Posts Tagged ‘design’

Materialisierte Zeitlichkeiten. Hasten & Rasten, Shoppen & Rumhängen.

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

Noch eine Vortragsankündigung: im Rahmen des dieses Jahr in Frankfurt am Main stattfindenden 35. Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie werde ich in der Ad-hoc Gruppe Transitarchitekturen einige Ergebnisse meiner Studie zu Bahnhöfen und Fährterminals präsentieren. Der Rahmen passt hervorragend, da die Ad-hoc Gruppe an die architektursoziologische Arbeitsgruppe der DGS angeschlossen ist. Hier das von mir eingesandte Abstract für den Vortrag:

In Transitarchitekturen kreuzen sich die Bahnen einer Vielzahl unterschiedlicher Bewegungen. Einige ziehen sich durch diesen Ortstypus hindurch, wie der Transport von Personen und Dingen von einem Ort zum nächsten. Andere beginnen oder enden an diesem Ort, wie das mit dem Partner verbrachte Wochenende der Berufspendlerin. Wieder andere Bewegungen spielen sich an diesem Ort selbst ab, wie Bahnen des Reinigungsmobils über die polierten Böden oder wie das überwachte Auf und Ab der hier im Wortsinne Marginalisierten. All diese verschiedenen Bewegungen sind in unterschiedlicher Weise an die gebaute Räumlichkeit dieser Orte gebunden. In dieser materiell-körperlichen Gebundenheit – genau wie in der nicht davon zu trennenden ästhetisch-symbolischen Gegenwart – laufen diese unterschiedlichen Bewegungen aber keinesfalls unabhängig voneinander ab, jede in ihrer eigenen neutralen Sphäre, zugehörig zu einem je anderen, sich selbst reproduzierenden Bedeutungsgefüge. Das Gegenteil ist der Fall. In Transitarchitekturen treffen diese Bewegungen aufeinander, sie stoßen zusammen, prallen aneinander ab, stören sich und bringen sich gegenseitig in andere, manchmal unerwartete Bahnen.
In dieser Präsentation wird anhand von Videomaterial gezeigt, wie unterschiedliche Bewegungsmuster aufeinander treffen und wie – auf subtile oder auch offensichtliche Weise – ihre Hierarchie ausgehandelt wird. Anhand eines Vergleichs der Transitarchitekturen von Fährterminals und Bahnhöfen in Deutschland und Skandinavien wird darüber hinaus deutlich gemacht, wie unterschiedliche Transitformen unterschiedliche Zeitregimes hervorbringen, die sich durch eine jeweils spezifische Materialität und Symbolhaftigkeit auszeichnen. Darüber hinaus wird auch der Frage nachgegangen, welche Rolle lokale Eigenheiten und/oder nationale Einbettungen im jeweiligen Geschehen spielen und inwieweit diese sich über architektonisch-körperliche und/oder kulturell-performative Prozesse konstituieren.

A single man – A day of drift.

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

Thanks to Lars M.’s special sponsoring, I was recently able to go to the movies in spite of a really tight budget. (I was even able to get some nice treats for consumption during the show!) We chose to see A single man because I really like Colin Firth, who was nominated for an Oscar for this role. The rest of the setting sounded nice too: a single day in the life of a man, stylish early sixties design, a movie that takes its time. All of these promises were kept and I was not disappointed. The work on the colors (desaturated for the moments when Colin Firth was doubtful if the world was actually still worth living in, strongly saturated in moments of aesthetic and emotional fulfillment) might be a bit too obvious, but not too a degree that would make me uncomfortable. The worst thing that I can say about this movie is that I somehow found myself – though sympathetic to the protagonist’s pain – not really moved or emotionally involved. I kept a distance. In a way, the distance might be similar to the distance that the protagonist had to the world around him, to life that had lost its deeper meaning… but I would be surprised if achieving such an effect was intended.
IMDb entry | Trailer

Simultaneous publication.

Wednesday, April 19th, 2006

Welcome to the world of parallel publication. These days our new book is being printed and sent out to distributors. You can read many things on Negotiating Urban Conflicts : Interaction, Space and Control. Thanks to transcript Verlag – I am really looking forward to having the thing in my hands. You should too: go to your library and tell them to order it (or buy it yourself if your account allows spending about thirty Euros for a book you might not desperately need…)
At the same time, the website that accompanies my article goes online. Since it was not possible / too expensive to put a CD or DVD into the book I had to rely on other means to make the video and sound sequences that I analyze in the article accessible. I’m excited about this parallel publication in two media and we’ll see how it works out. The major backdraw is that I can’t publish the whole article online, since Transcript wants to sell the book. Too bad. I did not invest much time into the negotiation, but I will try to improve how this is negotiated with future publications. However, I fear this will be difficult, especially since I do not have the status of a Bruno Latour, who publishes most of his printed work online too. Kudos for being an example, M. Latour!
Regarding the multimedia content on the new website: it is possible to embed multimedia objects in a way that makes them display in most browsers. Usually, that would mean breaking web standards. It is also possible to use a trick or two to keep to standards and still display the content in most browsers. This was the way I chose for several years. But my patience has run dry and now I am using straightforward, standard-compliant code with neither tricks nor bells and whistles. The result is that Internet Explorer for Windows is not really doing very well with the page – surprise, surprise. The solution? Browse Happy.

Feines Design.

Thursday, February 16th, 2006

Christine Kitta, die bereits die Webseiten von Florian und Herbert Schui gestaltet hat und auch einen Teil des Designs für die Konferenz Technisierung / Ästhetisierung unseres Graduiertenkollegs übernommen hat, stellt nun auch ihre eigenen Seiten ins Netz. Wer also Gestaltungsaufgaben oder Illustrationen für Gedrucktes oder das Internet braucht werfe doch mal einen Blick auf Tinis Website: www.christinekitta.de.

Design by Christine Kitta #2.

Friday, November 4th, 2005

Florian Schui is the second member of the Schui family for whom Christine Kitta has provided pleasant web design. You can check out his site, including cv, list of publications and so forth under the address http://www.florian-schui.de. I am looking forward to visiting Florian in his new home in Ireland… (Perhaps Tini should add a few leprechauns to the design in an easter egg fashion – hover over Florian’s face and a funky leprechaun pops up.)

Abstract for Negotiating Urban Conflicts.

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005

The following text summarizes what I currently think I will talk about in the upcoming conference Negotiating Urban Conflicts this April. If this sounds interesting to you – take a look at the even more exciting multitude of other talks held by people from far away places like Singapore, Nigeria, India, Russia and other countries from around the globe! And come to attend. This is it:

Conflicts take place in concrete environments. This talk will explore some of the subtle processes that channel conflicts into specific paths. Where these paths are leading to and what might happen while following them is influenced by certain spatial relations and by the materiality of urban places. The placement of things, the way visibility is established or barred, the closing or accessibility of areas, the marking of territorial boundaries – all of these aspects of built space participate in the production of human action in the city. Drawing on ethnographies of the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, of railway stations, and of passenger terminals in harbors, this talk will focus on the processes through which normalities are produced by tangible socio-spatial constellations. These places are centrally located and of a high symbolic and economic importance; the strategic socio-spatial constellations channeling human action in these places will be exposed in this talk.

Conference getting closer.

Thursday, January 20th, 2005

Today, Sergej has finished the website for our upcoming conference Negotiating Urban Conflicts. The conference will take place in Darmstadt, April 7th-9th. Yours truly will talk about Pacification by Design: An Ethnography of Normalization Techniques.

(Yes, the html has been generated by Dreamweaver and there are lots of ugly font tags – if I find some spare time, we’ll see if we can fix this.)

Improved layout.

Wednesday, October 29th, 2003

That was a surprisingly easy solution: On the Post-Graduate College’s homepage that I coded one sometimes had more than one scrollbar to navigate the contents of a page – which was pretty confusing. After setting up the page and doing the initial corrections and adaptations I was not especially eager to do even more work on this page so this issue has been lingering for some time. But not anymore! It was an easy fix, I just had to change the overflow attribute of the div elements that I was using to format the layout: I had set them to auto, putting trust into the browser’s abilities to do the right thing; now I changed it to visible and the additional scrollbars disappeared.