Tensegrity

Tensegrity from Personal Cinema on Vimeo.

Tensegrity is a working title for a new cooperative project of Personal Cinema media arts group. The project aims to be a multilayer research and composition of different elements, combining physical and virtual installations and online game art applications. It also aims to sketch the formation of open patterns for a visual theory,in relation to the ideas and concepts of play, game, labor, political/social struggle and war, anticipating the coming urban warfares and the possible alternatives of the next decade. For this, the ongoing fusion between the virtual and the real world is considered as a fact.

Tensegrity is a portmanteau of tensional integrity. It refers to the integrity of structures as being based in a synergy between balanced tension and compression components. The term "tensegrity" was first explored by artist Kenneth Snelson to produce sculptures such as his 18 meter high Needle Tower in 1968. The term 'tensegrity' was coined for Snelson by Buckminster Fuller. Fuller is best known for his geodesic domes, which he developed based on concepts explained and demonstrated by Snelson through sculptures. In other words,Tensegrity is the exhibited strength that results "when push and pull have a win-win relationship with each other". (wikipedia)

The term was also used (re-appropriated) by the sect of Carlos Castaneda, an application of the term that according to the members of the sect, expresses perfectly both the relations between the members of the group/s, as well as the connection and the acts of the sect with the rest of the society.
And this , because due to this elastic property of interconnections, when one element of the tensegrity structure is shifted, this shift is spread throughout the whole structure, and all the other elements shift as well, or adapt for a new configuration, yielding to these shifts without breaking.

Similar ideas regarding the drawing of an urbanistic plan and the utopian idea of a global city, was proposed in 1960 by the Dutch architect and artist Constant Nieuwenhuis in, his project New Babylon.

In order to facilitate a starting working plan several concepts/tags are invented or borrowed, that may be helpful to build the narrations that will be used in the project.

Tags as: corbusieros, bots, post-bureucratic guerillas, state machines, desire machines, war machines, real time wolves, ludotechnocrats, ludocapitalists, technobohemians, cybertariat, infoproletarium, soulitarians, antisurvivors. More tags will be invented through the development of the project.

A new world is pending, more Mad than Max or the appearence of something else, of something unexpectable.

Doing a project, is a process based on the freedom of becoming something, anything, except being an artist.


Contact at: mbholgr@gmail.com