To Scale: Slow and Fast 1.1

Let us now return to the discussion of the merging of two vocabularies; drawing and moving image and to note that it is not moving image that is being looked at for inspiration, or that the starting point is architectural drawings but that rather the intent is to create a hybrid, a new kind of document which allows these dualities of the realistic and abstract, picturesque and analytical to coexist. In the discussion of this merging, the measuring system is related to both time and distance. Scale is described through time and duration and it is sinuous to speed. Like on a conventional architectural drawing, zooming in is about looking at details, zooming out is about seeing a larger organizational system. Conversely, with moving image zooming in is achieved by slowing down, zooming out is achieved by speeding up.

In Auggie’s story, slowing down allows one to understand the uniqueness of each moment and the many stories told with the images captured with photography over a long period of time, while looking quickly through these images (speeding up) allows us to see the repetition and sameness of these individual moments. In “this contradiction is embodied the two distinct scales that can be revealed in two different speeds” in moving image. This is evident in NY A/V. “By speeding up the footage of the entire length of Broadway Street, we see and understand the physical and ephemeral patterns of the city. We see the transformations of the configurations of the street, the light, the topography and the movements of people and cars. Slowing down the footage allows us to see the details - the activities, the populations, their clothing, what they say and look at, what they express”. (32) At both speeds, we experience the fleeting moments, the temporal. These moments are as Kracauer states in The Establishment of Physical Existence, “…imperceptible were it not for two cinematic techniques: accelerated-motion, which condenses extremely slow and, hence, unobservable developments…and slow motion, which expands movements too fast to be registered”. (33) Speeds with video, like scales in a drawing, allow for different information to be articulated. In the study of a place, extreme slow motion exposes the subtleties of what may be considered banal everyday interactions, slowing down reveals the gestures that would usually remain unseen at normal speed. Like artist Bill Viola’s video/sound installation, The Greeting, which takes the real-time 45-second encounter of two women and stretches into a slow-motion encounter of 10-minutes, this document is in a zoomed-in state, achieving a kind of possession of time. It is a moment so slow that it is “arrested, rendered, stretched, and compressed, in short articulated, we can state that we have possession of it, that we are approaching a new vocabulary of space-time”, as stated by photographer László Moholy-Nagy in Vision in Motion. (34)

32 Skinner, Martha. South to North: Zoom/Section Seven Day Trajectory on Broadway Street. In South edited by Ronald Rael, 30-39. Clemson School of Architecture, 2005, p. 34
33 Kracauer, Sigfried, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Oxford University Press, 1965, p. 52
34 Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo. Vision in Motion. Chicago: Institute of Design, 1947, p. 247

Mathematical and Sensual Knowledge, the Body and the City 1.3

Returning to the moving image aspect of this mapping, historian and architecture critic Anthony Vidler poses the question of whether Walter Benjamin had suggested such a map in his life-long unfinished Arcades Project. In The City as Film in Kracauer, Benjamin, and Eisenstein, Vidler states that Benjamin in his writing of the Arcades Project “opened the possibility of yet another way of reading this work: was it not perhaps the sketch of a screen play for a movie of Paris?” (28)

“Could one not shoot a passionate film of the city plan of Paris? Of the development of its different forms [Gestalten] in temporal succession? Of the condensation of a century-long movement of streets, boulevards, passages, squares, in the space of a half an hour?” Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project

We do not know if that was Benjamin’s intent and we do not know what such a map would have been like, however as has been so far demonstrated, we must explore this filmic potential in the making of our maps. And that of much importance are these filmic, real life experiences in the relationship between the human body and the city body. Film critic and former architect Siegfried Krakauer in Once Again the Street, states that “the flâneur is intoxicated with life in the street” (29) suggesting that he, in this case the strolling inhabitant is obviously affected by the sensory experiences triggered by its immediate environment, the city it travels. In this case, “intoxicated” as if the body has been overdosed by phenomena and the complexity of activities of the city as if substances now moving within the blood flow of the human body.

Krakauer recalls the first film he saw as a child; “What thrilled me so deeply was an ordinary suburban street, filled with lights and shadows which transfigured it. Several trees stood about, and there was in the foreground a puddle reflecting invisible house façades and a piece of sky. Then a breeze moved the shadows, and the façades with the sky below began to waver.” (30) And even though this description comes from his observation of a film, something that had been choreographed by a director, the observation is a typical representation of an everyday moment in the life of any city. Let’s imagine this as a real life perception, something ephemeral and intangible. If captured, is this something that we can chart and even analyze? Could we not calculate the exactitude of those vibrations as mapped by the size, frequency and speed of the ripples in the water?

In that same essay, Krakauer speculates; “perhaps cinema helps us to move form ‘below’ to ‘above’?” (31) and while this is the opposite of what I have been proposing, does it suggest the potential of the below returning us to the above. Does it suggest what the observation of the individual ants interacting tells us about the overall system?

Yes possibly, but what Krakauer is referring to as the ‘above’ in this case is celestial and even spiritual, this being the opposite of sensual and of the body and while contradicting my main argument it also supports it. It emphasizes the flaw of this sole superior point of view as totalizing, abstract, removed and disconnected from the tactile realities of the below experiences and interactions that make up the reality of the city. It is important to also note that Krakauer’s recollection also describes something very physical and sensual; the reflectivity, transparency, movement…the physical aspects of place as affected by each other and as perceived by an inhabitant of the city in that particular moment and space. Let’s now bring the potential of the GPS into this and speculate on the potential also of it deciphering the multiple forces defining that fleeting moment… the wind, the rain, the time of the year, the passing resident and his particular placement on earth in relationship to these elements bringing us back to the importance of looking at these devices, GPS/audio/video, as interrelated and capable of combining the “mathematical” and the “sensual” of these bodies.

28 Kracauer, Sigfried, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Oxford University Press, 1965, p. 52
29 Vidler, Anthony. Warped Space, Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England 2000. P. 115
30 Kracauer, Sigfried, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Oxford University Press, 1965, p. 52
31 Kracauer, Sigfried, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Oxford University Press, 1965, p. xi