Project 2b: diagram and model

Project 2b

Stereotomic PermutatoinsPreston Scott Cohen

This is probably the shortest reading, we will every get in this class. Cohen proposes a stereotonic technique of projection(s). A system of opposing projections that are combined to become "techniques of formal transgression". In other words, opposing projections that when combined offer a transitional state of the object. This sort of ties everything back to the project, where we can imagine film offers us multiple views of a space. Combining theses views not to rebuild the space, but to inform us about the camera and it's movement.

(I suppose that's what we are doing for part b.)

Project 2a: Re-Visiting the diagram

I'm still not sure what film has to do with morphology and versioning, but I'll humor you. Above is a diagram of the camera movement for the clip of La double vie de Veronique. The scene only has 10 cuts as opposed to 33. Below I tried to map what was actually happening.

CUT 1: The camera begins by focusing on Weronika ad a figure in a ground, but as she passes the camera, Weronika becomes the ground that frames the background action.
CUT 2: The camera shows Weronika as a figure again. This is a very cropped shot.
CUT 3: The camera shows Veronique as she boards the bus.
CUT 4:The camera shows Weronika, more of Veronique's figure (not so focused in on the face anymore) to set up for Cut 6.
CUT 5: Veronique is show on the bus.
CUT 6: As Weronika circles the bus. the camera spins with her.
CUT 7: The bus spins, hiding the view of Veronique from Weronika, causing . . .
CUT 8: Weronika rapidly rotates around the bus (the camera following that spin.) Weronika pauses as . . .
CUT 9: The bus spins again affording Weronika a view of Veronique, but turns away for the last time.
Cut 10: The camera shows Weronika still standing in the plaza.

Project 2: Spatial and Temporal SeqenceCONSTRUCTED MORPHOLOGYPROCEDURAL SEQUENCE

This is an exploration of the camera's view to the narrative's focus. The animation sequence (without the motion is below. This shows the changes of the camera's focus and the narrative's focus.



As I expressed in the previous blog, This scene would not be as captivating if only The characters' perspective was shown. The film director focuses on the movement of Weronika and the movement of the the bus that reveals and obscures the view of Veronique.

The camera for the most part has always been focused in on Weronika, in parallel with the character's self-absorbed world. But for this scene the camera abruptly turns away from Weronika as she sees Veronique. Weronika's movement slows as she first catches a glimpse. Then the bus speeds up followed in sequence with Weronika speeding up. Then she stops ad the bus spins toward her. And as the bus slowly turns away, she watched and follows for a few steps.



The movement is circular and focuses on the spin of one object, permitting a view for 180 degrees and hiding the view for the other 180 degrees.




(Below is a stand alone animation without the movie.)

or click here

Umberto Eco: travels in HYPERreality

Eco discusses the American phenomenon of recreating moments. The Fortress of Solitude is a experiential museum recreating moments of Lyndon Johnson's life. The items and places recreated are not actual replicas but shinier, polished idealistic versions that would never deteriorate like the real one. In the same way, films are recreating places and stories but only depicting certain aspects to show the audience. Thus, the audience experiences such places in a state of heightened or "hyper" reality. They see, hear, smell, touch, and taste only what the author wants them to.

That being the said, this new state of reality is a medium for filmmakers to explore themes and drive a certain interpretation of events. For example, the encounter of Veronique and Weronika in La double vie de Vernoique. The motion of the camera heightens the experience of the audience. The audience in a sense experience the moment as Weronika, seeing her double. They feel her curiosity and frustration as the bus turns away. The director could have equally only shown Weronika's view of Veronique on the bus or the view that Veronique had. (Though these would be more realistic recreations of the event, they speak noting to the effect on the characters.) But showing Veronique as she circles to match the spin of the bus, the audience is captivated with equal dismay. Thus, the scene isn't just about Weronika meeting Veronique, it's about the emotional and psychological effect the experience has on her.

It is this "hyperreality" that authors bring out. It is almost a state of after thought or remembering. People, never actually recalling exactly how events happened, reinterpret the series of events and memories over and over again. Each time, events shift according to the action that we are trying to remember. Giving some details clarity and others obscurity, until they focus on what we want them to. A memory of knocking down mangos with a basketball, of a friend pulling you out of harms way, of crying after a bad panel review. This reinterpretation is parallel to what authors and filmakers do. And people slip in and out of memories as with equal ease as they do with the "reality" of movies.

Project 2: Film ClipTHE DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUELa double vie de VeroniquePodwójne życie Weroniki Krzysztof Kieslowski

Krzysztof Kieslowski is a Polish film director. He was born in 1941 in Warsaw, Poland and died at the age of 51 in 1996. The majority of his films were Polish. His last four films (La double vie de Veronique, Les trois couleurs: bleu, blanc, rouge) were foreign co-productions, most of the money coming from France.

At the Cannes Film Festival in 1991, La double vie de Veronique won the FIPRESCI Prize, the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the Cannes Film Festival and Best Actress for Irene Jacob's role as Veronique/Weronika. The film was also nominated for the Golden Palm.

a brief summary:

Somewhere, in the world, unknown to you, lives your double. Your identical "twin" who shares identical personality traits, but leads a completely different yet connected life. In Poland, Weronika is a singer. In Paris, Veronique is a music teacher. They are unaware of each other's existence, but feel an psychological and emotional link to the other. Overwhelmed by the the loss of Weronika, Veronique quits her singing career. She is haunted by "Van Den Budenmayer" music (which is actually the wonderful music of Zbigniew Preisner). And she is stalked by a marionette performer.

In this scene, Weronika sees Veronique, who is wearing the similar clothes, but is too busy snapping pictures to see her. The photograph becomes the only tangible evidence of their overlapping parallel lives:




I don't remember this film and I think I fell asleep. I do remember wonderful cinematography matched to the beautiful music of Zbigniew Preisner (a close friend of the director). I'll watch it again . . .

Tuan, Yi-Fu.SENSE OF PLACE, SELF, AND TIME "Sense of Place: It's relationship to time"

This is an excerpt from a book written by Yi-Fu Tuan, a professor emeritus in Geography and East Asian Studies at University of Wisconson - Madison. His CV was 16 pages long, I know of his writting from another book the Professor Eisenbach assigned, Space and Place. Where according to Tuan:

space: boundless, infinite
place: defined, measured

I found the below excerpt relevent to our studies of films: "place" and "time" in 2-d space as a photograph or a painting (which he discusses before this excerpt begins), film as "place", and revisiting the "place" of film and photograph. Enjoy:

Photographs

Photographs are another sort of surrogate place. Compared with paintings, photographs are deficient -- lacking in certain aesthetic qualities -- largely because the artist's control over them is incomplete. On the other hand, precisely because they are beyond the artist's total control, photographs exude a pathos particular to real that paintings do not have. A photograph is not just a representation of reality, it is a bit of reality transmitted to and retained by a coated surface through physical and chemical means. When we see a bright patch on the photography, we know that it is put there more by a bare cliff deflecting sunlight than by the artful manipulations of the photographer. When we look at a the smile of a child in a faded photograph and smile back, we know that we are responding not just to a painter's illusionary skills, but to the smile of a real child -- now probably an old woman or dead -- who once stood five feet from the camera.

Unplanned elements in a photography also contribute to a sense of reality. In real life, as in a photograph, the beer can on top of the fridge, the tumbleweed wedged between two boulders, are not put there by design: they are there either accidentally or through the operation of physical laws. Painting, by contrast, typically exclude the accidental: everything in a painting is where it is for an artistic reason. Awareness of this fact makes even the most realistic painting a little unreal. Another difference between a painted picture and a photograph is this. Where as both enable the viewer to contemplate process, the painting does not tell the viewer that an end or consummation is imminent. The photograph does. John Keats famously says that the lover painted on the Grecian urn will never kiss, and we know he is right. However, if we see these lovers in a photograph, we know as we do when we see them in real life that, unless heaven falls, their lips will touch.

Early photographs were confined by their technical limitations to recording immobile objects. As technology improves, more and more pictures are taken of things on the move and even in rapid motion. Through exposure to both kinds of photographs, we develop the habit of dwelling imaginatively not only on stable objects -- houses neighborhoods, landscapes, but also on objects in transit -- the train pulling out of the station, the hand raised to say good-bye. Objects so caught give the places in which they occur a vibrancy or poignancy that these places would not otherwise have. Photographs thus promote our sensitivity to place -- our sense of place. They are also surrogate places in that we can visit and revisit them whenever our spirit needs rest or rejuvenation.

Movies

Later that the photograph in establishing a hold on people's consciousness is the movie; hence one might think of it as a more distant cousin of place. But why consider place it a relationship of place at all? On first thought, the movie cannot be place in any sense because it embraces time. In a movie, one event follows another. Even in its quiet moments, when time seems to slow down, a neighbor may still be shown mowing the lawn, a cat chasing a ball. The movie reminds us too much of the restlessness of real life, even exaggerate it, making us yearn for a pause, for a place where we can forget time and motion. Yet one reason we go to the movies is to take a breather from the demand of time -- from having to do things now rather than later. Movies, it turns out, are as much bound space -- a world or place -- as it is bound time. Indeed, movies are more place than time because, whereas we can never go back and live in an earlier time, we can return to a movie. And that's how we treat our favorite movies. If we see them more than once, it is not so much to understand their plot better as to return to worlds that, for some reason, have the power to enthrall.

Movies, I say are places. But maybe I speak in metaphors. It certainly is true that movies can invoker place. They do so with images and sounds: normal images of the sorts that people experience at ground level and bird's eye views that are no part of daily human experience; normal sounds such as those of a shrieking kettle indoor and the swoosh of passing cats outdoor, and sounds that are not part of daily life, by which I mean the music that the movie director adds to a scene, subtly in that background or loudly in the foreground, to create or enhance a mood.

Let me now make a confession. I have seen the movie Gone With the Wind at least a dozen times, the first time in 1942, when I was a child. My English was not good then. I could not understand much that was said. The Civil War, as history, meant nothing to me. The South, as geography, meant little more. So, why did the movie have this kind of grip? Could it be the war itself, always exciting to a child? The plot line? Yes, in part. But these excitements could not outlast the first viewing, and yet I returned to the movie again and again. I returned to it as I would to a fond place. For, after several viewings, Gone With the Wind became a place foe me. The movie implanted in my awakening imagination a South of red earth, cotton fields, plantation houses, afternoon siestas and elegant parties. But is also awakened in me, through simplistic images and story lines that a child could understand, longings for romance, gallantry, noblesse oblige, courage, and indomitable will that remains with me unassuaged to this day, making me slightly ridiculous in the eyes of sophisticated friends who know the real, far darker history of the South. (49-51)

Tuan continues on and discusses poems, stories, novels and music and the language of "place". Finally, he reached the next relevant excerpt on the sense of place and the individual and time(less)ness:

Place, I have been saying, slows down time, stops it, and can even -- by offering the possibility of return -- reverse it. We are comfortable in place, but not in time, as though we are atemporal creatures, inexplicitly ensnared by the temporal stream. We catch ourselves saying, 'How he's grown!' and 'How time flies!' as though a universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty (Lewis 1958, 158). In other cultures and in earlier periods of history, people have not found time quite so problematic or burdensome. There was certainly less talk about it less explicit awareness of it as a personal problem. A variety of reasons explain this apparent lack of concern. First is the absence of a sense of an individual self apart from the group. Only the individual human being is truly subject to time, for only the individual lives and dies. The group by comparison is immortal. Second, the material place of premodern peoples stays much the same from one generation to the next. Neither their natural nor their built environment contains obvious and constant reminders of time's relentless, one-directional passage. Third, when time consciousness does intrude, it is obliterated by sacred rites, during which the dead reappear to mix with the living, and the atemporal status of human beings is reaffirmed. I am saying, then, that people everywhere do not just roll along with the temporal flow in total acceptance and innocence, as animals presumably do. I would also say that place is the means most readily at hand to overcome this sense of ceaseless flow. (53)

Excerpt taken from:
Reanimating Place: A Geography of Rhythms
Tom Mels(editor)
Ashgate Publishing Company, Burlington, VT: 2004.

Footnote:

Lewis, C.S. (1958) Reflections on the pslams. Harcourt, Brace New York .

Project 2: ([versioning])

Can the forces that make the object, both in the generation of the broad strokes and specific resolutions, combine with an intelligence of fabrication to become a 'process product'? --michael speaks

Is architecture and/or design a process product rather than a finished product? When is a design or an investigation ever finished?
Ideally, architecture is a never ending process. However, architecture should be "product" in the completion of that idea. That's where versioning comes in.

from WANDERLUST series, Troy M. Litten. http://www.troyland.com/index.html


In industrial design and consumer product design, many iterations are developed and massed produced every year. Each time the product is redeveloped according to new or anticipated needs, trends and/or technology. If you can imagine the first telephone by Bell in 1876 . . .

Bell on the telephone in New York (calling Chicago) in 1892.

image from http://www.americaslibrary.gov/cgi-bin/page.cgi/jb/recon/telephone_1

. . . the millions of iterations of telephones . . .

. . . the cellular phones

I don't think this process of re-iteration will ever be finished. Each time the act of communication is re-visited. Each generation has a different meaning of handheld communication. Each version is an un-finished model. (The investigation is never finished)
However . . . is it a "finished product" yes because you can use it, but no because by the time this phone hits the production line designers are already looking for the next "phone".

Versioning suggests that architecture is an evolving and dissolving differential data -- design that no longer simply 'exists' but rather 'becomes', as it becomes informed in and through the process's
differen t/ciation. -- ingeborg rocker

So in a way, architects need to think like industrial designers. They need to mass produce hundreds of versions. And through this mass production rediscover their design each time. Their designs need to be "process" in their investigation, but "product" in their completion of an idea.

Project 1: Virtual Projection [ANIMATION] and in retrospect

This is a study of contours of the object in sequence.




Animation: manipulation or change of the objects natural state
Rendering: making your model look good via fly through shots of the model.
(3/12/2007)

So, sadly, this is the only part of my final movie that comes close to animation. I actually think it is borderline animation-rendering too. It is a rendering because it is only a re-interpretation of the original model. I haven't changed the existing model. Yet, it could be considered an animation . . . You only see the vertical contours of the model, but only a segment at a time.

In essence, I animated TIME in the model--the temporal state of the objects.
Each segment is given five seconds of existence. Rather than existing in the
same five seconds their existence is staggered and it becomes a sequence of
on/off movement through the object.

Tant pis!

I think I'm frustrated at the lack of progress I'm making with the digital medium. I don't know a single program in it's entirety and I am forced to switch back and forth. And I still can't do what I envision.


(more of a physical animation: cut the maya model into sections for study)

I'm almost there.
(3/27/2007)

Project 1: Virtual Projection Revisiting the [DIaGRaM] and MODEL

diagram of side view

diagram of front view


Because the diagrams are two dimensional representations f a three dimensional action, the third dimension needed to be extrapolated from a third element. For this model, I was about to use two diagrams of different views rediscovering the third dimension. The movement was also elongated each frame of movement was dragged out over the space. The front view was pulled to the left. Thus,the model is more diagonal in profile than a straight on front view. As seen below this allowed for more dynamic vertical contours cuts with out losing the original profile of the curves.




The above model, which consisted of irregular and cut pieces, was connected and smoothed out so that the surface was a continuous form. This new model will be used for the next steps in this study of virtual projection.

Project 1: Virtual Projection New [MOVEMENT]

[Click on photo above] or click here

I choose a new movement to study. My original movement was random and not planned, which meant that reproducing the movement was difficult. This new movement can be repeated and studied from different angles, which gives me more flexibility for study and the analysis. Click the photo above. Enjoy.

Shuhei Endo: Springtecture H and other LINES (Zaha Hadid's Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art)

Shuhei Endo

Springtecture H
Singu-cho, Hyogo, Japon, 1998
http://www.archilab.org/public/2000/catalog/shuhei/shuheien.htm

I still think that there is a separation created by the linear plane. Here the separation is exposed and refuges spaces. However, where Diller + Scofidio building fails in creating a connection and becomes two separate comb shaped pieces, the linear folding plane in Springtecture H connects three separate building pieces. They are two very different parti diagrams that both employ the linear form. Diller + Scofidio building is inherently a datum of stacked spaces where the linear planes create a figural condition that breaks up the datum. The each layer turns into a positive-negative, right-left sided condition. Springtecture without the linear plane would be three separate buildings. The linear plane connects the three parts and holds the building together, thus becomes the parti and connection of the building. The "separation" mentioned earlier less evident in Springtecture H. Perhaps, it is in the separation of interior and exterior spaces . . .


The best part of this building is when the plane dips down and holds the path. The interaction of the corrugated plane and the ground plane seamlessly connects the building to the landscape. The "separation" is between the exposed to the sky and the enclosed landscape/refuge spaces.





Zaha Hadid and her Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati was also brought up during the last discussion.


Zaha Hadid
Rosenthal Centre for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, 2003
Design: Zaha Hadid
© Zaha Hadid Architects
http://80.87.131.158/design/zaha-hadid

The linear fold is figural gesture that unites the seemingly haphazardly placed forms in her building. The forms act as a datum of similar building language: the material, the rectangular forms, the manner which these forms recess and project in the facade. However, without the linear plane, each parts of the building would seem completely haphazard. It is the tension and contrast of the linear plane to the rectangular forms which allows the datum to be realized.
The fold also holds the building within its context. Unlike Frank Gehry's EMP or his "Ginger and Fred" which use the existing context as a datum and connect to the block as figural pieces, the rectangular forms of Zaha Hadid's building are not dissimilar enough from the forms of the existing block. The plane maintains much of the language of the rest of Zaha Hadid's building: its similar in material. However, it speaks the language of planes and bend rather then the three dimensional language of forms. It is a figure within the building itself and adds that extra push which separates it from the language of the existing block. Thus, through tension and juxtaposition, the plane becomes the figural piece that bridges the gap between Hadid's building and the existing buildings on the block.

In comparison to the two previous examples, Zaha Hadid's building is perhaps the most successful in using the plane to connect the building. Diller + Scofidio use the plane as a figure, but to break the datum. The plane is a figure sitting in the datum of the fleshy part of the building. It doesn't actually connect the building visually or in any other way. Shuhei Endo's Springtecture H uses the plane to connect each part of the building. It is a figure, but is so integrated within the landscape that it becomes part of the landscape. It is no longer a two dimensional plane, but the surface of the landscape. Thus the building becomes part of the landscape which has simply unrolled itself. In Zaha Hadid's building, the figure retains its figural essence and connects both the building itself and the building within the block.

PROJECT 1C: cOMPoSiTionAL DisPlaceMent: Full ANIMATION

This is animation for Project 1c. I'm not sure that the Form-z animation turned out after all the compression. I was trying to study the relationship between surface and skin. There is an overlap wireframe and rendered surface in the transition between the two. It would be interesting if i could have integrated the studied from the Form-z model and those from Electric Imager more.

Click here:

or visit http://www.archive.org/details/proj1c_finalanimation