Techno Solitude

Page 1

figure i. - Tech Magazines General reading material. Usually printed with adverts and a selection of smaller articles, made for mass consumption figure j. - Cleaning Pads. Travel sized cleaning clothes used to clean electronic equipment. Micro-fibers allow for less scratches to glass.

figure a. - Travel & Medical Cards. plastic cards containing a magnetic strip corresponding to account information. Specific cards allow for transfer of information or money.

figure i figure a. figure b

figure j

Watching 6-hours of TV a Day? Surveys indicate that the average US citizen watches the tube six hours daily. Is this really a good thing? see page 10

figure k. - Digital Camera: A camera that records light into digital information, used to replecate an image.

figure l. - Headphones: wires that transfer electrical pulse into two small speakers placed in one’s ear. Usually attached to an MP3 Player

figure c

figure m. - storage disk: a portable hard disk for storing digital data on a magnetic disk

figure l

figure e. - MP3 Player: a personal music player, that stores thousands of digital tracks downloaded from the internet.

figure e

figure m

Real-Time Streaming Video Justin.tv makes it possible to view any form of content 24/7 granted someone is willing to post it online. Real-time video streams of anything from homemade talk shows to fish swiming in a tank. see page 11

figure p. - wireless mouse: a wireless input device that communicates with a computer the your location on the screen

The Ubiquitious Use of Helvetica From street signs to magazine covers the font Helvetica has become the graphic language we most often encounter. see page 01

Our Everyday Interactions Has the screen taken the place of human interaction? From ATM’s to self-checkout lines our lives are being automated more and more. What type of places does this type of interaction create? see page 03

figure f. - Mobile Communication Device: Data device in which you can communicate via text or voice through digital wireless transfer.

figure n. - power supply: a plug for connecting a computer to a power supply figure o. - IR Remote: a remote control that uses infared light to communicate simple commands such as play or volume control on a computer

figure c. - Power share: Cord allowing for the transfer of power from a computer to other electonic devices. figure d. - Identification Pass: allowing clearance to and from the workplace. Picture and barcode carry meta-data about the user. Data is then linked back to a central computer where each user can be tracked by time, date and location.

figure d.

figure k

figure b. - Keys & Dongle. metal objects used to open corresponding locks in doors. Dongle is a digital storage device that plugs into computers.

figure f

figure g. - Mobile Computer: A cordless computer with built in video screen, keyboard and finger pad controls. Capible of executing advanced mathmatical computations to achieve desired results.

figure n.

figure o.

figure g

figure p. Photo Credits: BagContents - http://www.flickr.com/people/mhjohnston/ - Morgan Johnston

figure h

figure h. - transfer cord: a transfer wire connecting MP3 type devices to larger computers or electrical supply

Non-Places: What Are They? Has your town or city lost its sense of place? Text and symbols are replacing cultural places leaving society with meanless non-places. Find out what’s causing this. see page 06


figure i. - Tech Magazines General reading material. Usually printed with adverts and a selection of smaller articles, made for mass consumption figure j. - Cleaning Pads. Travel sized cleaning clothes used to clean electronic equipment. Micro-fibers allow for less scratches to glass.

figure a. - Travel & Medical Cards. plastic cards containing a magnetic strip corresponding to account information. Specific cards allow for transfer of information or money.

figure i figure a. figure b

figure j

Watching 6-hours of TV a Day? Surveys indicate that the average US citizen watches the tube six hours daily. Is this really a good thing? see page 10

figure k. - Digital Camera: A camera that records light into digital information, used to replecate an image.

figure l. - Headphones: wires that transfer electrical pulse into two small speakers placed in one’s ear. Usually attached to an MP3 Player

figure c

figure m. - storage disk: a portable hard disk for storing digital data on a magnetic disk

figure l

figure e. - MP3 Player: a personal music player, that stores thousands of digital tracks downloaded from the internet.

figure e

figure m

Real-Time Streaming Video Justin.tv makes it possible to view any form of content 24/7 granted someone is willing to post it online. Real-time video streams of anything from homemade talk shows to fish swiming in a tank. see page 11

figure p. - wireless mouse: a wireless input device that communicates with a computer the your location on the screen

The Ubiquitious Use of Helvetica From street signs to magazine covers the font Helvetica has become the graphic language we most often encounter. see page 01

Our Everyday Interactions Has the screen taken the place of human interaction? From ATM’s to self-checkout lines our lives are being automated more and more. What type of places does this type of interaction create? see page 03

figure f. - Mobile Communication Device: Data device in which you can communicate via text or voice through digital wireless transfer.

figure n. - power supply: a plug for connecting a computer to a power supply figure o. - IR Remote: a remote control that uses infared light to communicate simple commands such as play or volume control on a computer

figure c. - Power share: Cord allowing for the transfer of power from a computer to other electonic devices. figure d. - Identification Pass: allowing clearance to and from the workplace. Picture and barcode carry meta-data about the user. Data is then linked back to a central computer where each user can be tracked by time, date and location.

figure d.

figure k

figure b. - Keys & Dongle. metal objects used to open corresponding locks in doors. Dongle is a digital storage device that plugs into computers.

figure f

figure g. - Mobile Computer: A cordless computer with built in video screen, keyboard and finger pad controls. Capible of executing advanced mathmatical computations to achieve desired results.

figure n.

figure o.

figure g

figure p. Photo Credits: BagContents - http://www.flickr.com/people/mhjohnston/ - Morgan Johnston

figure h

figure h. - transfer cord: a transfer wire connecting MP3 type devices to larger computers or electrical supply

Non-Places: What Are They? Has your town or city lost its sense of place? Text and symbols are replacing cultural places leaving society with meanless non-places. Find out what’s causing this. see page 06



mask image left – on the set shooting against a blue screen background.

The image above displays the code work needed to create a realistic fall from the pills in the 3d software. Each variable controls a real world condition such as gravity, wind, surface tension or velocity. It also controls the amount of particles, or pills in this case, that are created and how long they remain in the scene as well as their physical characteristics.

3d animation

To create the falling pills scene in the images on the left I used 3d animation overlayed on a 2.5d image of a room. The scene of the fan and the room was created from a flat 2d image. I then recreated it into 3d in Adobe After Effects. I then needed a realistic 3d animation of pills falling onto the carpet from the table above. I used camera mapping, and Xpresso code within Cinema 4d to acheive this. The image above is the 3d animation of the pills before they were rendered in full color.

Once the desired effect is created, I began rendering out the scene. The camera mapping information must be the same as the footage. Then I input the 3d pill footage into my film footage with an alpha, or transparent layer, that I then overlayed cleanly into the scene. Once everything has lined up and color corrected, the scene looks as if it really happened. The advatages of shooting the pills falling in 3d is that I can now slow the footage down or even stop time all together and rotate around the object; a task that would be almost impossible otherwise.

T To replicate a character in the c scene below I set up a green screen, scre or in this case, a blue one, to shoot the character against. This allowed for a clean even background that I could take into post-production. From there I used editing software such as Keylight to take away the blue colored background while leaving the character untouched. This gave me a moving character with an alpha, or transparent, background. I then placed the footage on top of the previously shot footage of the same character. This technique can be used in many situations to acheive numerous results. In my case I wanted to acheive a sense of the uncanny, by creating a doppelganger effect. Another useful effect is the ability to change backgrounds while the character continues to move through the screen. This distorts the reality of what the viewer is expecting from the sceen.

note: A more tedious way of achieving simalar results would be to create a junk matte around the character in each frame.

Using green screens on objects within the space of the film can also be used to displace other footage. Image 01 shows a computer screen with a blue screen covering the area to be displaced. In my post-editing software I can then track the blue screen and apply my footage as seen in Image 02.

image 01

This allowed me to zoom in and out of screens to displace the setting as seen from the viewers’ position. The viewer then begins to distrust the view of the camera, not sure of whether or not they are watching an image of scene or the original scene itself.

image 02


mask image left – on the set shooting against a blue screen background.

The image above displays the code work needed to create a realistic fall from the pills in the 3d software. Each variable controls a real world condition such as gravity, wind, surface tension or velocity. It also controls the amount of particles, or pills in this case, that are created and how long they remain in the scene as well as their physical characteristics.

3d animation

To create the falling pills scene in the images on the left I used 3d animation overlayed on a 2.5d image of a room. The scene of the fan and the room was created from a flat 2d image. I then recreated it into 3d in Adobe After Effects. I then needed a realistic 3d animation of pills falling onto the carpet from the table above. I used camera mapping, and Xpresso code within Cinema 4d to acheive this. The image above is the 3d animation of the pills before they were rendered in full color.

Once the desired effect is created, I began rendering out the scene. The camera mapping information must be the same as the footage. Then I input the 3d pill footage into my film footage with an alpha, or transparent layer, that I then overlayed cleanly into the scene. Once everything has lined up and color corrected, the scene looks as if it really happened. The advatages of shooting the pills falling in 3d is that I can now slow the footage down or even stop time all together and rotate around the object; a task that would be almost impossible otherwise.

T To replicate a character in the c scene below I set up a green screen, scre or in this case, a blue one, to shoot the character against. This allowed for a clean even background that I could take into post-production. From there I used editing software such as Keylight to take away the blue colored background while leaving the character untouched. This gave me a moving character with an alpha, or transparent, background. I then placed the footage on top of the previously shot footage of the same character. This technique can be used in many situations to acheive numerous results. In my case I wanted to acheive a sense of the uncanny, by creating a doppelganger effect. Another useful effect is the ability to change backgrounds while the character continues to move through the screen. This distorts the reality of what the viewer is expecting from the sceen.

note: A more tedious way of achieving simalar results would be to create a junk matte around the character in each frame.

Using green screens on objects within the space of the film can also be used to displace other footage. Image 01 shows a computer screen with a blue screen covering the area to be displaced. In my post-editing software I can then track the blue screen and apply my footage as seen in Image 02.

image 01

This allowed me to zoom in and out of screens to displace the setting as seen from the viewers’ position. The viewer then begins to distrust the view of the camera, not sure of whether or not they are watching an image of scene or the original scene itself.

image 02



techno solitude

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Techno Solitude an report by

Tyler Joseph Barnard

written for Masters of Architecture in Design UCL, The Bartlett, London, UK Tutor: Nic Clear completed June 15, 2009


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tyler joseph barnard

Some Rights Reserved 2009 - This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Please contact tylerbarnard@gmail.com for further information coverpage photo credits: All images used are licenced under a share and share alike Creative Commons Licence. front inside jacket: top image - Helvetica_01 - http://www.flickr.com/people/psd/ - Paul Downey bottom image - gutted grocery store http://www.flickr.com/people/houseofsims/ Brandi Sims back inside jacket: top image -Two feet watching TV! http://www.flickr.com/photos/ lexrex/59956502/sizes/o/ Bashar Al-Ba´noon bottom image- My Gold fish fish tank http:// www.flickr.com/photos/moorthygounder/2228820386/sizes/l/ Moorthy Gounder


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table of contents

1a – editor’s notes: the particular layout of this essay… 2a - What am I interested in? 2c - What concerns me? 2d - What am I doing... 3a - Joe Briefcase and Pierre Dumont: mass appeal and the individual 4a - What are the spatial implications? 4b - The aura of non-place, and our addiction 5a - discovering the uncanny… 6a - The flickering image… 6b - Real-Time… to watch a fish swimming in its tank in Houston, TX 6c – Blurring the boundaries - “Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others.” 2b - broken narrative of time-based events… 7a - What to do then? 8a - How do I propose to do this? 8b - creating the uncanny 8a - Screens, event sequences and exhibition… 8d - the use of overheard conversations, and glitch music


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1a – editor’s notes: the particular layout of this essay… I am emulating the layout style of David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Why? Because I really enjoy his non-linear chapter order and obsessive use of footnotes that tend to break up the way in which you read his books. I think this is particularly clever and fitting towards my topic.1 ∆ design

note: I have decided on the use of the font type Helvetica, due to

its simple lines and upright clean geometries. There is a feature length documentary film dedicated to the explanation of its popular usage called Helvetica. I have not yet seen it. www.helveticafilm.com

2a - What am I interested in? “Seeing dawn and dusk at the same time–was of being neither within nor without; it was an experience of being between the two, a “between” formed only in the simultaneous presence of the two.” (Paul Virilio’s experience…”returning from San Francisco to Europe”)2 This type of experience exists as a temporal space, or event, or ‘Slip Space’3 between two or more physical geographies. This ‘space’ and the ‘places’ it connects are a type of hyper-reality, created by the use of ‘tactics,’4 or opportunities in time, creating

1 David Foster Wallace, A supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, (1997) - Specifically on page 154 you see ch. 6a come after ch. 7, which is then followed by 6b. Chapter titles are more like internal dialogue from the author rather than declarative one-liners. see. 2 Victor Burgin, Indifferent Spaces (1996), pg. 185 Referring to Virilio’s, “Improbable Architecture”, pg 83. “Paul Virilio, ‘returning from San Francisco to Europe,’ over the glaciers of Greenland and observes; ‘Behind us glow the red fires of dusk and, in the same instant, ahead of us glimmer the green lights of dawn.’ 3 Lewis Tsurumaki Lewis, Situation Normal (1998) Slip Space, a project by, investigation the space between gallery and the basement below through various mechanical devices connecting the use of common objects. see. 4 Lewis Tsurumaki Lewis, Situation Normal (1998) pg. 05, 07 “In particular, tactics are the modes of creative opportunity that operate within the gaps and slips of conventional thought and the patterns of everyday life.”… “A critical architecture challenges the familiar, seeking out what has been forgotten in the making of the conventions and norms of generic, everyday architecture.”


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the illusion of simultaneity, where one exist in more than one place at a given moment. A ‘tactic’, as stated by Certeau, “depends on time–it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized “on the wing.” Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into “opportunities.”5 One use of tactics, or maneuvers, in everyday life is through the use of everyday high-speed technologies, such as real-time video, mobile phones, passenger jets, etc.6 These technologies blur the boundaries of physical space reality and create a hyper-reality, which, as stated by Baudrillard, is something by which states itself as real but questions its origin of reality at the same instance.7 It is this hyper-reality along with the excess’ of what Augé calls ‘super-modernity’ that creates places void of ‘meaning’8, called ‘non-place’9.

What interests me are

5 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (2002) pg xix “A tactic insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance. It has at its disposal no base where it can capitalize on its advantages, prepare its expansions, and secure independence with respect to circumstances. The “proper” is a victory of space over time.“ 6 Victor Burgin, Indifferent Spaces (1996), pg. 186 “Today ‘the tube’ has extended the shopping street into the upper atmosphere. I am on a flight into Los Angeles. Video projectors have just transmitted live news broadcasts onto screens in the aircraft cabin; I leaf through a shopping catalog provided in the seat pocket in front of me. Above this pocket, inset in the seat back, is a telephone handset. I may use a credit card as a key to release the telephone and call anywhere in the world; I may also use it to order goods from the catalog, which will be wrapped and waiting for me on my deplaning at LAX. Back on the ground, as I head for the baggage claim area, the “terminal’ is itself an agglomeration of video terminals informing me of times and places I may make further connections to other places and other times. “ 7 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1994) “Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.” 8 I use the word ‘meaning’ here with the understanding that meaning for me is not the same as meaning for you. What I am trying to say is along the lines of Augé’s use of ‘anthropological place’ that is derived of cultural and historical significance. It is a place that ‘is a principal of meaning for the people who live in it’. – Augé, non-place: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity pg 52 9 Marc Augé, non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, (1995) pg 78… “If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place. The hypothesis advanced here is that super modernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which, unlike Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate the earlier places; instead these are listed, classified, promoted to the status of ‘places of memory’, and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position.”


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the uncanny relationships between our use of technology, travel and media culture, and the resulting isolation and solitude created in the hyper-real landscapes in our communities, cities and homes. What I will attempt to point out throughout this essay is the ubiquitous nature of this isolation, and its causes, in an attempt to suggest an alternative direction.

2c - What concerns me? In today’s post-modern capitalistic societies our obsession of speed, technologies and efficiency, we are losing our communities and sense of anthropological place.10 I am not stating that advancements in travel and technologies are bad or even the problem here, rather I think their use and cultural significance is misplaced. In fact, in today’s culture ubiquitous technologies like TV, the Internet, GPS, mobile phones, Wi-Fi, digital imagery, ATM’s, jumbo jets and high-speed trains, help us connect and create our global network of people. The side effects of this type of culture are equally as exciting but perhaps more damaging. Think Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll11 of the late 70’s, only now you are watching Ian Dury’s video on your iPhone12, your prescription for Prozac is your drug of choice and sex, well, you wouldn’t want to spread any diseases13. In the age of super-modernity and hyper-realism we are increasingly becoming more isolated and living our lives in a sort of techno-solitude, where we are all dancing to the music but you can’t talk to the person next to you if you tried14, but that’s ok because the bright

10 Marc Augé, non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, (1995) pg 52 …”anthropological place – is a principle of meaning for the people who live in it, and also a principle of intelligibility for the person who observes it.” 11

Richard Balls, Sex And Drugs And Rock And Roll: The Life Of Ian Dury (2000) Omnibus Press

12 Steve Wheeler, Connected Minds, Emerging Cultures: Cybercultures in Online Learning (2009) – see pg. 29-42 13 Susan Okie, MD Sex, Drugs, Prisions and HIV, n engl j med 356;2 www.nejm.org January 11, 2007 – this article seemed appropriate in showing the significance in the spread of a global disease as a consequence of a global network. 14 This is good spot to point out iPod Flashmobbers - Mobs of people descend upon a single location that was decided upon through a common website or emails. At this location everyone listens and dances to their iPod or mp3 player. The scene can only be scene as uncanny when seen from the viewpoint of someone who doesn’t know what is going on while hundreds of people begin to dance spontaneously in


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colorful moving lights on the video screen are telling you this is “your night” and you are an individual, but you just so happen to be dancing in a crowd of millions of other equally unique individuals.

2d - What am I doing... I am proposing an 8-12 minute film that reveals, through the uncanny15, the tactics and strategies of the everyday life of people in our not so distant future through a surrationalist lens. This film will be a critique of a possible direction I feel we are headed, pointing out the isolating features of our spatial experiences with a growing landscape of ‘non-places’.

3a - Joe Briefcase and Pierre Dumont: mass appeal and the individual Meet Joe Briefcase16 and Pierre Dumont17, both slanted towards a particularly western view and both what Certeau would call the ‘ordinary man’ or ‘common hero’. According to DFW they are teleholics18, addicted to the flickering image culture, while in a similar vein, Augé might describe them as the ‘spectator,’ trapped in a kind of inverted gaze upon their own position in life. 19 I think Certeau and Augé would both argue that the ‘average’ Joe B. and Pierre D. are both fairly isolated individuals

an otherwise banal public space. 15 Allen Vanneman – Dead or Alive 2003 http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/42/uncanny.htm. He discusses the use of the uncanny in most of Hitchcock’s films. Mostly through the use of making inanimate objects or figures seem alive. Making the familiar very unfamiliar. 16 DFW refers to Joe B. throughout the text as chosen version of the everyday man off the street. I particularly like this name over John Doe which conjures up thoughts of a court trial and future imprisonment 17

Pierre Dumont is the generalized “everyman” in Augé’s prologue equivalent to Joe B.

18 David Foster Wallace, A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again, (1997) pg 38 - “But the analogy between television and liquor is best, I think. Because (bear with me a second) I’m afraid good old average Joe Briefcase might be a teleholic. I.e., watching TV can become malignantly addictive.” 19 Marc Augé, non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, (1995) pg 86 …”we should still remember that there are spaces in which the individual feels himself to be a spectator without paying much attention to the spectacle. As if the position of spectator were the essence of the spectacle, as if basically the spectator in the position of a spectator were his own spectacle.”


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whose addiction to ‘Image-Fiction’20 and ‘non-space’ conveniences have jaded their relationship to the spectacle21. Or as DFW alludes to, they are becoming the very spectacle they wish to gaze upon.22 Joe B. watching TV, a type of ‘non-place’ situation, is an environment saturated with symbols and text and therefore is an extension of the super-modern landscape. It is similar to Pierre Dumont’s experiences traveling on the A11 in Paris, to row J in the parking garage, to Gate B at the airport, to the “Espace 2000” seat on the airplane. What is described here is a ‘non-place’ that weighs heavily upon symbols and directions of use and proper behavior, much like that of the contractual relationship of the viewer to the TV.23 The role here that each participant accepts is the feeling of individualization while, simultaneously, surrendering oneself to the ‘gaze of millions’22, thus establishing complacency towards solitude. Augé states: What he is confronted with, finally, is an image of himself, but in truth it is a pretty strange image. The only face to be seen, the only voice to be heard, in the silent dialogue he holds with the landscape – text addressed to him along with others, are his own: the face and voice of the solitude made all the more baffling by the fact that it echoes millions of others. The passenger through non-places retrieves his identity only at Customs, at the tollbooth, at the checkout counter. Meanwhile, he obeys the same code as others, receives the same messages, responds to the same entreaties. The space of non-place creates neither singular identity non-relations; only

20 David Foster Wallace, A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again, (1997) pg 52 …“Image-Fiction is paradoxically trying to restore what’s taken for “real” to three whole dimensions, to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of flat sights.” 21 Guy Debord, La Societe du Spectacle, (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967) “The spectacle is not a collection of images,” Debord writes. “Rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images. 22

David Foster Wallace, A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again, (1997) pg 24-25

23 Marc Augé, non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, (1995) pg 96 “But the real places of super-modernity...driving down the motorway, wandering through the supermarket or sitting in an airport lounge waiting for the next flight to London or Marseille - have the peculiarity that they are defined partly by the words and texts they offer us: their ‘instructions for use’, which may be prescriptive (‘Take right-hand lane’), prohibitive (‘No smoking’) or informative (‘You are now entering the Beaujolais region’).”


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tyler joseph barnard solitude, and similitude.24

4a

- What are the spatial implications?

The use of these technologies and modes of transport create a certain typology of place. Joe Briefcase’s daily experiences are filled with subway terminals, highways, gas stations, airports, billboards, parking lots, ATM’s, bus stations and even the out-dated phone booth. Each place fulfills a programmatic need while facilitating a way of communication and/or travel. Joe B. might say…”So what? My train ride is efficient, I can work on my laptop the plane ride and I can catch the latest Hollywood release in High Definition.” This, however, is where the picture becomes fuzzy. Yes, Joe B’s individualization in his daily ‘tactics’ makes things seemingly better and his modern dreams are fulfilled. However, I would have to say Joe B. is not better off, but rather Joe B is living in a society of excess, in everything from information to space, and he is living more and more of his life in solitude. All of this is contributing to a loss of place, adding to the increase in what Augé calls ‘non-place’ in our ‘supermodern’ society. More specifically I would point to Augé’s three points of excess, ’overabundance of events, spatial overabundance, the individualization of references’, which he claims as the characteristics of super-modernity.25 Our landscapes, our cities, and our homes are beginning to lose their meaning to the idyllic conveniences of Image-fiction. As our history catches up with us, places become more accessible, and our sense of community loses out to individualism, our exterior and interior constructions portray our isolation. It could be said our nonplace reality is already here.26 It’s the automatic mechanization of everything the

24

Marc Augé, non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, (1995) pg 103-104

25 Marc Augé, non-places: introduction to an anthropology of super-modernity (1995) pg. 29 “This need to give a meaning of the present, if not the past, is the price we pay for the overabundance of events corresponding to a situation we could call ‘super-modern’ to express its essential quality: excess.”…pg 40 “The three figures of excess which we have employed to characterize the situation of super-modernity – overabundance of events, spatial overabundance, the individualization of references – make it possible to grasp the idea of super-modernity…” 26 Marc Augé, non-places: introduction to an anthropology of super-modernity (1995) pg. 28-32, 109 - “If Descombes is right, we can conclude that in the world of super-modernity people are always, and never, at home: the frontier zones or ‘marchlands’ he mentions no longer open on to totally foreign worlds. Super-modernity (which stems simultaneously from the three figures of excess: overabundance


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Joe Briefcase relationship: single birthday: September 9, 1971 status: global citizen friends: 147 email: joe_brief@mail.com

profile pic tagged: subway, commute, travel, work taken: January 30, 2006 location: unknown 1 comment @ ben_stevens02 - nice profile joe, whats it been 5 years? chat with ya soon. ab abou outt 1 ho ou hou ur ago ur g

photo credits - airport - train station http://www.flickr.com/photos/toniphotos/ Toni


Airport lounge @ “Terminal 2� 2tagged: airport, lounge, travel, work

taken: July 26, 2006 location: unknown 1 comment

2 people like this

@ jsmith0230 - hey joe, love the pic. lets catch up soon maybe LAX. im headed to LON tmrw. ok cya soon. ab abou outt 1 ho ou ourr ago g @charlie_Vx01 - thurs. lets do lunch. busy till 1. meet @ holiday inn. ciao ab abou outt 2 ho ou our urss a ag go

photo credits - http://www.flickr.com/photos/mujitra/ MIKI

tyler joseph barnard


techno solitude

information click here

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airport signs tagged: airport, signs travel, work taken: August 26, 2006 location: unknown no comments

3 people like this

photo credits - http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidbenito/ David Benito


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bathroom vending machine tagged: toothbrush, hotel, convenience taken: Sept 14, 2006 location: unknown 2 comments

tyler joseph barnard

5 people like this

joe_brief02 - forgot the toothbrush again. saved by the vending machine in the toilets! $1.00 toothbrush abou o t 1 hour ago ou richie_king - thats not all ur buying you dog u!! haha lol! just kiddin bro...have a good night... ab abou ut 1 hour ago

photo credits -bathroom vending machines http://www.flickr.com/people/specialkrb/ Karen


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Hotel room/ office for the night tagged: business, hotel, convenience taken: Sept 15, 2006 location: unknown 2 comments

5 people like this

joe_brief 022 at the hotel, its a nice room. looks like its a room service kinda night. hope the cable channels are worth the upgrade ab bou out 1 h ho our u ago o @sherie_a122 ur in town? how about a coffee? thursday for me...u? ciao! ab a out ou ut 2 ho h urrs ag go

Hotel Room Hilton Hotel Manhattan New York City http://www.flickr.com/photos/kathika/ Micheal Gray


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garage parking - tickets

tyler joseph barnard

tagged: parking, garage, convenience taken: Sept 26, 2006 location: unknown 0 comments

0 people like this

photo credits -Parking garage ticket payment http://www.flickr.com/photos/richiec/ Richie


techno solitude

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Toll booth tagged: toll booth, travel, waiting taken: May 08, 2006 location: unknown 1 comments

5 people like this

joe_brief 022 toll booth line again...time to upgrade to the express pass...@phil_239 is it worth the upgrade phil?

photo credits -Bay Bridge traffic jam http://www.flickr.com/photos/gohsuket/ Gohsuke Takama


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tyler joseph barnard

new office sculpture... tagged: sculpture, office, art taken: November 11, 2006 location: unknown 1 comment

3 people like this

joe_brief02 2 - office just invested in this new sculpture thing...not sure what it is..hope it doesn’t fall though...about 1 hour ago

photo credits -Hart Senate Office Building http://www.flickr.com/people/goldberg/ joe goldberg


techno solitude

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The office...the desk tagged: office, desk, work taken: Oct 4, 2006 location: unknown 2 comment

0 people like this

joe_brief02 2 - pic from my desk...quite bored... anyone plans tonight? ab bout 2 hour ho ago

tadkj_002 2 - new movie out...wanna come over l8r we can get the first showing at the theater? dinner before? ab a ou out 1 ho our a ago go o

photo credits -My Office http://www.flickr.com/photos/sburt/ Steve Burt


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tyler joseph barnard

first class upgrade tagged: first class, airplane, luxury taken: Dec 14, 2006 location: unknown 1 comments

5 people like this

joe_brief02 2 - just got the upgrade notice ...thanks mileage bonus points!! ab bou out 1 ho out hour ur ago g

photo credits -First Class, United 747 http://www.flickr.com/photos/alan-light/ - Alan Light


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1950’s promised with the individualized preferences the computer age provided us. It is provided to us as an image of whatever our addiction desires, like the narrator in “Fight Club” screaming in horror over the loss of his apartment, not because he couldn’t replace it, but because it and the objects in it, represented a version of ‘himself’.27 We are placing our values on a representation of what our life should look like, echoed from the media, controlled by an unidentifiable manipulator. Nonplace is DeLillo’s ‘photographed barn’28, we cannot see it for anything other than what it is because we have all read the signs.

4b - The aura of non-place, and our addiction DeLillo, a favored author of DFW, wrote a section in his book called White Noise28 about “THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN THE USA.” It is about a tourist site that attracts hundreds of people to take pictures of a barn, which is quoted on the signs leading up to the site as “THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN THE USA.” The following is a small sample of the dialog from DeLillo’s characters as they visit the site. “We’re not here to capture an image. We’re here to maintain one. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.” “What was the barn like before it was photographed?” he said…”We can’t answer these questions because we’ve read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can’t get outside the aura. We’re part of the aura. We’re here, we’re now.”28 I would argue that this example is not only an illustration of what DFW called ‘ImageFiction’, but could qualify as Augé’s ‘non-place’, as well as, Baudrillard’s “hyperspace.”

Let me first start with Augé’s ‘non-place’,“super-modernity produces non-

of events, spatial overabundance and the individualization of references) naturally finds its full expression in non-places. “ 27 Fight Club (1999) – The Narrator played by Ed Norton - “That condo was my life, okay? I loved every stick of furniture in that place. That was not just a bunch of stuff that got destroyed, it was ME! 28

Don DeLillo, White Noise, (1986) pg. 12-13


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places …[which] do not integrate the earlier places; instead these are listed, classified, promoted to the status of ‘places of memory’, and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position.”9 He goes on to describe these places as…”places exist[ing] only thorough the words that evoke them…”29 Baudrillard, while discussing his views on Las Vegas and advertising states…”(whatever signs circulate there) that plunges us into this stupefied, hyper-reality euphoria that we would not exchange for anything else, and that is the empty and inescapable form of seduction.”30 This image of the barn, the image of taking the image of the barn, becomes the ‘seduction’ of the place. It no longer retains its meaning as a barn with-in an original landscape, it becomes the simulacra, the idea of the place, a non-place filled with convenient iconographies telling us what we are experiencing.

And because we

have read the signs, even in jest, we become part of the fiction and can no longer see the barn, making the aura of non-place inescapable. Movie Note: Twin Peaks, a TV series by David Lynch, addresses the ideas of image-fiction by overtly dramatizing the point. His ubiquitous use of ‘typical’ Hollywood drama, points out the fact that you are watching a fictional TV series portraying a stereotypical version of reality. Its as if Lynch wants us to become part of the fiction by making us aware of our role as the audience, just as modern adverts invite you to join in the irony of their message.31 DFW suggests our relationship to TV and the image has become like an addiction18. I would suggest that we have also become addicted to the nature of ‘non-place’. We are addicted to both the convenience of its conventions, and its disillusionment from the reality of our own banal lives. Like a drug the fictional image offers us both

29 Marc Augé, non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, (1995) pg 95 “Certain places exist only through the words that evoke them, and in this sense they are non-places, or rather, imaginary places: banal utopias, clichés. They are the opposite of de Certeau’s non-place. Here the word does not create a gap between everyday functionality and lost myth: it creates the image, produces the myth and at the same stroke makes it work...” 30

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1994) pg. 92

31 David Foster Wallace, A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again, (1997) pg 65 - “For irony – exploiting gaps between what’s said and what’s meant, between how things try to appear and how they really are – is the time-honored way artists seek to illuminate and explode hypocrisy.”


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immediate satisfaction, and a distraction from reality. This is an easy comparison to places like Disneyland or Las Vegas, but more surprising is its parallel more ubiquitous places like the A11, the elevator, the airport, the shopping market, or the restaurant. In fact, there are very few places that don’t qualify in offering some type of high-speed convenience along with the sale of some type of alternative experience. And we can think of our relationship to media as the supplier in this chain of addiction. The supplier is the faceless, nameless entity that exists in the aura, created by the aura.32 And with any type of addiction, it is ours to bear alone, with the millions of other addicts who bear no other help than commiseration.

5a - discovering the uncanny… The image of the barn, or the ‘aura’ of non-place is like experiencing the ‘uncanny’ or ‘unheimliche’33. This is not to say that all uncanny experiences are ‘non-place’ events, but rather that experiencing the barn a good example of what it is like to experience a non-place. Zizek describes it best when describing the ‘uncanny’ nature of ‘the Hitchcockian procedure’ – “The more we find ourselves in total ambiguity, not knowing where “reality” ends and “hallucination” (i.e., desire) begins, the more menacing this domain appears.”34 As seen in films like Vertigo, Hitchcock masters this type of play of what is known and what is not. This gives the spectator a sense that everything has a double meaning, and he or she begins to distrust what is real within the situation, much like that of the characteristics of non-place. Lewis, Tsurumaki and Lewis (LTL) are very good at invoking the uncanny within the realm of architecture. They employ the tactics of Surrationalism to uncover the unfamiliar by careful arrangement of the familiar. They use this tactic within projects such as Slip-Space or Eaves-dropping, where the occupant’s notions of a space

32 Marc Augé, non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, (1995) pg 32 …In reference to TV and image access Auge writes; “This spatial overabundance works like a decoy, but a decoy whose manipulator would be very hard to identify (there is nobody pulling the strings).” 33 Uncanny or Unheimliche -literally meaning the un-knowing or un-familiar, Freud defined it as “that particular variety of terror that relates to what has been known for a long time, has been familiar for a long time.” Freud, Sigmund. (1919h). Das Unheimliche. Imago, 5: 297-324; GW, 12: 229-268; The “uncanny,” SE, 17: 217-256. 34

Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry, (1992) pg. 89-90


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become unfurled as they experience and interact within the space. In Slip-Space, programmed as an art gallery, if you sit down on one of the various stools with-in the room you will find that the support of the chair begins to slide below the surface of the floor into an unknown space below, bringing into question the reliability of the familiar object and a questioning of the space in general. Defining Terms: “Surrationalism, [as defined by LTL] “is first and foremost a conscious, critical, and rational project, its goal being the liberation of rationality from the encrusted habits of convention. As opposed to indulging in dreams, automatism, and unqualified chance, surrationalism seeks a creative logic to engender disquieting associations between or within the everyday. If surrealism seeks to explore the more-real-than-real world behind the real, then surrationalism uses rationalism to test the boundaries of rationalism itself.”35 This brings me to the use of ‘Strange loops,’ or self-referential systems as a possible tactic to expose the uncanny. These are tactics that leave the viewer questioning the very nature of what is real about the situation they are experiencing by subverting their expectations. Example: William Adams of Time Magazine published an article entitled “UK Couple to Divorce over Affair on Second Life.”

His article explains

the workings of the couple’s virtual relationship that ended in deception and eventually led to an end of the 5-year online marriage after Dave’s online avatar was caught sleeping with an online prostitute in Second Life. The article continually questions the seriousness of the virtual vs. the real, leaving the reader slightly confused in this ‘strange loop,’ not quite sure where the relationship ended or if it really ever began. In the above-mentioned article there is an unsettling feeling of not knowing which side of the argument that you stand on. This creates a sense of parallax, or a fuzzy distance between both sides, yet creates a sense that they are, one and in the

35 Lewis Tsurumaki Lewis, Situation Normal, (1998) pg 4-9 “This challenge arises from the possibility that beneath the surface of the normal or the familiar exists the strange or the unfamiliar; the possibility that what is considered normal must, by definition, include the abnormal.”


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same. Strange loops are another example of a non-place and could be described as hyper-real, and hyperrealism is a product of the overt illusion of something real, then I would call ‘non-place’ the theater of the uncanny.

6a

- The flickering image…

As added elements to the uncanny nature of non-place – video, TV, surveillance and the Internet helps to displace the familiar. Their pervasive, and yet ubiquitous nature, continue encroaching into every aspect of our lives. The ability to visually capture, record, manipulate and broadcast almost anywhere in real-time affects the ways in which we communicate, travel and see the world as a whole. The gaze of video technologies, like surveillance, is furthering the ubiquity of hyper-realities. Example: A 1994 episode of Modern Marvels states that the average person is caught on tape 300 times daily in London. This type of constant monitoring threads itself into the urban fabric, recording the fluctuating trajectories of the average citizen in their everyday life, reflected in the security monitors and storefront windows.

6b - Real-Time… to watch a fish swimming in its tank in Houston, TX On the screen you are watching a man sleeping in Brazil, or maybe you want to watch a fish swimming in its tank in Houston, TX. There are the possibilities of the various channels on www.Justin.tv, a new website out of San Francisco, CA, giving you live uncut reality 24/7. The site broadcasts live web cams and steaming video from anyone with an account. If you have an account, you can do all of this while chatting with your friends in the side bar of the site. Movie Note: The movie Lost Highway by David Lynch plays off of the idea of video surveillance when the main couple receives mysterious VHS tapes on their doorstep. The tapes contain video of the two of them sleeping, and this implicates the viewer as having trespassed into their home to have taken this footage. This creates an intrusive and creepy atmosphere to the movie from the onset. As the first act comes to end we see…”Bill Pullman


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tyler joseph barnard standing over the mutilated corpse of Patricia Arquette – we see it only on the video. And then Bill Pullman’s arrested and convicted and put on Death Row.”36 ∆ design

note: By singling out the movies and indenting them I feel it brings a

sense of casual conversation, such as, “hey did you see that movie?” This writing style is meant to possibly counter the stiffness of the play-by-play analysis. Paul Virilio talked about the 24-hour day being created by the electric city lamp. We are now seeing the next phase of a world revealed by the instantaneous flickering image.37 For example, Y.T, a character in ‘Snow Crash’ by Neal Stephenson is wired with cameras constantly pulling ‘intel’ from her location using retinal scanning to tag the people in the video. More currently, Google.com’s street view pulls real-time data from roaming street vehicles that update their geo-coded information like orbiting satellites. Take it a step further: What if CCTV footage was used in the future to replay your actions and place you in an advertisement as you walked by, altering the real-time version of your reflection? Real-time video dislocates the viewer from the actual creating a new hyper-real mode of operation, creating ‘the uncanny’. For example, robotic surgery and the use of instantaneous video feeds allow a heart surgeon to operate, remotely, on a patient in another city. This type of engagement with the practices of everyday is creating a visual landscape that is much different than that of a pre-automobile era. Our eyes have access to an immense amount of visual information that distorts our actual physical location into a hyper-real fractured geography.

6c

– Blurring the boundaries - “Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others.”38

36

David Foster Wallace, A supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, (1997)

37

Paul Virilio, Julie Rose, A Landscape of Events (2000)

38 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (2002) pg xii, 36, 38 -”(1) The ‘proper’ is a triumph of place over time... (2) It is also a mastery of places through sight. (3) And ...power of knowledge.”…”The division of space makes possible a panoptic practice proceeding from a place whence the eye can transform foreign forces into objects that can be observed and measured, and thus control and “include” them within its scope of vision. To be able to see (far into the distance) is also to


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Not un-like our addictions to the TV, non-places are, or have become saturated with video, either surveying or displacing images around the world. Spatially, this type of place lacks boundaries and clear borders, which in the end, confuse and distort Joe B’s sense of the reality of things. For example, Diller + Scofidio’’s “The Slow House reconsiders issues of optical paranoia which emerged over forty years ago in the growing affinity between the television and the picture window. The designations ‘public’ and ‘private’ were put into doubt as television privatized the most public condition, the media, and the picture window publicized the most private, the interior.”39 This type of uncanny experience causes a sense of isolation for Joe B. in that, the relationships between private and public have dissolved but so have the social expectations that follow suit. For instance, Joe B. is now ‘comfortable’ having an intimate conversation on his mobile phone in a crowded subway, surrounded by people not talking to one another, but then return home and view real-time video streams or news about what is going on in Pierre Dumont’s corner of the world, thus blurring the borders by inviting the outside in and the inside out.40 This strange sense of boundary lost can be directly linked with the events, spatial layouts, and signage that condition us within non-place41. Our interactions in the super-market checkout, the ATM or the Toll expressway have replaced our need to verbally communicate. Interactive screens take over the essential processes of ticketing and transferring information, while benches, private coaches, wide corridors, elevators, cars, privacy screens, stalls, booths, and kiosk spread farther apart and offer more seclusion from one another as a symbol of greater status. Joe B. can now be free to stretch out his legs, drink his customized Starbuck’s ‘triple-tall

be able to predict, to run ahead of time by reading a space.” 39

Diller +Scofidio, Flesh (1994) pg 249

40 Diller +Scofidio, Flesh (1994) pg 62 In talking about David Ireland’s renovation of a century old house in San Francisco. “Both factual and fictional ‘ domesticities’ are available for viewers, who are invited to move freely through the installation and allowed restricted visual access to the artist’s living quarters through peepholes. With time, the overlapping domains of public and private begin to blur, then to exchange: the private domain yields to the public gaze and performs for it, while private acts inadvertently intersect public space.” 41 This links back to the ideas, brought up earlier in the essay, regarding Augé’s three points of excess. see pages 1-2


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nonfat mocha’ at 150 degrees42, fire up his mobile email device and chat with his friend in Atlanta, and listen to ACDC on his personalized streaming music station while avoiding all of the other travelers around him. ∆ design

note: I am using the font Abadi MT Condensed Bold as the font

for the titles of each section. I have always wanted to use this font as it appears first in the font list and it looks relatively modern. It is usually the Condensed Bold that drives me to use another font, but it seemed fitting here. I also took the liberty of use the option to Bold the titles as well which actually only increased the justification between letters. I think this is what makes it work so well.

2b

- broken narrative of time-based events…

In the context of boundary loss, Augé’s super-modernity and its excess of space and time, along with technologies that fuel it, it becomes possible to see the field of architecture as something more than building physical structures. I would argue that we should no longer view architecture as the linear production of static, physical space, but rather a fractured, inebriated lexicon void of a structured narrative. It looks more like a broken narrative of time-based events. Paul Virilio’s “definition of the event is less in space than in time. P.V’s thesis may be simply that time has finally overcome space as our main mode of perception.”43 Then the effects of our perception of simultaneity are that “space is temporal” and requires new ‘modes of operation.’44

42 Jennifer Reese, CNNMoney.com, STARBUCKS INSIDE THE COFFEE CULT AMERICA’S RED-HOT CAFFEINE PEDDLER GIVES NEW MEANING TO “ADDICTION,” “PRECISION,” AND “BARISTA.” IF YOU DOUBT THAT COFFEE MEANS BUSINESS, CONSIDER: A LATTE AND SCONE PER DAY IS A $1,400-A-YEAR HABIT. December 9, 1996 43 Paul Virilio, A Landscape of Events (2000) (Bernard Tschumi- Foreword) “His definition () of the event is less in space than in time. P.V’s thesis may be simply that time has finally overcome space as our main mode of perception.” 44 Paul Virilio, A Landscape of Events (2000) (Bernard Tschumi- Foreword) “Time, rather than space, is the theme of this book: the collapse of time, the acceleration of time, the reversal of time, the simultaneity of all times. Another title for Virilio’s “A Landscape of Events” could have been “Mediated Blitzed.” Indeed, rarely has a contemporary writer so engaged in an exacerbated analysis of the acceleration of time, to the point where space itself becomes engulfed in time. Space becomes temporal.”


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cell phone parking lot - free wi-fi tagged: wifi, airport, waiting taken: Sept 28, 2006 location: unknown no comments

0 people like this

photo credits - Cell Phone Lot at TIA - http://www.flickr.com/people/84161724@N00/ - jrgts


vending machine urge

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tagged: hunger, vending, convenience taken: Sept 26, 2007 location: unknown 1 comment

tyler joseph barnard

3 people like this

@susanlane256 interesting pic joe...i thought you gave up the smokes? hehe...you were headed for the water right?? ab bou outt 1 ho h ur ur ago g

photo credits - Ubiquitous vending machines http://www.flickr.com/people/mroach/ mroach


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waiting for the train tagged: travel, train, late, waiting taken: Sept 03, 2006 location: unknown 1 comments

1 person likes this

joe_brief02 2 - train is late again. snack food is not holding out...waiting...waiting... ab bou ut 1 ho ou urr ago go

photo credits - Wait http://www.flickr.com/people/lordferguson/ Pablo


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tyler joseph barnard

atm island tagged: travel, late, waiting taken: June 03, 2007 location: unknown 1 comments

1 person likes this

joe_brief02 2 - so this is what they call personal service nowadays..... ab bou out 1 ho ourr ago o

photo credits - Loneliness is an ATM http://www.flickr.com/people/swanksalot/ - Seth Anderson


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bird landing tagged: travel, late, waiting taken: Sept 03, 2007 location: unknown 1 comments

1 person likes this

joe_brief02 2 - hope thats not my plane...im soo late..... about 1 hour ago

photo credits - Los Angeles traffic http://www.flickr.com/photos/46183897@N00/ Robert Nunnally


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tyler joseph barnard

Grocery store night tagged: store, food, shopping, consumerism taken: Oct 20, 2006 location: unknown 2 comments

2 people like this

joe_brief02 2 - what to pick for dinner any suggestions? frozen box 1 or frozen box 2...hehe ab abou outt 3 ho hour urr ago charlie_3022 2 - I always go 4 box 2, the one that reminds u of home cook meals...haha... ab abou out ut 2 ho our a ago g go

photo credits - http://www.flickr.com/photos/dennajones/ daisybush


techno solitude self-check

17 out “please place the items in the bag”

tagged: automation, store, convenience taken: Oct 20, 2006 location: unknown 1 comments

7 people like this

joe_brief02 2 - don’t know why i always pick the self-checkout stations, i can’t stand that voice.. abou ut 1 hour ago

photo credits - Self Checkout http://www.flickr.com/people/pinadd/ pin add


bad traffic report again 18

tagged: freeway, signs, travel, work taken: June 14, 2006 location: unknown 1 comment

tyler joseph barnard

3 people like this

@susanlane256 6 no worries, stuck in traffic as well. lets do dinner l8r. i will stop at the store- pick up something to go ab a ou outt 1 hour u ago ur go

photo credits - http://www.flickr.com/photos/respres/2544979655/sizes/o/ Jeff Turner


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dinner to-go tagged: to-go, fastfood, travel taken: June 07, 2006 location: unknown 1 comment

5 people like this

joe_brief02 2 - not sure what it is but its dinner abou abou out 1 ho h ur ur a ag go go

photo credits -DSC00652 http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexcastella/ Alex Castellå’


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tyler joseph barnard

watching the tv at home... tagged: tv series, home, work taken: July 19, 2007 location: unknown 1 comments

2 people like this

joe_brief02 2 great se seri r ess on th the e tv tv. cha h nnel ell 8. btw eddie, skip the qout utes i gav utes ave e yo you u earl rlier about 1 hour ago

photo credits - This is how I watch TV http://www.flickr.com/photos/stickwithjosh/ Joshua Blount


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This idea, of course, is not all new. In the 1950’s, Guy Debord and the Situationists created a manifesto by which to discover this type of architecture space with the creation of the dérive, détournement and psycho-geographies, as reactions to the spectacle of a commodity society. “The spectacle is not a collection of images,” Debord writes. “rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”45 “In the Situationist view, situations are actively created moments characterized by ‘a sense of self-consciousness of existence within a particular environment or ambience.”46 Then in the 1980’s, the group NATO (Narrative Architecture Today), spearheaded by Nigel Coates, took these ideas to further fruition in a struggle to better understand how the city could represent the ‘experiences it contained.’47 During that time, Bernard Tschumi was working with the notions of time-space events with the ‘Manhattan Transcripts’ project. His use of collage was seeking to explore this notion of temporal space.48 The Slow House, and other projects by Dillard + Scofidio also speak to a time-based architecture, or temporal space, through the use of constructed views and time-based events with the surroundings.49 Therefore, with this and other research in mind, I believe there will be room for new design opportunities, in architecture, by understanding the use of everyday time-based ‘tactics’ as they relate to high-speed technologies and spatial relationships.50 Architecture will become less about program and static

45

Guy Debord, La Societe du Spectacle, (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967)

46 Simon Ford, The Situationist International: A User’s Guide (1950) “…to wake up the spectator who has been drugged by spectacular images,” “through radical action in the form of the construction of situations,” “situations that bring a revolutionary reordering of life, politics, and art”. In the situationist view, situations are actively created moments characterized by “a sense of self-consciousness of existence within a particular environment or ambience.” 47

Nigel Coates, Marcus Field, Ecstacity (2003)

48 Neil Spiller, Visionary Architecture (2006) “Tschumi’s polemic was grounded in his assertion that ‘there is no space without event,’ (Questions of Space, Bernard Tschumi) and it was his collaging of events, his mixing of programmatic considerations and his development of a personal architectural spacetime notation that formed his contribution to the progress of twentieth-century architectural vision.” 49

Diller +Scofidio, Flesh (1994) pg249

50 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (2002) pg xxi “This mutation makes the text habitable, like a rented apartment. It transforms another person’s property into a space borrowed for a moment by a transient. Renters make comparable changes in an apartment they furnish with their acts and memories; as do speakers, in the language into which they insert both the messages of their native tongue and, through their accent, though their own “turns of phrase,” etc., their own history; as do


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functionality and more about physically non-locatable electronic presences and the tactics they produce or are produced by.51

7a - What to do then? I believe that architecture, at its best, should be an ever-evolving art form and a connecting thread between people isolated by our modern culture. Augé calls this type of architectural experience ‘anthropological place’. Augé defines anthropological place: “In geometric terms these are the line, the intersection of lines, and the point of intersection. Concretely, in the everyday geography more familiar to us, they correspond to routes, axes or paths that lead from one place to another and have been traced by people.” He goes on to define these paths as leading to centers of activity, such as markets, and monuments that define spatial boundaries along with political, economic or religious ideals as well. Furthermore, he defines this ‘place’ as a blended version of space that contains “partial overlap” serving many scales and institutions. “Identity and relations lie at the heart of all the spatial arrangements classically studied by anthropology.”52 Much like the tactics employed by that of sousveillance53, we must use the machine against itself.

As architects, designers and ‘ordinary heroes’ creating a world of

daily experiences, it is our responsibility to evoke the banal, realize the image for its worth and find cultural meaning in our work and actions. “Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, their rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality,

pedestrians, in the streets they fill with the forests of their desires and goals.” 51

William Mitchell, Me++; The Cyborg Self and the Networked City (2004)

52

Marc Augé, non-places: introduction to an anthropology of super-modernity (1995) pg. 57-58

53 Jascha Hoffman, Sousveillance, The New York Times, Dec 10 (2006) “Surveillance, from the French for “watching over,” refers to the monitoring of people by some higher authority — the police, for instance. Now there’s sousveillance, or “watching from below.” It refers to the reverse tactic: the monitoring of authorities (Tony Blair, for instance) by informal networks of regular people, equipped with little more than cellphone cameras, video blogs and the desire to remain vigilant against the excesses of the powers that be.”


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melodrama. Of over credulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law.”54 We must avoid placing value and worth in the flickering images, words and symbols that contextualize today’s non-places, and rather celebrate the places, objects and experiences that contain cultural, regional or historical value. Because if Joe B. were currently getting his 6-hour daily dose of TV, then I would imagine his daily dose of non-place experiences is double this amount, leaving Joe B with few hours of actual ‘meaningful’ experiences left in a day. In the words of LTL – “A critical architecture challenges the familiar, seeking out what has been forgotten in the making of the conventions and norms of generic, everyday architecture.”55 By invoking the uncanny nature of the everyday we turn the familiar into the unfamiliar so that Joe Briefcase and Pierre Dumont might begin to question the status of their own hyper-reality, and like the chair that slips through the floor in LTL’s Slip Space Gallery, distrust for their surroundings is born.

8a - How do I propose to do this? To create an uncanny atmosphere, along with a perception of isolation in a futuristic narrative I am exploring the following mediums.

Primarily I will use digital video

and still image capture along with the use of depth of field, both analog and digital. 3D modeling, 2 ½ D manipulations in after effects, projected and constructed perspectives, camera mapping and displacement through the use of green screen will also be explored to invoke the unfamiliar. For the soundtrack I will use glitch, or experimental sampling, to further the sense of familiar yet unfamiliar paradoxical relationship between the viewer and the video. I will seek a representation that both describes as well as challenges typical linear relationships between spaces, much in the same way Duchamp studies the compression of events in Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. I am looking at the

54

David Foster Wallace, A supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, (1997) pg. 82

55 Lewis Tsurumaki Lewis, Situation Normal, (1998) pg 4-9 “This challenge arises from the possibility that beneath the surface of the normal or the familiar exists the strange or the unfamiliar; the possibility that what is considered normal must, by definition, include the abnormal.”


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film as the design itself where you, the participant, are part of the engagement of the event.

8b - creating the uncanny More specifically, I will use depth of field to create a narrative within each shot as a tactic by which to bring up the uncanny. The use of this blurry field of vision helps to disorient the spectator, causing preconceptions of what they are viewing, then by focusing or widening the shot, those preconceptions are no longer valid. The use of green screen and alpha layers also help to displace objects into settings they might not otherwise be in, or the ability to separate layers and show the displacement could also invoke an unnerved feeling of what is to be expected within the film. Camera mapping and constructed perspectives are two architectural representations that will help me to form these scenes. Below is a list of several techniques used in other films to help create this distortion of familiarity. •

Obsession w/ the object o

Safety of Objects, (2001) Rose Troche

Doppelganger (the idea of seeing one’s self as a double) o

Dead Ringers (1988) by David Cronenberg

o

Zed and Two Noughts (1985) by Peter Greenway

Use of Perspective

Repeat of experience

Mirroring of reality with inanimate objects such as artwork.

Cyborgs, mannequins or the stuffed animal etc.

o o o

Eraserhead (1980) by David Lynch Inland Empire (2006) by David Lynch Vertigo, (1958) by Alfred Hitchcock

o

Electrorama: (2006) Daft Punk

o

The Quay Brothers, (1987)

o

Fido, (2006) by Andrew Currie

Use of Gaze o

Final Cut, (2005) by Omar Naim


techno solitude

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I am interested in film as an Auteur, such as films like Eraserhead or Blue Velvet by David Lynch. As the director and screenwriter, Lynch is able to display his stylistic and thematic preoccupations while diving into a symbolic and dreamlike story. One of his main themes is to use the dreams to enter parallel worlds and alter the understanding of what is real. Eraserhead displays a slightly dystopic world by using minimal sets that are pulled off with stark lighting and long narrow shots.56 His films also by their very nature are considered uncanny, or invoke the unfamiliar. David Foster Wallace speaks on the term “Lynchian” - “For me, Lynch’s movies’ deconstructions of this weird “irony of the banal” has affected the way I see and organize the world.”57 The ‘red room’58 scene in the TV series Twin Peaks is by far one of the most enjoyable pieces of Lynch’s work. Its reverse order puts an already strange scene into a different level of the uncanny. In the Special Features DVD of Twin Peaks, Michael Anderson talks about the scene in the red room as “having no context” when he asked David Lynch to describe the before and after events leading to this space. It is this type of awkwardness that I am looking for within my own work. Its strange qualities come from the need we have to associate or connect them to something, when in fact, they may not have any symbolic reference at all. However, its juxtaposition is what offers us the sense of the uncanny. Movie Note: The 1995 movie Strange Days, by Kathryn Bigelow, is a scifi story set on New Years Eve 1999 [4 years into the future] where virtual reality has been introduced on the black market. With the use of a device called ‘The Squid’, worn on your head, you are able to record or play the experiences of your own or another person’s life as a direct feed into your brain. The main character is a dealer on the black market, peddling any

56 Matt Pearson 1997 “The world beyond the radiator is given a very theatrical setting; the stage, the spotlight and the surrounding curtains. This idea of performance recurs also;” 57 David Foster Wallace, A supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, (1997) pg163 “For me, Lynch’s movies’ deconstructions of this weird “irony of the banal” has affected the way I see and organize the world. I’ve noted since 1986 that a good 65% of the people in metropolitan bus terminals between the hours of midnight and 6:00 A.M. tend to qualify as Lynchian figures – flamboyantly unattractive, enfeebled, grotesque, freighted with a woe out of all proportion to evident circumstances.” 58 The scene was filmed with the characters speaking and acting in reverse so that when playing the film in reverse it would play correctly.


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tyler joseph barnard type of experience you want.

Hitchcock is also known for his use of the uncanny. His films such as Vertigo use inanimate objects, seeming to be alive, and silhouetted characters abstracted from their familiar settings to help create a sense of the unfamiliar within the familiarity of everyday objects. Mirrors and alternate perspectives of one’s reflection also invite an unfamiliarity of embodiment, causing a distancing from the subject.59

8a

- Screens, event sequences and exhibition…

Screens, displays, and monitors allow for the visual display of vast amounts of information and visual data. In addition to this, within the film medium they allow for transitions of space and time to occur. The can also signify a blurring of boundaries. I will use screens within my project to help break up the linear flow of space by transitioning in and out of them. I will also use them to help describe and portray ‘non-place’, by adding text, symbols and icons that help create and define this type of place. Example: Screens Videodrome (1983) by David Cronenberg

8d - the use of overheard conversations, and glitch music It is a common practice to lean into another conversation just enough to grasp a few good sentences for your colleagues to have a good laugh at. Pull anything out of context and you can find humor in it.

Overheard conversations are a part of a

rich background noise that is otherwise ignored. However, like John Cage pointed

59 Allen Vanneman – Dead or Alive 2003 http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/42/uncanny.htm “Although Hitchcock used mirrors endlessly in his work, they are rarely used for overt drama. However, he achieves a phenomenal effect in Psycho when Lila Crane (Vera Miles) sees a double reflection of herself in two mirrors. Notice how the gaze of the “second Lila” (the far-right image) takes us deep into the center of the frame, where the gaze of the “third Lila” directs us back out of the frame toward the “first Lila” at the far left, who is turning around to confront who? Us? Someone behind us? Mrs. Bates?”


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out in 4′33″, the background could be as interesting as the foreground.60 The music style “glitch,” which is derived from an artist like Cage, uses software and recording devices to capture the sounds of everyday life, such as copying machines, cd drives, etc. to create music.

I have found this music to be quite good at creating the

tension, as well as creating the beauty found in the uncanny. Therefore, I have chosen to use this type of audible style within my film. This will no doubt have an impact on the way by which the edit will be constructed and rearranged. By pairing certain phrases, rhythms or sounds with differing visuals than one would expect it will create a sense of the uncanny, forcing the viewer’s expectations to change. Without much context your expectations and imagination will fill in the blanks of the conversation. Example: An overheard from Gaylord’s Café, Oakland -And I have this friend who dances you know, naked, in a club? -Why? -She, I don’t know. She, well enjoys it. But on a different level, you know? -The world is so unbalanced. -She could get a nine to five or something. -Existentially she’s probably better off, you know what I mean? It’s a simple concept from school and I guess balance is balance, you know? So our goal might be, ‘some things mirror and some things’…I don’t know. -I think we have to understand ourselves, you know? I wonder, ‘do we all have to have the same goals or the same, you know, like, goals?’ -Well that’s the way we’re taught, you know, like, ‘buy the house, find the right man or woman…’ -Buy the house. -Yeah, buy the house”61 Are the two people speaking male or female? What does the space of Gaylord’s Café look like? Your preconceptions will easily fill in this narrative. But what if I

60 Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage (2003) Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4′33″, the three movements of which are performed without a single note being played. The content of 4′33″ is meant to be perceived as the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed 61

Jamba Dunn, American Dust (2006) /ubu editions www.ubu.com


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tyler joseph barnard

gave you a film that contained a set of visuals that didn’t necessarily correspond to the dialog? It would be much harder to have those same preconceptions, thus creating an uncanny situation, leading to curiosity that might not have otherwise been achieved. Example: In a film by Joseph Cornell Rose Hobart “consists almost entirely of footage taken from East of Borneo, a 1931 jungle B-film starring the nearly forgotten actress Rose Hobart.”62 In this film, Cornell re-edits this footage into a new montage, giving the film a sense of uncanny qualities based on the juxtaposition of objects, characters, and actions. To conclude, the project will investigate the impact of technology in our present culture through the surrational or uncanny presentation of everyday life. Thus Certeau’s concept of ‘everyday life’ will be used to implicate future tactics that directly oppose the general strategies suggested by utopian visions of the media culture.

62 Brian Frye, Senses of Cinema, November 2001 www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/01/17/ hobart.html “Rose Hobart consists almost entirely of footage taken from East of Borneo, a 1931 jungle B-film starring the nearly forgotten actress Rose Hobart. Cornell condensed the 77-minute feature into a 20-minute short, removing virtually every shot that didn’t feature Hobart, as well as all of the action sequences. In so doing, he utterly transforms the images, stripping away the awkward construction and stilted drama of the original to reveal the wonderful sense of mystery that saturates the greatest early genre films. But the root of Cornell’s genius as a filmmaker is his singular version of montage. Cornell’s version of continuity is the continuity of the dream. He does not juxtapose images so much as suggest unlikely — but still vaguely plausible — connections between them. Hobart’s clothing may change suddenly between shots, but her gesture is continued or she remains at a similar point in the frame. Unlike most collage filmmakers, Cornell does not rely on cheap irony or non sequitur. His films are unsettling because their inexplicable strings of images are like reflections from the deep well of the subconscious. In fact, one of the most arresting images in Rose Hobart comes when a solar or lunar eclipse is paired with the image of an object falling into a circular pool of water. Hobart simply gazes bemusedly at this spectacle, as if it were little more than a parlour trick.”


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The End ◊


mask image left – on the set shooting against a blue screen background.

The image above displays the code work needed to create a realistic fall from the pills in the 3d software. Each variable controls a real world condition such as gravity, wind, surface tension or velocity. It also controls the amount of particles, or pills in this case, that are created and how long they remain in the scene as well as their physical characteristics.

3d animation

To create the falling pills scene in the images on the left I used 3d animation overlayed on a 2.5d image of a room. The scene of the fan and the room was created from a flat 2d image. I then recreated it into 3d in Adobe After Effects. I then needed a realistic 3d animation of pills falling onto the carpet from the table above. I used camera mapping, and Xpresso code within Cinema 4d to acheive this. The image above is the 3d animation of the pills before they were rendered in full color.

Once the desired effect is created, I began rendering out the scene. The camera mapping information must be the same as the footage. Then I input the 3d pill footage into my film footage with an alpha, or transparent layer, that I then overlayed cleanly into the scene. Once everything has lined up and color corrected, the scene looks as if it really happened. The advatages of shooting the pills falling in 3d is that I can now slow the footage down or even stop time all together and rotate around the object; a task that would be almost impossible otherwise.

T To replicate a character in the c scene below I set up a green screen, scre or in this case, a blue one, to shoot the character against. This allowed for a clean even background that I could take into post-production. From there I used editing software such as Keylight to take away the blue colored background while leaving the character untouched. This gave me a moving character with an alpha, or transparent, background. I then placed the footage on top of the previously shot footage of the same character. This technique can be used in many situations to acheive numerous results. In my case I wanted to acheive a sense of the uncanny, by creating a doppelganger effect. Another useful effect is the ability to change backgrounds while the character continues to move through the screen. This distorts the reality of what the viewer is expecting from the sceen.

note: A more tedious way of achieving simalar results would be to create a junk matte around the character in each frame.

Using green screens on objects within the space of the film can also be used to displace other footage. Image 01 shows a computer screen with a blue screen covering the area to be displaced. In my post-editing software I can then track the blue screen and apply my footage as seen in Image 02.

image 01

This allowed me to zoom in and out of screens to displace the setting as seen from the viewers’ position. The viewer then begins to distrust the view of the camera, not sure of whether or not they are watching an image of scene or the original scene itself.

image 02


mask image left – on the set shooting against a blue screen background.

The image above displays the code work needed to create a realistic fall from the pills in the 3d software. Each variable controls a real world condition such as gravity, wind, surface tension or velocity. It also controls the amount of particles, or pills in this case, that are created and how long they remain in the scene as well as their physical characteristics.

3d animation

To create the falling pills scene in the images on the left I used 3d animation overlayed on a 2.5d image of a room. The scene of the fan and the room was created from a flat 2d image. I then recreated it into 3d in Adobe After Effects. I then needed a realistic 3d animation of pills falling onto the carpet from the table above. I used camera mapping, and Xpresso code within Cinema 4d to acheive this. The image above is the 3d animation of the pills before they were rendered in full color.

Once the desired effect is created, I began rendering out the scene. The camera mapping information must be the same as the footage. Then I input the 3d pill footage into my film footage with an alpha, or transparent layer, that I then overlayed cleanly into the scene. Once everything has lined up and color corrected, the scene looks as if it really happened. The advatages of shooting the pills falling in 3d is that I can now slow the footage down or even stop time all together and rotate around the object; a task that would be almost impossible otherwise.

T To replicate a character in the c scene below I set up a green screen, scre or in this case, a blue one, to shoot the character against. This allowed for a clean even background that I could take into post-production. From there I used editing software such as Keylight to take away the blue colored background while leaving the character untouched. This gave me a moving character with an alpha, or transparent, background. I then placed the footage on top of the previously shot footage of the same character. This technique can be used in many situations to acheive numerous results. In my case I wanted to acheive a sense of the uncanny, by creating a doppelganger effect. Another useful effect is the ability to change backgrounds while the character continues to move through the screen. This distorts the reality of what the viewer is expecting from the sceen.

note: A more tedious way of achieving simalar results would be to create a junk matte around the character in each frame.

Using green screens on objects within the space of the film can also be used to displace other footage. Image 01 shows a computer screen with a blue screen covering the area to be displaced. In my post-editing software I can then track the blue screen and apply my footage as seen in Image 02.

image 01

This allowed me to zoom in and out of screens to displace the setting as seen from the viewers’ position. The viewer then begins to distrust the view of the camera, not sure of whether or not they are watching an image of scene or the original scene itself.

image 02



figure i. - Tech Magazines General reading material. Usually printed with adverts and a selection of smaller articles, made for mass consumption figure j. - Cleaning Pads. Travel sized cleaning clothes used to clean electronic equipment. Micro-fibers allow for less scratches to glass.

figure a. - Travel & Medical Cards. plastic cards containing a magnetic strip corresponding to account information. Specific cards allow for transfer of information or money.

figure i figure a. figure b

figure j

Watching 6-hours of TV a Day? Surveys indicate that the average US citizen watches the tube six hours daily. Is this really a good thing? see page 10

figure k. - Digital Camera: A camera that records light into digital information, used to replecate an image.

figure l. - Headphones: wires that transfer electrical pulse into two small speakers placed in one’s ear. Usually attached to an MP3 Player

figure c

figure m. - storage disk: a portable hard disk for storing digital data on a magnetic disk

figure l

figure e. - MP3 Player: a personal music player, that stores thousands of digital tracks downloaded from the internet.

figure e

figure m

Real-Time Streaming Video Justin.tv makes it possible to view any form of content 24/7 granted someone is willing to post it online. Real-time video streams of anything from homemade talk shows to fish swiming in a tank. see page 11

figure p. - wireless mouse: a wireless input device that communicates with a computer the your location on the screen

The Ubiquitious Use of Helvetica From street signs to magazine covers the font Helvetica has become the graphic language we most often encounter. see page 01

Our Everyday Interactions Has the screen taken the place of human interaction? From ATM’s to self-checkout lines our lives are being automated more and more. What type of places does this type of interaction create? see page 03

figure f. - Mobile Communication Device: Data device in which you can communicate via text or voice through digital wireless transfer.

figure n. - power supply: a plug for connecting a computer to a power supply figure o. - IR Remote: a remote control that uses infared light to communicate simple commands such as play or volume control on a computer

figure c. - Power share: Cord allowing for the transfer of power from a computer to other electonic devices. figure d. - Identification Pass: allowing clearance to and from the workplace. Picture and barcode carry meta-data about the user. Data is then linked back to a central computer where each user can be tracked by time, date and location.

figure d.

figure k

figure b. - Keys & Dongle. metal objects used to open corresponding locks in doors. Dongle is a digital storage device that plugs into computers.

figure f

figure g. - Mobile Computer: A cordless computer with built in video screen, keyboard and finger pad controls. Capible of executing advanced mathmatical computations to achieve desired results.

figure n.

figure o.

figure g

figure p. Photo Credits: BagContents - http://www.flickr.com/people/mhjohnston/ - Morgan Johnston

figure h

figure h. - transfer cord: a transfer wire connecting MP3 type devices to larger computers or electrical supply

Non-Places: What Are They? Has your town or city lost its sense of place? Text and symbols are replacing cultural places leaving society with meanless non-places. Find out what’s causing this. see page 06


figure i. - Tech Magazines General reading material. Usually printed with adverts and a selection of smaller articles, made for mass consumption figure j. - Cleaning Pads. Travel sized cleaning clothes used to clean electronic equipment. Micro-fibers allow for less scratches to glass.

figure a. - Travel & Medical Cards. plastic cards containing a magnetic strip corresponding to account information. Specific cards allow for transfer of information or money.

figure i figure a. figure b

figure j

Watching 6-hours of TV a Day? Surveys indicate that the average US citizen watches the tube six hours daily. Is this really a good thing? see page 10

figure k. - Digital Camera: A camera that records light into digital information, used to replecate an image.

figure l. - Headphones: wires that transfer electrical pulse into two small speakers placed in one’s ear. Usually attached to an MP3 Player

figure c

figure m. - storage disk: a portable hard disk for storing digital data on a magnetic disk

figure l

figure e. - MP3 Player: a personal music player, that stores thousands of digital tracks downloaded from the internet.

figure e

figure m

Real-Time Streaming Video Justin.tv makes it possible to view any form of content 24/7 granted someone is willing to post it online. Real-time video streams of anything from homemade talk shows to fish swiming in a tank. see page 11

figure p. - wireless mouse: a wireless input device that communicates with a computer the your location on the screen

The Ubiquitious Use of Helvetica From street signs to magazine covers the font Helvetica has become the graphic language we most often encounter. see page 01

Our Everyday Interactions Has the screen taken the place of human interaction? From ATM’s to self-checkout lines our lives are being automated more and more. What type of places does this type of interaction create? see page 03

figure f. - Mobile Communication Device: Data device in which you can communicate via text or voice through digital wireless transfer.

figure n. - power supply: a plug for connecting a computer to a power supply figure o. - IR Remote: a remote control that uses infared light to communicate simple commands such as play or volume control on a computer

figure c. - Power share: Cord allowing for the transfer of power from a computer to other electonic devices. figure d. - Identification Pass: allowing clearance to and from the workplace. Picture and barcode carry meta-data about the user. Data is then linked back to a central computer where each user can be tracked by time, date and location.

figure d.

figure k

figure b. - Keys & Dongle. metal objects used to open corresponding locks in doors. Dongle is a digital storage device that plugs into computers.

figure f

figure g. - Mobile Computer: A cordless computer with built in video screen, keyboard and finger pad controls. Capible of executing advanced mathmatical computations to achieve desired results.

figure n.

figure o.

figure g

figure p. Photo Credits: BagContents - http://www.flickr.com/people/mhjohnston/ - Morgan Johnston

figure h

figure h. - transfer cord: a transfer wire connecting MP3 type devices to larger computers or electrical supply

Non-Places: What Are They? Has your town or city lost its sense of place? Text and symbols are replacing cultural places leaving society with meanless non-places. Find out what’s causing this. see page 06


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