Nostalgia Transplant
Graduate Thesis 2022
Yuxing Xu
Graduate Thesis 2022 Thesis Statement
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Keywords
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Graduate Thesis 2022 Provocations week01: Friends & Enemies
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week02: Past GT Archive
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week03: Previous Studies
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week04: Workshop Prompt Response
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week05: Readings & Quotations
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week06: Midterm Review & Techniques Developing
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week07: Scene Setup
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week08: Refining subjects & Scenes Design
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week09: Position Group Talk
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week10: Progress
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week11: Exploration of storytelling through science fiction
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week12: Summary
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Thesis Statement We’re living in the world of images and cultural tourism where people are free to recreate their living space based on every cultural and personal mark. In cities with a relatively short history like Los Angeles, it’s not strange to see a peculiar combination of unrealness, simulation, and nostalgia which asserts itself through artificial assemblages and fabricated “worlds”. In the process of transplantation when objects are extracted from one site, moved around, and re-implanted in another, their “replicas” are likely to possess different expressions from the original one, reflecting people’s desire of controlling and densifying things out of their specific historical fabricates. One interesting thing about replicas or transplants is that they can’t survive well if we just have taken by themselves,
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by doing the 1 to 1 replicate of the “authentic one”. There’re always some extra parts we have to take with us which are sometimes very nostalgic to people. Like the small amount of soil needed when people transplant a flower, the nostalgic part of a replica is meaningful and crucial in the process of transplantation. This thesis project will look into the nostalgia that is essential when we make replicas of our living space, and question what the power of replicas is and what empowers them when they can formulate their own truth, challenge, and even corrupt the meaning of the original one. By utilizing the media of science-fiction film, the project will envision a future world with advanced immersive augmented reality technology but loses most of its previous history including our time due to a global disaster. As we follow the perspective of the main character, a traveller who is set to speculate and visualize his living space based on cultural remains from 1920 to 2020, the project will show a variety of provocative misinterpretations in the process of transplanting the built environment.
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Keywords Replica Narratives Bizarre Counter-Culture
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Provocations
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Week 01 In this week, I try to delineate friends from enemies (a series of precedents I relate my thesis to, either in agreement or in opposition). On the left side of the spreads
I placed images and text referring to my friends; on the right side of the spreads I placed images and text referring to my enemies.
FRIENDS ENEMIES histories HISTORY Counter-culture
Standard/Noramlity
Inventory Singularity Object-Oriented
Function-Oriented
Pastiche Cleanliness Bizarre
Uniformed
Decentralized Centralized Multi-cultural
Single-Narrative
Artistic Expression Logic Generation Experience
Data
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histories
HISTORY
Counter-culture
Standard/Noramlity
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2.
1. Frank Hallam, En Masse Sunners seen from Pier 45 2. Sunbathing on the Pier, New York, Leonard Fink 3. The Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana
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Inventory Object-Oriented Post-modernism
1. Sir john soane museum 2. Seattle Public Library 3. Seattle Public Library Diagram
Singularity Function-Oriented Modernism
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Pastiche Kitsch Bizarre Grotesque
1. Disneyland, mountain and cable cars 2. New Museum of Contemporary Art
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Cleanliness uniformed
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Decentralized Multi-cultural Multi-centered
1. Illustrated Map of Foodie Los Angeles 2. Lu JiaZui District in Shanghai, China
Centralized Single-narrative
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Artistic Expression Experience Phenomena
1. The Manhattan Transcripts, Bernard Tschumi 2. Les Cols Pavilion, RCR ARQUITECTES 3. Global Cities, Zaha Hadid Architects
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Logic Generation Parametricism Data
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Week 02 Past Gradute Thesis Archive In this week, I looked back at thesis from past GT archives that are especially in the medium of film, and trying to study
what were the questions asked by these students in the past and how were they answered.
STUDENTS PROJECTS Justine Poulin Rabbit Hole Julia McConnell Pledge of Alleglance Yutao Fang Wei-Jue-Lu
Experience, Experiment, Expectation
Saleh Jamsheer Live Support Julia Pike Julia Pike Loves Los Angles
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Questions & Answers: -When replicas lose resolution or start to formulate their own truth, reaching the point where the original meaning is lost or corrupted, how do people believe what is the truth? -"We create our own narrative and formulate our own 'truth'"--Instead of responding to the question directly, Justine made a film about how she find her own way in an constructed illusion of SCI-Arc.
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Questions & Answers: -The way of seeing and engaging the world. -Utilizing the medium of film through speculative fiction to illustrate that the perspectival bias of each citizen creates dissonance from a truly shared reality.
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Questions & Answers: -How we speculate Asian-futurism? -The project re-graphed a non-western, non-modern and non-universal narrative that is rudeness and ritualized while trying to look for an intimate symbiotic relationship between man and nature, tradition and technology.
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Questions & Answers: -How we speculate an individual's survival necessities in a future dystopia? -The project well-envisioned an adventurous journey of a characte traveling to another supply location for survival necessities.
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Questions & Answers: -What makes L.A. special? -Utilizing the medium of film to tour us three "digital archipelagos" in an effort to seek how these enclaves of identity can impact future development.
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Week 03 Previous Studies In this week, I looked back at my previous studies at SCI-Arc and trying to bring back some topics and ideas that I have been thinking about.
Graduate Thesis 2022
In 2GBX, following the psychological design paradiam where internal world of human nature and the external world of organic nature get redistributed to challenge common senses, I tried to explore a more fractured man-nature
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relationship by blending with five different architectural elements and organic nature. In this process, the meaning of a replicated terrain is always renewed according to its ways of being used.
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In HT2201: Theories of Contemporary Architecture II, I have looked into the defamiliarizing power of nature replica. In the case of artist Heida Hatry who compose flowers with sex organs of deceased animals, the strangeness
created through repositioning flesh out of its context brings aesthetics and ethics into an explosive collision that is both conceptually corrosive and visually arresting.
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Week 04 Workshop Prompt Narratives
In Richard McGuire’s ‘Here’. We're looking at a cornor of a living room which serves as a frame for many human activities over those days and years.
Readers can feel the power of replica through the repetition of a room corner at different times and events.
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In High-rise, a 2015 British dystopian film directed by Ben Wheatley from a screenplay by Amy Jump, the design of the building is closely related to the plot. It's not only a metaphor for the divided social structure inside of the
building, but heralds the inevitable fate of the collapsing. The design of architecture have to be closely related to how we build up a scenario.
subject: combination of real world and fictional world
narrative and characters: real human characters composited in vfx motion captured characters
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Week 05 Readings & Quotations You have to pay for you public life Charles W. Moore
1. Cae Lique Dolest Abo 2. Lorem Ipsum Dolor — Eicidentist 3. Tesequo Sitioratur Rehent
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Week 06 Midterm Review & Techniques Developing
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Week 07 Scene Setup
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Week 08 Refining subjects & Scenes Design You have to pay for you public life
Charles W. Moore
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Disneyland.... it recreates all the chances to respond to a public environment, which Los Angeles particularly no longer has.
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Disney has created a place, indeed a whole public world, full of sequential occrrences, of big and little drama, full of hierarchies of importance and excitement. ...nobody thinks that that mountain is the Matterhorn or even a mountain... Yet the experience of being in that space is a real one, and an immensely exciting one Disneyland does not offer the full range of public experience, The political experience, for instance, is not manifested here
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Week 09 Position Group Talk In this week, I looked back at thesis from past GT archives that are especially in the medium of film, and trying to study
what were the questions asked by these students in the past and how were they answered.
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Week 10 Progress Argument Refined We're live in the world of images and cultural tourism where people are free to recreate living space based on every cultural and personal mark. It’s no strange to see all kinds of weird, sometimes nostalgic cities and landmarks replicas that possess different expressions from the original one, but it’s always neglected that the purpose of it, the desire of controlling and densifying things out of their specific historical fabricates. And the interesting thing is that the replica or so-called transplant can’t survive well if we just have taken by themselves,
by doing the 1 to 1 replica of the “authentic one”. There’re always some extra parts we have to take with which are sometimes very nostalgic to people. Like the small amount of soil needed when people transplant a flower, the nostalgic part of a replica is meaningful and crucial in the process of transplantation. This thesis will look into the nostalgia that is essential when we make replicas of our living space, and questions what is the power of replicas and what empowers them when they can formulate their own truth, to challenge and even corrupt the meaning of the original one.
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Week 11 exploration of storytelling through science fiction
Swan Song(2022)
Den-noh Coil
Contact Lenses inbeded with immersive augemented reality technology to facilitates everyday life and work.
An anime about children growing up in the near future, when semi-immersive augmented reality (AR) technology has just begun to enter the mainstream.
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Envisioning a [dystopia] future
However, this world lost connect
world [Los Angeles] when science
with the previous history of our
is so advanced that immersive
time due to a mysterious disaster.
augmented reality technology
And people can only speculate
becomes a common thing.
what happens in our time based on cultural remains and pieces.
The story will be the experience of travelers using AR technology to speculate and visualize their living space [hotel room] using replicated elements in our times. And have misinterpectation of all of them
Blade Runner 2049 (2017) A simulated environment by the designer of replicating human memory, Dr. Ana Stelline in Blade Runner 2049
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a retrospect of our nowadays living environment from far future, creating a sense of nostalgia
Three Robots (Love, Death+ Robots, 2019) Long after the fall of humanity, three robots embark on a sightseeing tour of a post-apocalyptic city.
WALL-E (2008) Wall-E, the last robot left on Earth, has developed a personality after 700 year's work. He likes carefully hide the collected object and watch the song and dance films hundreds of years ago after work
Graduate Thesis 2022
Collage Juxtaposition
Scalar Change
Morph Animated
Filter Toneing
Waltz With Bashir: The Dream
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Past Graduate Thesis Archive 2 In this week, I looked back at thesis from past GT archives that are especially in the medium of film, and trying to study
Spencer Daly
what were the questions asked by these students in the past and how were they answered.
imaging Architecture
image culture: how it can relate to contemporary architecture The possiblity of creating architecture through images the images we look at on our screens, do they have to be the complete builidng?
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Paul Krist
Ensemblespiel
There’s no dialogue and little amounting to action in Ensemblespiel, yet the arrangement of objects and the specula-
tive, digitally-rendered spatial interventions are sufficient to keep the viewer engaged for the film’s duration.
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Keith Marks Image Fodder : Between the Artificial and Real Lies the Image
Images are artificial. The mechanical process to produce them does not reflect the reality we see. The role of the image, similar to the fodder of our domesticated counterparts, is to be consumed. The rate at which this consumption occurs is exponential. With the inception of image based apps, we are constantly asked to like, dislike, save, discard, self-organize, and curate with the simple act of a double tap or quick swipe to the left.
Within our currently saturated image culture there is a discontinuity between the attention given to an image, versus the reality the image depicts. For instance, post processing techniques dealing with coloration, cropping, and filters pull the image further and further away from what it originally captured. It is this tension between the real and artificial that we find a useful process which exists in the latent space between the two.
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Cinematography Study Panic Room
david fincher, 2002
Innocents in Jeopardy: an unusual camera position for a classic thriller situation in Panic Room
As the camera tries to go outside its blocked by the key on the other side. It zooms through the coffee pot handle and inches from a countertop. The long take also serves the purpose of showing the audience the layout of the house. The entire movie takes place among its 3 floors and its crucial in building tension when you know how close the protagonists are to the danger. The camera never cuts away even as it moves through the house and in between floors.
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Being John Malkovich
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Spike Jonze, 1999
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A Movie
Bruce Conner, 1958
how associational form can confront us with evocative and mysterious juxtapositions, yet can at the same time create a coherent film that has an intense impact on the viewer.
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Rear Window
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Alfred Hitchcock, 1954
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Project