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Anything Muppets: a new method

dia

For anyone looking for a thesis topic, look no further. There is so much architectural possibility in this - both in terms of functional and programmatic cues, prefabrication and modular systems, characterisation and narrative, volumes and flexible spaces.

Read on:

Anything Muppets are 'empty' Muppet heads. Facial features, bodies and clothes can be added to make any kind of character. A similar group of puppets known as Whatnots appeared on The Muppet Show.

During the first seasons of Sesame Street, they were known as "The Anything People" who could be anything they wanted. This ever-expanding troupe of Muppets came in all shapes, sizes, and appearances, and were able to play any role needed.

Usually the actors would turn them into different characters. This concept was abandoned after a few seasons, although every once in a while an Anything Muppet character would take off his nose or lose his moustache.

Main Sesame Street characters that are made from Anything Muppets include Count Von Count, Prairie Dawn, Fat Blue, Guy Smiley, Roosevelt Franklin and Sherlock Hemlock.

Instantiations:

Fat Blue
Fat Blue with hands
Pointy-headed Green
Tall Orange (Pumpkin)
Purple
Lavender
Brown
Large Lavender Live Hand
Small Pink
Small Purple
Small Orange
Small Green
Small Lavender
Orange Gold
Orange Gold Live Hand

 
Mar 3, 11 7:52 pm
dia

For example, Small Lavender alone had the following modulations:

Sonny Friendly
Max
Various AM kids
at least one bug

And Pointy Headed Green had far too many to mention.

Mar 3, 11 7:55 pm  · 
 · 
Cherith Cutestory
Mar 3, 11 8:18 pm  · 
 · 

There's a Muppet Wiki. The internet is a good thing.

Mar 3, 11 10:13 pm  · 
 · 
Gonzo owns what he claims is the world's biggest mold garden, made up of fungus, truffles and spores. He explains to John Denver in episode 401 of The Muppet Show that he'd gone away on vacation, forgetting to clean out his refrigerator. When he returned, the food was all green and fuzzy: too cute to throw out.

John Denver + organic self-perpetuating city structures. I want to go back to the 70s.

Mar 3, 11 10:17 pm  · 
 · 

love it, dia, but (speaking of the 70s) how would this thesis topic be different from the old-school talk of typology?

(which, i'll admit, was a major thread of my 1991 thesis...)

Mar 4, 11 6:52 am  · 
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4 Canonical Muppets:

Oscar.
An incomplete whole, one whose grammatical closure is only assured through iterative negotiation with his trash can: his semiotic envelope of meaning. Meaning through negation of childhood nostalgias. A sign, an oracle, in Jacobs living streetscape; one that taunts us with mortality and detritus.

Kermit.
On being an organismic green sac rendered functional only through manual manipulation and co-operation of diverse mechanical systems. Ego here is sublimation. Personhood pathologically subverted to context. In Fraiser's words: "Where the dendritic bifurcation ceases to produce differentiation, that is the Garden of Eden" (The Golden Bough)

Gonzo.
A temporal and perspectival sequencing of Bramante's medulla. What more needs to be said?

The Swedish Chef:
The Valley of the Uncanny. A chimera, acorporeal; half human/half animal. What Agamben, through Heidegger, might call: 'the within-ing of the exteriority of the manimal'. The muppet that made Linneaus insane. Babbling not so much as languaging, but as the collective Continental Wolf-pack Howl of the onset of Mechanical Warfare in the Twentieth Century.

Also:
John Denver's song about Buckminster Fuller:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wie219qytT0


Mar 4, 11 9:36 am  · 
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jmanganelli

yeah! what he said!

......

......

......

what was that about hats, again?

Mar 4, 11 11:31 am  · 
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Excellent post, e e w.

Mar 4, 11 2:17 pm  · 
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dia

See? Muppetism is deep

Mar 4, 11 8:37 pm  · 
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Rusty!

Cookie Monster Demolition Inc.

Mar 5, 11 11:02 am  · 
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blah

Here's my little muppet!!!! (with her friends)

:-)

Mar 5, 11 2:14 pm  · 
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blah

The Swedish Chef: was he muppet that made Linneaus insane?

HILARIOUS!

I thought he was the one that proved Lamarck right!

Mar 5, 11 2:23 pm  · 
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Rusty!

Awww. make, that's adorable!

Mar 5, 11 2:38 pm  · 
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toasteroven
twiddle bugs

apparently inspired the rural studio.

Mar 5, 11 5:34 pm  · 
 · 
Mar 5, 11 5:45 pm  · 
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toasteroven
more twiddlebugs

(sorry - in spanish):

translated: the twiddle bug father is creating a modernist landscape for his LEED house, but later regrets his decision after destroying large portion of the surrounding natural habitat. Ernie expresses shock and dismay over their eventual landscape urbanist solution.

Mar 6, 11 11:54 am  · 
 · 
dia

Okay,

I don't have the time, but I would love to see an Anything Muppet (hereto after known as AM) esquisse that centres around a programming a parametric volumetric architectural response.

The brief is up to you, and I would like to see a site and its constraints. You can characterise/codify/functionalise the colours using your own methodology, and I expect that there will be some nice AM juxtapositions and Venn muppetgrams that result from a blending of functions.

In terms of volumetric scale, I have denoted the following AM proportions (note Small Lavender):

Fat Blue (100%)
Fat Blue with hands (100% + appendages)
Pointy-headed Green (100%)
Tall Orange (Pumpkin) (100%)
Purple (75%)
Lavender (75%)
Brown (75%)
Large Lavender Live Hand (100% + appendages)
Small Pink (25%)
Small Purple (25%)
Small Orange (25%)
Small Green (25%)
Small Lavender (125%)
Orange Gold (75%)
Orange Gold Live Hand (75%)

As a machinist, I expect that the built model might be able to respond to further manipulation from an outside source, which might be a script, sketch or the letter/number of the day.

Steven, feel free to leap in with any advice on typology.

Mar 6, 11 6:05 pm  · 
 · 
elinor

when i was small in the developing world, we only had four good tv shows--ONE 30-sec spot of Tom&Jerry once a week, Dallas on saturday nights, the Sound of Music once a year......and the MUPPETS!

...i can't possibly express how much i love this thread!!

Mar 6, 11 11:39 pm  · 
 · 
dia

Correction:

Orange Gold Live Hand (75% + appendages)

NB. I doubt that sentence has ever existed before - thank the Muppets.

Mar 6, 11 11:45 pm  · 
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Rusty!
"ONE 30-sec spot of Tom&Jerry once a week"

They wouldn't even play you a whole 4 minute episode? That's torture. You poor Bosnian.

dia[strike]base[/strike], you completely went over my head with the AM design challenge. You should be in charge of NCARB tests.

Mar 6, 11 11:51 pm  · 
 · 
elinor

oh, maybe it was 4 min...it seemed SO SHORT.

and...we WISHED we were bosnian....... :)

Mar 6, 11 11:52 pm  · 
 · 
dia

I just want to see this thread on the main page with an image to match

Apr 12, 11 10:30 pm  · 
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http://www.slate.com/articles/life/low_concept/2012/06/what_kind_of_muppet_are_you_chaos_or_order_.html?fb_ref=sm_fb_like_toolbar&fb_source=home_multiline

 

More information about Muppets, wherein they are seen as quasi-bio-animate analogs of Systems Theory.  Some acting as strange attractors (read: Lucretius' clinamen), finding formality through accretion.  Others functioning as something akin to Wolfram's famous Rule 30.  The article is an object lesson in the creation and maintenance of form through the application of rule-based parametric iteration.

Jun 8, 12 4:33 pm  · 
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