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VVORK

VVORK 07/02/2012 00:54

»Only Love Faghat Eshgh«, 2007 by Farhad Moshiri.

VVORK

VVORK 07/02/2012 00:45

»Before the Law«, 2011 by Phyllida Barlow.

VVORK

VVORK 07/02/2012 00:42

»Leg«, 1965 by Alina Szapocznikow.

How to dismantle your door: A Man Escaped (1956)

BLDGBLOG 06/02/2012 04:19

[Image: From A Man Escaped (1956), courtesy of the Criterion Collection].

Breaking Out and Breaking In: A Distributed Film Fest of Prison Breaks and Bank Heistsco-sponsored by BLDGBLOG, Filmmaker Magazine, and Studio-X NYCcontinued last week with Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (1956). Spoilers ahead!

Bresson's film tells the story of Fontainea French prisoner held by Nazis in a prison in occupied Lyonand it operates through the "close scrutiny of salient details," in Roger Ebert's words. Fontaine himself becomes an avid student of the prison interior, always looking askance for points of weakness. This has the effect of explicitly foregrounding the space of confinement in which Fontaine is held, including, as we'll see, the objects in the cell with him, deemphasizing characterization in favor of an intense focus on architectural setting. Ebert continues:

In this way, we watch Fontaine examine his cell. We know it as well as he does. We see how he stands on a shelf to look out a high, barred window. We see how the food plates enter and leave, and how the guards can see him through a peep hole. We see the routine as prisoners are marched to morning wash-up.

Amongst these daily routines, we also watch Fontaine slip a note into a fellow prisoner's pocket. What does the note say? "The exit route from the building and how to dismantle your door," Fontaine whispers.

[Image: From A Man Escaped (1956), courtesy of the Criterion Collection].

As usual, I want to focus only on specific spatial details, in keeping with the premise of Breaking Out and Breaking In, so I'll just make two quick points.

1) Breaking out, in A Man Escaped, occurs through the strategic dismantling and reassembly of all designed objects that aren't architecture. Blankets are cut down to strips then rewoven into rope, finally wrapped and strengthened with wire from the bedframe. The hinges of a small cupboard door are bent and refashioned into grappling hooks. A mere spoonthen anotheris sharpened to a chisel with which to cut through the soft wood of the cell door.

It's as if the tools of escape are, in fact, already hidden all around us, disguised as the overlooked equipment of everyday lifethe mundane bits of furniture, clothing, and internal ornament that, provided we teach ourselves how to reassemble them, will lead to an unparalleled state of post-architectural liberation. Put another way, the limits of architecture are exposed by everything normally stored inside it.

[Image: From A Man Escaped (1956), courtesy of the Criterion Collection].

2) The other obvious detail is the film's overriding non-visual dimensionthat is to say, the sound design of solitary confinement.

From the coded coughs of fellow inmates to the banister-tapping approach of a particular guard, and from the reciprocated wall-knocks passed prisoner to prisoner to the soundscape of the final escape itselfwith the other-worldly grinding gears of a patrol bicycle and the marching feet on gravel that betray a guard who the escapees might not otherwise have seenthe prison is more an acoustic environment than a visual one. Even the timing of Fontaine and his last-minute assistant, as they scamper across the prison rooftop, is coincident with the passing of a nearby train, using the sonic effects of urban infrastructure as camouflage for their actions.

They thus navigate from ring to ring, passing steadily outward, carrying reconstructed ropes made from bedding and forcibly recurved grappling hooks, arming the building's contents against the building itself, disguised by the sounds of a city into which they successfully disappear.

(Earlier: A Prison Camp is for Escaping. Up next: watch Cool Hand Luke on Monday, February 6; for the complete Breaking Out and Breaking In schedule, click here).

Making Planning Popular

BLDGBLOG 06/02/2012 03:19

[Image: Making Planning Popular on display at the RCA in London].

For those of you near London, you have one more day to see David Knight's Making Planning Popular on display in a group show called GRIST at the Royal College of Art. I'm a huge fan of Knight's workan ongoing research project on the strange terrains both encouraged and required by local planning ordinancesand he's thus become a regular referent here on the blog.

[Image: The manifesto from Making Planning Popular].

Specifically, Making Planning Popular "aims to encourage greater popular knowledge of how the built environment is, or could be, produced." Accordingly, "David is showing a manifesto, recent articles and essays, and a series of case studies chosen from his growing database of arcane, marginalized, or forgotten planning practices. This work will in time form a popular history of planning"publishers, take note!"one in which such practises are brought back to life to explore their relevance to todays environment, in the belief that putting planning knowledge back into popular culture will lead to a more democratic built environment."

[Images: Excerpts from David Knight's "growing database of arcane, marginalized, or forgotten planning practices," part of Making Planning Popular].

Above are some examples of these case studies; but stop by the RCA before the end of the day on Monday, February 6, to see more. Here's a map.

Object Cancers

BLDGBLOG 06/02/2012 02:09

There was a lot of talk last week about the emergence of "physibles," or downloadable data sets hosted on the Pirate Bay that would allow (potentially copyrighted) objects to be reproduced at home by 3D printers. The idea is that we won't just share music files or movie torrents, but actual physical objects; I could thus print an IKEA table or a Quistgaard peppermill at home, without ever purchasing an original object.

[Image: A printer known as the Replicator].

Bruce Sterling wrote about just such a scenario in his 2008 novella Kiosk, suggesting that a new "poetry of commerce" would arise in the form of infinitely repeatable, unregulated surrogate objects churned out by desktop factories.

Among many other things about this story, what caught my attention was the specific detail that you could scan any object you happen to have on hand; you could then upload that dataset to a kind of eBay of physibles; and, finally, someone on the other side of the earthor sitting right next to youcould print out their own "pirate" version. As New Scientist writes, however, we might soon soon see a corporate response in the form of what might be called physible rights managementbased on, even repeating, certain aspects of the misguided digital rights management (DRM) policies associated with MP3s. This would mean, for instance, "placing a marker on objects that a 3D scanner could detect and which would stop it operating" (though such marks, the article quickly points out, can simply be covered over with tape or otherwise occluded); in fact, we read, a similar such system is "already used to prevent banknotes from being photocopied." The article then mentions other forms of watermarks and "marking algorithms," detectable only by machines, that could be inscribed onto object surfaces, like invisible hieroglyphs of protection, so as to interfere with those objects' being scanned.

The corporate response to the robot-readable world, mentioned earlier, is thus a kind of robot-blocking world.

In any case, what seems more provocative here, on the level of design, would be to appropriate this protective stance and reuse it in the design of future objects, but emphasizing the other end: to allow for the scanning of any object designed or manufactured, but to insert, in the form of watermarks, small glitches that would only become visible upon reprinting.

We could call these object cancers: bulbous, oddly textured, and other dramatically misshapen errors that only appear in 3D-reprinted objects. Chairs with tumors, mutant silverware, misbegotten watchesas if the offspring of industrial reproducibility is a molten world of Dalí-like surrealism.

[Image: Misprinted objects by Zeitguised and Matt Frodsham].

Put another way, the inadvertent side-effect of the attempted corporate control over objects would be an artistic potlatch of object errors: object cancers deliberately reprinted, shared, and collected for their monstrous and unexpected originality.

Landscape Architecture for Machines

BLDGBLOG 06/02/2012 00:30

One of the more interesting sub-conversations at last fall's Art + Environment Conference at the Nevada Museum of Art revolved around the question of whether or not the future of landscape architecture would be for humans at alland not for autonomous or semi-autonomous machine systems that will have their own optical, textural, and haptic needs from the design of built space. As highway signage networks are adapted to assist with orienting driverless cars, for instance, we will see continent-spanning pieces of infrastructure designed not for human aesthetic needs but so that they more efficiently correspond to the instrumentation packages of machines.

We touched on this a few weeks ago here on BLDGBLOG with the idea of sentient geotextiles guiding unmanned aerial vehicles, and London-based design firm BERG refers to this as the rise of the robot-readable world. I was thus interested to see that Timo Arnall from BERG has assembled a short video archive asking, "How do robots see the world? How do they extract meaning from our streets, cities, media and from us?" Arnall's compilation reveals the framing geometriesa kind of entoptic graphic language native to machinesand directional refocusings deployed by these inhuman users of designed landscapes. Future gardens optimized for autonomous robot navigation.

VVORK

VVORK 06/02/2012 00:09

“Untitled (Jokepainting)”, 2006 by Karl Holmqvist.

A Short History of the Modern Calendar

The Long Now Foundation 03/02/2012 21:34

Keeping time, it turns out, is a messy business. In order to satisfy science, religion, and sometimes ego, our calendar has changed quite a bit throughout history. This video by Jeremiah Warren tells the story up to now.

Since we can’t predict what changes might be made in the future, the 10,000 Year Clock has been designed to keep track of the cycles of the Sun, the Moon, the planets and the constellations – things even the largest of egos will have trouble changing.

drones away

A Thousand Tomorrows 03/02/2012 13:13

Image shows Gatewing’s X100, Ghent (Belgium).

Related posts:

1. drone phone home
2. peak lithium?