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

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.

Urban CT

Living Section final cut from Joshua Atria on Vimeo.

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

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.

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!

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.)