Outlooks Seminar [REMIX]

remix

(v.) to mix again

Jesse Wetzel//Outlooks//Mitnick

dj spooky - reworking the forest

girl talk - reworking the trees

la as ground

la as figure

seeing the sign[s]

seeing the sign[s]

seeing the sign[s]

seeing the sign[s]

seeing the sign[s]

seeing the sign[s]

what’s at stake?

what’s at stake?

what’s at stake?

the possessive spectator

the possessive spectator

the possessive spectator

the possessive spectator

the possessive spectator

the possessive spectator

Norman M. Klein, with Rosemary Comella, Andreas Kratky and The Labyrinth Project :: Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 19201986, 2002 Coproduction of Norman M. Klein and the ZKM | Institute for Visual Media; The Labyrinth Project, Annenberg Center for Communications, The University of Southern California Based on the writings of cultural historian Norman Klein, this interactive Installation is an urban collage held together by the outline of a novel grafted over a loosely constructed documentary. Spanning sixty-six years, the novel centers around a woman named Molly, a fictional character modeled on a real-life person, who may be hiding a murder. She lives within a three square-mile area near downtown Los Angeles, a death zone where more cinematic murders have been committed than anywhere else in the world. In fact, this area is full of stories that have been neglected, forgotten or contaminated by murderous representations in films as diverse as DOA, Chinatown, T-Men and Training Day. One of the most complex ethnographic districts in the United States, this neighborhood is represented in Hollywood movies, urban legends and real estate boosterism in ways that erase the lived ethnographic reality. This reality is the back story to MollyĂ­s fiction.

the conflation/construction of man/city/architecture

the conflation/construction of man/city/architecture

the conflation/construction of man/city/architecture

the conflation/construction of man/city/architecture

the conflation/construction of man/city/architecture

the conflation/construction of man/city/architecture

dj lautner

dj lautner

dj lautner

dj lautner

dj lautner

dj lautner

dj lautner

keeping it

dj lautner

chemoshpere john lautner

chemoshpere [remix] charlie’s angels

dj lautner

notes

remix[ed]

(v.) to remix again

This project is an exploration of several of the issues of this course through the lens of the remix. Perception, identity, culture; when discussing these ideas as they relate to design they are often tied to the visual image. The image however, is more subjective than the medium by which the image is produced might suggest. Photos and film lend a sense of authenticity to whatever the subject might be, but as the interests of this project will explore, what you see isn’t necessarily what you get. Perhaps more importantly, this project is gaming with the idea that as the generators and consumers of content (sometimes happening simultaneously), we are the ones who should have control over what is indeed authentic.

An authentic vision of Los Angeles was something that I found very difficult to grasp.

Like multiple cross sections through a city or a building, I found that I could only piece together very specific moments of the city. While none of these instances fully capture “Los Angeles”, each plays a supporting role as an identifier for the city. As each of these moments/images of the city exist in an almost standalone condition, I became interested in how these moments might get reworked in a way that allows for a different understanding of the city that might not be what we are generally exposed to through the media. Said another way, I was interested in how I might begin to remix LA, or more generally, the urban condition. Using ideas about the city that come from a variety of sources I want to make a case for the reinstatement of the agency of curator. That is to say, I want to suggest that LA (as an example) may not simply be the snapshots of Julius Schulman or scenes from The Hills, but also the crappy photography of the average point-and-shooter.

I’m interested in this idea as a way to both widen the gaze and reconsider the image we have built up as “the city”—ultimately putting the control back into the hands of the individual. All of this to say that no one perception takes priority over another but that these multiple threads/fields of input can be put to work in service of some narrative of our own choosing. The provocation is to challenge the spectator to reinforce/reconsider/reconstruct/remix the city in whatever way he or she sees fit. To take the pieces that might be useful in framing a particular narrative and reworking them in a way that takes the pieces out of their native context and puts them in dialog with similarly dislocated pieced in order to tell a story.

This project is an attempt to do just that. To have a conversation built up of other conversations that have a specific connection to their own contexts which they are disconnected from and then relocated next to other material in such a way that a new story emerges.

Order, arrangement, the length of the curated content is all determined by the composer, but the native material itself is not original. The material that is chosen is not meant to be the “cliff notes” of the native material, but instead the highlighted material is highlighted because of its relationship to the new narrative. I also like the highlighted material being left

in situ as a way to suggest and distinguish between the multiple narratives that are actually in play, allowing for the ‘user’ of this project to engage in multiple threads of thought if they are so inclined. This is another way to consider the document as a body made of references or hyperlinks that might also lead to other understandings of the content (intentional or unintentional). This text, considered as preface or post script can be considered as such or it can be compartmentalized as something that operates outside of the discussion and the ideas as purely a supplement to the curated text within. So while this project is discussing a certain kind of process of seeing/thinking/doing, it is having that discussion in the language of the remix.

Los Angeles and the urban condition is the starting point for this investigation, but the idea of the remix is applicable in any context. The city, the building, and the person all become different scales at which one can apply the same investigation. The work of Hugh Ferriss, Koning Eizenberg, Hitoshi Abe, and Ai Wei Wei all start to bridge the gap between several scales and what emerges is the anthropomorphization of cities and buildings and whatever the opposite equivalent would be for people. We start to understand all of these as scales of systems that have relationships with one another. As we can rewire one system we can do the same at the other scales, and what becomes interesting is how each of the systems are able to affect the other systems regardless of scale. This is critical for design as it illustrates a necessary sensitivity to each of the scales all at once during design.

John Launter’s work does this very well. Lautner is responsible for several of LA’s most iconic houses. His buildings have shown up many movies and television shows of the years, and epitomize Los Angeles modern design. Lautner is somewhat less well known for the development of a commercial design genre known as “Googie” architecture. Although not very popular within architectural circles, this style came to represent the postwar zeitgeist and as such influenced many other buildings. The idea of these different breeds of design all came from the same man, who grew up in the Midwest and learned from Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin, demonstrates the ability to take the same fundamental sensibilities and rework them in ways that allow for many different results. The remix (the man) provided the material for the remix (the building) which would come to represent the remix (the city). Lautner, for the purposes of this project functions as the conflation of the remix at three different scales that would come to represent a city. In this way, I think Launter serves as an example of taking ideas out of a specific context and reconsidering them in a way that allowed him to tell a new story. Whether that story is about blurring the line between nature and artifice or about representing a culture of increasing speed and efficiency, he blends the multiple fields and scales of narrative together in one body of work. Today, pop culture and media continue to rework the material that Lautner provided, although largely just a visual reconsideration, the process continues.

-Jesse Wetzel

sampled albums texts Cohen, Jean-Louis, John Lautner, R. Nicholas. Olsberg, and Frank Escher.

Between Earth and Heaven: the Architecture of John Lautner. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2008.

Eizenberg, Julie. Architecture Isn’t Just for Special Occasions: Koning Ei zenberg Architecture. New York, NY: Monacelli, 2006.

Gordon, Eric. The Urban Spectator: American Concept Cities from Kodak to Google. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 2010.

Hess, Alan, John Lautner, and Alan Weintraub. The Architecture of John Lautner. [New York]: Universe, 2001.

Miller, Paul D. Rhythm Science: Paul D. Miller, Aka DJ Spooky That Sublimi nal Kid. Cambridge: MIT, 2004.

Wilkins, Gretchen. Distributed Urbanism: Cities after Google Earth. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2010.