February 3

Last Action Hero: Coast to Coast, Real to Unreal

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(By Nicola Bozzi)

After last week’s post about Demolition Man (1993) and the city of Los Angeles, today I’m writing about another action flick dealing with urban imagery, also come out the same year: Last Action Hero. Both movies are cop-tales, reterritorializing a way of dealing with crime and justice from one world to another. In Stallone’s sci-fi exploit the change happens in time, while in the more sophisticated – and also more tongue-in-cheek – film starring future governor Arnold Schwarzenegger the jump is twofold: from reality to fiction and, quite significantly, from New York to Los Angeles. Before we go further about the retorritorialization I mentioned before, a short introduction to the movie’s plot is necessary.

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January 27

Demolition Man: to Destroy LA is to Build LA

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(By Nicola Bozzi)


Due to a mostly comedy-oriented film education as a kid, I had missed Marco Brambilla’s action-classic Demolition Man (1993) back when I had the chance to catch it in its box-office semi-freshness (17 years ago it took a while before a movie passed from the movie theater to the TV screen). I have recently made up for this lack, and while the roughly-cut screenplay, the flat characters, and the unlikely fighting choreographies might have amused me much more when I was 10 years old, I have to be thankful I could enjoy a first impact with the movie after reading Mike Davis‘ City of Quartz and watching a couple of documentaries about the riots that shook Los Angeles in the 90s. In the analysis that follows, this article here has also been a big inspiration in terms of the movie’s relationship with Hollywood and LA’s urban and social landscape. Read more

January 6

hometta.com

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(Text by Nicola Bozzi)

In his Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, Antonio Sant’Elia despised all architecture that wasn’t built for the people inhabiting it. Decades later, the Archigram group was designing computer-inspired visions of modular living units, focusing on human scale living spaces and the use of technology to make the best of urban living. Designing and building your own home is still too hard to do on your own, but while we wait for a technology that will allow everybody – regardless or design or architectural education – to build their own place like Lego, we can still get somebody to help us in the process of choosing and building our shelters. Today, if you are looking for both relatively-customized design and tailored assistance, as well as a relatively simple interface, you can turn to the Hometta guys. Read more

December 23

Panic Attack! Is sci-fi going global?

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(Text by Nicola Bozzi)

As you might have read somewhere (like here, here or here), Uruguayan filmmaker Fede Alvarez has just signed a deal with Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures for a future feature sci-fi movie. Raimi was impressed by a short clip Alvarez created and posted on YouTube (see video above), immediately becoming a hit on the video-sharing platform. AtaqueDePànico shows some giant robots attacking the city of Montevideo and destroying all its landmarks, eventually exploding and reducing everything to rubble in a surprisingly good FX spree.

Little else happens in the short movie, which has nonetheless been compared to Neill Blomkamp’s Alive in Joberg, the one that eventually led to District 9. Which one is better and YouTube’s exact role in hi-jacking the attention of the Hollywood industry’s talent scouts are debates I’ll leave for other occasions. What I’m really curious about is: where will Alvarez’s feature film be set?
As we’ve seen before, Peter Jackson’s support to District 9 has been rather invisible and not patronizing, allowing Blomkamp’s movie to become an unprecedented example of sci-fi imagery going global and enriching itself with unexpected locations and social actuality. Seeing Johannesburg taking the place of New York as the theater of human-alien confrontation was one of the reasons why I think the movie is significant: it was also an opportunity to legitimate the ascension of local geographies to the status of global imagery. Read more

December 8

Electrosmog Festival – International Festival for Sustainable Immobility

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(Text by Nicola Bozzi)


While browsing Facebook on an iPhone or working via wireless on a train, we tend to forget all those electromagnetic fields and aerial data we exchange compulsively each and every day are a physical matter and not just a platonic projection of our cognitive babble.* Given that we’re all more or less dependent on this stuff, some don’t think it’s necessarily making our life the best possible, and definitely not healthier. This is the premise to the Electrosmog Festival, to take place in Amsterdam (and in many other places) on next March. Read more

December 7

Urban Screens @ Trouw, Amsterdam

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(Text by Nicola Bozzi, photos by Marta Colpani)

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As more and more cities in the world install huge digital billboards to get their share of the Times Square appeal, scholars and practitioners from both the new media and architecture fields are trying to make sense of these new elements of our public spaces. That’s the case of the Urban Screens Event, which just took place in Amsterdam at Trouw, under the INC (Institute of Network Cultures) banner. Along with a series of talks and presentations with speakers ranging from architects, designers and artists to scholars, the event included a couple of interactive installations by the students of MediaLab Amsterdam and the presentation of the Urban Screens Reader. The book features themed essays by international theorists, among which Saskia Sassen and Andreas Broeckmann. Read more

November 25

District 9 and the Dystopian Present

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(Text by Nicola Bozzi)

Before actually going to the movies to watch it, you hardly notice District 9 is not a Peter Jackson movie. His name is so boldly sported on the flyer you are easily tricked into thinking the maker of the Tolkien trilogy movies and former gore enthusiast must have moved over to another genre, this time tackling sci-fi with his signature close-ups, ever-moving camera, and post-King Kong FX spree. But the movie is no silly adult fairytale, nor an epic fantasy horseride across the green meadows of New Zealand. And, more importantly, it’s no sci-fi cliché either. At his first big shot, South-African director Neill Blomkamp (who had only made shorts before, including a prelude to the movie you can actually see below) has achieved something that – like many of his padrino’s early works – will probably go down as a cult, if not a masterpiece. Read more

November 18

From yskira.com to ymag.it

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One year ago we launched the first issue of The Skira Yearbook of World Architecture. It was a unique editorial and cultural initiative which, I think, suffered for the unlucky economical and historical moment it was released.
In the same days we timidly started the YSkira blog, to support the Yearbook publication and, at the same time, to create an online tool giving us new opportunities for research, international networking, and critical confrontation with the most active and experimental blogs.

In the following months – and under the pressure of the devastating effects of the economical slump – the paper project was progressively brought to a halt, while the blog gained more and more energy and connections. It was probably the future smartly pushing the past away, but maybe it’s too early to tell.

Anyway, our blog has recently become one-year-old and and it’s been growing together with us. We want it to be an open, transversal, strongly critical and receptive medium, able to short-circuit architecture, design, interior, photography, arts and contemporary critique. Along with its first birthday comes the first little graphical and conceptual restyling, along with a new autonomy.

Today yskira.com becomes ymag.it, a platform with a wider scope and a more radical and critical grasp on architecture and design.

We think these disciplines are going through a difficult period, for what concerns both contents and means, and that most of the research and experimental results we come cross are still waiting for a proper reading. Our society is expressing wishes and formulating questions that these creative fields are hardly able to answer. Maybe we’re living the dawn of a new era we can hardly even perceive. Probably a medium like the blog – with its essential freedom of content and cooperative spirit – is one of the realest and most interesting answers to our times.

Y Magazine is born to be curious, critical, and relentless, and we’d like you to help us make it even more radical and perceptive of the most compelling issues around built environments and living tools. In the future, in order to respect both Yearbook’s original selective attitude and the cosmopolitan and collaborative spirit of the blog medium, we would like to involve our readers more directly – through surveys and polls, for example – and have you share your opinions and projects even more. Let’s find out together what the most challenging projects and ideas in our future are.

In occasion of ymag.it’s launch, I’d like to thank all the people who have cooperated with us (like Ilaria Mazzoleni and Ethel Barona Pohl), contributing with their valuable content and personal research in making yskira.com a sharper tool, plus all the readers and bloggers who have been using our website daily or linked it in their homepages or bookmarks. Thanks are also due to Angelica Di Virgilio and Simona Galateo, and in particular I thank Nicola Bozzi and Milena Sacchi for managing, supervising and coordinating this project since the beginning, with passion and dedication.

Luca Molinari

July 1

Interview to Bestiario.org (part 2)

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As promised, here’s the second part of our interview to bestiario.org. These last questions touch the very sensible subject of geospatial web, one of the emerging technologies that are already changing (and are likely to change more) internet use for everybody.

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What do you think is the correct balance between direct information and an imaginative visualization? Do you consider your work as closer to visual research, like generative art, or to conveying customized, intuitive information modeled on the reading user?
Different projects deserve different approaches. But there are two things we don´t want to create: aesthetic experiences that barely communicates an idea and analytic and cryptical tools that give computed answers. We believe in the power of human brain – and not only on its rational capacities – to understand and create. Our spaces should facilitate the brain’s hard work giving it information and several ways to navigate it, display it and combine it. We strongly believe in intuition. Our spaces might give and experience to perception, analysis and intuition. Generative art is usually devoted to results instead of giving understanding of the processes. That´s why, although if we use some generative arts techniques, we are more close to “conveying customized, intuitive information modeled on the reading user”. Read more

June 30

Interview to Bestiario.org (part 1)

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As you readers probably remember we’ve dealt with bestiario.org and their dynamic data visualization interfaces before. Here’s an interview with Bestiario’s Santiago Ortiz, who answered a few questions dealing with the group’s activities and future projects, plus new tendencies and perspectives for internet use. It’s a pretty long read, so I split it in two. Enjoy.

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When and why did you realize you wanted to work with graphic data visualization?
I began playing with code very early, when I was 12 years old. I used to play with random numbers, or sinusoidal functions to create interesting patterns. Then I discovered complexity: fractals, cellular automata, chaotic functions, which generates much more interesting shapes and dynamics. Finally, as a natural step that increases complexity, I discovered the possibility of working with external data. My first serious project on data visualization was GNOM (2005), based on genetic data. With Bestiario we have developed a powerful framework based on graph theory, topological algorithms, physic models, geometrical and geographical representations…

What kind of clients do you usually have?
One of the most interesting things of this work is the wide diversity of persons and institutions than can require information spaces (and also the aims of the projects). Although the main kind of clients are cultural institutions this pattern is changing and we begin to work more with big companies. Among our clients there are cultural institutions, communication enterprises, big companies, research departments (university and enterprises), advertising agencies, museums, educational institutions. Read more

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