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7/16/07: Divining the Open City

A holiday weekend, a "Veranito de San Juan" and the Gallinita and I packed the bikes and took off north along the coastal highway to the Ciudad Abierta de Ritoque (Open City in Ritoque), a sort of architecture and outdoor sculpture workshop along a 1.5 mile section of the coast run by the Universidad Católica and the Corporación Cultural Amereida<7p>

The "Open" is more likely the free experimentation that the giant spaces permit, a park of peculiar structural solutions unhindered by patronage or context or the economic limitations that would constrict any "real world" design. Here we see beach houses with bowed walls, a giant flute sculpture played by the wind, a precarious looking wooden sight-seeing deck, a just-started or never-completed outdoor sculpture. It brought flashbacks of Donald Judd's Chinati Foundation, the giant ranch of outdoor scultpure in Marfa, Texas. But here, the expansive land is more a workshop than a sculpture garden, unsanded edges, tools lying all around and remnants of late night asados with all the sculptor's friends.

The site is closed off and tucked away. It seems to exist more as an error in beach front real estate - a railroad runs between the coast and the highway, bringing a sudden halt to the sprawling weekend condiminiums contaminating their way up the coast from Viña del MAr and Con Con. All that greets you from the highway is an ultra-designed white gate (easy to miss even on a bicycle). We entered the Open City like a couple of barbarian invaders, curiously poring through the empty half-started projects in the alien landscape. Later, a couple of resident dogs led us across the train tracks and out to a picnic on a desolate beach.

These are the rest of my photos
A description (in Spanish)
More views on Flickr
A video

posted by jeremy @ 5:07 PM

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7/11/07: step three community

i come back to this pile of posting, i take a look through stacks of old paragraphs and missing illustrations and at first glance it's all horrendous - rotten links and giant blast holes and horribly unsound CSS layouts from a long history of careless joyride design overhauls - but then there's memories and it's probably impossible for anyone else to have such specific special things, and i blow off the rotten leaves and let all the parts slide all over and fall in on each other.

i've thought about the big chore of cleaning it all up. suddenly for the first time i remembered a writer i once met at a house dinner who completed an entire novel without punctuation, probably an annoying choice but his choice nonetheless, and at the cusp of a publication offer he had to decide between sinking with his aesthetic ship or the tedious task of going back and inserting every comma and capital letter that "belonged there." i go back to betacorpo cerca september 2003 (an interesting month in my absurd life) and i just hope that all the little scraps of documentation rest in the dust curiously like old letters found in a drawer in a desk in an abandoned house.

and then i turn to the side links and realize how many great little blogs and journals and such have all disappeared and turned into "search portals," not even staying up there frozen for the perusal. so i've trimmed them out and planted some of the newer things i've been reading from in the past little while, and these things lead to other things and...

worth mentioning are...

the literary blog and DIY media guide called no media kings, insightful green commentary both on green ink and under the concrete, the zine library, articles on border struggles at delete the border, and a slew of bike-related blogs that spark the pedalust with more than just tour de france updates: the welcomingly named bike hugger, practical tips at take the lane, and the travelogs of a couple on a bike trip along the pacific coast highway

posted by jeremy @ 5:00 PM

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7/8/07: new pixels

I owe this sudden surge of online activity to an occasional weekend job I have watching over a bed and breakfast, shut up in a house at a desk with an Internet connection. It's winter, so no one really comes here except the occasional Santiago couple who need to "escape from the air" for a bit

So while making up for lost time in 2 years of not owning a computer...

I've re-animated the betacorpo blog

I've finished a new set of photos from Mexico City taken while wandering with a plastic Holga camera

I've been playing with Flickr and you can voyeur at a bike trip through the lakes region of Chile, down through Chiloé last February if you´re so inclined

posted by jeremy @ 3:14 PM

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: pickup

Whoever's reading this at the moment can see all of the design tropes of a blog and if you've been anywhere around here in the past 6 months or so you've seen a few new changes in fits and starts (you see, I'm doing all of this without my own computer). And yes this blog is brand new, until you dart over and see this is actually a rather old endeavor with hideous gaps in updating and if you glance down below this you'll notice you're seeing the first fresh words after a long long silence.

And after a couple of years I've come back to this thing, I've thought about this thing a lot without really putting my finger on why, just realizing that I can pour through the archives and try to put them back together and realize I really enjoy all this. Whether I ignore it or not it follows me from place to place and different jobs and different hats and places and I still want to keep using it. And I enjoy it, and that's exactly why there's so many millions of these around.

So this post is a new post strung onto a thread that broke quite a while ago and rotted and stopped getting recognized in the street and just points to things that have long since disappeared like me.

I came back and took a look around and decided not to throw it away but string new words onto the old ones and see if I keep coming back and see if it grows and turns into something I really like again.

hey there...

It's July 2007, I live in Valparaíso, Chile, I speak English only about 6 hours a week, and there's many stories between this new salute and the last bit of consistency this thing once managed to maintain but I'll stick it's head out and pull it back and return hopefully not too much later and see if this thing can grow and be interesting.

posted by jeremy @ 1:41 AM

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