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“As above, so below. The human being finds himself, or herself, in the middle. There is as much space outside the human, proportionately, as inside. Stars, moons, and planets remind us of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Is there a bigger being walking with all the stars within? Does our thinking affect what goes on outside us, and what goes on inside us? I think it does.” — Log Lady, Twin Peaks, Season 2: Coma
ENTRY 02: COMING TO TERM WITH ARCHITECTURE W02: 25.01.21 Giuliana Bruno explores the definition of architecture through the camera lens of Warhol’s Empire. The 8-hour film is taken as an atmospheric back-bone to her discursive and descriptive explorations of the essence of filmic architecture and the intrinsic connections of architecture in the real and the reel world. Bruno takes us through her text with an extremely cyclical mode of writing, whilst still using seemingly abrupt ‘cuts’ by using layout techniques such as the rows of asterix between film descriptions, a formatting which is reminiscent of the clapperboards used between takes when filming. The rhythm of the textual clapperboard increases as she touches upon Warholian films (other than Empire) more concisely, giving the text itself a sense of timing through a rhythm; flowing between “reel time” and “real time” in order to form connecting arguments between scales. Bruno continues to explore key themes – the geological time and the biological time, cinematic legacies with hints at the politicisation of architectures. Interestingly, it is the political trends which give further meaning to the motifs in the text “zero degree” and “ground zero”, especially when read in the context of Davidson’s editorial opening to Log No.2, which brings to attention the ‘goings-on’ of the world of architecture – by logging architecture, you log the “news” of humanity, including political and economic landscape. This continues to build an blurry, but very real, definition of what architecture is (through the reel). This is the encompassing theme of the text- and arguably the whole Log issue – “What is […]?”, true to theme, even Davidson’s own essay is titled “What’s in a Log?”. Bruno continues exploring the definition of space by taking us from the geological eon to biological ticking, using architecture as a mediator, an embodiment or to encompass; “Taking on the time sex, food, or architecture, Warhol’s films take up a bodily landscape. Here, the atmosphere of dailiness is a space of incorporation.”1 In so doing, Bruno begins to define the void which architecture
creates and which human activity ‘fills’. Bruno establishes the ‘void’ of new stylistic opportunity which Warhol creates through filming Empire, Sleep and To Eat, which is ‘filled’ by subsequent directors, creating a legacy attributable to Warhol. Bruno closely explores one of his legacies: Tsai Ming-Liang. She uses Ming-Liang’s work as a prime example of filmic architecture and the creation of narrative from void, or nothingness: “This hole, and empty space, becomes filled with wonderful stories. It also becomes pregnant with gags.”2 This is a particularly interesting way to describe the void as an architecture of body: “pregnant” being such a mammalian term, a term that signifies an uncomfortable fullness3; a filling of the uterus as the ‘void’. At the same time a filling that is full of the opportunities of new life – new human stories to exist in the ‘voids’ of (reel or real) architecture – the potential of new forms of body (as embryonic cells divide) and new forms of space (as voids are divided?) which frame bodily activities that sleep, eat, etc, in an all-encompassing Empire of architecture. And of course, as all pregnancies must come to term – a mammalian condition which is measured, by a predictable timeline – it is the timeline of the real – and for Bruno, the reel – that “not only expose[s] the architecture of time, but especially the idea that architecture itself is a matter of time, and not simply of space.”4 What is in Architecture? Much like a woman’s body can temporarily be the embodiment of potential, form and narrative, when one asks the question one might faintly hear the echoes through the void: “Architecture is the very dwelling of temporality, it’s very home”5.
1 Giuliana Bruno, “Architects of Time: Reel Images from Warhol to Tsai Ming-Ling.” Log, no.2 (Spring, 2004): 86. 2 Bruno. “Architects of Time”, 91. 3 The word “uncomfortable” here might betray that I write as a young woman who has heard of the “miracles” and “horrors” of pregnancy and childbirth – a heritage of societal expectation. 4 Bruno. “Architects of Time”, 93. 5 Bruno. “Architects of Time”, 93. Word Count: 676
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