Geomedia
BLDGBLOG 21/05/2013 04:14
[Image: "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei].An incredible example of what can be done with laser-cutting, Amanda Ghassaei's project "Laser Cut Record" features music inscribed directly into cut discs of maple wood, acrylic, and paper, resulting in lo-fi but playable records.
For what they are, the otherwise scratchy and off-kilter audio quality is actually quite amazing, and the sounds themselves are made all the more haunting and strange by the crackling noise and resonance of the material that hosts them.
[Image: "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei].Some technical details are available at Ghassaei's Instructables page, and you can see the laser-cutting itself at work in the following video.
I'm reminded of a short letter called "Acoustic Recordings from Antiquity," written to the Proceedings of the IEEE in August 1969 by a man named Richard G. Woodbridge III. The somewhat eccentric Mr. Woodbridge explains that he has been researching accidental recording of sounds found, after careful analysis, on the surfaces of physical objects rescued from antiquityin particular, pieces of pottery originally shaped on potters' wheels (seen here as a kind of primordial record platter).
Woodbridge even claims some sounds have been "recorded" as re-playable waves in the slowly drying shapes of oil paintings.
To listen to these lost recordings, the letter suggests, you simply hold a record cartridge near the work of pottery in question, such that the needle of the phonograph can "be positioned against a revolving pot mounted on a phono turntable (adjustable speed) 'stroked' along a paint stroke, etc." When this was done properly, he claimed, a "low-frequency chatter sound could be heard in the earphones."
That is, the voices of people present in the room during the making of the pot could be re-played from the surface of the pot itself.
[Image: "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei].Woodbridge suggests that this might have alternative applications: "This is of particular interest as it introduces the possibility of actually recalling and hearing the voices and words of eminent personages as recorded in the paint of their portraits or of famous artists in their pictures." So an experiment was orchestrated:
With an artists brush, paint strokes were applied to the surface of the canvas using oil paints involving a variety of plasticities, thicknesses, layers, etc., while martial music was played on the nearby phonograph. Visual examination at low magnification showed that certain strokes had the expected transverse striated appearance. When such strokes, after drying, were gently stroked by the needle (small, wooden, spade-like) of the crystal cartridge, at as close to the original stroke speed as possible, short snatches of the original music could be identified.Through this technique, the overlookedoverlistened?acoustic qualities of various objects, beyond high-brow pottery and oil paintings, can thus be revealed:
Many situations leading to the possibility of adventitious acoustic recording in past times have been given consideration. These, for example, might consist of scratches, markings, engravings, grooves, chasings, smears, etc., on or in plastic materials encompassing metal, wax, wood, bone, mud, paint, crystal, and many others. Artifacts could include objects of personal adornment, sword blades, arrow shafts, pots, engraving plates, paintings, and various items of calligraphic interest.Woodbridge calls the pursuit and revelation of these sounds "acoustic archaeology."
[Image: Like the rings of Saturn, from "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei; in fact, perhaps the rings of Saturn are an unread recording...].But why stop at sounds?
Perhaps in two years' time, we'll watch as Amanda Ghassaei cuts DVDs"the data on a DVD is encoded in the form of small pits and bumps in the track of the disc"with a combined and simultaneous laser-cutter/3D printer ensemble, coating inscribed "small pits and bumps" with reflective metals.
Suddenly, wood, rock, metal, even exposed geology in situ can host visual content. Indeed, perhaps it already does, but we haven't inventedor we simply haven't appliedthe right technologies for decoding it. In other words, we have DVD players; we just haven't, learning from Richard G. Woodbridge III, used them to "read" other materials.
In August 2015, you and some friends hike up to a rock wall in the middle of Utah, and there are DVDs printed all over the surface of the hillside, full-length albums laser-burned into White Rim sandstone, and audio-visual pilgrims carrying deconstructed laser-lens systems, scanning for hidden film fests and warbling soundtracks, swarm every surface all around them.
It's the rise of geomedia.
In the Box: A Tour Through the Simulated Battlefields of the U.S. National Training Center
BLDGBLOG 17/05/2013 17:36
[Image: Photo courtesy of Venue].(This post originally published on Venue).
Fort Irwin is a U.S. army base nearly the size of Rhode Island, located in the Mojave Desert about an hour's drive northeast of Barstow, California. There you will find the National Training Center, or NTC, at which all U.S. troops, from all services, spend a twenty-one day rotation before they deploy overseas.
[Image: Photo courtesy of Venue].Sprawling and often infernally hot in the summer months, the base offers free tours, open to the public, twice a month. VenueBLDGBLOG's ongoing collaboration with Edible Geography's Nicola Twilley, supported by the Nevada Museum of Art's Center for Art + Environment and Studio-X NYCmade the trip, cameras in hand and notebooks at the ready, to learn more about the simulated battlefields in which imaginary conflicts loop, day after day, without end.
[Images: Photos courtesy of Venue].Coincidentally, as we explored the Painted Rocks located just outside the gate while waiting for the tour to start, an old acquaintance from Los Angelesarchitect and geographer Rick Millerpulled up in his Prius, also early for the same tour.
[Image: Photo courtesy of Venue].We laughed, said hello, and caught up about a class Rick had been teaching at UCLA about the military defense of L.A. from World War II to the present. An artificial battlefield, beyond even the furthest fringes of Los Angeles, Fort Irwin thus seemed like an appropriate place to meet.
[Image: Photo courtesy of Venue].We were soon joined by a small group of other visitorsconsisting, for the most part, of family members of soldiers deployed on the base, as well as two architecture students from Montréalbefore a large white tour bus rolled up across the gravel.
Renita, a former combat videographer who now handles public affairs at Fort Irwin, took our names, IDs, and signatures for reasons of liability (we would be seeing live explosions and simulated gunfire, and there was always the risk that someone might get hurt).
[Image: Photo courtesy of Venue].The day began with a glimpse into the economics and culture of how a nation prepares its soldiers for war; an orientation, of sorts, before we headed out to visit one of fifteen artificial cities scattered throughout the base.
[Image: Photo courtesy of Venue].In the plush lecture hall used for "After Action Reviews"and thus, Renita apologized, air-conditioned to a morgue-like chill in order to keep soldiers awake as their adrenalin levels crashwe received a briefing from the base's commander, Brigadier General Terry Ferrell.
With pride, Ferrell noted that Fort Irwin is the only place where the U.S. military can train using all of the systems it will later use in theater. The base's 1,000 square miles of desert is large enough to allow what Ferrell called "great maneuverability"; its airspace is restricted; and its truly remote location ensures an uncluttered electromagnetic spectrum, meaning that troops can practice both collection and jamming. These latter techniques even include interfering with GPS, providing they warn the Federal Aviation Administration in advance.
Oddly, it's worth noting that Fort Irwin also houses the electromagnetically sensitive Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex, part of NASA's global Deep Space Network. As science writer Oliver Morton explains in a paper called "Moonshine and Glue: A Thirteen-Unit Guide to the Extreme Edge of Astrophysics" (PDF), "when digitized battalions slug it out with all the tools of modern warfare, radio, radar, and electronic warfare emissions fly as freely around Fort Irwin as bullets in a battle. For people listening to signals from distant spacecraft on pre-arranged frequency bands, this noise is not too much of a problem." However, he adds, for other, far more sensitive experiments, "radio interference from the military next door is its biggest headache."
[Image: Photo courtesy of Venue].Unusually for the American West, where mineral rights are often transferred separately, the military also owns the ground beneath Fort Irwin, which means that they have carved out an extensive network of tunnels and caves from which to flush pretend insurgents.
This 120-person strong insurgent troop is drawn from the base's own Blackhorse Regiment, a division of the U.S. Army that exists solely to provide opposition. Whatever the war, the 11th Armored is always the pretend enemy. According to Ferrell, their current role as Afghan rebels is widely envied: they receive speci
Skyfall
BLDGBLOG 17/05/2013 00:20
Although the Earth itself will be coming to its fiery and magmatic end in 7 billion years' time, its nighttime skies will be undergoing an extraordinary slow-motion light-show: the merging of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies.An animation released last summer by NASA, called "What the Night Sky Will Look Like Over the Next 7 Billion Years" and embedded above, depicts the glowing filaments of these two galaxies, like plate tectonics in space, crashing together, gravitationally distorting one another, and then merging in a featureless cloud of light.
[Image: Via HubbleSite].In his weird, brilliant, and unimaginably dense book The Invention of the Zero poet Richard Kenney exclaims, "Imagine, all new constellations! ...a seethe / and flume of unfamiliar skies."
But such skies are not merely the domain of speculative poetry, as they are, in fact, on their way, roiling toward us in billion-year-long collisions that we, as a species, will never see the true light of.
[Image: Via HubbleSite].Im reminded of an essay by geologist Steven Dutch, at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, called The Earth Has A Future, originally published in the May 2006 issue of Geosphere.
Advocating what he calls a futurist approach to the planetary sciences, Dutch points out that a million years is relatively short in geologic terms. For example, even the fastest plates, moving on the order of 15 cm/yr, will have moved only 150 km in a million years, enough to have very significant local geological effects but scarcely enough to be casually noticeable on a globe.
However, Dutchs futurist approach to landscape studies becomes particularly fascinating when he turns his attention upward, to the sky, looking out beyond the Earth to what stars and their constellations might look like in roughly one million years. Dutch predicts, for instance, that distant star patterns like Orion should be recognizable for several hundred thousand years, but many constellations will have changed noticeably.
In other words, the sky is alwayseven nowadrift, already fulfilling Kenney's "seethe and flume of unfamiliar skies."
[Image: Via HubbleSite].But that's just a million years. Multiply that by seven-and-a-half thousand, and the heavenly distortions torquing through the skies above us become magical even to contemplate.
(Related: Pruned's Proposal for an Ideas Competition Seeking Design Proposals for a Pavilion for Viewing the Coming Intergalactic Collision between Andromeda and the Milky Way).
Eyeball
BLDGBLOG 16/05/2013 20:56
[Image: The throwable eyeball from Bounce Imaging].A throwable building-mapping sphere from Bounce Imaging was recently chosen by PopSci for a 2013 Invention Award. The "throwable, expendable, baseball-size probe," in PopSci's words, "has a shock-absorbing shell embedded with six cameras, plus clusters of near-infrared LEDs to light up dark rooms (for the cameras)."
To deploy the Explorer, an emergency worker links it to a smartphone or tablet and chucks the ball into danger. It immediately begins taking photos and testing for methane, carbon monoxide, and dangerously high temperatures. A microprocessor inside the ball then stiches the photos together and converts the raw data for transmission over Wi-Fi. Just seconds after the toss, a wrap-around panoramacomplete with environmental warningsappears on the synced device.The usefulness of this as a tool for cave mapping, or even as a new piece of kit for semi-autonomous, non-destructive archaeological investigations, seems both obvious and worth tracking in the future.
Unsurprisingly, however, the MIT Technology Review points out that the "ball-sized device could be particularly useful for the military," as it is lightweight, extremely portable, and, because of its low cost, it "could be abandoned, if necessary." Teams of soldiers, arriving at a building or city of which no accurate maps or floorplans exist, could thus toss these little baseball-like devices into the darkness ahead and achieve tactical awareness within secondsunless, of course, WiFi-hijacking counter-measures send back deliberately incorrect plans and layouts to the unsuspecting soldiers.
Warfare, here, would become a weird sort of architectural sorcery, casting spatial spells on one another, broadcasting ghosts and mirages to the screens of an approaching enemy.
Bounce Imaging's research is interesting to put into the context of another building-mapping project currently underway at MIT: Maurice Fallon's "automatic building mapping" project
which functions by way of a wearable LiDAR pack, sort of like a forward-scanning Iron Man chest piece, that allows for real-time mapping of a structure's internal layout.
As you can see in the above video, though, the design aesthetic of the scanning pack is, at least right now, workaday and extremely pragmatic; I would thus love to see what students from, for example, the Design Interactions department at London's Royal College of Art could do with it, putting together a shell or housing unit for the scanner itself. Take a look at the recently all-over-the-internet project called Eidos, by which RCA students promise to "sharpen your senses" through a set of beautifully-made wearable devices.
[Image: Part of the Eidos system by RCA students Tim Bouckley, Millie Clive-Smith, Mi Eun Kim, and Yuta Sugawara].But I'll leave this for now, as a forthcoming interview soon to be published over at Venue, with Georgia Tech roboticist Henrik Christensen, picks up many of these threads with great interest.
The Extinction Orchestra
BLDGBLOG 14/05/2013 19:20
[Images: From Marguerite Humeau's Opera of Prehistoric Creatures; photos by Stuart Bailes and Felipe Ribon].Designer Marguerite Humeau reconstructs the voices of extinct animals based on speculative extrapolations from their skull structure.
As she described her work in an interview with We Make Money Not Art last month, the project is an attempt "to resuscitate the sound of prehistoric creatures by reconstructing their vocal tracts," casting large resonation chambers that then whistle, bleat, bellow, and moan, offering fictionalized bodily soundtracks for multi-million year-old landscapes.
Appropriately called The Opera of Prehistoric Creatures, it includes sonic reconstructions of three species of extinct mega-fauna, including the Ambulocetus, or "Walking Whale," an Entelodont, or the terrifying-sounding "Terminator Pig," and a Mammoth Imperator.
[Images: From Marguerite Humeau's Opera of Prehistoric Creatures; photos by Felipe Ribon Dirk van den Heuvel].Partial reconstructions of their skeletons, combined with the speculative sounds of their long-lost calls, form what Humeau calls "semi-real, synthetic ruins." They stand like bleached monuments in the gallery space: resurrected animal bodies singing dead songs for the 21st century.
Briefly, and unrelatedly, I'm reminded of the extraordinary point made in Adrienne Mayor's fantastic book The First Fossil Hunters, where we read that one of the reasons for ancient myths of cyclops, giants, and titans was, in effect, bad paleontology. In other words, the ancient Greeks and other civilizations around the Mediterranean simply got their fossils wrong, reconstructing old bones not as the mammoths they really were
[Image: From The First Fossil Hunters by Adrienne Mayor].but as truly massive, humanoid forms with odd, singular holes in the middles of their skulls (actually a nostril, not a cyclops eye), lording over tiny humans who quaked miserably beside them.
[Image: From The First Fossil Hunters by Adrienne Mayor].In any case, you can listen to Marguerite Humeau's soundscape of extinct animal calls here.
Then he heard the ice coming
BLDGBLOG 11/05/2013 21:27
[Image: "The ice is up taller than the cottages and homes," we read. "It kind of dwarfs them." Photo and quotation via the Winnipeg Free Press].Several houses were destroyed, the Winnipeg Free Press reports, after "a massive ice floe rose out of Dauphin Lake" in central Canada. One local homeowner described the ice's arrival as "so powerful that it plowed though his two-storey home, pushing furniture from one bedroom into another. It pushed the bathroom tub and vanity into the hallway."
This kind of reverse-Titanic moment occurred just as the gentleman had sat down to watch TV: "Then he heard the ice coming."
In fact, one wonders, if this were to become an annual event, how houses might be adapted to account for it, similar to John McPhee's descriptions of the altered suburbs of Los Angeles, where garage doors have been repurposed to let mountain landslides pass safely through. You pop open some doors and shutters, or deploy emergency stilts, and the ice slides quietly by, your lakeside home unviolated.
[Image: "This is nothing you can predict," one homeowner said. "Theres nothing you can do to prevent this." Photo and quotation via the Winnipeg Free Press].The photos also show what it might look like if an ice age were to kick off again in the North American suburbs, with massive walls of ice simultaneously crushing houses from all sides and bursting them from within, like Caspar David Friedrich's Sea of Ice crossed with an unpublished novella by J.G. Ballard.
[Image: The Sea of Ice by Caspar David Friedrich].The Great Plains of America filled with jagged labyrinths of ice, their peaks and troughs littered not with the timber of shipwrecks but with the split wooden frames of abandoned houses.
(Thanks to Lawrence Bird for the tip! Randomly related: Floating islands gone wild.)
Sim City: An Interview with Stone Librande
BLDGBLOG 09/05/2013 17:58
[Image: Screenshot of our own SimCitycalled, for reasons that made sense at the time, We Are The Champignonsafter three hours of game play].(This interview was originally published on Venue).
In the nearly quarter-century since designer Will Wright launched the iconic urban planning computer game, SimCity, not only has the world's population become majoritatively urban for the first time in human history, but interest in cities and their design has gone mainstream.
Once a byword for boring, city planning is now a hot topic, claimed by technology companies, economists, so-called "Supermayors," and cultural institutions alike as the key to humanity's future. Indeed, if we are to believe the hype, the city has become our species' greatest triumph.
[Image: A shot from photographer Michael Wolf's extraordinary Architecture of Density series, newly available in hardcover].In March 2013, the first new iteration of SimCity in a decade was launched, amidst a flurry of critical praise mingled with fan disappointment at Electronic Arts' "always-online" digital rights management policy and repeated server failures.
A few weeks before the launch, VenueBLDGBLOG's ongoing collaboration with Edible Geography's Nicola Twilley, supported by the Nevada Museum of Art's Center for Art + Environment and Studio-X NYChad the opportunity to play the new SimCity at its Manhattan premiere, during which time we feverishly laid out curving roads and parks, drilled for oil while installing a token wind turbine, and tried to ignore our city's residents'known as Simscomplaints as their homes burned before we could afford to build a fire station.
We emerged three hours later, blinking and dazed, into the gleaming white and purple lights of Times Square, and were immediately struck by the intensity of abstraction required to translate such a complex, dynamic environment into a coherent game structure, and the assumptions and values embedded in that translation.
Fortunately, the game's lead designer, Stone Librande, was happy to talk with us further about his research and decision-making process, as well as some of the ways in which real-world players have already surprised him. We spoke to him both in person and by telephone, and our conversation appears below.
Nicola Twilley: I thought Id start by asking what sorts of sources you used to get ideas for SimCity, whether it be reading books, interviewing urban experts, or visiting different cities?
Stone Librande: From working on SimCity games in the past, we already have a library here with a lot of city planning books. Those were really good as a reference, but I found, personally, that the thing I was most attracted to was using Google Earth and Google Street View to go anywhere in the world and look down on real cities. I found it to be an extremely powerful way to understand the differences between cities and small towns in different regions.
Google has a tool in there that you can use to measure out how big things are. When I first started out, I used that a lot to investigate different cities. Id bring up San Francisco and measure the parks and the streets, and then Id go to my home town and measure it, to figure out how it differed and so on. My inspiration wasnt really drawn from urban planning books; it was more from deconstructing the existing world.
Then I also really got into Netflix streaming documentaries. There is just so much good stuff there, and Netflix is good at suggesting things. That opened up a whole series of documentaries that I would watch almost every night after dinner. There were videos on water problems, oil problems, the food industry, manufacturing, sewage systems, and on and onall sorts of things. Those covered a lot of different territory and were really enlightening to me.
Geoff Manaugh: While you were making those measurements of different real-world cities, did you discover any surprising patterns or spatial relationships?
Librande: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I dont think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.
Manaugh: You would be making SimParkingLot, rather than SimCity.
Librande: [laughs] Exactly. So what we do in the game is that we just imagine they are underground. We do have parking lots in the game, and we do try to scale themso, if you have a little grocery store, well put six or seven parking spots on the side, and, if you have a big convention center or a big pro stadium, theyll have what seem like really big lotsbut theyre nowhere near what a real grocery store or pro stadium would have. We had to do the best we could do and still make the game look attractive.
[Image: Using the zoning tool for the city designed by We Are the Littoral New York
BLDGBLOG 09/05/2013 16:31
[Image: This surreal, Planet of the Apes-like image, taken in 1982, shows sand dunes seemingly at the foot of the World Trade Center towers, when Manhattan's Battery Park was still a beach; photo by Robin Holland, via Tribeca Trib and Curbed NY]. Sky Crane
BLDGBLOG 08/05/2013 16:01
[Image: View larger].When I walked out to get breakfast this morning, clouds had obscured all but the topmost workings of the 1 World Trade Center site, visible through our living room windowa strange vision of machines, pulleys, cranes, and gears sort of hovering in the sky, like something out of Archigram by way of Hayao Miyazaki.
(Full photo here).
Documentary Holography
BLDGBLOG 07/05/2013 20:27
[Image: A "detail theft" by ScanLAB Projects].ScanLAB Projects, a reliably interesting and enthusiastic design-research duo formed by Bartlett graduates Matthew Shaw and William Trossell, explores, in their words, "the potential of large scale terrestrial laser scanning as a tool for design, visualization and fabrication. We use a range of state-of-the-art 3D scanning technologies to capture buildings, objects and spaces."
As it happens, they mean this quite literally, as they aim to "capture" and then illicitly reproduce, using multi-axis milling machines, architectural details scanned around London. These are what they call "detail thefts... arguably cloning the original architect's intellectual property."
[Image: A "detail theft" by ScanLAB Projects].You can read an earlier write-up of their many projectsfrom "stealth objects" to scanner-jamming architectural ornament installed on an urban scalehere on BLDGBLOG (as well as in the forthcoming Landscape Futures book).
What I find so consistently interesting in their work, though, is that, over the past few years, they've been expanding the representational range of the laser scanner, using it to document highly ephemeral, even ethereal, spatial events.
Whether scanning mist and humidity or traveling north to the Arctic to shoot lasers at pressure ridges and melting ice floes, their work is almost a kind of documentary holography: not a film, not a photograph, not a 3D model, but also not simply a point-cloud, their work operates almost narratively as they capture objects or places in the process of becoming something else, blurred by passing fog or pulled apart by unseen ocean currents. You could write a screenplay for scanners.
[Images: From the "Arctic Climatic Tour 2011" of ScanLAB Projects].For a more recent project, one that indicates a growing environmental or ecological emphasis in their work, the duo found themselves in the presence of heavy forestry equipment, a haunting and behemoth machine busy uprooting, de-branching, and stacking trees, converting a living forest to mere timber. The satiny black background makes it all that much more dreamlike, as if occurring in secret at 2am.
[Image: Forestry Commission Tree Harvester by ScanLAB Projects; view larger].
Cast in black and white and seeming to gleam in the laser light, the machine is both dinosaur-like and ghostly, implying the total gutting of the forest around it as the orderly bar code of the trees is disrupted by this artificial clearing.
[Image: Scans of a Forestry Commission tree harvester in action, by ScanLAB Projects; view image one, two, three, and four larger!].
In all cases, the images are much more evocative when viewed at a larger size (see captions for direct links), which you can also find on the ScanLAB Projects website.
Finally, if all this interests you, consider signing up for a 10-day workshop with ScanLAB Projects up in Ottawa, Canada, from 5-13 July 2013, focusing on "post-industrial landscapes." Here's the course description:
Set within the context of a post-industrial era, we find ourselves venturing through the Canadian wilderness of Gatineau Park, walking in the footsteps of industrial alchemist Thomas "Carbide" Willson. Within this natural blossom lie the ruins of his former empire, the decaying heart of industrialization and manufacturing in a factory that never fully materialized.More information, including registration, is available here.
The course will explore 3D devices that can scan the unnatural post-industrial landscape in an attempt to fuse the accidental qualities of discoverysuch as Willsons trial and error of calcium carbidewith the mathematical precision of laser-scanned environments. Students will form their own architectural "carbide," a fusion of scans and digital modeling to generate a landscape that materialies from Willsons place of decay into a new architectural ground.
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