AA SUMMER SCHOOL 2017 - HYPERLINKED
W H Y
H O W
In London, a homeless man stakes out his space in the shadow of Harrods luxury department store. Down the road, a lighting technician emerges from an underground salad farm. A financial executive flies into Heathrow for a rare night at home, next door to the squatting community opposing airport expansion.
The ‘Kuleshov Effect’ is a psychological phenomenon described in film/montage theory. When observing
The city is increasingly a place of departures and destinations. Traversing urban space tends to no longer
be a continuous, connected experience, but rather can be interpreted as a set of discrete, disconnected happenings. The spaces between places are compressed, forgotten, and we slip with surprising speed and ease between vastly different worlds. We leave our homes, descending into the darkness of a subterranean transport system and emerge at our places of work or study. In the familiarity of our hometowns we enter flying metal tubes to emerge hours later in exotic climates, cultures and timezones. As we browse the aisles of a supermarket or the shelves of a department store, we sample fragments of products and ideas from all over the planet. Experientially, we might consider ourselves to already be a society of teleporters. This compression of inbetween spaces sets up new adjacencies between previously un-linked elements. We believe that it is vital to discover and imagine these unexpected and surpising adjacencies, for it is there that we hope that the greatest cultural and design opportunities reside.
two scenes in sequence, we automatically modify our understanding of the second based on the content of the first. In Hitchcock’s famous example, we are shown a baby, and then a smiling old man. Who is he? A kind, caring gentleman. Then we see a girl in a bikini, then the same smiling man. Now he’s a dirty old pervert. Utilising the Kuleshov effect, we will explore how strange spatial adjacencies might generate new meanings. Urban hyperlinks that reveal hidden realities, spin cautionary tales or envision previously un-imagined possibilities. We work with the strong belief that speculative fiction is vital for innovation. We will tell lies that reveal truths, to create strange worlds that mirror our own, and bring together the wild fantasies of imaginary architectures, with the difficult truths of our lives today. Ambitious design – unrestricted by the constraints of contemporary possibilities – will be informed by anthropological ethnography and models of social functioning; examining power relationships, behavioural motivations, and cultural propagation. Our media will be film and animation. We will imply worlds through the careful design of strange and beautiful adjacencies; scenes that reveal, criticise or celebrate our increasingly hyperlinked cities.
//Enter the HYPERLINK. Consider the way we browse. In short bursts we jump from content to content, from video to blog, from blog to news, from news to store. With each click we travel to a new context, a new world. As our online lives continue to grow in importance and complexity, who is to say that the city itself is not much like the internet? A place of weird adjacencies, of displaced and misplaced cultures, constantly shifting, all impossibly close, and all barely visible to one another.
COVER: RIGHT:
Through Leviathan’s Eyes - Nathan Su & Bethany Edgoose 2017 Hitchcock explains the Kuleshov Effect 1964
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AA SUMMER SCHOOL 2017 - HYPERLINKED
W H A T In this unit, students will collaborate on a short film that explores hyperlinks in contemporary cities. Working in groups, students will script, shoot, and edit scenes that present meaningful adjacencies. The final film will be a high quality piece of collaborative work that explores the communicative power of storytelling, while respecting architecture as a practice that goes beyond the design of physical buildings, and imagines structures, systems, and interfaces that use every possible material at all scales of human culture. We will work towards a public screening of our film, along with an exhibition of the work-process, which will be documented by the tutors over the course of the summer school. We will build skills in cinematography, script-writing, 3D modelling, animation and compositing, all while immersing ourselves in strange hyperlinked worlds we find online, in film and on the streets of London.
A Chinese Click Farm - workers rate apps to raise their status in the Apple store
Concept Art - Cloud Atlas Fabricant Slaughterhouse 2012
Food Production - Still from Samsara 2011
99 Cent - Gursky 1999
Digital Rendering of the Social Media Trend Landscape - The Atlas of False Desires - Nathan Su & Bethany Edgoose 2016
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AA SUMMER SCHOOL 2017 - HYPERLINKED
W H E N DISCOVERING ADJACENCIES
03-Jul
04-Jul
05-Jul
06-Jul
07-Jul
08-Jul
09-Jul
MORNING
Welcome and Unit Introductions
Workshop - Film
Workshop Workshop - Narrative Introduction to 3D
AFTERNOON
School Workshop Inductions
Design Exercise: Spatialising the Kuleshov Effect
Design Exercise: Constructing Cultural Adjacencies Studio Work/Tutorials Studio Work/Tutorials Field Trip/Shoot Day
Free
EVENING
Film Night: AA Cinema (Cloud Atlas) Studio Work
Film Night: AA Cinema (Samsara) Studio Work/Tutorials Internal Presentations Field Trip/Shoot Day
Free
CONSTRUCTING FANTASIES
10-Jul
11-Jul
12-Jul
Studio Work/Tutorials Field Trip/Shoot Day
13-Jul
14-Jul
15-Jul
MORNING
Studio Work/Tutorials INTERIM REVIEW
AA Student Presentations
Group Work - Scene Development
Shoots/Animation
Shoots/Animation
AFTERNOON
Presentation Prep
INTERIM REVIEW
Group Work - Scene Development
Group Work - Scene Development
Shoots/Animation
Shoots/Animation
EVENING
Presentation Prep
Free
Group Work - Scene Development
Group Work - Scene Development
Shoots/Animation
Shoots/Animation
NARRATING HYPERLINKS
17-Jul
18-Jul
19-Jul
20-Jul
Guest Workshop - Colour & Emotion (TBC)
16-Jul
Workshop - Editing
21-Jul
MORNING
Guest Workshop (TBC)
Film Edit
Film Edit
Rehearsal/Final Production
FINAL REVIEW
AFTERNOON
Film Edit
Film Edit
Film Edit
Rehearsal/Final Production
FINAL REVIEW
EVENING
Film Edit
Film Edit
Film Edit
Rehearsal
PARTY
Virtual sand dunes hijack the city - Through Leviathan’s Eyes - Nathan Su & Bethany Edgoose 2017
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AA SUMMER SCHOOL 2017 - HYPERLINKED
W H O
W I T H
Nathan Su & Bethany Edgoose have been collaborating since 2013 on architectural projects that reimagine social realities. Nathan is a designer and storyteller, working through speculation, architecture and film to imagine futures from the scale of the home to the city. Bethany is a social designer and anthropologist who works at the intersection of tech-development and society. Their previous work together has included Through Leviathan’s Eyes - a mixed reality city, collectively constructed as an ever changing visual palimpsest, and The Atlas of False Desires, a short film about social media manipulation that was awarded Best Short at Sci-Fi London 2017. They also collaborated with Chong Yan Chuah on Aisha’s Asylum, a short story that received an Honourable Mention in Blank Space’s Fairytales 2017 competition, and Vital Networks, a system of international telemedicine awarded 2nd place in the 2015 Advancing Development Goals Geneva Challenge.
SOFTWARE & EQUIPMENT Where necessary and appropriate for scenes, we can give workshops in the following softwares: Rhino + Grasshopper, 3DS Max, Cinema4D, VRay, Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, InDesign, Premiere, After Effects), Vuforia for Unity, Processing, Vue
Nathan completed the Bachelor of Environments at Melbourne University, graduating with the University Medal. He then worked for two years at Melbourne architecture firm McBride Charles Ryan, before completing his studies at the Architectural Association, graduating with Honours earlier this year. He was a 2016 recipient of the RIBA Wren Association Scholarship and his Part I project ‘The Augurs of Slave Island’ was awarded the Grand Prize at the D3 Unbuilt Visions competition. Bethany graduated top of her year from the MSc of Anthropology and Development at the London School of Economics in 2015 and has since managed the Research Analyst and Technical Writing team at cyber security company Darktrace. She has previously worked in Uganda as an agricultural project manager and for multiple non-governmental research institutes on projects ranging from international migration to nuclear security. www.nathan-su.com www.bethany-edgoose.com
In addition to the AA’s computer & AV facilities, we are able to supply a video camera + stabiliser and a drone (if necessary and under supervision). However, if students possess any of the following, we recommend bringing them along: Laptop + Spare Hard-drives, Cameras - DSLRs, GoPros, Point & Shoot (anything is useful) THINGS TO READ (LONG) The Techno-Human Condition - Allenby & Sarewitz You are not a Gadget - Larnier Synthetic Worlds - Castranova The City and the City - Mieville Last and First Men - Stapledon Cryptonomicon - Stephenson (SHORT) The Allegory of the Cave - Plato (The Republic) Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems - Ong & Colliers The Data that turned the World Upside Down - Grassegger & Krogerus (Motherboard) How a Book about Flies Came to be Priced $24 Million on Amazon - Solon (Wired) THINGS TO WATCH (LONG) Cloud Atlas - The Wachowskis Samsara & Baraka - Fricke Her - Jonze District 9 - Blomkamp Manufactured Landscapes - Burtynsky (SHORT) Black Mirror - Brooker Jonah - Factory Fifteen Noah - Cederberg & Woodman Nerdwriter (Youtube Channel) Every Frame a Painting (Youtube Channel)
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