Welcome the new age of turtle bred homeless people! Who like hermit craps carry with them their own collapsable, portable shelters! Made out from cheap cardboard and expensive arduino chipboards... why spend $35 dollars on a GODDAM tent, when you can use the money to BUILD your own non-waterproof, floor-less, carboard shelter, with an incorporated adress that turns on some funny lights far away, with no real meaning yet...
I still can't see how this thing could ever work, or even help homeless people. First off... what's the idea of having an adress? I'm pretty shure homeless people don't recieve mails, and, aren't wuite interested in that basis. INDIGENCY is to be dead in society, this is like, giving food to you dead granmother... PLUS, how in bloody hell are this guys suposed to KNOW about SHELLHOUSE? surfing through the internet??? going to a museum??? I mean... it's not like a poor drunk will even have enough dexterity to even fold the cardboard in the rigt way... and if you GIVE them a ready shellhouse, they'd probably sell the electronics for some wine and tear the cardboard in order to build a more protective shelter....
This thing doesn't work, and I hate it. I can't really understand why it's captured so many people's attention.
But, what the hell, art is all about MAKING problems, not solutions so, yeah, I get it, this is a friggin' piece o' art.
So, why am I talking about all this? Well...
Last Thursday I went to this lecture about the whole SHELLHOUSE thing. Carolina Pino, who made this for her Magister Thesis (I think), was giving the lecture, with the help of another three experts in arts (Pablo Rivera), philosophy (Sergio Rojas) and architecture (Rodrigo Tisi).
After ms.Pino gave her poorly supported powerpoint introduction, Pablo Rivera gave his opinion about the whole project, which was a bit hard to understand. He gave a couple of examples about art projects with homeless people that didn’t work in reality, like for example, someones idea of creating a supermarket trolley that somehow, probably with the help of Optimus Prime, turned into a home. What the artist wasn’t expecting, was that if the trolley lost a wheel, it was done for (I know, I know... he talked about loosing a goddam wheel, and not about the whole autobot transformation).
Once he was done talking, Sergio Rojas charged in and started talking about a short story about evil spirits taking control over a house, and slowly making the owners push themselves through the main door and into the street. He than said that art wasn’t the best way to communicate something.
Rodrigo Tisi was ready with a powerfull comeback to what his companions had said, but, I didn’t really quite understood him. He said something about Shellhouse being the center of a Electronics, Architecture and Arts triangle... I’m pretty sure he meant a love triangle, but... whatever...
To this, the other invites branched into another conversation and begun debating about communications and arts... to what I couldn’t really pay much attention, for I was starving and dying on my knees.
They then talked about how goverments are becoming more authoritarial, and how this adress thing makes homeless people trackable and an easy target for shadowy goverment agencies... which... probably made them homeless in the first place...hahah...
The truth is, the conversation that sparked through the lecture was probablly the same thing any other group of people could have had anywhere else about the project (except they didn’t directly talked against this horrid project), and, that was hard to follow, specially because in this open, informal lecture, the exposees talked to each other like close friends talk, you know, in their own PERSONAL language.
So yeah, it was a bit of a bad expierence... at least I had the chance to give the UC’s srchitecture campus a quick glance through the night.
It was also fun reading the myriad amount of comments on the internet about the un-improvised shelter... specially the funny remarks on some of the negative feedback .
No intentions to hurt anyone but, I can’t really see much of a future on this project...
maybe something like what THIS guy did would work better...
