I needed to show a new Netlab intern the maps from Banham's Los Angeles, Architecture of Four Ecologies and realized that I had left the original behind. Luckily, Google Books had a copy here, strangely however, in their quest to remove copyrighted images, Google's censors (human? algorithmic?) had gone awry and had started producing art such as this image:
Is this meticulous work the result of someone emulating Justin Jorgesen's Obscene Interiors in which amateur pornography is removed, leaving only amateur decor? (Jorgensen's project is a recapitulation of Naomi Uman's 1999 film Removed and not all that different from John Haddock's Internet Sex Photos or Laura Carton's Fictive Porn series or Jo Broughton's Empty Porn Set series…the list seems to go on endlessly…thanks to my crack team of researchers for these) Or is this a sly commentary by the Google AI (which is reputed to be feasting on all the world's books) on a future immaterial world? Or perhaps it is evidence of the state of Los Angeles architecture, (in Banham's time as today)… in which branded, signature work is an alibi for the careful removal of traces of anything but bottom-line-driven developer design from the landscape?
I needed to show a new Netlab intern the maps from Banham's Los Angeles, Architecture of Four Ecologies and realized that I had left the original behind. Luckily, Google Books had a copy here, strangely however, in their quest to remove copyrighted images, Google's censors (human? algorithmic?) had gone awry and had started producing art such as this image:
Is this meticulous work the result of someone emulating Justin Jorgesen's Obscene Interiors in which amateur pornography is removed, leaving only amateur decor? (Jorgensen's project is a recapitulation of Naomi Uman's 1999 film Removed and not all that different from John Haddock's Internet Sex Photos or Laura Carton's Fictive Porn series or Jo Broughton's Empty Porn Set series…the list seems to go on endlessly…thanks to my crack team of researchers for these) Or is this a sly commentary by the Google AI (which is reputed to be feasting on all the world's books) on a future immaterial world? Or perhaps it is evidence of the state of Los Angeles architecture, (in Banham's time as today)… in which branded, signature work is an alibi for the careful removal of traces of anything but bottom-line-driven developer design from the landscape?