Monday, May 6, 2013

Familyography


Familyography
Visualizing a Portrait of Tactile, Chromatic and Audible Definitions

Abstract

While physical geographies and personal differences dictate our daily schedules, truly we are all running together, experiencing life in parallel.  A family portrait is visualized in three perceptions to extend the efforts of the traditional still-photography, family portrait.  These perceptions are crafted from the physiological arousal of individual family members throughout their daily routines.  Activity and emotion are combined with the visualizations of a family, created through a topographic surface (a tactile experience), a field of color (a two dimensional reading), and a composition of sound (an engaging, space activating interaction).  This is our experience, a familyography, visualized through an emotivescape, chromascape, and phonoscape (or, that of topography, color, and sound).







Wednesday, March 13, 2013


OBcities



























Dr. David Suzuki says it best, “With an estimated population of nine billion people by 2050, we cannot continue to consume resources at the same rate and maintain our quality of life.” We have become an obese race, rapidly consuming even more than we physically can. This consumption is occurring at an alarming rate with no regard for the effects that our actions have not only on the health of environment but also indirectly on the health of current and future generations. Society is becoming more diseased and overweight everyday. I am considering further researching this topic through my seminar project for Urban CT. I would like to use the CT as a new lens to look at the parallel between healthy cities and healthy bodies.

"David Suzuki Foundation | Solutions Are in Our Nature." David Suzuki Foundation. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Mar. 2013.

Tuesday, March 12, 2013


The Team




The Body




Monday, March 11, 2013

fragmented visioning


fragmentary visioning from Joshua Atria on Vimeo.

The video was captured through the aid of an iphone strapped to my leg. This unique perspective overlaps the sinusoidal patterning of the dynamic (caused by the motion of the leg) with the visual patterning of the static (the painted lines in the road, trees, etc). Inspired by the excerpt below from Siegfried Kracauer's, "Once Again the Street."

"The Street in the extended sense of the word is not only the arena of fleeting impressions and chance encounters but a place where the flow of life is bound to assert itself....The kaleidoscopic sights mingle with unidentified shapes and fragmentary visual complexes and cancel each other out, thereby preventing the onlooker from following up any of the innumerable suggestions they offer. What appears to him are not so much sharp-contoured individuals engaged in this or that definable pursuit as loose throngs of sketchy, completely indeterminate figure. Each has a story, yet the story is not given. Instead, an incessant flow of possibilities and near-intangible meanings appears."

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Robotic Acceleration

robotic acceleration from Dan Hutcherson on Vimeo.

I see this as a translation of my acceleration through a robotic tool, a large format cutting table. Video and acceleration is captured in three directions to illustrate the mechanical motion.

Living Section

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

CT-scan and Reflexology



The purpose of this video is exposing the hidden connections between the city infrastructure and the foot reflexology. In traditional Chinese medical science, the subtle relationship between the inner body system and outer physique can be reflected through the acupuncture points. This practice of theory has been widely applied into body massage treatment, such as foot and hand. The fact that cities are constructed by hard and soft infrastructure is fairly similar to the human body’s internal and external organs. Based on a brief study of the foot reflexology diagram, the reflex zones can be divided into two parts; one being the internal organs, such as brain and nerves, while the other one being the external organ, such as ear and eye. In this video, the urban soft infrastructure can be understood as things that involved human cultural efforts (graffiti, sculpture, etc.) or natural elements (plants, animals, etc.), while the urban hard infrastructure are things that are essential in constructing a city (road, bridge, building, etc.).

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Interesting statements on population growth and the environment.

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/02/picturesque-chinese-landscapes-are-actually-disguised-photos-of-landfills/
Hey guys, you should check out this beautiful film that explores the movement of the body.
http://vimeo.com/langanfilms/choros

Saturday, February 23, 2013

Way back to home




I took the video on the way from Madren Center to my apartment. I want to combine the geographical information with the video to show events along the road. Admittedly, it's not a video that really make everything as a whole. But it is a exploration in terms of how to show multi-dimension in a video. Potentially, it could be a video map or a map video, not only used as a map or a record, but more importantly, as a tool to observe and capture the features of real world in a different way.

Sunday, February 10, 2013

Time and Urgency of Motion

Living Section I-85 Commute from Dan Hutcherson on Vimeo.

A 50-minute segment of motion along I-85 south is documented in living section to illustrate the speed experienced throughout several different layers.  The active motion of the vehicle and its neighbors contrast against the static moments that transverse the direction of the traffic.  Simple events occur in unpredictable places as cars start to grow and recede away from the point of view.  Section annotations reveal the time and urgency of the woven threads of traffic and context.




Living Section_ A Natural Cycle through Time




Thursday, February 7, 2013

Living section of Lee III




Living section of Lee III.
By putting clips of different time in a day, I want to show a section not only in height and length but also in depth and time. Lee III is the building of Architecture School of Clemson University. It is a great building in terms of views and circulation. Hopefully, this video can show this openess.

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Film: The Draughtsman's Contract

"The nature of power, as played out through a sexual and economic game of class, property and inheritance, is the somewhat obscured subject of Peter Greenaway's masterfully baffling, frequently hilarious 1982 film The Draughtsman's Contract. This is a film in which surface appearances are very much set off against the reality underneath, a reality that can never quite be seen directly, head on, but only glimpsed out of the corner of one's eye: truth, like the living statue that mysteriously moves around the grounds of a rural mansion, rude and naked but mostly unseen by the mannered aristocrats who inhabit this estate circa 1600s England, is so elusive that one is never quite sure if one has actually glimpsed the truth or merely a figment of the imagination."

I'm referencing this paragraph of words from the website 'Only the Cineme' to give ya'll a brief introduction about the film. The film in my understanding is interesting, but also kind of creepy. Definitely worth of watching through!

Friday, February 1, 2013

Shan Shui and Reality


Brook Bank by Dong Yuan AD 900s
Shan Shui, a style of Chinese painting that usually depict the beautiful natrual scenery including mountains, rivers, waterfalls, trees and also buildings and people (but in small scale).

The article of "walking in the city" by Michel de Certeau talked about that it is an illusion to see the whole city from the top of a high rise. That intrigues me because we are asked to re-think what we see. In some ways, what we see probably is not the reality while the illusions could be more real in terms of feeling and perception. All of that reminds me this kind of Chinese painting, Shan Shui, which could be translated as Mountains and water.

The power of this painting is not from the likeness of shape. What they drew is not the scenery itself but the scenery in their mind. There is a different form of reality, reality of subjectivity and reality of perception. As viewers, we could have a richer experience from the drawings.

Different from western drawings that are usually perspective, Shan Shui used diferrent line types and line weights to show three-dimension on two-dimensional media, paper. The perspective point keeps changing in the drawings at three dimensions.

What is reality? It is what we see or what we think or something else? I think there are more than one form of reality and they should be explored more in this course.

Anyways, Shan Shui is a presentation of Chinese philosophy. I don't think it's easy to understand and explain the beauty of Shan Shui, even for me, who lived in China for more than 20 years. But I think it is always interesting and helpful to think problems in a different context in terms of another culture and another form of design.

A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains by Wang Mengxi
A close-up view

(Wang drew this painting when he was 18 and he died at 23. He is a genius and this is simply a master piece. It is kept in Museum of the Forbidden City. The first one by Dong Yuan is kept in Metropolitan Museum of Art. Click for original size.)


Monday, January 28, 2013

Living Section

To be immersed is to look at the city in section, to be inside, to look at the inner workings of this body, as a kind of x-ray vision. The section drawing as we know allows us to understand the adjacencies of interior spaces, their configurations and relative proportions, etceteras. While they are revealing of this static, and abstract characteristics of space, they do not provide us with the representation or the analysis of what is happening inside, how often it is happening, what are the variations, the rhythms and patterns, the ephemeral, what is the life of that which is being investigated. To be immersed is to be inside but it is also to look at the city moving, to look at the city in time, to look at the city changing. Last Wednesday I presented this idea of the Living Section to the class, as well as a series of dissections of time/space studies which take the conventional section-cut drawing as we know it and combine it with video to create a new kind of document. These included personal projects, student projects as well as inspiration in other works that influence this kind of document. I started with this text from Philosopher Michel de Certeau in Walking the City in which he argues that the plan-like image of a city as seen from above is nothing else but a “viewpoint… a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices”. He argues for the experience of wandering through the city as a “process of appropriation of the topographical system”. “The ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below’, below the thresholds at which visibility begins. ... whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms. The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility. It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness. The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other.” de Certeau, Michel. Walking in the City. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Trans. by Steven Rendall. California: University of California Press, 1988, p. 128 We also spoke about ants. Yes!

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Eye Tracking Study

What do you see?  Josh, Chen, and Jingjie participated in a CUshop consumer biometrics study last week using Tobii mobile eye tracking glasses.  Their eye movements were tracked at a frequency of 30 times a second as they navigated packaging goods.  Traces of the participant's perspective and physiological reactions are illustrated with red dots (fixations) and connected with red lines (saccades), representing the viewer's path.

Josh's eye tracking:

Josh-eye tracking from Dan Hutcherson on Vimeo.


Chen's eye tracking:

Chen-eye tracking from Dan Hutcherson on Vimeo.


Jingjie's eye tracking:

Jingjie-eye tracking from Dan Hutcherson on Vimeo.

Monday, January 21, 2013

City Lights and Neurons

City lights and neurons are displayed alongside each other in this blogger's post on "Infinity Imagined"

city lights and neurons

http://infinity-imagined.tumblr.com/post/40405626799/city-lights-photographed-from-the-international

This expresses the notion of scale (both large/small, fast/slow) and the Powers of Ten films (Eames) that we discussed in class.  Beautiful imagery, especially when you click on the source images...

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Building the Research with a New Team

We are resuming activity with a new group of students coming from Columbia, Jacksonville, Beijing, Hangzhou, and Greer with backgrounds in architecture, urban planning and packaging. We will be working from a series of texts and discussions on temporality, public space and representation. We will use audio, video and GPS (Global Positioning Systems) to explore the potential of a drawing which is temporal and ever-changing and which looks at the body of the city in its intimate relationship to the mapping of the human body. The seminar will use historical references in architecture, film, cartography, photography, drawing, literature, urbanism, biology, sociology, science, and physiology… as well as contemporary visualization examples in graphic design, art, architecture, medicine, aviation...