Questions for Discussion 8

In the excerpt entitled The New Langauge of Cinema, Lev Monovich discusses the evolution of cinematic representation parallel to technological advancements. In the section The New Temporality: The Loop as Narrative Engine, he discusses the traditional linear narrative of cinema; "In contrast, narrative cinema avoids repetition; like modern Western fiction forms in general, it puts forward a notion of human existence as a linear progression through numerous unique events.”

Monovich then draws on the history of the “loop” in computer applications, computer games, and playback interfaces (QuickTime) and asks the question "Can the loop be a new narrative form appropriate for the computer age?” The idea of the “loop as a new narrative form” could have valid application to the study of architecture and the city, specifically a way to evoke the narrative ability of architecture and the systematic study of the city through progressive “loops,” with each loop adding a new layer of information that is collected then graphically represented. “As the practice of computer programming illustrates, the loop and the sequential progression do not have to be considered mutually exclusive.”

The Loop as Narrative: Architecture
Can the narrative ability of architecture be logically explored in the terms of the loop?
Here are a number of projects that contain the two temporal forms (loop and narrative) and have a somewhat linear circulation flow pattern where the pedestrian moves through the building in sequential progression. It should be noted that Monovich lists the Mobius House in his article as an illustration of his argument.

The Danteum; Guiseppe Terragni; Rome; 1942 (never constructed)
The Kunsthal; OMA; Rotterdam, Netherlands; 1992
Mobius House; UN Studio/Van berkel & Bos; Utrecht, Netherlands; 1998
Pontifical Lateran University Library Extension; King Roselli Architects; Rome, Italy; 2006

The Loop as Narrative: The City
Can the mapping of a city be represented or re-played in loop format (multiple loops) so that thoughtful analysis can occur and evolve? Can a narrative about the city emerge out of these multiple layers or loops? Mapping can be thought of as a layering of information that provokes thought about new relationships so can we begin to represent these layers as audio/visual loops that progressively add more information?

The Invisible City: Design in the age of intelligent maps discusses the possibilities of what designers can do with mapping, which can be helpful in thinking of what these “loops” can begin to show. “The act of mapping itself is a process of analysis, discovery, and design. It is a process of finding and giving meaning to information, contextualizing information, and of developing new understandings of the places represented…[mapping can be used for] finding patterns by layering information and letting relationships emerge through the process. As making maps allows relationships and patterns to become intuitively apparent, when data is entered into a GIS, these intuited relationships can be quantitatively verified.”

Lastly, if we begin to think about strategically mapping the city and playing this information back in loops, each loop containing a new layer of information, or maybe just the same information collected at a different time; can we think of these loops as feedback loops that inform the future design of the city? This question goes back to the idea of the city as an emergent organism, that can be studied and learned from, much like computer software or “real-world organisms.” (The Myth of the Ant Queen)

Readings:
Albert, Saul, Critical Cartography
Manovich, Lev, The New Language of Cinema in the Language of New Media
Varnelis, Kazys and Meisterlin, Leah. The Invisible City: Design in the Age
of Intelligent Maps
(mentioned) The Myth of the Ant Queen from Stephen Johnson's "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software"

Questions for Discussion 7. Geospatial Web + Redefining the Basemap

What effects do Geospatial spam have on creating maps that reveal valuable/usable information?

On the other hand is there such a thing as Geospatial spam? Can this information be accepted and filtered to reveal novel informative revelations about the city.

I find tagging very interesting and useful, but what are some of the problems with tagging?
Is it that the formatting of 'tags' are not standardized?
Are 'tags' to vague? For example does turkey refer to the country or the food?

Can the defamiliarization of such mappings effect the reading and perspective we have on the city , or enhance it because of its ability to force people to view the common everyday in a more unique manner?

Questions for Discussion 6. geospatial web + basemap response

geospatial web:
How do you "tag" content? is it too subjective?

How would you go about implementing LUI in a regulated way? and would there be a way to have "standards" for geo-tagging locations, like Wikipedia?

Would/could this interface be public and available to all people, regardless of socioeconomic status?

basemap:
Is there a way to objectively define the city as event?

Space is an evolving set of relationships. Aside from the cell-phone and computer, what are some other objects/advances in technology that have defined space?

If the infrastructure of a space is being violated, is that set of roads, sidewalks, or paths, still valuable?

Questions for Discussion 5. Space-Time Problems / Change Made Visible ?

Interpreting the writings purely by their titles one could interpret these articles to be contrary. However, both articles discuss a retooling and a rethinking of our design and environments simply stating that the speed of things has changed. “Another is the futurists who tried to portray the inner life of things, both animate and inanimate, and to show how it connected to its surroundings” (Change Made Visible, 164). Both articles site futurists and discuss the environment in relation to change, time, and speed. “A new viewpoint in the visual arts is a natural consequence of this age of speed which has to consider the moving eye” (Space-Time Problems, 246). While both articles discuss juxtaposition, layering, montage, inversion, contrast, transparency and light, Change Made Visible optimistically narrates opportunity for intervention within our environments, while Space-Time Problems portrays and architectural ignorance to the changing nature of our lives. Change Made Visible was part narrative fiction and part advocacy for passive environmental stimuli.

Speed

Did humans speed things up?

Did nature have trouble relating to nature before we sped it up?

Did the invention and implementation of the internet, automobiles, trains, and planes ultimately manifest our sped up lives and cities?

Is there a problem with the way we relate to our environments?

Should environment or city stimuli be designed passively or actively?

While Change Made Visible gives suggestions on ways to design such as sequence design as a layering of historical artifacts what other ways might we design juxtaposition, contrast, and layering into an environment?

Is awareness of environments complexities one the most critical departure points for the design of environments? This is to say do we need to understand that a very old baroque building looks interesting when juxtaposed against a modern minimalist buildings made of contrasting materials or is that inherent?

Who wrote these articles?

Is motion a derivative of speed and time?

Is speed the derivative of distance and time?

Questions for Discussion 4

The Establishment of Physical Existence - Kracauer

Kracauer states that, "films are different in two ways: first they respect reality as it evolves; and do so with aid of cinematic techniques and devices." Their is much talk in the article of the idea of 'realism'. What makes film interesting as an art form is its ability to capture reality, even realities that we may never have the ability to experience.

Can reality possibly become problematic because of the capacity of film is to frame, interpret and shape the reality it depicts?

He goes on to state that, "not all films are realistic (filming someones activities for 24 hours) would be neither interesting nor artistic." This makes me think of current themes in television that deal in the realm of Reality TV. Though they undergo an editing process, they tend to have this 24 hours reality to them.

How is our cultures depiction of realism over time skewed from his interpretation, due to what we are subjected to (reality tv), and the fact that we do find these things interesting?

Film has the ability to inform us of everyday life and serve to document time and place and make connections between aspects of experiences that are often now thought together. "Film ought to proceed like a tourist who, in strolling through the landscape, lets his eyes wander about so that his ultimate image of it will be composed of sundry details and vistas."

What is it about the camera that when behind it begins to reveal the material world in a different perspective, that would otherwise go unnoticed?

If the camera is a tool for recording place, time, movement and event. Are there elements that become skewed and lost information due to the eye behind the camera and the editing process? Does the vision of the person filming begin to take over, in a way to get a specific message across (a 'lie')?

"Unlike paintings, film images encourage such decomposition because of their emphatic concern with raw materials do not get consumed." Kracauer could not of foreseen what the computers abilities and role it would have on film editing and how it is used to view the physical world.

With a few exceptions has film disintegrated into our culture, and in a way stopped exploring physical reality, and a world that is unknown? Or has the use of CGI and other digital technologies allowed us to have the opposite effect.?

It might be safe to say that film is the art of our generation, but with this in mind what if any are the problems with this? Is it causing social disconnect or manipulation and misinterpretation of our cultures?

Kracauer does not discuss the idea of mixed or hybrid medias. How can these types of mixed medias add to the linage of expanding the pictorial field?

How can using film techniques as a process make us (architects) multidimensional thinkers in search of new possibilities for cultural and environmental design?

How do you begin to translate and communicate moving image of space, inhabitation, perception, and experience that unfolds over time? (Creating 2 dimensional drawing systems)


Berger suggests that in the beginning of the camera age, people that were subjected to the camera were unaware of the images purpose, and the capacity with which the image would have over time, that is why old photographs are more telling then they are now.

Why is this? Is it because of our consumer driven society, and our relentlessness to pound product driven imagery for the sole purpose not for art but for selling us products?

Questions for Discussion 3

Working from the following articles: The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention by James Corner and The Myth of the Ant Queen by Steven Johnson.

"In this active sense, the function of mapping is less to mirror reality that to engender the re-shaping of the worlds in which people live." (Corner 213)

"Mapping is perhaps the most formative and creative act of any design process, first disclosing and then staging the conditions for the emergence of new realities" (Corner 216)

"Rather than engineer a solution to the trail-following, the two UCLA professors had evolved a solution; they had created a random pool of possible programs, then built a feedback mechanism that allowed a more successful program to emerge...The tools of emergent software had been harnessed to model and understand the evolution of emergent intelligence in real world organisms." ( Johnson 62-63)

Questions:

If a consensus of the city shifts from a framework of 'disorganized complexity' to an 'organized complexity,' does even the act of foresight or planning may become an irrelevant exercise?

Is it possible to view the city as analogous to a bottom-up system?

If the city is viewed as a 'real-world organism' and mapping is thought of as a conceptual 'tool of emergent software';

1) how can mapping aid in understanding the evolution of emergent intelligence in the city?

2) is it possible to design a feedback loop (mechanism) to evaluate collected mapping information?

3.) it it possible that this feedback mechanism could allow more successful programs (in urbanization) to emerge?

4) what would any and/or all of this look like?

Questions for discussion 2

Subjective Vision and the Separation of the Senses in Techniques of the Observer, by Jonathan Crary.


What are some instances in 21c. art and architecture where the combination of science and art, the subjective and the objective, sensory and logical is necessarily used?

How is the “visual infantine” theory important today? Is it even an objective among today’s artists and architects to view our surroundings as well as our art as if we were seeing it for the first time? Is this important in our culture?

Is our present culture more focused on the dissection of the senses or the conglomeration of the senses?



Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino


How could this combination of philosophy and architectural description affect your work?


On page48 Calvino talks about the changes of language that occur from city to city, he states “I realized I had to free myself from the images which in the past had announced to me the things I sought: only then would I succeed in understanding the language of Hypatia.” What are some of the “language” differences faced today when considering new architecture in a new city?

Questions for discussion 1.2

In “Night on Earth”, it speaks about Michel de Certeauʼs experience of “Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the WTC.” It talks about a “migrational city” that “slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city.” Even from the birds eye view, there are parts of the city that cannot be seen, movements that resist rationalization. The article then compares this to the different vantage points as seen by a cab driver and the mayor of NYC.

Compared to a set of construction documents for a building, this is not all that different from looking at an overall plan and then a set of detail drawings. Could the vantage point of the cab driver be a detail of how the city works and is put together?

Can the city be mapped or built by the inside view or vantage point of the cab driver alone, or does there still need to be some kind of overall comprehension of the city?

In “Walking the City” it is said that the operations of people walking can be traced on city maps as a way of transcribing their paths and trajectories. However, the reading says this kind of mapping is missing the act of passing by: the operation o walking, wandering, or window shopping.

Is it possible for this activity to be mapped or shown as some kind of trajectory?

Is the architecture or the people informing the mapping, or both?

In “Mapping Places” the some of the examples described seem to explore the limits of our visual realm. We can only see an comprehend to the limits of what are eyes can contain. If we want to see more we must turn our head, leaving other things out of our sight. Even if we could see 360 degrees, are our brains built to be able to comprehend what we are seeing?

If you think about this in the concept of mapping, is there a limit to what we can comprehend?

If you try to map everything, will it get to a point to where things be come to much or unclear?

Questions for discussion 1.1

These are some quotes I found significant from Michel de Certeau's "Walking in the City", along with some response questions:

"The city becomes the dominant theme in political legends, but it is no longer a field of programmed and regulated operations. Beneath the discourses that ideologize the city, the ruses and combinations of powers that have no readable identity proliferate; without points where one can take hold of them, without rational transparency, they are impossible to administer."

"What spatial practices correspond, in the area where discipline is manipulated, to these apparatuses that produce a disciplinary space?"

"...spatial practices in fact secretly structure the determining conditions of social life"

How do you construct a "disciplined" space? Is it ethical or even possible to try and control space and structure the conditions of social life?

Quotes and questions from "Night on Earth" by Trui Vetters:

"...to put all partial views together not simply as composite vision but as a cognitive map that shows how each view can itself be explained by and integrated into some grander conception of what the city as a whole, what the urban process in general is all about."

How important is it to have an all encompassing view of a space as a whole? Can it be more meaningful to emphasize certain moments as parts of this "whole"? Which view is more accurate in understanding a city?

For example:
Giuliani's pictures (iconic and controllable) vs. Cabby's pictures (moments and uncontrollable)