Buscada
Observation on perception
So as Dogen said, “Time goes from present to past.” This is not true in our logical mind, but it is in the actual experience of making past time present. There we have poetry, and there we have human life.”
- Shunryu Suzuki
A number of years ago I read a book called On Intelligence by Jeff Hakwkins, who is the inventor of the palm pilot among other things, and who turns out to be an avid amateur neuroscientist. The theory in his book which interested me most was that your neocortex (the layers of membrane that sit around your brain) are memory storage units and what you actually see when you use your eyes is a memory of what was there, or what you have seen before. Only if something drastic changes does your brain have to use some energy to look again.
This sounded like an interesting theory; how could your brain, something much slower than a modern computer chip in terms of processing electrical inputs, be able to do so many complex things so quickly? It’s powerful not to have to think every time you do something. Not having to think about the size, shape and feel of a cup reduces the amount of power required from your brain to pick it up. Once again, an elegant solution by your body and brain.
A quote from On Intelligence :
” Imagine you are about to have dinner in an unfamiliar restaurant and you want to wash your hands. Even though you have never been in this building before, your brain predicts that there will be a restroom somewhere in the restaurant with a basin suitable for hand washing. How dies know this? … You look for expected patterns that let you find the restroom quickly. This kind of behavior is a creative act; it is predicting the future by analogy to the past. We don’t normally think of this as being creative, but it very much is”
Recently I noticed a phenomenon in my own life which made this theory really come to life. I am a new parent, and one of the things that new parents do on a regular basis is to check that their precious new baby is still breathing.
This might sound simple : just look at the baby and see if his chest is moving up and down, right? Wrong. I found when I did this that at a glance I could not see any movement (worrying) but if I looked again much more closely engaging my brain more completely I could pick up the slight movements which showed that my new baby was indeed breathing. Very strange, until I thought of Jeff Hawkins’ theory. What was I really seeing when I glanced, just a memory? I think so, my brain was giving me the minimal amount of information to tell me that my baby still exsists and is sleeping on the bed but not wanting to use up more energy it skimmed over the vital information of the small movements of his chest which show me that he is breathing.
I really enjoy when theory comes into practice: when you see an idea that seems very abstract realize itself in reality. The next time you look at something, look again. There might be a whole world of detail you are missing.
Read On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins
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Buscada on CNN!
The CNN next list TV show and blog made a great video about our recent project Layered SPURA. The video talks about the history of the area and then visual urbanist approach taken by Buscada in creating dialogue between communities in the area.
Getting interviewed on a cold February morning by the CNN crew.
The Layered SPURA / City Studio project, headed by Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, explores this complex site using a hybrid approach of pedagogy, art and research, and involves long-term collaborations between Lower East Side community organizations and students in Bendiner-Viani’s City Studio, a part of the New School’s Urban Programs. The Layered SPURA exhibition, a culmination of four years of student, faculty, and community collaboration which appeared at the New School’s Sheila Johnson Design Center in Winter 2012, does not suggest solutions for a place beleaguered by top-down planning, but rather hopes to spur new conversations amongst people with different points of view about SPURA’s past, present and future.
Find out more about this project : Layered SPURA
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A new exhibition : Layered SPURA
Get a preview of the exhibition
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Buscada @ Creative Time’s Living As Form / MARKET
Please join us on October 7, 8 & 16th at our residency at Creative Time’s Living As Form, “a vast collection of documentation of 100 socially engaged projects from the last twenty years and from locations around the globe.”
Our residency features a new iteration of our ongoing work on the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA), in collaboration with Temporary Services’ MARKET.
More on the Buscada SPURA project
More on MARKET
You may know SPURA as the parking lots along Delancey Street. More than forty years ago, the area was razed for “slum clearance” and few renewal projects have been so contested. Very few of the originally-planned buildings were ever built, and many people were once displaced from the site, some now live on it, and many people live in the blocks around it. Many different communities claim SPURA, and imagine different futures for it.
Our work builds on Gabrielle’s City Studio class at the New School, and considers the past, present and future of this contested site, collaborating with community organizations, and using a visual urbanist approach to create a series of annual exhibitions to create space for dialogue.
On October 7th, 8th and 16th, in residence at MARKET, we continue to present and explore the multiple stories of SPURA. Please join us, and students from four years of City Studio us to tell your own SPURA stories, to talk with others at our booth, and to discuss the future of the neighborhood.
We will also be hosting a walking tour, on October 8th at 2pm, in collaboration with Dutch artists Bik Van der Pol, to explore the layered nature of SPURA, the hidden and intersecting voices behind the often perplexing physical, political and personal landscape of SPURA.
Sign up for our walking tour
We hope to see you at Living As Form on October 7th, 8th or 16th!
When:
Friday, October 7, Saturday October 8, Sunday October 16th, 12-8pm
Special guided tour on the complexities of SPURA : October 8, 2pm
Where :
the historic Essex Street Market, SE corner of Essex & Delancey Streets
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Buscada at Visible Evidence, August 13
Join us this weekend at the Visible Evidence conference! We’ll be speaking on August 13, at the day-long workshop at Hunter College : The City and the Expanded Documentary.
It will be a great day, and we’re looking forward to our panel, “The Urban Documentary, New Forms for New Cities” in which we’ll be talking about the new ways that our recent project, The Triangle Fire Open Archive, explores new ways to know the city and its history – through unconventional archives, visual urbanist approaches, and creative forms of participation. In particular, we’ll be talking about some of the newest objects and stories about the 1982 Chinatown garment workers strike (one of these, above) – and the way gathering these objects in the context of the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire tells a complex story about the city.
We’re looking forward to a compelling conversation with chair Martin Lucas and our co-participants, Lise Gantheret and Samara Smith.
9:30 AM – 11:00 AM, August 13
WORKSHOP: “The Urban Documentary, New Forms for New Cities”
Hunter College, Dept. of Integrated Media Arts / 544 Hunter North Bldg / E 68th & Lexington Ave.
The urban documentary has taken new life formally and socially as concepts move away from origins in ‘single channel’ form to a broad variety of new lives in locative media contexts, including GPS triggered audio and video, web-based media from issue-based blogs, to games, to social mapping. Sometimes these are projects initiated by filmmakers, at other times, they are framed by architects, urban planners and organizers. What do these new practices look like? What is their justification? What happens to documentary notions on these new platforms where the boundaries between subject, maker and location shift? This workshop is designed as an introduction to some of these practices in a form useful both to makers and theorists.
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A new exhibition : Layered SPURA
Get a preview of the exhibition
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The Open Archive on the Brian Lehrer show!
On March 25th, the 100th anniversary of the Triangle fire, we were honored to attend the centennial events on Washington Place – with the crowd filling the blocks from Washington Square Park all the way to Broadway. We were also excited to see objects from the Open Archive filling the jumbotron screen above the speakers on the platform. It was wild to see our good friend Amy Reddinger’s sign from the Madison, WI rallies (which she had contributed to the archive) beaming above the trees, while the inspiring Mary Bell from the Wisconsin Education Association Council was speaking. Finally, it was phenomenal to have stories and voices from the Open Archive featured on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show that morning.
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Join us for a pop-up exhibition of the Triangle Fire Open Archive!
Join us this Wednesday, March 16th, from 3-7pm, for a pop-up exhibition of the Triangle Fire Open Archive at the Brooklyn Historical Society!
The Triangle Fire Open Archive – a collaboration between Buscada and the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition – is an online, participatory archive of community contributed stories, images and documents. Each of these objects tell a piece of the history and impact of the infamous fire and its critical relevance for today’s pressing questions about labor rights and safety from New York City to Wisconsin to Bangladesh.
Join us for this rare opportunity to see some of the pictures, documents and objects from the Triangle Fire Open Archive in person!
The exhibition, honoring the Triangle fire’s centennial on March 25, will include items from BHS’ archival collections, rare documents from Our Lady of Pompei church (from the Center for Migration Studies), creations by performance artist LuLu LoLo, personal photographs, and much more.
We encourage you to bring in your own items to share - stories, photos, memorabilia, etc. about the Triangle Fire, or any kind of labor or women’s activism over the last 100 years. We will create digital photographs of your items and upload them to the Triangle Fire Open Archive, for the world to see. This event is open to the public and is free with museum admission.
The Triangle Fire Open Archive exhibition
Wednesday March 16, 3-7pm
The Brooklyn Historical Society
128 Pierrepont Street at Clinton Street
Brooklyn, New York 11201
Trains :
2, 3, 4, 5 to Borough Hall, the A, C, F to Jay St/Borough Hall, or M, R to Court St.
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Playing by your own rules
It is hard to win when you are playing by someone else’s rules or, worse still, do not entirely understand the rules. By redefining the “meaning” of your project you become an expert in the rules of the game, and one of the people defining those very rules.
The Meaning to Tasks model uses the idea of a “project meaning”.
It supports a practice for teams and individuals to create fundamentally new meanings for projects, products and services. By working in this way the meaning of everyday projects are changed, and projects created are differentiated from the rest of the market through innovatively integrated strategies, rather than solely through feature-level improvements.
To read this article in full, click here to download the PDF.
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Visual Thinking
Making a sketch is often the first step towards thinking about a design problem. But I’ve found that oftentimes making that mark feels daunting – it is the first sign of my imagination committing to a solution. A mark feels risky – the idea is now out in the world for more than just me to see.
I often think of sketching an idea as making a visual list. Making lists helps move ideas forward, another kind of decisive first mark. I also think about list-making as a process :
1. Make the list (Thinking out loud, possibly in collaboration)
2. Looking through the list again and re-ordering it. (Fitting it to the needs of the idea)
3. Reviewing your new list (Critique and time for contemplation)
4. Fixing the list and deciding to follow its order (Deciding on a course of action)
With sketching, or visual thinking, these steps happen simultaneously, still holding a lot in common with a simple list.
Here’s an example from one of our recent projects with MIT’s Wolk Gallery for a exhibition promotion piece.
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