building which bring both nature 'the organic world' and culture/technology together in a hybrid form best resemble the human body now in it's hybridity, an erasure of gender, a merging of the 'other', a bringing of the outside inside? I noted, as we walked and talked that there appears to be an obsession when box-like buildings are constructed the outside surface is embellished with staggered, pure primary colors (red, yellow, blue) used by Mondrian, as though they cannot think to do anything else. But my mind wanders to the myriad of buildings that line St.Kilda Road, huge glass structures that reflect the world back to you as you look quietly through in the passing tram. If these building also represent the body, what do they say? Is everything moving, transmogrifing surface? I directed Francesco to my article entitled: Human By Design: GATTACA, published in Australian Screen Education/Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM), Australia, Issue 46, 2007. In the article I argue that Art Nouveau and Art Deco design elements are deployed in the bioethical film GATTACA (Andrew Niccol, 1997) to frame it within the era of the eugenics movement. These designs, which refer to the organic world or an abstraction of it, draw the viewer into thinking about human evolution and to the role that contemporary biomedicine plays in the redesign of genetic information.
Francesco Vitelli is a freelance Architect undertaking a PhD in History & Architecture at The University of Melbourne (where he currently tutors) he may be contacted at: vitellif@unimelb.edu.au
Hi,
ReplyDeletelooks like an interesting and informative blog. I hope you don't mind me joining in.
I'm currently doing Masters in Internet Studies, and am putting together a 'work team' for next year when my PhD options are open. I'm really into how far we can push our bodily technologies. Its not really AI, because the A is only to get peoples attention.
Have you read Diaspora by Greg Egan. Right on the money for me. Maybe for you too.
Thank you, I hope that you continue to find it interesting and you are welcome to join in and make comments. Where are you doing Internet Studies? I haven't read Diaspora, however my friend Francesco may have read it. He is an architect, doing his PhD in architecture at the University of Melbourne. Perhaps you could explain how it is relevant to this discussion, I would be interested.
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