TIMEless Exhibition Catalog

TIMEless Curated by Martin Roy Mervel & Ralph Spencer Steenblik

Including: Dr. Michael A. Arbib Sevak Petrosian F. Myles Sciotto Craig Hodgetts Carlos Barbosa Robin Nanney Roberto Prado Marcos Novak Michele Saee Orhan Ayuce Joseph Rosa Michael Fox Taiki Sugita Tim Durfee Patti Oleon John Muto Amy Shea Syd Mead ... and others.

SUPERFRONT @ THE PACIFIC DESIGN CENTER

BOOK BY NAOMI SCULLY AN EXHIBITION EXPLORING 4D SPACE cargocollective.com/timeless Cover art by Davis Nagrupe

Introducing:

TIME less E

x h i b i t i o n

C

a t a

LoG

Take a trip with the TIMEless curatorial team in

time through space.

Interactive architecture is more than cinema, more than architecture- it is Spatial new media.

Featured are over 100 works from award winning designers, architects, filmmakers, artists and musicians, including ten commissioned interactive installations.

Design critic and planner Sam Hall Kaplan adds that at last architecture is shown in a new and exciting perspective, as a place in time: "it is really the way we experience architecture, temporal and temporary.”

“Questions are more important than the answers; we explore

immersive

environments and connect them to the 20th century architecture and film," explain the curators.

Participating artist F. Myles Sciotto describes the exhibit as

lineage of

"highlighting

projects that blur the threshold of spatial and temporal

constructions.”

Graphic: 26 letter alphabet typed with the font ‘CommercialPi BT’

exemplifies a simple reordering of syntax

TIME less C

a t a

LoG

TIMEless Contents Prolog: TIMElessness CONCINNITY NAO & NOW. Activity: Evolution Technologhy As a Conduit of Intimacy The Sentient TEARing Down The House: Modern Homes in The MOVIES Architecture As A Threat… and Escape Inspiration^BIG TIME TNT Production DesigN Média Thèque Saint-Malo FLUX The Spectacle TodaY. The SITUationist SPIV ALTERnity FEATHERED Edge 24 X 7 @ Phl : CODIFY of HarmONY The Supply and Demand of CULTUrE The Store STORE: You are Here and HERE. 747 WINGhouse Works by The ValidAtion Of Architecture Narada - Enterprise Film & Architecture An American CULTURAL CONTEXT Works by Work by NaNO-CitY Movement + Sound + Sign = City Utopia + Virtual Reality The HAWK LOS Angeles: 2015 Film is to Architecture AS Production is to Practice ecoTopia resonancesRESONANCES: the QUANTA of Memory Works by The MOTO Missions image: NARRATIVES Works by SPACE The Bend Unlimited COFFEE TABLE FuturePROOF bk-DINO-zoo CoMMuter’s LaMent Lecture notes and Thoughts on Arch and Neuroscience Sources : Reference Glossary Appx: CONSTELLATIONS OF LOS ANGELES

C . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

o n t e n t s

. . . .

Mervel + Team Ralph Spencer Steenblik . .

Naomi Scully .

Amy Shea .

Steve Curcuru .

Joseph Rosa .

Jay Malloy .

Jeff Hall .

Carlos Barbosa .

Jakob+MacFarlane .

CandaP ÞipMan .

Roberto Prado .

F. MYles Sciotto Benjamin Ball-Nogues . .

Robert Trempe .

Taiki Sugita .

Stephen Mitchell S.Hicks, A.Newmeyer,J.Luu . .

David HertZ .

Sevak Petrosian Martin Roy Mervel AIA . .

Scott Chambliss .

Martin Roy Mervil AIA .

Patti O’lean .

Cannon Design .

Michael Fox .

Robert Ivanov .

Andrew King .

Syd Mead .

Joseph Kaufman .

Craig Hodgetts .

Dorsey Dunn .

Jennifer Gilman .

Steven Suchman .

Coy Howard .

Alan Abdulkader Shamsul Kamal Akmal . .

Dimitry Kim .

Ken Saylor .

Jason Less Bruns .

Dr. Micheal Arbib .

Compiled data .

Compiled data .

Orhan Ayyüce

Page

3 5 7 12.68.73 14 15 16.19.20.22.5 17 18 21 24 26 28 30 30.32 34 38 41 42 43 44 46 48 50 52 53 54 56 59 61 62 64 66 69 70 72 74 76 77 78 79 80 84.85 86 87.88.89.90 91

Exhibition

Superfront, Pacific Design Center, LA May 26th, 2011

and a subsequent show in

Prolog:

TIME less ness

The connections made through computation could not have been conceived of by our forefathers. Today there are more connections than ever before.

Like the ancients, we share the ability to dream. This exhibition is a result of many of these connections. The content overtly unites the creative process of making interactive spaces. We are honored to showcase work from concept designers such as Mr. Syd Mead, Exceptional architects, production, set designers, and art directors to highlight the contributions of creatives globally. Our voyage of collecting work also includes research from the scientific community providing biofeedback from the USC laboratory of Dr. Michael Arbib and the work of F. Myles Sciotto at the UCSB Translab.

Film has influenced architecture since the dawn of the modern era. The creative process for entertainment as well as spaces for life and work share common ground. Perhaps film influences the profession of architecture through its speculative spaces which are removed from the constraints of reality. These instances serve as inspiration in the creation of the environments of tomorrow.

Our exhibit documents the Historic, Metaphoric and Literal examples of interactivity. Like all of the arts, there are distinguishing characteristics between high art and low art. Concept based spaces must be acknowledged and evaluated on a different level than the broad strokes of developer projects who’s details and refinement are deleted due to a spartan budget.

We want more than we can afford, but mundane building without thought can be seen to damage the greater social good like a bad movie can waste one’s time. There is no visible crime here, but having well designed spaces makes life more meaningful.

Brooklyn

Summer 2011

The

content

overtly

unites

the

creative process of making interactive spaces.

Mr. Mervel expressed one example, “designing the long clear axis lines with open doors (for depth on screen and ease of hand held camera work) on the sets of “ER”, and in the primordial making of “Kate Mantilini” at Morphosis, I watched my team of Eric Kahn, Michele Saee, Kazu Arai and Brendan Macfarlane research for weeks prior to juxtaposing the pieces of time inspired puzzle parts.” The quality of work expressed in this exhibition “TIMEless” is consistent with that of the most nuanced examples within the respective disciplines from which they originate.

We are witness to the “reality” of the cultural icon the “Enterprise” in Scott Chambliss’ production design and the imagination that he bestows onto all of us with a phantasmagoric onslaught of sets. Jeff Hall opens us up to the possibility of sets for television that inspire and Jay Malloy stimulates our sense of predictable context. When masters like Robert Boyle or John Lautner deliver, then humanity is restored and people are inspired universally.

Free of style, or time, the achievement of a landmark or a great film live on over successive generations, withstanding the test of time: “timeless”ly. The connection is a link between human minds and hands. The master architect, Thomas Jefferson expressed his ideas and concepts in an innovative way in the new world with his architecture. Going back 2,000 years to the height of Rome, the emperor Hadrian as the first innovative “modernist” employed architects and himself to study the myriad uses of the simple brick. The Atelier Italia allowed students to measure and draw these temples of modern thought. Here our collective efforts sweat through, and ultimately executed, a vast intricate network of spaces.

The act of making is a contact sport involving producers and consumers. Creative disciplines, are in fact flip sides of the same coin. Making is channeling energy, that gives back some spark of inspiration to humanity. This exhibition connects the lineage of film and architecture to a contemporary idea of interactivity.

Martin Roy Mervel AIA

7

The spectacle Today

Concinnity r a l p h

s p e n c e r

s t e e n b l i k

The exploration of time as an active element of spatial composition became available when computation and technology informed interactivity. The most ambitious pursuit of this exhibition collects time-based tools for making spaces.

Architectural Historic figures like Vitruvius and Alberti, both wrote ancient books on architecture interested in ‘disparate elements as composition,’ named concinnity.

Later, it was translated into the term “symmetry.” Symmetry limits the concept to simply a spatial idea, whereas the idea left open as ‘disparate elements in composition’ disengages them from dimensional limitation.

Were they alive today, Vitruvius and Alberti surely would have sought and probed the boundaries and possibilities of time-based toolsets. Like the leaders of the past, TIMEless contributes to culture by highlighting four-dimensional compositions. This is where film and space coalesce as COCINNITY. From ancient times and across cultures, the fascination to pursuit and harness dimensional compositions does not elude us today. Film has influenced architecture since the dawn of the modern era, where the creative process for entertainment and the spaces for life’swork and play share common ground.

Film influences the profession of architecture through its speculative spaces, which are removed from the constraints of reality and are therefore dimensionless.

These instances serve as inspiration and research to extend the potentials for the the environments of tomorrow. Timeless looks at designers including filmmakers, architects, media artists, writers, programmers, etc, as M. Sciotto describes the mode and processes of “blurring the threshold of both spatial and temporal constructions.”

Summer 2011

“Time is dynamic and literally full of possibilities. If all things occur in infinite time, and if time is truly infinite, every occurrence must not only occur once but must occur an infinite number of times.”

~ Craig Hovey

Philosopher Wilhelm Gottfried con Leibniz claimed that man’s interest in “the secret of the heavens, the greatness of the earth, and time measurement” revealed that the human mind contained “something of the divine”The great clockwork of the universe continues to puzzle and challenge modern thinkers even as inventions such as the telescope and timepiece helped to illuminate its mysteries. Time’s lofty position in the seventeenth-century pantheon of wonders suggests something of its power to enthrall the intellect and inspire the poetic and philosophical imagination, a power that increased in subsequent centuries.

Since Leibniz’s age, time has become a ruler of Western philosophical, cultural, and social consciousness. When Charles Baudelaire accurately stated: “[M]odernity [is] the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art, whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.”3 What holds true of art and modern society in general: the sense of temporal acceleration and historical fragmentation, of an ephemerality at once exhilarating and devastating, is so pervasive in the pronouncements of modern culture and society as to seem ubiquitous. 5 For designers who work in space,time is there to “activate… occasionally to transform them by challenging the perception of their boundaries. Time is what allows us to measure space. When we say that his space becomes temporal, it is because we feel, in reading him that society has become entirely a function of time, and that duration is really a conjunction of simultaneities.”7 These ideas and cultural interests ultimately encompass spatial composition that is measured on a time scale. The Architect, The Director, and The Composer are allies.

http://cargocollective.com/timeless

9

Flux

A Short Animation Inspired by the Works of Ă?lhan Koman

The spectacle Today

N aÖ nOw

g

I

n

t

R

o

A

C

t

i

V

i

N

ew media absorbs the title of architecture in its understanding of projected settings and concepts through the extensions of the human body and mind in technology and material accessory. Writing and analogy act as both architecture and film’s accessory.

By gathering essays for this catalogue we break down broad ideas regarding the interaction with time space, and then culture virtually activated and data driven environments come together in a TIMEless exhibition. The collection informs the future of how our spaces relate to our bodies and group behaviors.

Our ability to design spaces evolves with our modes of interaction: with the development of translation devices, like the video camera, we extend our understanding.

Light relates these subsystems to the intention of an environment’s reality.

Engineers describe light as a charged spiraling fluid. Artists describe light as optically relativistic.

Neuroscientists describe light as a symptomatic energy exchange.

The human experience in architecture exists as his memory of the previous sequence of events to create an overall sensibility, to which through analysis can be developed with the use of vicarious devices like film or literature.3 Architecture acts as a translation tool for researchers and engineers to develop and build spatially aware Form. Galleries activate our bodies and minds with art. It is through art that emotion flows--- freely.

Story telling though motion picture and its influences on life provide a lineage for the interactive environment. The analogies dance in tune to a catenary curvature embossed by our minds and displayed in a sequence of ways.

t

Y

:

E

v

o

L

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n

and may implement dynamic input from a user, like that in ‘Alternity’. Scalar Proportion results in resonant cues based on taste and ritual ‘liquid’ flow of the community environment through orders of human At this point, we understand the ‘harmonics,’ where both it and percept of each of our senses dissonance are regarded as individually and continue to positive feedback values.[coincinity configuring ways to map and at a reflection plane] 4 exchange information toward greater orders of our cognition The connection of parts and by juxtaposing it with precept in the parts themselves have code. developed exponentially and require both more The parallel between this and and less conceptual time movies exists in sequence like simultaneously.

Information a musical composition but feedback loops have increased instead of the note on a staff, turnover for social exchange our environment is composed and the turmoil of fluctuation of dimensional warped ‘staff develops both resistance and structures’ that encapsulate the extreme experimentation. very dance of the daily and weekly rituals of neighborhoods.

Light adopts the languages of building representation and Robert Irwin’s paintings of light buildings have adopted light’s have revolutionized the way integral infinituum. Computer we see art, and projection has screens create sensation revolutionized the way we see the through projected vicarious world. Architecture’s obsession spatial mapping. with projection connects it fundamentally to conceptual Sensation and architectural spaces. spaces develop an obsession with contrast and pathways The tension between theory, through the extension of the representation and computation human’s various processes. remain at the heart of architecture Language systems overwhelm exemplified by Ed Rouche’s art as the borders between geometric a diagram model for discussion. outputs. Overlay and interplay Drawing is an extension of the depict space and narrative body when the muscle memory of verifies collage as a tool for the composition provides insight between. [where precedent=layer] into the resultant coordinates, IN ARCHITECTURE, FILM BEGINS depicted as a projection onto two TO UNWIND EXPERIENCE AND dimensional surfaces. Drawing PLAY IT BACK TO YOU AS IF from Dimensional Space records YOU WERE SOMEWHERE OTHER volumetric extensions of bodies THAN WHERE YOU ARE. THE through scalar proportion systems Products that push sensation with warped and structured realities increase the elastic plasticity within our brain and subsequently to our working built environment in architecture.

Continue on next page

12

Catalog: TIMEless

ouR

represents a collective or plural relationship, in this context, to the ‘collective existential brain’

Summer 2011

“The two extensions are→ that of the mind,

though our projection of such into technology+ that of the physical body as a projection of such through architecture and accessory.” ~ Naomi Scully

Continue from previous page

SCREEN TAKES OVER THE VIEWER’S OPTIC RANGE DURING A SINGLE FOCAL PERIOD, AND POTENTIALLY, DURING A FILM, WHILE YOU SENSE YOURSELF ‘LIVING VICARIOUSLY’ AMONG THE CINEMATIC ENVELOPE, YOU ARE ACTUALLY MAPPING A SEQUENCE OF MEMORY FRAMES, OR ECHO PULSE FREQUENCY SHADOWS. At every focal moment- we pause to process data. Film uses this limitation to dominate sensory impulses through the sequencing of visual images. The series produces the illusion of space through the referential math and data measured during experimentation with furthering established spatial relationships between a human and their prismatic understanding of mirrors, refraction, and material.

From this, we know that when we rest with a screen, we are actually frequenting firing locations outside of our environment.

Discussions about life and mood refer to a vicarious encounter with a film, and senses relate to the environment in sequential adaptations. 5

Pixels and Optics : Frame of Reference The black and white optic grid appears to bounce because of the way our eye perceives light literally traveling from within one and into the Other.[frequency domain] This relates to the acceptance of representation through pixelization[reduction to smallest percept unit] and the spectrums of frequency between the ‘colors’.

Light can be mapped next to the up and down vibration of what we perceive as ‘sound’, etc.6 As we imagine manifesting from thought, a fossil2 in the form of drawing, carving, craft, building, etc, and then translate that thought into multiple realities that echo the original fossil. Here the description is between the mind’s eye and the object’s eye. The external and internal frequency exchange contains multiple participants each of which enters our percept through a separate reading/translating device, or in other words, each of our sensory organs pick up a different set of data cues from the spectrums of our perception. The spectrums exist relative to each individual limitation and their feedback loop.[evolutionary growth]7

The diagrams of the organ of the eye describe color spectrums and their emotional reference as well as their overriding devices for the balance sector of our inner ear.

The ear translates the ‘sound’ through the exchange of a vibration in material density changes. Our nose picks up material chemistry geometries and translates them into ‘yum’ or ‘yuck’. Our skin picks up larger wave cues and adds to the focal point with the memory of the rest of the room as a sort of memory bank [echo impulse]. 8 The sequence of spatial relativity to firing locations in the brain becomes the base geometry to analyze growth patterns. It seems like there would be a spatial jump or ‘crack’ in the sequencing when a human is introduced to a film screen.

Polarity describes how the orientation or relative direction of light reacts to electrical induction or an optic/material filter with a change in orientation.

The analogy of the human as ‘light object’ creates an opportunity to think of thought as an electrical exchange of data. Oriented contours create a framework for basic mathematic and physical properties and principles beginning with the vector. Vector diagrams continue to break down time frame : mechanism or structure and character posture : gesture.

The shape of the brain is not a sphere, but it reflects into and from our ovular eyes. It is a unit contained within a responding shell volume with multitudes of layers of density transfers between signals read by our senses.

The Mind’s space is composed of Modules: Section and Resonance vector fields that contain Potential for Electrical Exchange. The Body’s space is composed of Modules: Section and Resonance vector fields that contain Potential for Environmental Evolution, or change and development with regard to motor function.9 Continue on page 68 NaÖWoN

“There

is a difference in the

manner of action in souls and bodies. a

Souls

are directed by

teleological

law;

bodies

are determined by mechanical motion.

But

unison

by

harmony...the monads,

both

work

in

pre-established

when

spiritual they

are

perceived by the senses, appear

as the phenomenal universe; in

other words, matter is spirit discerned by the senses.”

1 ~ S. Krishnananda on Leibniz

Overlay collage of Dimitri Kim , Jennifer Gilman, and Candas Sisman.

‘Below Monumental Spyramids’

Thank you to SCIarC and all of the faculty and staff for providing the RESOURCES of question and VALUE through the insight of professors, students, and their guests.

13

Technology

The spectacle Today

Amy

A

As a Shea

Conduit

cultural sea change never

Of

Of

Intimacy

fails to bring out the futurist in us. Such was certainly the case unique application, offering itself with technology, as applications up in the interest of a personalized and devices seemed to proliferate experience. From Facebook pages been true, such uses are selfbeyond our ability to absorb them. to customized phone apps to homes destructive and damage others.

It is, and was, a growth that not that read our body temperature only awed us with its speed and and adjust the thermostat, we now

Yet, it is the minority. Statistics tell us that. And the sensationalism

its reach, but cowed us in the turn to technology for the bespoke of that minority has kept many of process, leading to dire predictions experience. It serves as a mirror of us from a more balanced view of of an alienated population: who we are, and, as such, it insists technology. Imbalance is never a disconnected, isolated, and more on some degree of reflection if we good idea, and always limits the dependent on technology then are to give it instruction, to help view, depending on what side of the touch. us be the us we want to be. see-saw you are on. The real, nonPerhaps now enough time with One cannot create in one’s virtual reality is that many people’s this reality has passed that we can image if the self remains a experience of Facebook posts pause and take a look at what mystery. The intimacy of are done in the name of sharing, technology has actually wrought. technology demands passing along the little things that To pause, examine our lives, and makes one feel connected to the the role of technology in them.

some degree of selfknowledge. And it is that

lives of those they care about but

what self that we are encouraged to that today’s world has scattered to technology can do, and failed to exchange with those hand-picked far-off places. As we examine what see what it does. And what it does from the entire world, with greater is timeless, it is human connection is defined by those who get to say: ability to do so than has existed that threads from the past to the We

have

feared

the users—not the creators. An since all a human knew of the future, as methods have changed iPhone can do a lot of things, but world were those thrown together from drums to data, and letters to the thing it actually does is act as by fate and gathered around those web links. one of the most efficient conduits first fires. ever built to deliver intimacy. Not

It is fitting and proper that

Certainly, we can use care is taken, especially with the just intimacy with others through technology to create an illusion young, and that we do not leave voice, image-sharing, and data, of self, the ultimate aspirational physical connection behind in our though that in itself would be app, as we create avatars more fascination with the shinny object enough. But beyond that, to the alluring than we believe ourselves in our hand. But it is also time bastion that once belonged only to be. And worse—to prey on to acknowledge that technology to philosophers: the imperative to others. These are the stories we may be the monster under the know thy self. hear about, the ones that make bed. If anything, it has put the The most pervasive social use the papers. Clearly technology responsibility back on us to take an of technology is the creation of enables a safe isolation where such honest look under that bed. Is the the customized life. Technology scheming can take place in virtual monster nothing more than dust? not only allows but encourages reality alone. And, as has always Or is the monster us?

14

Catalog: TIMEless

Summer 2011

Steve Concept art for how an A I

Curcuru

The

Sentient

drone might scan and study a human

is a new feature film including futuristic visuals of information

displays.

As concept artist it was my job to

imagine how an unmanned, artificially intelligent drone could scan a human face. ...necessary to visualize how a cyborg’s “mind transfer” could be combined with a proximity sensor for a hologram in the film.

http://cargocollective.com/timeless

15

The spectacle Today

Tearing Down the House:

Modern Homes

in the

Joseph

I

n recent Hollywood movies, modern domestic architecture has become identified almost exclusively with characters who are evil, unstable, selfish, obsessive, and driven by pleasures of the flesh. Were they still alive, this might well shock the pioneers of modernism, who envisioned their movement facilitating a healthy honest, and moral way of life. Nonetheless, filmmakers of late have chosen modernist works as the sites for murder, gangsterism, adultery, and a catalog of other illicit and otherwise unsavory behaviors. Bad guys may no longer wear black, but they do live in white-walled modern homes.

What went wrong? If one believes Tom Wolfe’s 1977 screed, From Bauhaus to Our House, modern design is simply anathema to the American way of living, and it therefore only makes sense that those who contest and violate American values be associated with it. The reality is actually more complicated, though it is fair to say that Americans have never fully embraced modern architecture for their homes. More to the point, Hollywood films have both reflected and shaped American views about modern domestic design.

Homes inevitably reveal something for their inhabitants’ aspirations.

Notwithstanding the pioneering legacy of the founding fathers of this nation, most Americans have never had a desire to “start from zero,” as members of the Bauhaus

16

Catalog: TIMEless

Movies

Rosa suggested, at least not in terms of architecture.

Americans have always been motivated to keep up with Joneses---not to supplant the Joneses’ way of life. American domestic architecture, with all of its revival styles, communicates this essential conversation.

To the American public of the 1930’s, modern architecture was anything but conservative. In fact, it was a somewhat frightening sign of progress driven by technological and scientific advance. Inasmuch, modern architecture was considered appropriate for the workplace though unsuitable for the middleclass home. Fear of the modern---mirrored both in films and in the press---focused on the negative effects such settings could have on the family.

For example, in a 1931 critique of the Aluminaire House, a prototype modern home designed by A. Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey that was viewed by more than one hundred thousand New Yorkers, Elsie McCormick advised female readers of the World Telegram to be wary of the “stern, office-like effect” that would likely drive a husband to seek succor in “fluffer apartments.”

The elegant, urbane “modernism” of so many films of thirties---pioneered by such legendary art directors as Cedric Gibbons and Van Nest Polglase--soothed these fears, offering Depression-era audiences escape in sumptuous art deco fantasies.

Continue on page 19 Tearing Down the House: Modern Homes in the Movies

Summer 2011

Architecture as a

Threat ...and Escape Jay

Malloy

T

hese computer concept renderings were generated for a chewing gum commercial where a man escapes a world created only for machines.

Refuge from machine is found in the organic world of bubbles. Those bubbles represent the product, chewing gum. In the past, and to some extent still, advertising architecture reproduced private and public spaces - the four walls of a living room or a kitchen.

Today, however, advertising architecture also incorporates alternate or enhanced reality, by using typography, textures, motion, space, and spaciousness. This new reality of advertising “architecture�, whether or not is virtual, real, or a symbiotic hybrid, is both incredible and credible. It gives designers an unlimited canvas for creativity.

Client: Bruce McCloskey/Anonymous Films

The spectacle Today

Technology Timeline New Media: Spatial Arts

15 billion 14 billion 10 billion

3.4 billion 65 million 90,000

8,000 4,000 3600

3100

1000

2000

F.Myles Sciotto

2550 3150

wwwSoCinematic.com

1100

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Agricultural revolution Homo sapiens emerge

Dinosaurs become extinct

great pyramid of khufu emerge in Mesopotamia

The Universe is born

Wheel stonehenge Mesopotamia

-Zoroastrianism -Judaism: Moses 1500-1350 Zoroaster 628-527 -Hinduism: 2000 -Buddhism Buddha 563-483 -Jainism Mahavira 599-527 -Taoism 580-500 -Confucianism Confucius 551-479

Xerxes the G king of ancie

hanging gardens statue of babylon at olym

Anciet Greece Anciet Egypt cosmic Calendar

INSPIR

TIME ATION • BIG

TNT

Jeff

Hall

“We are inspired by nature and the universe. We take inspiration from great monuments of ancient cultures, by modern cities, remarkable people, great artists, and visions of the past, present and future. Our greatest inspiration is from design that is imbued with meaning - that is what makes a design ‘timeless’...

Every place has a story. Every story has a place. Our goal is to create meaningful experiences for people. Our new set design will inform, educate, and entertain with a sophisticated sense of humor that reveals a story about the place. This approach touches people’s core sensibilities...

We can achieve a sense of grandeur, timelessness, idealism and optimism when we work on a large scale.

The larger the project, the more grand the ideas can be. Creating space requires an understanding of people...

It drives the collaborative process from concept to completion... Each area will be broken down into sectors that define the space and tone for the Infrastructure...”

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Summer 2011

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Roman empire falls

Renaissance begins {religious}

-Christianity Jesus 1-33

Western rationalistic philosophy: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle

Alexander the Great Macedon

e Great cient Persia

the colossus of Rhodes

-Islam Muhammad 570-632

porcelain tower of nanjing

-Shinto 100 Cleopatra, Julius Caesar queen of Egypt

Gutenberg's movable-type p press produces the Bible

the colosseum

Santa Maria del Fiore

the pharos of alexandria

Chartres (Notre Dame)

ue of zeus lympia

Santa Maria Novell Alberti

Ottoman Empire

Byzantine Empire

Anciet Rome

leaning tower of pisa Westminster Abbey Hagia Sophia San Marco Basilica

Joseph Rosa continued from page

16

Even still, deco design, itself a far cry from high modernism, never really challenged the supremacy of America’s historically based housing styles. In Reaching for the Moon (1931), The Women (1939), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), and countless other films of the period, a husband returns from the office to a happy, traditional home life with wife, children, and, sometimes, domestic help.

Matrimony, a traditional institution if ever there was one, was appropriately set in a traditional dwelling.

Conversely, modern domestic settings---invariably urban apartments---were reserved for youthful singles, the unusually wealthy, easy women, and terminal bachelors. Once married, even these characters left their modern quarters for more conventional accommodations.

In practice, there was a significant differentiation made between the portrayal of those living in apartments and those living in penthouses.

The apartment-dweller was generally young, naïve, ambitious, in a precarious financial situation, and on his or her own for the first time. The penthouse was typically

reserved for the wealthy, older, well educated, and unsentimental.

The penthouse-dweller lived in the present and looked toward the future with little concern for the past---with the exception of its bearing on his or her social status.

It was almost never the home for a married family with children, though a typical story line had a penthouse-dweller coming to his or her senses, falling in love, and relocating to a more traditional home. Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1931), Dark Victory (1939), and Christmas in Connecticut (1945) all feature examples of just this phenomenon.

More than anything else, though, penthouse-dwellers were rendered as eccentrics. This is best typified

by Morton DaCosta’s Auntie Mame (1958), in which the title character, play by Rosalind Russell, alters the décor of her apartment to ward off a nephew’s conservative fiancée. At the beginning of the film, Mame’s brother dies, leaving his young son Patrick in the care of Mame, his “irresponsible sister.”

The interior of her penthouse duplex on Manhattan’s tony Beekman Place changes throughout the film, reflecting

her whimsy. When Patrick---now in college---tells Mame of plans to marry Gloria Upson, a girl from good conservative stock, Mame goes along with it until she visits the girl’s parents at their home in Darien, Connecticut.

There she learns of the Upson’s anti-Semetic views and dreams of a clubby lifestyle for their daughter.

Mame invites them to her place in Manhattan for an intimate dinner party before the wedding and proceeds to transform her duplex into an ultra-modern space filled with Danish design, Calder-like mobiles, and cubist art. Couches in the living room are supported by hydraulic pedestals that allow them to move up and down. Not surprisingly, the décor---coupled with the appetizers of grilled rattlesnake and a cast of Mame’s oddball friends---sends the Upsons and their daughter running.

(Patrick ends up marrying Mame’s personal secretary.)

Meanwhile, the depiction of the traditional home became ever more entwined with notions of domestic bliss.

The 1944 film The Enchanted Cottage, Continue on next page

http://cargocollective.com/timeless

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The spectacle Today

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Gutenberg's movable-type printing press produces the Bible

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St. Peter's Basilica Villa Rotunda

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Byzantine Empire leaning tower of pisa Westminster Abbey Hagia Sophia San Marco Basilica

Joseph Rosa continued from previous page

starring Robert Young and Dorothy McGuire, illustrated the magical powers that a traditional setting could provide. The film’s premise; love found in an enchanted cottage can mend any problem and even render an outcast couple “normal.” The cottage in question is an eighteenth-century brick, shingle-roofed structure with memorabilia, including, a coat of arms from the original occupant, an English gentleman. A homely girl, play by McGuire, takes a job as a housekeeper and falls for a wealthy young man who was disfigured in World War II and then disowned by his society fiancée.

He takes refuge in the cottage, which he had originally rented for his honeymoon. Inevitably, the disfigured man and the homely girl fall in love. While every outsider who sees them notices their flawed appearances, they see only the beauty in each other’s eyes.

H.C. Potter’s 1948 romantic comedy Mr. Blanding Builds His Dream House cemented this association between traditional architecture and traditional happiness.

Looking to escape

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the teeming metropolis of New York, Jim and Muriel Blandings (Cary Grant and Myrna Loy) embark on a mission to build their fantasy home in the suburbs of Connecticut. After a series of calamitous miscalculations (the film was remade as The Money Pit in 1986), the Blandings do eventually find domestic bliss in the form of a large colonial with a steeply pitched roof. Conversely, in King Vidor’s 1949 architectural melodrama, The Fountainhead, we see a series of self-absorbed ideologs inhabiting a series of supposedly spectacular “modern” homes and apartments. In the end, the architect is triumphant, but the victory is, at best, Pyrrhic.

By the late 1940’s, the technology and optimism that had ushered in modern architecture in the early part of the century had been tainted by a knowledge of the destructive power of modern science and imminent fear of annihilation from the bomb. At the same time, corporate America was busily appropriating modernism--now the “International Style”--for it’s own needs, stripping it of its ideological content. America

faced a housing shortage, but such corporate and military associations mitigated against any wholesale adoption of modern design for the home. Not surprisingly, whitewalled residences rarely appeared in films featuring loving couples.

Palm Springs Weekend (1963) typifies Hollywood’s unhappy depiction of modern domestic architecture at the midcentury.

In a film, a family weekend house is trashed by teenagers who crash an unsupervised party. Elegant modern furniture is hurled through the air, destroying a wet bar and much else. Oddly, no one seems too concerned about the destroyed structure. Indeed, the film’s main accomplishments lay in reinforcing the equation between a hedonistic and destructive throwaway culture of weekend living and the cool look of modern design. Ironically, Hollywood elites had been cultivating a progressive school of modern architecture since the 1930’s; indeed, it was the very homes they had designed for themselves---by such architects as Continue on page 22

astro with

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U.S. Declaration of Independence

e's Hamlet

Leopold I Holy Roman emperor speed of light

Mormonism Joseph Smith

Photography Joseph Nicéphore Niepce

Lightning rod Benjamin Franklin

Spectrum heterogeneity of light Sir Isaac Newton

Evolution: by natural selection Charles Darwin

Telegraph lines connecting San Francisco and New York

Vaccination Edward Jenner

war

Olaus Roemer

Taj Mahal

Electron Sir Joseph J. Thompson

Telephone: Alexander Bell

Baha'i: Baha'u'llah 1817-1892 CE

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Telegraph Samuel Morse

electric light Edison

Motion pictures Thomas A. Edison Marconi

Sign theory Peirce

CIVIL WAR James Clerk Maxwell A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field

Alessandro Volta electric battery St. Peter’s Bernini

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{technology}

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product

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voking the defensive, medieval notion of a moat... The interior architecture of CTU had to reflect that CTU is a government facility where the prime business is intelligence gathering and counter-terrorism. I introduced a four-foot by four-foot grid that serves to organize CTU. Floors, walls, ceilings and architectural components had to be part of the grid. This grid also became the vehicle for organizing all the computer display information.

Only elements with a function directly related to the business of intelligence gathering and counter-terrorism were acceptable.

For example, objects not having a practical use were not allowed.

Only technology and information were considered in creating a minimalist interior architecture of maximum efficiency. All the volumes that compose offices, labs, conference rooms, etc., were aligned within this grid, maintaining transparency with the use of glass.

Barbosa

S E T : Season Eight

“24“

T

ransparency was vital in giving a layered effect and great depth for camera. The choice of color finish was dictated by the mood I wanted to create. Glossy blackbrown to envelop the skin of the facility and submerge it into a reflective darkness. Glossy burnt-range to create a mood of intensity in interior office spaces; glossy creamy-white for a septic and sterile mood for the labs and for the interrogation cylinder. All surfaces have a high glossy finish reflecting every bit of light to create an environment where all the elements are echoed and constantly “in your face.”

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The spectacle Today 1619 1800 1859 1609

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Freemasony Albert Mackey, Albert Pike U.S. Declaration of Independence

The Leibniz Computer Calculus Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Lightning rod Benjamin Franklin

eare's Hamlet

Leopold I Holy Roman emperor Spectrum heterogeneity of light Sir Isaac Newton

speed of light

Mormonism Joseph Smith

Photography Joseph Nicéphore Niepce

Evolution: by natural selection Charles Darwin

Telegraph lines connecting San Francisco and New York

Vaccination Edward Jenner

war

Olaus Roemer

Taj Mahal

Electron Sir Joseph J. Thompson

Telephone: Alexander Bell

Baha'i: Baha'u'llah 1817-1892 CE

Periodic table Mendeleev, Russia

Telegraph Samuel Morse

electric light Edison

Motion pictures Thomas A. Edison

Sign theory Peirce

CIVIL WAR

Alessandro Volta electric battery St. Peter’s Bernini

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1905

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Marconi

Boston and New York connected by telephone

St. Paul's

astronomical observations with a telescope

{technology}

Joseph Rosa

Continued from page 20

with unparalleled regularity in Hollywood productions.

And in seemingly every case, they play host to less-than-savory If any genre has confirmed the characters.

In both Brian De Palma’s 1984 association between dastardly doings and modern design, it erotic thriller Body Double and has been the action thriller---in Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1998 particular the James Bond series. crime comedy The Big Lebowski, In these films, master criminals innocent men are lured to Lautner bent on world domination inhabit houses where they are drugged remote, precariously sited and framed for crimes they did modern hideaways---in the early not commit. In Body Double a films these were most often sets naive, would-be actor is asked by designed by the art director a recent acquaintance to houseKen Adam at Pinewood Studios, sit---the house in question being outside of London. On occasion, Lautner’s futuristic 1960 Malin however, the Bond villains did find Residence (better known as the homes beyond the confines of the Chemosphere) in Hollywood, a Pinewood backlots. In Diamonds saucer-shaped domicile perched on are Forever (1971), Bond nemesis a column over a steep slope. With Ernst Blofeld commandeers a its panoptic, 360-degree views house of poured-in-place concrete of the surrounding landscape, with sweeping views of what is the house drives a Byzantine supposedly the Nevada desert. plot in which the hapless actor In actuality it is the 1968 Arthur becomes an addicted voyeur who Elrod Residence, the sine qua witnesses the staged killings of a non of bachelor pads, designed porn actress. In The Big Lebowski,

by John Lautner and located in the equally hapless Jeff “The Palm Springs. Laurtner’s signature Dude” Lebowski (Jeff Bridges), California baroque aesthetic--- visits loan shark Jackie Treehorn soaring interior spaces, curving (Ben Gazzara) who has mistaken forms, dramatic vistas---is him for another man with the Lebowski is ideally suited for translation same last name. to film, and his houses appear summarily drugged while admiring Rudolph Schindler, Richard Neutra, and John Lautner---that were starting to crop up in their own films as the ultimate signs of sin.

the shylock’s space-age pad--Lautner’s 1963 Sheats House, a spectacular poured-concrete structure of triangular forms set in the mountains overlooking Beverly Hills. In both Body Double and The Big Lebowski, directors tease their audiences along with their guileless lead characters in games of architectural bait-and-switch.

Lautner’s striking modern designs are traps---highly seductive sites of crime and deception.

In the 1990’s, filmmakers have returned dramas to modern dwellings that serve as signs for the unstable, the transitory, and the amoral. In the 1991 film Sleeping with the Enemy, Julia Roberts and Patrick Bergin play a married couple (Laura and Martin Burney) living in a flat-roofed, modern beach house. Everything in the home’s minimalist environment is precisely placed, from the furnishings to the food in the cabinets. Shortly after the film opens, it is revealed that Martin is an abusive obsessive-compulsive who controls every aspect of Laura’s existence, from the people she sees to the aesthetics of their home. This sun-filled house quickly becomes a glass prison, forcing Continue on next page

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Theory of General Relativit Einstein

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DADA Surrealism Constructivism Quantum Theory max planck erwin schrodinger WORLD WAR 1 // Panama Canal

vity Atomic nuclear model Ernest Rutherford,

1991

1976

2001

Bauhaus Walter Gropius

Gandhi

Elctron Microscope frequency modulation Vladimir Zworyki Edwin H. Armstrong

Expanding universe theory Art in the Age of Edwin P. Hubble Mech. Rep. Benjamin Antibiotics Alexander Fleming Golden Gate Bridge

Mickey Mouse stars in Steamboat Willie

Conscious Unconscious Freud

2002

1994 1998

Dymaxion bucky fuller

Expressionism Futurism Cubism

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Motion pictures & sound Warner Bros.

Robie House FLW

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moving assembly line Ford

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Russia launches Sputnik I Circuit, integrated: phase-shift oscillator

Scientology L. Ron Hubbard

Color Television Ronchamp Broadcast Le Corbusier Hiroshima and Nagasaki Atomic bombs determination of double-helical structure Crick & Watson

Quarks Apollo 11 Friedman & Kendall

NASA’s founding

The Mechanical Bride

WORLD WAR 2

Fall of Communism Motorola DynaTAC in the United States

America Online has 1 million subscribers // the Channel Tunnel World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee &Marc Andreeson Empire State Building String theory (10 dim’s) Thomas Kibble

Electromagnetic and weak interactions Quarks realized joined Murray Gell-Mann

friendste

Itaipu Dam

String theory (11 dim’s)

Wikipedia

Google founded

IR Radio Astronomy Jansky/Reber

Continued from previous page

Laura to fake her death and move to another town. In this new location she embraces her own traditional aesthetic sensibility. She rents a cottage, paints it happy colors, and puts up kitschy patterned wallpaper.

The kitchen cupboards are a mess. But it’s not long before Modern Martin tracks her down, fiendishly plotting to eliminate his erstwhile bride.

In Ang Lee’s 1998 film Ice Storm, the morals of the various characters are similarly encoded by the architecture they inhabit. Set in the 1970’s, the film juxtaposes two families that live near each other, examining their friendships and relationships.

The Hoods live in a traditional house located on a suburban lot with a lawn; the Carvers live in a modern flat-roofed house in a wooded area. Needless to say, the traditional building is home to the more stable family. Moreover, it is the “modern” woman who seduces the “traditional” man---one of the film’s central traumas. Ice Storm is set against the Thanksgiving holiday, but only the Hoods sit down together--on their screened-in porch---for the holiday meal.

Both families have problems--Ben Hood (Kevin Kline) is unfaithful and Jim Carver (Jamey Sheridan) is sexually inadequate---but the Hoods’ troubles are for the most part normal

and reparable. The Carvers, on the other hand, are completely unhinged by the infidelity of matriarch Janey Carver (Sigourney Weaver), father Jim’s problems in bed, and the death of their eldest son, who is killed by a fallen live wire during an ice storm. Throughout the film, the Carvers’ modern home is framed so that it can be seen in full through the woods.

The camera stalks through the surrounding property, giving the impression that it is spying on the inhabitants. Inevitably, the modern house becomes the site of sexual indiscretions on the part of the adults and the children.

When it comes to manipulation and downright evil, Janey Carver has nothing on Catherine Ames, the middle-aged film-diva-cummurderess at the heart of Robert Benton’s 1998 neo-noir Twilight.

As portrayed by Susan Sarandon, Ames knows what she wants in life and goes to great lengths to get it, mostly at the expense of others. Not surprisingly, given her nature, Ames has a taste for the modern. Along with her second

husband, Jack (Gene Hackman), also a well-known actor, she lives in an opulent art deco residence (the 1929 home designed by legendary MGM art director Cedric Gibbons for himself and his wife, Dolores Del Rio). The Ameses’ “country” home is Frank Lloyd Write’s 1948 Walker House in Carmel. As the film proceeds, the audience learns that Catherine had masterminded the murder of her first husband---at the Wright house---and that her foul play had been facilitated by Raymond Hope (James Garner), a retired detective now living well beyond his means in John Lautner’s 1947 Polin House in the Hollywood Hills. The house is Hope’s undoing; even after his role in the sordidi backstory is revealed, he refuses to turn himself in---“And give up this house?”---opting instead for a shootout that winds up getting him killed.

The nostalgia for past domestic ideal has always helped to define the “good” character for the audience.

In Curtis Hanson’s 1998 film L.A. Confidential, Kim Bassinger plays a high-priced call girl---a Vernoica look-alike named Lynn Bracken--who lives and works out of a Spanish revival house furnished in glamorous deco style. The central space of the house features a living room and bed Continue on page 25

http://cargocollective.com/timeless

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The spectacle Today

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Dymaxion bucky fuller

ng York

electric light Edison

Maxwell Theory magnetic Field

Robie House FLW

Motion pictures Thomas A. Edison

Sign theory Peirce Boston and New York connected by telephone

Gandhi

Motion pictures & sound Warner Bros.

Baha'i: Baha'u'llah 1817-1892 CE

table eev, Russia

Marconi Theory of General Relativity Einstein

Expressionism Futurism Cubism

Proton Ernest Rutherford

DADA Surrealism Constructivism Quantum Theory max planck erwin schrodinger WORLD WAR 1 // Panama Canal

Atomic nuclear model Ernest Rutherford,

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Electron Sir Joseph J. Thompson moving assembly line Ford

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1958 1955

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Elctron Microscope frequency modulation Vladimir Zworyki Edwin H. Armstrong

Expanding universe theory Art in the Age of Edwin P. Hubble Mech. Rep. Benjamin Antibiotics Alexander Fleming Golden Gate Bridge

Mickey Mouse stars in Steamboat Willie

Conscious Unconscious Freud

Russia launches Sp Circuit, integrated: phase-shift oscillator

Scientology L. Ron Hubbard

Color Television Ronchamp Broadcast Le Corbusier Hiroshima and Nagasaki Atomic bombs determination of double-helical structure Crick & Watson The Mechanical Bride

WORLD WAR 2

Radio Astronomy Jansky/Reber

J a k o b

Média

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M a c f a r

l a n e

thèque Saint-Malo.

We wanted the p u b l i c to immediately c o n n e c t with the WORLD of Saint-Malo: adventures of the sea, travellers, sailors and writers. We imagined therefore the building like an imposing blue vessel, both naval and spatial, an elegant, slender, light, furtive work open to both present and past. The project materializes the connection between the train station and the historic center surrounded by the sea.

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Quark Friedm

NASA’s foun

2000 1980

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arks Apollo 11 edman & Kendall

unding

in the United States

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friendster

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String theory (11 dim’s)

Electromagnetic and weak interactions Quarks realized joined Murray Gell-Mann

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web 2.0

twitter

Wikipedia

2029

human and a virtual personality relationships for everyday use // CERN

facebook

World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee &Marc Andreeson Empire State Building

2045

2009 2009

myspace

America Online has 1 million subscribers // the Channel Tunnel

Speech to text language paradigms

Apple iphone A personal computer can perform a trillion calculations per second

Permanent or removable implants (similar to contact lenses) for the eyes as well as cochlear implants are now used to provide input and output between the human user and the worldwide computing network.

Direct neural pathways perfected for high-bandwidth connection to the human brain Neural implants is becoming available to enhance visual and auditory perception and interpretation, memory, and reasoning

Google founded

IRAQ CONFLICT

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A strong trend toward a merger of human thinking with the world of machine intelligence that the human species initially created.

There is no longer any clear distinction between humans and computers.

Most conscious entities do not have a permanent physical presence.

There is widespread use of all-encompassing visual, auditory, and tactile communication using direct neural connections, allowing virtual reality to take place without having to be in a "total touch enclosure."

M-theory edward written

Joseph Rosa

Continue from page 23

area; this is where she conducts her business. Behind Bracken’s icy persona, of course, is a warm heart. After falling in love with policeman Bud White (Russell Crowe), she invites him to spend the night and brings him into her true bedroom, which is furnished with a brass bed, floral bedding, and a pillow embroidered with sentimental maxims that reflect her nostalgia for a traditional life.

Conversely, mysterious millionaire Pierce Patchett (David Stratharin), who runs the escort service that pimps Bracken, lives in an austere modern house with a terraced garden situated on a hill near Griffith Observatory.

It’s no ordinary modern box---like the Carver’s home in Ice Storm---but Richard Neutra’s seminal Lovell Health House (1929), one of the first American houses framed in steel. In the film, the sheer size of the house is a symbol of the owner’s wealth, and the modern aesthetic signifies a cool, calculating demeanor that allows Patchett to mediate between the legitimate and

Previously

published in

Architecture

and

Film,

edited by

corrupt worlds of Hollywood.

No film better illustrates Hollywood’s bizarre love/hate relationship with it’s modern patrimony than the formulaic action picture Lethal Weapon 2 (1989). Much of Richard Donner’s apartheid-era film---which pits L.A. detective Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) against a South African smuggling ring led by the country’s racist, murdering ambassador---take place at what is supposedly the South African Embassy. (What the embassy is doing in Los Angeles is never explained.) In actuality, it is yet another house by Lautner (1962 Garcia Residence), a unique structure with a bowed concrete ceiling plane and perimeter walls mostly of glass. Elegantly sited on a steep hillside, the house is supported by exposed pillars that stretch to the ground below an exterior deck. These supports become a target for the film’s vigilante heroes in a sequence that forms one of the most symbolically loaded images of the modern home in Hollywood

Mark Lamster, Princeton Architectural Press 2000.

history. Stymied from searching the house by the South Africans’ claims to diplomatic immunity, Riggs ties a rope to one of the pillars, hitches it to his Dodge pickup, and pulls the house from the hillside---bad guys along with it.

For better or worse, filmmakers can’t stay away from modernist buildings. By day they shoot their films in them, and by night they call them home. Perhaps there’s something in Hollywood’s collective psyche that demands to be understood as transagressive, dangerous, wild, even criminal---and it is this that has led to the unfortunate stereotyping of modern design and those who enjoy it. The silver lining? Moral content aside, modern design sure looks great on film.

Joseph

Rosa

25

The spectacle Today

Candaþ

Þiþman

Flux

“the

A Short Animation Inspired by the Works of Ýlhan Koman

emerging

of a dimensional

sphere from a two-

circle by the

principle

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and that simple direction is re-interpreted in digital medium.”

“With the integration of the sounds of various materials – which Koman used in his sculptures – Flux turns into an impressive spatial experience.”

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The spectacle Today

The Spectacle Today

The Situationist Spiv R

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The Spectacle in Time and Space “In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, Today, we are exposed to that life is presented as an immense many by lunch time. accumulation of spectacles.

Everything that was directly lived Presaging the rise of social has receded into a representation.” networks, Debord stated that the spectacle was not a collection - GUY DEBORD, THE SOCIETY OF of images, but a social relation THE SPECTACLE between people that is mediated He continued to With the above lines, Guy Debord by images. begins his brief, but seminal work, say that the spectacle was not The Society of the Spectacle. He merely “visual excess produced by proceeds to describe the sum mass-media technologies”, but a total of the efforts of Western “worldview that has actually been materialized:.

Civilization as a progression of images, sounds and streams of That was nearly fifty years ago. video.

Today this worldview is When Debord penned those words manufactured in real time by in 1964, the spectacle was at a ourselves as we create a steady remove - something seen from a stream of user generated content distance. flooding newly invented social Billboards, magazines, motion networks in a non-stop, addictive pictures, television, radio - all of dialogue that we maintain and these media were represented update with unblinking regularity. outside of the observer’s personal Teenagers are being diagnosed with newly created neuroses that space, over there.

In the intervening decades, the have newly coined names like spectacle has closed the distance “FOMO”, for “feelings of missing between the observed and the out” and which has become a observer, to absorb the society serious emotional condition for completely. What was once at a our spectacle based society. We remove now forms an integral part no longer observe the spectacle, of the atmosphere in which human we are the spectacle, and we feel interaction occurs. The spectacle a compulsion to connect to it and has absorbed us and we are now live in it as much as possible. It protagonists in it, and active is not uncommon today for an participants in its construction. In individual to watch a television the 1930’s, the average person was program on one appliance, while subjected to approximately 3000 communicating with friends on advertisements in their lifetime. a social network with another appliance.

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We carry the spectacle around in our pockets, so that we may constantly refer to it and never feel as if we are disconnected from it. Human relations now occur on screens, in the spectacle, obliterating all time and distance in a perpetual here and now.

Because, of course, there is no there here, there is no then, either.

Marshall Mcluhan referred to this interrelated community as the global village, a curious expansion of the familiar which absorbs the macro-worldview into the microworldview, in a through-thelooking-glass inversion of space and time, bringing the far away into the sphere of the familiar and sanitizing it along the way for easy consumption.

“Now that we live in an electric environment of information coded, not just in visual, but in other sensory modes, it’s natural that we now have new perceptions that destroy the monopoly and priority of visual space, making this older space look as bizarre as a medieval coat of arms over the door of a chemistry lab.”

- MARSHALL MCLUHAN, WAR AND PEACE IN THE GLOBAL VILLAGE Which is why for so many people today, relationships on social networks are more important than

Continue on next page

Human relations now occur on screens, in the spectacle,

Summer 2011

Obliterating all time and distance in a perpetual here and now.

“In societies dominated by modern conditions of production,

life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles.

Everything that was directly lived has receded into a

Sanitizing the Spectacle : The End of Celebrity

representation.”

~ Roberto Prado

Continue from previous page

relationships in the real world, or as George Bernard Shaw put it: “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

In the early 1960‘s news, entertainment and advertising images were already loaded with emotional and social importance. An ad for cognac featuring a group of well dressed young men gathering around a tufted leather sofa is not just and advertisement for cognac, but a symbol of fulfillment, an image of success.

Today we receive much of our emotional information, our social barometer, from the spectacle.

In the 1960‘s war was brought into living rooms around the industrialized world with an immediacy and drama that had never been seen before. What was once reported on in newsreels, safely removed in both time and space from the actual events, became a daily representation of acts that increasingly took on familiar faces. The spectacle of war was, at first, shocking, but was quickly commoditized, packaged and put in context.

Riots, demonstrations, assassinations, million man marches, all became part of the grand spectacle that civilization was manufacturing at an ever increasing pace and with ever increasing intimacy. In the Vietnam era, journalists were not embedded with troops, essentially limiting their access to anything other than one side of the conflict. Journalists were loose and in the middle of the conflict, often covering both sides of the war and frequently being excoriated by those wishing to limit coverage to stories that either justified or romanticized the conflict. Just five years ago, a single suicide bombing would capture the world’s attention for days, becoming the leading headline of the day in all media. Today, a suicide bombing barely makes the news at all, frequently being relegated to a “crawl” along the bottom part of a television screen, receiving cursory notice at best. The

act becomes just another part of the spectacle, so similar to so many others that it does not warrant the turning of heads or the billion blinks per second of the global media audience. The portrayal of carnage is given a more visceral and engaging treatment in films and video games than it is in news reports, further distancing society from its most horrific acts, while simultaneously desensitizing its reaction to them and even eroticizing violence.

A curious phenomenon is the transformation of the most spectacular of all of the creations of the spectacle - the celebrity. Movie stars, rock stars and sports stars lived their lives in the spectacle. That was, in part, their purpose, to be spectacular, to embody the excesses of their age and do so for the rest of society to consume from a safe, middle class distance. Doctors, lawyers, bankers, the gatekeepers of the middle class worldview, cannot behave like rock stars or movie stars. They cannot be seen in those clothes, they cannot jet to the Riviera, overdose on drugs, have wild orgies or, in short, live spectacular lives. So it is left to a select group of individuals to do it for us and present themselves to us as spectacle, for consumption as spectacle; for us to admire, censure and ridicule. In their lives we see the extreme consumption of the products of civilization.

The excesses that the rest of us cannot permit ourselves, either because of the decorum imposed on us by the rigid morality of the middle class, or because we simply cannot afford it. In this, too, the spectacle has closed the gap between the observer and the observed. Articles written recently about the demise of the movie star coincide with the emergence of the proletarian star.

We have all become protagonists in the spectacle. So called reality television shows show us ourselves, but presented in the formats required for spectacular consumption. Thus, the glamour of celebrities of the Continue on page 36 Roberto Prado

http://cargocollective.com/timeless

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The spectacle Today

Through the Projected Perception of Spatial Harmonics

ALTER abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

Abstract:Visualization

Innovation and Realization

This thesis is an experimentation in architecture’s capacity to produce alternative forms of experience, blurring the threshold of both spatial and temporal constructions.

Beginning to ask the question; How is the current understanding of how we experience our surroundings going to be effected by the digital networks and persuasive computing which is beginning to be embedded within the existing physical environment and will certainly play a role in the world to come. These new paradigms will require new tools, techniques and theories in the formation of our future world, and Architecture’s responsibility is to be at the vanguard of conceptualization, experimentation and generation of these new dimensions of space.

Blur

Ring

the threshold of both spatial and temporal constructions, Ambient Alternity is an experiment in architecture’s capacity to produce alternative forms of experience.

“I am not interested in the stable core of the known, but in the turbulent edge of the barely conceivable.” ~Marcos Novak

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Catalog: TIMEless

Summer 2011

N ITY

F|myles

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SCIotto

“The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship

of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend”.

~Aldous Huxley, “The Doors of Perception”

Alternity: Informed Spatial Constructs Blurring the threshold of both spatial and temporal constructions, ambient alternity is an experiment in architecture’s capacity to produce alternative forms of experience. It asks how our current understanding of how we experience our surroundings is going to be affected by the digital networks and persuasive computing beginning to be embedded within the physical environment.

This thesis explores the concept and practice of world making by designing an environment that allows for the experimentation of spatial and temporal harmonic possibilities using information as material. Geometry [numbers in space], sound [numbers in time], and sense [coherence of numbers] are constructs containing forces and velocities which are translated by their inherent relationship to frequency, and periodicity, thus creating potential harmonies. This feedback loop through projection, both spatial [geometric] and temporal [sonic] are informed by mapping perception [EEG data].

This allows a unique relationship to be reprogrammed, and is experienced through

tranSection; an evolved threshold paradigm, projecting space by perceiving our sense of it. It becomes

the

an experiment in the evolution and transformation of the visceral, infinite spaceScape of possibilities.

Continue on next page

31

Continue from previous page

Welcome to Installation:

Alternity. ∞

Perception & Projection

In the installation supporting this thesis, a feedback loop containing two programmatic models, perception and projection, are established.

Upon entering the environment, the user is connected to a wireless EEG transmitter which senses the neural activity of the brain and sends it to a computer. A program then translates this data and maps it through different parameters, scanning and sending the coherent patterns found in real-time.

These coherencies are then rendered in a virtual environment and sent to the projection paradigm.

The Projection Paradigm utilizes two projections in converting the virtual environment into the real environment, aural and visual.The aural projection plays the specific tones and harmonies of the coherent patterns through a multi-channeled sound system while the accompanying harmonic geometry is projected through a layered construction of mesh screens and colored haze.

The installation incorporates a handheld controller which allows the user to navigate through the virtual environment while exploring the physical.

The environment is continuously morphing and reacting as the user wanders through architecture generated by his or her own thoughts. Projecting space as it is perceived.

Sense, & the Sensor: Sensational Architectures

The world around us: the world we design and build to experience.

All around us we have created stuff. Stimuli, candy for the modern imagination, stimulation for the conglomeration. We are amidt a transconnected threshold, whereby everything is networked, plugged in, online, and in real-time. Computer chips now out number humans and questions of embodiment through architecture are beginning to be questioned. These emerging new paradigms require new developments in the formation of our future. ‘Digital networks are no longer separate from architecture and pervasive computing is being inscribed into the everyday social, political and environmental complexity of the existing physical environment’ (1).

‘Sensuality is a force creating a symbiosis of human and machine.’ and everyday the world is becoming increasingly clearer that it’s becoming one of individual interconnected self-expression.

Who

is to be responsible for these new endeavors, designs and spaces?

How

will these n

architecture has long set the stage,”(1) It is architecture’s responsibility to illuminate the wa 32

Catalog: TIMEless

responsible at incorporating this realm, its constructs, and infr

“Human life is in which

interactive life, Summer 2011

architecture has long set the

stage,” F|myles

SCIotto

he real is already virtual (3), and “The virtual connects body and perspective in new ways” (4). But the last thing we need is more

‘T

’

meaningless connectivity in the vein of virtual reality. Attempting to simulate reality by symbolizing it. Rather a new capacity needs to be investigated, alternative to which is known.

“Existing notions of body and space need to be reprogrammed to stay meaningful” (5). So it is through our architecture that “Alternity” originates. Alternity employs informed dimensions of space and time. Superseding virtuality by attempting to avoid symbolism, existing between the physical & metaphysical, material & immaterial, real & unreal, it exists within this current blurred threshold. The threshold, which society is beginning to feel comfortable within and the threshold which architecture, is in need of a defense. Defending its necessity and responsibility within these new realms of our world.

new dynamics inscribed into the world make us feel?

McCullough States, “Human life is interactive life, in which But if architecture is at all interested in creating experience in this information age then it must be rigorously frastructure. In this new space ‘The Architecture becomes the information editor’ (2).

way.

The spectacle Today

Benjamin Ball-Nogues

Studio

nexus of art, architecture, and industrial design integraing experimental environments that enhance and celebrate the fabrication practices to create social interaction sensation, spectacle, and physical engagement. potential for through Ball-Nogues Studio explores the

Feather

ed Edge

was commissioned by the

Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Using specialized software, the artists generated a

map

that was printed

proper locations and lengths of the twine in the space. Each piece onto the scrim to establish the

The project explores the convergence of digital technology and craft. It is one in a series of installations curated by Brooke Hodge and Alma Ruiz.

Integrating complex digital computation, mechanization, and rinting with traditional handcrafted roduction techniques, It explores our desire to alter a space with fluid architectural forms that require a minimal use of material while utilizing a new proprietary

technique that yields the effect of three

dimensional spatial constructs “printed” to resemble objects hovering in space.

It was comprised of 3604 individual lengths of twine, totaling 21 miles, that were dyed, cut, and then suspended from mesh scrims installed on the walls and ceiling of the gallery.

With the aid of a machine designed and manufactured by BallNogues, the strings were precisely saturated with inks using four digitally controlled airbrushes and then cut to varying lengths.

was attached to the mesh scrim, and then knotted

by hand in a technique

similar to that used to make latch-hook rugs.

The weight of the string creates a complex system of overlapping catenary curves on which cyan, magenta, yellow, and black segments were “printed” to yield the effect of ghostly three dimensional objects.

Sometimes the objects are

visible, at

other times they blur to resemble a fluid-like vapor that floats and hovers in the gallery space.

The software can yield nearly infinite possible design configurations. While the environment is defined by the string formations and printed “objects,” it is also constructed from the negative space found within the array of catenaries, which allows sight to extend into and throughout the spatial structure.

The space is activated by people, movement, and light, creating a continually changing experience.

34

Summer 2011

35

The spectacle Today

“Now that we live in an electric

environment of information coded, not just in visual, but in other sensory modes, it’s natural that we now have new perceptions that destroy the monopoly and priority of visual space, making this older space look as bizarre as a medieval coat of arms over the door of a chemistry lab.” ~ Marshall McLuhan, War and Peace in the Global Village

Continued from page: 29

Roberto Prado

past has receded and been overtaken by the working class interpretation of celebrity today. As the distance between spectacle and audience has been closed, so too has the social imperative for comportment. Decorum is now the purview of the upper middle class alone. The image of Elizabeth Taylor, Cary Grant or Audrey Hepburn is no longer possible today as a commodity, having been replaced by thousands of programs about celebrity chefs; ice road truckers; crab fishermen; poorly educated, poorly behaved and not even very attractive people with names like Snooki, that have captured the attention of a society which no longer views the spectacle as something at a remove, but something in which they participate.

This is also true of plastic surgery. Once an exclusive luxury commodity, available only to movie stars and individuals whose lives were, by definition, lives of spectacle, plastic surgery has also been democratized and is now available to the society at large. This is in no small part due to the increasingly spectacular nature of what were once ordinary lives - average citizens now feel a cultural imperative to have botox treatments, breast implants, face lifts and to inject thousands of pounds of collagen into their lips, all in an effort to both match the images presented to them as desirable in the spectacle, and to demonstrate their acquisitive ability to afford such commodities.

Thus, the glamorous images of the spectacle of the past have been replaced with the working class images of the spectacle of today. Now it is possible for a banker, a lawyer or a doctor to have visible tattoos, huge puffy lips, wear outrageous clothing or engage in behaviour previously limited to only a select few individuals living on the edges of society. It’s okay now. We have become a society of rock stars and movie stars, and so our rock stars and movie stars have become simply part of our society, blended together with celebrity chefs and celebrity party animals. There is no longer a distinction between the movie star and the average citizen - or at least the average citizen with a reality show. The truly spectacular has been reserved for royal weddings and, to a lesser extent, the Academy Awards.

This principle has been extended to include politicians and world leaders, who are now selected as much for their

36

Catalog: TIMEless

resemblance to the so-called “common man” as they once were for their spectacular and elite nature, a trend a hundred years in the making. Presidents wish to be seen as “somebody you can have a beer with” today, whereas this concept would have been completely alien just 75 years ago.

When fashion icon Cristobal Balenciaga announced the closure of his boutique in 1968, the reason he gave was “there is no one left worth dressing.” He was right.

Today Balenciaga is worn by the sixteen year old daughters of investment bankers and Dior can be bought at any department store.

This is the essence of the tautological character of the spectacle. There is no political point of view or direction, there is no single hand at its controls.

The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself.

From the

Ideal

to the

Mundane

A phenomenon of the spectacle is the presentation of material and conceptual constructs in ideal environments. The phenomenon exists because, just as there is no space or distance in the spectacle, there is also no time. “Ours is a brand new world of allatonceness”, as Marsall McLuhan put it in his book The Medium is the Massage. The idealization of the mundane, then is accompanied by emotional attributes connected to the image at hand.

In a society in which all opinions and social attributes are instantaneous and governed by the spectacle, acquisition of objects, goods, social status and emotional happiness are also connected umbilically to the spectacle. Thus, an individual that does not have the au courant technological appliance, be it Tivo, a smartphone or an iPad, is considered a luddite or socially backward. Middle class society, always tyrannical in its insistence on homogeneity, demands a lockstep adherence to the outward appearance and adhesion to the current social norm - whatever that may be.

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Summer 2011

“The spectacle was at a remove - something seen from a distance.

Billboards, magazines, motion pictures, television, radio.

- All of these media were represented outside of the personal space... ...OVER THERE.” ~ Roberto Prado

Continued from previous page

Remember, the spectacle is tautological, it exists for its own sake and changes spontaneously to suit social convention, which is at the same time informed by the spectacle. Thus, it is a social imperative to have a Facebook account, rather than a MySpace account, the former being the au courant flavor of the month in social networks, the other appearing middle-aged and staid by comparison.

The transferral of the object from its ideal representation in the spectacle, to its palpable materialization in reality, however, brings with it the curious phenomenon of temporal relevance. Once removed from the sphere of the ideal, the object immediately begins to lose appeal, to tarnish and age, and to be replaced in rapid succession by the next idealized image for consumption. The iPhone is replaced by the iPhone 3GS, which, in turn is replaced by the iPhone 4 and the Android. The Kindle is hailed as remarkable and revolutionary, only to be replaced by the iPad in relevance and social desirability, which, in turn, is rapidly replaced by the iPad 2. Each new image is ideal, ageless and desirable - until it is materialized in the mundane world of real existence. At once it loses relevance and becomes mere object waiting to be replaced in the spectacle by the next idealized image.

This is just as true for concepts as it is for objects. The relevance of Stalin, as Debord put it, has receded to a trite parody, a cracked and broken image of a concept long forgotten and no longer applicable to the current age.

As Dr. Sandy Krolick writes in his blog kulturCritic, this dichotomy is probably best described by French philosopher and social critic Maurice Merlau-Ponty in his criticism of the Cartesian bifurcation of the object and mind, with its “intertwining of the body-subject, le corps suject, and the world-as-lived”, affording a tangible, palpable relationship between the body and the object” - a relationship denied by the virtual, electronic reality that is rapidly replacing Merlau-Ponty’s world of “TOUCHING AND BEING TOUCHED, SEEING AND BEING SEEN, HEARING AND BEING HEARD, OF SMELLING AND BEING SMELLED, OF TASTING AND BEING TASTED.” ~MAURICE MERLAU-PONTY, THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISIBLE To again quote McLuhan: “ELECTRIC CIRCUITRY PROFOUNDLY INVOLVES MEN WITH ONE ANOTHER. INFORMATION POURS UPON US INSTANTANEOUSLY AND CONTINUOUSLY. AS SOON AS INFORMATION IS ACQUIRED, IT IS VERY RAPIDLY REPLACED

BY STILL NEWER INFORMATION. OUR ELECTRICALLYCONFIGURED WORLD HAS FORCED US TO MOVE FROM THE HABIT OF DATA CLASSIFICATION TO THE MODE OF PATTERN RECOGNITION. WE CAN NO LONGER BUILD SERIALLY, BLOCK-BY-BLOCK, STEP-BY-STEP, BECAUSE INSTANT COMMUNICATION INSURES THAT ALL FACTORS OF THE ENVIRONMENT AND OF EXPERIENCE COEXIST IN A STATE OF ACTIVE INTERPLAY.” ~MARSHALL MCLUHAN, THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE

Continue on page: 40 Roberto Prado

Continuity Device gabriel

noguez

joanna

cheung

The spectacle Today

Robert

COD

Trempe

24 X 7 @ Phl : Codify Slows down and composites the accumulated information of seven days traffic (customer pickup and drop off) at an international airport; v i s u a l i z i n g information in such a way as to not only notate the

generations

and changes in patterns,

but also to show the beauty that can be found in data while unlocking the emergent potential for design. “Codify” makes use of the accumulation of N U R B S g e o m e t r i e s as a methodology for u n d e r s t a n d i n g the specific conditions of movement created by the interaction of existing architecture and user, the results of which are currently being used to develop everything from the design of several furniture pieces to that of a new cladding.system for the Philadelphia International Airport.

“ art d

38

D

l o g i Sc d

j

S

Swarm Control Indexing: Translation in Scripting

D

IFY

Summer 2011

It is an investigation into the novel usage of time-based animation software and procedural modeling as a method for

visualizing

time-based quantitative data via the construction of a qualitative, two-dimensional rendering. Treated as an experiment in the extrusion and aggregation of time-based qualitative instances.

ro

o c

e d

u

MAP

The spectacle Today

The Signifier and the Thing Signified Continued from page: 37

T

Roberto Prado

he spectacle also represents choices, choices already made by the collective worldview of our age and materialized by our engines of production. The resulting collection of news, propaganda, entertainment and advertising presents these choices, along with their justification, as a whole.

Crucial to this equation is the justification of these choices. Thus an image will transform over time to better represent the visual characteristics of the pre-selected choices of any particular moment. The spectacle becomes the embodiment of a historical moment. I offer up Barbie as an example. When Barbie first appeared on the spectacle she was introduced as a perfect plastic embodiment of all that is an adult female, for consumption by young girls seeking instruction on how to become the perfect embodiment of an adult female. In 1959, and for several years after, when this anatomically disproportionate, always smiling symbol first captivated the hearts of little girls, she was a sophisticated 27 year-old fashion model, living in a penthouse in Manhattan. Barbie was intelligent and independent, with a wardrobe based on designs by the leading fashion houses of Europe: Dior, Balenciaga, Yves Saint Laurent.

Barbie wore lipstick and opera gloves.

She had dramatic eye make-up and earrings and drove a convertible.

Today, Barbie has been transformed into a teenager, perpetually 16 years old and wearing jean shorts and sneakers, pushing a baby stroller. She drives a Volkswagen bug with daisies on it.

Similar transformations have occurred and are occurring constantly as each image is brought in line with the thinking of any given moment, adjusted to suit the consumers of the images and their tastes.

In this manner, the spectacle has chronicled the transformation of the goals of a global society, from the 40

qualitative, to the quantitative, to a pure illusion based on the appearance of the qualitative and quantitative.

For example, in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, the United States automotive industry was focused on manufacturing the best cars in the world. In the 1970’s and 1980’s that focus shifted from the qualitative to the quantitative and the US became interested only in manufacturing the most cars in the world. Today automobiles with US brands on them, like Chevrolet and Chrysler, only aspire to the appearance of being manufactured in the United States, when, in fact, they are made in Korea or Japan, and Japanese or German brands like Toyota, Honda, BMW and Volkswagen are manufactured in the United States.

Similarly, a Prada or Chanel handbag in 1960 looked much like any other handbag, except for qualitative differences. A Chanel clutch wold be similar to a thousand other clutch purses, except that it was made of the finest calf skin, was hand made, with superior stitching and was, ultimately, a far superior handbag to the more pedestrian version being sold in department stores. During the 1980’s it became important to sell more Chanel (or Prada or Luis Vitton) handbags and so they began appearing in department stores, were mass produced, as opposed to hand made, and quality was sacrificed to quantity. Today, it is more important for the handbag to have the appearance of a Chanel or Luis Vitton handbag and so they must be covered in logos identifying them for all to see as Chanel, Luis Vitton, etc. - even if they are counterfeit. The need for consumption of the image of the article has become more important than the actual article and many people are just as proud to own an

inexpensive copy of a Luis Vitton bag, than the genuine article. Moreover, the quality of construction is often identical as the fashion houses, seeking ever less expensive means of production, have shipped their manufacturing to the very places that produce the cheap copies.

Now the actual article is identical to the copy.

The German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach wrote in the preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity that the “present age, … prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence.” He wrote this in 1848.

In Closing “BECAUSE SUCH FINGERS NEED TO KNIT THAT SUBTLE KNOT, WHICH MAKES US MAN…” ~JOHN DONNE, THE ECSTASY

C

reation of the spectacle is a necessary part of modern human existence.

As we begin to interact in increasingly virtual, synthetic environments, our separation from nature and increased auto-referential cosmology becomes further and further separated from Merleau-Ponty’s le corps sujet while simultaneously creating an increasingly intimate and personal experience of reality. A heightened sense of solipsism as it were. The real world becomes more distant as the dream world becomes more real, but the dream world also begins to absorb all aspects of the real world. In a sense, as mind becomes the ultimate observer of an increasingly self-created reality, the sense of the universe observing itself through our eyes becomes more palpable.

The spectacle which we are constantly creating becomes both more separate from reality, and more immutable.

“THE GREATEST MYSTERY IS NOT THAT WE HAVE BEEN FLUNG AT RANDOM BETWEEN THE PROFUSION OF MATTER AND OF THE STARS, BUT THAT WITHIN THIS PRISON WE CAN DRAW FROM OURSELVES IMAGES POWERFUL ENOUGH TO DENY OUR NOTHINGNESS.” - ANDRÉ MALRAUX

R

o

b

e

r

t

o

p

r

a

d

o

Summer 2011

oF

Harmony Taiki

Sugita

1996 ------

“To me, an architecture is an art of harmony where the architect’s knowledge and personality is shown. From just a simple view, it may be categorized as an art or engineering but architecture is a masterpiece of the architect’s knowledge which includes the diverse subjects, one can know.”

“The reason why I wanted to be an architect is because I have found that architecture can change ones mental perspective and is mentally relieving. So

Design

I wanted to become an architect and want more people to feel the same way I felt from architecture.”

“Architecture can bring solutions to the world by making a space for one another to have a better interaction with each other to help each other and to discuss with each other which gives them a meaning to living.” ~Taiki Sugita Sketch of an object

41

The spectacle Today

Stephen Mitchell

Supply and Demand of

The

Culture

T

he American Heritage Dictionary defines culture as: The totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought. This is a very depressing thought, if I may say so. I grew up in a time when films were made by studios whose chiefs were from the Old Country and were dead-set on demonstrating by way of their product that they were of an elevated class--that they had class.

These studios produced stars like William Powell, Clark Gable, Gregory Peck, Myrna Loy, Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner to name a few in no particular order. Some of the best roles for women were created

There Davis

during

their

reign.

Bette Hepburn of today’s

is no equivalent of or

Katherine

in the iconography

Hollywood. Has anyone filled

Cary Grant’s shoes in the movies or in our culture?

Charm and stature have gone by the boards as valuable commodities, it would appear.

Having myself run a “movie studio” in the form of a repertory company for film and television with an average of a hundred actors, writers and directors in the organization at any given moment from about 1980 until 2001, I feel I understand the process of making movies. I know, for example, that one can choose to create a demand or supply a demand. The latter is perhaps the easier approach but it leads us to the current state of affairs--a dwindling spiral

42

absent intellectual discourse and inspiration in the culture and movies and television shows that do all they can to make ignorance and coarseness acceptable and even laudable.

In the past, movies were aimed at adults. They were the dominant age group and thus the primary clientele at the box office. More recently, the age of the clientele has shifted and fourteen to eighteen year-olds are the prime audience. This explains why two films dealing with the same subject but made to suit a differing clientele are so at odds with one another. To wit: Tora! Tora! Tora! and Pearl Harbor.

One begins to realize that culture--whether in the movies, architecture, painting, dance or music--is a factor of what one can sell in a commercial transaction. It was ever thus, I suspect. Therefore, something other than commercialism has had an impact on what I see as the decline of our culture.

I think I know what it might be.

I believe that the culprit is the bell curve used in the educational system also known as grading on the curve which, according to Wikipedia, is designed to yield a pre-determined distribution of grades among the students in a class.

Let us consider that for a moment. The system has designed a method of ensuring that the bulk of subject understanding on the part of students will be at the level of seventy percent. Social engineers intent on returning us to the Dark Ages could do worse than adopting the bell curve. As an aside, when was the last time you heard someone--a college graduate particularly--use the subjunctive case properly? When was the last time anyone had to learn a dance step?

How does one appreciate Mozart, Neutra, Hemingway, Picasso, Matisse, Billy Wilder, Cole Porter, Django Reinhardt or Miles Davis at a comprehension rate of seventy percent? Inadvertently, we have created a demand from that bulk of people in the middle of the pre-determined distribution of grades for material that is less nuanced, more elemental and easier to grasp or, in the extreme, requires no understanding. For commercial reasons, the demand is being supplied.

I prefer that we begin to create a demand for more exacting standards of excellence in all areas of our culture. In my film school, we didn’t grade on the curve. A student moved to Lesson Two only after understanding and mastering Lesson One. We could educate rather than process students.

Would taking this approach mean that some would have a longer stay in the academic world than others? Yes, it would. It would also mean, I believe, that they would have a more fulfilling experience with the lives they lead subsequently in the real world and would imbue our culture with a demand for better, more nuanced offerings in thought, music, politics and every other facet of the thing we refer to as culture.

Summer 2011

The Store Store:

You are Here and Here.

S

and

tore/Store

digitally

samples

sensations

of

storefront

arranges

them

archived

spatial

data.

As

the

brick

practicalty

of

storefront

erodes,

surrogate

sensory

into

the

experiences

a

cataogue the

of

economical and

Store/Store encounters

physical

that

mortar provides mediate

moments between the virtual and the real.

The

result is a kind of hi-tech/lo-tech rotoscoping of reality that presents a new way of looking at ourselves and our immediate surroundings. By actively abstracting a viewer’s perception of their environment, we uncover a suspicion that there are hidden possibilities and narratives latent within the landscape of the street.

T

his project creates a story that, through the interaction of people walking on the street, builds

into a three-dimensional real-time interactive narrative that speculates the future of commerce. When all stores go online, the physical sensations of shopping will be obsolete. The Store Store is the answer. Passers-

by observe and interact with the installation through visual and sonic exchanges with a series of viewfinders presented by a fictional entity, Store/Store.

Stewart Hicks Allison Newmeyer J i m my L u u

http://cargocollective.com/timeless

43

Time

T

|tīm|

noun

1.

a

non-spatial

continuum

in

which

events

occur

in

apparently

irreversible

he boeing 747 was designed in 1965 and it’s first commercial flight was in 1970. The building of the 747 represented one of the single largest industrial achievements in modern history... “what if we just float the wings over the existing retaining walls and keep a low profile while THE WING APPEARS TO CASCADE DOWN THE RIDGE? ...Innumerable airplanes sit desiccating in the desert of obsolescence. These airplane graveyards are bone-yards of industrial technology that contain much more potential in secondary uses that require a substantially less ‘risk’ factor then trying to use them as an airplane again... The airplane is a sinuous collection of curvilinear forms, idealized by aerodynamics.

The architect convinced the cleint to purchase the 747 airplane, w h i c h

succession

from

the

past,

through

the

present,

to

the

future-

new was over 250 million dollars for $30,000 and then, using a laser, beheaded the airplane, then, using a laser, beheaded the airplane, removed the tail and finally cut it longitudinally.

Next, transverse sections reduced large segments of fuselage and the wings to a manageable size for transport...

The largest cargo lifting helicopter in the world, the ch- 47 chinook CH- 47 Chinook was brought in on transit... The total emissions and EMBODDIED ENERGY OF TRANSPORTING LARGE PIECES... emboddied energy of transporting large pieces... Has a much smaller ecological footprint then conventional construction.

747 wing house exemplifies a significant transformation between definitive objects in actualized architecture and their recontextualization.

44

2.

successive

moments

s

of

nowadjective

&

1.

pronoun

a

comparative

of

little-

2.

not

as

great

in

amount

or

quantity-

3.

with

the

deduction

of

mimes-

4.

to

a

smaller

extent

degree

or

frequency-

747 Wing

House

“Enclosed with glass, the sculptural forms of the wings and their construction are honestly expressed in a manner that speaks to the use of our abandoned infrastructure,

repurposing large scale post consumer waste AND expressing the nostalgic, timeless forms of the wings for everyday use.� ~David Hertz

David

Less

|les|nowadjective

&

pronoun

1.

a

comparative

of

little-

2.

not

as

great

in

amount

or

quantity-

Hertz

3.

with

the

deduction

of

mimes-

4.

to

a

smaller

extent

degree

or

frequency-

The spectacle Today

46

Summer 2011

S e va k

P e t r o s i a n

The spectacle Today

The Valid of Architecture ation

Martin Roy Mervel AIA

Architecture is born and architecture dies with our human imaginations. Nature connects us with the universe of experience and we frame our views inside and outside and on all sides of this built environment. Most of the planet’s population exists outside of the raw, natural elements of nature by choice within the confines of built, constructed forms. But our origins of corporeal form begin with nature’s vocabulary.

I suggest that the natural connection in the “Mediterranean“ climates like Southern California enable us to let nature into our awareness to make us happier human beings. When we are inside our living or working spaces, we look out to see nature’s forms, and we unconsciously connect with nature. Whether we enjoy outdoor activity in nature or not- I believe every human elevates their chance to connect with joy and happiness when they peer into nature’s visual field.

This eye candy could infuse and elevate our additional senses of taste and smell. The pungent scent of the pine forest enhances our visual delight (Frank Lloyd Wright describes this with eloquent romance). And so we architects enjoy taking cues form nature in our tinkering with design because nature’s great system of simultaneous co-existent ecologies, habitats and vegetal organisms have been interpreted by many in a myriad of art forms…

Architecture is simply the recycled supply of nature reassembled with reason and material substance. It is within the rubric of language and metaphor that architecture arises to announce itself as the sustainer of life. In it’s raw literal sense, the dawn of modernism may have been interpreted as harsh and cold. The writing and heroic constructions of the early L’Corbusier work freed up the use of materials and laid to rest generations of decoration from previous eras.

But when his disciple, Albert Frey arrives in America within one week of the Great Depression fresh from his mission of

48

delivering the iconic Villa Savoye (1928) in Paris for his mentor, Corbu, Albert’s vigor, enthusiasm and fascination with technology and optimism creates fresh solutions that posit complex incite. His associates called him “The American Guy” in Paris.

Frey creates the Aluminaire house (1931) exhibited at the groundbreaking “International Style” 1932 MOMA show, with his individual brand of clean, sleek elegance that expresses a timeless quality. And like a silent monk deliberating his philosophy “towards a new architecture,” we are witness to the evolving language in his homes: “Frey I (1947-48) Frey II,(1963-64) are commercial gifts to the desert: the Palm Springs City Hall (1952-57) North Shore Yacht Club (1958-59) the Palm Springs Tramway lower station (1961) as well as the Tramway Gas Station (1963-65) consistantly continue to express his passionate love affair with a newly discovered lifestyle in the desert.

His legacy links old and new worlds together in a language, demonstrating a fascination with detail, pragmatism, optimism and material efficiency akin to Thomas Jefferson and Hadrian, thus positioning him as a transitional modernist.

The analysis of architecture is often written by historians who have more adroit words than the architects who analyze their own peers work.

And I will grant you that the romantic writings of Frank Lloyd Wright or even the Kindergarten chats of Louis Sullivan are steeped in idealism. In today’s bottom line culture where cynicism trumps romance, I say that the arrogant cynics should be damned. Let’s bring back the era when a person’s word was their bond- and it was a genuine honor

Summer 2011

to work hard. I used to joke with my son when he was younger, “I never worked a day in my life.” Now as a nineteen year old, he understands this to mean that because I love what I do, the work just does not feel like work at all.

1991

Speculation play: Hollywood 2X .

1993

Product INTRO: Bud Ice-Raleigh Studios

1993

Bud Ice: Rearview Projection Port

I feel blessed to design and create architectural solutions.

When a client tells me, “I love you, Martin”, as one did this week, it not only makes me feel great, but it validates the hard work and effort and successive sweat energy put forth by the team of folks that draw, build, and then maintain our work.

But every generation is influenced by politics and the evolution of technology and today the acceleration of this change is unprecedented. This afternoon I sent an “e-blast” mail in my computer and within a short time thousands of people were notified (I hope).

Each generation creates a paradigm shift built on the previous one. When Albert Frey was building canoes as a boy, and then making box cameras, he was connecting and communing with an understanding of nature. We are expressions of nature watching the universe unfold. We question externally and ask ourselves many things and sometimes we discover complete or partial answers.

We wonder, we study, we contemplate. And nature is the grand impresario, revealing herself with majesty, fury, chaos and beauty with power and silence simultaneously. Witness Thoreau’s ‘Walden Pond’ or the trajectory of the rising mist at Niagra Falls. One can easily imagine both as a metaphor, and the source from which all artists and scientists should be deriving inspiration.

1981 NightLINE L.A

49

The spectacle Today

N

Scott

50

a r a d a

Chambliss

Summer 2011

E

n t e r

P

r i s e

Film & Architecture C ultural

C An American

The spectacle Today

ontext

The dead do not whisper, they howl. It is the density of the earth that decreases the sound of their cries. Their sound is strained and deamplified...

Martin

Mervel

Ortega Gassat said “Man is not a natural animal. Nature is out to kill us from the minute we are born”. We are part of the predator/ prey dynamic of eat or be eaten. Yet subsisting in the realm of creativity and commanded by reason we insist on making, shaping, and responding to a myriad of environments.

When referring to the TWA structure, Aero Saarinen remarked, “What interests me in these structures is when and where to use them. Probing deeper into the different possibilities of these structures, one finds that they are not necessarily just mathematical formulae that have to be done in such and such a way or they will fall down, but that there are many equally logical and good ways which go in many directions.” And while examining the process of making, the architect John Hejduk says; “Art, be it painting, literature or architecture, is the remaining shell of thought. Actual thought is of no substance.

We cannot actually see thought, we can only see its remains. Thought manifests itself be its shucking or shedding of itself; it is beyond its confinement...

For all intents and purposes, our inside is to us weightless as a thought which has no substance. The illusionary, internal, voided space is like the internal space of our brain, with the observation that we live in our heads, in constant communication with the sensations given off by our hearts. In our excitement of creation, the mind and heart begin to fill, we feel the filling internally, the feeling is pure sense. We are filled within and we are thrilled. We are filled with thought that escapes from us. We have been filled with breath...

52

What I have attempted to illustrate is the possible space of architecture. I wish to emphasize that there is the breath of the male and the breath of the female, and that we have yet to breathe fully the breath of the woman and her thought in architecture. When woman’s air impregnates our objects, we will be astonished, and angels will cease to weep.”

The diaphanous and simultaneous concrete image that Hejduk paints above continues to humble me whenever I make a sketch, sculpt a mask, draw a drawing, write a change order, collaborate in the art department, or observe and take notes on a tech scout. Life has an awareness and conversation with death; it is healthy to respect both, while we have the ability and energy to balance and communicate our perceptions! The conversations that I was privileged to share over the last decade of Julius Shulman’s life remind me that our lives really are fleeting wisps of warm energy that are channeled as privileged pathways in overlapped collages.

Right now, as you read this- any moment of sharing and understanding printed words or reading the soul filled eyes of one’s lover are the experiences that enable the creative mind and body to produce. It is in the collaboration of working with my partners and assistants that I earn my education daily in this new world, where the mystery of technological tools truly blurs and constantly redefines my ability for how to understand the client’s program or the screen writer’s script- or my assistant’s vast computer landscape knowledge.

Architects and Art Directors create the world that we inhabit with wonderful fresh pre-visualization tools. And the experience of paying attention to the “scratch and sniff” interaction of experience with materials requires a renewed, vigilant dedication because our world of legal codes, Spartan, economies, and interactive cultures are changing faster than we were trained to perceive. Our minds must adapt at ever faster rates and, as in the faster edited pace of modern films- we humans evolve our levels of understanding and appreciation of the world we inhabit.

Summer 2011

P a t t i

O’ l e a n

Queen Mary Theater

House on Fire 53

CAPILANO UNIVERSITY FILM SCHOOL

Summer 2011

capilano university film school architecture/cinema

VANCOUVER 2009-2010 design principal andrew king james wu winston chong orest klufas jorge remolina vincent yen marion larue greg fenske larry podhora jennifer beagan

Cannon

Design

Film is the driver for many of the formal, spatial and material developments of the work.

The building became defined as a ‘machine for film’.

It became a device in support of the teaching of film, it creates moments of potentially filmic power and it acts on many scales as a metaphor for filmic qualities and mechanisms. This is based on an understanding of where architecture and cinema merge.

Movement cinematic complexity is formed through the relationship between velocity and space. In this work meaning is not derived through static spatial complexity, the project is composed such that the very spatial compositions of specific points gain complexity through the cinematic sequence defined by moving through them.

Experience builds cinematically, and architectural complexity results through movement. Glimpse cinema is a about the glimpse, the almost subliminal moment of comprehension. This includes smaller, finer grain potential moments that add to the depth of experience and poetic undertanding at an intimate, body scaled calibration.

Peripheral cinema builds on the unfocused. Cinematic complexity embraces the peripheral. The project implicitly embraces the peripheral. It builds on the u n c l e a r s p a c e , the barely hidden space; the implicit but not primary space. Architecture and cinema merge in critical and compositional strategies.

Structure, rhythm, colour, foreshadow, overlay, linear disjunction, light density, compressed space, expanded space, montage, collage, continuous space, is continuous space are the syntax of cinema and architecture.

These composition strategies make a building that is also an armature in which film can be projected, from which film can be projected and on which film can be projected.

55

“Nano

-City”

Michael

The concept behind” Nano-City” is that

technological advance

and ecological responsibility are not necessarily a contradiction in terms. We believe that technological development from within the fields of design and architecture can be focused to transcend ecological equilibrium. NanoCity is an interactive robotic city moving across the landscape demonstrating a massbalance of resources. Both the city and the landscape are made of the same material. At the forefront there are many small mining robots which are milling up the landscape, next there are constructor bots that are building the city. As the city moves along there are bots at the back of the city that are breaking down the city and lastly bots that are reconstructing the landscape.

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Continue on next page

Fox

Summer 2011

T

Continued from previous page

he head of the city resembles a massive mechanical cathedral but would fool

anyone who examined it for too long. For all of its apparent symmetrically

flaunting oppressiveness, it is nonexistent. Indeed at any instant it does exist but it is ever changing, morphing, melding, destroying and creating. Itself. For the city itself is in fact one and the same with the landscape that it ploughs through. The city moves across the planet without regard for the forests, the seas, the deserts and the glaciers.

For any and all landscapes is fuel for its growth. The city is a momentary composition of tiny machines, so tiny that they operate at the atomic and molecular level.

The machines are just as invisible as the atoms they are composed of. Essentially the entire city is composed of nano-sized robots. There are gatherers, sorters, transporters, assemblers and dis-assemblers. The assemblers work endlessly immersed in a bath of parts or molecules that have been gathered from the landscape, sorted and transported, along a nano-conveyor belt system to the point where they can be reassembled and bonded to the new molecular structure of a part of the city.

A tree in the forest is disassembled to the molecular level and transported to the other end of the city and reassembled into the city. On and on it goes, tearing up everything in its path and creating paths where there are none for the sake of creating the city. The city rolls out from the back of the head like a perfectly geometric beaver's tail: houses and parks and playgrounds and streetlights and furniture and food and even toys. The people of the city find homes but they never grow terribly attached to them because everyone understands the temporal frailty of the city.

There is no money and no one seems to care what others have because the city is constantly churning out new designs for the urban fabric. Everyone simply migrates towards the head of the city because that is where the newest of everything is to be found. Of course they also must constantly move towards the head because the rear of the city is always disintegrating literally from beneath the citizens' feet. It is not so drastic as that, and a house may take upwards of three years to completely disintegrate but it does indeed keep the people moving. On the macro scale then, as a result of the nano-scale, the city operates as a conveyor as well.

The disintegrating city is reconstructed into the forest, or sea, or desert or glaciers.

Where once was a mountain a new one was built in its place. Everything stays in balance; natural resources can replenish themselves as fuel for the next time the city rolls by and the citizens never tire of the scenery. http://cargocollective.com/timeless

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The spectacle Today

4

©

para

T

meters, movement, and sound

Several concepts were used as guidelines for this animation, such as utopia, abstraction, rhythm, asymmetry, movement, virtual space exploration and harmony of the elements. The animation is composed of two elementary objects that fluctuate in size and position over a non-definite times¬cale, hence creating a complex structure reminiscent of Chernikhov’s drawings. The topology of this abstract form can serve as a tool for understanding the evolution of a (vir¬tual) city. Through an immaterial topology our composition tries to explore a model of a (virtual) city. It can be read as a diagram in which position, time and music interact.

The ani¬mation travels in a virtual world passing from a microscopic, rather abstract, flat referential to a macroscopic point of view, unravelling a complex three-dimensional organisation.

The composition reveals interaction between virtual param¬eters, the language of signs (a construction), movement (the city) and sound (human activities). Movement is a social need for every life form organised in societies (insects, humans, etc…). Movement is not only a consequence of group or¬ganisation, but it is also the consequence of individual life. Depending on the length of observation, every living being is in movement. Cells, the elementary units of living organisms, are also animated and vary in shape and size during their entire life. Even matter on certain scale is in movement; atoms spin and electrons form clouds around them.

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Catalog: TIMEless

I

Summer 2011

“Sounds and Movements Characterize the Essence of Human life and Activity.”

Movement + Sound + Sign = City Utopia + Virtual Reality Robert

Firing of Neurons Image From Dr. Michael Arbib Lecture

Ivanov

They are connected with the growth of societies. Creating a sparkling environment where one generates the other. Sounds give rhythm to our lives, they produce a fracture in time, which can serve as a reference, like a time scale. The evolution of a city is created by movement of private and public space. Each space can mutate and become the other.

Propagating on an ever-changing landscape, a perpetual movement generated by human actions connecting Cartesian coordinates to time and music. 2 dimensional images can be generated by the 3 dimensional structure viewed at very close range (physically unattainable but possible in virtual space). In the virtual world time is a coordinate that can be modified at will. It is non-definite, since it’s virtual; it can be seconds, minutes, years or centuries.

The music used is also composed of various sounds that come and go, sometimes forming melodies or just sounds. Like the movements of human activity that produce sound.

Movement is not only a consequence of group organisation, but it is also the consequence of individual life. The proposed animated composition explores Iakov Chernikhov drawing taken from: “Fundamentals of the Modern Architecture 1920-1930” Several concepts were used as guidelines for this animation such as utopia, abstraction, rhythm, asymmetry, movements, virtual space exploration and harmony of the elements. The animation is composed by two elementary objects that fluctuate in size and position during a non-definite timescale. Hence, creating a complex structure remembering Chernikhov’s drawing. The topology of this abstract form can serve as tool to understand a (virtual) city evolution.

Through an immaterial topology our composition tries to explore a model of a(virtual) city. It can be read as a diagram where position, time and music interact. The animation travels in a virtual world passing from a microscopic rather abstract planar referential to a macroscopic point of view, unraveling a complex three dimensional organization.

Iakov Chernikhov Drawing “Fundamentals of Modern Architecture 1920 1930” The composition reveals interaction between virtual parameters, the language of the signs (a construction), movement (the city) and sound (human activities). Movement is a social need for every life form organized in societies (insects, humans, etc…). Movement is not only a consequence of group organization, but it is also the consequence of individual life. Depending on the length of observation every living being is in movement.

Cells, the elementary unit of a living organism are also animated and vary in shape and size during their entire life. Even matter at a certain scale is in movement, atoms spin and electrons form cloud around them.

Sounds and movements characterize the essence of human life and Continue on next page

59

The spectacle Today Continued from previous page

activities. They are connected with the budding of societies. Creating a sparkling environment where one generates the other. Sounds rhythm our lives, they produce a fracture in time, which can serve as reference like a time scale. The evolution of a city is created by movement of private and public space. Each space can mutate and become the other. Propagating on an ever changing landscape, a perpetual movement generated by human actions. Movement + Sound + Sign = City Utopia + Virtual Reality One driving concept used in this composition is the duality between utopia and virtual reality.

The term “utopia” is combined from two Greek words “no” (ou) and “place/land” (topos), thus meaning “nowhere” or more literally, “no-place/ no-land”. The word “utopia” was created to suggest two Greek neologism simultaneously: outopia (no place) and euto-pia (good place). In our case, the no-place could associate to everywhere or every contemporary urban environment. Virtual reality is about some reality but not the “reality”, it is about almost reality, theoretical reality, invisible reality, abstract reality or even unhistorical reality.

As suggested Gilles Deleuze, who uses the term virtual to refer to something that every object carries with it, which is neither its reality nor merely what it could have been, but rather what it is imagined to be. Virtual is therefore taken to mean a potential state that could become actual.

Virtual is not opposed to “real” but to “actual”, whereas real is opposed to possible. Virtual reality does however shed some light and provide some direction enabling a search for answers, with some ideas about what to look for. Movement + Sound + Sign City abstraction structure rhythm asymmetry movements’ space Abstract Space Our composition investigates the interconnection between different dimensions, connecting Cartesian coordinates to time and music.

Two dimensional images can be generated by the three dimensional structure viewed at a very close range (physically unattainable but possible in virtual space). Every element of the

composition has a definite position in space and time, thus it is possible to have complete knowledge of physical matter and all of the laws governing that matter at any one time. It is possible to compute, as would Laplace’s demon in a deterministic world, the time and place of every event that will ever occur. However, as we showed previously (2D can rise from 3D by changing

the referential), a complex structure can arise from the simple elements composing it. Minor modifications in the model can make the global shape to change but again it can be observed only by moving to a different scale. In the virtual world time is a coordinate that can be modified at will. It is non-definite, since it’s virtual, it can be seconds, minutes, years or centuries. The music used is also composed of various sounds that come and go, sometimes forming melodies or just sounds.

Like the movements created by human activities that produce sound. These sounds can also form melodies or just come and go. These 5 parameters are components of an abstract space, it can be used to expand human perception. Immateriality The idea of materiality is connected to the concept of quality of the space.

Materiality is tight to the structure and quality of the mater used. Thus driven by space determinism, where every element has a definite function and purpose. Modern architecture has transformed the concept of materiality by the use different materials in its construction. Materiality has evolved to transparent materiality (lightness, deepness, absence of distinct frontiers between the inner and outer space) which is a metaphor for immateriality. Transparency is a link to movement, density, sensibility and the deformability. However the transparency is a concept that goes beyond the use of a material. Immateriality is where space becomes an immaterial quality, where atmosphere that is transformed change continu-ously (in a nondeterministic movement).

Where the land of the sensitive one is become directly involved. The sollicitations are multiplied; the borders are uncertain and vanish to you, that is the character of the place that is entrusted to the feelings, always changing. It is the end of exclusivity of function for a definite place. Some of these questions where recurrent elements of Chernikhov’s research on “Fundamentals of the modern archi-tecture 1920-1930”. The evolution of a city is created by movement of private and public space. The idea of materiality is connected to the concept of quality of the space. Materiality is tight to the structure and quality of the matter used. Every element of the composition has a definite position in space and time, thus it is possible to have complete knowledge of physical mat-ter and all of the laws governing that matter at any one time.

City Drops Robert Ivanov & Tecla Tangorra With Daniel Bruylandt Alex Wohlkonig Music - Torli by Miki Yui -L-NE [2000] Inspired by Iakov Chernikhov Video format : 1920p / 1080p Video Lenght : 1min 20sec

Robert 60

Catalog: TIMEless

Ivanov

Summer 2011

Andrew

THE is

an

King

HAWK

ocean

side

retreat

built

at

the

southern most tip of an island on the southwestern tip of nova scotia, canada.

It

is the southern most piece of private

property in the province and is skirted by a

bird sanctuary, long sand beaches and ‘the hawk’, an uninhabited island to the south.

It

is at once bucolic and tough, wind,

with

fog

and

storms

arriving quickly and changing the context dramatically.

The

project, to be built this year, is a

studio

and

cinematic

house

lenses,

framed looking

around towards

two an

archetypal landscape of ground, ocean, horizon, sky.

These

lenses inform the two formal and spatial components of the building.

One

is ground based, an

8’

high and

70’

long glazed surface creating an intensified panorama demanding movement along it to perceive its edges.

The other is a tower, a 24’ high and 10 feet wide lazed surface demanding movement along its length to widen the slotted view defined by its edges.

The spectacle Today

Syd

LOS

Mead

ANGELES: 2O15

This was a major ‘style view’ for a proposed Television series to be called ‘L.A. 2O15’ with script and concept

by Peter Hyams. Columbia Television dismissed the proposal at the time. The scene is a combination of iconic ‘L.A.’ features; the L.A. City Hall building, ‘typical’ older multi-story brick faced buildings with signage and other street accoutrements as applicable props to support the ‘future’ setting of the story. In background is an ‘earthquake engineered’ high-rise.

The concept is a building literally hanging inside of an actively articulated framework.

DIS

ASTER AT SYNTRON

Depicted is an enormous rotating ‘tube’ world that has been hit by an asteroid. The tube, it’s rotational inertia now disturbed, twists along its 35 km length, producing the curved perspective disappearing into the distance. The damage is apparent in foreground. An inspection craft cruises through the tube completing a 3D damage assessment. Arthur C. Clark’s ‘RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA’ inspired the illustration concept.

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Summer 2011

The spectacle Today

Film is to Architecture As Production is to Practice Joseph

Kaufman

“Architecture may be, as Goethe famously said, frozen music, but it may also been seen as still space in motion; and its space-in-motion qualities make it an ideal partner for film.”

Architecture may be, as Goethe famously said, frozen music, but it may also been seen as still space And its space-in-motion qualities make it an ideal partner for film.

in motion.

In the earliest days of the motion picture going back to 1895, filmmakers such as the Lumière Brothers made wonderful observational recordings of the people and environments of the world. As cinema evolved directors saw the possibilities of sheer spectacle and size, resulting in what may well still be the largest set ever constructed, the “mile long” recreation of Babylon that was built at Sunset and Virgil Avenues in Los Angeles for D.W. Griffith’s 1916 epic INTOLERANCE. Not too long afterwards the possibilities of architecture on film to present the subjective experience

of the characters resulted in some remarkable creations: the huge, oversized city square created from

F.W. Murnau’s poetic late silent SUNRISE: A SONG OF TWO HUMANS, and the “elevated pulp fiction” of Joe May’s ASPHALT, which “…stands as a synonym for urbanity, haste and vitality.” (FILM ARCHITECTURE, edited by Dietrich Neumann.) scratch to represent the awe of the rural man towards the big city in

The last of such ambitious cityscapes probably PLAY TIME (1967), nicknamed “Tativille,” a vast

Jacques Tati’s Paris neighborhood with many of the large office and apartment buildings almost fully functional. Never before or since has an all-encompassing environment been used for the most subtle comic effects as in this masterpiece. was the ruinously expensive set for faux

A special case is that of Fritz Lang, who studied architecture in Vienna before becoming a filmmaker.

His fascination with architecture is best known from METROPOLIS (1927), which imagined an enormous city a hundred years hence, overwhelming and built on human oppression, overtly a modern Tower of Babel. But also, and crucially, Lang was inspired by architecture there and in other films, especially M and THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE, which foreshadowed the terrible forces that were to tear Germany apart only a year or two later, in the mass movements of extras across shadowy angled spaces.

In modern times we find conceptualists like Syd Mead who envisioned a dystopia in BLADE RUNNER Christopher Nolan who deconstructed and reconstructed the cities of the mind in INCEPTION. The recent trend towards creating real-life architecture that moves and changes according to human needs finds an analog in such cinematic works, and also in the musical, as with Fred Astaire’s tap-dancing up the walls and onto the ceiling in 1951’s ROYAL WEDDING, accomplished with or directors such as

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Catalog: TIMEless

Summer 2011

a locked-down camera and a rotating set.

“gimbal”

These

sets continue to be used occasionally,

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) and Mark Romanek’s 1995 Michael and Janet Jackson video “Scream”, as for the spaceships in

and in the dreamscape of the aforementioned

INCEPTION (2010).

Architects

manner of

Second Life.

Some

Indeed

Director Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1934 THE BLACK CAT imagined diabolical architect Hjalmar Poelzig, played by Boris Karloff, living in a Corbusier-style mansion built on the walls

architects

of a ruined fortress above a cemetery at the site of a terrible

World War I

battle.

(Ulmer

started as a set designer who was mentored by

German architect Hans Poelzig on the 1920 film THE GOLEM. The director named Karloff’s character in homage and was also the uncredited set designer on

THE BLACK CAT.)

Other architect characters include Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark as embodied by Gary Cooper in THE FOUNTAINHEAD and Kirk Douglas as an architect having an affair in his client’s house under construction in STRANGERS WHEN WE MEET. Peter Greenaway’s THE BELLY OF AN ARCHITECT depicts the final months in the life of the title character.

Fritz Lang

returned to the subject with an

architect hero for his period epics set in

India,

THE TIGER OF ESCHNAPUR and its sequel THE INDIAN TOMB (both 1959), remakes of early 1920s silents he wrote with Thea von Harbou that had been directed by ASPHALT’s Joe May. Sliding briefly sideways to television, guest star Frank Gehry was inspired by seeing Lisa Simpson’s hastily crumpled-and-tossed piece of paper to create the Walt Disney Concert Hall on THE SIMPSONS. Famous houses make their way into films, as in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis-Brown House becoming the original HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1959).

Then

filmmaker.

there is the case of architect as

Pritzker Prize winner Rem Koolhaas was part of a precocious group of teenage Dutch filmmakers the Filmgroup 1,2,3 and later coscreenwriter with director Rene Daalder on the 1969 feature THE WHITE SLAVE. Even after he became an architect he occasionally

continued to work on screen stories, including as co-scenarist with

Daalder

HOLLYWOOD back in the mid-

on

TOWER, a proposed film that 1970s anticipated the entirely digital

character

in movies and other aspects of modern existence,

such as a cyber-replica of the entire world in the

the

most

innovative

uses

of

CG-animated features. Think the Googie-inspired homes of THE INCREDIBLES, New York City as future rubbish dump in WALL-E or the lived-in neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro in RIO.

themselves make their way into

film stories more often than one might suppose.

of

architecture in recent movies are to be found in

have

the

ease

have

brought

and

with

film

than ever before.

familiarity

modern

architecture

closer

computer-based

and

design

The production designer of Steven Spielberg’s MINORITY REPORT, Alex McDowell, acknowledged the influence of CGpioneer and UCLA and Yale professor Greg Lynn. Another visionary architect, Lebbeus Woods, found his work copied for science fiction films so frequently that he successfully sued the producers of

Terry Gilliam’s 12 MONKEYS for

The distinguished Columbia, Yale and SCI-Arc professor Hernan Diaz Alonso openly announced an intention to go into filmmaking. And infringement.

the director of TRON: LEGACY, Joseph Kosinski, was an alumnus of the Columbia Graduate School of

Architecture, Planning

and

Preservation

still is an adjunct assistant professor there.

and

Practically speaking, in all kinds of story-based filmmaking it is the production designer who functions in the adopted role of architect. The best designers thoroughly understand cinema in all its aspects. They are capable of converting mise-en-scène onto a twodimensional page. Their designs are manifested on set or in a 3-D animated world as an environment that expresses not only the atmosphere of a film, but also all its hidden underlying meanings, personal and philosophical. Thus film and architecture most thoroughly share a common ground.

Joseph

Kaufman

The author gratefully acknowledges the contributions of Rene Daalder and Alison Pinsler to this article.

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The spectacle Today

Craig

Image From: Ecotopia Series

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Catalog: TIMEless

Hodgetts

Summer 2011

E C O

T

O P I A

“These drawings were for a film version of Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston, a 1975 novel by Ernest Callenbach which, true to its name, schematized a futuristic sustainable utopia. In 1978 Hodgetts was commissioned to create renderings to speculate what the architecture and infrastructure of Callaenbach's world might look like.

Images From: Ecotopia Series

A

train station beneath the solar canopy, showing bean-bag group seating, overhead view

windows within gull-wing doors, the mag-lev track, and an ecotopian decorative motif.

These gentle, washed out drawings have a virtuosity and playful optimism that is lacking in the majority of digital renderings. The example above lineates a solar-powered mag-lev train system and the rest of the et illustrates city life and power generation in a futuristic Pacific Northwest breakaway nation.

This work is inspirational...”

“Ernest Callenbach and I had distinctly different approaches. I was interested in making a popular movie with an appeal to 12-year-olds, complete with aftermarket consumables! And Ernest, with a pure, almost religious zeal, was preaching ecology. In fact, if the movie had been made—the producers had optioned the novel some years earlier— we were going to retitle it and make up our own story.”

The power plant utilizes helium-filled mylar balloons to lift and orient a wind-powered generator.An umbilical power cable runs to land and serves as a tether which can be ascended by a maintenance gondola.

“Seems the right time for this rediscovery,” ~Hodgetts Craig

Hodgetts’

generators

over

1978

vision

for

San Francisco Bay,

the

cult

with

a

novel

“Ecotopia”

maintenance

gondola

includes in

the

balloon

foreground.

The spectacle Today

N a Ö n O w

g

Continued from page 13

The phantom limb diagrams were monumental in the spatial modeling of the brain’s understanding of space and the multiple rolls of mirror neurons.

The discovery that mirror reflections can train a human to understand that he no longer ‘feels’ in his missing arm. The solution uses computation to then break down axial space, with regard to scalar reference and the distance from the brain’s synapse location, the center of the spheroid of the eye, the distance to the surface membrane, and the distance from two perspectives outward from the face of the center of the eye into the perspective plane of the mirror reflection. It is a counter evolved play in time and material boundary which provides us with data about plasticity and the relationship between the largest axis plane of the mind—the central cut: an optic hemispheric flip, or ‘dual duality dodecahedron’.11 THE INBETWEEN, OR TRANSITION, REMAINS THE HUMAN CONDITION AND “IS SO PERVASIVE IN THE PRONOUNCEMENTS OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY AS TO SEEM UBIQUITOUS.” THE CONCEPTUAL EXCHANGES AT THE INTERSECTIONS ARE FILTERED ELECTRICALLY OUTWARD BY THE MULTIPLE NUCLEI COMPLEXITIES IN TERMS OF ORIENTATION, TIMING, AND REPETITION. THEY REQUIRE COMMUNICATION TOOLS FOR TRANSLATION. In philosophy, the initial interaction of the mirror is described in Plato’s Natural Philosophy, that Chora, “in

which

motion

takes

place,

resembles

a

mirror- a reflective thing gathering a view of something which remains external to it… requir[ing] one part of inside to be outside

This describes the perceptual intake of dark matter and the output of light matter. the color spectrum. Turns out, Gottfried Leibniz metaphysically described a social network observation of two spheres reflecting around one body.

His hemispherical reflection planes explain duality and social relativity like those in the MOTO project.27 the

other.“13

The exchange between action and 68

“...warps

all of our time-limited analysis into a

whirlwind of spectral curvature.” ~ Naomi Scully

impulse takes on multiple master analogies of perception and has adapted science into themes of time and culture. Mirroring the ancient concept of ‘monad’, for instance with a proverbial narrative using distinguished by higher mathematic translation through principles like wavelet and category theory, we seek more and more information to enjoy the life that we live today, constantly interacting with ‘devices.’

the heat transfer of spatial echoes through convex and concave lenses and angled mirrors, relates to the heat transfer of data from device to device and the frequencies involved in relaying the image accurately.

Next, man adapts an interaction with a screen, where classic psychology could not discuss, the understanding of spatial exchange and social response with an interactive device. [Differentiated from the

of such through architecture and accessory.

Man understands one form of spatial representation, or between translation, through perspective drawing, now may use codes and interfaces to configure three dimensional axonometric First, man sees self through the interactive volumes using his mind manipulation of his body with the alone. light echo of his form in a mirror As man continues in SpacE, or reflective surface. As a basic his sensibility to Self gathers rule; A human begins his spatial information from two environments development at the instant he that extend outward. The two discovers how light is transferred extensions are, one: that of beyond himself.

This basic the mind though our projection development discussion between of such into technology and the parietal and the total area coding languages translating the exposed to positive feedback from information into binary codes of childhood psychology, which shows ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ and two: that of how we EVOLVE. 10 the physical body as a projection

initial passive interactive spatial tool--mirror]

The discussion

adapts a new dimension for Chora discussed in detail in a previous essay, ‘Geometry through Language in Architecture’.

Now, man sees that he has mind control over buttons and coded visual simulacra as an extension of Self through technology. He sees the light of his potential energy exchanges as an extension to his knowledge with no fear of selfexposure. An image’s exposure in terms of photography depicting

Pedagogically, teachers and students exchange values in cycles of adaptation and re-articulation of generational difference and despite the importance of the multiple nuclei, they may orient themselves toward a single information sector to focus on their individual function of the simulacra[total] unit exchange* and popular cultural or institutional regulations. The metaphoric dendrite hairs connect and disconnect to exchange information through frequency[e-<->+e] to boundary pedagogies’ functional and theoretic overlapping symbols.

Continue on page 73

The spectacle Today

Resonances

RESONANCE

Exhibitions: Tesla, Berlin, 2007 (solo); Jack Straw New Media Gallery, Seattle, 2008 (solo).

Dorsey

based upon a simple

of

presupposition – that a space occupied for a finite period of time retains the presence of that occupation well after the space itself has been This

presence

is a collective and individual memory; it is an energy held in the atmosphere and the material of the place. It has no fixed duration. Having charged the space relatively briefly, the slow ebb of this spatial energy is discernible, but not precisely quantifiable. Resonances seeks to bring the afterlife of a discrete sonic period of time into the realm of the

Dunn

Using

This installation is...

‘emptied’.

Summer 2011

S: THE QUANTA OF MEMORY

perceptible.

various

decaying

e

,

models

nergy

sounds

pulled from a suspended moment unstable

subsides

in

patterns,

the

crumbling material of time.

This

disappearance

perfectly

linear;

it

is

not

moves

from generally synchronized to radically disconnected ‘Moments’ of audio appear and sound in altered sequence and at various speeds, segmenting into smaller and smaller pieces.

Events recur with new linkages. The source material may run forward or backward, or may hang itself for some time in a spiralling loop. In this respect, Resonances is a mirror of the physical qualities of

space: over time, initial impulses

waves in a particular

scatter,

re

flect, and

Continue on page 68: NaÖWoN...

subside in a complex .

cloud

Twining Principle as 4 modular echo frames ‘of s’metrical feathers’~ NaO illustrating dancing above the material object

Library, mixed media, Jennifer Gilman, 2007

Two Towers, mixed media, Jennifer Gilman, 2006

Ship of Tears , 70

mixed media, Jennifer

Gilman, 2010 Ship of Tears 2, mixed media, Jennifer Gilman, 2010

Summer 2011

Jennifer

Gilman

The spectacle Today

Steven

Suchman “THE MOTO MISSIONS”

IMAGE

NARRATIVES:

“Having suddenly sprouted arms and legs, 12 newly MOTOs looked around at each other with delight, taking joy in simply BEING together...”

formed

The

other

MOTOs

see the smallest

“GONG! each turned with a

MOTO

start,

to

now lying motionless,

there on the expansive platform of steel they had gathered on, following their exhausting journey from the future

... But after a breathless moment.... ... to the delight of all the others..”

a squeaky metallic snore escapes

The mirror, shows the group that there is one more moto than they counted before since The Motos each represent a perpective of the other 11

they see themselves in the reflection.

"Watching

the smallest

MOTO

sleep so deeply,

naturally gave the others the same inclination

....

as they gathered closer together, like massive

“We

mushrooms, for a well deserved nap..."

were the first to arrive at the foot of the

massive

MOTO .... up close it was even bigger than

it appeared than in our living room hologram at home...”

"Philip dimensions.

Suchman introduces a charector who is aware of his own illusions of space and time. The awareness includes the limitations of memory and the insignificance of objects. It

counted eleven

MOTO

giants in all, when

yet another brilliant starry nebula began to build in the sky above him, just like the others... this one was blue...”

“We took one more somber look at the only world

we’d ever known, before boarding our compassionate

MOTO to make the long journey ...”

“To

think... in only a few moments i'll be hurling

into an uncertain future, through time and space in our

MOTO,

with nothing more than the rags i'm

wearing and my allowable

1.8 kilograms of junk in

this sack....”

also includes the beautiful possiblities of life when we live, letting go of our obstructions to really view all of the perspectives of exchange.(Naö)

72

~Steven Suchman

“The author-architect is a director to the architecture,

Summer 2011

where the experience is analogous to plotline as:

Group acts on Ground, ground reflects emotion onto Self, Self projects the feeling toward group to TEST self against GROUP--

all results exist at the same instant, but the process is over a timeframe, and recorded as a ‘script’[code sequence] or narrative.”

N a Ö n O w

C 68

~Naomi Scully

g

ontinued from page

S

tories cue emotions and trigger responses from a Hegelian ‘Other,’ to communicate the processed vibrations to a friend. The value is in the ability to pass information accurately from one body to another.

Charles Baudelaire describes now as “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art, whose other half is the eternal and the immutable,” he defines a culture which lives beyond life in electric memory and impulse where the artist lives connected with ‘death’ and the exchange of emotional data is the art itself where life is between. 14 “It can be described as a positive ephemerality, or constant changing of present-ness which exhilarates and devastates,”14 illusively attempting to maintain integrity and speed in cycled figuration.

Actions can be mapped in space, time and geometry.

Computer theory derives programs from sequencing vibrations and filters the data. Various tools, like mass spectrometers, can implement a basis for understanding the ratio between mass and frequency in a magnetic field.

Today, we have come across a new reflective state that has reoriented principles, discussion and output toward an unprecedented future. Its existence absorbed a ‘weakform’ frequency nuclei imperative to social awareness of proximally exchanging information with translation tools between Orders. The Internet has added a spherical dimension to architecture’s social responsibilities that validates computational relevance.

Tectonic dendrites must speak to the screen as well as they actualize interaction.

In a single generation, we can see which Brands emerge as Images to display information to the youth.

Our footprint of construction aims to coordinate a discussion between generational shifts in language, diagram, symbol, and text into geometric overlays of their unknown language associations. 12 Scripting is also important in the exchange of aesthetic information, memory information, and physical information translation from whatever field the person is most familiar, into a drawing or sequence similar to that of a film or narrative

A single Film [Set of Groups] contains a sequence of descriptions ordered as counterexamples within a time frame. It parallels time in [Metabolic Orders] scalar reference planes ordered as sequence or series [E Sum Union etc].

It intersects the dynamic optics of the surrealist style in painting composition where the emotional string of events ties the total depiction of an experience as a symbol and color frequency including those of the optic nerve; integrating color and fear of neurological perception and geometric illusion principles.

The Domains of the Metabolic Orders [MO] retain data similar to those of any number of living species.

The film describes the experience to the viewer in a way that the Other can understand the values placed on the economic means to provide a built environment.

The work contains elements of spatial architecture and stories about their culture.

The script contains the tone of the movie, and the questions provide intellectual research tools to translate the tone from a person into a space. The comfort and quality of the questions posed allows us to magnify the optic and experiential dreams of imagination into their setting, or at least an environment that contains aspects of the illusive fossil memory, or shadow.

The distance light travels in a flicker describes one instance of a space or setting. Can someone use Fourier Analysis, for instance, to reverse engineer CODE for an emotional event? The turbulence and exchange between this light and dark matter warps all of our time-limited analysis into a whirlwind of spectral curvature.

RITUALS PROVIDE LANDSCAPE FOR INFORMATION EXCHANGE: Computer scripting, or coding, provides the conduits for exchange. HOW DO WE EXTEND, CONNECT, INTERACT WITH, AND TEACH OURSELVES through the Quadrant Riemannian: Geodesic Mirrors[Twinning] in TransLation, and Trans-Architecture?

It transforms based on your environment. Consider the experience of a film or comic strip. It depicts and renders a sequence of potential events by mapping coordinates of multiple planes. Three types of RITUAL are considered in this 3D map where the 4th dimension occurs in your imagination. The first f(Ritual) is Tradition; The second f(R) is Repetition; The third f(R) is Distance.

+ and - UNITE

Life:

We are all teachers and students. cube IT.

Naomi

Scully

...unroll the sphere and rebuild the sphYramids: a configuration of pyramid, dodecahedron and ovular solids--- while thinking ‘Translation. Projection. Refraction and Light.’

73

The spectacle Today

Lilies and Marble Floating by Acer palmetum, mixed media, Coy Howard

74

Catalog: TIMEless

Summer 2011

Coy

Howard

Electric Lemonaide, mixed media, Coy Howard

Orchard at the Levee, mixed media, Coy Howard

The spectacle Today

A

L A N

Space

A

B

D

U

L K A D

E

R

11 A conceptual imaginative intervention

of

spatial

studies generated through digital media process and investigations imagining a new space that is different from our daily sight and deforming the restrictions of what we expect from the spaces of our setting.

body

How can one react to a new space or transform its

by blending into an imaginative environment?

become a potential future site and living condition?

Can

this new atmosphere

In the course of these inventive studies I

am thinking about architecture space as a living creature and a character of a narrative not building and architecture reaches beyond the crisp edges and faรงades.

76

Catalog: TIMEless

Summer 2011

Shamsul Kamal Akmal

The Bend U

nlimited

Coffee

Table. ...

forty unique table leg posibilities

A-03

A-03

A-03

A-09

A-07

A-03

B-06

A-06

B-01

A-06

A-06

A-06

B-06

B-06

B-06

B-08

B-08

B-08

A-09

A-09

A-09

A-01

A-07

A-09

A-07

B-07

A-07

A-09

A-07

A-03

B-08

A-03

A-03

B-06

A-08

B-08

B-08

B-06

B-08

B-05

B-05

A-09

B-03

A-08

A-08

A-07

B-01

B-08

with three legs per table, this can be worked out to 64000 unique coffee tables. These can be mass manufactured using CAD/CAM technologies such as a CNC pipe bending machine.

There is a spatio-temporal quality that results from the non-uniform configurations of the tables. This is experienced when moving past a series of these tables when arranged in a sequence, as the tables change forms yet is still coherent with distance travelled. In addition to this, the schedule of table legs resemble a sequence of frames from an animation [1]. By compiling them, an interesting animation was created revealing a similar space-time quality that is found in cinema.

This can be seen as design influencing cinema, as a tool to extend the imagination in the creative process for a moving image and as a connection between physical space and moving image.

http://cargocollective.com/timeless

77

The spectacle Today

Dimitry

Kim

'Fut

ureProof’

is a scenario based, meta-

narrative project that speculates a hyper-globalized urbanism based on fictional, future scenario.

Centered around globalization as the apex of civilization, the project references the myth of the ‘Tower of Babel’, where the progress of humanity was viewed as hubris and hence, destroyed by the act of god.

The setting for the project includes, decadency of civilization, transnational culture, geopolitics, global commerce, and superstructures. Evolution of birth and death of the city is portrayed through the narrative of the construction of transnational highway and terminal (St. Lazarus Superterminal) that bridges the fictional, unified North America (MX/US/CA)

or

North American

Composition

union.

in time,

the project, the image, and the narrative

Alpha and the omega, beginning and the end, ascendency and decendency… Future Proof is about imminent death after birth; not a gradual, natural death, but a sudden and catastrophic death by design or hubris of its unnatural perfection (like the Tower of Babel). Two contrasting image series (‘The Tower’ Series and ‘The Fall’ series) of the same object can be perceived from either subject matter, yet through its physical and metaphorical representation (cold, mechanical representation of overgrown commerce or a giant serpent usurping the city), the

78

Catalog: TIMEless

duality is ever-present.

BK-

Dino Ken

T

Summer 2011

Zoo

Saylor

he Diomede Islands function as mirror images—identical and opposite cliffs spanning the International Date Line.

Little Diomede (Alaska) occupies the space of yesterday relative to Big Diomede (Russia), which correspondingly exists in relative tomorrow...The project proposes a boathouse/time travel portal... How long is a minute? a day? a week? Exposure to manipulated conditions that are widely seen as fixed leads travelers to emerge from voyages with a heightened sense of personal agency and newfound ability to perceive nuance in their surroundings... Thresholds are simultaneously blurry and crystal clear, manifestations of visceral truth and fantastic fiction. Einstein is credited with defining insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,” while 4D Replica proposes a different conclusion: that nuanced difference is inevitable and unpredictable, regardless of the similarity of initial conditions.

Dinos<

Alibis

>Reflections

Let’s pause for a second, recall the recent past vis-à-vis digital and analog production, pull something from the archive and question a distinct cultural shift, circa the 1990’s, when corporate spectacle, technology and branding strategies began to significantly transform the city as well as our daily lives.

New digital spaces, borne from Madison Avenue, Hollywood special effects and the Internet 1.0, were captivating the masses. Not only within the economic, cultural and social spaces of the urban but also within the ways we worked, communicated and conducted our private affairs. These so called advances were primarily digital and shared across multiple scales and modes of production.

A dominance of claims to interdisciplinary practice over a myriad of creative fields produced hybrid engagements and grand claims of spatial and social transformation. These were serious sources of engagement, conversation and revenue for all, and Yes, we were fascinated, online and often took the bait.

Yet within these fictional spatial transformations, the remix of architecture, film and digital production, corporate entertainment, mass reception as well as networked publics, no one could fully imagine or honestly articulate what the outcome might produce and/or how we might inhabit and interact within these hybrid digital and physical spaces. This spatial convergence continues today with very little critical examination.

Narrative, a Hollywood script, a program within architecture, a game designer’s trajectory or an ad man’s pitch, supplies the potential content from which both formal and spatial solutions occur. Immersion and interactivity within corporate architectre, filmic and game spaces are often very advanced constructions within their own self-serving master narratives. They are not only highly codified and difficult to subvert but also designed to encourage and appropriate local and global social interaction and remove attention from larger and more pressing social and political narratives.

Exterior

At the time of our proposal, speculative science fiction allowed for a questioning of the future, present and past. Narrative space, irony, misreading and sub-text were all highly regarded within the utopian critiques and distopian projections via the work of P.K. Dick, Paul Virillo or J. G. Ballard. We combined these genres along with the blood and guts of B grade horror films and single person “shoot ‘em up” video games hoping to question, engage and enact new interactive spatial and narrative forms.

Then and increasingly today, digitally based spatial effects, parametric modeling and motion graphics produce spaces far removed from the narrative threads of their conception, often contained only within the void between a designer and their digital screen. As the production methods of film, architecture and design continue to converge, a simple question is posed: What’s the real Story?

Our proposal did reach Spielberg’s lair, rumor has it that he rejected the entire project because he thought that his film could not be shown in a setting where nature and the public could affect the reception and outcome of his work. We ask: Who are the raptors?

Little did we know, that years later, corporations would be recognized as political citizens, given “human rights” and that the “public” would provide these phantom beings “social agency”… as we now freely supply our personal spaces and stories, visions and emotions as content and entertainment to any number of web based social networks and digital flows. ~Ken Saylor [Notes] 79

The spectacle Today

“Chromatic passages paint a picture of motorcycles zipping in and out of lanes, and dynamic swells simulate the Doppler effect created by these and other vehicles. The end of the piece employs a faster sequence of rhythmic

anticipation of finally arriving home.””

motives, evoking the

~ Dr. Jason Gamer

Commuter’s Lament J

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Catalog: TIMEless

a s o n

L

e e

B

r u n s

Image: NaO Collage Photography Collaboration

with

Lament Scores, ‘Communter’s Lament Echo Impulse Sound Shadows’

Summer 2011

The spectacle Today

The usual sequence of ... i

d

ea becoming

d

e

si

g

n

becoming

a

is

r

i

t

interrupted

at a

f

a

c

t

point

before the design

materia l i z e s ... between

idea

and

rea l i z atio n .

Matei

82

Denes

Summer 2011

Images and Text From Dr. Arbib Lecture

Populations of place cells: Like a distributed GPS: “You are here.”

Respond to sensory cues, or undergo dynamic remapping.

A neuroscience quest: to use the cellular details from the rat to illuminate our understanding of

Architecture of the brain may inspire new ideas for using neuroscience in a new approach to architecture.

Different functions/different architectures. Cf. Goodale & Arbib (1998) on Architecture as Metaphor. “the immense plasticity …” That’s poetic, says Gil. The brain is an adaptive computer that changes with experience.

episodic memory.

[For cerebral cortex, see Colby, C.L. (1998) Action-oriented spatial reference frames in cortex.

Neuron 20: 15-24.] Movement is the measure of Space The animal’s spatial behavior exploits a variety of different representations in its brain: representations of oculomotor space- representations that guide locomotion- representations that guide reaching and many more … The brain's multiple maps gain their coherence not by their subservience to some overarching mathematical definition of space but with respect to a repertoire of actions Locomotion is the Measure: Introducing Locometric Space A subway map helps us navigate a city, yet has little metric structure.

Here we return to the world of actions – measuring the world in terms of the actions (walking, swimming, flying) whereby we traverse it. We coin the term locometric (locomotion + metric) for this way of measuring space the animal measures the world in terms of actions (e.g., how many steps taken) or perceived measures of such actions (e.g., the visual effect of an action such as the achievement of a goal) Just as when we descend from the train at a station we re-enter the world of locomotion, so the subway map must be complemented by a space that is “more metric” in nature. the bee’s “odometer” is based on integration of optic flow, rather than energy expended or a count of wing beats the notion of locometric space is particularly relevant to the notion of path integration, the ability of a wandering animal to keep track of the location of its home base relative to its current position, a capability related to dynamic remapping of the hippocampal map (Guazzelli et al., 2001). It is often suggested that the place cells of hippocampus (and more recently, the grid cells of entorhinal cortex) furnish a cognitive map. However this can only be part of the story: Hippocampus and Cognitive Maps Wayfinding Using the physical environment to navigate from one location to another How do we code the locations of things, navigate around the world, and represent and mentally manipulate spatial information? What tools can the building provide? Wayfinding Apps that take account of whom we share the space with? ~John Eberhard -- What are the cues? Loos: Principles of symmetry in good design help us find the Men’s room if one finds the Ladies. Contrast a building that actually guides one. Publicly visible signage (cf. Ada’s floor) versus an iPhone App versus augmented reality (e.g., with virtual reality glasses (or Brain-Machine Interface [BMI]?)). For BMI – cf. William Gibson’s Neuromancer. DARPA: BMI for soldiers on the battlefield. Current research on macaque brains → BMI to aid paraplegics. Impact not just of architectural spaces but also of the people who share the space with the observer.

“Y

84

.”

ou are here Respond to sensory cues, or undergo Populations of place cells: Like a distributed GPS: dynamic remapping. A neuroscience quest: to use the cellular details from the rat to illuminate our understanding of episodic memory.

Catalog: TIMEless

Summer 2011

Brains, Machines & Buildings

“I am not an architect – but I am keenly interested in architecture.” ~ Arbib

Towards a Neuromorphic Human-Adaptive Architecture

The core of my own work has been the use of computers and mathematics to explore how the brain works and how it has evolved, and each Fall I give a course on “Brain Theory and Artificial Intelligence” at USC. For a couple of years early in the new millennium, I asked students, mainly from computer science, to think about projects in which they designed rooms which had something like a brain.

I want to thank ANFA for giving me the inspiration to return to this theme, and explore the notion of neuromorphic architecture with you. ************************ Changing spaces, changing activities (day, night), changing people.

Michael A. Arbib

University of Southern California arbib@usc.edu

[Neuro]Extracts from Lecture NotesCybernetics as Communication and Control. This book was my starting point.

Conversion from pure mathematics to a lifelong interest in “brains, machines and mathematics” Brain as existing machine: e.g., Wiener’s servomechanism, prediction, communication theory.

Brain as a driving force for an expanding conception of machines: multi-level, adaptive, embodied systems interacting with the world about them.

And the use of computers to create simulations/virtual machines (think of Apps) that can behave in brain-like ways BMM motivates title of talk.

Computational models and Brain Operating Principles bridge Experimental Neuroscience and NMA. What is a brain model? How might that inspire neuromorphic architecture.

Loop: Brain → Machines to understand brains → new machines → brains ….

Schemas

A higher-level representation of what neural networks – and networks of networks – do Integrating patterns of perception (perceptual schemas) with patterns for action (motor schemas) Architects, too, use functional specs to guide structural design But … Brain modelers need a functional specification to guide the search for details of the structures which support them.

Each schema embodies the knowledge of how to act or perceive as well as the computational process by which it is enacted.

~Dr. Arbib Shares pHd

Brain Modeling Case Study 1: From Mirror Neurons to Social Cognitive Neuroscience.

Competition and Cooperation is the Style of the Brain Segmentation: Low-Level Vision Competition and Cooperation at the level of local image features grow edges and regions to yield a first-pass subdivision of the image to ground semantic analysis Recognition: High-Level Vision Schema instances compete and cooperate to interpret different regions Sky: Data driven Roof: Data driven (but with context) Wall: Hypothesis driven Platonic forms? E.g., the house?

Not really. The visual appearance of a house can vary greatly between cultures.

A house as shown here might help us recognize a house with a flat roof, but would help little with teepees and rondevals. But can link to functions.

Probably shelter and sleep are the minimum, with food consumption & preparation, indoor plumbing, etc., being increasingly optional.

Note that the same principles hold whether images are black and white or in color, 2D or 3D – our brains integrate multiple cues distributed across multiple subsystems to reach a (possibly dynamic) equilibrium which serves as the interpretation which can guide future behavior.

The neural circuitry (e.g., for detecting images or for stereo vision) reflect developmental processes guided by environmental interactions building on the genetic specification of growth rules and neural plasticity.

Insights from the computational analysis of brain mechanisms involved in the cognitive underpinnings of social interaction. We will provide sketchy examples of Brains for Intelligent Rooms (I-Rooms): Preliminary Projects from CS 564: Brain Theory & Artificial Intelligence (USC, 2003 & 2004) Mirror Neurons The firing of a mirror neuron correlates with both the monkey’s action & the monkey’s observation of a similar action The unity of consciousness. Needbased deployment (competition and cooperation) of multiple representations.

Contrast contour map for hiking/biking and road map for driving. NAE as well as NMA. Cultural dependence: Recognizing affordances (e.g., a doorway); but then recognize which are “permissible”. Men’s versus women’s room. Sacred space in a cathedral. In Orthodox churches, the iconostasis has three doors. The congregation may not use these doors. There are two on each side so the clergy can enter and leave the chancel. In Orthodox worship, the nave represents earth, the chancel represents heaven, and the iconostasis is the barrier that prevents us from seeing heaven from earth. The celebrant opens the middle door at appropriate times when heaven is revealed to people on earth. A useful map for charting tube rides – but it doesn’t provide the metrics (the 2 nearby stations …)

Explain how neurons communicate by “spikes” and how microelectrodes can pick up the activity of single neurons.

Each histogram lasts about 1/3 to ½ second.

Mirror neurons correlate with both the monkey’s action and the monkey’s observation of a similar action: Different neurons “code” for different types of action The Mirror Neuron System as a Learning System: The Mirror Neuron System (MNS) Model Learning to recognize actions associated with hand→object trajectories The right hand diagonals Control the reach and grasp The rest constitutes an evolutionary refinement for

recognition.

(self & other) (Oztop and Arbib 2002) Modeling the Empathy The power of projecting one's personality into

(and so fully comprehending) the object of contemplation.

Many today would see mirror neurons as providing the neural roots

This

term

introduced

was to

of empathy. apparently

English

1909 by

in

E. B. Titchener in his Lectures in the Experimental Psychology of ThoughtProcesses: Not only do I see gravity and modesty and pride...but

I

feel or act them

in the mind's muscles. is,

I

This

suppose, a simple case of

empathy, if we may coin that term as a rendering of fühlung.

Ein-

http://cargocollective.com/timeless

85

Source Files Concinnity 1. Alberti, Leon Battista, and Giacomo Leoni. Ten Books on Architecture. New York: Transatlantic Arts, 1966. Print.

2. Anderson, Kristi. Brook Taylor’s Work on Linear Perspective . New York: Springer-Verlag, 1992.

3. Arbib, Dr. Michael. “Brains, Machines, and Buildings: Toward a Neuromorphic Human Adaptive Architecture.” 2011.

4. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. The Body in Theory. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,

1994.

5. Boyer, Carl B. A History of Mathematics. 2. New York: Jogn Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1991.

6. Cache, Bernard. “109 Provisional Attempts to Address Six Simple and Hard Questions About What Architects Do Today and Where Their Proffessions Might Go.” Edited by Jennifer Sigler. Hunch, no. 6/7 (2003): 123-125.

7. Cohen, Preston Scott. “Projective and Topological Geometry in Architecture.” gsd2102Syllabus . Fall 2009. http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/

icb.topic598043.files/gsd2102_syllabus_rev091020.pdf (accessed April 22, 2010).

NaOwoN 1. Krishnananda. Studies in Comparative Philosophy. Shivanandanagar, Distt. Tehri-Garhwal: Divine Life Society, , 1999. Print.

2. DeLanda, Manuel. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone, 1997. Print.

3. Koch, Christof. The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach. Englewood, Colorado: Roerts and Company Publishers, 2004.

4. Xenakis, Iannis. Formalized Music : Thought and Mathematics in Music. Revised. Hillsdale, New York: Pendragon Press, 1990.

5. Arbib, Dr. Michael. “Brains, Machines, and Buildings: Toward a Neuromorphic Human Adaptive Architecture.” 2011.

6. Levitin, Daniel J. This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. New York, New York: Plume-Penguine Group(USA) Imc.,

2006.

7. Thomas, Dr. Rene, and Richard D’Ari. Biological Feedback. Boca Raton, Florida: CRC Press, Inc., 1989.

8. Johnson, Steven. Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life. New York, New York: Steven Johnson, 2004.

9. Burgess, Neil, Kathryn Jeffery, and John O’Keefe. The Hippocampal and Parietal Foundations of Spatial Cognition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.

10. Allman, John Morgan. Evolving Brains. New York: Scientifc American Library, 1999.

11. Kipnis, Jeffrey. Pefect Acts of Architecture. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2001.

12. Hahn, Theo, ed. International Tables for Crystallography, Brief Teaching Edition of Volume A: Space Group Symmetry. 5 Revised. Wiley and

Sons, Ltd., 2010.

13. Koolhaas, Rem, Bruce Mau, Jennifer Sigler, Hans Werlemann, and Office for Metropolitan Architecture. S, M, L, XL. New York: Montacelli Press, 1988.

14. Plato. Timaeus. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Forgotten Books, 2008 [360 BC].

15. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. The Body in Theory. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,

1994.

16. Evans, robin. “The Developed Surface.” Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.

17. Fox, Micheal. “Catching up with the Past: A Small Contribution to a Long History of Interactive Environment.” Footprint (Delft University), no. 6

(Spring 2110): 3-14.

18. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. The Monadology. Translated by Robert Latta. Forgotten Books.org 2008, 1898.

19. Shmueli, U, ed. International Tables for Crystallography: Reciprocal Space . Kluwer Academic, 1993.

20. Silagadze, Z.K. Relativity without tears. Novosibirsk: LT, 2008.

21. Somol, Robert. Dummy Text: Or The Diagrammatic Basis of Contemorary Architecture. New York: Universal Publishing, 1999.

22. Steventon, Alan, and Steve Wright. Intelligent Spaces: the Application of Pervasive ICT. London: Springer, 2006.

23. The Future of Information Modelling and the End of Theory: Less is limited, more is different. “Closing the Gap: Information Models in

Contemporary Design Practice.” March/April 2009: 22-28.

24. The National Geographic Society. The Incredible Machine. Edited by Robert M Poole. Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 1994.

25. Thomas, Dr. Rene, and Richard D’Ari. Biological Feedback. Boca Raton, Florida: CRC Press, Inc., 1989.

26. Virilio, Paul, and Julie Rose. A Landscape of Events. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000. Print.

27. Heidegger, Martin. History of the concept of Time. Translated by Theodore Kisiel. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1985.

28. Derrida, Jacques, and Peter Eisenman. Transcript One, Chora L Works. New York: The Monaceilli Press, 1997.

29. Burgess, Neil, Kathryn Jeffery, and John O’Keefe. The Hippocampal and Parietal Foundations of Spatial Cognition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.

30. Cohen, Preston-Scott. Contested Symmetries and Other Predicaments in Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001.

31. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repitition. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Print.

32. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Ambient Alternity 1. Malcolm McCullough. Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental

Knowing. MIT Press pg. xiv, 2005.

2. M. Plottegg. Hybridarchitektur & Hyperfunktionen. 2007 3. A. Ludovico. Marcos Novak interview. Neural.it, 2001 4. P. Queau. The Virtual Simulation: Illusion or allusion. 1995 5. J. Hoog, Real Virtuality, Immersion and perception of virtual Architecture in Multi-User Virtual Enviroments TEARing Down The House: Modern Homes in The MOVIES 1. Elsie McCormick, review of the Aluminaire House, New York World Telegram, January 10, 1931.

The Spectacle TodaY. The SITUationist SPIV 1. Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: [Radical America Etc.], 1970. Print 2. McLuhan, Marshall, Jerome Agel, and Quentin Fiore. War and Peace in the Global Village: an Inventory of Some of the Current Spastic Situations

That Could Be Eliminated by More Feedforward. New York [u.a.: Bantam, 1968. Print.

3. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, and Claude Lefort. The Visible and the Invisible; Followed by Working Notes. Evanston [Ill.: Northwestern UP, 1968.

Print.

4. Donne, John. Poems of John Donne. vol I. E. K. Chambers, ed.London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1896. 53-56.

The Supply and Demand of Culture 1. The American Heritage Dictionary. New York, NY: Dell Pub., 2001. Print.

The ValidAtion Of Architecture 1. Hays, K. Michael. Hejduk’s Chronotope. New York: Princeton Architectural [for The] Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1996. Print.

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Glossary Trans-Architecture

[Novak]Today, the practice of architecture can be expanded radically, because: 1. We are now used to virtual spaces online. 2. Even outside of the Internet, we think in ‘virtual’ terms. 3. And the way we create architectural models has mutated. In today’s day and age, even the stable concept of ‘ topology‘ is challenged by computation. Instead of trying to isolate the virtual behind our computer screens, we should embrace it and interweave the informational and the material, in a fluid trans-architecture. “Materially, an architecture of our times is one that is conceived algorithmically, prototyped rapidly, fabricated robotically.” “Informationally, an architecture of our times is likewise conceived algorithmically, executed computationally, and inhabited interactively.”

electromagnetic induc- "–noun Electricity . the induction of an electromotive force by the motion of a contion ductor across a magnetic field or by a change in magnetic flux in a magnetic field. " Polarity

"Physics . a. the property or characteristic that produces unequal physical effects at different points in a body or system, as a magnet or storage battery. b. the positive or negative state in which a body reacts to a magnetic, electric, or other field. 2. the presence or manifestation of two opposite or contrasting principles or tendencies. 3. Linguistics . a. (of words, phrases, or sentences) positive or negative character. b. polar opposition.

Photon polarization is the quantum mechanical description of the classical polarized sinusoidal plane electromagnetic wave. Individual photons are completely polarized. Their polarization state can be elliptical, circular, or linear[dubious – discuss]. "

Self-agency: SA

is the individual’s perception that an action is the consequence of his/her own intention. The neural networks underlying SA are not well understood. We carried out a novel, ecologically valid, virtual-reality experiment using blood oxygen level–dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) where SA could be modulated in real-time while subjects performed voluntary finger movements. Behavioral testing was also performed to assess the explicit judgment of SA. Twenty healthy volunteers completed the experiment. Results of the behavioral

Deferential

showing respectful difference

Polemics

art or practice of disputation or controversy [branch of theology dealing with the history or conduct of ecclesiastical disputation and controversy.

Flying Scenery

Scenery suspended from the grid

Build

Construction time for fabricating sets in the shop, knocking them down, and re-erecting them on stage

Polytope

a geometric object with flat sides, which exists in any general number of dimensions

feedback loop/system

"[exists from neurological echos to programming datascapes]–noun Computers, Electronics . the path by which some of the output of a circuit, system, or device is returned to the input. "

Ubiquitous computing

can be defined as computation thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and activities, and is often regarded as the intersection of computer science, behavioral sciences, and design.

Emergent

–adj 1. coming into view or notice; issuing. 2. emerging; rising from a liquid or other surrounding medium. 3. coming into existence, especially with political independence: the emergent nations of Africa.

EXPAND 4. arising casually or unexpectedly. 5. calling for immediate action; urgent. 6. Evolution . displaying emergence.–noun 7. Ecology . an aquatic plant having its stem, leaves, etc., extending above the surface of the water.

script

— n 1. handwriting as distinguished from print, esp cursive writing 2. the letters, characters, or figures used in writing by hand 3. any system or style of writing 4. written copy for the use of performers in films and plays 5. law a. an original or principal document b. (esp in England) a will or codicil or the draft for one 6. any of various typefaces that imitate handwriting 7. computing a series of instructions that is executed by a computer program 8. an answer paper in an examination 9. another word for scrip

The enduring challenge: to relate this diversity of form to

– noting the immense plasticity that “over-rides” it to create “virtual machines” ~ function

Dr. M. Arbib, Lecture Slides/notes

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frequency

"1.In physics, the number of crests of a wave that move past a given point in a given unit of time. The most common unit of frequency is the hertz ( Hz), corresponding to one crest per second. The frequency of a wave can be calculated by dividing the speed of the wave by the wavelength. Thus, in the electromagnetic spectrum, the wavelengths decrease as the frequencies increase, and vice versa. Also, fre·quence. the state or fact of being frequent; frequent occurrence: We are alarmed by the frequency of fires in the neighborhood.2.rate of occurrence: The doctor has increased the frequency of his visits.3.Physics .a.the number of periods or regularly occurring events of any given kind in unit of time, usually in one second. b.the number of cycles or completed alternations per unit time of a wave or oscillation.

Symbol: F; Abbreviation: freq.

EXPAND4.Mathematics . the number of times a value recurs in a unit change of the independent variable of a given function.

5.Statistics . the number of items occurring in a given category. 5. ecology 6. the number of individuals of a species within a given area 7.the percentage of quadrats that contains individuals of a species. Medical 8 : the number of individuals in a single class when objects are classified according to variations in a set of one or more specified attributes 9 : the number of repetitions of a periodic process in a unit of time "

sonic

1 : having a frequency within the audibility range of the human ear —used of waves and vibrations2 : utilizing, produced by, or relating to sound waves sonic device used to rupture cell walls> 3.of or pertaining to sound.4.noting or pertaining to a speed equal to that of sound in air at the same height above sea level.

mirror neuron

"[Wiki] A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another.[1][2] Thus, the neuron ""mirrors"" the behaviour of the other, as though the observer were itself acting. Such neurons have been directly observed in primate and other species including birds. In humans, brain activity consistent with that of mirror neurons has been found in the premotor cortex, the supplementary motor area, the primary somatosensory cortex and the inferior parietal cortex.

Mirror neurons were first described in 1992. Some scientists consider this to be one of the most important recent discoveries in neuroscience. Among them is V.S. Ramachandran, who believes they might be very important in imitation and language acquisition.[3] However, despite the excitement generated by these findings, to date no widely accepted neural or computational models have been put forward to describe how mirror neuron activity supports cognitive functions such as imitation.[4]The function of the mirror system is a subject of much speculation. Many researchers in cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology consider that this system provides the physiological mechanism for the perception action coupling (see the common coding theory). These mirror neurons may be important for understanding the actions of other people, and for learning new skills by imitation. Some researchers also speculate that mirror systems may simulate observed actions, and thus contribute to theory of mind skills,[5][6] while others relate mirror neurons to language abilities.[7] It has also been proposed that problems with the mirror system may underlie cognitive disorders, particularly autism.[8][9] However the connection between mirror neuron dysfunction and autism is tentative and it remains to be seen how mirror neurons may be related to many of the important characteristics of autism.[4]"

concinnity

any harmonious adaptation of parts-Concinnity expresses the concept that Leon Battista Alberti defined “to compose parts that are quite separate from each other by their nature, according to some precise rule, so that they correspond to one another in appearance.” 2 “Beauty is a form of sympathy and consonance of the parts within a body, according to definite number, outline, and position, as dictated by Concinnity...

This is the main object of the art of building, and the source of her dignity, charm, authority, and worth.”2

modular function

is a systematic method and procedure for company-supportive product modularisation. It consists of five major steps. It starts with Quality Function B19Deployment (QFD) analysis to establish customer requirements and to identify important design requirements with a special emphasis on modularity. The functional requirements on the product are analysed and technical solutions are selected. This is followed by systematic generation and selection of modular concepts, in which the Module Indication Matrix (MIM) is used to identify possible modules by examining the interrelationships between ”module drivers” and technical solutions. MIM also provides a mechanism for investigating opportunities of integrating multiple functions into single modules. The expected effects of the redesign can be estimated and an evaluation can be carried out for each modular concept. The Module Indication Matrix is then re-used to identify opportunities for further improvements to the single modules. [Gunnar Erixon]

neuroPLASTICITY

Capacity of neurons and neural networks in the brain to change their connections and behaviour in response to new information, sensory stimulation, development, damage, or dysfunction. Rapid change or reorganization of the brain's cellular or neural networks can take place in many different forms and under many different circumstances. Neuroplasticity occurs when neurons in the brain sprout and form synapses. As the brain processes sensory information, frequently used synapses are strengthened while unused synapses weaken. Eventually, unused synapses are eliminated completely in a process known as synaptic pruning, which leaves behind efficient networks of neural connections. Neuroplasticity occurs during development in childhood, following physical injury such as loss of a limb or sense organ, and during reinforcement of sensory information such as in learning. Neuroplasticity forms the basis of research into brain-computer interface technology, in which computers are designed to interact with the brain to restore sensation in people with an impaired sense such as the loss of vision. Research on neuroplasticity is also aimed at improving scientists' understanding of how to reactivate or deactivate damaged areas of the brain in people affected by stroke, emotional disorders, chronic pain, psychopathy, or social phobia; such research may lead to improved treatments for these conditions.

Catalog: TIMEless

Glossary

Summer 2011

Cell

"— n 1. a small simple room, as in a prison, convent, monastery, or asylum; cubicle 2. any small compartment: the cells of a honeycomb 3. biology the basic structural and functional unit of living organisms. It consists of a nucleus, containing the genetic material, surrounded by the cytoplasm in which are mitochondria, lysosomes, ribosomes, and other organelles. All cells are bounded by a cell membrane; plant cells have an outer cell wall in addition 4. biology any small cavity or area, such as the cavity containing pollen in an anther 5. primary cell secondary cell dry cell wet cell See also fuel cell a device for converting chemical energy into electrical energy, usually consisting of a container with two electrodes immersed in an electrolyte 6. short for electrolytic cell 7. a small religious house dependent upon a larger one 8. a small group of persons operating as a nucleus of a larger political, religious, or other organization: Communist cell 9. maths a small unit of volume in a mathematical coordinate system 10. zoology one of the areas on an insect wing bounded by veins 11. the geographical area served by an individual transmitter in a cellular radio network "

Fabric

"— n 1. any cloth made from yarn or fibres by weaving, knitting, felting, etc 2. the texture of a cloth 3. a structure or framework: the fabric of society 4. a style or method of construction 5. rare a building 6. the texture, arrangement, and orientation of the constituents of a rock "

intelligent environments (IE)

"are spaces with embedded systems and information and communication technologies creating interactive spaces that bring computation into the physical world. ""Intelligent environments are spaces in which computation is seamlessly used to enhance ordinary activity. One of the driving forces behind the emerging interest in highly interactive environments is to make computers not only genuine user-friendly but also essentially invisible to the user"" (Steventon and Wright 2006).

IEs describe physical environments in which information and communication technologies and sensor systems disappear as they become embedded into physical objects, infrastructures, and the surroundings in which we live, travel, and work. The goal here is to allow computers to take part in activities never previously involved and allow people to interact with computers via gesture, voice, movement, and context. The annual IET conferences on Intelligent Environments (IE06; IE07) present current trends and applications. "

Feedback

–noun1.Electronics .a.the process of returning part of the output of a circuit, system, or device to the input, either to oppose the input (negative feedback) or to aid the input (positive feedback).b. acoustic feedback. 2. the furnishing of data concerning the operation or output of a machine to an automatic control device or to the machine itself, so that subsequent or ongoing operations of the machine can be altered or corrected. 3.a reaction or response to a particular process or activity: He got very little feedback from his speech.4.evaluative information derived from such a reaction or response: to study the feedback from an audience survey.5.Psychology . knowledge of the results of any behavior, considered as influencing or modifying further performance. Compare biofeedback.6.Biology . a self-regulatory biological system, as in the synthesis of some hormones, in which the output or response affects the input, either positively or negatively.

Code Language

1.a system for communication by telegraph, heliograph, etc., in which long and short sounds, light flashes, etc., are used to symbolize the content of a message: Morse code.2.a system used for brevity or secrecy of communication, in which arbitrarily chosen words, letters, or symbols are assigned definite meanings.3.any set of standards set forth and enforced by a local government agency for the protection of public safety, health, etc., as in the structural safety of buildings (building code), health requirements for plumbing, ventilation, etc. (sanitary or health code), and the specifications for fire escapes or exits (fire code).EXPAND4.a systematically arranged collection or compendium of laws, rules, or regulations.5.any authoritative, general, systematic, and written statement of the legal rules and principles applicable in a given legal order to one or more broad areas of life.

6.a word, letter, number, or other symbol used in a code system to mark, represent, or identify something: The code on the label shows the date of manufacture.7.Computers . the symbolic arrangement of statements or instructions in a computer program in which letters, digits, etc. are represented as binary numbers; the set of instructions in such a program: That program took 3000 lines of code. Compare ASCII, object code, source code.

8.any system or collection of rules and regulations: a gentleman's code of behavior.9.Medicine/Medical . a directive or alert to a hospital team assigned to emergency resuscitation of patients.10.Genetics . genetic code.11.

Linguistics .a.the system of rules shared by the participants in an act of communication, making possible the transmission and interpretation of messages.b.(in sociolinguistic theory) one of two distinct styles of language use that differ in degree of explicitness and are sometimes thought to be correlated with differences in social class. Compare elaborated code, restricted code. "

construct

1. to put together substances or parts, esp systematically, in order to make or build (a building, bridge, etc); assemble 2. to compose or frame mentally (an argument, sentence, etc) 3. geometry to draw (a line, angle, or figure) so that certain requirements are satisfied — n 4. something formulated or built systematically 5. a complex idea resulting from a synthesis of simpler ideas 6. psychol a model devised on the basis of observation, designed to relate what is observed to some theoretical framework

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Architecture

"1. the art and science of designing and superintending the erection of buildings and similar structures2. a style of building or structure: Gothic architecture3. buildings or structures collectively4. the structure or design of anything: the architecture of the universe5. the internal organization of a computer's components with particular reference to the way in which data is transmitted6. the arrangement of the various devices in a complete computer system or network 7.the basic structural form especially of a bodily part or of a large molecule architecture  and function of the cerebral cortex"

Virtual

1.virtual memory, probably from the term "virtual image" in optics) 2. Common alternative to logical; often used to refer to the artificial objects (like addressable virtual memory larger than physical memory) 3 .created by a computer system to help the system control access to shared resources. 4. Simulated; performing the functions of something that isn't really there. An imaginative child's doll may be a virtual playmate. Opposite of real or physical. 5. having the essence or effect but not the appearance or form of: a virtual revolution6. physics being, relating to, or involving a virtual image: a virtual focus 7. computing of or relating to virtual storage: virtual memory 8. of or relating to a computer technique by which a person, wearing a headset or mask, has the experience of being in an environment created by the computer, and of interacting with and causing changes in it 9. rare capable of producing an effect through inherent power or virtue 10. physics See also exchange force designating or relating to a particle exchanged between other particles that are interacting by a field of force: a virtual photon

Schema

"1.a diagram, plan, or scheme.2.an underlying organizational pattern or structure; conceptual framework.3.(in Kantian epistemology) a concept, similar to a universal but limited to phenomenal knowledge, by which an object of knowledge or an idea of pure reason may be apprehended. 4. (in the philosophy of Kant) a rule or principle that enables the understanding to apply its categories and unify experience: universal succession is the schema of causality 5. psychol a mental model of aspects of the world or of the self that is structured in such a way as to facilitate the processes of cognition and perception 6. logic an expression using metavariables that may be replaced by object language expressions to yield a well-formed formula. Thus A = A is an axiom schema for identity, representing the infinite number of axioms, x = x, y = y, z = z, etc 7. a nonconscious adjustment of the brain to the afferent impulses indicative of bodily posture that is a prerequisite of appropriate bodily movement and of spatial perception 8. the organization of experience in the mind or brain that includes a particular organized way of perceiving cognitively and responding to a complex situation or set of stimuli "

Catalog: TIMEless

Summer 2011

Appendix: Exerpts: Stars of L.A.

CONSTELLATIONS OF LOS ANGELES "In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period Orhan Ayyüce drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.

~ GUY DEBORD 1958, Theory of the Dérive In Los Angeles a Dérive is a 'drive by,' in a car...

CONSTELLATION NICK NAME:

FROG

MAP SHEET: 111B157 - RANCHO LA BALLONA

Let us say and imagine, in Los Angeles, urban scale "planned points of interests" are indeed constellations. They are places in this vast metropolis. They are formed by the grid, by the politicians and their supporters, developers, engineers, and, as far as the buildings go, the architects.

Separated by mere 15 miles and sometimes as close as the next lane, urban core of Los Angeles is indeed 'the house of everything.' All the variables contrasted and occupied. The grid goes for hundreds of sq. miles. These special constellations let us to assume, experience, imagine and expect while driving. They are vortices of our stories in an horoscopic sense. These are the lines of our reality and the reasons of our act.

Your next friendly gathering, cultural outing or errand, you drive by these constellations... There are thousands of them... http://cargocollective.com/timeless

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