where has the blog gone?
september 28, 2003
After some 39 months, this site's weblog focusing on contemporary architecture and the city has reached its conclusion.
The weblog at varnelis.net was originally developed in response to the rapid expansion of the net. The speed with which information proliferated required new tools. The rapidly updateable weblog became a highly efficient means with which to organize this knowledge and to bring it to your attention.
At the time, weblogs were a new thing, barely registering on the radar scope of network culture. During the worst excesses of the dot.com boom, blogs offered the possibility that content could still be produced and/or organized by individuals or small collectives in defiance of post-Fordist corporate culture.
Blogs survived the dot.com crash and spread widely, often becoming places for teenagers and lost souls to bare their hearts in public or for radical pundits to comment on contemporary politics. The latter was an especially powerful force during the recent US invasion of Iraq.
But as Hegel points out, the Owl of Minerva spreads her wings at dusk. Something curious has happened to culture recently: it has imploded as radically as it once exploded. This is not only true in network culture, but in all culture. Witness the virtually complete collapse of OMA, Project on the City, the Eisenman office, Any, Assemblage, and other ventures that dominated architecture's previous golden age. This is not to say that intriguing work isn't being done, but that what is being done is slower, more subversive and subterranean. Acting fast has been replaced by thinking strategically. This is certainly the guiding principle behind the project that Robert Sumrell and I have taken on in our non-profit collective AUDC. Moreover, as the small number of recent entries here and at Archinect attests, there is less to report on. News organizations have cut back on investment and the economic slowdown has resulted in a broad cultural slump.
Putting the blog on a hiatus allows me to concentrate on a number of tasks for the web site. Expect changes in the next week or two that organize the large amount of content here more clearly. Expect more information as well. Instead of the weblog expect more essays, some unique to the web. Expect more projects by AUDC, my students at SCI-Arc, and myself.
Your favorite weblog entries are in the archives below.
