Architexture VIII: Nam June Paik and dreaming about electronic ecology of future urbanisms

February 9th, 2010 referencesTags: city, detournement, experimental circus, inanimata, photopia, screen

breaking down the ontological divide between the virtual and the material…another piece of interactive architexture to consider as flora and fauna for the electronic ecology of the future city.

Cinema in a Cabinet

October 26th, 2009 germinating ideasTags: architexture, haunted space, immersion, photopia, screen, visceral

a solution to the screen vs. physical space dichotomy: merging two different ontologies of immersive space. You need to enter a secret space within the larger installation to look at the screen: watch a movie in a closet, a cabinet, then crawl out/emerge.

79 Springtimes of Ho Chi Minh: acid rock starts your fight

July 27th, 2009 references, researchTags: kinetic, machine, music, politic, screen, shock, time, visceral

Alvarez's film is rare, but bombing footage is not...

Santiago Alvarez’s 79 Springtimes of Ho Chi Min opens with a flower slowly blooming, followed by a shot taken from a plane overflying Vietnam. Just as slowly as the flower opened, two bombs drop to earth, becoming invisible until – we knew this would happen, but were subconsciously hoping it wouldn’t – the earth erupts into flames. The camera zooms into a photograph of Ho Chi Min as a young man until we see only his eyes. Then, through a series of photographs (Barthes: the poignancy of the photograph is that it is evidence of the certainty of death – a death that already occurred or a death to be), we see those eyes grow older, until we finally zoom out again – Ho Chi Min is an old man, his face and figure freeze into a negative. Here Alvarez brilliantly evokes the passage and passing of a life – a life that (according to the filmmaker) unfolded with beautiful purpose, the process of aging signifying the fulfillment, the blooming of the young man’s promise, rather than a descent or decay. Alvarez simultaneously ties the meaning of this life irrevocably to a place, Vietnam, an event, the Vietnam war and a mission, the struggle against the destruction of Vietnam, a struggle for life (- again, the flower, the earth). Ho Chi Min is embalmed in the negative flash, pharaonically preserved in celluloid to continue to inspire this purpose, ascending to some super-human plane where he is transfigured into ideality – resurrected as a symbol via the film.

Later, more footage of violence in Vietnam is cut with a woman singing in lyrical anguish, ecstatically, until, as she draws out a high note, she disappears, replaced by the explosion of another bomb. The dialectic between vibrant life and sudden anihilation is didactically picked up again, but this is didacticism of a purely emotional, even physiological order. This sequence increases (at least my) heart rate, makes me breathe more heavily, until the world, life, my heart beat is stopped by the arrival of the bomb hitting the singer’s high note.

To cite Jane Gaines’ article Political Mimesis: the spectator “bodies back” to the images on the screen, reacting to the projected world as if she were witnessing reality, something happening right now that calls for an immediate reaction – wherefore the adrenalin. Alvarez’ method is more Eisenstein than Workers’ League newsreel, however – we are not encouraged towards mimesis of the action on screen (no waves of bodies, no protesters arouse this response) but provoked to imbibe the political message being laid out in front of us, namely, that the destruction of life (as it shines forth in the face and voice of the singer, in the liquid harmonics of the synthesizer soundtrack, in the ravaged faces of napalm victims, in the eyes of the old Ho Chi Min) calls absolutely for counter-attack, a commitment of the whole body, a kinetic force of feeling directed against the destroyers. Ho Chi Min is at the center of the footage: he appears as the eye in the storm, the rallying point for everything that stands against the anonymous machinery of death.

more remains of Ho Chi Minh...

After his funeral, the world falls apart – first in the faces of his supporters, unmade by tears (again, a physical manifestation) and then on the arena of the war itself: the filmmaker mangles footage of gun machine fighting at close quarters so that the soldiers’ violence finds some physically authentic correlate in the violence done to the celluloid, causing epileptic flashes to periodically slice the action unfolding on screen. The lasting impression is one of sensually exprienced chaos, as if the sign – what is represented – had savagely leaped out of its ontological cage to manhandle the spectator, directly triggering the spectator’s self-defense reflexes. As a result, the war footage, the attack on Vietnam starts to feel intimately personal – the bombs dropping on Vietnam seem to be aimed at me.

Like Man with the Movie Camera, I found 79 Springtimes of Ho Chi Min galvanizing, in its etymological sense of muscular stimulation by electric shock. As in Vertov’s film, we are lifted into a universe constructed by the Kino-eye – one where the juxtaposition of actuality coalesces into a higher meaning, a fullness of experience / life. This beautiful vision is then put under attack by the war footage – footage that, although posessing the aesthetic qualities that characterize the entire film, releases all its potential for shock value when considered side by side with the faces and bodies of children, masses, protesters and the compact figure of the deified Ho Chi Min. That the power of cinematic representation can be used so effectively to short-circuit the spectator’s critical capacities to plug in directly to her emotional core and stimulate a physical response (the catalyst for action) is, according to Gaines, the dream of the politically engaged documentarian. But the question of the political content being conveyed cannot be gotten around. The cinematic apparatus remains amoral.

Interactive Recombinant Editing: SPECTER OF SENSE

July 13th, 2009 germinating ideasTags: ambiance, archive, contingency, database, derive, detournement, haunted space, kinetic, mapping, maze, noise, photopia, play, punctum, screen, uncanny

still in the room. player squeezes a knob when he hears a prompted word (s) a voice speechifies on possibilities

determines which set of footage from the database will be edited into another set of footage (not completely haphazard) or running simultaneously on different screens??

editing algorithm, blackout, obeys a subterranean rhythm, cuts words in midstence, faces in mid-expression

cutting between this, this, and this ? CLOUD OR SHAPE, SPECTER OF SENSE – sampling of the cultural whirl – not quite arbitrary drops (it’s all water)

Peter Greenaway – Prospero’s Books ; David Bowie ; Jem Cohen: sea change, becoming, wishing, wish fulfillment, riffling through, collecting books, collecting memories, collecting personalities. databases all.

Dissertation Project_ITERATION#3

March 8th, 2009 germinating ideas, researchTags: augmented reality, body, database, immersion, material, play, screen, space, virtual

REDEFINING IMMERSION:

abstract vs. physical metaphors for virtual space?

Most discussions of “immersion” or the extent to which a media experience can sensorially and psychologically engulf the viewer, presumably bringing them closer to a ‘real life’ experience, revolve around kidnapping the viewer/player more decisively into the realm of the virtual – wherefore larger screens and stereoscopy, even VR.

Another route towards immersion involves the notion of “augmented reality” or embedding the virtual in physical space in order to create the experience of a (ideally) seamlessly merged virtuality/reality.

Is there a way to rehabilitate the screen, historically a hallmark of the 1rst type of immersion, for purposes of augmenting reality? Typically the screen is the well-known boundary between the physical and virtual, the thing that extrudes from normal, material space to shed simulacra down on us.

Returning to the idea of creating a “burrow” or an immersion “box”, the idea of physical space or geography serving as the interactive device for a database narrative – cannot the screens or “displays” themselves become part and parcel of real space, so that rather than running into a simulacra-projector, one is thrown in/sucked into the hidden, temporary space of a media-fragment?

Even more urgently – to complete the dream of seamlessness between material and virtual, can we be satisfied with an analogy between architecture i.e. the space of a gallery/rooms/hallways, and database structure? The textures of narrative and information, relayed across different media technologies are too viscerally pervasive and “real”, urgently present to us, to find adequate expression in the cool, ascetic, representational spaces offered to the typical art installation.

Must we not go deeper, more intimately into our project to map the virtual onto the physical? Perhaps it is important to start considering the sensorial/sensual rather than abstract properties of real space. To think of the body rather than architecture as a proper metaphor for our collective apprehension of virtuality.

David Cronenberg’s Videodrome as the faithfully visceral rendering of our felt relationship with media technology…

Dissertation Project_ITERATION #2

February 20th, 2009 germinating ideasTags: body, immersion, maze, rhizome, screen, trap

(these are broken notes!)

TO BE MOCKED UP IN ‘SECOND LIFE’ – SUMMER 2009

Stuff that you have to put your eyes to, ‘put your head in’ the image to perceive? Mixture of this and a large screen? A large screen enveloping a small screen. PORTABLE OR INSTALLATION ? SCREENS MOVING ON A GRID LIKE PUZZLE PIECES? DIFFERENT SOUNDS COMING FROM DIFFERENT CORNERS OF THE ROOM?

IMMERSION BOX (SMALL PLACE WHERE YOU HAVE TO SIT DOWN CROSS-LEGGED) WHERE YOU ARE BOMBARED BY STIMULI?

Mapping of database space onto real space? System of tunnels and burrows??? In the space of abandoned factory or industrial complex? Turn it into a medium for uploading different work rather than just a one-time thing?? Kafka’s The Mole, real-space rhizome??

You hear sound in one area of the burrow, or perhaps a dim light and you

go to investigate??

A GIANT BLACK BOX RIDDLED WITH TUNNELS,

(Franz Kakfa's story "The Burrow" deals with our paranoid compulsion to map, codify, and control space)

A MAZE, ONE ENTRANCE AND ONE EXIT –

operated like a funhouse ride

(a person in costume pushes on a lever to start the experience).

“The Burrow”, “The Box”.

Relationship between physical movement and body sensations and light/sound??

See movie: CUBE. Create an ecstatic and terrifying/sublime experience

Movement of the body (what you step on, lean against, press on in space) is the interactive device. But the logic must be clear/ must we have a cathartic movement/moment, an end-point?

Work with sensory deprivation too: the whole cube goes dark and you just hear sublime music coming from different directions, or different discourses –

Signals, flashing icons help you on your way