beyond extraction

Araucanía and antofogasta’s geological narratives

in daily memoriam

The Borders of Boston Carol-Anne Rodrigues The Borders of Boston Carol-Anne Rodrigues

Part 3: Roxbury & Somerville

In our visits to restaurants, we have entered homes and crossed borders to taste food from across the world. However, for as many places as there are with those that offer food, there is equally as high a number of places where people cannot even afford food. In this piece, we explore the food provisional institutions, Project Restore Us & Food For Free, in their respective missions to bring food to all.

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Call and Response Jenna Schnitzler Call and Response Jenna Schnitzler

Call and Response - Procedure

Still, there is an unseen middle phase in the process of most human things. Francesca Hughes likens the struggle between ideas and matter in buildings to the hesitance for artists, scientists, and philosophers to draw embryonic development in the 14th and 15th centuries.

Likewise in architecture, there is an “awkward generation of drawings that immediately follows the concept sketch, the not-yet buildings and the buildings-to-be––the drawings we are never shown[…], or the drawings that are too ugly to draw” (Hughes).

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Ready Player 77 ReadyPlayer 77 Ready Player 77 ReadyPlayer 77

Traipsing through Boston in 1783

The historical film is a journey into the past. You watch as known narratives or even alternative ones unfold, catching a glimpse of idiosyncrasies, and at times, judging historical accuracy. So if the historical film is a journey into the past, then the historical game, in this case Assassins Creed III, is an experience of that past through the lens of a participant that has a hand in the unfolding of those narratives, occupying space and viscerally reacting to the events that have been coded in.

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Call and Response Jenna Schnitzler Call and Response Jenna Schnitzler

Call and Response - Error and Precision

Error is good, and precision is a technical myth.

From the hatch tests we drew last week, it is clear that this instrument is most precise when both the X and Y axes are moving together. Diagonal lines, in this case at a 45 degree angle, are drawn on paper with the greatest fidelity to the coded input drawn in CAD space. This makes me think that this instrument and I have some similarities, gravitating towards drawings created in the plan oblique, or axonometric projections.

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The Borders of Boston Carol-Anne Rodrigues The Borders of Boston Carol-Anne Rodrigues

Part 2: Watertown & Somerville

On a grey Wednesday afternoon, Carol-Anne and I, Ana, took the bus down Mt Auburn St into Watertown, to visit Tabrizi Bakery owned by Mohammad Tabrizi. The store is famous for its Persian cookies. We tasted nazok, papion, zaban, and rice flour cookies, among others. They all have a subtle, soft sweetness with hints of cardamon.

Five miles east in Somerville is The Neighborhood Restaurant. On a sunny summer afternoon, I sat down in the vine-covered outdoor patio that defines the restaurant’s dining experience. Before even sitting down with me, the owner, Sheila Borges, served me a bowl of The Neighborhood’s famous cream of wheat. It’s a warm, sweet and creamy porridge with a rich taste of cinnamon.

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Call and Response Jenna Schnitzler Call and Response Jenna Schnitzler

Call and Response - Lines

I spent two weeks in the winter building a small machine.
It is a machine with three motors, three drive screw rotary axes, and a motion controller – it is most simply something that can move precisely in three dimensions and is controlled by numbers.

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Ready Player 77 ReadyPlayer 77 Ready Player 77 ReadyPlayer 77

A Brief Attempt to Diagram Homes in Open World Games

In an open-world game where you can own homes, what exactly do you experience as a player? What do these homes provide after stripping away our actions in real life, such as eating, cleaning, or sleeping? Here, the definition of home is literal: It does not imply the symbolic meaning of belonging to a player community. Home, here, is also interchangeable with a plethora of synonyms, such as a safe house, hideout, base, home plate, garage, HQ…

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Positions Collective Positions Collective

Week II - III: The City & Global Economy

In reading Rem’s and Sassen’s writing on globalization – and in part due to their Dutch nationality – I was reminded of the lustfully divergent joy and terror of vanitas style paintings that emanated from the beginnings of globalization in 16th century Holland. (Bayowa) // Koolhaas' Junkspace is a fundamentally thermodynamic and geological phenomenon concerned with the reorganization of matter, a single, giant, convective substrate. On the surface it appears hyperspatial: a collapsing of reality into a topologically connected network of air conditioned nodes. (Wolk)

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