Architexture VI: trampolines and mesh slides

February 9th, 2010 referencesTags: architecture, architexture, body, city, experimental circus, play

I like the idea of using fabric to transform the geometry of a space: multiplying the possibilities for interaction yet flexible, mobile and eminently adaptable to other architectures

Architecture turned into enjoyment and participation.
instead of contemplating the void of the guggenheim museum‘s central space,
JDS architects have proposed an experience which sees a trampoline net spiraling down
the institution’s rotunda. this idea plays on frank lloyd wright’s original scenography
for the guggenheim in which he envisioned patrons visiting the exhibition from the top,
downwards.

DEAD RINGERS remix: the insides of bodies

September 10th, 2009 referencesTags: architecture, body, haptic, haunted space

They should have beauty contests for the insides of bodies

I decided I want the humiliation

You’re fucking a mutant!

Architexture3: Gutted Organs Old Railway Stations

August 26th, 2009 referencesTags: ambiance, architecture, architexture, city, detournement, haunted space, inanimata, interactive, machine, music, play, uncanny

From architecture and design magazine website Blueprint:

“Clear transparent tubes feed plumbing pipes with compressed air. These create a chorus of howls and moans. It is sort of like an out of tune harmony but isn’t displeasing, almost like the cry of a stream-train but not intrusive. This is apt for the Roundhouse, as it was built in 1846 as a Steam engine shed. The sounds become a reawakening of the haunts of its previous existence. It gives significance to the user of the building, as if our own experiences and lifetimes within that building become infused into the very make-up of it. This user-building relationship is highlighted by the operation of the installation, where the building only speaks when the user touches the keys of the pump organ to feed it.

If the large, round room is empty when you enter it, the installation is silent. One may feel timid walking to the pump organ, with its yellowy spotlight and the massive room to play to. The words ‘Please Play’ painted on the floor offer some encouragement. Most people are generally shy when playing musical instruments to an audience, but the pump organ cannot make a formal tune: the sound it generates is more like the clunking noises made by old, creaking heating systems in houses. The instrument itself is like an exaggerated version of the solitary church organ, usually played alone because it is only in tune with itself and not with other instruments.” (Elice Catmull, August 2009)

Architexture

July 31st, 2009 referencesTags: ambiance, architecture, architexture, derive, espace heureux, haunted space, photopia, utopia

Featuring my short animated film “Remainder” …

May 13th, 2009 project updatesTags: architecture, city, contingency, haunted space, music, photopia, remainder

CYBORGS: the uncanny reconfiguration of space

April 2nd, 2009 researchTags: Anthony Vidler, architecture, body, cyborg, Donna Haraway, haunted space, machine, mapping, uncanny

Diller and Scofidio's "Blur building"

Texts:

Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny

Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journey in Art, Architecture and Film

Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto

Vidler uses the cyborg as a useful metaphor to map out the contemporary direction of the relation between the theory and practice of architecture. The issues Vidler addresses, specifically regarding the history of the question of how spaces are perceived as (and designed as) places of human habitation, and how this search is dogged by the irruption of modernism and its sense of the uncanny/the failure of a sense of “dwelling”, are pragmatic issues oriented towards the design/creation of space and therefore open up a point of view very different from Lefevre’s, De Certeau’s, and Harvey’s focus on the experience of the inhabitant/the consumer. Contra Lefevre’s and de Certeau’s understanding of “abstract” space (designed, top down space, planned space) as something that must be contested and re-imagined by the user, Vidler reveals a much more complex mechanism of how different spaces (concrete, as well as imagined/idealized) can produce different subjectivities/bodies.

In the process, he creates a historical mapping of a phenomenology of space, starting with the rise of a modernist “eye” and its bisection of space into a positivist space, regularized by routine, mapped with reference points, knowable, and a “repressed”, uncanny space that emerges out of the woodwork when we lay down our guard/our epistemological grid – a secret, elusive space characterized by the phantom presence of an “other”. Vidler argues that this “haunting” is generated by a sense of the loss of a more complete or satisfying “original” space, one that would constitute a more real or more proper dwelling for its human inhabitants – wherefore a common nostalgia for the topos of childhood, architectural attempts to recreate atavistic, womb-like environments, or, on the other extreme, to invent a new mode of transparent, frictionless habitation (le Corbusier). All these creative and theoretical responses to the haunting of the reified, given spaces of modernity speak to a desire to align the human body with a spatial body, human interiority with an exteriorized space of imagination. According to Vidler, the history of modernist architecture is a series of attempts to build better homes, spaces that can properly connect subjectivity with the world.

The cyborg, and postmodernity invert this utopian search for dwelling. The nature of the cyborg, the new inhabitant of the present-future is not to dwell in a place (or to yearn for a lost art of dwelling) but to build/reconfigure/tinker (bricolage)/invent a body for herself that can plug into the multiple valences of her environment. Rather than occupying a home, the cyborg consumes space, collecting/archiving the content of a conflated material/virtual realm, “establishing a host of half-completed, half-broken refracted lines between mechanical objects and organic subjects”. Giuliana Bruno’s discussion of the “eye-mouth” as an epistemic organ for the visualization/understanding/devouring of (material and cinematic) space is particularly relevant to Vidler’s discussion of the cyborg as a subjectivity that assimilates space and the world it contains within the hitherto (theoretically) inviolable boundaries of her own body, in the process metamorphosizing into a sort of human Aleph. As a site of multiplicity i.e. multiple spaces, the body of the cyborg represents the anti-fulfillment of the modernist search for a lost unity or wholeness, instead premising the uncanny, the fractured, the heterogeneous as that which is fundamentally familiar and “natural” (in the way Haraway understands nature as a total environment encompassing human and non-human). In this sense, the cyborg symbolizes the attempt to theorize away from the endless quests for reconciliation that characterize modernism, to mobilize our energies into living in/with contemporary space and time rather than remembering/anticipating a proper home for subjectivity, paradoxically by presenting us with a superhuman or hybrid, posthuman ideal/ideality.

This mystical embracing of the postmodern condition, and its rejection of the anxiety infecting the modernist project, finds an echo in Edward Soja’s notion of Thirdspace and his attempt to envision space as an (infinite) potentiality rather than the sum of its parts (the literal space systematically produced by capitalism). In both cases it seems necessary to tease out whether these concepts express something more concrete than simply the movement of flight from failed (modernist) constructs.

N0-PLACE / U-TOPIA : second articulation of an animation project

March 13th, 2009 project updatesTags: Amy Kravitz, architecture, city, contingency, haunted space, immersion, infrastructure, mapping, maze, music, noise, photopia, space, trap, uncanny, utopia

The city we walk through everyday is not necessarily the city we experience. The urban landscape we experience is colored by our goals and projects, subordinated to the destination we are moving towards. We tend to blank out or forget the real space of the city, a often inexplicable space created by the various forms of infrastructure that are the bare bones of our urban lives. This short film recreates our sensation/perception of these “forgotten” spaces when we chose to focus on them, to really feel the contours of their existence. Although these different urban landscapes have different moods or atmospheric connotations, they all share the same capacity to both suck in and repulse our attention. Both omnipresent and indefinable/unnamable, this infrastructure-landscape creates a sensation much like falling down a well or becoming lost in a maze, as the mind loses all points of reference and is engulfed by/trapped in undiluted space.

Photographic stills of urban spaces representing freeway underpasses, unidentifiable buildings, passages, unplanned-for vegetation, pipes with no immediately visible purpose, walls, fences, or placing in the same space elements that are physically contiguous but semantically unrelated, such as a row of windows in a building and the tree growing in a parking lot next to it, or the sidewalk corner that randomly unites two structures are woven into each other in an editing style strongly reminiscent of Amy Kravitz’ piece “Trap” in which patterns of light and shadow alternate and flow into each other in order to create (for me, at least) an abstract, mysterious, elusive space that hypnotizes the viewer and thwarts/encourages her attempt to find a form of fragmented meaning in the seamless changeability of the images. The infrastructure space I aim to create is not as abstract as that, since the shape of the elements that are represented will be visible, although, in the spirit of “Trap”, cut up and disjointed, thrown out of physical/topological context. However, the nature of the spaces represented i.e. the fact that no clear “object” of representation but only shape, line and texture will be truly identifiable in the frame should contribute to the viewer’s same sensation of being lost, even dizzy, that she gets from watching Amy Kravitz’s piece. In addition to using Kravitz’s technique of blending/ fading in and out frames to create this effect, I anticipate using lighting effects in After Effects, for example, having stripes of light or spotlights flow over the images, much like in Pistachios’ “Curare Bulgari” piece.

To add dramatic buildup to the piece (which Amy Kravitz’s piece perhaps lacks) I will interrupt the flow of photographed infrastructure with short segments of live action (5-10 seconds), in which a mime, using a combination of gestures (mostly upper body) and facial expressions will introduce to more jarring and explicit effect the sensation of mental distress/discomfort that one feels when confronted with the emptiness and “semantic insufficiency” of these spaces.  As the piece progresses, these interludes will become more frequent, more brief and the gestures and lighting will become more intense. In terms of the gestures, more intense does not necessarily mean more contorted or frightening, but less controlled, perhaps even more passive, as if one had finally surrendered to the space represented. In terms of lighting, this will mean a gradual stepping up from flat to very contrasty (the mime mostly in shadow, along with the background, except for part of her face brightly illuminated). The progression of the “mime” sequences should culminate in a cathartic release from tension, as if the mind, after putting up resistance against the flow of incomprehensible space, after having tried to imbue it with meaning / decipher it, had decided to flow with it, to follow it where it lead, even into an unknown territory where the city, where lived space, ceases to make any conventional sense. Ideally, the viewer will be brought to the point where this release will be a desired thing, something that needs to happen in order to reconcile the insupportable tension between the space and the viewer’s mind. The final mime sequence would be, in sharp contrast to the visual/editing buildup of the previous sequences, longer (10-15 seconds) and would involve completely flat, very bright lighting and a passive posture on the part of the mime.

The mime will be shot against green screen. Ideally, I would like to create a background that resembles the “luminous cube”. The walls of the cube will be a different color in each sequence to match the color palette of the previous photographic sequence. As we progress in the piece, we will be able to see less and less of the cube, however (until the final sequence), as the lighting recedes from the background to focus more on the mime, and becomes more contrasty – as if the person were “losing space” and losing their footing in a black emptiness. The mime will be dressed in textureless, close-fitting black, their body gradually losing visibility with the change in lighting, until only their face can be used as the expressive element.

The soundtrack will be atonal and electronic, incorporating sound effects and feedback, in the style of noise artists or industrial electronic music artists such as John Cage, Throbbing Gristle and Venetian Snares. The music for the sequences involving the photography of infrastructure will progress to become more and more monotonous, to include less and less variation. The music for the sequences involving the mime will progress to become more varied, faster, and will start to incorporate harder and harder beats (perhaps even morphing into a drum n’ bass sort of sound). The final pairing of a photography / mime sequence will have both soundtracks merge again in a common soundtrack, a more melodious, more “beautiful” sound (something like the way the soundtrack I used in my exercise piece earlier this semester climaxes/dissolves into a more ecstatic, slow movement) to express the release or relief, the sense of liberation at the end of the short.

I’ve decided to use only one screen – although I am playing with the idea to have the final climactic sequences “explode” across multiple screens.