THE TOXIC FORUM
JEREMY BONWICK A A V I SIT ING SC HO O L _ WINT ER 2 02 0 UNIT F I VE _ G HO S T HARDWARE
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THE DIAGNOSIS
RESEARCH AND THEORY
VISUAL PRECEDENT A N A LY S I S
THE ENVIRONMENT
THE SOUNDSCAPE
REFLECTION
UNIT FIVE ; GHOST HARDWARE LEADERS; Alvaro Fernandez+ Sergei Maier THE AGENDA of unit five was almost to dissolve the idea of architecture and instead approach a spatial, thematic and conceptual idea from the perspective of a filmmaker or artist, to operate with a sense of intentional intuition that leaves behind grand gestures and inyour-face design for something more subtle, something that creates an impression or
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evokes a response in a viewer. The intent was to manifest a speculative environment, not speculative in its imagining but in its implications. The space carried meaning only through its allusions, being in itself inherently real or in some ways banal. Architecture so often seeks to conjure something into existence, this unit asked us to instead frame — to reposition the world in a hyper-real manner.
CONTENTS
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THE TOXIC FORUM _ The environment created depicts a bucolic scene that has been infested and defaced by the inherent toxicity in nature and humanity as a backdrop. Any expected order in the forest scene has been overrun and denigrated by parasitic plants, aggressive flowers and smothering ivy. At first glance the scene could be confused for an idyllic landscape, but there is an overall unsettling 4
feel; the canted angle, the foundry smoke plume in the background, the sickly colour pallet. The viewer is held in the scene and begins to notice details, the infestation of the scene, the black pooling water, a tire being pulled into the earth... The scene is an allegory of the toxicity of humanity on online platforms, defiling the rules and order in their abuse, debauchery and perversions.
Rendered image, by Jeremy Bonwick and David Liu
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THE DIAGNOSIS
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THE FORUM _
Online discussion spaces — one of the most popular destinations on the internet — are home to everything from benign cat and baking tutorials videos to hardcore pornography and exploitation material. As spaces of mass communication and dissemination of information, forums and social media platforms open themselves up to everyone. This democratic vision of equal access is Utopian and works well in a world where everyone is obeys the rules and acts altruistically. We know however this is not the case. The Internet brings the veil of anonymity to the baseness of humanity — giving
voice and platform to trolls, bullies and racists. These spaces are overrun by the inherent toxicity of the human race. The anonymity has a huge role to play in this — no longer is it loners and the outcasts who are banished from society for the extreme views, now the hidden and underlying waves of denigration emerge in the form of people venting their frustrations with no consequences to their real life. Online spaces such as YouTube comments, 4chan threads, twitter feeds and Twitch streams will inevitably descend into toxicity as humanities inherent baseness is brought to the forefront.
THE H AT E F U L INTERNET
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ONLINE POLICING _
What is law-keeping on the Internet? Lawmaking is easy enough, set out in community guidelines, terms and conditions and usage rules. But how is this policed? Maybe there is a set of code that trawls posts and threads for keywords that flag rule breaking content, or maybe a system of user flagging content. Whatever is employed, it doesn’t work. The extreme example being PornHub which was visited 42bn times last year, a site who’s guidelines strictly forbid any exploitative or illegal material.1 Despite this, researchers have found the site is littered with vile material that is either failed or ignored in filtering and policing. The rules will be broken, and it seems our online law-keepers cannot keep up. An initial pondering was on the idea of what an online prison was. In real life when people break the law, the ‘community guidelines of reality’, they are sent to prison. These are the equivalent of online troll — people who’s actions and beliefs are not commensurate with societies. But in an online sphere these people are allowed to roam free, only barred momentarily from 8
entering online spaces after an infringement, or hiving their posts deleted. Even in the most extreme case that their profile is deleted it is not a stretch for someone to create a new profile and go on spreading their vitriol. So is there an online prison? No. What powers do the police of the internet have? None. In cyberspace, criminals and lawbreakers are allowed free passage, or very nearly — certainly compared to the real world. Given this, it is inevitable that online spaces will be overrun by trolls and toxicity.
THE RULES ARE BROKEN _ So the rules are broken. Both in the sense that the system of rule on the internet is broken and that what rules there are will always be broken by those in society who see fit to do so, the baseness of the human race will come through. The term ‘Godwin’s Law’ was coined to describe lawyer and author Mike Godwin’s theory that; “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one,” 2 Such a comparison is exemplar of how a discussion online will inevitably denigrate to the point of the utterly pointless and unfounded comparison to
Nazis. Even though not a break of ‘rules’, it is a demonstration of how online threads deteriorate. Here is a parallel with the world of science and the second law of thermodynamics; entropy — that a system will inevitably head towards disorder and chaos. If online forums are entropic, then inevitably they will tend towards the invasive forces of entropy and its associated disorder, being the breaking of the rules and imposed order of the space. So the mass of toxicity online breaks the system. The rules are overrun and order and balance is inevitably lost. The thread, the comments or the post goes to ruin... 9
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Tintern Abbey, William Turner, Graphite and watercolour on paper, 1794.
THE ALLEGORY THE TOXICITY OF NATURE + THE TOXIC FORUM Having asserted our diagnosis that the forum is broken, we moved to how our environment and imagery would convey this position visually. We decided that a strong metaphor was needed to stand as an allegory of the state of online discussion spaces. For that, it needed to have two key attributes — a sense of order which inherently and that order be inevitably prone to descending into chaos. The natural world seemed fitting in this manner as it is also something that man tries to tame through order and control — flower arrangement, botanics, landscaping — but
which left to its own devices will overthrow this order for its own individual purposes and needs. The parasitic plant cares not for the smothering of the garden, as ivy grows over and infests a man-made structure it cares not for the order of the bricks and mortar courses. The allegory was decided as a scene of nature, the semblances of order present in the environment, an almost idyllic bucolic landscape... but a landscape that is being eroded, overrun and intoxicated by nature’s baseness, just as the forum spaces of the Internet are filled with the baseness of humanity. These two systems sit as mirrors to each other and the project seeks to reveal this.
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RESEARCH AND THEORY
“we do not belong to ourselves, that this world is not our world. That it is not only in its totality that it stands opposite us, but in the fact that it is alien to us even in its most intimate details.” — The Theory of Bloom
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Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich, oil on canvas, 1818.
ON SYSTEMS, CYBERNETICS AND ECOLOGY _ From the initial reading and research for the unit, the focus lead to an examination of individualism and networks, in humanity and in nature. With the idea of the forum already in the back of the mind, Tiqqun’s The Cybernetic Hypothesis set off an investigation into how the human can begin to take on attributes of a machine. Tiqqun suggests that cybernetics pursues two main paths; either to turn “living beings into machines, to master, program, and determine mankind” or to “imitate the living with machines”.4 The former is key in the discourse on forums, as we seen people become integral to a digitised system that is programmed to act in a machine-like way with a set of rules or protocols. Here, we deviate from Tiqqun’s ideas and instead suggest that despite the attempted cyber-isation of man through the forum, they instead becomes more of a “Randian” hero — after the theories of author Ayn Rand.5 Instead of working altruistically within order, each is an individual who will act selfishly, or at the very least with a degree of self-interest, in pursuit of their own values. Rand was a champion of objectivism where
the individual has autonomy to act outside the system that contains them. The problem with this analogy is that a Randian hero acts rationality... the trolls on an online forum do not. Rather, in a forum space which is intended to set man in a “network” there is instead an agency granted which sees humans acting selfishly and in a way that is against the ‘rules’ in pursuit not of rational objectives but cloaked hate, chaos and toxicity. Romanticism and other artistic movements around the time of the 18th and 19th century see a general move towards this type of objective or individualism. In Friedrich’s work Wanderer above the Sea of Fog we see a Georgian explorer surveying a jagged, uncertain landscape.6 As a departure from overtly religious scenes of previous epochs, this painting instead pits man against reality in all its baseness, uncertainty and treacherousness. This is a secular image; man stands alone in awe and confronted by the world in all its disarray and sublimity. This could be the image of a man standing on the brink of a forum, overlooking not an ordered arrangement of well-formed ideas and courtly conversation
but instead he overlooks the rampant perversion, toxicity and sweeping fog of hate. Here, the attention switches to natures as an analogue — that humans, despite their obsessions, with order (their cyber-isation) will return to their base nature-state of individualism. Adam Curtis’s series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace explores this concept.7 In the 1970s, Ecology described the natural world as almost a closed loop, a balanced system that always found order. But this was disproved to instead assert that “after disturbances plants and animals would recombine in radical and different ways”, in nature there was “no stable order”. This undermines the theories of Architects such as Buckmiser Fuller, who envisioned humanity working in a network just like his designs for a Geodesic dome. So nature, like a forum, has the initial appearance of order in the bucolic landscape, but underlying that there is nothing stable. The natural world acts individualistically, after its own survival, which results in parasitic tenancies, toxicity and infestation. This is the bases of the scene... 13
VISUAL PRECEDENT A N A LY S I S
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TINTERN ABBEY _ William Turner, Graphite and watercolour on paper, 1794.
This work by Turner of an abbey in Wales was an initial focus of investigation into the idea of the sublime and romanticism. The work takes on attributes of CLV Meek’s essay discussing the Picturesque in 18th century art, an attention and taste for that which is showing the passage of time, has a “roughness” and “irregularity” and sense of “movement”.3
Turner’s painting was an early visual reference of the type infestation of nature the scene would be mimicking — showing the crumbling Abbey covered in creepers and ivy, the scene has a nostalgia mixed with a sense of natures powers to reclaim man’s own attempts at taming and bringing order to their existence, symbolic in a place of religion.
PAN’S LABYRINTH _ dir. Guillmero Del Toro, 2006.
As well as toxicity, the scene seeks to bring a sense of discomfort to the natural elements. In del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth the significant tree in the forest Ophelia explores is shaped in an anthropomorphic way to mimic the horns of the Faun — using natural elements to allude to the sinister intent and motive.
ANTHROPOMORPHIC HORNS ALLUSIONS TO THE DEVIL AND CONNECTION TO THE ANTAGONIST, THE FAUN
THE LORD OF THE RINGS _ ANGLED TRUNKS
TREES AND LOW KEY LIGHTING SMOTHER AND ENCIRCLE THE SUBJECTS
HORIZON, FOREST FLOOR DOMINATES
dir. Peter Jackson, dop. Andrew Lesnie, 2001.
The framing and art direction of Fangorn forest in The Lord of the Rings is designed to give a sense of a corrupted landscape that closes in and smothers, being an idyllic forest that has then been infested by evil. The trees are haphazard and lopsided and the undergrowth and floor is snaking with twisted vines and roots. 15
THE GARDEN O F E A R T H LY DELIGHTS _ Hieronymus Bosch, Oil on oak panels, c. 1500.
AREA TAKEN AS THE BASE FOR THE BUCOLIC LANDSCAPE
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Bosch’s 16th century triptych depicts biblical scenes of the garden of Eden, paradise and hell. The artwork concern deals in a dialogue between the picturesque and the uncanny as well as the unsettling, in the leftmost panel Adam and Eve are seen in the idyllic garden of Eden, which is filled with a variety of strange creatures and an anthropomorphic statue in a lake. Discussion around this work centered on the idea of paradise lost, the scene of the bucolic garden or forest in which man frolicked before succumbing to temptation. The scene in Bosch’s painting (particularly the outlined area shown to the left) was used as the basis for the scene, in composition and topography. This base scene was then to be corrupted and infested by the toxicity of nature and man symbolic of the manner of online forums discussed in the diagnosis.
LINES OF THE HUT FALL INTO THE WATER
NATURE INFESTS PULLING DOWN
A N N I H I L AT I O N _ dir. Alex Garland, dop. Rob Hardy, 2018.
Alex Garland’s 2018 film concerns itself with the forces of infestation in natures. The film features the almost viral and parasitic treatment of spaces and sets where nature and fungal organism begin to infest and degenerate landscapes and people. In the above shot, the man-made is being smothered by a growing mass of plants and flowers which are not of the same species and should not thrive together, and yet as a mass they begin to have the
power to pull the hut into a murky lake. The interesting element here is that each is acting almost interdependently, for survival, each for their own, but the resultant effort is enough to dislodge the order of the shed and corrupt it — like the mass of individual trolls on an online form who inadvertently conspire to bring it down through toxicity. Similarly the human form and concrete walls below are overridden by parasitic plants and organisms.
NATURE TAKING OVER AND DEFACING, INFESTING THE HUMAN FORM
PARASITIC NATURE, VIRAL INFESTATION
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GRASS INFESTING THE FRAME TO OBSCURE
STALKER _ dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, dop. Alexander Knyazhinsky, 1979.
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Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker heavily influenced the attitude towards many elements of the final environment and frame. The film depicts the journey of a writer and journalist into a contaminated zone by a guide, the ‘Stalker’. The directorial style privileges a slow and methodical pace that lingers on shots and builds tension through the time spent in the environment. This approach gives the film a realism, but also at such a slow pace it gives the sense that the viewer is being absorbed in and by the action, or lack thereof, on
screen. Tarkovsky summarises that he “wanted time and its passing to be revealed”.8 This is how we approached the viewers interaction with our frame, to bring in details and intricacies that forces a lingering gazes beyond the initial impression o a bucolic scene. Tarkovsky also shows a sensibility for the type of infestation we explored — for example in the shot of the tanks shown above which gives a sense of the passage of time and its effect on man made objects in a landscape, they need to be absorbed. For another of his films, Solaris, Tarkovsky is famously quoted as saying he wanted the spaceship to “look like a broken down bus” The film stock and camera used gives the nostalgic feel of bleach bypass, a form of analogue film development which leaves the image with deep blacks and a muted hue as it skips the bleaching process. This was an influence on the colour space of our frame (see opposite).
FRAMING FRAMING ELEMENT DIRTIES THE SHOT
NATURE OBSCURES THE HUMAN FORM
SINGLE KEYLIGHT
HIGHLIGHTS SHADOW CONCEALS FACE
In framing Tarkovsky employs foreground elements to ‘dirty’ the shot which creates a sense of uncertainty as the viewer feels they are peering into the scene without access to the full context behind the obscuring element. Tarkovsky also uses elements of nature — such as fields of grass — to start to dissect his frame, specifically beginning to obscure the human form creating the impression that the landscape is beginning to swallow up and dominate the humans. LIGHTING Tarkovsky lights many scenes with a single key light behind his subject — a low key lighting setup. This creases a ringing around the edge of the character’s face as seen opposite. Although their features are visible in profile, the majority of their face is left in shadow. This heightens the drama and uncertainty of the scene as well as symbolically obscure his characters motives. Similarly, we have used it in the environment to create pockets of shadow that conceal the infestations of toxic elements.
COLOUR SPACE
The polluted murky swamp
Dried bark
Undergrowth
Toxic leaves
The sky
Light filtering through branches 19
THE ENVIRONMENT
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COMPOSITIONAL PLANNING _
Compositional depth, basic move of foreground to background, right to left, almost to a vanishing point 21
I T E R AT I O N R E N D E R S _ WEEK ONE / THURSDAY Initial exploration in a more jungle based scene with a more prominent man-made object being engulfed by nature in the form of a crashed aircraft.
WEEK ONE / INTERIM PRESENTATION By interim this had evolved to the scene which took its roots in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. There is a desolate nature to the environment which would later be left behind for more density. WEEK TWO / MONDAY As the scene become more densely populated in the second week the influence of Stalker’s colour space also made its way into the image.
WEEK TWO / TUESDAY The density was further increased to increase the immersion of the scene and make the viewer feel like they were in the forest itself rather than a clearing.
WEEK TWO / THURSDAY The infestation around the tire was increased to make its presence less didactic and the overall canter of the frame was increased to further destabilsze the scene. The smoke plume was also added to increase the pollution of the environment. 22
IMAGE CONSTRUCTION _ ROUGH TERRAIN The scene is backed by a jagged mountain range, its angular form symbolic of the roughness of nature and the environment — it is unforgiving.
THE FOREST The scene is set for the bucolic landscape. The sporadic placement of trunks off into the distance gives the impression that this space is never ending.
UNDERGROWTH The scene is first infested by grass that carpets the ground and the foliage of the trees. The hero trees are set at angle sightly to destabilise the scene.
INFESTATION The foreground tree is the most overt place of parasitic infestation, the placement of smothering ivy over the roots of the tree and toxic flowers draws the eye.
INDUSTRIAL SMOKE The background contains a rising, polluting plume of smoke from a refinery, a mirroring of natures own infestation and man’s intoxication of the natural landscape as the smoke spread, dissipates and infects the sky. 23
TOXICIT Y & WERNER HERZOG _
FRAME BREA _
SO F
The was from film did its i env pul
BURDEN OF DREAMS, 1982 Warner Herzog’s documentary portrays nature as “full of obscenity, it’s just in nature there is vile and base, it is fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away,” something that the scene tries to capture also. BACKGROUND BACKGROUND FOCUS FOCUS
LEKTIONEN IN FINSTERNIS, 1992 Herzog’s later film which features sweeping, omniscient views of the devastated landscape of post-Gulf War Kuwait oil fields paints a picture of the intoxication and debasing of the landscape at the hand of man and his greed for oil. The film features lingering shots of oil covered plants, swallowed up and poisoned by the waste and sludge. This imagery begins to creep into the scene in the murky black swamp and stagnant water, lapping and staining the rocks of its banks. 24
The swamp which background is th pollutant, which surface in pools o refracting into co is not containabl into stagnant poo low-lying indent clearing. THE CINEMATOGRAPHIC
The scene is framed with allusions to cinema, as a
KDOWN
The scene is destabilised through the canted ‘dutch’ angle of the camera as well as in the angling of the trees, which seem to slide away to the right. This creates an overall unsettling impression on the viewer.
FOUL A SKY, dir. ALVARO F. PULPEIRO
e intoxication of the scene s inspired by photography m tutor Alvaro’s upcoming m. The refinery is not dactically down but implications on the vironment, the waste smoke le, rises and infects the sky.
h sits in the hick with black shimmers on the of light, almost olour. The water le, spreading out ols that form in the tations of the forest
h a 2.35:1 ratio to draw almost a frame from a film.
SCREEN DIRECTION The focus of the scene is split between two points in the foreground and the background, these are orientated so that the main focus in the foreground site on the right, with the eye tracking backwards to the lake and smoke plume. This eye movement takes the viewer from bottom left to top right, which is considered the most difficult screen movement.
HORIZO
N LINE FOREGROUND FOCUS
Sitting, almost obscured in the front of frame is a tire which has been swallowed up by the landscape, the grass, ivy and plants. This is symbolic of the imposed order of a forum — the tire being man’s first simple machine — being overrun by the baseness of nature. Light falling in bands across the image which both mimics the verticallity of the scene and creates thresholds of depth.
In the shadowy foreground of the scene sits the most toxic plants. Our research led us to four specific toxic plants which had an semblance of beauty whilst being deadly — almost like the impression that a forum is harmless until one starts to look closely and deeper. These are Blue lupin, Creepers, Death Cap Mushrooms Common Coleus. 25
THE SOUNDSCAPE
T H E F O R E S T, DEFACED _ The soundscape, like the environment, seeks to undermine and degenerate the natural scene, both through nature’s inherent attributes and in man’s intervention. Thus, the sound tracks a journey from a seemingly normal forest scene into a smothering,pulsing and dirty industrial refinery. The initial sounds of the forest are by means idyllic, there is a harsh wind and a bubbling swamp with animal 26
cries in the distance. This is not a settled scene. This dissolves into the industrial sounds which pollute the ear. As the industrial sounds build so does the pinging of notification tones, these grow in intensity and regularity as engulfing the soundscape before everything goes quiet in a rush. This is symbolic of the growing amount of toxicity the also engulfs forum spaces in time. Everything is base-lined with a low frequency rumble, throughout the whole soundscape there is a sense of discomfort as a result which builds tensions.
Editing in Soundtrack Pro, using sounds from Apple’s FX library with Final Cut Studio 2009.
THE WAVEFORM BREAKDOWN
The forest sounds flooded with wind and simmering water, beginning to fade away into a man-made scene.
Interference and static, the remnants of the forum that has just been hijacked by the simulacra.
Ping, ping, ping... message alert tones building and build, almost suffocating the soundscape. 02:10
Beginnings of forest sounds.
The remnants of voices coming through from the toxicity on the online forum.
Forest sounds mixing with aggressive animal noises.
Industrial machinery pulsating and starting to drown out the forest.
Human toxicity has overrun the soundscape. 27
REFLECTION _
The experience of AA Visiting School has been an invaluable insight into a tangential but equally fulfilling and satisfying realm of design. In architecture school so often we are asked to create something novel, something eye-catching and in some cases garish. In all, there is an emphasis on grand gestures. In unit five, Alvaro and Sergej were searching for, encouraging and supportive of a more subtle response to 28
a brief. When the idea of a forum space as simulation first landed the concepts and design thinking was immediately large scale, altruistic and ultimately looking for a solution. Where it ended up was with something more subtle, more cynical in a way. The final environment, indeed the image itself, does not offer up a solution to the idea of the toxic forum. Instead it presents itself to the viewer and says; there, what do you think? The idea of subtly is appealing, in considering fine details that add up to create an overall impression. This combined into an overall
360 degree environment render, by Jeremy Bonwick and David Liu
learning on a sensibility towards the familiar and the mundane that has an edge, an unexpected twist. Its a cinematic or photographic technique of old, capturing life in unique ways to present a new perspective to the viewer — the environment and the still frame try to do this, but more importantly these are learnings that can be taken forward into future architectural studios; a concern for small details, the allegedly mundane, which when considered closely become important and key to the overall design’s success. That as a whole is one of the greatest benefits of this unit
— considering a brief from a different angle, from the angle of a filmmaker. If more time was to be given to the project it would have been good to explore the back-end thinking — the diagnosis and its implications — in greater depth. As a two week unit, the concept is never going to be exceedingly well researched and water-tight, but I think that despite this the project follows through well on its conceit, its main ideas are symbolically present in the final image and, more than that, the final frame has a certain quality and feel that is imbued with a sense of unease and discomfort
that alludes to the cynical nature of the diagnosis. The scene could have been improved in its technical standard with greater attention to detail on aspects such as the types of toxic plants included and their abundance, as well as finer tuning of the lighting to better highlight certain elements of the frame (something that was considered to a degree, but could be heightened even more). The 360 image too could have been tightened to take on some of attributes of the still frame which stands to better connote the ideas of the toxic forum. 29
N O T E S & CI TAT I O N S _ 1. Grant, Harriet. “World’s biggest porn site under fire over rape and abuse videos”. The Guardian, March 9, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/mar/09/ worlds-biggest-porn-site-under-fire-over-videos-pornhub 2. Godwin, Mike. “Meme, Counter-meme” Wired, August 1, 1994. https://www.wired. com/1994/10/godwin-if-2/ 3. Meeks, C.L.V. “Picturesque Eclecticism.” The Art Bulletin, vol. 32 (1950): 226-235. 4. Tiqqun, The Cybernetic Hypothesis, digital version, MIT Press, 2010. 5. Curtis, Adam, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, Episode 1, BBC, 2011. 6. Gaddis, John Lewis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past. Oxford University Press, 2004. 7. Curtis, Adam, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, Episode 2, BBC, 2011. 8. Tarkovsky, Andrey. “Sculpting in Time: Tarkovsky The Great Russian Filmaker Discusses His Art, digital version, University of Texas Press, 1989.
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