REVIEW Christian Maidankine
Since taking over On Site Review in 2015, the designers, academics, practitioners, and journalists that make up The Site Collective?s core team have been experimenting with different ways that print media can serve as a forum for architectural ideas. Their first half-dozen editions of The Site Magazine continued the thematic, call-based format of On Site Review. But more recently, readers have been treated to some new formats.
The four slim volumes in the series Deviant Devices are held together by a rubber band notched into their covers. Each volume follows a theme?Perceive, Collect, Translate, and Disperse?exploring how it is practised through physical apparatuses. Together, they inquire: how do designers use tools to understand, collate, and spread their work?and how do these processes become just as important as the information they treat"  Perceive follows those who use their work to look at the world. Some later analyze this data, while others, such as artist Dan Tapper, value the raw observations. Tapper?s bespoke Machines to Listen to the Sky track electromagnetic sounds in the world?s ionosphere. Collect describes different projects of information recording, including Elaine Ayers? piece on colour coding in botany?a work that expresses the complications that arise from the deterioration of material samples and information over time. The projects in Translate relay information, including Project Gnomo, a solar clock created by Unive...