crime
Traced in the summer skies
Yes, it was the hour when, a long time ago, I was perfectly content. What awaited me back then was always a night of easy, dreamless sleep. And yet something had changed, since it was back to my cell that I went to wait for the next day…as if familiar paths traced in summer skies could lead as easily to prison as to the sleep of the innocent.
Putting the streets to use
Tad Friend writes, if you build “nine hundred miles of sinuous highway and twenty-one thousand miles of tangled surface streets” in one city alone, then you’re going to find at least a few people who want to put those streets to use. This suggests that every city blooms with the kinds of crime most appropriate to its form.
Every heist is a counterdesign
Heists obsess people because of what they reveal about architecture’s peculiar power: the design of new ways of moving through the world. Every heist is thus just a counterdesign—a response to the original architect.
To commune with the space
...having realized long ago that the best way to commune with an architectural space was by breaking into it.
Bandits
A FilmA Burglar's Guide to the City
A Book by Geoff ManaughAuthorisation vs. Consent
An Article by Terence EdenI recently read this interesting, and distressing, story of a man who was drugged and robbed. A form of crime which has been going on for centuries. But the 21st Century twist is that the thieves forced him to transfer large sums of money via his phone's banking apps.
While under the influence, the victim used his usernames, passwords, PINs, and biometrics to send money to the criminal's accounts.
Is there a "technological" way to stop this? His banks initially refused to refund the stolen money. Only once the press stepped in did they relent. One bank, Revolut, said:
This was an unusual case where the payments were authorised by the customer but, as is now clear, without his consent.
Picking locks with audio technology
An ArticleThe series of audible, metallic clicks made as a key penetrates a lock can now be deciphered by signal processing software to reveal the precise shape of the sequence of ridges on the key's shaft. Knowing this, a working copy of it can then be 3D printed.
Phenomenal: Exhibited Works
Untitled (Light Canvas)
A key transitional work for Wheeler is his untitled "light canvas" from 1965. The canvas was primed white, then over-sprayed..., but with no emblems or polished elements. The contrast in the light canvas is provided not by any imagery within the painting but by back-lighting; the canvas is backlit with neon light, which is embedded in a reverse bevel Plexiglass frame that projects the piece about five inches from the wall. The effect suggests an eclipse, or some other spectral occlusion of a bright light source.
Eindhoven
Stuck Red
Zero Mass
On an autumn night in 2009, I experienced a version of this piece installed in a stone barn in rural France. The evening was moonless and cold; I stood with two friends inside the piece for the better part of an hour, as our eyes adjusted to almost total darkness, before any of us could begin to see one another. It was the definition of a liminal, or barely perceptible, experience. Eric Orr, who died in 1998, was involved with Zen Buddhism and considered these pieces to be spaces for meditation. Experiencing them as intended requires the visitor to focus quietly on the mechanics of their own perception.
Little Blank Riding Hood
As a student at Chouinard, Larry Bell also started as a painter. His early canvases features simple shapes rendered in gestural strokes...From there he started eliminating the texture of the strokes, applying opaque color (thin Liquitex paint) to unprimed canvas, masking off shapes to create straight-edged parallelograms. An example of these works is Little Blank Riding Hood, whose top left and bottom right corners are clipped, suggesting an isometric projection of a three-dimensional form.
Afrum
Untitled (White Light Grid Series-H)
The entire box is suspended from the ceiling by only four evenly spaced monofilaments, so that it seems to float with no physical connection to the wall or to a power source. Behind the wall (which must be purpose-built and is quite thin) is a cabinet containing four Tesla coils. The coils emit a high-frequency energy that passes through the wall and lights the tubes. The energy pulses a bit, making the tubes flicker at times both vertically and horizontally. The Tesla coils make a crackling static sound that is mostly muffled by the barrier wall, while the neon tubes emit a low hum that is audible close to the work. The work is elegant and slightly menacing, evoking something of a mad scientist's experiment.
Five Paintings IV
One of the most extraordinary examples of McCracken's illusory surfaces occurs with Five Paintings IV, 1974. This wall-mounted work has a black polyester resin finish. From some angles the surface is opaque, from others highly reflective, and from still others it seems to reveal great depth. A happy accident in the creation of the work sealed many tiny air bubbles or particulates in the piece. When these catch the light, they suggest a galaxy of stars on a moonless night.
The Iceberg and Its Shadow