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COLLASUS COLLASUS COLLASUS

COLLASUS COLLASUS COLLASU

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COLLASUS

COLLASUS COLLASUS Office for Collaborative Sustainability

collasus.com

COLLASUS COLLASUS COLLASUS

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Oil soaked wave breaking, Gulf Shores Alabama photo: Eric Hunter

Oil soaked wave breaking, Gulf Shores Alabama photo: Eric Hunter

Coolsurf is digital drift. Kind of like a sa-

fari and sketchbook; snapping screenshots, we

google through history, geography, and culture.

The way finding system is quite simple. Blank text

boxes, and saturated hierarchies give us the lay

of the land. As we surf through sharks, shells, and

salt. We develop a reconstructed environment,

with a fresh scale of values and a new view of dif-

ferent relationships.

Singular acts which seek to place order over

an ever-ending field of difference. The globe,

a boundless breadth of riches. Became site for

standardization and infrastructural fields. Our cur-

rent systems of data transmission, satellite orbits,

and intercontinental pipelines do not belie this

fact. We have the capacity to roam forever. Plug-

ging into everything around us. Foraging from

boredom.

Like a rip in panty hose, otherwise tightly

bound to the skin it covers, the hole or interrup-

tion allows for desire to seep in. Once penetrated

by these acts of violation, the grid releases its op-

pressive hold over our desires. What was held in a

matrix of ordered directionality begins to slip into

diagonals and eddies. An act, which accompanies

they chess piece celebration of the grid.

What we seek is to expose a nefarious and

promiscuous history that we have. A practice eas-

ily comparable to postmodern collage, or games

like 7 degrees of Kevin Bacon. These journeys are

tools for liberation, simultaneously new urber-

urban maps and engines for creative production.

MANHATTANISM COOLSURF

nonlinear internet grid

keyboardsubjectivity’s plug-in

never ending similarity

superimposed eventcentral park and broadway

GLOBALISM

never ending difference

superimposed systeminfrastructure

&

THE BAND

THE BAND

AG O O G L I N G D O W N A S T R E E T

I N T E X A S > f o r a m o m e n t w e

c a u g h t a g l i m p s e o f o u r s e l v e s

w e g r e w w e a r y a n d d e c i d e d i t w a s t i m e f o r a r e s t

,

B

S P L A S H

1Black Box

C

W e c l o s e d o u r e y e s s s s s s s

> p u s h e d p l a y

n o w s c r e e n i n g o n o u r e y e l i d s

Face down in the desert snow after the crash, our eyes were nearly

frozen, our bodies almost paralyzed.

Everything was the shade of an antique ivory, as he started into his

story of the crystals.

An older gentleman in a felty suit called Wayne had located our

transmitter’s signal.

1CRYSTALS

D

1Crystals 1

Mounds

1Body Hose

D E

FD - F G - I J-K

L - N O - Q R - T

CHARACTER MATRIX SITE

Wayne SchmidtJoesph Bueys

excerpt from Energy Plan for the Western Man

Suburbia

Native AmericanCasper David FreidrichWade Boggs

Yankee StadiumMoundville, Alabama

BDSMSEREEN

Underground ClubJapanese TV showBedroom

E

“Music is an art not yet grown up; its condition is comparable to that stage of Egyptian bas-reliefs when the head and legs were shown in profile while the torso appeared "front face" - the stage of development in which the myriad irregular suggestions of nature can only be taken up in regularised or conventionalised forms. With Free Music we enter the phase of technical maturity such as that enjoyed by the Greek sculptors when all aspects and attitudes of the human body could be shown in arrested movement.

Existing conventional music (whether "classical" or popular) is tied down by set scales, a tyrannical (whether metrical or irregular) rhythmic pulse that holds the whole tonal fabric in a vice-like grasp and a set of harmonic procedures (whether key-bound or atonal) that are merely habits, and certainly do not deserve to be called laws. Many composers have loosened, here and there, the cords that tie music down. Cyril Scott and Duke Ellington indulge in sliding tones; Arthur and others use intervals closer than the half tone; Cyril Scott (following my lead) writes very irregular rhythms that have been echoed, on the European continent, by Stravinsky, and others; Schoenberg has liberated us from the tyranny of conventional harmony. But no non-Australian composer has been willing to combine all these innovations into a consistent whole that can be called Free Music.

It seems to me absurd to live in an age of flying and yet not to be able to execute tonal glides and curves - just as absurd as it would be to have to paint a portrait in little squares (as in the case of mosaic) and not to be able to use every type of curved lines. If, in the theatre, several actors (on the stage together) had to continually move in a set theatrical relation to each other (to be incapable of individualistic, independent movement) we would think it ridiculous, yet this absurd goose-stepping still persists in music. Out in nature we hear all kinds of lovely and touching "free" (non-harmonic) combinations of tones, yet we are unable to take up these beauties and expressivenesses into the art of music because of our archaic notions of harmony.

Personally I have heard free music in my head since I was a boy of 11 or 12 in Auburn, Mel-bourne. It is my only important contribution to music. My impression is that this world of tonal freedom was suggested to me by wave movements in the sun that I first observed as a young child at Brighton, Vic., and Albert Park, Melbourne. (See case I)

Yet the matter of Free Music is hardly a personal one. If I do not write it someone else cer-tainly will, for it is the goal that all music is clearly heading for now and has been heading for through the centuries. It seems to me the only music logically suitable to a scientific age.

The first time an example of my Free Music was performed on man-played instruments was when Percy Code conducted it (most skilfully and sympathetically) at one of my Melbourne broadcast lectures for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, in January, 1935. But Free Music demands a non-human performance. Like most true music, it is an emotional, not a cerebral, product and should pass direct from the imagination of the composer to the ear of the listener by way of delicately controlled musical machines. Too long has music been subject to the limitations of the human hand, and subject to the interfering interpretation of a middle-man: the performer. A composer wants to speak to his public direct. Machines (if properly constructed and properly written for) are capable of niceties of emotional ex-pression impossible to a human performer. That is why I write my Free Music for theramins - the most perfect tonal instruments I know. In the original scores (here photographed) each voice (both on the pitch-staves and on the sound- strength staves) is written in its own specially coloured ink, so that the voices are easily distinguishable, one from the other.

Percy Aldridge Grainger, Dec.6, 1938”

F

emotional placebo & character development

“Saiyuki / Alakazan the Great.” by yasuji mori_father of anime

1Devils 1

Mounds

1Body Hose

G H

ID - F G - I J-K

L - N O - Q R - T

CHARACTER MATRIX SITE

Schenzen

Native AmericanCasper David FreidrichWade Boggs

Yankee StadiumMoundville, Alabama

BDSMSEREEN

Underground ClubJapanese TV showBedroom

,..

Cool_surf: is the diagramming of the flux of information in contemporary media.

The Cool_surf project began as a collaborative web exercise. Participants would start with a theme and expand on it via individually curated web surfs. Some searches became expansive narratives, and others prompted additional research. The project developed as a dynamic syntax that catalogues, maps, and issues this information. The first edition explores and develops the ex-panding vocabulary.

#1COLLASUSThe Office of Collaborative Sustainability is a collective of young architects, planners, sculptors, painters, web designers, graphic designers, and farmers.

Our creative thinking process is like looking at the clouds or stars. The freedom to use our full imagina-tions sustains our personal practices and allows unpredictable forms to emerge. The systems that we watch and the patterns that we find are all part of a growing mass of documentation. We gather, create and recycle our resources by critically deconstructing and reconfiguring that information, to construct a new language of sustainability through collective experimentation and design. www.collasus.com