text:
Tafterjournal n. 73 - luglio 2014
VOICES: an urban map of sentiment
di Ilaria Bollati
Parole chiave: cities, interaction design, milan, multimedia installation, urban spaces
"The feeling Milan gives me? I close my eyes and think that the word Milano is masculine. The word city is feminine. So maybe it's a hermaphrodite feeling." (Alessandro Mendini – architect (1) )
As the pencil does with its graphite, can words, dipped in feelings, draw? Can they leave a visible mark, overlapping to the conventional representations of a city?
Talking about cities, from their planning to their living, means activating fields of dialogue with more and more heterogeneous connotations. It means being able to face, handle and argue not only themes with architectural features, concerning infrastructures, services and buildings, rather it presumes to involve human dimensions, somehow ephemeral, barely related to pure spatial and traditional paradigms. It means to interface with a complex system, with emerging qualities, which cannot be reduced to a merely static comprehension (Giorgia Lupi, 2013). It is the dynamic human grids, the multiplicity of the involved social interactions, information, people and emotions that, in an intense and shimmering exchange or game with the surrounding architecture, draft the tangible urban morphology.
The "Urban fact", as defined by Aldo Rossi at the end of seventies, becomes matter of the man. The architect itself puts the focus back to people, places where they live and their needs, detaching himself from the risk of a superficial demiurgic choice, which follows purely artistic paths and methods. The attention is gradually shifted, from the single space and time to the procedural aspect of living the public city. In our time, shared conditions, leading to new hopes and project's possibilities, are recreated. Fertile collective inheritances are collected. Possible futures are identified.
A question is still open. Data, here described and involved, are complex, various and multi-sensorial. How could we make them available and usable in portions of knowledge and significant urban stories? The city is a multifaceted and multidimensional organism. It is the result of the interaction among several specific contexts. It does not open to simple comprehensions but it develops in different shades, levels and behaviours.
In his Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino writes: "I could tell you how many steps there are in the stair-like streets and the degrees of the portico arches, what zinc scales cover the roofs, but I know this would be like telling you nothing. This is not what the city is made of, it is made of the relationships between the dimensions of its space and the events of its past".
Resizing the matter to the reality of Milan, VOICES suggests an answer or an approach to the issue, revealing as the fresco of a city's map, painted and dotted by comments of people who live it. In a moment of great frenzy, like the 'Fuorisalone' (April 2014) 2, characterized by rapid movement and new products' presentation, the multimedia installation, designed by Domus and Studio Azzurro, diverts the traditional mechanism. It takes a step backward. Before talking, it listens. It gathers together, crosses and hands down stories and emotions of those who, for some reason, live Milan. It establishes a dialogue with the audience. It conceives the event as something that, by virtue of the modalities of contents presentation, puts in contact, for specific aims, people with other people or with things, converging them to a certain and determined place. It is conceived as an element that gives value to the territory itself.
It is part of a public manifestation, of which sometimes media intensify the aesthetic, frivolous and fashionable aspect, spreading a too simplified and commercial imagine of a phenomenon which, in reality, is deeper and more articulate. The rational discipline of design was born tending towards the optimization of the production, where process and product, repeatable endlessly on industrial scale, were completely detached from place and context. Now, in the contemporary landscape, facing globalization's dynamics and dematerialization of goods, with the local emergency and its need of 'distinction', we should think of the territorial dimension, not as a field of application but as a project's opportunity and responsibility (Eleonora Lupo, 2007).
Ideation of the fresco of a city's map
It sounds out the urban space with specific aims. It makes tangible and presumable, or better that can be represented, the ephemeral dimension of this new plural urban mosaic. It involves more than fifty architects, designers, artists, stylists, students, enlightened businessmen, artisans, start-upper… It raises diverse questions to people variously linked to the art-architectural world, it addresses to well-known or common voices. It starts a dialogue and encourages the self-telling and share of their own urban experiences. It allows to participate and absorb an original proliferation of climates and feelings, thoughts and opinions, connected to places, cities and its services.
It generates 'live' information, often more important and immediately useful than a centralised and scientifically gathered one. It brings to life the knowledge of the community, through people who, once put in contact with one another, may be able to mobilise the sharing and wider appreciation of such knowledge. (Paolo Rosa, 2011)
It takes place, ideally and physically, in the courtyard of the 'Giuseppe Verdi' conservatory in Milan. No casual but significant choice. The courtyard, like the here presented theme, does not appear easily accessible to a superficial and hasty vision; it suggests a discovery, invites to cross the cognitive threshold, and not only the spatial one. It is the place used to stop and meditate. It forces to get some air, to sit down, before going ahead in the traditional close tracks, imposed by the design week. It is the linear space of the encounter, which, although at first sight associated with the concept of closeness, it has historically served as passage from a part of the same structure to another. Moreover, it belongs to a high education institution, dedicated to art and music, whose term (conservatory) etymologically refers to the act of preserving. Guarding without crystallizing or paralyse. It recalls, at the end, to the architectural typology of the house yard, where Milan discloses and deploys itself, offering unconventional and unexpected points of view about its identity.
We cross the main door. Between the columns, it is possible to see immediately a big, regular and coloured cube, placed exactly in the middle of the courtyard. On one side, its pure form has an horizontal wooden plan, used as a platform for the performances. On the other side, it leaves place for a led-wall, populated by faces and aerial imagines of the city. On the top, it gives up the horizontal element; in this way, it remains hollow and we can use that empty space as housing for a majestic air balloon.
The multimedia contents, skilfully gathered and developed, are accessible only on one face of the cube, both to restate and give the chance to imagine, on the other faces, the hidden and possible pictures of the city's multiple facets, and to underline the mechanism of transforming punctual visions and perceptions in collective maps.
Therefore, the unilateral view is able to produce the immediacy of the instantaneous space, which is created in a process of synthesis while we take distance, as it happens when we watch a single moment of a show while keeping in mind the whole story.
The spherical balloon, during the day, gains altitude and floats in the air. It becomes a preferential eye on urban fabric and, at the same time, a visible element; extraneous from the everyday skyline. It takes a look and chases after looks.
It observes Milan and let be seen by it, in a relationship of mutual curiosity. It grabs, from the moving urban surface, sights from above and sound islands, on which unexpected interferences introduce voices and stories able to complete, or simply continue, the drawing and representation. When the evening comes, the eye goes down to in-between height. It gets closer to the viewer and interrupts its mapping activity. It leaves space to macro- visualisations of lighted elements and neon urban signs on the led-wall, while live musical improvisations are held in the surrounding open space, in order to demonstrate that it is not a closed work but it leaves the chance for further extemporaneous intuitions and cognitive reflections.
Reality's metaforic pictures, flexible restitutions
Therefore, we witness a 'tool' able to take extremely comprehensible and clear reality's snap-shots, pictured through visual metaphors. The city is interpreted as an intense net of temporary and fragmented data, coming out from the man-place interaction. Divers and dynamic visual sequences are tailored in relation to the day. Perceptible narrations, where the temporal, relational and emotional dimension gains the same importance and relevance of the physical space of the map supporting them, or sometimes even more. Narrations able to go beyond the unpredictability of the future, potential stories never conclusive or unchangeable but articulated in flexible video – narrations, updatable and again 'interrogable', in order to face changes and possible evolutions.
VOICES presents itself as a privileged moment to promote learning and common creation of significances in a continuous dialogue between past and present, thanks to a dialectic and fluid memory. The more relevant local and 'live' information, the true knowledge, is often located in the mind of people who live in a specific geographic area. (Paolo Rosa, 2011). The oral culture allows the human density, typical of word-of-mount telling, above all residing in gestures, expressions, dialects, glances' luminosity, intensity and inflection of silence. It offers people's portraits, able to hand over their emotions and to establish a direct communication, rather than usual interviews. It encourages, in this way, a prolific graft between a modern technological language and a more antique manner of telling and representing. It transforms an individual path into a shared listening, ensuring, with its contents, a plurality of points of view.
The spoken sequences activate and realize creative intensions, invite to unusual and surprising associations, work only if you abandon prejudices. They are thought as mobile units in an open structure, just to maintain the possibility of their endlessly recombination. You can create diverse versions and meanings, even depending on your interpretative keys and cultural background. The valueable turning point of VOICES lies in our capacity of ironically and sharply mirroring ourselves in signs, symbols and reflections on our city. They make us reflect and fascinate us, as soon as we recognise them. In line with the transversal features of multimedia languages, VOICES triggers the different sensitivities of the viewer, creating synaesthesia, involving his emotional component, up to leading him to be active; useful condition for a re-composition of your own narration.
The city, indeed, restores the overlapping and layering of its intertwined stories, which climb to the surface out of a kind of latent depth. It reveals an "ever growing" past, that "has never ceased to be" (Deleuze, 2001, p.42). It preserves and accumulates in this moment an experience, which emerges continuously on the horizon of the present not just through traces, signs, but particularly through the stories, the memories, the recollections, the feelings, the dreams that "populate" the people, who inhabit an permeate them, clashing with the present and having a powerful influence on the future.
"One has to rely on the sound of footsteps, follow the paths of experience, listen to the voices, the stories, the tales of those inhabitants who are constantly moving around it and through it8, weaving invisible threads which mould the spaces in an incandescent fashion, feeding them with meaning. Only they will be able to conjure it up almost by magic. As in a kind of kaleidoscope where the images are continuously multiplying and overlapping." (Lidia Decandia, 2010)
Conclusion and new paradigms
In the city of signs of which Italo Calvino once again says "the eye doesn't see things but images of things that mean other things". VOICES has been able to initiate both an immediate real need of in-depth analysis and comparison in the audience and an actual participation of the involved people. All of them, aware of being listened, have immediately exposed themselves, establishing a proactive dialogic practice. Besides supplying various suggestive images of the perceived city, the main challenge would be building true and proper methodologies of analysis and a graphic (or not) restitution of collected and identifiable data; it would be facilitating the usage and the approach to instrumental paradigms, based on possibilities' diagrams and interpretations rather than a priori choices; it would be persuading the planning dynamics to become always less severe.
Waiting for a future 'metabolizing', now VOICES has been able to stimulate and gather ideas, impressions and portraits of what your own city can be. It has broadened reality. It has awakened the capacity of the fruitful sharing, of the reasoned listening; the whole work blended by a strong sentimental ingredient.
It has led us to reflect and to not confuse being with being present, but rather discover that what is seen is only the tip of the iceberg, the superficial road sign, the fold of a deeper reality which draws its essence from its own invisibility. It finally showed, with admirable fascination, that this city, like others, is much more than what it let us see.
"It shall enable us to discover that in the midst of this hell we live in not all is hell (Calvino, 1972) and that perhaps right there where the traveller no longer expected to see anything, having become so accustomed to noticing nothing except clear cut lines and contours, there are still glimmers of stories and buds which need breathing room in order to show us how to get back to imagining the future." (Lidia Decandia, Sensitive City 2010)
It is the pivotal idea around which has revolved part of the artistic research of Studio Azzurro (Sensitive City in 2010, Sensible Map in 2008 and The fourth stairway in 2008). Dismantling the system of the cartographic representation, which had accustomed us to reducing a city to a simple set of signs, the format of the story bearers wants to make us aware that "the territory is not just an empty space upon which one can lay any content indiscriminately. It is instead a highly diversified and continuously shifting space, with many layers and levels, and within which, beneath the surface, the thrust of invisible memories, forces and energies are constantly at work, inducing a never-ending change. And it is these forces which have to be taken into account when planning the future." (Lidia Decandia, Sensitive City 2010)
Concept, which not only broadens the notion of reality, but deletes the idea of a future detached from the present and a static or pre-constituted project, which – as in a utopian model – is only missing existence in order to be. Therefore, the project, no longer envisaged as a still image, is conceived as "a life that develops starting from (and within) a land that is not an empty blackboard, devoid of content: it is instead a dynamic and evolving form that lives inside time, capable of taking root, opening up, of becoming real through interactive steps triggered by continuous creative reinvention." (Lidia Decandia, Sensitive City 2010)
"What feeling does Milan give me? First of all, I feel that it is my city. It takes a long time to conquer that word "mine". You feel the city is yours when you're old, otherwise you can't say it. You don't know what life has in store, or where you'll end up. Now I can say it, because I like it here" (Andrée Ruth Shammah – stage director and director of Teatro Franco Parenti (1) )
1. Quotations by Alessandro Mendini and Andrée Ruth Shammah were taken from the VOICES interviews, which are available online divided and organised in six days
Project http://www.domusweb.it/en/news/2014/03/31/domus_voices.html
Day 1 http://www.domusweb.it/it/video/2014/04/09/studio_azzurro_domus_voices_1.html
Day 2 http://www.domusweb.it/it/video/2014/04/11/studio_azzurro_domus_voices_giorno_2.html
2. Domus Voices, 8–13 April 2014 at the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi
Opening Hours 11am–10pm
Live Performances 7pm
3. Sensitive City is the exhibition created by Studio Azzurro for the 2010 Universal Expo in Shanghai. The theme of the Expo 2010, "Better City, Better Life" invites the countries taking part to consider the future of the city and to suggest alternatives for how contemporary urbanisation should move forward. With Sensitive City, Italy has decided to underline a unique and very distinctive feature of its cities, revealing the quality of its small and medium size centres by presenting an interactive experience which enables the visitor to entertain a relationship with the digital images of people who live in these cities by stopping them (in a virtual sense) as if on the street and then listening to their comments.
http://www.studioazzurro.com/
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What an effort "to enter out"! Closures and resistances in the cultural sector
Working with surfaces to create spaces: street art or landscape project?


Demon, Alien, Doll, Mutant or something else?
Instead of making a post for each one, I put them all together, I hope paper doesn't mind.
When I read a small summary, I didn't expect much of it.. taking care of a baby? That doesn't sound so interesting. Yet, I watched the first episode just out of curiosity since people said its good… Why did I have to do that!? I was in the library and I just wanted to burst out laughing throughout the whole episode. The Momotaro's story reference just cracked me up, as well as the story of the magic spring XD One thumbs down though, were the thunder cries that were a bit overused for my taste(I hope they don't keep it like that throughout the whole series).
When I saw the pic and the small summary for the anime, it seemed just a normal anime good enough to kill time. Nothing special or eyecatching except maybe the character design that look nice. The first two episodes proved me that there might be more to it. Victorique is some sort of Sherlock Holmes while Kujo is like Watson who provides a bit comedy relief, which is nice.
At any rate, I'll keep watching this.
I first heard of the series when I was reading HunterxHunter, though I never started reading the manga. Some months ago, to my surprise and delight, I found out that anime was on the making. So I had a big expectation for this one, and the first episode satisfied me completely. I thought it was going to be a dark story since its sci-fi but it actually had some really nice humor. The alien guy is really funny haha The good thing is that they didn't overdid the jokes, so it keeps the story balanced between the laughs and the suspense of knowing what this unknown life form is doing here on Earth?
The first episode left in a cliffhanger >_< I'll definetely keep watching this.
This wasn't on my plan to watch list, but I just sort of just randomly dl it. So when I started watching it, I didn't have any expectation, I mean, I didn't even remember seeing it on the upcomming anime chart (after checking it actually was the first XD). At first it seemed like a really normal world, when all of sudden the main character is talking to same strange and weird looking robot? Hologram? Things get a bit more confusing, when a mysterious girl appears to be chased some othe unknown guys. The whole episode left me really confused about who was that girl, she seem to come from the past, but she never explained. I guess she wouldn't.. its just the first episode >_< Then there's those hologram things (they were called dooplers or something like that).
The first episod left me with too many doubts, though the pace seems like it'll be a bit slowm and to a certain point boring, i'll watch this, at least the next episode.
Ok, I just watched this because of the trial trailer I saw way back some months ago… I should had watched the new trailer for the anime. The first episode was just plain boring. Saving the princess in distress? Haven't we seen that like waay to much, and that's just not taking into account that the "princess" is a japanese >_< like seriously? Though I understand the anime is meant to be for a japanese audience, but I don't think they had to set the story in Japan..
This entry was posted in Anime, Beelzebub, Currently Watching, Gossick, Level E, On Hold For Now, Wolverine and tagged beelzebub, fractale, gossick, Level E, wolverine. Bookmark the permalink.
Lol, I want to see the Demon King's face too. He's just too funny since I didn't expect for the Demon King to have that kind of a personality.
I've heard that the electrocution thing isn't that frequent as the manga goes on so it might be the same for the anime.
Well, Beelzebub is the only one I've watched so far.. I didn't get to watch the other ones yet but seeing as Level E is top priority for you, I'm looking forward to watching that one.
Well that's good to know , I wouldn't stand more of those electrocutions.
Beelzebub has entered my meh list–it was there from episode 1 and episode 2 did not help its case. It's got the occasional funny, but they need to STOP with the freaking electricity.
Gosick didn't live up to my expectations, but I'm enjoying it anyway and looking forward to more.
Fractale has me torn. I enjoyed the first episode, but I'm mostly just worried about finding out more regarding the Fractale system.
And Wolverine? I didn't watch that. I don't want to risk seeing one of my favourite superheroes messed up.
Yeah Gosick could have been better, but its still nice =) As for Fractale, I'm on the same boat as you, this fractale system seems intringuing… but i fear that the anime won't explain everything and the story will be rushed since it'll only have 11 episodes.
as for merry wandering…. is that yumekui merry? im a bit confused.
Oh now that clears up everything, Ill try watching them though lately Ive been busy with my art classes..
I cant believe I got trolled. It really got me during the third ep.
haha, definitely. Did you like the episodes with the Color Rangers?
haha, this comment thread is getting messy. i dont know where the last comment is either.


I think I nearly passed out at work today.
One minute, I felt totally normal, writing an email at my desk, having just eaten my favourite lunch: BBQ pork noodle soup at Congee Star. The next minute, the room swam and I nearly fell over.
And now I just feel really crappy. Maybe I'm getting sick. Unfortunately, I can't stay home as I have a big launch party to go to and I have no sick days left, apparently. Not sure how that happened, as I believed that I had only been away twice all year. However, I'm sure my boss tracked it VERY carefully.


Need some inspiration for 20th September? Voyager 2 was launched on this day in 1977, on its way to rendevous with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. You can see some early rockets and space probes at the Science Museum. Or maybe you can catch a planetarium show at the Royal Observatory?
20 Sep to 27 Oct 2019 The Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society put on a West End show but will they crack under the pressure?
20 to 29 Sep 2019 Why not combine a visit to the Buckingham Palace Summer Opening with a tour of the Queens gardens as well?
20 Sep 2019 Why not try something a bit different -- how about going to the Royal Courts of Justice and watching a real-life court case?
20 Sep 2019 Walk the streets of Whitechapel and try and discover the identity of the Victorian murderer Jack the Ripper - if you dare!
20 Sep 2019 If weaving your way in and out of the busy London traffic on a hire bike sounds like fun then how about hiring a Boris Bike for the day?