Bus idea

possibly use bus advertising that fades in light or with changes in weather / seasons. could change depending on where the bus drove, the conditions, the shadows and underpasses, trees, etc.

Decomposition

This is from Ellen Lupton's article "A Postmortem on Deconstruction."

"Deconstruction asks a question: How does representation inhabit reality? How does the external appearance of a thing get inside its internal essence? How does the surface get under the skin?"

"A work of design can be called deconstruction when it exposes and transforms the established rules of writing, interrupting the sacred 'inside' of content with the profane 'outside' of form."

*inventive typography from the past has done this, and by writing that is what she means.

"For the design field, deconstruction has been reduced to the name of a historical period rather than an ongoing way of approaching design."

"Deconstruction will never be over because it describes a way of thinking about language that has always existed."

"It's not a style or a movement, but a way of asking questions through our work. Critical form making will always be part of design practice, whatever theoretical tools one might use to identify it."

style wars

"the danger is that the style of the work will be taken as a model - a common failure of communication in any theory of the visual arts. A truly exemplary philosophy of art or architecture should transcend any one practitioner's applications. It should on the most basic, conceptual level, provide a ground plan for a wider range of interpretations without losing its central message." - james wines, "de-architecture"

*Design should not ignore the existing disorder or attempt to tame it. - Premise for my project, applied from my paper.

"Although art cannot radically change the world, it can function as a sensitive chronicler, revealing relationships between aesthetic visions, social order, and natural forces. In this regard, the present climate of risk, and its effect on our lives, is another important source for a narrative architecture." - james wines, "de-architecture"

*When we show design's weak side (decomposition / age) it connects with real life through imperfection.

"...New York has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future. A city composed of paroxysmal places in monumental reliefs." - Michel de Certeau

*NY is the perfect climate for testing mortality design.

Death and Religion

"Let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death... We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom."
-Montaigne, "The Oxford Book of Death"

"if one knows that what is born will end in death, then there will be love."
-Sutra of Buddha Teachings the Seven Daughters

"But it is reasonable to enquire whether, in the mystical illusions of man, there is not a reflection of an underlying reality. Heaven is nowhere in space, but it is in time."
-Sir Arthur Eddington

Religion has in common (African, Buddhism, Catholic Church, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Judaism, Native American, Sikhism, Taoism, Islam / Muslim):
death
ceremony - wake, funeral, pilgrimage, mourning
tradition - ways of dealing with death
explanation of what comes next - afterlife, reincarnation, transition, purgatory
**Afterlife, the transition of, the reason we are alive, the things we should do while alive, ways to behave

"The equilibrium state of life is death." - Fagg

Idea that we borrow from nature to live, and eventually must give back in the form of death (human body returns to the earth in decomposition.) No matter religious viewpoint of the spirit, the physical is a cycle that cannot be denied. Shows death as absolute necessity.

I like the idea of death /mortality / time / change as a "living moment." Every second of our lives is a living moment, and every attempt at design is a living moment, or a moment to reach and interact with other human beings' living moments.