Hi Johannes,

That sounds like a great project!  I will check it out. 

The book actually delves quite a lot into water as itself being a bridge.  For example, it claims that the Latin word for bridge derives from the ancient Greek word for sea, and that ancient Greece understood the sea to be a "bridge" among its many islands.  

The book also looks at transits in general, for example by ferry, and how they compare to and differ from bridges.  Often, locations where bridges are built are chosen to replace excess ferry traffic (as with the Golden Gate bridge).  In cultural traditions ferry-crossings often represent transits which are one-way or controlled by a guardian or deity (such as Charon, about whom so many great artworks have been made).  I absolutely agree that in a sense -- if I'm not misunderstanding your point -- bridges are to technology what rivers are to nature, and they are profoundly related on basically every level while retaining fundamental aspects of difference.

After closer reading I'll check to see if the book considers rivers in the sense that they connect, as it were, the planet's water with itself, perhaps between its atmospheric and terrestrial states.  To me they definitely do!  🙂  And this kind of perspective goes back to forever I think as in the Nile, Ganges, and so forth.

All very best and happy autumnal equinox,

Max



From: NetBehaviour <netbehaviour-bounces@lists.netbehaviour.org> on behalf of Johannes Birringer via NetBehaviour <netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 22, 2021 9:58 AM
To: netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org <netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org>
Cc: Johannes Birringer <Johannes.Birringer@brunel.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] Wavelets, water, bridges
 
Thanks for these references and writings, Simon, Max and Anthony....
and while I pondered what was said about bridges, and the comment on the bridges book (..."also evaluates the concept of bridge from a network perspective, exploring the nature of connections i.e. how accelerated hyperconnectivity can be a form of isolation, control, and homogeneity lacking informational richness"), it occurred to me that no mention is really made of water, and all the issues that could be brought up in regard to its crucial role on our earth and its "network" connectedness for our survival.

In this context, if you are interested, an art review I found in "Afterall 49" really got me hooked to re-redirecting bad memories from this summer's dismal floods in Germany to different memories of how crucial rivers are, and thus also exploring a kind of imaginary "river flow."
We performed it in the dance studio yesterday, hoping it might enable a certain visceral connectedness into "drawing out" (with graphite on extended paper roll) an unruly, winding, perhaps serpentine river-run on the canvas to sounds we generated and mixed (we photographed the action to build towards further media research to be done on water, hydropower, capitalist extraction, hydro-engineering, ecological democracy..... along the lines perhaps of the collages that Forensic Architecture uses in their politically invested critical installations (who owns, occupies and has the right to land is always a thorny enough question yet the flow of water presents even more complicated conflicts?)

The review article is "When Walls Become Rivers: Carolina Caycedo’s 'Serpent River Book' (by Lisa Blackmore), and can be found here (https://afterall.org/article/when-walls-become-rivers)

If you wish to see a bit of Caycedo’s challenging and intricate 'Serpent River' installation, here it is: 
http://carolinacaycedo.com/serpent-river-book

regards
Johannes Birringer
dap-lab


________________________________________
From: NetBehaviour <netbehaviour-bounces@lists.netbehaviour.org> on behalf of Anthony Stephenson via NetBehaviour <netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org>
Sent: 22 September 2021 14:57
Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] Wavelets

Ah yes, beyond Giaconda, bridges can be interesting. Chris Burden, my old teacher and advisor at UCLA, was working with bridges towards the end of his life: https://architizer.com/blog/practice/details/chris-burden/

--

- Anthony Stephenson

http://anthonystephenson.org/


[https://docs.google.com/uc?export=download&id=0B2CfYcwRRRESdzhEWmFsTlRLVEk&revid=0B2CfYcwRRRESNEFMVUFRWmRzcVp2Rys3VWxSNTFHUS9QMDhRPQ]