Month: July 2011

[Image: The Dark Knight Rises, courtesy of Warner Brothers].

Paul Owen of the Guardian today attempts a thorough critique of director Christopher Nolan’s most recent films, by way of nothing more than the new poster for The Dark Knight Rises, due out in summer 2012.

The poster presents us with “an empty city totally devoid of people,” Owen writes, which suggests to him a film that will be at once “claustrophobic, joyless, and derivative”—and he adds the third term as if in delayed realization that the first two, despite themselves, can often frame a compelling drama (many morality tales are precisely claustrophobic and joyless, which is where their effective power lies). But, in this way of thinking, the poster’s highly architectural glimpse of a “city literally falling to pieces,” as Owen describes it, is indication that the film itself will also shudder and fail under Nolan’s unfounded narrative ambitions, as if depopulated streets accidentally reveal the director’s inability to portray human complexity.

Is Owen right to deduce from a single piece of visual art the internal collapse of a film whose release is still more than one year away? And does this foreshortened view of a ruined metropolis—”an empty city totally devoid of people” with “rubble crumbling from the roofs”—rightly imply a story equally vacated of human interest?

Either way, it’s nice to see a short piece of virtuoso art interpretation, inspired by an image of buildings.

(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Dream-Sector Physics and Inception Space and Shining Path).

[Image: The “Situationist Drawing Device” by Ji Soo Han and Paul Ornsby].

The “Situationist Drawing Device” is a backpack-sized mechanism for recording the experience of landscape. Designed by Ji Soo Han and Paul Ornsby, and operating by way of mirrors, the Device “records a journey taken in an altered state of perception through drawing.” It is an “intermediary and interpretative tool,” the designers add, one that stands between the human body and the landscape it exists within and explores.

It is spatial equipment—an optical exoskeleton. Navigational clothing.

[Images: The “Situationist Drawing Device” by Ji Soo Han and Paul Ornsby].

This video shows it at work:

“As each eye retina receives different images, both conditions blur into one and simultaneously alternate—phasing in and out over the other,” the designers write. “This blurring effect, as known as retinal rivalry, creates a new perception of the site. The device was initially adapted from the pseudoscope (Greek, false view) which is a binocular instrument that reverses depth perception. The idea of reversing left and right eye vision was adapted to reverse forward and backward vision.”

You advance by looking backward, walking into layered optical phantoms of the place you’ve left behind. It is both mnemonic and projective.

[Images: The “Situationist Drawing Device” by Ji Soo Han and Paul Ornsby].

The key detail, though, is that the backpack also registers, through drawing, your experience of wearing it; a small, Iron Man-like disc (see opening image) on the user’s back serves both to house and to produce those vaguely seismological sketches. It is a mystical drawing pad for upstart Situationists.

[Images: The “Situationist Drawing Device” by Ji Soo Han and Paul Ornsby].

The device later inspired Han to design a project called the “Scrap Metal Refinery,” a few images of which appear here.

[Images: The “Scrap Metal Refinery” by Ji Soo Han].

That proposes a bridge that would stride across its own curved shadows and reflections, which are meant to be seen as a form of spatial notation, the structure registering itself in the landscape.

[Images: The “Scrap Metal Refinery” by Ji Soo Han].

For my money, the device is the stronger of the two projects, recalling the introductory essay written by CJ Lim for an edited collection of student work produced at the Bartlett School of Architecture, Devices: A Manual of Architectural + Spatial Machines. Quoting at length:

Devices have shared a long and complex history with architecture. The machines of Vitruvius and Leonardo da Vinci were devised in times of peace and war for both the construction and destruction of the built form. Today, kinetic intelligent systems are incorporated into building facades for environmental and aesthetic control. The device, however, has simultaneously followed a parallel trajectory—the Victorians invented a proliferation of devices, often ingenious, rarely of much practical use; Heath Robinson’s contraptions displayed the absurd length to which devices were invented to satisfy our convenience and curiosity; his illustrations, sometimes carrying satirical and political overtones, are best remembered for their humor. Similarly, many of today’s devices no longer perform quotidian practical tasks but are the results of artistic endeavor and are housed in galleries and museums.

The “Situationist Drawing Device” is what happens when an unironic Vitruvian sensibility is crossed with the willful absurdity of Situationist urban exploration, by way of mirrors and pens: an unfeasibly complicated piece of clothing through which the experience of built space is memorably upended.

Read a bit more at Ji Soo Han’s website.

[Image: Allied bombers in World War 2; via KUED].

Allied bombing raids during World War II “inadvertently experimented on the weather” in England by creating massive concentrations of artificial clouds as the planes roared off toward continental Europe. Researchers quoted by New Scientist claim that “where the aircraft circled and assembled into formation,” on one particular day back in 1944 for which military, meteorological, and even anecdotal eyewitness records are available, “it was significantly cloudier and 0.8°C cooler than the area upwind of the bases.”

In many ways, this is both obvious and uninteresting, as, of course, any uniquely large-scale act of artificial cloud-production—such as aircraft contrails—would have at least some effect on local weather.

But what, to me, seems most remarkable about this story is the darkly poetic idea that war brings with it its own meteorology, its own skies, storms, and atmospheres, literally altering the very firmament beneath which human affairs take place. World War II becomes an even more frightening event, as sun-obliterating cloudfronts of mechanized combat roll eastward over the ruined cities of Europe.

(Spotted via @subtopes; you can read more about weather warfare in The BLDGBLOG Book).

[Image: The infrastructure of bullet time].

A digital image-processing system under development since 2007 will allow photographers “to artificially create photos taken from a perspective where there was no photographer.” It uses “a computer-vision technique called view synthesis to combine two or more photographs to create another very realistic-looking one that looks like it was taken from an arbitrary viewpoint,” as New Scientist explains.

One expert quoted refers to this as “anonymizing the photographer.”

The images can come from more than one source: what’s important is that they are taken at around the same time of a reasonably static scene from different viewing angles. Software then examines the pictures and generates a 3D “depth map” of the scene. Next, the user chooses an arbitrary viewing angle for a photo they want to post online.

The photo then goes through a “dewarping” stage, in which straight lines like walls and kerb angles are corrected for the new point of view, and “hole filling,” in which nearby pixels are copied to fill in gaps in the image created because some original elements were obscured.

While the article rightly emphasizes the political implications of this—writing that the technology “could help protestors in repressive regimes escape arrest—and give journalists ‘plausible deniability’ over the provenance of leaked photos”—there are, of course, other possibilities inherent in the technique that seem worth exploring. These include virtualizing photographs taken of a landscape, building, person, or city, producing views, angles, and perspectives never actually seen by human beings. This would be like something out of the work of Piranesi—specifically as interpreted by Manfredo Tafuri in The Sphere and the Labyrinth—in which impossible scenes overlap to produce a single, far from comprehensive spatial reality.

Perhaps some editor somewhere could send Iwan Baan and Fernando Guerra out to shoot a new building together, then “hole fill” their images to create a virtual, third photographer. Every image thus published in the resulting article documents a viewpoint neither photographer either experienced or saw. It is the building as seen by no one, virtually extruded from otherwise real-world photographs.

To throw another gratuitous theory reference out there, it’s like Foucault’s analysis of “Las Meninas” in The Order of Things, where we read that the painter may or may not have included an obscured vantage point from which his painting was supposedly painted. To translate Foucault’s hypothesis into New Scientist‘s terms, this would be “location privacy,” that is, “a way of disguising the photographer’s viewpoint.”

[Image: “Las Meninas” by Diego Velázquez].

Or, imagine, for instance, an entire film assembled from “dewarped” images—intermediary, falsified frames precipitated out from between the cameras—creating an uncanny motion picture of interstitial imagery. Virtual films between films; films recombined to create a third cinema of gaps; virtual still images taken from virtual films, overlaid and dewarped to form fourth and fifth and sixth films generationally removed from the original, in an infinite splintering of derivative film stills. We won’t document the world as everyone sees it; we’ll document it from places where no one’s ever been.

(Thanks to Luke Fidler for the tip).

[Image: Log Chop Bench by the Practice of Everyday Design].

For their project Log Chop Bench (2011), the Canadian design firm The Practice of Everyday Design used “a logger’s brute strength and surgical precision to carve out seats on a reclaimed log.”

[Image: Log Chop Bench by the Practice of Everyday Design].

Seats made from “fine, hand-sewn upholstery by a motorcycle saddle maker” were then added to the spaces chopped into the log, creating a surreally massive piece of high-end furniture.

Here is the log’s chopper—a lumberjill—in action, as well as the sketch it was all based on.

[Images: Log Chop Bench by the Practice of Everyday Design].

Resulting in this:

[Image: Log Chop Bench by the Practice of Everyday Design].

I would love to see a movie theater or lecture hall furnished with two or three dozen of these, with higher backs for long-term seating but each individual perch unique.

Other projects are viewable at the Practice of Everyday Design‘s website.

This has been a long summer of hotel rooms, from Las Cruces, New Mexico, to Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, and an incredible range of interesting stories has passed by that I didn’t have a chance to post. So I thought I’d briefly reach back into the past three weeks or so and salvage a couple things I wish I’d had a chance to cover when they first popped up. In other words, you’ve probably already seen these—but they’re worth the attention, nonetheless.

[Image: Markus Kayser‘s Solar Sinter].

1) The video documenting Markus Kayser‘s solar-powered 3D printer—capable of producing complete glass objects from loose desert sand—has been viewed more than half a million times on Vimeo, presumably because the design implications of his experiment are so compelling.

[Image: Markus Kayser‘s Solar Sinter].

As Kayser explains, the “process of converting a powdery substance via a heating process into a solid form is known as sintering and has in recent years become a central process in design prototyping known as 3D printing or SLS (selective laser sintering).”

These 3D printers use laser technology to create very precise 3D objects from a variety of powdered plastics, resins and metals—the objects being the exact physical counterparts of the computer-drawn 3D designs inputted by the designer. By using the sun’s rays instead of a laser and sand instead of resins, I had the basis of an entirely new solar-powered machine and production process for making glass objects that taps into the abundant supplies of sun and sand to be found in the deserts of the world.

Watch the video yourself, if you haven’t yet seen it:

As you can see, the objects produced are quite rudimentary, but it’s hard not to imagine something like this scaled up—an urban-sized glass factory in the desert, out of which strange future objects are released—or even mobilized, wandering the dunes, sintering Great Wall-sized pieces of desert architecture directly into the landscape, perhaps even dune-sailing across the hills of another planet, printing forward operating bases into that alien terrain.

[Image: Markus Kayser‘s Solar Sinter].

If you haven’t yet seen the following video, meanwhile, it makes an interesting partner with Kayser’s project. Here, we watch as a parabolic mirror concentrates sunlight to a point so hot it melts rock:

Perhaps solar-powered bedrock-sintering is the next logical step for Kayser’s technology: 3D-printing whole mountain landscapes from artificially produced magmatic lumps, like something from a fever-dream by Vicente Guallart.

2) A couple years ago, we looked at an artist’s book called 15 Lombard Street by Janice Kerbel. Kerbel’s book is “a rigorously researched masterplan of how to rob a particular bank in the City of London”:

By observing the daily routine in and around the bank, Kerbel reveals the most detailed security measures such as: the exact route and time of money transportation; the location of CCTV cameras in and around the bank along with precise floor plans that mark the building’s blind spots. Kerbel’s meticulous plans include every possible detail required to commit the perfect crime.

A similar idea was taken up recently by architect Armin Blasbichler. For an architecture seminar at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, Blasbichler’s students “had been assigned to pick up a bank in the city, study it, identify its Achilles’ heel and plan a bank robbery,” as We Make Money Not Art explains.

[Image: From Armin Blasbichler’s bank robbery course; via We Make Money Not Art].

Although Blasbichler’s interview with WMMNA is worth reading, my own interest in his course is less in the idea that, as Blasbichler suggests, bank robberies are a way to foreground “the continuing marginalization of the role of the architect.” What interests me more is the idea that bank robbers have a very specific, albeit highly illegal, understanding of architectural space—indeed, we might even say that bank robbers understand the city better than architects do, and, in the event of a successful heist, better even than the police meant to patrol it.

[Image: From Armin Blasbichler’s bank robbery course; via We Make Money Not Art].

Of course, I am using the phrase bank robbery to refer to a specific type of heist, a uniquely ambitious form of breaking-and-entering: tunneling into a vault, dodging security cameras, picking locks, exploding whole walls or doorways, not merely handing a note to the teller and walking out with sacks of money.

But in this sense, the bank robbery becomes a very specific kind of spatial operation, one that cuts through architecture along unprecedented obliques and diagonals. It is counter-space: an illicit misuse of plan and section. In the process, the bank robbery produces and exploits perforations in the built environment; it operates by way of gaps, sudden accelerations and pauses unplanned for by the bank’s own protective administrators. In one sense, the bank robbery proceeds by asking a simple question: how do we move through this building as if the building is not really there?

3) The so-called “internet in a suitcase” is an astonishing example of soft infrastructure. As the New York Times explains the overall idea:

The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.

The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”

This suitcase “will rely on a version of ‘mesh network’ technology, which can transform devices like cellphones or personal computers to create an invisible wireless web without a centralized hub.” This means that files “could hop directly between the modified wireless devices—each one acting as a mini cell ‘tower’ and phone—and bypass the official network” altogether.

A similar technology is referred to in the article as an “expeditionary cellular communication service.”

[Image: Internet-in-a-suitcase, via the New York Times].

The Jason Bourne-like, black ops thrill of this is clear: you parachute in behind enemy lines—or you smuggle, by way of some dusty, unpoliced airfield unmarked on official maps—a suitcase-sized portable internet. A kind of electromagnetic nervous system unfolds like living origami from your luggage, creating a “stealth wireless network” through which you and your fellow rebels can remain connected to data from the rest of the world.

The internet-in-a-suitcase thus joins the city-in-a-box in the annals of on-demand infrastructural utopias, spatially influential packages theoretically outside of political control.

On the other hand, I can’t help but think that this is all a bit like Gordon Gecko’s infamous cellphone from the movie Wall Street: an almost absurdly clunky solution that will be replaced sooner than we might expect by something much more sleek, embedded, and ubiquitous, requiring not even the weight of a carry-on bag but operating through something as small as an RFID chip.

It will be the internet-from-nowhere, a connective ghost whose quasi-magical presence has been promised to us not only by the gurus of modern technology and political liberation, but by ancient myths and folktales: a cloud of voices from afar to which we are invisibly connected at every moment, everyday.