DIY Wine-making with Lifepatch and Camera Hacking at L'Observatoire

On Saturday, we visited Isabelle's fantastic little space/studio, "L'Observatoire", near Turf club road. Set in a somewhat bucolic part of town - lush greenery, horse stables, and wide open spaces - Isabelle's space was full of plants and specimens and some really awesome microscopes for observation. We marveled at strange little wiggly green blobs inside the cells of plants and stained sample specimens from mice and other creatures - the output from a set of optical microscopes, magnified onto a wall with a projector. It seemed a fitting setting for our friend Andreas Siagian of Lifepatch to conduct a little workshop on the process of DIY wine-making, along with other friends from Indonesia who were also visiting Singapore.



We began with a bunch of bananas. This was because bananas were the only fruit we happened to have there, and the store-bought fruit juices in Singapore almost always have strange additions to them. Naturally one could have tried using any manner of juice product as the base, but it seemed nice to start with the pure fruit. Here, Andreas explains to us the process before he begins...







We were using a packet of inoculated yeast (extracted from Soursop) which had been specially prepared by Lifepatch.





Boiled water was allowed to cool slightly and then added to a blender with all of the cut fruit. Some of the boiled water was used to rinse the containers that were to be used later as well.

















The fruit mixture was strained and the larger pulp removed.





The packet of yeast was added to water, and then later added to the fruit.



A hole was drilled into the bottle's cap, and tubing was inserted so it would be virtually airtight.





At this point, a little sugar can be added as well to make it sweeter.







The yeast eats the sugar, and turns it into alcohol and carbon dioxide. This is evidenced by the bubbling that will happen in the cup of water below, issuing forth from the tubing. When the bubbling has stopped, it means the yeast has finished its job. If there is excess sugar left, this makes the wine sweeter, which is why the addition of sugar can help result in a sweeter wine at the end, because there is excess sugar left after the yeast has done its course...



After the fruit-wine-mixture was prepared, what could we do? Well next Isabelle suggested we could dissect some pens. And so we did! We dissected the pens. The pens were empty, because the children use a lot of pens. We dissected them pens good, and squeezed the dried ink sponges to see if there was any more ink in them. We squeezed them until there was nothing else to squeeze.



After the pens were dissected, Isabelle took out a box of old cameras which she had been reserving for a "Tinkering Sundays" class she was conducting on 5 May 2013 for kids.





It was discovered there and then that if you give a bunch of artists/diy builders?/hackers?/programmers? some disposable cameras to take apart, they will be occupied for hours. If not days. Perhaps even weeks. They will be gluing bits of the camera lens to their smartphones permanently. I still have mine partially attached to my phone. You might have to pry them out of the work room with an electrified stick. It is truly that engrossing.









NEED A SUGGESTION FOR HOW TO CREATE HOURS OF ENDLESS FUN FOR THAT SPECIAL GEEK IN YOUR LIFE?
GIVE THEM AN UNWANTED OLD DISPOSABLE CAMERA, A PAIR OF PLIERS, AND WATCH THEM GO AT IT!



HAVE YOU EVER WANTED TO TAKE MACRO INSTRAGRAMS OF EVERYTHING IN YOUR LIFE?
WHY NOW YOU CAN, WITH AN OLD DISPOSABLE CAMERA LENS!



Mushroom which Isabelle picked up - with suspected beetle infestation.

[Note: Yuta's horrifying mushroom beetle story comes to mind, he told us a story about how he had bought a beautiful ornamental hard bracket mushroom which looked a lot like this. One day it suddenly changed colour, so he suspected something was happening inside the mushroom, so he put it in the microwave, a few small beetles fell out of a small hole in the mushroom. I know, I'm obsessed with this story and you've probably all heard it from me too many times, but I still can't get over it. I can't decide which is more horrifying - the accidental death of the beetles? yuta's decision to microwave the mushroom?? the idea that there might be lots of beetles secretly living inside these inert-looking mushrooms??? the secret life of beetles inside fungi, of which i know so little about????]



Dead Bee from my kitchen.



Dead spider from my table.



Dead wooly aphid. Yeah I brought all these insects as a present for Isabelle.
Other people bring gifts of fruits and wine when they visit friends, I bring dead insects.





The surface of some seed pods.



Basically I could go on and on and on...
Thanks to Isabelle (and her family) for hosting us at her wonderful wonderful space and spending the afternoon with us, and thanks to Andreas for conducting the little workshop! It was great to have other friends from Indonesia over (Ade, Coki, Monica) and to see Luis and Anne-marie there as well! Good times...

The Simulacra of Cobain the Cactus

Today I decided to do one pomodoro of Second Life building. I decided I would try to build a replica of Cobain the Cactus, a plant on my windowsill which G gave to me because it initially resembled a toy rabbit I had named Kobain. Unfortunately, G forgot that cactuses are not inert objects, so it continued to grow many new cactusey fingers, and now Cobain the Cactus does not look like Kobain the toy rabbit anymore.

This is a photo of Cobain the cactus - in Real Life:



I cropped out the other bits so it was just the cactus. I prepared this as a 512 x 512 image for uploading to Second Life.


Next I found some random 8-sided mesh/sculpted tree and retextured it with my cobain.png texture. You can find many free sculpted trees on SL Marketplace if you don't have one to start with. If I had more time, I could probably have used Blender to bake the plant sculptie/mesh myself and then imported it into SL instead of repurposing some other plant mesh. I'm not building it in order to sell it, so the permissions don't really matter to me at this point. Finally I created a brown pot for the bottom from a tube, added a circular disc textured with soil and linked them all together.



And so by the end of one pomodoro, I had a copy of Cobain the cactus - in Second Life:

"Theo.do.lites" (Institute of Contemporary Art Singapore Gallery 1, 17 April - 20 May 2013)

Thanks to everyone who came down to the exhibition on wednesday! And also, many thanks to Kent and Silke for all their hard work and careful thought in putting this show together, as well as to the other artists and everyone at the Institute of Contemporary Art Singapore for making it all come together. Here is a bit of a photo documentation of the show:

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‘Theo.do.lites’ is an exhibition examining the project of modernity through artistic explorations of site-specific urban and rural realities in Asia and Europe, in the context of their conjoined yet deferred histories.

If studies in city cultures often exhibit a critical nostalgia for an urban formation from the earlier stages of heroic modernity, we witness today a shift, revealing a sense of loss towards the promise of a vibrant future once offered by these early prototypical modernist cities. Rather than occupying the forefront of global developments, these cities are instead fast becoming a part of history. The works from Europe turn its eyes away from urban spaces towards unoccupied landscapes, reflecting a sense of disillusionment or a quest for a new spirituality. At the same time, works from Asia convey a suspicion towards its rapid urbanization in recent years, skeptical towards an idea of modernity that was never its own.

With an emphasis on moving images without being limited to it, 'Theo.do.lites' reflects on these changes and presents the work of 14 contemporary artists from both continents and will offer a new appreciation of creative documentary aesthetics.

Curated by: Silke Schmickl and Kent Chan.

Exhibiting artists: Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Raqs Media Collective, Uriel Orlow, Alexander Schellow, Charles Lim, Romain Kronenberg & Benjamin Graindorge, Marylene Negro, Tan Pin Pin, Daniel Hui, Masayo Kajimura, Massimilian & Nina Breeder, and Debbie Ding.

The exhibition is supported by: National Arts Council, Singapore International Foundation, Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, LASALLE College of the Arts, Institut Français Singapour, Embassy of France in Singapore, Goethe Institut Singapur, German Embassy Singapore, Locale, and Lowave.

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Opening Night (17 April 2013):












Artist Talk (18 April 2013):






Exhibition Catalogue:






Setup:











The team all together - the artists, curators, and ICAS - after everything was up and completed!




More pictures coming soon.

Maps without Buildings (2011-2013)

Maps With/out Buildings is a hand-illustrated study of place, the map-making process and natural geogrpahical features as they are commonly represented in topographic maps. I have been working on an ongoing collection of "maps" of my dreams since around 2009. However, along the way I realized that all of my dreams had buildings in them, such that all the “dream maps” that I used to draw upon waking were technically more like dream building plans than maps of places. I wondered why it was that I didn't have dreams without buildings in them. So I became interested in exploring the process of making maps which did not have urban features in them. By studying the landscapes I encounter in my travels, and by trying to visualise landscapes devoid of buildings, one day I hope to have dreams without buildings in them.



Maps without Buildings (2011-Present)



Ellipsis (2013, London)



Lichen Mountain (2011, Cornwall)



Le Petit Arbre (2012, Paris)



Gepenstermauer (2011, Berlin)



Lake of Dreams (2011, London)
The texts are integral to the pieces. One of the accompanying texts was generated by running the contents of this long-running blog through a markov text generator, automatically producing a text which sounds like Debbie. More on that in another post!...

The work is being shown at "Theo.do.lites", an exhibition curated by Kent Chan and Silke Schmickl, at Institute of Contemporary Art Singapore (Lasalle ICAS Gallery 1). Featuring the works of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Raqs Media Collective, Uriel Orlow, Alexander Schellow, Charles Lim, Romain Kronenberg & Benjamin Graindorge, Marylène Negro, Tan Pin Pin, Daniel Hui, Masayo Kajimura, Massimilian & Nina Breeder, and Debbie Ding. Show's on from now until 12 May.

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See also:

Photos from Opening Night -





More Photo Documentation of Theo.do.lites, the exhibition.

Field Recording: Jatinegara Dangdut (December 2010, Jakarta)

A few years ago, not far from Jatinegara Stasiun, I visited a spot close to the railway tracks that was full of javanese street dancers dancing to traditional gamelan music, night markets with trucks full of chickens, cabbage, leles (catfish), and dangdut played live on blown-out speakers to a haphazard crowd of people drinking warm beers, amidst older ladyboys, shy widows, and old men dancing on gravel in bare feet. Much of the audience of this musical medley sat on the railway tracks, often shaded from the street lights by the shadow of trees.



Traditional Javanese Dance under a highway
Every so often, a piercing alarm bell would go off, and there would be a rumble and a vibration on the tracks, heralding the distant arrival of the trains. Perhaps it is a Singaporean response to be extremely cautious and very alarmed by the thought of sitting on a live railway track - in 2009 there had been a well-publicised case of a young Singaporean couple being gruesomely killed when they sat on the KTM railway tracks at night and had been unwittingly crushed by the train - so my instinct was to steer completely clear of the tracks once I realised that it was actually a live railway track with numerous trains passing every hour or so. But even as the alarm bells rang, the indonesian motorbikes and bajajs continued gaily rumbling over the tracks as if it were of no concern - until the very last perilous moment! When the kerapa api came blazing through the tracks. No accidents occured, and after the trains had gone, people would file back onto the tracks to listen to the street dangdut by dark. People were generally very friendly and came over to talk to us, probably curious also because we were the only visible "bules" or "japanese-looking people" who had wandered into this area, and they tried to get us to dance with them. I put my recorder in my pocket and this is the sound of the live music coming out of their blown speakers:





Jalan Pissangang (Banana Street)

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See also:

Documentations: Allah Akbar / In Excelsis Deo / Huat Ah Heng Ah - Other devotional recordings from Indonesia and Malaysia
Documentations: Newton Circus Getai (歌台) in Singapore

Field Recording: French Rap and Derbouka on Paris Metro (12 October 2012, Paris)

This is another recording of street buskers in Paris. It seemed to me as if most of buskers on the streets and travelling through the metro system seemed to play typically "Parisian" music, or jewish or romanian sounding music. But one group that I saw on the Paris Metro whilst on Ligne 8, from Strasbourg St Denis to Concorde was slightly different - it was a rap and breakdancing group. Technically speaking, this was the musical equivalent of some unfeasibly loud youngsters getting on the train, blasting some music and wildly rapping and dancing along to it - except, that they were actually doing it for your listening pleasure! OLE OLE S'IL VOUS PLAIT! The tight-lipped commuters, women and men in dark coats and gloves sat dangerously still and quiet, staring straight ahead, whilst the group rapped and then beat enthusiastically on the derbouka, and one of them danced, somewhat dangerously, within an invisibly demarcated space on the train. Neither musical group nor trapped commuters seemed to know what to do with each other. As the train pulled into the metro station for Concorde, the group disembarked, and as the pneumatic doors whoosh open you can hear the strains of another more classical busking group just outside the cabin on the platform. And as the train pulled out of the station, one could see the two groups of buskers walking into each other on the same platform...

Field Recording: Mariachi band on autobus to Teotihuacan (2 June 2012, Mexico City)

Last year I made a madcap trip to see Teotihuacan within ONE MORNING. I kept notes on my phone on how this was done. I got up at the crack of dawn, wormed my way to the Terminal Autobuses del Norte via the metro (its on Line 5), bought an autobus ticket for 35 pesos, and looked for the one bus with another tourist boarding it (signage quite poor there and somewhat confusing, abandon hope all ye non-spanish speakers who enter here...) Got on a bus that said PIRAMIDS with a picture of a pyramid on it. I was dropped off at Teotihuacan at around 7.30am, was allowed to enter despite most public signs saying that it is only open at 9am. After a significant amount of walking and puffing and even more walking, I reached the peak of Pyramid of the Moon at 8am. This skillful time maneuvering was made possible thanks to a tip from my old schoolmate Paul (who was also coincidentally in Mexico at the same time??) who told me they would let visitors in early. This helped me avoid the tourist crowds before they start coming in massive droves of buses - and I was one of the first to scale the peak of the piramids that morning.



Here's a recording of a live mariachi band that forced its way onto the autobus from the terminal to Teotihuacan. There was also a jelly seller, and a knives seller on board. I didn't really care for the jellies (??) or the knives (???), but the band was quite funny and IN YOUR FACE, and in an extremely cramped bus with most of the people going on their normal lives with far too many baskets and bags. When the band started up in that cramped space, on the faces of the people around me I could see the tensing up of the teeth-clenching muscles, eventually followed by stoic resignation. Basically, everyone was trapped as their captive audience, and the band fought hard to be heard over the roar of the engine. The quality is not so great because it was obviously recorded on a very noisy bus, but I'm still uploading it in case anyone ever wondered what a bus ride to Teotihuacan would sound like...
Oh and this is me with a random overfriendly trinket seller in Teotihuacan.

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The reason why I am suddenly digging up all these because yesterday I attended the Substation Conferences and did an audio recording for them, and while I was there, I realised that the moderator for the roundtable discussion was someone whom I had seen speaking at another forum (Hello Ai Lin, if you ever see this!). I wanted to see if I could find the recording I had made of that other forum, but could not find it, because I think the audio file is trapped on a hard drive that I broke while I was in Paris and which I left in a drawer in London....

Nevertheless I did find the physical notebooks with the notes on those talks, as well as a whole bunch of other audio files and half-written descriptions and notes of trips to various museums/galleries such as Museo Nacional de Antropología (Mexico City), National Museum of Korea (Seoul), and other things in Hong Kong, etc. I've started pushing some of these draft entries online, and ONE DAY I WILL COMPLETE ALL THE BACKDATED DOCUMENTATION! But for now I should really get back to proper work...

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See also:
Other posts from Mexico -
Retroalimentacion (Facultad del Artes Gallery, UAEM)
Don Porfirio - El Senor de la Bestias
La Pulqueria (San Fellipe Tlamimilolpan)

New posts on Documentations -
Notes on the "The Cost and Value of Heritage in Singapore: The Belitung Shipwreck and Bukit Brown" (14 April 2012, Mochtar Riady Auditorium, Singapore Management University)
NUS Museum's Prep Room

Field Recording: "Hava Nagila" (27 September 2012, Paris)

Dug up a bunch of old recordings while looking for something else - here is a jolly recording of a large Jewish street band and women's choir singing "Hava Nagila" just outside the Palais de Tokyo.

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See also:

Other audio recordings from Paris -
Field Recording: Paris Gypsy Band on the Metro, 11 September 2012
Field Recording: Paris Musique Kiosk, 9 Sept 2012

Real Life and Second Life Paredolia

Recently I have been working on a few things. One, is the manuscript for Dream Syntax, consisting of 5 years of transcribed dreams and maps of dream spaces. Two, is this game we call Russian Jogging Roulette, or "Ruskijogelette". Basically we pick a time and two of us in separate continents HAVE TO GO JOGGING at the same time (OR OTHERWISE DIE). Three, is a slight increase in the time I've spent playing Second Life, because I've been trying to learn to build and script. (We bought the land, now we have to make it. And oh yes I have "Grandiose Designs" for it....)

It should be obvious why Second Life attracts me so much. I suppose I like dream spaces and virtual spaces as much as I like real spaces. I was uploading my daily phone pictures along with some of my SL screenshots to Flickr (a somatic reflex of self-documentation), when I realised two of images from different sources - coincidentally uploaded one after another - had certain similarities. I'm not sure about you, but for me it is a curious case of the two having a similar composition and alignment, made apparent as my Real Life and Second Life become indistinguishably mashed up online.

I know it is a human impulse to find similarities even where none truly exist (pareidolia), but after having transcribed and written out my dreams so extensively, and in real life having all this strange physical distance between me and you whilst we do virtual things together and talk as if we are in the same room together, it sometimes feels like the real life things I write about are not so very different to the imaginary things I write about.

Now, what I would really like is for Snapshots in SL to be automatically embedded with its SLurl in the EXIF data for each image. Then doing the documentation of my virtual life would be... (pardon the pun) like a... dream?

Scanbox: Foldable box that lets you use your smartphone as a portable scanner

Several months ago, I backed a Kickstarter for Scanbox, a foldable paper box with in-built light that would hold one's phone in place so that one could use one's smartphone for scanning documents and presentations. I forgot about it because it arrived in Singapore whilst I was in Paris. Today I had to scan some receipts and I recalled that I had never even opened the package before (even while moving house), so I took it out of its envelope for the first time...



Folded it together so the magnets snapped in place, found an old 9V battery and plugged it in to make the flat LED strip light up and OH MY GOD! Can I just say how simple and genius this is? It just works. And some of you might say, what if the iPhone isn't that great a camera? Well I can still read the receipt. I mean, life is too short to spend all day scanning receipts immaculately! Just scan the goddamned thing and move on with life! And as income tax filing season approaches, this suffices as a tool for digitising all your receipts and documents. I am planning to sell my bulky (but very awesome) Laser printer/scanner when I go to school in a few months time, but I can see this as one of the few things I'm definitely going to take along with me on that plane...



I got the Scanbox Plus for USD25 (S$31/£16) when it was on Kickstarter, but it is retailing now on the Scanbox site for USD34.95 (S$43/£23). It can be flat-packed (minus the battery) into an rectangle size just slightly larger than A4. The workmanship is okay (meaning that I think there isn't that much attention to detail and the product was not sufficiently protected for international shipping), and I know you could probably build your own semblance of a "Scanbox" out of cardboard and LEDs and magnets and any other additions... BUT... seriously, I have so many OTHER things I'd rather be building or doing. This box just works. The end.

Bone, Metal, Wood, and Other Artefacts found on Pulau Saigon

A photo of a photo of a torn map of Kampong Saigon...
Last year whilst at the library, I copied out a list from Jennifer Barry's "Pulau Saigon : a post-eighteenth century archaeological assemblage recovered from a former island in the Singapore River". I completely forgot about this document but just unearthed it today, so I thought I should put it online in case anyone should be interested in the "OTHER ARTEFACTS" list found in this little catelogue of artefacts, including a detailed list of ceramics finds, and flora and fauna. As the ceramics and flora/fauna lists are very very long and detailed, I will leave it up to those who are interested to locate the book at the National Library of Singapore (Lee Kong Chien Reference Library, English 959.57 BAR) and read those portions for themselves.

I wanted to purchase or request for a copy of this book but it seems impossible to track down the publisher, Rheidol Press, and they either have ceased to exist or do not have any sort of online presence at all. No copyright infringement intended here by reproducing part of the text here, but it seems impossible to even find or contact them to even ask for the permission. Short of writing to their postal address in Stamford (which conceivably could have changed by now), there are no other leads or clues or ways to contact them (although I suppose I will try to write to them to see what happens). I have never even been to Lincolnshire nor have I ever thought of going there, and I find the idea of an obscure book about Singapore's own little-known Pulau Saigon being published there very strange indeed.

I have retained all the author's original typos in the following copy of the list - this is exactly as it was on the page.

From Jennifer Barry's "Pulau Saigon : a post-eighteenth century archaeological assemblage recovered from a former island in the Singapore River"

THE SITE

Archaeological finds began to appear at Pulau Saigon in 1988 when bulldozers first moved in to start work on the Central Expressway tunnel. Tan family members who owned the petrol kiosk on the island brought this to the attention of Mr Koh Lian What who in turn alerted authorities at the National Museum and the National University. A prompt rescue operation was organized and a team of expert, including Dr C. G. Kwa, Mr Lee Chor Lin, Dr J. Miksic and Mr Koh, was permitted to collect finds and soil samples. Collections were made between November 1988 and March 1980 but no systematic archaeological excavation could be undertaken due to constraints of time.

THE FINDS

Broadly speaking the site covers the 170 years from the early 19th to the late 20th century, the period between the arrival of Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819 and the initial construction in 1988 of the tunnel at Clemenceau Bridge. The bulk of ceramic finds are generally consistent with this time frame, up to about the mid 1960s, although there are a few sherds which pre-date the 19th century.

Apart from ceramic, which accounts for the greater part of the entire assemblage, finds include artifacts of glass, bone, metal, wood, stone, plastic and rubber as well as faunal and floral remains. These include a large group of marine shells identified by Mrs Emily Glover of the Natural History Museum, London. There are eleven species of gastropods and give of shallow water burrowing bivalves, two of which are often found in mangroves. All are common to the Singapore area and many are widespread in the Indo-Pacific. Glover notes that the small holes in many of the examples were drilled by predatory mullscs and not by humans, confirming Koh's view that there was no prehistoric habitation of the site. This possibility had been proposed during the early stages of the rescue.

(…) Before 1889 one would expect that, generally, the deeper finds would be the oldest; yet some of the more recent finds are below 2 and 3 meters of mud, such as the coins dated 1926 and 1883 respectively. A late 19th or early 20th century Doulton square-mouthed stoneware bottle was found at 2m depth. This clearly indicates massive disturbances which, no doubt, had been caused by the dredging of the river, and the subsequent use of this archaeologically rich material as landfill.

BONE, METAL, WOOD, AND OTHER ARTEFACTS

Asbestos: 2
Beads:
 6 small (3 red, 2 blue, 1 yellow, in film roll container)
 40 approx. (in plastic bag)
Brushes: 
 1 bone or ivory with black bristles
 1 bone or ivory toothbrush with white bristles
 2 bone or ivory toothbrush handles
 1 carved tortoishell? handle
 1 wood bristle base
 1 wood handle
Corks: 3
Electrical fittings:
 3 white ceramic
 1 bulb filament
 1 small glass bulb
 1 small battery
Metal:
 1 belt hook (s or snakes-head shape)
 1 bolt
 1 brass lid
 1 buckle
 1 button
 1 cigarette holder
 8 copper coins (Straits Settlement 1884, 1887, 1894)
 2 coins (1 round, 1 square)
 1 door furniture?
 1 fish hook
 1 lamp base? (corroded)
 4 lead pieces plus ore workings
 7 nails plus fragments
 1 pin
 1 scale hands?
 1 wall hook
 1 spoon (European type)
Plastic:
 1 bakelite threaded neck
 2 pink fragments
 1 political party badge
 1 spoon (Chinese type)
 1 table tennis ball
Rubber:
 2 (degraded)
Stone:
 1 cylindrical pounder
 8 white marble spheres plus one hemisphere
 2 dice (marble, limestone?)
Tiles:
 3 small (modern compound type)
Tools:
 1 iron spike or pick, wood shaft
 1 iron bill-hook, wood shaft
Wood:
 1 carved comb (fragile)
 1 broom or brush handle
 1 oar or paddle
 1 clog or shoe sole

MISCELLANEOUS

Coal: 1
Stone:
 3 flints
 1 flint knife? (previously labelled as such)
 8 flint tools?
 1 pyrite (also known as Fool's Gold)
 1 green stone
 1 piece of lava or pumice
 24 slate plus 3 knives (previously labelled as such)
 35 small smooth pebbles
 1  worked stone?
 1 quartz (rock crystal)
 

Team Fire's Fun House

After watching Grand Designs, I decided to invest in a sweet little piece of virtual land. Since we can't build it in real life, we'll build it in Second Life. And I hadn't realised how affordable Second Life land was in the rolling auctions - for about L2500 (approx USD10) I got a simple 512m sq plot (my land tier limit) on the side of a mountain by the seaside. Seemed like a good kickstart for practicing some building and scripting. I don't know if thats a good price in the Second Life land auctions since I haven't watched the numbers for long, but it seems reasonably affordable as the startup cost to embark on this game. A GAME WITH NO RULES...

Introducing the site of TEAM FIRE's NEW FUN HOUSE:





Okay nothing has been built yet but we have grand designs for a skybox/sandbox of some sort... in the meantime, I rezzed up a giant flower that rotates. I mean, obviously, it can be really hard to find our precise plot on the mountainside if there isn't some giant spinning psychedelic flower floating over it. And so we sat on top of the giant flower on the mountainside and admired the view...

ALSO...



OH and we also met our hunky tattooed neighbour, who is probably going to start up a chain of sexy nevada-style casino brothel skyscrapers next to us. He probably thinks we're a bunch of inexperienced tools, wiling away our days, sitting on a giant retarded flower next to his plot...

BUT I'LL BET OUR FLOATING FUN HOUSE WILL BE MORE FUN THAN HIS CASINO SKYSCRAPER!

I've decided to seperate my SL from my RL interests, so for those interested in following our building progress and other tips/notes on Second Life Building, you can visit our other building blog at teamfirefunhouse.blogspot.com

Grand Designs: Houses of Fun

I just took a series of planes from London to Singapore, during which I ended up watching far too many episodes of a show called Grand Designs, a fascinatingly endearing programme about self-build projects in the UK. Apparently this is a show that has gone on for over ten years now, and the programme itself is a home-builders wet dream, or should i say, one big fat architectural wank fest. I'm surprised I haven't seen this earlier but OH!!! Its fantastic!

What really fascinates me is the characters who are the homeowners/builders, who are often delightfully grating, anal-retentively stubborn, and pigheadedly ambitious. I am not sure how or in which order the episodes had been curated or selected for my viewing pleasure on the plane, but it seemed to me that many of the episodes were featuring people who had been specifically seized by the desire to build HOUSES OF FUN (notably, to be spelt in CAPITAL LETTERS) -- this was just something that they all seemed to say: "HOW CAN ANYONE NOT HAVE FUN IN A HOUSE LIKE THIS HOUSE!". No matter how expensive or impractical or annoying (to others) it would be for them to do so, no expenses were to be spared! £20,000 dance floor in your basement? Yes! Fantasy volcanic sauna spa just for yourself?? Yes! Gratuitously curvy looking house just because you like curvy houses?? YES! 2-tons of minimalist artisanal latvian glass surrounding the exterior facade of your delicately cantilevered house??? YES! Reality TV style camera swoop onto the house? YES! YES! YES! NOW THIS IS WHAT I CALL TELEVISION!



Planning permissions battles? Water table considerations and flooded worksites? Theft of all your precious work tools while you're away for a weekend? Mortgaging yourself up to the eyeballs and doing some refinancing gymnastics? Moving the whole family into a boathouse temporarily because you had to sell your original house to pay for the construction? Resorting to completely un-ecofriendly cement fills to prevent leakages? Investing in eco-friendly but expensive energy panels that will charge your electric car and maybe hopefully pay back for itself after about what, 7 years, or was it 25 years? Totally self-cleaning houses? Excessive use of astroturf? Exploring stone finishes which feel like leather? Behold, the host, Kevin McCloud, enthusing that ARCHITECTURE CAN HAPPEN ANYWHERE!

As you can tell, I have been won over by its winning combination of reckless ambition, ridiculously minimalist cuboidial architectures, and sheer boring construction site mundanity. I mean, if you've ever been unreasonably excited by a trip to the B&Q, then you might conceivably feel drawn towards these lofty spires of epic DIY housebuilding! Whenever my housing conditions are correct, I do turn into the sort who might be obsessing over joint fillers and materials, getting all excited by the thought of customizing my own drainage system for my hypothetical one-day-to-be-built-from-scratch-with-my-own-two-bare-hands future house. This show has admittedly reinvigorated my housebuilding aspirations. I love building things! I mean, WHY DON'T I RANDOMLY OWN SOME LAND ALREADY? Why can't I build myself a funny house to live in?

My favorite was this episode with a woman who wanted to build a minimal modernist box of a boathouse on the River Thames in the middle of a long row of pristinely conserved Tudor houses. AND SO SHE DID.



"My next project is to demolish the other houses next to mind and BAM! Turn them all into awesomely NEW and FRESH and SHARP houses and turn this part of the river into a frozen snapshot of the new and fantastic modern 21st century forever instead of the 16th century. That'll show them up, all of them them stuck-in-the-mud Tudor houseowners..."



Okay the lady did not quite say all that in quite those words, but she did say everything until the BAM (addition mine), and she also did say it, gleefully, whilst sitting in a little wooden pleasureboat as the host Kevin McCloud interviewed her and they floated sanguinely down the Thames...

McCloud then tiptoed over to the neighbors to ask them if their views might ever soften after seeing the no-expenses-spared construction work and extremely thoughtful delicate care that was taken to produce what the homeowners wanted to be the best ever modern contemporary house on the Thames riverfront in Oxford. NO!!! NEVER!!! hissed the lady neighbour, and god almighty what was that sound we heard echoing in the background? Was that the sounds of pearls exploding as they were being tightly clutched all up and down the riverfront, or was that just the sound of 21st-century-style house-demolition-and-construction whether-or-not-you-like-it-or-not? The housebuilding lady was totally trollin' man. She totally worked them all up and I love it.

You know, if I could build any house in the world, I think I might want to build a ridiculous house as well. I wouldn't want to build a traditional house in a traditional style in a traditional area. I'd maybe like an upside-down house. One that got bigger at the top instead of being bottom heavy. I'd want to build a house that would look like NO OTHER HOUSE IN THE WORLD...