scale . scape . scope MAK Schindler residency Los Angeles, 2011
research project for “a cartography from a roadtrip-point-of-view”

scale. Exploring infrastructural landscapes, it becomes obvious that infrastructure not only provides the framework for moving patterns as such, but foremost informs the very patterns of perception. When passing by in a car, the view on the surroundings is rendered a cinematic experience. Landscape becomes an ephemeral and transient projection from a floating perspective, its scale becomes loose.

scape. Historically landscape is a framed view on a piece of land. 18th Century English garden architecture arranged pavilions, ruins, trees and lakes in the garden, accentuating certain views on idealized nature informed by landscape painting. Current discourse treats landscape as a continuous field without distinction if man-made or natural. It is characterized by the loss of figure-ground relationships dominating 20th century urban design, which directly associated building mass with a determined function. Space is rather treated as a continuously mediated field, thus negotiable and takes into account a presence of the participant. Space is not a vessel, it is produced / practiced by its protagonists, creating their very own space-time.

scope. A -scope has always been a tool for inspection, i.e. telescope, microscope, kaleidoscope. We face an age in which the human sensory organs and physical body get inextricably interconnected with their media extensions. Gadgets and prostheses allow for accessing hyperspaces. Virtual and geographical realms overlap, are even coextensive. A GPS in a car, Google Earth, Street View and such applications create their own space intersecting with the geographical. This current state exceeds the three-dimensional, redefining what falls under the scope of the architectural. How might it be mapped / drawn? What might cartography from a moving point of view be like? With the car being the tool for examination, a car-scope, what does it reveal?

sound by abby lee tee, live gps: Claudia Slanar ]]> http://horhizon.com/main/mak-exhibition-los-angeles/feed/ 0 http://horhizon.com/main/narrating-embodiment/ http://horhizon.com/main/narrating-embodiment/#comments Tue, 19 Jan 2010 22:26:44 +0000 horhizon http://horhizon.com/main/?p=711

.narrating embodiment

Author: Tobias Klein and Eva Sommeregger

with Nikolaos Klimentidis and Graham K. Smith

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.concept

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The project is initiated by a response to Shinkenchiku design competition where it won a commendation. Further more the project is an ongoing investigation on non-linear projections and narrative architecture within a digital environment.

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We do not believe in static renaissance modes of representation. We understand plans and sections neither as a design integral document nor as a means of architectural construction. We embrace a perceptive architecture that has evolved from a narrated background and is only able to be drawn and understood in a perspective projection. We think of projections and projection planes that are capable to embody a narrative within architecture. We are interested in creating a dialogue within projection, representation and design so that the architectural representation becomes architecture and the narrative becomes projection.

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The architecture we project in this scheme is related to the movie Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky, in that he was able to transcend a Deleuzian crystal image idea within a narrative embodiment allowing for the establishment of the zone. The zone for us is an n-dimensional space embodied within architecture that acts as a 3 dimensional projection space for a 4 dimensional projection. The site in this scenario is the famous Trellick Tower in London by Erno Goldfinger. At the time it was conceptualised as a vertical city allowing the inhabitants to form an urban community but similar to the novel High-Rise by J.G. Ballard, soon a dystopian image emerged from the planned residential order. The narrative of a distorted perceptive architecture is informed and informs the scheme and constantly shifts the viewpoint from an immersed spectator to an external visitor. This creates an architecture from the within utilising the cinematic experience of the ubiquity of n-dimensional space, embodying the character, the narrative within the formal expression.

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Narrating Embodiment is a project that explores the boundary of experimental architecture, attempting to design and understand a cinematic zone-like space – a chthonic landscape that allows the architecture to be projected and fused within a site specific narrative. The projects transcends through functionalism and rational static description; merging instead perception with story and time with projection.

The site is defined as an ever oscillating narrative ground. It flitters between the actual of the Trellick tower estate in the west of London and the virtual of the zone-like wilderness depicted in the movie Stalker by Andrei Tarkovski.
Site is an amalgamation of the two states, creating a High-Rise – a Ballardian dystopian space, cinematic in its nature and narrative in its expression.

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The plan was defined as a vertical orthographic projection of an object – within a cinematic architecture, it has evolved into a narrative projection plane. It is three dimensional in is form and incorporates a 4 dimensional story-line that transforms the plane to a landscape. In our scheme the chthonic landscape embodies the Tarkovskian void reflecting a psychopathic vertical society.

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The section always carried the closes narrative aspects within and could best describe spatial qualities. It is a linear cut through 3 dimensional space creating a 2 dimensional section. Within the immersed 4-dimensional projective scape the section becomes an immersive space that has been generated from the character’s point of view. This opens up towards a realm of perceptive construction of possibilities, rendering them visible and believable to the viewer’s eye. In particular it deals with how the ubiquity of imagery and specifically the moving image changes how architecture is consumed at the moment and consequently projected into the future.

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The elevation is the altitude within a horizontal coordinate system, a projected celestial coordinate system that uses the observer’s local horizon as the fundamental plane. This divides the sky into the upper hemisphere, and the lower hemisphere. A distortion within this horizontal equilibrium leads to a replacement of the physical thought-model with a more dynamic viewer oriented system. Within the zone the horizon becomes distorted and space becomes simulacra- space becomes scape.

palimpsest digital film

selected for

Zebra filmfestival, Literaturwerkstatt Berlin
Beyond Media festival, Florence – awarded best 20
Asolo Film Festival

This film touches upon the notion treated in an essay by André Corboz, in which he suggests to read the land / the actual architectonic landscape as palimpsest. Consisting of a layered up information structure dating back to ancient times, the land is constantly rewritten on and erased by its inhabitants. Using animation within a space set up by a 2 1/2d technique, the film wants to explore our take on both tactics and strategies within the cultural landscape – reading it as an intertwined tissue where figure-ground relations are abandoned.

2008, 3:50 min

slow sculpture

winning competition entry

11th Venice Architecture Biennale, 2008, Aaron Betsky EveryVille Competition

A collaboration with Itai Margula and Shimon Takasaki

It was neither Tuesday nor Wednesday, and it was certainly not at 02:32 pm when the phone rang at her place. She was in the midst of mounting a picture on the wall, that’s why she could not pick up the phone. That night, she had decided to go to the cinema and – because she didn’t have an answering machine, she would never find out who had called that day. She took it for granted that different events were taking place simultaneously, after all, she was living in the city. Missing out on occasions has never really bothered her. Was her day-to-day life affected by construction sites growing like mould everywhere feasible? This cer­tain digging into the ground that would unveil a series of hidden structures and traces of eras most citizens had already forgotten about, showing traces of someone else who had been there before, mounting another perspective in space time. Traces, which connect another time in space and another space in time.

Traces of somebody who saw the same rays of sun making their way through the dawn, heard the same whispering in the trees, smelled the same mouldy air on the long escalators and elevators in the under­ground, someone who touched the same wall, the same floor, the same book or the same glass. Contributing to one sLow ScULPTure called city, a space between individuals within a material-immaterial something. Objects being formed within a broad scale of time, creating an ever-changing archive. Either one defines their space where the rain falls or builds a roof against it. Either one flows through space or space flows through them. If there are no spaces anymore, cause urbanity has swallowed them all, then at least there are stories telling about them. And the stories were not too bad, so no need to forget them. Every story sets up its own space, and likewise every space is a carrier of stories. And then, it was Monday

This film was created as final piece for the Masters in Architectural Design at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London in 2007 and was given a distinction.

Since then, it has been shown at

Lost in Vienna filmfestival, Vienna
AniFest festival, Prague
Audiovisiva multimedia festival, Milano
Dislocate symposium, Yokohama
Beyond Media festival, Florence
and used within independent film productions: Choices (dir: Ibrahim Miro), Egression (dir:Des Brady)

This digital film is informed by a sense of unlimited mobility:

Actual places, specific locations, geography have lost quite much of their sovereignty. Space is neither defined nor restricted by its local horizons. Traveling huge distances has never been that easily accessible, popular or affordable. The so called globalized world consists of generic, interchangeable spaces, distances are measured in time. Current discourse treats space as an entity detached from geography. Is geography lost?

Geography is not seen (anymore) as fully capable of representing the qualities one would refer to as space. Space’s inherent characteristics exceed what a local geography describes. This piece of work treats of an individual’s continuous movement making up its own space – a space that is defined by a perpetually changing locality. How do we trace movement, how does the individual locate themselves within the bigger picture, being in constant movement? How does movement create its own, nomadic space? We do act as mobile carriers of references and coordinates, interacting with both virtual and physi­cal landscapes. Individuals’ positions within a bigger picture are multiple and in constant flux – to be renegotiated over and over again.

What does a derive look like in a space informed by the loss of a particular sole locality? The animation deals with a person’s nomadic movement: an individual’s shifting between various interchangeable territories, occupying and navigating a mediascape. In this animation, space is being depicted by a so called subjective camera, from a first person view. Instead of looking at something, the spectator is the camera and fi nds themselves literally in the centre of what is happening. The animation consists of a linked up sequence of several interchangeable landscapes, so that space becomes detached from singular, specific geographies.

An embodied camera occupies disembodied realities – being in constant movement: The camera is positioned in the middle of a layered up, spherical projection that contains everything perceivable from a specific point (a 360 ° x 360 ° projection) – a nomocentric viewpoint within a spherical projection. Rather than looking at things from outside this animation creates an ambience from being within. The spatial set-up is inspired by [google street view], which cartographs cities by an almost infinite number of spherical photographs. Al­luding to google, one might ask: How relevant are these endless numbers of pictures to us, first captured and then stored in the collective memory of the www?

Rather than recording the actual, the animation generates fake landscapes – imagined scapes, entirely made up. Seductive, poetic, exotic and uncanny, the landscapes are completely interchangeable. It is the manipulated moving image which is capable to visualize this notion. It produces a more plastic reality than the one which is lets say captured by a camera. And that this form of representation relates much more to the way we actually do perceive the world. Occupying and watching space is not static, it is dynamic.

How do we position ourselves in the bigger picture, while being in constant movement? Many of us individuals occupying the so called first world have either committed themselves to a rather nomadic lifestyle or spend most of their everyday in actualized virtualities. Plus – any tiniest bit of our globe has been explored, even by means of media: What is physical space to us?

2007, 4:02 min